Technoreply

JS-Kit’s Haloscan is being shut down on the 19th of February, this year. This is what the team from Haloscan announced today in a mail to registered members:

The Haloscan hardware and software is physically failing and we have no choice but to discontinue the service.

Haloscan users now have the choice to either switch to Echo, another JS-Kit project or export their comments freely from Haloscan to their original blog host’s commenting system.

For several years Haloscan has been a good alternative to bloggers (especially those using Google’s Blogger) looking for a better and more rapid solution to their blog’s original commenting system. Now that Blogger has implemented some changes to its commenting system and that JS-Kit has developed Echo, a better performing system, that amongst others, integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo accounts, Haloscan has become quite obsolete.

Sony just announced the new E Series VAIO. Big surprise concerning the laptop, its physical appearance and its price tag. Indeed, the new E Series will come in a series of flashy colors to choose from. Sony states “Caribbean Green, Iridescent Blue, Hibiscus Pink and Lava Black”.  Moreover, flashy keyboard skins and mouse covers are available too.

The best thing yet is the price. The laptops start at a little less than $800. This is bargain price if you ask me. The keyboard skins and mouse covers are at around $20 and $5 respectively.

And if you are still not persuaded, don’t forget that this laptop comes with the latest processor from Intel, the Core i5.

Right now, the laptop is available on pre-order only. And if you have a Sony Financial Services card, you will enjoy 12 months of free interest. Now isn’t that a deal?

I have seen several attempts, in the past, to dissuade people from using IE6. All in vain, though. But this time, Google is trying to show IE6 the door. Let’s be honest about IE6 for a while. This browser has done its time and has had its share of glory, but it really needs to let go. All the HTML, Javascript and CSS incompatibilities are there to sate one thing… “IE6 has done its time”.

So now, just some hours ago, Google has announced that it will no longer support IE6. Their message is clear, IE6 is preventing them from moving on and adding new features to their products. They state:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

This is a real hit towards IE6. Personally, I really like the way things are going. It’s about time some giant organisation attacked IE6.

What are your views about this? Do you think Google is going too far?

Since December 24th 2009, Wikileaks, a website that allows the publishing of anonymous user uploads, has ceased all operations, with the exception of allowing users to upload contents on the website. The reason given for this is the lack of fund amassed from the past year. According to a statement on Wikileak’s homepage, “we have raised just over $130,000 for this year but can not meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered. These amount to just under $200,000 PA. If staff are paid, our yearly budget is $600,000.”

Wikileaks is thus asking for donations from visitors and users for it to be able to break even and continue operating.

The website which has contents that generally take the form of leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, has promised the release of important documents once it has gathered enough fund to resume operation.

No date has yet been given as to when Wikileaks will resume operation but it seems that funds are not flowing that much. It has also had issues with its Paypal donation account several times which have now been solved.

Since its beginning in late 2006, Wikileaks has given rise to much a buzz around itself, featuring on many newspapers and inspiring much political reforms. Though the website has been much criticised, it remains an important asset on the web, one that could deserve being saved.

Point and find poster from Nokia Conversations

It’s just out, Nokia will be trying out augmented reality as a pilot project in Colchester in England.

This project has been made possible thanks to a collaboration between the mobile phone giant and JC Decaux, a leading worldwide advertising company. To be part of this project, users need to download and install Nokia’s Point & Find by texting “HERE” to 81066.

The system is pretty intuitive too. Just point your camera on an advertissement and you will be shown all the relevant information available from the Nokia Point & Find database.

If the pilot is a success, this will mean Point & Find can make it to your own town. All good news, let’s wait and see.

For the impatient, here is the list of officially compatible Nokia phones:
Nokia N97, N96, N95 8GB, N95,N86 8MP, N85, N82, N81, N81 8GB, N79, N78, N76, E71, E66, E63, E51, 6720, 6290, 6220, 6210 Navigator, 6124 Classic 6121 Classic, 6120 Classic, 6110 Navigator, 5700 Xpress Music, 5800

You will find more information on the official Nokia blog entry.

Makes you think that everything is now possible… sort of. Friday 22nd of January 2010 will go down in Twitter’s history as the day when the first tweet was made from outer space. The author of the Tweet is NASA astronaut TJ Creamer and here is what he tweeted:

Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! : ) More soon, send your ?s

This first live tweet from space was made possible due to a major software upgrade by NASA that was carried out during this past week. Astronauts working on the International Space Station now have direct access to the Web via a wireless internet connection. Prior to this, they had to email down their tweets to Earth and those were posted to their Twitter accounts by Earth-based staffs. Those were obviously not live tweets.

Astronauts assigned to the International Space Station previously had access to emails, video conferencing and Protocol phone calls, they can now add surfing the web to that list. However it is to be pointed out that they are expected to respect the same Internet use policies that are imposed on other government employees.

It’s ridiculously easy, these days, to get lost among the different types of memory cards on the market. All new phones come with a memory card slot and each have their own compatibility issues.

There are 6 major types of memory cards that you should know about: SD, miniSD, microSD, SDHC, miniSDHC and microSDHC.

SD cards

SD (Secure Digital) cards were among the first cheap memory cards to be sold. They were released in 1999 and are now becoming obsolete. This card can hold a maximum of 2GiB.

MiniSD cards

MiniSD cards came right after the SD card. For the 2 years after its release, it was the most popular memory card. The must have among geeks. These cards had the same maximum capacity as the SD cards.

MicroSD cards

When the first microSD card was released, it was a real revolution. For its 11 mm x 15 mm size could hold 4 GiB of data. These cards proved to be conveniently sized for phones, which were getting thinner and thinner at that time.

SDHC cards

The SDHC card looks exactly the same as the SD cards. But their capacity are in two leagues, since the SDHC card can hold up to 64 GiB of data. This is an enormous amount considering the size of the card. SDHC also has faster speeds of transfer.

MiniSDHC cards

The miniSDHC cards can hold up to 32 GiB of data. They share the same dimensions with miniSD cards, but offer faster speeds of transfer.

MicroSDHC cards

MicroSDHC cards are similar to microSD cards physically. MicroSDHC cards can hold much more data and have faster transfer speeds. These cards can hold a maximum of 32 GiB of data.

Additional advice

You should note that while SDHC and SD cards share the same size, devices supporting SD cards do not necessarily support SDHC cards. However, devices supporting SDHC cards do support SD cards.

Sometimes, microSD cards are sold with a miniSD or SD skeleton. This means that you can plug the microSD in a slot in the bigger card. Be aware that it is not 2 separate cards.

Memory cards are fragile, never buy them second hand. They are very cheap commodities, so buying a new one will be more profitable.

Be aware that there are a lot of memory card imitations sold. Buy from a trusted buyer.

“When did I join Twitter?” That’s a question that you might not be asking yourself often but when you do, you often find that the answer is not so easy to find, mostly because Twitter itself does not show you the age of your account. But there’s a way to go about this… and it’s rightly called When Did You Join Twitter?

When Did You Join Twitter is pretty simple to use. You only have to correctly type you Twitter username and the age of your account is given to you. You will get to find the date on which you created your Twitter account and it will also specify the age of your account in terms of days! You can also tweet the result directly from the page.

When Did You Join Twitter is a project by Neville Ridley-Smith, an Australian coder who is the creator of yet another Twitter-related webpage, How Often Do You Tweet which gives you the frequency of your tweets in terms of time lapse and average number.

When Did You Join Twitter and How Often Do You Tweet are arguably two not very essential services but they sure provide some answers to the inquisitive “twitter”.

Images: screenshots of Whendidyoujointwitter.com and Howoftendoyoutweet.com

Replying to comments on status updates, photos, videos or Wall posts has now been made easier: users can now reply directly via email.

Previously, users were only notified by mail about new comments on their content or on other people’s contents they have commented on. Replying to comments meant logging in to Facebook and posting the comment. This was not always possible due to companies banning the site from work offices or users being on the go, receiving notifications on their mobile phone.

Reply to a comment by email

Email-reply successfully posted on Facebook.

As from yesterday, Facebook users can simply click “Reply” on their notification mail and type the comment they want to send back without having to log in to Facebook.

This new feature would predictably make the site even more active.

To know more about it, head over to the announcement post on Facebook’s blog.

Google’s new phone, the HTC Google Nexus One has been creating a buzz all over the Internet ever since it was released on January 5, 2010. The  phone has been dubbed state of the art in mobile by Michael Arrington.

We at Technoreply, strongly believe that this offering from Google is a worthy competitor to Apple’s iPhone 3GS. So we set out to compare the two phones… Hardware wise. Because, let’s not kid anyone, comparing the inside has been done already by lots of sites.

To the naked eye, this means that the Nexus One is a lot more sleeker.

Size matters

The Nexus One is longer but the iPhone 3GS is larger. The latter is also heavier by 5 grams. To the naked eye, this means that the Nexus One is a lot more sleecker.

Screen

The Nexus One’s 480×800 pixels display almost makes the iPhone’s 320×480 screen look tiny. The size is 3.7″ for the Nexus One and 3.5″ for the iPhone, so the Nexus One should have better video playback quality.

Memory

The iPhone comes with either 16 or 32 GB of internal storage memory. It is a great deal for a smartphone. The Nexus One unfortunately comes with little internal memory and users have to rely on micro SD cards.

Connectivity

Both comes with 3G, Wifi, Bluetooth 2.1, EDGE and a USB 2.0 port. The Nexus One has a Wifi connectivity that would please the die-hard geek. Indeed, the smartphone from Google comes with a/b/g/n standards. Granted the a standard is becoming more and more rare, but the n standard is starting to take off.

Camera

The iPhone’s camera was always laughed at. The pictures are very bad. To a point where people stopped taking pictures with their iPhones. The Nexus One however boasts a 5 Megapixel camera. This means that the photos and videos will come out better.

A variant of the Snapdragon will be found on the next iPhone.

Processor

The iPhone used to be among the best when it came out. The 600 MHz ARM sourced processor was a mighty one. But today, with Qualcomm’s 1 GHz on the Nexus One, things have changed. The Qualcomm, more commonly known as the Snapdragon is currently the most powerful processor ever fitted on a smartphone. There are even talks that a variant of the Snapdragon will be found on the next iPhone.

Operating system

The Android OS v/s the iPhone OS deserves a post on it’s own. We’ll update later.

Battery

Both phones say they will do around 300 hours standby time, with the iPhone having longer talk time on 2G, 12 hours (2 more than the Nexus one). On 3G however, the Nexus One will do 7 hours, 2 more than the iPhone. The battery times seems confusing to all of us.

Price

The Nexus One can be had for $179 through T-Mobile where as the iPhone can be had for $199 through AT&T.

Verdict

The iPhone is a great phone. It’s very easy to use and very nice to look at. It feels classier. But now that the Nexus One is out, we cannot help to look at the iPhone as a dated smartphone. The Nexus One looks younger and sexier. And that Android OS… That’s just geek’s play.