[tech junkie]

QOTD: Norm Papernick

Norm Papernick: "Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad." (Via Quotes of the Day.)

Automate getting your RSS fix

Over time I've messed around with a number of OS X applications that automate the finding and downloading of content that I subscribe to with RSS. Some of the applications that I have been using have not been updated in a long time and they have begun to become more and more unreliable. Fortunately I recently came across "Automatic": Automatic allows you to set up subscriptions for virtually any content linked in RSS feeds: podcasts, videocasts, torrentcasts... Rule of thumb: if i...

QOTD: Alan Corenk

Alan Corenk: "'Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms.'" (Via Quotes of the Day.)

The Core Group continues to screw South Africa

I wanted to post this a week ago, but as I had bought the new iPod nano as a gift for a loved one, I didn't want to spoil the surprise. About two weeks ago I started hunting for a way to get the new iPod nano delivered to my door before the 23rd of September. I tried to convince Amazon to deliver to SA, I tried BH photovideo as well as local some local stores like wantitall and have2have. Although wantitall and have2have could get them for me, they couldn't guarantee that it would arrive in t...

Xbox Live finally coming to South Africa ?

This morning while I was listening to one of my weekly podcasts (ZA Tech Show Episode 80) and yawning through the Halo: ODST review, Simon Dingle makes reference to John at M$ SA about the imminent release of Xbox Live locally. Now I know we've heard this before, but something about this conversation gives me hope that something really is about to happen. I hope the guys over at ZA Tech don't mind but I've cropped their audio clip down to the relevant part to make it easy for you to li...

Better than WiFi: Ethernet over power

[Rating:8/10] Yip, you read that correctly. Ethernet over power, not power over Ethernet. For years I've been having performance and coverage issues with WiFi at home. Most of the kit I have is pretty good quality stuff (Apple and Netgear mostly), but for applications like streaming video I just never seemed to be able to just turn my devices on and then sit back and relax. I always had to fiddle with something here or reconfigure something there. Eventually I just got sick of it and eithe...

Side scrollers making a comeback ?

[Rating:10/10] A mate of mine told me how awesome Shadow Complex was one night while we were defending the Earth from a locust horde invasion. I asked him what it was all about and he basically told me that it was based on the idea of the old 2D side scrollers we enjoyed in our youth, but that this was actually pretty awesome. I dismissed his comments and steadied my shotgun for another headshot. A few days later I thought I'd see what he was on about. Well, let me tell you. It was alm...

Click-to-dial from the Apple address book

I've been using an IP softphone on my Mac for some time, but there has been no integration between the softphone and the Apple address book. It wasn't the biggest issue for me, but I became really tired of copying the numbers I looked up and pasting them into the softphone to be able to dial. After trolling the interweb yesterday and finding a few address book plug-in scripts (that no longer work with Snow Leopard), I came across Dialectic from JN Software. It works with pretty much ev...

What are they scared of ?

I guess it's getting close to Xmas and they need to keep buying their kids expensive presents, just like they've done for the last decade... TechCentral ejected from Icasa meeting: "TechCentral was on Tuesday morning asked to leave a meeting in Sandton, called by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) to discuss the cost of telecommunications in SA. This followed an objection to the publication’s presence by MTN SA CEO Karel Pienaar. The meeting had been called by Icasa to ask n...