Visitors to Russia should be on the alert for cheap iPhones, according to an item on Englishrussia.com. The scam is simple; someone comes up to you in the street, apparently in distress because they don’t have enough money for a train or plane ticket. You look like a helpful sort of person and they offer to sell you their iPhone for a bargain price, so they can get home. It looks just like the real deal, and the seller offers to show you it is working, he (or she) switches it on and the Apple logo appears on the screen, but it quickly disappears; the battery is dead they explain, but it will be okay when you charge it up. Having parted with your money you hook said iPhone up to a charger, only to find that it’s a clever fake. What you have bought is a very convincing iPhone case, with a simple backlit screen with the Apple logo illuminated a small battery powered light bulb. Oh yes, and you get a small chunk of metal, to give it the right weight.
Just a couple days ago Google released its own version of a web browser, dubbed Google Chrome. This is exciting news, because it now increases the pressure on Firefox and Internet Explorer to be all that they can be. It’s even surprising, considering that Google and Firefox were business partners in advertising. Just a while ago Google Adsense was paying people for referring people to Firefox.
Google Chrome has a unique minimalist look that easily separates itself from other browsers. The browser bars are not cluttered full of different options, menus and toolbars, instead it only features your most used browser features, like the back and forward arrows, bookmark button, bookmark toolbar address bar, go button, and two pull down icons for page settings and internet options. Read the rest of this entry »
That’s what Toshiba reckons its latest Super Charge Ion Battery (SCIB) is capable of, and the icing on the cake is that it should be able to withstand between 5000 and 6000 charge/discharge cycles, or up to ten times the number of charge cycles for a standard Lithium Ion battery pack. There’s even more good news, they won’t explode when crushed, which is probably not something most people need to worry about, but it could happen. However, there’s no word on what SCIB’s do when they are short-circuited, which is one of the possible reasons for the recent spate of well-publicised laptop battery fires. So what’s the catch? Well, Toshiba hasn’t announced a launch date yet, which usually means there are some manufacturing or cost difficulties, or both, still to be ironed out, but the idea of being able to get a dead laptop battery up and running in just a few minutes is going to appeal to a lot of power-users, so we probably won’t have to wait too long for it.
You can never have too many picture viewer programs on your PC. If you are into digital imaging then you have to stay ahead of the game and have up to date software that can handle new and old file formats, as well as all the variations in between; then there are the apparently intact image files that stubbornly refuse to open in normal file viewers. You also need to be able to convert from one format to another, singly or in batches, read hidden EXIF data and fiddle around with the image. If your image viewer can do all that then fine, if not you should definitely have a look at XnView. Read the rest of this entry »
Nowadays it seems you can’t buy a laptop without a built-in Wi-Fi adaptor, and it has happened really quickly, in the space of 2 or 3 years. If the GSM Association gets its way, in another couple of years, most new laptops will have a Mobile Broadband adaptor as well. It has already started to happen, though currently most Mobile Broadband adaptors are in the form of plug-in USB ‘dongles’. They’re basically compact 3G (or 2.5G) mobile phones that hook your laptop up to the mobile phone network and provide fast data transfer rates, as good as and in some cases better than wired broadband. The only trouble is coverage is still a bit patchy, and there are several different standards around the world, but they’re working on that and multi-mode adaptors are not a problem to build. Read the rest of this entry »
Visitors to Russia should be on the alert for cheap iPhones, according to an item on Englishrussia.com. The scam is simple; someone comes up to you in the street, apparently in distress because they don’t have enough money for a train or plane ticket. You look like a helpful sort of person and they offer to sell you their iPhone for a bargain price, so they can get home. It looks just like the real deal, and the seller offers to show you it is working, he (or she) switches it on and the Apple logo appears on the screen, but it quickly disappears; the battery is dead they explain, but it will be okay when you charge it up. Having parted with your money you hook said iPhone up to a charger, only to find that it’s a clever fake. What you have bought is a very convincing iPhone case, with a simple backlit screen with the Apple logo illuminated a small battery powered light bulb. Oh yes, and you get a small chunk of metal, to give it the right weight.
