bradgrier.com

Month: May 2010

  • 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…