In my iPhone 4S review, I mentioned I had a hard time using Siri (the personal/virtual assistant) and concluded I can live with the iPhone even if I’d deactivated it. Turns out there’s a group that hacked Siri and replaced it with Vangie.
Continue Reading
Barely over a month since my Paypal account was hacked and restored, I once again encountered a disastrous incident — this time, Paypal emailed me saying they have placed the account on Limited Access.
Continue Reading
In the recount of what happened yesterday regarding my hacked Paypal account, I realized that it was my GMail that was originally compromised and used to reset my Paypal password.
Continue Reading
So my Paypal account was hacked at exactly 10:01am this morning. In the many years that I have been doing online transactions, I’ve gotten used to frauds and hacks but this one from Paypal (Unauthorized Transaction) is the biggest so far.
Continue Reading
The original PlayStation 3 was way too expensive when it first came out. That’s probably one of the main reasons why it lagged behind the Nintendo Wii and the XBox 360 in sales. So Sony has come up with a newer but cheaper one — the PlayStation 3 Slim.
Continue Reading
I felt a bit stupid discovering that my iTunes account was hacked for about a month already and only noticed it yesterday. Now, I’m just figuring out how it happened and will wait for Apple customer support if they can reverse the charges.
Continue Reading
There was some sort of mass panic last night when Google was spewing a warning “this site may harm your computer” on all their search results. People search on Google were shocked and confused as if the search engine itself was hacked.
Continue Reading
Tony of DJI talks about an unexpected outcome from TailRank’s River, a blog monitoring service. A large number of blogs turned out to have been hacked to promote spammy content and affiliate links.
Continue Reading
Robert Scoble got the boot from Facebook recently for hacking the site by running a script that pulls data from his account. This raises so many questions. Do you own your data on social networks? Is Scoble a freedom fighter or a data thief?
Continue Reading
As some of you might have already read the breaking news lately, or even blogged about it, the real identity behind Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) has been unmasked.
As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. All the fun, humor and mystery will cease to exist for readers of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs now that he’s been outed.
Continue Reading
Here’s a really nice ongoing project for WordPress — Shuttle Project.
The Shuttle is a complete beautification of the WordPress Administration Panel. The project has been in development since early 2005. The images below effectively show the future of the WordPress administration panel. These are the images we did on Photoshop, so there is no plugin for you to download, as it’s not been incorporated into the final release yet.
One of the beautiful things about this project was the collaborative effort from people of completely different backgrounds, in completely different countries all working for one goal. 1000s of emails were exchanged between myself, Michael Heilemann (of Binary Bonsai), Joen Asmussen (of Noscope), Chris J Davis (of Chrisjdavis), Bryan Veloso (of Avalanstar), Joshua Sigar (of alphaoide), Matt Mullenweg (of Photomatt) and Ryan Boren (of Boren).
Check out the screenshots here. They are awesome and really practical revisions.
I’ve actually hacked my own WP 1.5.2 Dashboard to work something like this (which is why it’s hard for me to upgrade to WP 2.0.2)
Here’s what I would have wanted to add to that existing design:
- Add Technorati blog stats in the Dashboard (i.e. Technorati Rank, links and sites linking in)
- Add search post and search comments feature in dashboard.
- Add pagination in Post/Comment Management and option to show number of posts to display per page (default now is 20 I think).
- Add most viewed posts today, this week and this month.
The design is already good for me.
Manuel was asking me earlier what my favorite WP plugins are. I did post something like that here before in my Must-Have list but that was a long time ago. There are much better and more useful WP plugins now (really great ones I must say).
Here are the ones I have installed on this blog:
- BackupRestore – Simple way to backup and restore a WordPress MySql database and wordpress folder.
- Spam Karma 2 – Reloaded – prolly one of the best, if not the best, anti-spam plugin out there.
- Adsense-Deluxe – for the heavy-weight probloggers.
- Author Highlight – Author Highlight is a plugin that prints out a user-specified class attribute if the comment is made by the specified author. It is useful if you would like to apply a different style to comments made by yourself.
- Blogs Of The Day – Notifies BOTD every time a post or the home page is viewed.
- Favatars – A system to show favicon.ico files as avatars: “Favatars”.
- Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.
- Gravatar Signup – Allows commenters to sign up for a gravatar by clicking a checkbox and filling in a desired password.
- Gravatar – This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options.
- Headline Images – Replaces Post headlines with PNG images of text, from ALA’s Dynamic Text Replacement. Includes soft-shadows, improved configuration, and previews.
- Multiple Random Images – hacked this a little bit for my blog header.
- Paged Comments – very sueful if you have entries with hundreds or even thousands of comments.
- Photopress Plugin – Adds buttons to the quicktags toolbar to launch popup tools that allow users to upload photos and browse previously-uploaded photos, then insert linked-thumbnail code into posts.
- PHP Exec – Execute PHP Code inside a post.
- Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches.
- Google Sitemaps – This generator will create a google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
- Subscribe To Comments – Allows users(readers) to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted after their own.
- Dunstan’s Time Since – Tells the time between the entry being posted and the comment being made.
- Top10 – Top 10 Posts/Views
- Translator – Translates blog dynamically (from English) to eight languages.
- WP-Amazon – adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon.com to your post entries.
There are a lot of other Wp plugins that I really like but have not found time (or need) to add them to this blog (though I’d like to use them on my other blogs) – Random Posts, WP Plugins Manager, WP-Cache, Theme Switcher, Miniblog.
Looks like this week is full of exciting (and not so exciting stories) after all. Here are some of the noteworthy ones for me:
- ABCI Anniversary Bodega Sale at MC Home Depot, Global City, Taguig on October 12 to 16 (10AM to 8PM). They’re be selling iPods, Jabra headsets, Philips and Sony electronics and gadgets, laptops and other mp3 players. Take note of the ECS A530 laptop which is around Php24k and the On-Key Karaoke System just below Php7k. Worth the visit.
- Evo-Dev just released evoTopSites Pro today. I’m excited to upgrade PinoyTopBlogs to that version.
- BBC 6 slips and prematurely announced Apple’s Video iPod. Apple is set to unveil a new video iPod at the BBC Television Centre in London on October the 12th. (via Engadget)
- 170 Mbps broadband connection via electrical sockets! Yes, you read it right!
- Spread Firefox has been hacked yet again, for the second time, once more. (pun intended)
- Google Office was a fluke. Too much excitement magic powder being spread around the blogosphere.
- Yahoo! buys UpComing.org.
