Category Archive: Technology
Subcategories: No categories
Where are the ITWeb feeds?
I have been looking for some sort of clue to where the feeds are for ITWeb, and up to now I have not managed to locate any. I hope its just stashed away somewhere amongst the tons of ads and other garbage, surely the leading technology news site in SA will have a feed, right? I hope so, let me know if you know it, I hope it is just a case of poor link placement.
If not I am starting to get a little concerned, it tweaks me that so many local sites haven’t caught one yet.
Message to non-syndicated sites: C’mon guys, you’re competitors are providing feeds, why cant you? Contact me, I can help.
Technorati Tags: RSS, ITWeb, South Africa
The Municator, possible african solution?
I saw a mention of this on Rocketboom a week ago already, but only recently decided to give it a more in depth look.
What I found seems fairly interesting and seems to hold a whole lot of promise for developing countries like South Africa.
The Municator is a small form factor PC designed for use by Chinese citizens using Chinese hardware and is the brainchild of the forward thinking company Yellow Sheep River.
In the photo it is actually the small silver metal box marked with “Municator” in blue.
The device was featured at Cebit and was touted as having a $146 (later I saw 123 Euro) retail price tag, a brief spec overview reveals:
- 400/800 MHz CPU
- 133MHz FSB
- ATI Radeon 7000-M
- C2700 SODIMM slot,Support DDR 266 module, 128MB/256MB/512/MB,512 MB total memory capacity.
- 40G HDD:Easily upgradeable ATA100/66/33 support
- Optical storage optional but well supported
- IO Interfaces well supported including 4xUSB 2.0, S-Video, VGA out port, IrDa etc.
- Internal LAN: On-board 100M/10Mbp/s Ethernet LAN controller Realtek : 8139D
- WiFi-compliant wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11a/b/g) by USB dongle(Optional)
- Modem (Optional)
The Municator is designed around an OS called Thinix designed to suit the needs of the average Chinese household and that in facts encapsulates the vision of the manufacturer YelloSheepRiver. Their philosophy was to design a PC using local manufactured components to serve the needs of the local users first and foremost.
If we can produce our own products by ourselves, more Chinese computer-users can enjoy the benefits, and this is what we have aimed to achieve.
The Municator is a very small form factor designed to be mobile and to “move it where it is needed”, if you have a keyboard and a TV around chances are that you will be ok. Also interesting is the Thinix UI that seems to have been been designed to be very usable to non PC users, i.e. easy access to the main features like internet (FireFox), email (Thunderbird), word processing (RedOffice, a Chinese developed MS Word compatible software) etc. (Instant Messaging is also supported btw.). Overall this is not the device for you if you need a high tech machine to play the latest games or use high impact applications but for most people it will be more than enough.
While the Municator is not a terribly fast solution and still lacks the keyboard, mouse and monitor something like this does look very promising. It could be argued that used hardware of similar specs can be cobbled together cheaper, but for a developing country it makes a lot of sense to have something as neatly packaged as this running standardised software used for browsing , email , audio and video offering a easy to support appliance rather then a wobbly old PC.
I hope some entrepreneuring individual will take it on himself to start looking at devices like these in conjunction with the government to start putting communication technology like the internet within reach of every South African.
Read more here:
http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/146-municator-computer/
http://cebitvideo.com/?p=20
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/municator-the-146-linux-computer
Further scanR tests
This time with a 2MP camera (by the way the “after” looks a little shorter because I cropped it badly and I don’t feel like fixing it 
)
Technorati Tags: scanR
Optimise your paper trail with scanR
I saw a link to a service called scanR (another case of lost letters) in the geeknewscentral newsletter today.
I decided to give it a bit of a spin and was pretty surprised by what I found.
What it does:
In a nutshell it allows you to send in photos taken of a whiteboard document or fax and will then clean it up for you a little and send back a PDF document pre tagged with words found in the scan for easy searching in tools like Google Desktop.
How do you use it?:
Simple, take a picture with your > 1 megapixel camera phone (or by whatever other means) and bang an email through to the service. The first step for a new user involves a confirmation email and there after its smooth sailing.
What could it be handy for?:
This looks like it could be handy to take a quick snap of a whiteboard after meetings to save the time in writing down, I have done this a couple times and if this will make the resulting snaps easier to use it seems like a bonus. It should also be nice for people on the road to send through digitized copies of documents if they don’t have access to scanners. There may also be nice applications for keeping digital copies of a business paper trail due to the searching element.
Overall I think this is quite a smart idea, I don’t think that this will ever replace proper OCR and archival tools in business but it a nice bootstrapper solution for private individuals and corporates on a tight budget.
I included a before and after sample of a crappy cellphone image test.
Before:
After:
Poor results before, poor results after but you get the drift. As with everything else its a case of garbage in, garbage out and I think this is due to the poor lighting and crappy low resolution image taken by my phone, maybe 1.2MP is still too low?
US pundits say that Internet technologies are not yet ready for TV
Mark Cuban has in interesting post where is citing a a testimony by Craig Moffet stating that the US internet infrastructure is simply inefficient for the demand that will be placed on it in the next couple of years.
As we are entering the domain of REAL broadband applications like Internet TV and downloadable movies as the PC is slowly becoming an integral part of the home, it seems inevitable that the speed demand is going to move from the business and into the home, current over hyped technologies like WiMax will just be totally inefficient and copper/fibre technologies will reach their limits at around 20mbps. New technologies will need to be developed but they always carry prohibitive costs. Moffat states that he believes TV over Internet is not going to replace traditional broadcasting in this decade.
What is more worrying from a South African perspective is that we are still stuck on a measily 1mbps connections and firing it up to its full potential is the domain of the rich and famous.
We need to move to catch up or I for see a technological dark ages in our dear South Africa.
Technorati Tags: Technology, Broadband, Cuban
Vista and the saga of the impossible rewrite
One of the more interesting things to come out over the weekend is an article written by renown Australian journalist Dave Richards, provocatively titled 60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten.
The article states that the Microsoft Vista team has undergone a large scale restructuring in order to meet its deadline for the CES show in January 2007. It then lists an internal memo verbatim that underlines this restructuring and the vision for the new team.
Let me say first off, before quoting others, that while it is believable that MS is rushing to get the final changes and tweaks done before going to the presses, it seems ridiculous and sensational to claim that any major OS is going to get a 60% rewrite at this stage of the project, the fact is that people have been running Vista betas for months now out there in the real world and it certainly doesn’t seem like a product that needs to be near rebuilt. In terms of time frame this is just not feasible and if these projects are run properly there should be absolutely no reason for this to happen at this late stage.
In a further development today, Richards cites Mr Raymond Vardanega, MD of Acer Australia as having confirmed this rumour and hints that the problem is contained somewhere in the Media Center portion of Vista.
Robert Scoble is currently denying all reports and quotes the X-box team as having unvalidated the comments on them giving up developers towards the Vista cause.
Further more this quote from the Xbox blog:
In fact, Vista is feature complete – meaning the code writing process is essentially over. The next phase of development focuses on security, testing and fit/finish – not writing new code. Vista is on track for business availability in November 2006 and consumer availability in January 2007.
At this stage it is unclear what is exactly going on at Redmond, but for now it seems unlikely that there really exists such a massive problem on the code base and I am going to dismiss this as rumour mongering for now, at least until Microsoft takes up an official stance on the problem.
Further rumour based reporting at the inquirer.
What ever happened to getting both sides of the story before running with it? Is this the effect that blogs are having on mainstream reporting? I hope not. Is there still something to be called integrity and accuracy in reporting, or have blogging made it obsolete? I am not saying that there is no semblance of truth in these articles, merely that at this stage no one really knows enough to make any real concrete comments, its all word-of-mouth until Redmond takes an official stance, which is not Scoble’s role btw.
BarCamp Cape Town has a new logo!
Have you signed up yet? Visit http://barcamp.org/BarCampCapeTown/ today!
Big thanks to Damien and Mark for the effort, it looks awesome!
Technorati Tags: BarCamp, BarCampCapeTown, SouthAfrica
ShoZu, takes the effort out of camera phoning.
Its true that there are ways of getting camera phone photos uploaded to your favorite service, mainly revolving around email, or alternatively downloading to your PC and then uploading , but it has always seemed a little like voodoo to non technical people. (Most people find even MMS difficult)
Along comes ShoZu an application enabling direct-from-phone uploading to four popular photo sharing/blog services:
1) Flickr
2) Buzznet
3) TextAmerica
4) WebShots
I was happy to see a large list of supported phones including mine, the Sony Ericsson V600i (K600).
During registration on the site you provide your phone number for the service to SMS you a download link. The SMS arrived instantly and the 216KB Java application proved easy to download and install.
After installation you are presented with a neat Java application that allows you to view all the photos on your phone, add tags, descriptions and titles and then upload these images to your photo service of choice, I chose flickr. A handy feature is that you can modify the meta data on the image even after the upload. Videos uploaded via the will be forwarded to an email address you can specify.
Its all very simple and easy to use, and its definately worth a look if you use your phone a lot.
Well done to the folks over at ShoZu!
iBurst Phone
PCStuff has the scoop on an IP phone designed to run on the local iBurst network.
The graphic he has of it looks somewhat “dubious”, but still seems like an interesting proposition.
The weird thing is that you need to plug in your iBurst PCMCIA card on the top of this thing so you will look kinda dorky with a massive brick stuck to your ear and then of course you have to make sure that stay within the reception area. Then there is the price of that darn modem as well…
Oh well, its a start I guess.
Technorati Tags: iBurst, SouthAfrica, VoIp,
Why the internet is cool – Part 1
So two days ago I was trying to get a recipe for butternut soup, my mother wasn’t able to find hers, and I couldn’t find one in the plethora of cookbooks we have at home.
In comes the Internet, a quick google search revealed:
South African Starters: Butternut Soup
I opened the page up in the good old browser on the notebook last night, perched it on the kitchen counter and started cooking, an hour and a half later we had creamy and delicious soup for dinner.
The internet is cool!
Technorati Tags: Internet Is Cool