Microsoft Surface - surface and gesture based computing

Microsoft Surface represents a fundamental change in the way we interact with digital content.

With surface, we can actually grab data with our hands and move information between objects with natural gestures and touch.

Surface features a 30-inch tabletop display whose unique abilities allow for several people to work independently or simultaneously.  All without using a mouse or a keyboard.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

WP-Autoblog vs FeedWordPress

WP-Autoblog is another one for group blogging that uses RSS to get content from external blogs.

This plugin is potentially dangerous: it converts xml into Wordpress posts. It could be used to run an aggregator site, or it might be used by spammers to push high-profit keywords into their blogs. I’m not sure if writing a Wordpress plugin to automatically post from RSS will enable spammers a “5-minute” spam blog installation or not. However, I think that it’s useful in its own right, and helped me learn a little more about RSS.

Read more from their website

FeedWordPress - store RSS data inside Wordpress database

This is useful for group blogging without having to leave your existing blogging platform.

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you choose into your WordPress blog; if you syndicate several newsfeeds then you can WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (”planet”) website.

FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of configuration in mind. You’ll need a working installation of WordPress (version 2.1, 2.0 or 1.5), and also FTP or SFTP access to your web host. The ability to create cron jobs on your web host would be very helpful but it’s not absolutely necessary. You don’t need to tweak any plain-text configuration files and you don’t need shell access to your web host to make it work.

More info: http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/

Legends of the Name Game

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here's how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

Garry Cherbnoff bought his first domain, Netincome.com, in 1995. By 1999 he'd quit his job as a hospital electrician, and how now lives on a 10-acre lakefront spread in Brithis Columbia

Scott Day, the watermelon farmer from Waurika, Okla. discovered domain names in 1997 when he bought Watermelons.com for $3000. Today he holds one of the most admired portfolios in the business.

Frank Schilling made his mark buying generic .com names in 2002 and 2003, when others were fleeing the Internet. Today his portfolio of 320,000 domains is among the world's biggest, and he works out of his home in the Cayman Islands.

Yun Ye was among the first to write code to automate domain purchases. In 2004 he sold his portfolio of 100,000 names to Seattle-based Marchex for $164 million.

Craig Lovik began exploiting the generic typo in 1998. Now he owns 200,000 names, including lucrative misspellings like Peircings.com, and Pheonix.com.

Read the complete article about Kevin Ham

How to Get Started as a Domainer: 28 Tips, Techniques and Resources

A good read for a new domainer like me.

How does a salary of $10,000 per day sound to you? Webmaster and marketing extraordinaire Marcus Frind reportedly pulls in $10,000 per day in Google AdSense from his dating website PlentyofFish.com. But that’s chump change compared to the $100,000 per day that domainer Yun Ye was pulling in before he sold his domain portfolio for about $164M in 2004 and subsequently disappeared under the radar.

When it comes to making a buck on the internet it seems that everyone has a solution, although few of them seem to work. But if you’re looking to capitalize on one of the most powerful cash earning enterprises on the internet that is actually making plenty of people money, you should check out domaining. Although you may not be quite as successful as these two entrepreneurs, it’s never too late to start in the domaining industry.

A domainer is someone who earns a profit buying and selling domain names. The philosophy is similar to the stock market: buy low and sell high. Here are 28 tips, tools, techniques and financing options to get you started on your way to successful domaining.

Read the complete article

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Gets Preliminary Approval

This could have saved Engadget from last week's false report about the delay of Apple's iPhone which costs Apple investors about $4 billion.

Spammers, phishers and other Internet bottom-feeders, be warned.

A key Internet standards body gave preliminary approval on Tuesday to a powerful technology designed to detect and block fake e-mail messages. It's called DomainKeys Identified Mail, and it promises to give Internet users the best chance so far of stanching the seemingly endless flow of fraudulent junk e-mail.

Read the complete story… 

My Mobile Phone History

These are the mobile phones I used for the past 10 years

• Philips Diga.  My very first mobile phone.
• Nokia 5110
• Nokia 3210
• Nokia 6510
• HTC Tanager aka Smart Amazing Phone
• Another Nokia phone.  I forgot the model
• HTC Voyager aka Smart Amazing Phone 2
• O2 Xphone II.  This was stolen.
• HTC Tanager again
• HTC Voyager again
• O2 XDA Mini
• HTC Tornado aka T-Mobile SDA
• Benq P50.  Good PDA phone with qwerty keyboard but battery gets drained quickly
• Gigabyte g-Smart/HTC Tornado.  First PDA Phone with TV and radio
• Xphone II. I accidentally killed this one when I tried to downgrade the ROM.
• T-Mobile MDA Vario aka i-Mate K-Jam, O2 XDA Mini S

Google Earth Ruler

Google Earth has a nice tool called Ruler.  It can measure the distance between two places in centimeter, meter, kilometer, inch, feet, yard, miles, nautical miles and smoots. See red dots below.

 
Click to see bigger photo

This tool is useful if:

• you are using your own transport and you start thinking on how to save gas by getting the best route
• you are to going to travel out of town and you want to compute the cost of gas
• you want to know how far you are from your girlfriend/boyfriend's house or your relatives in the province or abroad
• you want to measure some big properties like your mansion, hacienda, pool, etc.
• … and other things I can't think of while writing this blog post

I used this tool to find out the distance between my work and my house.  Here's my data:

• Emerald Ave., Ortigas to Market Ave. Pasig (via Ortigas Ave.) - 6.6km (I use this very often)
• Emerald Ave. to Market Ave. (via Julia Vargas Ave.) - 6km
• Market Ave. to Emerald Ave. (via Julia Vargas) - 6.1km
• Emerald Ave. to Market Ave. (via Ultra/Canley) - 5.6km
• Market Ave. to Emerald Ave. (via Canley/Ultra) - 5.56km

Apparently, using the Ultra/Canley route is the shortest (and also the safest and cost effective because you don't go beyond 60km/hr) but I doubt if this is better because the Julia Vargas route has less stops and Canley is stiffer than the latter (if going to Ortigas).  

I need help here.  I want to know which route to use.  I hope my fellow GT members could help me with this. 

Webmasters should have this setup

This is my current setup in the office — dual monitor using one workstation. It may not look good because the other one is a CRT but, as a webmaster, it helps me determine how a particular design looks like on LCD and on CRT.

Setting up a dual monitor is easy.  If you have a laptop, you just plug in another monitor, setup Display Properties and your done. With desktop PC, you have several options. 

On my workstation, I use two video cards — one is an AGP and the other one is a PCI .  It is very important that your video cards support dual monitor.  

You can also use this

Or this

Or this

Just make sure you use the correct monitor or an adapter like this

I will not elaborate on the the details but if you're interested, you may just google "dual monitor".

Let me know if this post inspired you to have this setup.