News, Software

Netvibes now available on your mobile

Yesterday Netvibes launched a version of their service for mobile phones available at m.netvibes.com. I’ve been playing around with it using the RIM browser and Opera Mini on a BlackBerry 8700g for a day now and the first impressions are good when using the RIM browser. The site doesn’t seem to work in Opera Mini at all, though. That surprises me. I’d like to know why.

Some widgets like Google Maps and flickr streams don’t work. I can understand that the AJAX laden Google Maps would not work on the RIM browser, but I am at a loss why RSS streams with images won’t show up.

I haven’t registered much noise on the ‘net about the launch yet. The Netvibes blog doesn’t didn’t mention it [yesterday].

Take it for a test spin on your mobile devices and let me know how you fared!

Update 1:
Samy wrote a comment to let me know that there is a separate address for the iPhone version. He also mentions that there is a list of supported widgets at m.netvibes.com/help.php. The iPhone version at iphone.netvibes.com. However the iPhone version does not work very well on the BlackBerry 8700g. Thank you, Samy!

Update 2:
When trying out the iPhone version of Netvibes I just discovered that there are some access issues. When several people behind our proxy are logged in on Netvibes at the same time, I get the start page of the other person who logged in most recently when accessing iphone.netvibes.com. That is to say I can see all the tabs of this user and all the pages they may have already accessed/loaded in that same session. Is it just me being paranoid or do you also think this is a major security issue? Perhaps we should take a look at some phone security statistics and get real. It’s good to be apprehensive, although technology is a safe way of doing things these days, it needs to be secure from hackers.

Update 3:
The Netvibes development team says in an email that they’ve fixed the proxy security issue and that they knew about it before launch. Nice that they responded that fast, but I find it a bit careless to knowingly launch new services with such issues unresolved.

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Software, Usability

Ustream.tv registration form does not play nice

I’ve been trying to register on ustream.tv since yesterday, but I keep getting an incredulous error message when entering the captcha correctly:

ustream registration form

I’m on Win XP using Firefox 2.0.0.6. I’ve tried c leaning the cache. I’ve tried everything. It fails to accept a correct captcha on every session.

Is this happening to you too or is it just me? Am I an idiot doing something wrong? Leave me a comment and tell me how it’s working out for you!

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Hardware, Lessons Learned, Software

Do you backup?

I was reading Chris Pirillo‘s latest blog entry about backup and file management this morning and it inspired me to share what I do to back up and mirror the important stuff. (Watch the show featuring Chris’ dad if you haven’t already.)

The hardware: Two cheap and identical 500 GB external USB hard drives from TrekStor. € 99,- / USD 135,- each.

The software: MirrorFolder for Windows XP from TechSoft. € 28,5 / USD 39,- per computer license. (If anyone knows of a better software solution for mirroring and for other platforms, please leave a comment!)

Important files and folders on my workstation(s) and laptop are set to be automatically mirrored on both of the external disks. Projects, music, settings, etc are all mirrored on both of the disks for redundancy. So in event that one hard drive breaks down, it doesn’t automatically translate to an entire loss of backup data.

Another clear advantage of keeping redundant external drive backup is that I can take one of the disks with me on the move without worrying too much about data loss.

Works for me ™.

What do you do? Please share your experiences and leave a comment!

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3D, Business Ideas, Social, Software

Second Life in CGN

Currently I’m I was at a SecondLife Stammtisch in Cologne at a place called ‘4 Cani‘ on Thursday the 9th of August. As I arrived late after deciding first going swimming, I missed the introduction round and I’m currently I felt a bit isolated for a while (but it didn’t take that long before the conversations started). Thus I’m I was a tad bored and thought I’d blog to look important and busy keep me occupied until contact was initiated.

Here’s a picture taken with my crap webcam:

SL Stammtisch CGN 20070809

Thanks to Christian Scholz for the invitation!

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