Category Archives: Technology

Is it Time to Switch from Google?

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This is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) concerning the new Google privacy policy:

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

via How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google’s New Privacy Policy Takes Effect | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Let me say at the outset that I love Google. I use quite a few Google products. However, this news, well, seems a bit creepy to me. I’ve had web history turned on since 2005 and I found that I’ve had a lot of searches. Sometimes it was even nice to go back through “memory lane” and see what I searched for and when.

There wasn’t anything I wanted to hide in my search history, but this article from EFF did cause me to pause. Then I went and deleted almost seven years of search history. I was a bit sad to do it. Yet, I didn’t want my search history connected to my YouTube account, and my Picaso account, etc., etc., etc.

I don’t know that Google will do anything wrong with the data, it’s just that it seemed…a bit…creepy. To realize that at some point all the dots of data could be connected to create a type of “profile” of who I was, what I liked, etc., just made me feel uneasy.

Started to make me wonder if I should switch from my current search engine, to something different.

Rob Bell on IPhone, IPad, and Android

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Not sure how I missed this, but Nooma, the video series by Rob Bell, is an app for both IPhone devices and Android devices. After downloading the app you can download the first video in the series, Rain, for free. The others will cost you $2.99, but the app itself is free.

Now Rob can go with you where ever you go! You can find the Nooma app in the Android Market, or Itunes.

Christian publishing company Zondervan has developed an app for NOOMA, a series of short films featuring the author of Love Wins, Rob Bell, for mobile users of Apple’s iOS and Android platforms.

via The Nooma App.

AT&T To Increase Handset Upgrade

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At&T is set to increase their fees for upgrading phones. I guess I don’t understand why any carrier would “give away” phones for “free” yet charge for an upgrade fee. Actually I do understand why. We want “free” phones. This is a way that AT&T and give customers what they want, while still charging something.

Just gives me more reason to stay on my current GoPhone plan. Yes, I have to buy my phones outright, but at least I know what I’m paying upfront without any of these “upgrade” fees. See article after the break.

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What if Someone Stole your Phone?

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If you have a smartphone, then you should probably be thinking about how to secure it…just in case you lose it, or it gets stolen. MakeUseOf discusses this, plus gives some advice on how to secure your phone. Use the link to read the full article:

 

As the processing power of mobile phones continues to increase, so their use as a de facto communications and storage device gains more and more users. The end result is a society of connected individuals carrying around expensive hardware holding all of their most important data from contacts to document, music to movies and photos and games.

via What Everybody Ought to Know About Securing Their Mobile Phone.

Gophone Data Speed

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Wow is all I can say. At some point in might post about my moving from a postpaid to prepaid (gophone) account.  Right now I’ll just mention that I purchased a used HTC Inspire which is 4G. As far as I know, you aren’t supposed to get 4G on a gophone account.  While the speeds above aren’t awesome, they are a lot better than I thought they would be.

Too bad the speed test uses so much of my data plan.

Moving From Drupal 7 to WordPress 3.3

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I’ve been running this site on Drupal for quite a while. Back in March I decided to move the site to Drupal 7. While I really like Drupal, there are some things that I would like to do, but just can’t seem to be able to get worked out.

One of the main things I’ve wanted to do was use Windows Live Writer, or my phone to post to the blog. I’ve messed with Blog_api to no avail. While there has been some work in that area, it seemed like there wasn’t enough interest, so the only way I could really post was to go to the website….which I didn’t do very often.

After trying out the WordPress app on my Android phone I realized my best option was to move the site to WordPress. That is _much_ easier said than done. So, for those of you who want to move your Drupal site to WordPress, I want to outline the _basic_ steps. I do this knowing full well that my site isn’t completely functional. I will get to that in a moment.

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Updated…

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Not sure why I decide to update the site on a Friday night, but I did. This site runs on Drupal. It was sitting at Drupal 6.3 and every time I would log in it would complain because the current version is Drupal 6.20. Well, one thing led to another and after getting the site to 6.20 I thought, why not just upgrade it to Drupal 7? After all, how hard could it be?

After about 6 hours (plus some time off for pizza and a movie) I think I have it upgraded. I still need to work on the theme, and I just got some errors, but hopefully it will be something I can either fix or live with for the time being.