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SIM Annoyances

My new Samsung Galaxy S3 phone takes a micro-SIM (see the Wikipedia page about Subscriber Identity Modules for details [1]). All my other mobile devices take a mini-SIM so I can’t just put the SIM from my old phone in my new phone. I’ve just made my second application to Virgin Mobile for a new […]

Finding an ATM Skimmer

A member of SAGE-AU [1] found two ATM skimmers [2] and gave me permission to publish his description and analysis of the situation. I’ve lightly edited this from a mailing list post to a blog format with permission from the author. This Courier-Mail article refers to the skimmers in question [3].

People were wondering what […]

Everyone Needs a Tablet

Care2 has an interesting article about people being offended by a picture of a poor Afro-American boy using an iPad [1]. It seems that people object to poor people having what is in many ways the greatest educational tool available because it can also be seen as a status symbol. I wonder if one of […]

Samsung Galaxy S3 First Review with Power Case

My new Samsung Galaxy S3 arrived a couple of days ago. Kogan added to the weirdness in their shipping that I documented in a previous post [1] by shipping the two phones on consecutive days with separate invoices for $789 each (as opposed to the $449 that I paid). This means that if customs were […]

Using BTRFS

I’ve just installed BTRFS on some systems that matter to me. It is still regarded as experimental but Oracle supports it with their kernel so it can’t be too bad – and it’s almost guaranteed that anything other than BTRFS or ZFS will lose data if you run as many systems as I do. Also […]

Globalisation and Phone Calls

I just watched an interesting TED talk by Pankaj Ghemawat (of which the most important points are summarised in a TED blog post) about the world not being as globalised as people expect [1]. One point is that only 2% of traditional voice phone calling minutes (and ~6% when you include VOIP) are for international […]

Dependencies in Online Ordering

I have just ordered two Samsung Galaxy S3 phones and matching cases from Kogan. The price was good and Kogan gave me 30 cents discount as part of a verification process. Instead of billing the full amount for a large order (for which the cutoff is somewhere between $25 and $1014) Kogan will deduct a […]

Links December 2012

Steven Johnson gave an interesting TED talk about where good ideas come from [1]. He starts by attributing coffee replacing alcohol as a standard drink for some good ideas and then moves on to how ideas develop.

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel gave an interesting and amusing TED talk about the ngram analysis of […]

Returning the Aldi Tablet

I have decided to return the 7″ Android tablet I bought from Aldi last week [1]. I still think that the tablet isn’t all bad, but the main problem I had is the short battery life. The battery can be entirely exhausted in less than an hour’s use. Another problem is the fact that most […]

Ingress

Today Google sent me an invite for Ingress – their latest augmented reality game [1]. The fact that they sent me the invitation while the Google Play store page for Ingress [2] tells me that it’s not available in my country (Australia) is interesting. Google obviously aren’t using their Big Brother powers effectively!

The way […]