Words fail me. This is something I would expect from old regimes: "Travellers' laptops may be detained at border".
More information here and here.
Prepare for another bubble FAIL: Yahoo!Xtra cancelling Flickr PRO status?
UPDATE: read the bottom for an update.
Arghhh. When are things going to look good for the Telecom Yahoo!Xtra team and their included premium services? Ive just posted this in our Geekzone forums and contacted Telecom - someone is looking into this now:
Hi freitasm_xtra,
Your Flickr Pro account expired on . You have 316 photos but you're now only seeing the last 200!
Perhaps you'd like to renew your Pro account?
You'll even get 3 months free for purchasing before 30 September 2008!
You can learn more here:
http://flickr.com/yay/comeback/3mo/
The Flickreenos
No date in the "expired on", and indeed my PRO status is gone. Another storm coming? Or is just my account?
I contacted the Telecom support and received a response, which is obviously not good enough. I don't think I should be contacting Flickr since this is a Telecom service:
I am sorry to hear about your Flickr Pro account has been cancelled. Unfortunately we do not support the Flickr here, I would need to refer your to the help section within www.flickr.com/help/ There is a "contact us" option on this page that maybe your best option.
I can confirm that your Xtra account is all active and can see no reason why you shouldn't have a valid Flickr account.
UPDATE: After talking to someone at Telecom New Zealand the case was escalated to Yahoo! in the U.S. It looks like there aren't any other cases of accounts being cancelled so let's see how it goes - waiting for my account to be reinstated.
UPDATE: The Flickr team at some point reprovisioned the account and it is all fine again. Also their team member Tara posted in the forums to confirm this was ok.
YouTube's new floating bar
YouTube has a new bar to look at, right at the bottom:
From left to right:
Play/Pause, Play Next related Item, Volume On/Off, QuickList, History, Hide/Show bar
Volume On/Off is great for those sudden needs...
Bloggers Dinner @ TechEd
I got my invite yesterday for the Bloggers Dinner @ TechEd. Bloggers @ Tech Ed is designed to help the New Zealand blogging community with both practical advice and an exclusive opportunity to network with other key bloggers in New Zealand.
The dinner will be held on September 1st at Sky City Convention Centre, Auckland.
The best part of the event is that its being hosted and keynoted by Scott Hanselman 
If any of you attending the Dinner, please do leave a comment and we can meet there 
See you there 
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference
This week Microsoft, and every company that is a partner of Microsoft, have descended upon Houston. Thankfully, I live here so I didn't have to travel far. I get to...
Vodafone extends free broadband deal... what I think they should offer instead.
I think the free broadband deal has past it's used-by date.
I was hoping for a fresh new offer on 1st August, like part of their other changes at Vodafone.
Just for people who only require plain home phone and broadband, here was what ihug used to offer in 2007 compared to Vodafone's current offer:
| ihug: Bundling | Vodafone: Free Broadband till the end of 2008 | ||
| Minimum requirements |
|
| |
| Offer |
|
|
|
| Total spent in a year without offer* | $1000.95 | $988.95 | |
| Total spent in a year with offer* | $759.95 | $852.00 | $810.00 - $930.00 |
| Contract term | 0 months | 12 months | |
* Some notes:
- Modems used to cost $99.95, but as Vodafone have dropped their prices to $49.95, this is the modem price described here (credits for modems are equivalent to the modem prices at the time of offer)
- Home phone for ihug is calculated to the price at the time of the offer ($41.00)
- talk plans are not included for total with/without offer on the ihug column, as for this we only want to sign up to home phone and broadband in comparison to the Vodafone offer. The extra expense for talk 1 for one year is $180.
- Only the cheapest plans are selected for the offer (ihug home phone + broadband 1 and Easy pack and talk 1)
It was at this time that we signed up to ihug, just when Telecom got criticised for their management on Go Large (we were on it for 2 months).
We really thought that this was an excellent deal compared to any other ISP because of one thing - no contract!
I would actually like Vodafone to reinstate an offer of a similar kind. Even if it's just two months with $30 credit rather than the full broadband component price. ihug was in Vodafone ownership back then, so there isn't much of a reason why they can't now.
No contract will definitely stand out in the marketplace, because the requirement to have talk 1 really is excessive (really - $15 a month for national calls only in weekends and weeknights... come on!)
I don't think that free broadband (for 7 months from when it first started) is worth having a 12 month contract along with a calling plan.
Iphone 3 G White
Geeze its about time I updated my Blog-it was last updated February.
Launch day was July 10 and I took the plunge and got a White 16gb Iphone 3 G.
Yes I saw all the hype and probably got sucked in a bit but boy am I glad I did.
I wasnt terribly happy with the Nokia N 95. Sure it probably has more features, better camera MMS and others but I dont think it beats the Iphone for ease of use and the WOW factor.
I always look for a Yahoo group concerning a device that I use to see what what others are experiencing.
I did on this occassion and signed up as a member of apple-iphone@yahoogroups.com.
It is quitre a busy group and the initial posts I came across were people upgrading to Firmware 2 on there previous Iphones and Ipods.
There nwas also a lot of issues with the new service Mobileme which is replacing the old .mac service. As an upshot Apple are now offerring users a 2 month tirial of this service. More about this later.
The initialisation of the phone was easy and after I walked out of the shop my old sim card was disabled so I went home to activate the new phone. Not a problem. ( I was given a new sim card with my old number transferred) Changed from a You Choose 20 plan to one of the new Iphone plans. Talk 120, txt 600 and 250mb data.
Set up Itunes 7.7 which was required. I am using a Windows PC and managed to transfer a lot of my songs collection onto the device. So far so good.
Tried to Sync outlook with the device. Contacts went across ok but no Calendar items. Fiddled a bit with preferences. Looked at the forums reset sync options. Hello worked from Deskltop and not from laptop which is where I had all my latest calendar items ??? very frustrating sorting this bit out.
How about a work around I wondered.
Set up Mobileme-its free for 2 months.
http://www.mobileme.com/
The concept of this is that you have all your information-ie contacts, calendar, files, photos. You sync between various PC's and mobile devices into the "Cloud" and the data moves around over the air thereby keeping everything up to date. The iphone supports this-basically a Push data system.
After some twidling I finally managed to get this working so now all my data is in sync with the laptop and the Iphone and any changes I make is live on the mobileme website within minutes and vice a versa.
Impressions of the vfarious apps:
I like the threading of the SMS-just like you are having a conversation
The email is a brease and easy to set up and use and now I have the poush email up and running its even better. Albeit at cost. The Mobileme service is going to cost around $155 a year to use.
Thye camera is OK and a shame it doesnt have more Mega pixels and there is no MMS. But theyu can go out in emails easily enough. There are plenty of apps available that are sort of integrated to some social networking sites like Facebook, flikr and the photos you take are also geotaged as well which adds to the social nbetworking possibilities.
The Map function is quite usefull although seing im a Geocacher I already own a functional GPS unit and would not use this feature a lot.
Theree is a You tube Interface but I have found that it takes a while for the viudeos to load-on my wifi network so prob even slower if I was using the 3 G network. Use this moccassionally.
World Clock usefull. Stocks alsop usefull -I have set up NZ stuff just for interest. The weather app isnt the most detailed and I await for a local NZ app made by a guy at http://www.orsome.co.nz. He has produces a top seller app in trhe app store called My Trades which allowes you to follow your trades on Trademe. He has also got an app that followes the NZ TV Channels called tvGuide and gets rave reviews.
Obviously the Itunes store is a great feature and as yet I havnt purchased any music. Have listened to samples from the store though and have been tempted. What Ill do is go through my music library-consolidate all my folders and see what ive got 1st.
Ok what apps have I installed and comments.
My favourite so far is Palringo which is a Multi Chat programme like Trillian which I use on my PC. It enables you to run Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk and there own network plus they have groups. There is an Iphone group and now a NZiphone group on palringo.
This was a freee app.
I have installed netnewswire a news reader,m 2 mahjong games one I paid for, Express another aggregated data capture app, Labrynth game-free, speechcloud-enables voice command for your contacts, Shazam a music recofnition programe that identifies songs-not accurate all the time but links in with Itunes store which is quite cleaver; 105 Classics a Internet music channel, exposure a flickr related product; Ifob which uses the GPS function of the iphone to work out whoi is nearby-bit freaky but has its possibilities. Who is that nice chick across the rd ??!!
Epocrates a drug information app-good but the druf names are americanised so a bit hard to search for information. Last MoPhoTo and another flickr app.
The Safari web browser is very nice and the screen is very nice and resizing with your finger is easy to makes pages easy to read. I have found some local sites that are designed to run on your Iphone -Kiwibank,vodafone, NZHerald etc.
So far my impression has been very good. Some frustrations re the sync issues.
It does chew through Battery power though. Suppose things will settle down after the novelty wears oiff a bit.
I have found also that I am not using as much data as I expected. I signed up on the 10th July and today still got over 180 mb;s left to use.
So all in all a pretty good experience and Im glad I made the swith.
Feel free to makle some comments and ask my advice as I think I have learnt a lot during this process.
I was a bit reluctant to post a blog about the Iphone as there appeared to be a bit of anti sentiment around on GZ but after chatting to some of the "blokes" in the IRC channel I was encouraged to put my post in so thanks for the support Scott and a few others.
Web Futures panel at Microsoft Tech Ed New Zealand 2008
I found references to this "Web Futures" panel session in Darryl's blog last night, and since I couldn't find an agenda I reached out to him asking for more details on when this session would be happening.The Web Futures panel is happening ... (more in the full post)
Is Security Over or Under-Estimated?
According to the results of an RSA survey, 54% of respondents have addressed a security incident but only 11% reported it. Based on what we see reported in the news,...
Scott Hanselman speaking at Blogger Dinner during Microsoft Tech Ed New Zealand 2008
I just got my hotel booking and air tickets confirmation today, so I will be coming to the Microsoft Tech Ed New Zealand 2008 for sure.I will be landing in Auckland on Sunday 31st August, and attending the speakers' dinner on that evening.<... (more in the full post)
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