Category: Tech

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Opera IconAfter a long wait, Opera 10 is out! So what’s new in this first double-digit web browser?

Turbo

The biggest new feature is Opera Turbo, which can massively speed up web access on a slow network connection. Turbo takes the compression used for Opera Mini, which has to deal with slow cell phone networks, and brings it to the desktop. On fast connections you won’t need the proxy, but if you’re stuck on dial-up or sharing a busy network, it can help immensely.

I definitely could have used it on the painfully slow hotel wi-fi during Comic-Con!

Turbo can be turned on and off through the status bar, or set to auto-detect your network speed and switch on when it would help, and off when it’s not needed.

Speed

Even without Turbo, Opera 10 is a heck of a lot faster than Opera 9 was! The app itself is a lot snappier, it displays pages faster, and it responds quickly. Opera feels lighter than Firefox again, after the (comparatively) clunky 9.x series.

Web Fonts

Opera’s CEO CTO recommended embedding TrueType fonts with CSS in 2007, but Safari was the first web browser to support it in a non-beta release. Now Firefox, Safari and Opera can all download fonts as-needed. That means websites can use fonts that aren’t already installed on your computer.

Until now, if a designer wanted to use a font other than one of the standard fonts that come pre-installed with Windows or Mac OS, they had to save the text as an image. That’s fine for banners and the like, but a pain for anything that changes regularly…like headlines or content.

You can read more about web fonts at Mozilla Hacks.

Site Compatibility & Features

Website compatibility has improved a lot, and Opera has continued to add support for newer technologies. It’s great to see Opera, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all working toward the next generation of the web. (If only Internet Explorer were along for the ride – at least IE8 has finally caught up with the last generation.)

Spell-Check

Opera has had on-demand spell checking for a while, though on Windows you had to install a separate dictionary. Now it’s built-in, and it’ll underline misspelled words as you type. (Downside: it underlines inside HTML code. I don’t really want to add “href,” “li,” and so forth to my dictionary.)

Unite Postponed

One thing Opera 10 doesn’t have that was introduced in the betas preview snapshots is Opera Unite, which lets you set up a presence on your computer that other people can see for file sharing, social networking, etc. Apparently they decided it needed more work and didn’t want to hold up the release.

But Wait, There’s More!

Some other new features:

  • Visual tabs: Stretch out the tab bar and see a thumbnail of each page you have open.
  • New e-mail client, including the long-requested ability to compose with formatting.
  • Automatic update.
  • Customize Speed Dial.
  • Web apps integration with web-based email and feed readers.
  • Improved developer tools (Dragonfly).
  • Opera Link: synchronize bookmarks, history, notes, etc. across multiple computers and phones. (Not new, but I think it syncs more types of data than it used to)

And a lot more.

As a reminder: Opera is free (as in beer). It has been for almost 4 years now, but it’s worth repeating because every once in a while you see someone who thinks it’s still pay or ad-based software.

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The Station Fire burning through the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles is expected to reach the summit of Mt. Wilson sometime tonight. In all likelihood it will damage or destroy the communications towers and the observatory complex. The Mount Wilson Observatory is an active observatory, and is also of historical importance because of discoveries made there over its 105-year history. In particular: Edwin Hubble’s* observations with the 100-inch Hooker telescope (shown at right) indicated that universe is much larger than was previously thought, and that it was expanding — observations that revolutionized astronomy and led to the current Big Bang theory.

People listening to a talk, lots of pictures of the sun printed out on the wall.I’ve been to the observatory once, on a tour my family took on August 8, 1992. We’d just come back from a trip to Florida where we visited Disney World and Cape Canaveral during the summer I was 16. I really wish I could remember more about the trip…but I took pictures and labeled them (though not in much detail). With the observatory threatened, I thought I’d dig them out and scan them**. You can see all eight on my Mt. Wilson Observatory Tour 1992 photoset on Flickr.

Forested mountain valley with a hazy white sky.The Observatory’s website is apparently hosted on the grounds, so the fact that its fire status page is still responding indicates it’s still there and has power. The latest update says that they’re setting up a backup info page, but it’s showing a 404 error right now.

*As in the Hubble Space Telescope.

**Scanning them was not a problem. Digging them out? That was a problem. I knew exactly which photo album they were in, and thought I knew where the album was. As it turned out, it wasn’t there. It was in an unopened box shoved at the very back of the long,narrow hall closet, such that I had to move 3 other boxes, several bags, and an unused CD rack just to see that it was labeled “photo albums” on top. Edit: And, oh yeah, the trail of ants along the wall, going after the long-forgotten bag of Halloween candy. The wall I kept brushing up against. How did I forget that part?

That’s the missing piece that makes the classic phrase more than a simple tautology. It’s not just that it’s in the last place you look. It’s that it’s in the last place you want to look.

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I love my T-Mobile G1, but it’s no secret that the phone has way too little internal memory. Now Engadget reports that the limited memory could prevent the G1 from running future versions of the Android operating system.

You can add plenty of data storage (images, music, app data) by dropping in any size Micro-SD card (IIRC it came with 1 GB. I’m currently running it with an 8 GB card). But the phone system, all the apps, and the cache for updates all have to share the measly 256 MB internal storage. Android and Me breaks down the partition structure, and points out that the current system, Android 1.5 “Cupcake,” already fills 99.5% of that space. Since software usually gets bigger with each successive version, it’s been challenging for Google to keep the OS within that limit.

It seems like it would be easy to just move the update cache to the SD card and double the size of the system partition…except that it would require reformatting the phone. Doable, but risky.

Before we get too gloomy, T-Mobile has stated:

We plan to continue working with Google to introduce future software updates to the T-Mobile G1. Reports to the contrary are inaccurate.

Now, this may simply mean that they’ll continue issuing bugfix/security updates. Or it may mean that they’re working out ways to squeeze newer Android versions onto the phone.

Now, Some Perspective

Let’s face it: the G1 is a first-generation device. It’s right there in the name (Generation One). All of us who bought it are early adopters, and that carries a certain degree of risk. Just like all those people who paid, what, $600 for the first iPhone only to see the price drop heavily less than a year later.

Even so, with Cupcake, Android is already quite a capable OS. Whether the G1 hits the wall at Cupcake, Donut, Eclair or Flan, the phone won’t stop working just because it can’t get major updates. Whatever happens, it’ll still be usable for the duration of a 2-year contract (and presumably beyond).

I do worry about incompatible apps, but that’ll start happening anyway as more devices with varying hardware specs appear on the market.

Really, though: this is the first phone I’ve ever owned that had software updates of any substance. I think one of the two RAZR variants had a bugfix release that came out before I even bought the phone, but that’s it. The fact that my G1 is actually a better phone now than when I bought it is pretty damn cool!

(via TMONews)

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lol_spam

  • Does anyone actually start off email to friends with “Dear Friend”?
  • All right! I always wanted one of those! “Delivery Status Notification 81% 0FF.” (spam subject) Who can resist at that discount?
  • “Get rid of pests for good!” – if only it would work on the spammers themselves.
  • That’s it! Time to find another surgeon! “The way to her heart is through her wrist.” (spam subject)
  • Usually it’s the divorced parents using the kids against each other, not the other way around: “Use Mother Nature to beat Father Time”

After posting these today, I’ve decided to set up a Twitter account dedicated to posting funny spam subjects & commentary. I plan to keep the traffic low – 1 or 2 posts a day. Please check out @lol_spam!

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