Neat Net Tricks

Txt2Quit in New Zealand will send you 26 weeks worth of text messages to motivate you to give up smoking. It’s been 20+ years since I smoked, but as I recall, it took more than texting to shake the habit. But whatever works.

Come to think about it, this wouldn’t have done the trick 20 years ago.  We didn’t have texting then.  I can’t recall the patch, either.  We quit smoking by, errrrr, quitting.  Life was simpler back then.

In an effort to extend the Internet to some .8 billion people whose native language doesn’t include the Latin alphabet, ICANN, the agency that assigns Web addresses, is expected this Friday to change some important rules. They will allow entire addresses to be written in non-Latin alphabets. These could be Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, and others.

So, what’s next? I have nothing against making the Internet accessible to our non-Latin alphabet users, but does this mean we’ll have to provide alternate Web sites so that, Neat Net Tricks, for example, will look like:

I don’t mean to add to the glut already on the Web about Windows 7, but I thought this was an interesting article .  It’s of particular value if you recently bought a PC with Vista installed and were promised that you could upgrade to Windows 7 free.

When they declared in that old song The best things in life are free they surely didn’t have Microsoft products in mind!

Promise me, before you post another message on Facebook or Twitter, that you’ll read about the 9 Hidden Dangers of Social Networking . A lot of it is just plain common sense, but we don’t always seem to have that.

Ummmm, maybe. Anyway, if you have an extra $120 on you, this is to remind you that Windows 7 was officially released today.

How much are your medical records worth? Possibly more than you think as they are stored “in the clouds” and accessed (and sold) by others. If you need something more to worry about today, read this .

Are you using Firefox browser? Has it begun to display a pop-up that it is blocking Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation add-ons? That’s because of a security hole that allows for drive-by-download attacks and this was installed automatically earlier this year by the Microsoft clan.

They just keep giving, don’t they?

Just two of the 50 most annoying things about the Internet, and you might find your favorites here .

Knowing how to tweet should not be a career in itself.

If we all agreed to shut down the internet for a few hours a week – perhaps on Sunday evenings – long-suffering parents and grand-parents might get a few more phone calls.

Add my petty annoyance as #51: People like this author who refer to the Internet as “internet” and the Web as “web”. They are proper nouns and should be capitalized, bubba (or is that Bubba?)

By now, you’ve probably read about the latest snafu in which Microsoft somehow lost all the remotely stored data for T-Mobile Sidekick’s possibly one million cell phone customers. This meant all their calendar, notes, tasks, photographs, the works. T-Mobile said it was sorry and offered a less-than-grandiose gesture of a $20 credit and a $100 gift card to use on for other T-Mobile products and services. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working feverishly to recover the data and angry T-Mobile customers have filed a host of lawsuits.

As I’ve written before, storing everything “in the clouds” has a great deal of fascination but when you give up your local access to data and don’t keep a good backup, you might expect a lot of rain from those clouds.