bradgrier.com

Tag: Internet

  • What to do when you can’t connect to the Internet with Google Chrome?

    What to do when you can’t connect to the Internet with Google Chrome?

    Needed to reset the router. Did so, lost inter­net con­nec­tion while it was reboot­ing. Had Chrome open and refreshed my con­nec­tion. This neat little run­ning jump­ing game appears. It appears to just be a ‘no con­nec­tion’ screen… but press the space bar. And have fun!

  • Canadarm: Today’s Google Doodle

    Very cool of the fine folks at Google to recog­nize the 31st anniversary of the Cana­darm’s use in space with today’s Google Doodle.

  • Looking for a smart phone? Consider the Palm Pre 2. Seriously.

    Over the last few weeks I’ve been check­ing out the Palm Pre 2 — the next gen­er­a­tion key­board / touch screen data­phone from HP. Pre­vi­ously I’d not con­sidered a webOS phone much of a con­tender against the tra­di­tion­al lead­ers (Black­berry and iPhone), but this little unit changed my mind. In this review, I’ll touch on the…

  • How to run your favourite desktop utilities from almost any computer using Portable Applications

    In the course of my day, I use two or three main desktop and laptop com­puters in two or three dif­fer­ent parts of the city. And yet, work­ing on dif­fer­ent devices, I still have access to a core set of tools and util­it­ies that I find essen­tial to my daily work. Here’s how I do it. Some…

  • Two words I thought I’d never see together: Library & Groupon

    I must say I’m rather proud of the Edmon­ton Pub­lic Lib­rary — my loc­al lib­rary. They were one of the first in Canada to: offer free Wi-Fi to members, jump into social media, equip branches with self-check­out barscan­ners and RFID chip auto­mated checkin, allow online holds and media reservations, cre­ate a mobile lib­rary app, offer digit­al…

  • Speed up your Internet experience by using the right DNS server

    Last week I saw this Life­Hack­er art­icle (via AppleIn­sider) about NameBench, a win­dow util­ity that tests the speed of your sys­tem’s DNS serv­ers. And I was won­der­ing if my DNS was as fast as it could be… Pre­vi­ously, I’d switched my DNS ser­vices over to OpenDNS, a free altern­ate DNS Pro­vider that adds value as: Ultra-reli­able, glob­ally-dis­trib­uted…

  • Reinventing the Walkie Talkie

    Back in the day, this kind of thing was what people used to talk to each oth­er over dis­tances, using radio waves. You were lim­ited by the power of the unit and the type and num­ber of obstacles between you and the per­son you were talk­ing with. And gen­er­ally, your con­ver­sa­tion could be over­heard by any­one…

  • Remote control your computer from your iPad

    Some say that the iPad is a magic­al device. I won’t go that far, but it is kinda cool, though it does have its short­com­ings — espe­cially when you com­pare it to a desktop or laptop com­puter. There are just many things done much bet­ter on a com­puter than on an iPad, which is why…

  • Lots to think about when diagnosing a slow Internet

    Occa­sion­ally I get a tech ques­tion in the inbox that is quite com­mon. So much so that it makes sense for me to put and answer the ques­tion here where more can read and bene­fit from it.  By the way, if you’ve got some­thing you’d like to ask, feel free to drop me a line…

  • Saving the Internet, one plugin at a time

    Well, a few posts ago I men­tioned that I’d taken steps to speed up this blog. Here’s a Ping­dom response time graph show­ing how fast slow this blog was, before I pulled a few plugins. And here’s what it looks like today. So, accord­ing to these res­ults, the blog is faster. And what I’d done was­n’t…

  • 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…