This is what happen..!

Bye Bye Del.icio.us

Looks like Yahoo is killing Delicious. This is what ppl where wondering yesterday morning. It has now been confirm. Techcrunch got the word back from Yahoo. This is bad, as more and more original services are being shutdown. It’s not rare to see a startup being acquire by a big company to be kill in the next 2 to 3 years late. It happen to some site on Google and now it does on Yahoo.

As a personal service, I don’t mind it being down sometime or shutdown. But I makes us think what are the chance of a web service closing business with all your data. 

The trend going on now is moving everything to the web. You can see this with Google new ChromeOS. But we need services that are solid and that will stay available for the future. This trend might be good for consumers, but for tech savvy ppl, it doesn’t cut it. We still need places to store backup of what we do on the net. There is some convenience, but it not like there is no risk.

I wonder what ppl thinks of web services coming and going. Come ppl like me thought it was less trouble having hosted services instead of hosting by ourselves. But this might change when thinking about all the trouble it is to find something that will last.

I think we now need opensource alternatives that we can install on our own servers.

For the moment, I have registered at pinboard. Bye Bye Del.icio.us…

DodoCase #2

I’ve received my replacement Dodocase today. As you may recall, i’ve talked about my not too good experience from my first one, my DodoCase review. I got some attention while tweeting about it and comparing two case that looked the same.

DodoCase came out to me and offered to replace my original case. I’ve just received it like 30 minutes ago. Like a kid on Christmas, i’ve opened my package to see how it was. Well it does not have any bleeding glue. This time they use double sided tape. I had to firmly press against the wood to make it stick. This is probably du to the cold weather, -10 degree Celsius. It’s kind of cold today. The corner pad have been installed with precision. They are well glued and well placed in the corners. The elastic band wasn’t around the case, so the cover isn’t bent inside.

One observation, they now assemble the wood crate. It’s made from four pieces of wood gluded in the corners instead of being carved from a large piece. And it now has two red lining glued on top of each other. I’ve noticed this from it kind of coming off on the bottom.

So, it’s way better than my first one. I’m happy and I will now be sporting it again with my iPad.

How the Pogoplug software works

I recently bought a Pogoplug, nice gadget, works well, but was slow on my network. I’ve contacted Pogoplug support. And here is how they told me there software works. I think it’s important to know because I might not be the only one with a special network setup.

1. When the Pogoplug comes online it attempts to check in with our central service. The external IP address of the check-in is remembered as well as the internal IP address.
2. When you start the Desktop Application and it checks in with our service, we compare the IP address of this request with the remembered external Pogoplug IP address. If they do not match, the service establishes a tunnel between the two and itself, and all traffic goes via the service.
3. If our service finds the external IP addresses match, it will instruct the Desktop Application to talk to the Pogoplug directly, using the internal IP address reported by the Pogoplug when it checked in 
4. Therefore, if the external IP address of both the Pogoplug and the client are the same, yet the Pogoplug’s internal IP address cannot be reached by the client, no communication is possible and the Pogoplug or client should be moved into the same internal network 
5. For best results, the Pogoplug and the client should be on the same physical LAN as well as the same virtual subnet. They need to be able to route to each other. For big corporate LANs that use multiple internal subnets which all access the internet via the same internet connection, this is fine as long as the internal LANs can reach each other. Otherwise, again, no communication is possible
6. For users with multiple internet connections, if the Pogoplug checks in via a different internet connection (external IP) than the client, communication is possible but will travel over the internet entirely

Thanks, it was fun!

After 8 years as a subscriber of Easynews, I’ve decided to close my account. I haven’t been using it for at the minimun 1 year, but I would say at least 2 years. It was great, I could find almost anything, but I didn’t use it for all it’s value. And the thing is, paying for it at US10$ a month for something you don’t use, I could move that money to an other service like rdio or put.io.

iPad DodoCase

After thinking about it for quite some time, I finally bought a DodoCase for my iPad. I never had the chance to look at one or to hold one in my hand before placing the order. So I had to base my expectation on reviews / tales from sites like Twitter and Tuaw.

Now I had my case for 2 weeks, here are my observations.

First, this is probably the best looking case you can find for your iPad. I love the Moleskins design and this case is probably the best breed that would come out of mixing an iPad and a Moleskin. They are quite the same. So, it’s a nice design, well done, does a great job in protecting your iPad and it has the best look of any case that I found.

But…. Yes, there is a but.

I don’t think that the finished quality / quality assurance is up to my expectation. As you can see from the picture below, there is some glue that bleeded from gluing the wood crate that holds the iPad. It’s in the seem and it will stick to the other part of the case when closed. I’ve only took one photo, but there is visible glue on almost every side.

Other than the glue problem, the wooden crate kind of slides when you store the case upside like a book on the shelf. It might be due to the hot weather, but I didn’t take my DodoCase outside in the sun and my house has AC and the temperature is 22c. It does so in time as I can’t move it by myself. If I want it to slide back in position, I need to put it upside down and live it like this for the night.

And third, my small pads in the corner that keeps my iPad in place are lifting… It looks like I’ll have to glue the, back as they don’t hold anymore.

So that’s the issues I’m having at the moment. I don’t have any case of warping or my iPad beginning to loose hold in the crate. But it’s only been 2 weeks. These problems aren’t that bad. The case is still the best I could find. And you have to take in order that it’s made by hand. I’m only concerned about quality since they are beginning to ship case faster than before. I hope they don’t cut on quality. I’ve bought this case for 85$ including shipping to Canada. For that amount of money, I never tought that I would have those problems. And I’ve waited some time before buying it. So they sold a lot more before I got my case. They should have had those problem fixed or have had the time to work on their manufacturing process.

That’s it, I’ll keep you posted and see if anything happen other then what I’ve just mentioned.

*UPDATE*

So, I’ve contacted Dodocase, since I was looking at my options. I’ve told them about my problems and sent them a link to my blog post, this post. They offered, up front, to send my a replacement case. So far, I think this is great service. I hope the quality on the new case will be better.

Like I said earlier, I’ll keep you posted and will update this post when I’ll receive my new case.

Apple September First Event

iPods, Apple TV, the line almost got a full refreshment.

It’s nice to find FaceTime integrated with the new iPod Touch. That is really logical. Because my mom would never use an iPhone. She doesn’t have a plain cellphone. But an iPod touch could be really good for her to speak with her grand children’s. It will make a really nice present.

As for the Apple TV, I’m a bit disappointed. It has the exact same same interface as the old one and it does the exact same thing. I don’t know if I’ll buy a new one. The one I already have does what I need.

iPhone game

Since I discovered “Archetype”, my iPhone battery only last half a day. I must say that I have a lot of free time on hand.

iPad land

So I bought a new iPad yesterday. I wanted to get the 3G model. My previous one worked great, but I needed to use it while not in a wifi coverage area. Having the 3G gives me a lots of freedom.

I’ve been using it for 2 days and I already passed the 250 megs cap… A good thing that I took the 5 gigs data plan. I never thought that I would use that much data.