The DMA Don't Contact Me Database

You’re probably tired of receiving phone calls from banks and other institutions about ridiculous offers.

After all, marketing doesn’t work via the phone any more, and it doesn’t work in the direction that banks want it to. If you want something, you search for it on the internet, or ask friends where to find it. You don’t decide you want a pet pigeon one day, and then wait a few years for a pigeon sales representative to call you about the awesome stock of pigeons he’s gotten his hands on. You go and Google the shit out of pigeons and find yourself the best place to order one from.

So three thumbs up to the Direct Marketing Association of SA (DMA) who’ve set up a Don’t Contact Me database. Sign up there, and provide them with as many phone numbers and email addresses as you have. You’ll no longer receive any phone calls or emails from any companies belonging to, or checking, the DMA. You’re free to shop for pigeons in your own time.

Here’s a list of DMA members (which includes Standard Bank, thank God) http://www.dmasa.org/dmasa/dma_corporate.php?str=1/2/41

Ninite: install or update multiple applications at once

Definitely the most useful website I've seen this year: Ninite.

Select the applications you want to install or update on your PC, and Ninite creates an installer for you.
Download the installer, let it run, and it will install everything automatically.

Very useful if you just bought a new computer, formatted your current one, or haven't updated things for a while.

Ninite has pretty much all the popular freeware applications you could ask for. It pretty much sets up my entire suite of software, apart from Photoshop and Visual Studio.

Liquid timekeeping

I don’t always write about watches. But when I do, they’re not cheap.

Liquid timekeeping!


The Swiss made HYT H1 is the first in the series of Hydro Mechanical Horologists’ liquid watches. The watch displays time through luminescent liquid goo. Those two bellows you can see on the face push and pull the liquid to show the correct time. The bellows in turn are operated by normal-enough Swiss watch movements. The minutes are displayed separately with a non-liquid watch dial.

It’s the first watch of its kind. Seven patents are pending on the technology.

How much, you ask? $45 000. For the basic titanium model. Cha-ching. Also comes in an 18K red gold model.

Why the record industry is so upset with us

2012 Super Rugby schedule for Outlook or Google

Here's this year's Super Rugby schedule for your Outlook or Google Calendar:
2012 Super Rugby Schedule [Thanks greenandgoldrugby.com]

If you have Microsoft Outlook installed, just double click on the file you download to import it. With Google Calendar, select the "Other Calendars" option on the left menu, and click on "Import Calendar."

Vodacom want to sue you for using Blackberry Desktop Software

Vodacom have just updated their terms and conditions saying that they can take legal action against anyone who transfers files from their Blackberrys to other devices.

In other words, download a photo from Facebook, and transfer it to your iPod or computer and you’re “breaking the law".”

There's three problems with this (as far as I know):
1. Vodacom need to have ownership of the content to take any legal action against you. They don’t own what you download from the internet
2. It’s illegal for Vodacom to monitor what you transfer from your Blackberry to another device. Full stop. That would be a violation of privacy rights. They’re allowed to monitor what you download on your Blackberry, but not what you do with that from there onwards.
3. Vodacom's terms wouldn't allow you to use your Blackberry Desktop Software's backup utility, which stores everything from your phone on your computer

I reckon this is an attempt to stop naive users from abusing the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) – by downloading series and other content and transferring it to their other devices to view. Whether Vodacom actually follow through and try to sue anyone will be quite interesting.

Nice try, Vodacom.

My fucking opinion on swearing

The stigma against swearing is bullshit. Why? What's the harm? You might quote the bible, saying something about “not swearing by Heaven, Earth or Hell", but that’s concerned with a completely different type of swearing.

So if not from the bible, where did the anti swearing brigade originate from? What’s the difference between saying “Owwww!” when you bump your toe, and shouting “FUCK!” at the top of your lungs?

There is none.

Heading back to medieval times, if you said certain words, people believed the words magically brought evil spirits upon you. Pretty much the same thing as turning the lights on and off and saying “bloody Mary.” If you swore, you’d be damned by the Laawd, too. Religion and ghost stories merge into one, and bam, before you know it, you have to say poo instead of shit.

Hundreds of years later, and we’re still not allowing kids to watch certain films because actors use alternative vocabulary. We've nailed physics down to the neutrino, but we still haven't figured out that you don't get chased by a demon if you say dick. Unless you're talking about Richard. Then you're OK.

So, I beg you, swear if you have to. There’s nothing wrong with it. Just use it in the right context. Because calling someone a cunt is much more fun than calling them a vagina.

Google Play, your new media hub

With all the hype around the iPad/iPad 3 /iPad HD (Seriously, Apple, get a naming convention), something bigger went largely unnoticed in the news over the last couple of days.

Enter Google Play. Google have combined their music, book store and android market into one big hub.

You can purchase or find free movies, music, series, apps, books and games. Play allows you unlimited space on Google’s cloud, unlike Apple iCloud’s limit of 5Gb. Purchase a movie on your desktop, for instance, and you’ll be able to view it on your tablet or phone (Android). If you buy some music with your tablet, you’ll have it on your computer as well.


To sum it all up, Google are offering you infinitely large storage space for all your media and applications, so long as you buy the content from their stores. They’re providing an alternative to the iTunes service.

I love the idea, but again I wonder how this is going to help if you don’t have uncapped internet access on all your devices. Sometimes the conventional manual transfer of music and movies between your devices is the way to go.


At the moment, though, Google Play doesn’t allow you to buy Movies or Music from South Africa. Bleh.

To access these services right now, you’ll need to use a VPN. Check here [techpp.com] for the top 5 free VPN clients.

How to thank someone when they pull over for you

Someone’s doing you an awful nice favour when they pull over for you when you’re driving above the speed limit. They’re risking their life so that you can get to your destination a few minutes earlier. Which is why you should thank them with your hazard lights. And most people actually have the decency do that.


But have you ever taken a minute to consider my line of sight? You show the intelligence of a single cell organism when thanking me while still passing. I don’t have the eye positioning of a bloody parrot. Wait until you’re in front of the driver to thank them in plain sight. It really gets to me that a good 50% of our population haven’t thought this through.


And if you don’t thank someone for pulling over and risking their life for you when you’re speeding, I hope a thousand fat pigeons shit on your Audi A4.

Ubuntu for Android available soon

A free, full productivity desktop operating system that fits into your pocket!


Enter Ubuntu for Android: Dock your Android phone into a workstation, and your phone becomes your PC. Ubuntu runs on any dual-core or quad-core Android phone with version 2.3 Gingerbread or more, and requires HDMI and USB functionality. The phone runs using one core to run Android, and one to run Ubuntu. Run it on a quad-core phone, and you’ll get an even faster Ubuntu. When you undock your phone, Android continues running on all CPUs.


While plugged in, you receive phone calls and SMSes on the desktop. The desktop comes with all standard applications like Google docs, Mozilla Thunderbird, Chromium and VLC media player.


The details are a bit sketchy, but as far as I can see, all you need to buy is the dock, and make sure you have a keyboard and mouse which integrates with your phone.


I feel (and hope) that this is the direction in which computing is heading. You carry your entire computer around with you in your pocket, and just plug it in to dumb terminals which improve the computer’s typing and navigational ability, and provide you with a bigger screen. So long as your data is all on the Internet, stored in the cloud, you don’t have to worry about losing everything should your phone go missing.


This type of desktop solution still seems a bit impractical in Africa, though. Phones come with very limited storage capacity, so you’d need to store all of your data on the Internet. With our astronomical data charges, this can get quite costly without Wi-Fi connections everywhere. Without Wi-Fi, you’d need an uncapped mobile data plan to keep up with all your storage requirements. I'm not sure if docks are going to come with Ethernet ports, but that could help.


What’s more, support for PC gaming and more hardcore applications like Reason and Photoshop won’t be possible. We will need to give smartphones a few years still to catch up with the hardware requirements of serious applications and games – but then you could expect large price tags on these phones.


However, as a simple and portable office solution, Ubuntu for Android seems to be a bull's-eye. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.


Source: www.ubuntu.com