Ever the sceptic, I stopped believing in ‘free texting’ some time ago. There’s always a catch; living outside the USA invalidates the vast majority of offerings and spam & ads the rest of them. Still, being connected on 7 different chat-networks 24/7 at near zero cost, it itches having to sponsor the Telco’s obscene profits on text messaging texting to anyone not on a smart-phone. Continue Reading »
Just stumbled across a really useful service offered by DuckDuckGo*, a chat-bot. Kind of like your personal privacy conscious butler that answers nearly every question in seconds. Sure, you cannot talk to it, nor does it talk back, we’ll leave that to Siri, but I’ve yet to find a quicker way to access info on my mobile. The latest news or exchange rates, the weather in Arusha, the square root of PI, whatever tickles your fancy. Continue Reading »
Never thought I’d see the day I’d be proudly proclaiming to be born again. And it’s got very little to do with anything spiritual, and much to do with Facebook’s new Creepy Timeline aka the re-designed profile page soon to be rolled out. Continue Reading »
A post on Google’s Official Blog called “Designing an infinite digital bookcase” introduced the wonderful world of Chrome Experiments to me. I’d gotten used to working with PDF’s from a native tab in Chrome (bye bye top-heavy Adobe!) but this here website showcases what’s possible when artist paint with HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and WebGL.
As their by-line reads, “Not your mother’s JavaScript”… Continue Reading »
Continuing the saga of the hacked sites, it appears the traces I found earlier were nothing but a decoy.
This morning I found out, when we could not send out any emails, the hackers installed a malicious script on one of our sites that had been used to send a spamrun. This violated the terms of service of our hosting company, who in turn disabled outgoing mail.
Whilst I work with the legal department on getting back up, maybe I should share what happened, just so it might not happen to you. Continue Reading »
With the advent of the long awaited connection of our continent to the internet backbone, prices for mobile internet have gone down dramatically and (data)usage is rising by the day.
On a continent where only very few people have computers (and even those who do might not be able to run them when power fails once again), the new generation of smart phones (and the more complex feature phones) have in less then a year overtaken fixed broadband use and are now the no#1 means of connecting to the net in Africa. It does not hurt, ofcourse, that companies such as Huawei are now selling proper Android phones for only $100. Continue Reading »