DrAjao

What if your name is Valerie and you hail an Uber ride and as you get in and shut the door, Amy Winehouse's (sorry Mark) version of The Zutton's "Valerie" comes on? You know because Uber has some special deal with Spotify where drivers have access to a premium subscription while on an active drive. Still not impressed? Okay what if your favorite...no scratch that...your most favoritest (favoritestest?) song comes up? You know, because Uber has allowed you create a playlist on its servers that it streams via fairy dust and rainbows to the driver's car speakers. Still not impressed? Okay what if you hear a radio station where up-to-the-minute local whether and traffic conditions (plus breaking news relevant to you in particular) are being read by a Siri-like voice? You know, because magic. Still not impressed? Never fret. The self-driving cars will be ready for deployment in our lifetime. Sheesh. PS. If you look hard enough, you'll find people at...

The month of February is frequently chosen for fasting and other try-out resolutions because it is the shortest month (Super Bowl countries are exempt of course). Sorry but I will be eating heartily this month. I will however be giving up something else that starts with "F" for those 28 days. This addictive drug that my body doesn't seem to be able to do without. Facebook! My only treatment plan for the craving will be to actually pick up my phone and call someone...anyone and have some live conversation. So let the jonesing begin.

Here is a follow-up on this earlier post  where I suggested that Facebook add amenities to their "Groups" feature such as "search" and "categories". Thankfully, they implemented the search feature but we're still waiting for a day when group administrators (admins) will have the power to really order and prioritize the posts on their forums via categories and other means. Also, sadly, Facebook's group search feature can't seem to search beyond a limited time-frame or number of entries, depending on whether the entry was made in a comment or in a post. Illustration by Dr Ajao In another post , I commended Facebook on introducing the Timeline feature which serves as a categorization feature of sorts based on time. As long as anyone vaguely remembers what time a post was made, it can be more easily found via the timeline feature. A timeline feature should be highly appreciated by admins if also applied to Facebook Groups, the same way it h...

I'm impressed at how Facebook (FB) is 'sneaking' it's new timeline feature on us. With minimal advertisement the new template is spreading to 'hapless' users like wildfire. 'Unfortunately', the change is permanent (you might have to delete your whole FB account to undo the change). I've used the inverted commas above because...well...this time at least, I think FB made the right move. The timeline feature is actually a vast improvement. One that FB might not even have the incentive to implement, save a desire to please its users (and...em... compete better against Google+ ). I remember screaming bloody murder when FB first implemented their 'new' way of viewing photos. You clicked on the thumbnail, and instead of being taken to the photo in its album location, you got a temporary black background with the photo hovering over it. I hated the black background because I couldn't see anything else but the photo...no way to easily navigate...

Yeah, Facebook is the second most visited site but there is always room for improvement . Take Facebook Groups for instance, a very useful tool for bringing like minds and interests together. The tendency is to amass posts and threads, some, useful; some, not. Unfortunately, only so many posts can be immediately seen on the wall. Facebook allows you to show more posts by clicking the "Older Posts" link indefinitely, but this could take forever, depending on how many posts there are. Thus, the tendency is also to loose important discussions or repeat them unnecessarily. Even if the discussions are not lost, they should always be at the users' beck and call. I recommend a search feature specific to each group (or page, or event, or profile, or whatever-have-you). Not the general search feature that is sort of a joke especially when you're searching for people (maybe Facebook chose the wrong search engine to partner with). With a search feature, I'm sure I ca...

I may be wrong but I predict that Apple will still be relevant for at least the next ten years. (If this world lasts that long). They will however not be as valuable...may be relegated to the back, not making too many waves...kinda like, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, etc, after their glory days are over and before they manage to reinvent themselves. Their stock could even go up for a short while...but for different reasons. Probably because of more people buying established technology from a reputable brand...and not because the brand is the go-to brand for what is cool (or needed) any more. There's another company who's rising value is dependent not too much on the super powers of their leader(s) but on the pool of talent they employ (or acquire). Anyone who's read my blog a llittle probably knows what company that is.

No matter how much you hate Apple's pricing or closed ecosystem, you have to hand it to the man. He is a legend!

One major thing Google+ has going for it is the benefit of hindsight. They can simply look back at all the glaring mistakes that Facebook has made, and...well...make the same mistakes in cooler ways. Google+ gives people the ability to start afresh...reimagine their social networking...basically, add friends with more discrimination. Same goes for uploading content (comments, 'likes', pictures, places one visits...etc). Google also probably has the resources (even if not mindset) to limit the abuse of the right hand column of their pages with sponsored ads and 'friend' suggestions of the Orwellian order. They have the 20/20 hindsight of not describing all human relationships with the word 'Friend' and then limiting the number to only 5000. The truth is, Facebook already gave users the ability to compartmentalize their relationships with lists, so G+ isn't doing anything new in that regard...but they have not abused the words 'Friend' and 'Like...

Every new activity on a Facebook Group has the potential to generate email notifications that clutter our inboxes. While groups have many advantages (many of which we have not even begun to tap into), there is no excuse for unwanted mail. If the notifications are getting to you, don't exit the group for that reason alone (the group hasn't even started yet...you'll see), just adjust your settings a little. Here's how: These instructions apply to Facebook as of 2011 June 20th, and can be rendered obsolete at any time. Such is the nature of the web. Go to the top right hand corner of your page and click on ' Account '. It will drop-down a menu, click on ' Account Settings '. This will take you to your account page. Click on the ' Notifications ' tab. Scroll down a little to ' Groups '. At the bottom of that section, click on ' Change email settings for individual groups '. Just untick the group you do no longer with to receive notifi...

If your Internet Explorer is giving you crappy image resolution, it's possible you're viewing at a larger than 100% zoom. So just simply go to your browser menu. Go to 'View' and then 'Zoom' to reduce the value to 100%, or from 100% to 80% (depends). That should fix the sucker.

Today, T-Mobile announced a brand new no-annual-contract plan on their blog. This move (along with the earlier news of AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile), just points to my theory that the age of annual contracts is over. This is an extension of a theory that had me predicting a couple of years ago, that the most expensive phone call we will ever make will cost no more than the equivalent of 8 US Cents per minute, no matter what the distance between the speakers is. Recently I have extended that theory to predict that paid texts/SMS will soon be a thing of the past...at most, two more years (the time it should take for all phones/packages to have the ability to send e-mails). It shouldn't take man much longer to figure out that e-mails which cost next to nothing compared to texts, can send attachments and do not have absurd character limitations. Back to my post title, the age of two-year contracts is not compatible with the internet age. The fact that you sucker...em...I mea...

Hiding in plain site is definitely the way to go. I, for one, just discovered that the number of 'o's in the word 'Google' at the bottom of a Google search page correspond to the number of pages highlighted via links. So if the bottom shows links to 7 pages (say, 1, 2, 3, 4 , 5 , 6, 7,), it will spell Gooooooogle (seven o's). Also I didn't notice that the red 'o' corresponds to the page position you're currently on. So if you are on the third page highlighted, the third 'o' will be red. So is it spelled 'Gogle' when there is only one search page? Nah...it just omits the 'Google' and the page links at the bottom. Ok back to work.

In this age of facial recognition , one should be able to accurately tag their friends in a photo of a crowd of people. Facebook allows you to use a crosshair to pin point the spot where you want attention focused. You can then label the point with a tag (a name of your Facebook friends or any name you like). When you hover over the tagged name, your spot is delineated by an empty white-outlined box which is about a square inch in size. Problem is, this can fit several identifiable people or objects. I can understand our GPS navigators being deliberately off by a couple of houses, probably for privacy reasons, but I don't get the impression that privacy is of major concern to Facebook where photo tagging is concerned. Yes, Facebook has photo recognition software which they use in suggesting your name to others when they upload pictures that feature your likeness (you may want to disable this feature in your privacy settings). Yet, even their software would have a hard time ident...

Ok so I start to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data to an external drive. The computer tells me it will take dozens of minutes so I leave it running and go for a nap. I have a 'one nod rule', which is to prevent me from working while half-asleep, so if I nod off once, I go straight to bed. I wake up hours later only to discover that the transfer hasn't even reached halfway. The computer has paused the transfer to ask me if I'm sure I want to move a read-only file! Shouldn't the default be to just transfer the files? In the many years that I have been transferring files, never have I intended for the read-only files to stay put while the others move. That has never been my default. Why wait till the 35% mark to ask me a question you could have generically asked at the beginning of the transfer? Can you hear my Linux friends laughing at me? I know I'm ranting only because I was inconvenienced and I bet there are other scenarios where moving a read-only file (t...

Dear Photogs, If you use Adobe Bridge you might want to change your cache settings. Every time you view a large file you are most likely viewing a preview of that file generated by bridge. Bridge saves these previews in the cache so that next time you view the file, it doesn't have to waste time generating a preview. The problem is that this can amass many gigabytes of data in a rather short while. Open Bridge, press Ctrl+K (Win) /Command+K (Mac) and under 'Cache' you can start by changing the location of the cache to a partition of your drive that has more space. If you are bold enough you could even purge the cache altogether. Either way, you now know where those phantom 20 gigs have been hiding. One more thing, if you've ever used (or are still using) Bridge CS3, you might want to search your system for a file named 'filesystem_blobs.MYD'. Cheers, DrAjao

The person credited with inventing the internet is still alive. That tells me the internet is still very very young. We're still trying to figure it out and we likely haven't tapped anywhere near 1% of its full potential. Not that such is a completely bad thing because a fully grown internet is sure to be a scary thing ( The Matrix comes to mind). We haven't seen anything yet. The oldest people who have had Facebook present all their lives are only seven years old! These are people who will have so much to deal with that they won't have time to be saddled with old technologies that we have held on to simply because they were ingrained in our culture. Soon all generations who have lived a day before Facebook (yes including me) will be gone. The lifespan of technology (and I dare say, cultures) will be much shorter. Any invention or way of doing things we have held on to for centuries (because they 'work') will be replaced. Sorry newspapers and movie theaters bu...

A quick way to judge whether you know someone on Facebook is by looking at your mutual friends. The quantity and quality of the friends help you make a quick decision to accept or reject a new friend request. Same should go for Twitter. Instead of wasting prime real estate showing users that are 'similar to' a new 'follower', they should show me users whom both I and the new follower...well...follow, and/or users that follow both of us. I know I'm not the first to suggest this. I just hoped to add an extra voice to the demand...'cos I know the internet is always listening. Have a wonderful weekend. Update: The internet heard .

My first blog post on this blog was a prediction of the future. I predicted that gaming input devices like the Wii would soon be obsolete. Unfortunately, I thought we'd still need something (my goofy guess was plasma gels) to serve as a tactile user interface with the gaming computers. In retrospect, I can't believe it didn't occur to me that since computers can now see, hear, feel, and 'think', they shouldn't need us to wear or carry any input devices in order for them to 'understand' what we want them to do. Microsoft's Xbox 360 won't be needing us to touch any game controllers any more. With Kinect, some sort of glorified web cam, their gaming computers can now 'see', 'hear', and 'understand you. Check out the wikipedia article . Now I'll have a good excuse to play my favorite games. I'll just tell my wife I'm working out. For more complex input instructions, I guess we'll be looking into non-tactile EEG ac...

You should have seen the exam Facebook made me take when it suspected that my account might have been hijacked. I was asked to identify my friends from images they'd been tagged in and I had to be 100% accurate. You should have seen me trying to figure out which of my numerous friends were tagged as cartoons, celebrities and various inanimate objects. What's crazier is that I eventually passed the test!

In case you were by some freak chance, wondering, NTSC stands for the National Television System Committee, and is the analog television system used in most of the US. NTSC uses 525 horizonal lines of which only 487 make up the active picture. It's an inferior video standard compared to PAL (Phase Alternating Line) which uses 625 horizontal lines, of which 576 are used for the picture. In other words, it has roughly one sixth more resolution than NTSC, resulting in better color and sharper resolution. I guess the race really isn't 'unto the swift'. It's good to know that we're moving to digital now but also interesting to note that there has been some form of NTSC in use since 1941. What makes it so hard to change to new technology?