Prior to today, Skype was the only IM program that allowed voice+video chat between Mac and PC users (maybe Aim worked, but I don’t know anyone who still uses Aim). The Mac version of MSN only supported Mac to PC video chats for enterprises, leaving the rest of us in the dark. Now that’s a problem because I have more friends that use MSN then Skype (but of course everyone has a gmail account these days and can use gtalk). In comes Google to save the day!

Starting today, you can download a plugin that will allow you to have video chats straight from your gmail window (which is probably open all the time anyway…or several times a day if you’re like me).  Works on Windows XP and Mac OS 10.4 and above. Download from here and read Google’s announcement on their official blog here. Now I know that they didn’t come up with this for the sole purpose of allowing PC and Mac users to have video chats, but  that’s the aspect of this that interests me the most! What this means to you may be totally different. Maybe you don’t care about video chat? Maybe you don’t have a webcam? For the rest of us who do care this is another piece of awesome news coming out of an awesome company

Hmm Google’s gtalk becomes more and more relevant and theres another reason to kick Microsoft’s MSN messenger out the door? Seems to be a common theme these days when discussing anything by those two companies.

I’m lazy…clicking “bookmarks” on firefox, scrolling down the 200 or so links I’ve bookmarked over the years and then finally clicking on the blog I wanna read takes wayyyy to long. So adding 3 more blogs to my blog roll (on the lower right side of the page) so I can get to those blogs with less effort

New Additions (in alphabetical order):

- Awesome Cake: Don’t know if I keep going back to his blog to see his kick ass drawings or read his blog entries. Both are addicting like…well…like awesome cake!

- NobodyInIT: This is my long time (primary school and high school) buddy’s brand spankin new blog. Need to ask him where he got the title of the blog from :). Just by looking at the other 2 comments left on the blog, I can tell it’ll be a great way to keep in touch with old friends since they’ll be frequent visitors on that blog.

- Paradise Not Found: In the words of the blog owner “Who cares if you don’t know where Fiji is? We will tell you. We will show you. Most importantly…we will live it for you. Aimless youth with infinite possibilities on the how and when who would rather muck around town, shoot a few billiard games and drink themselves to a satisfying stupor then help achieve world peace.” Well I haven’t seen anything on world peace yes, but the blog entries have left me rofl at work (eeek…wait its probably not a good idea to admit I read this at work).

So earlier this week everyone’s favorite facebook app Scrabulous was taken off facebook due to a legal dispute with Hasbro and replaced by EA’s (online versions of the Hasbro owned game is handed by electronic arts) slow loading cumbersome version of the game. Facebook users tried to save the the much loved app through online petitions, but it was to no avail. I was pretty ticked off when I heard news of Scrabulous being taken down, but just came across some good news - Scrabulous is back with a new name; Wordscraper!

It looks a lil different graphically, but its still the same game. So log onto your facebook accounts, add the wordscraper application and send me an invite to a game!

Edit: I know EA’s official explantion for their Scrabble app being slow/unavailable/icky is that hackers attacked their app as an angry response to Scrabulous being taken down. Hat’s off to those hackers!

By now you must have heard about Cuil (pronounced cool), a new search engine created by former google employees. It was in the news all day today, and a lot of people initially thought of it as a potential google killer.

Google killer? Ha

As soon as I heard the news I jumped on Cuil and searched for some terms. Cuil claims that they have a larger index of web pages (i.e that through cuil you can find more results then google), but most of the terms I typed in resulted in ZERO search results! Here’s an example: I searched for “olympus e-520″ (its a digital camera) on both Cuil and Google.

Google came up with over a 880,000 search results including the price of the olympus e-520 at 3 online retailers and also linked the e-520 product page on the official olympus website.

How did Cuil do? All I got was a stinking:

“We didn’t find any results for “olympus e-520”

Some reasons might be…

• a typo. Please check your spelling.
• your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
• too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.”

Some other terms ended up giving me the same message. How pathetic is that? Google killer? Pfff….

Edit: Btw Google has found over 1 trillion pages on the web, but does not index all of them because many are similar or has auto-generated content. Read more on that here on the offical google blog.

If you sign on to your gmail account on multiple computers check out this new feature by google that lets you remotely sign out of any computers that you’re logged onto- Gmail Blog:Remote sign out

No need to install anything. Simply by looking at the footer of your open gmail account, you’ll be able to see how many other computers you are signed on to and can sign off.

I love this feature because I used to accidentally leave gtalk open at work…only to come the next morning to find tons of messages from people who thought I was at my desk. Now I can close those active sessions from anywhere!

One of the biggest complaints about the current generation iphone and the 3G iphone due to come out on July 11th (besides not having a physical keyboard) is the lack of MMS support. That got me thinking…Apple rarely does anything without a reason..were they trying to make a statement about SMS and MMS becoming less relevant as more and more devices can access email accounts combined with a greater abudance of both unlimited data plans and wi-fi networks? Personally I have no real use for SMS or MMS…I can email messages and images to friends…if I need to have a quick conversation with someone, I can log onto meebo on my phone and chat with anyone logged onto their gtalk, MSN, yahoo, aim accounts. And at $20/month for unlimited data, it goes a lot further then paying $20 a month for unlimited SMS messages or $0.10 a sms for messages capped at a measly 160 characters.

I was surprised to find that I’m not the only one who shares this view. Came across this blog earlier today -Click Here.

What do YOU think? Think this is crazy talk? Think that SMS is too important..too widespread to just be tossed aside?

Think back to May 6th of 1998, when Apple announced the then shiny new iMac..that caused a media uproar because it lacked a floppy drive! Now no computer manufacturer ships computers with built in floppy drives! It started with one company and then moved across the board.

Could the death of SMS and MMS also been looming? With over 70% of cellphone users using these services I don’t expect it to drop dead all of a sudden….but a slow death could be in the books for both SMS and MMS.

A little something extra thats also on my mind: When the Mac Air was announced a lot of people laughed at the lack of a optical drive (including myself..I think the Lenevo X200 is a much better laptop - almost as thin as the Mac Air, but has a optical drive)…but from the early 90s companies like Sun Microsystems have been trying to promote the concept of a “dumb terminal” (computer with basic hardware and not much software installed on it - these computers will run software off of central servers). Now while the Mac Air is not “dumb” in any regard it does look like a step in the direction of what Sun and other companies promoted at the time.

Update: Blog has moved. If you’re reading this that then means you’re on my new domain.

Even though this blog has been up for a extremely short time, I found out yesterday that I will not be able to grow it in the directionn I want to because of the limitations placed by my hosting company (GoDaddy). Even though their hosting plan prices are in line with competitors they lack a lot of services that others offer. Their lousy customer service responds to every question with “No..that feature isn’t available..but if you upgrade..blah blah blah” basically asking me to upgrade to a plan that costs 6x what my monthly cost of running this website is. Again these features are offered for much cheaper by other companies.

Theres only one way to deal with such companies…you drop em like a dead fish. Found my new host last night (Hostgator.com) and will be moving this site over to that account..and a new domain name soon. The new domain will be Geekdreams.net. At the time of this post, that name is not activate yet, but it should be within 24-48 hours. I’ll leave a message here once that is done..and I will slowly (in a week or so) switch the sh1va.net domain to my new hosting account as well and both will point to the new blog.

Who knows..maybe my current hosting provider will read this post against em and suspend my account..well I don’t care…

So moved last weekend and earthlink said that it’ll take 10 to 15 business days to relocate my dsl service. Until then they were going to provide me with unlimited dial up service….yup UNLIMITED 56Kbps! Now thats the stuff dreams are made of!

=0(

Can’t imagine how I managed to get by with 56Kbps back in the day. To make things worse I don’t think any websites are optimized for dial up anymore (since more and more people have broadband connections) so even checking email takes minutes and not milliseconds.

So how did I manage to survive the last few days on dial up? Well luckily my neighbor’s wireless network is unsecured =0) so I’ve been bumming his connection. I should bake him a cake or something…or replace his old doormat =0)

Going river rafting this sunday…can’t wait….would rather be scuba diving but anything that involves water is OK with me!