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Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts

16 February 2008

The Thinking Blog Goes Mobile (And So Can You)

Remember a few years ago when camera phones and music phones first started hitting the market? Everyone thought they were the coolest things on the block, but it's actually harder to find a phone that doesn't have a camera today than one that does. Technology is quickly advancing and the public wants more out of their mobile phones. They want to stay connected in every way possible and text messages just won't suffice. They want to harness the power of the world wide web everywhere they go.

Mobile Web For Everyone

Wireless data appears to be the next major frontier for consumer-level cell phones, but not everyone is willing to pay the hefty data fees involved in rendering full web pages. When you visit Beyond the Rhetoric or The Thinking Blog, a series of dynamic elements are conjured up and images are loaded. Watch a YouTube video or two and you could be looking at quite an expensive cell phone bill.

At the same time, blog owners want their loyal readers to have access to their website everywhere they go, and a mobile-optimized version (WAP) is one way to do that. For those of you who aren't familiar, WAP sites carry much the same content as their full HTML counterparts, but they've been stripped of the fluff and heavy downloads. Images are kept to a minimum and the formatting has been designed to better suit the small screen of a cell phone.

I'm not a coder, so I have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating a mobile site. Thankfully, there is a service set up at Wirenode that does this for you, transforming any regular blog into one that is more accessible from a cell phone's WAP browser. Whether you've got a RAZR or an LG Voyager, there's a good chance your modern phone does WAP.

Wirenode Cuts the Wires

Wirenode specializes in creating mobile versions of blogs. As I mentioned earlier, these mobile sites trim the fat, so to speak, leaving readers with the core content. Yes, you lose some of the sidebar navigation and some of the flashy formatting you may have on your full site, but it opens your blog up to a whole new (mobile) audience.

After the mobile version of a blog is set up, Wirenode then allows you to enter into an admin area where you can safely edit the mobile site, adding more pages, images, and adjusting the content to suit your preferences. This appears to be a very straightforward and easy-to-understand process. If you can handle Wordpress, you should be able to handle this.

Better still, Wirenode also provides widgets for your blog. These widgets can inform your existing readers about the mobile version of your blog. These can be found under the Promotion tab in the admin area.

My main gripe is that the mobile sites are hosted at the wirenode.mobi domain, though I'd imagine it is possible to transport them over to your own servers too.

Read The Thinking Blog On Your Phone

To see what mobile blog reading is all about, be sure to check out the mobile version of The Thinking Blog on your cell phone. You can find it at http://ttb.wirenode.mobi/. Now you can access all these thought-provoking posts at the coffee shop, in the library, or when your significant other drags you to yet another boring opera.

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04 January 2008

Water Resistant RuffBook Tech Giveaway - Winner!

This is it! After the final round of voting for the best Ruff PC review, we have determined the winner. But before we announce who won the prize worth $1,800 - let's look at the winner of the side contest - maker of the best demo video. As mentioned earlier, the rights of the best video will be bought by Ruff PC and used on the website, commercials..etc after some professional editing like Apple did.


Without further due, here is the creator of the best video: TechTreak!











Now, the moment you have all been waiting for: announcing the winner of RuffBook Tech!

..drumroll please..

..and the winner is..


Written by Michael Kwan, the killer review based on your votes was indeed one of the most comprehensive and honest reviews we've received for the giveaway. Starting with an interest provoking introductory paragraph, Michael gave reasons as to why would the average consumer need a Ruff PC, supporting his argument with statistics, and moving on to review each and every product in the Ruff PC product line. He also gave a brief opinion on the pricing and concludes with the links necessary to enter the giveaway. Being a rich blogger like John means that he would not need to add another laptop to his laptop collection and will be giving the RuffBook Tech away on his own blog.

So, don't worry if you didn't win this giveaway - you can get it back from John! - after he finishes testing the unit on birds:


Finally, I would like to thank everyone who participated in this giveaway, be it with reviews or votes, and congratulations to the winners!

Grab the RSS for future updates and keep thinking.

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30 December 2007

POLL: Vote For the Best Ruff PC Review (and Video) - Final Round!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the final round of The Thinking Blog 1st anniversary giveaway. As you might already know, this year we are giving away a brand new, rugged, water resistant RuffBook Tech sponsored by Ruff PC. It is all down to Top 5 reviews and these finalists will be voted down to one winner in another 5 days. The winner will be announced on Friday, January 4th 2008 on a separate post, and Ruff PC will get in touch with you to send out your New Year's gift. Please, everyone (especially the RSS readers), read all the 5 reviews and make sure you cast your vote.

Without further due, here is the list of finalists from the previous rounds in reverse order. Feel free to use the direct link of the poll or use the code below to add the poll on your blog.


LIST OF FINALISTS (votes from previous rounds)

01. Zero Hour Sleep (54)

02. Widget's Lab (61)

03. Search for Blogging (201)

04. John Chow Dot Com (576)

05. TechTreak (854)

<embed allowScriptAccess="never"  saveEmbedTags="true" src="http://www.polldaddy.com/pollN.swf" FlashVars="p=185231" quality="high"  wmode="transparent"  bgcolor="#ffffff" width="155"  height="330"  name="beta3" salign="tl" scale="autoscale"  type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" ></embed>



VOTE FOR THE BEST:



LIST OF VIDEO ENTRIES

01. Nakichiam - Demo



02. TechTreak - Demo 2









03. TechTreak - Demo 1




VOTE FOR THE BEST VIDEO: (Direct link for video poll)


<embed allowScriptAccess="never"  saveEmbedTags="true" src="http://www.polldaddy.com/poll.swf" FlashVars="p=174970" quality="high"  wmode="transparent"  bgcolor="#ffffff" width="252"  height="268"  name="beta3" salign="tl" scale="autoscale"  type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" ></embed>
Good Luck and Happy New Year!

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27 December 2007

Turn Your Desktop Into a Lava Lamp

Bring back 'far out' memories of the 70's with this mesmerising animated wallpaper. Drempels is a nifty piece of software that makes your computer's desktop behave like a screensaver, providing a hypnotic and psychedelic display of constant motion (best viewed on LSD). It allows you to add your own images and also runs in a screensaver mode. It's also open-source now, so you can get under the hood and tinker with the code if you so desire.

This is the first animated desktop program that we've come across that not only works, but it's stable and doesn't affect the system performance at all (when you put every setting on low and limit FPS to 10). Give it a try - it's really cool!

DIRECT DOWNLOAD (529 kb) - From the Drempels website:
"Drempels makes colorful, swirling, hallucinogenic patterns that resemble a hurricane or tornado. It normally runs in your Windows background or 'desktop', replacing your old still-image wallpaper with gently-animating visuals... and meanwhile, you can use your computer just like you normally would. It uses very little CPU overhead - so little that it even runs smoothly on a 233 MHz system!"

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25 December 2007

POLL: Vote For the Best Ruff PC Review (and Video) - Round 2

Upon much discussion on the previous poll, we decided to break this giveaway down to 3 rounds. We received quite a few comments and emails like how people are supposed to read all the 80 reviews, and concerns about "bribing" for votes among other things led us to take this measure to allow the best reviewer win - not the one with most loyal friends. This is not a popularity contest and we hope the giveaway goes for the one who deserve it most. For a prize of this size, it is much more logical to have a few rounds rather than voting it off in a single poll. So, this is how it will be.

From the total 80 reviews, Top 20 made it to the second round and you have 5 days to vote for the best. On December 30th, Top 5 of round 2 poll will make it to the final round and those finalists will be voted down to one winner in another 5 days. The winner will be announced on Friday, January 4th 2008 on a separate post, and Ruff PC will get in touch with you to send out your Christmas New Year's gift.

There are a few rules as to how you can collect your votes this round. You can't spam people or bribe them with money. Use of any other non-monetary incentives like giving out links, kisses or candy is fine. However, you can vote only once and any violation of these rules or gaming the system will leave the participant out of the giveaway. So, no cheating. It's holiday season people - let's keep the spirit up.

Following is the Top 20 reviews from the first round in reverse order. If you don't have time to read them all, just read a few random ones until you find a review that you think is worthy of your vote. Merry Christmas and good luck!


LIST OF SEMI-FINALISTS (Votes from Previous Round)

01. John Chow Dot Com (5)

02. Homespun Honolulu (5)

03. Zero Hour Sleep (5)

04. Everything and Anything (5)

05. Jim's Rants (6)

06. Great Giveaways (6)

07. Samuel Nova (6)

08. Nakichiam (8)

09. Tim Christie (8)

10. Evangelical's Anonymous (10)

11. In The Brink of the Mental Warzone (10)

12. Kissowa Insider (14)

13. Drops of Blood (15)

14. Bloggrrl (17)

15. Must Read Files (21)

16. Love and Horny (23)

17. Widget's Lab (55)

18. Search for Blogging (73)

19. TechTreak - Review 1 and Review 2 (85)

VOTE FOR THE BEST:



UPDATE 1: Forgot to mention that votes from previous round will be added to the poll to choose the finalists. So, your efforts to gather votes are not wasted. Here are the results from the first round (click on it to see the PollDaddy report):



UPDATE 2: We also started a little side-contest, if you will, for the videos that were created by the reviewers. The rights of the best video will be bought by Ruff PC and used on the website, commercials..etc like Apple did. If you haven't already created a video, you can join now by mashing up something in less than 10 minutes using Animoto, send us your URL via email, and we will add it here. The following are the videos created so far and they are up for votes as well. The same route applies: Top 5 videos that make it to the final round will be voted again, counting the votes from this round as well, to choose the winner.

LIST OF VIDEO ENTRIES

01. TechTreak - Demo 1




02. TechTreak - Demo 2









VOTE FOR THE BEST VIDEO:


UPDATE 3: Wordout emailed me and opted out of the giveaway. Good luck to the rest of you!

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20 December 2007

POLL: Vote For the Best Ruff PC Review

ruggedThe time has come and all the reviews are now up for votes. If you don't see your entry listed please send us an email. You have 5 days to vote for the best entry in this poll and the person with highest votes will win a brand new RuffBook Tech. Hopefully this way it will be fair and ensure we give equal opportunities to everyone at winning this stellar prize! The winner will be announced on Tuesday, December 25th 2007 on a seperate post, and Ruff PC will get in touch with you to send out your Christmas gift. Good luck!


LIST OF PARTICIPANTS:

01. Jim's Rants
02. Boredom Relief
03. Brain Ticklers
04. Bali Dream Home
05. Listening Learning Living
06. Blog Paradise
07. Search for Blogging
08. Writing From the Inside Out
09. My Life With IT
10. Tanny's Blog
11. Web Extremities
12. Truth or Dare
13. Rugged Notebooks Blog
14. ROTUS
15. Widget's Lab
16. The Pink C
17. Diet Pulpit
18. Bloggers School
19. The SOHO Quest
20. Everything and Anything
21. Great Giveaways
22. Blissful Travel
23. Rene O'Deay
24. Evangelical's Anonymous
25. Drops of Blood
26. ORIGENA
27. Life Cycle Analysis
28. Learn To Earn Too
29. Easy Tech Talk
30. Contest Bytes
31. Love and Horny
32. What's On My Mind
33. Wordout - Review 1, Review 2 and Review 3
34. The Electronic Replicant
35. The Pond
36. Trajcov Blog
37. Homespun Honolulu
38. Yakrib's Weblog
39. Diet and Weight Loss Programs
40. Must Read Files
41. Ang Alamat ni Huanito
42. Adventure Bookshelf
43. In The Brink of the Mental Warzone
44. TechTreak - Review 1 and Review 2
45. Thinking Tunnel
46. Colour Blind
47. Bloggrrl
48. Wickedly Cool Bean
49. The World According To Candes
50. About Blog Contests
51. ProBlogContester
52. Cardiogirl
53. Blogging Made Devilishly Simple
54. Needless Productions
55. Where the Walls are Soft
56. Prince John Blog
57. Laura Williams' Musings
58. John Chow Dot Com
59. Tim Christie
60. ITBBlog
61. Samuel Nova
62. Blog with Ric
63. Million Dollar Portfolio
64. Mini Billion
65. DOMTAN
66. Nakichiam
67. WebMoi
68. Decrepit Old Fool
69. Zero Hour Sleep
70. Milan Dinic's Blog
71. Arimou's World
72. Kissowa Insider
73. Quest To Write
74. TechZi
75. SpinningSilk Multimedia
76. My Blog Contest
77. Tech E Blog
78. Indo Consoles
79. Diana's Journal
80. Techno Updates

VOTE FOR THE BEST:



PS. Can anyone help me get the poll aligned to right of the participant list? It is a Flash based poll (RSS and Email readers click here to vote).

UPDATE: Thank you for your help guys. The list and poll are now aligned side by side.

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19 December 2007

Last 24 Hours to Enter the RuffBook Giveaway

Today is your last chance to win a RuffBook water resistant laptop. If you haven't blogged about our giveaway already, then write a quick post with one link to RuffPC.com, another to the contest page and email me your post URL - that's it! The deadline is only 24 hours away, so you better hurry if you would like to see your review listed here tomorrow (with a link to your post). This giveaway is open to anyone, anywhere in the world (as long as you have a blog) - what are you waiting for, Christmas?

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13 December 2007

10 Crazy Ways to Cool Your Computer

Due to increased heat produced by overclocked components, an effective cooling system is necessary to avoid damaging the hardware. Overclockers go to great extents to keep their valuable hardware cool in the face of ridiculous speeds. Here are a few examples of MHz junkies that might have gone just a little too far while trying to keep their computers cool (in no particular order):


  1. The Turbocharger: This guy had an old turbocharger lying around and decided to put it to good use, pumping air into his flaming hot case faster than any 90mm fan out there.


  2. Liquid Nitrogen Cooled: The Reigning Champion, used again and again with every new chip released. The only way to go for a new 3DMark record. This was used to cool a P4 over clocked to 5.25Ghz!


  3. The Oversize Fan: Built on Plastic Tubing, with a rediculously large fan. Completely custom case with probably the best ventilation possible.


  4. Pool Cooled PC: Cooler Computer, Warmer Pool. This guy integrated the water cooling system for a few computers with his pool's piping to get a cheap and efficient water cooling system.


  5. The Case Fan Case: This case consists of 70 Case Fans total, all blowing air into or out of the case. The fans aren't screwed onto the case, they are the case.


  6. The Cookie Jar Trick: A fan mount, air duct, and hard drive silencing enclosure -- all in one! This practical mod is for anyone running a high speed HDD but looking for some silence at night.


  7. Refrigerant Cooled PC: Think of it as Liquid Nitrogen Lite. This mod uses the same technology as a refrigerator, and is fairly cheap if you have the supplies.



  8. The Water Cooled PC: From 1885? This beautiful rig combines style and substance. Truly a work of art.


  9. The Cooking Oil PC: $1000 worth of hardware submerged in oil. The vegetable oil acts as a good coolant but doesn't conduct electricity. Just don't play Crysis for ten hours straight or you'll end up with some deep fried chips.



  10. Air Ducts: Foam Boards Direct Air Inside Case. This is another cheap and practical mod anyone can do. A few peaces of cardboard and a couple fans to efficiently direct air in any case.


This article was written by SpeedingComputer.com Computer News. Speeding Computer offers interesting tech information and computer news. If you are interested in contributing to the thinking process and become a guest writer on The Thinking Blog, find out more information here and be my guest!

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