Wireless, battery powered Hard Drive enters the market

This is a fabulous product idea. Seagate added wifi and a battery to their latest 500gb hard drive and some smart software as well. It’s really designed to stream media content to the new generation of tablet devices. It connects to your computer via wifi and presents itself as just another drive/computer on your network. Drag and drop files over to it like any other hard drive and then carry around those files anywhere. This is *the*perfect* device to load up with movies before your next vacation and then watch them on your iPad/Android Tablet/Laptop/Big Phone.

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Here’s why you can’t get Google Voice on your Sprint phone

Short story: Google Voice DOES work on Sprint phones including Hawaii, but will NOT work if your Sprint phone is under a corporate account (like mine). Here’s the details:

I was really excited to enable Google Voice on my Sprint EVO 4G phone “Hawaii Sprint Customers: Do we get Google Voice?“. So you could imagine how bummed I was when Google Voice says, “Unfortunately, Google Voice cannot be enabled on this Sprint phone. Please contact Sprint for more details as to why this cannot be enabled.”

Worse yet, other Hawaii Sprint customers were telling me that it worked just fine for them. Damn! Why me, Lord?

Well today I finally called Sprint. They were a little puzzled too but after digging around, we found out why: My Sprint is under my corporate account and apparently business accounts are not allowed to enable Google voice. While I’m disappointed, I can see why. On a policy level, if this was my company’s phone, I can certainly see that my boss might not approve of me implementing various re-routing and voicemail rules that Google Voice allows.

So, if you’ve got a personal/home Sprint account, you should be good. If you’ve got corporate, you’re out of luck.

Final note: a shout-out goes to the Sprint folks. I’ve only been with them for a year but their customer support has always been excellent, the service has been fabulous (I can’t recall a single dropped call that my phone caused) and the phone (other than the absolutely crappy battery life) has been an incredible workhorse. Thanks Sprint!

Fix IE9 appcrash on module igdumdx32.dll

Caution! This is for Geeks only! Hide the Children!

I was holding off upgrading my laptop to IE9 and finally today the Windows Update made its way to me. I’m running an HP G60 and Windows Vista. So I apply the IE9 update and guess what?

Crash.

IE9 crashes immediately on startup. Here’s the message:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: iexplore.exe
Application Version: 9.0.8112.16421
Application Timestamp: 4d76255d
Fault Module Name: igdumdx32.dll
Fault Module Version: 8.15.10.2302
Fault Module Timestamp: 4d558979
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00009754
OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 320d
Additional Information 2: 4edd9d66ee480f698f7a8471ff5bf4c7
Additional Information 3: fb88
Additional Information 4: 79a0529db8dfe57251a51521518a9816

Read our privacy statement:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=50163&clcid=0x0409

So you can imagine my frustration! So now I have to wrestle with it and there’s nothing I hate more than having to spend time fixing an update gone bad.

I tried a things that didn’t work, namely, setting my IE9 settings to system default. Still crash.

So here’s the fix for the ie9 appcrash on igdumdx32.dll

and I hope it works for you too: Go to control panel, Internet options. (normally you could do this within IE but since it crashes you can’t).

Then click on the Advanced tab, and under Accelerated Graphics, check the box next to “Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering”. In other words, turn off hardware acceleration.

You then should be able to run IE9 just fine. There’s probably an out-of-date graphics driver and I’ll have to fix that next, but for now, I wanted to publish my problem and my fix.

If this does NOT fix your IE9, please click on this link for other folks who can help you.

Netflix movies now on Android: I’ll never watch TV again.

I already watch more video on my Sprint EVO 4G than my big screen TV. Now that Netflix has arrived for Android it’s going to get even worse (better?). I just got through installing it. The video quality is great and it works like a charm. Holy Schmokes. I love it! The only reason why I will watch TV now will be as a family event. Otherwise, my EVO on the kickstand is my new video-watching device. That big screen is sure coming in handy.

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Google’s netbook launches, IT Depts are either cheering or running scared

You just got to love Google’s continued encroachment on sacred cows. First it was email, then office apps, and now it’s your IT department. Business customers with 10 or more users can get these “Chromebook” netbook PCs which essentially only run the Chrome browser, for $28/mo. Here’s the real killer: this includes technical (i.e. helpdesk) support. If I worked in an IT department, I’d figure out a way to become the Google Chromebook uberwizard because when these machines come into the company, I’d want to be getting a raise and not a pink slip

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they really sting when used as…

they really sting when used as a whip RT @LanaitheDJ: #Hanabatadays Getting lickens with my Hot wheels tracks

YouTube down! wow!

YouTube down! wow!

Google kicks Blockbuster in the teeth (and fires shot across Netflix bow) with online movie rental

When I bought my bluray player a few years ago I had the feeling this was the last time I was going to by a standalone media player and I’m right. YouTube has joined the fray and is now offering online movie rentals. The only reason why anyone with a broadband connection would go to Blockbuster instead of clicking and paying on YouTube would be because they can’t connect their PC to their TV. Of course all the new TV’s have NetFlix and YouTube built in. So its bye-bye blu ray and hello on-demand online video.

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Uh oh. google thinks @hnlnow d…

Uh oh. google thinks @hnlnow distributing malware. http://bit.ly/m0H5bA

How to get high ranking on Google? Build a quality site. From the horse’s mouth:

People always ask me, “How do I show up high in Google Search Engine Results? And my answer is simple and consistent: Build a Good Web site. I suggest everyone read this article and go through their quality control checklist against their own sites. The moral of the story continues to be: don’t build a site to get high rankings; build a good site and the rankings will follow. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tune your content to get high rankings on topics you care about. It does mean, however, that you shouldn’t try to play games or “scam around” to get your rankings unnaturally high.

We encourage you to keep questions like the ones above in mind as you focus on developing high-quality content rather than trying to optimize for any particular Google algorithm.