LG KU-800: have low expectations

LG KU800 phone Because the posts on disappointing hardware are very popular on my blog (e.g. Netgear storage and Lexmark printer), I’d like to write about a device that also should be avoided: the LG KU800 GSM. The KU800 is the Vodafone version of the KG800, which is sold in Belgium by Proximus (239€).


Web tool: visualize on Google Maps

I have been working a bit on Google Maps visualisations for my milonga.be tango site, to show an overview of all Belgian tango sites. I did it the following way:


The Good Wife’s Guide

This is how women were advised to behave as a perfect spouse in 1955.


Redirecting with Apache’s .htaccess

When you migrate web sites from one place to another, and the URLS change, you don’t want to lose visitors that still use the old links. If your ‘old’ website ran on Apache, you can use its mod_alias/mod_rewrite functionality to automatically redirect to the new URL. This involves adding redirect rules to the .htaccess file in the base folder of the redirects. Some examples:


“Living photographs” by Andrew Mole

I just discovered a really neat online publication: Cabinet Magazine. Here follows one of their articles, on Andrew Mole, a American photographer of the early 20th century. Kind of a Spencer Tunick, with a patriotic message and way more clothes (uniforms, actually).
Living Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson


My first Facebook spam

facebook-spam
The Belgian Facebook community is growing and I was expecting to have a first ‘spam’ invitation eventually. It came a couple of days ago, from a group that goes by the name “In Loving Memory of Juliane Angel”. It seems to be created by a guy in rememberance of a girl that died some time ago (Juliane Angel). Even if this sad story is not a marketing ploy (which I don’t think it is), the invitations are still ‘unsollicited’. Whether they are ‘commercial’ is hard to say now, that might only become apparent when there are enough members (only two for the moment).


Whisher: exchange passwords to share Wifi

There are different scenarios that enable people to share their Wifi. FON uses customer Wifi routers, Wifidog/OpenWRT uses custom server machines (PCs), and Whisher has a an interesting alternative: they aggregate Wifi passwords. You install an local application that you communicate the WEP/WPA key of your Wifi router to. This application will communicate this to the central Whisher service and give it to other clients when required. The other users do not see the actual key, it’s their application that does the login. Their mapping page seems to be broken, so it’s hard to tell how many Whisher-compatible access points there are in Belgium.


Pimp your laptop: Apple vs Dell

Imagine you can walk up to your favourite hardware store and tell the guy: “Give me the biggest, fastest, meanest laptop you have. Money is no issue”.


One continuous line movie

This is the video to “In Context” by Field Music. It’s just a hand drawing a really long line on a white background, but it’s worth watching until the end.
(via infosthetics.com)


New beta YouTube layout

This is what a YouTube clip page looks like now:
YouTube layout: now