Tag Archives: free

#thetimecapsule.org – Become a part of Internet history!

thetimecapsule.org  was launched on 1st Jan 2012. The basic idea emerged from the fact that I was coming across a lot of things: a lot of events, individuals and corporations who change our lives everyday and help form the year!

So I decided to create a ‘time-capsule’. But then I thought, creating a time-capsule will mean that I only add the things I’ve come across, thus missing out on what other people found important, etc. So, that’s where my holiday project emerged from: to create a website which will allow people to add ‘profiles’ on things and people that help shape and form a year, every year. But how to limit it? Well the time-capsule is limited to a 1000 top-rated entries. So each user can add up to three entries (free user registration), and all the other users can vote on the entries. The 1000 highest rated entries will stay in the time-capsule. This does not mean that the other entries will be deleted. This just means that although they will exist online on the website and you will be able to direct-link to them, the time capsule for that year will only contain the top 1000 rated entries of that year.

The site was built from scratch, so there might be a few bugs here and there. Let me know on Facebook or Twitter.

Also I’m currently planning a version 2 of the site. So if you have any ideas or features that you think I should incorporate, also do let me know =)

Click here to visit thetimecapsule.org

This also completes number 11 of my things to do before I die list.

 

Windows Phone – a month with my HTC HD7

So I’ve now had my HTC HD7 for around a month, and its a great phone.


I was a bit vary of the Windows Phone OS. But Microsoft has done a great job upgrading their mobile operating system from windows mobile to windows phone. The basic home-screen is a bunch of square tiles. Simple yet effective. There are no multiple homescreens like you get with the Android devices, but swipe across and you are welcomed by a list of all installed applications. Simple. It’s okay when you have say twenty or thirty apps, but as you download more it gets a bit confusing scrolling through a long list of apps trying to find the one you are looking for. Unless of course you know the name of the app, then you can just quickly use the little search feature and voila, you’re done.

What I really love about the new Windows Phone OS is the ‘People’ application. This links all your accounts, including windows live, facebook, twitter, etc. and gathers all the contacts from them into once place. You can then link up contacts who are available across the different platforms and quickly write on their facebook, or mention them in a tweet, text them, call them, whatever. All the possible options of contacting that person, is listed in that one contact. Sweet.

Windows Phone links with the Zune software which can be found on Microsoft’s media devices, and also available for desktops. This is the only way to get your content to and from your phone. I would have preferred to have bluetooth transfer and managing my media manually like a memory card, but never mind, it works. I can’t complain.

What I really didn’t like was the fact that I was unable to tether my phone. Yes Windows Phone does not give you the option to tether your data connection to your computer/laptop. After searching online for hours and hours, and reading the amazing forums over at XDA developers and many other forums and came across the Deepshining v3.1 ROM. Now this is awesome. The easiest way to tether your phone and some more added functionality.

It’s a good, solid phone. Particularly interesting is the little stand on the back. Personally I’ve never used it and don’t ever plan to. But its something different and cool. The camera is not bad. Okay I lied, the camera sucks. It’s worse than my BlackBerry Torch’s camera, but who cares? The phone is quite large itself, but I like having the large touchscreen, in fact I really like the Samsung Galaxy Note, only because it has a massive screen. One thing I do hate, is the really bad battery life, o and also the fact that it takes ages to sync my emails. BlackBerry on the other hand is amazing on push emails.

But Windows Phone is still a foetus when it comes to mobile operating systems. Microsoft has made a massive jump and given its mobile operating system a massive overhaul and designed it from scratch. The Windows Phone operating system is very much similar to the ‘tablet’ look of the Windows 8 Desktop version (public beta to be released sometime early 2012) . This post wasn’t meant to be a full review of the phone, you can easily find great reviews on many sites; it was just meant to be a rant about the phone and my month that I’ve spent with it.

It’s impressive. And still developing. The UI is amazing, but it still doesn’t have much of a unique and amazing factor to it; if I hadn’t received it for free, I would never have bought it. But all in all, a decent, large touch screen, smooth UI phone, with adequate camera, crap battery life, decent app availability, but great looks!

If you do want to read a full detailed review, TechRadar have a done a nice review of this device. Click here =)

 

DriveSafe.ly – Compliments of BlackBerry

First of the BlackBerry apps released as compensation was DriveSafe.ly, which is normally $19.99USD.

Simply put, it reads your messages out for you. Anybody seen Echelon conspiracy? Didn’t you always want an app that will read your text messages out to you into your minuscule bluetooth earphone? Well this is exactly what this app does, you might have to source your own headset (it works without a headset too).

Just not worth it, not even for free. It reads all your messages as they come, and lets you reply by voice. No use to me as firstly I don’t drive, and secondly I really don’t want to be replying to all my messages in public. Who wants to reply to their messages out loud? And having to repeat it a few times while the app decides to put wrong words in? Yea not any of us.

Also its not really good with ‘text speech’. So if your texts, or messages look anything like this:

“Yea if u gt a txt dats typd lyk dis, den it wnt reli read it proprlii init”

it won’t be able to read them. You’ll just hear some gibberish.

Some positives? It supports a lot of different languages. Its powered by iSpeech.org, so somewhat reliable while converting text to speech.

And lastly, I prefer typing my own messages. Everybody has their own style of typing and stuff, and it would just be wrong to have a ‘bot’ type my text for me! It’s just wrong?

So my final verdict, unless you find it hard to read texts or find it hard to work your phone in general, then yea sure go for it. In fact definitely go for it, seeing as its free – compliments of BlackBerry. But if you prefer to type your texts and work your own phone with your own hands, and make sure only what you typed gets sent as messages and that your emails and messages are not read out loud, especially not in front of other people, then this app is just a waste of memory on your phone.