Category: English

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Dindy Got An Update

After a year of not updating Dindy and mainly apologizing to users from time to time because Dindy doesn’t work on their phones, I finally updated Dindy. The trigger was a change made in Locale, which Dindy supports. Sadly enough, I’m pretty sure it will still won’t work on many phones.

I still haven’t managed to get my hands on a phone, on which Dindy doesn’t work, long enough to hook it up to my computer and figure out what the problem is. But since it works well on all base (“Nexus”) versions of Android and also on many other devices – I blame the changes made to the OS by phone manufacturers.

Hopefully I’ll figure it out. While Dindy is pretty much a finished and abandoned project, I would still like to know that it works well for whoever is using it.

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Thomson Cable Modem Drivers And Manuals

Here are USB drivers and manuals for Thomson’s cable modem and gateway products.

The manuals and driver in the zip file are for the following models:

  • DCM325
  • DCM425
  • DCW725
  • DHG520
  • DHG525
  • TCM420
  • TCM425
  • TCW710

The manuals are in these languages:

  • English
  • French
  • Swedish
  • German
  • Hebrew
  • Dutch (the file name is Netherlands)
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish

These are all from an original old CD I got around 2005 with my TCM425.

WARNINGS:

  1. Use at your own risk. I recommend first looking for official drivers for the product online or contacting your Internet service provider before trying these drivers.
  2. Since you probably don’t know me – don’t trust me and check the files for viruses first.
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Idea: Online Identity Score

A friend of mine wanted to start using eBay, both as a buyer and as a seller. After just a few days her account was permanently suspended, with no option to ever return to eBay. The reason appears to be some mix-up with PayPal. I’m saying “appears to be” because eBay doesn’t tell you why your account is permanently suspended. Calls to the live person support don’t help – the support people just recite a pre-written message and do not say anything else. Apparently the PayPal mix-up made someone in eBay think my friend was a criminal and that’s why she got this harsh treatment.

(On a side note: I witnessed one of these calls. It makes you feel really uncomfortable. If you want to see how criminals are treated, get your eBay account suspended and then call them to ask why. Just know that you will never be able to be an eBay user again)

My idea revolves around verifying that the person is real and “innocent.” Much like the American system of financial credit score, using a person’s email address, one service will be able to trigger an “online identity score” check with other services that user is registered to.

For example, let’s say I’m registering to eBay. During the registration process I give my Gmail address, which I also use for Facebook. With my consent, eBay will be able to query Google and Facebook and ask them about how genuine my account is, so as to verify both that I’m a real person and that my account hasn’t been hacked (both Gmail and Facebook already have fake account and anti-hacking protections.)

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7 Years Of Working Out

It’s a little bit strange to write about the 7th anniversary of my first day at the gym after not actually doing any physical activity in the past 2 weeks due to what turned out to be just an infection (which I’m finally treating with some antibiotics.) That’s why it’s also not surprising that I missed the actual date by a day. But I hope to get back to my running routine (3 times a week, 1 hour, ~11 km run) in a week or two considering that the pain is almost gone.

The big challenge over the past 8 months of workouts was running outside instead of in the gym. Running outside is considerably harder for me, especially when it’s hot, cold or raining. At some points during these months I’ve considered going back to the gym but eventually powered through. As winter is getting closer, I might reconsider.

So here’s to another workout year.

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Taking The Week Off From Running Due To Pain

I’ve been doing the same running routine for quite a while now – 3 times a week, 11.5km. Lately I’ve been experiencing some pelvic pain that refuses to go away. In 2 days I’m going to see an orthopedic doctor but for now, after reading online about some of the possible ailments (like Osteitis Pubis), I’m taking this week off from running.

Every time I stop running because of pain I start fearing that following the rest period I won’t be able to get back to running. Even worse, I fear that I’ll regain the weight I’ve lost since I started working out nearly 7 years ago. These fears may be illogical, but I can’t help it.

Hopefully I’ll be better soon enough to go back to my running routine.

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First Upgrade For My Computer After Nearly 4 Years

After nearly 4 years since I bought my desktop computer and after complaining about constant thrashing I finally decided it’s time to give it a little upgrade. It now sports 8GB of memory instead of just 2, and the improvement is noticeable.

The big culprits for the thrashing turned out to be Eclipse and Unity. We have pretty large projects by now, and having the main ones open together requires no less than 2GB of virtual memory and nearly 1GB of actual memory. That’s a lot, and it doesn’t include at least one running Android emulator! Unity added quite a bit to that (I don’t remember the number) but switching to Gnome helped.

I’m still happy with this Core Duo, now very old, computer. It does its job well and I expect it to last a year or two more.

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Google+ Following Violates Privacy (In Its Current State)

I’ve been using Google+ for a couple of days and have been very happy with it. It’s really a great social network, but I’ll refrain from rehashing the same things everyone has been saying. You can Google it yourself.

One of the things Google+ has been slated to be is a Twitter replacement, in which you can follow others without them following you by adding them to a circle.

However, if you previously shared something with all your circles (or intend to do so in the future) now the people you’re following can see these things too, something you may have not intended to happen. After all, they’re not your friends. Not even acquaintances.

For me this is a flaw in the current circles implementation. At the least I would like to be able to share things with all my circles except for some of them (e.g. “my circles minus the Follow circle”.) However, this does not fix things for historical posts, which I already shared with all my circles as you can’t change the sharing settings of a post after it’s been posted. With the current implementation I’m left with the only option of specifying each and every circle I intend to share with for every post, and if in the future I’ll have new circles – they won’t be able to see these posts.

Another way to fix this is to allow defining “following circles”, so that stuff you share with your circles (or even your extended circles), still won’t be shared with them.

Maybe I’m wrong. Let me know if I jumped the gun here.

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Trying Google’s Voice Search

Here’s what I got trying to say “Amit Schreiber” into Google’s Voice Search using my netbook and Google Chrome:

  1. sperm tribe
  2. sure I burn
  3. ami schreiber what the f***
  4. chile
  5. I’m yours driver
  6. tommy shaw rugs
  7. how many shriver
  8. short
  9. send me to a boot
  10. striper

Oh, well… I guess it goes through a relevance engine and I’m just not that famous enough. Yet! :)