bradgrier.com

Month: May 2010

  • Trust and Influence Online — is there such a thing?

    I’ve been involved with the Inter­net since the ‘90s. Over that time I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t always trust what you read online. Back in the day, it was ‘You can’t always trust what you read or see on TV’. Hoax email were the trade of the day, and even­tu­ally sites like…

  • Are faster blogs more Google friendly?

    Per­haps. And if you’re look­ing to be found by Google, you want to do everything you can to make sure you’re not doing things to make the pro­cess harder. A month or so ago, Google announced that they’re rank­ing sys­tem would take page-load speed into con­sid­er­a­tion when determ­in­ing how to present search res­ults to vis­it­ors.…

  • This is the week that was

    Face­book announces plans to roll out new pri­vacy con­trols that are ‘less con­fus­ing’, Apple jumps to the head of the busi­ness class, and Rock Band may get some new hard­ware. Oh, Tow­el Day too, and a few more things… …more This post is an excerpt from one of my weekly posts on the Future Shop…

  • Legacy Hardware loses flagship application

    Five years ago I mod­ded my first Xbox to cre­ate a Media Centre. The soft­ware I ran, and still run is the über awe­some XBMC (for Xbox Media Center). But now it seems that the days of using my ori­gin­al Xbox as a media cen­ter are numbered — the developers are stop­ping work for that…

  • Rest of world gets iPad this week. Do you care?

    Apple decided to phase the release of the iPad so that US mer­chants were able to sell the units (in the US) much earli­er than mer­chants in ROW (Rest Of World) nations could, due to man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cess con­cerns. Which is cool, because Asi­an factor­ies can only churn out so many iPads per day. And man­aging…

  • The well-equipped traveller is the ‘Envy’ of others

    Trav­el­ing with a laptop is always a bit of a chal­lenge, espe­cially if your flight exceeds 3 hours or so. That’s why I was rather inter­ested when I was offered the chance to check out the 15 inch HP Envy — espe­cially when I was allowed to take it on my recent vaca­tion to Hawaii. …more This…

  • Confirmed: Millions of hours lost due to Pac Man

    It looks like someone tired of play­ing Pac Man and decided to try and cal­cu­late how many hours of lost time could be attrib­uted to that ’80s arcade clas­sic reima­gined by Google: This week­end, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D‑Day and com­pared it with pre­vi­ous Fri­days (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and…

  • This is the week that was

    Face­book pri­vacy issues ruled the news last week, and this update reflects it. But, there were also a num­ber of oth­er inter­est­ing tid­bits includ­ing a new func­tion­al­ity for Hot­mail, Goog­leTV, and some inter­est­ing news from Apple… …more This post is an excerpt from one of my weekly posts on the Future Shop Techb­log. Check out…

  • World’s workforce suffers huge productivity loss due to Google

    Earli­er today Google decided to see how much it could influ­ence the eco­nomy and pro­ductiv­ity of first and second world nations by unleash­ing a vir­al online attack against Inter­net-con­nec­ted office work­ers world wide. Ostens­ibly pro­moted as a 30 year anniversary of a clas­sic video game, Google is, in real­ity, bring­ing work­place activ­ity to a crawl. In Canada,…

  • Online backup gets easier; better

    I’ve writ­ten before about Mozy’s online auto­mated backup solu­tion and it’s time for me to do it again, simply because Mozy’s just launched this sig­ni­fic­ant update to ver­sion 2.0 which includes …more This post is an excerpt from one of my weekly posts on the Future Shop Techb­log. Check out the full post here.

  • Keeping the Internet safe, one browser at a time

    Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer browser has­n’t been my daily work browser for many years, and I can­’t see that chan­ging any­time soon. There are many reas­ons that I’m not going to go into, but these days it’s mostly about what I’m famil­i­ar with. From the sat­is­fac­tion num­bers I’ve seen, IE is still quite the power­house browser-of-choice…

  • The browser you’re using right now is actually tracking your online activity

    An inter­est­ing news release by the Elec­troinc Fron­ti­er Found­a­tion last week shows that anonym­ous web surf­ing may not be as anonym­ous as pre­vi­ously thought. Due to each browser­’s unique char­ac­ter­ist­ics and con­fig­ur­a­tion (fonts avail­able, screen size, IP related inform­a­tion etc) it seems that many browsers cre­ate a unique ‘fin­ger­print’ that can be used to track…