For anyone – especially those born before 1985 or so – here is a very interesting history of computers and operating systems.
Check it out . . .

Comprehensive History of Computers [Infographic].

I am a far cry from being an Apple fanboy but this is way cool!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9XNfWNooz4

This is great news! Xmarks was all set to shut down next month due to inadequate revenue. But now . . . . LastPass to the rescue!

As much as I like freeware (these are both FREE) I will be paying for the premium even though I can’t use the premium features

Xmarks Blog » LastPass Acquires Xmarks!.

We’ve been a little busy so I’m just now getting around to posting about our newest gadget.  Two weeks ago we took the plunge and bought a new camera. Our other camera – Canon S3 IS – is 3 years old and kinda bulky. I love it and it’s 12X zoom, but it doesn’t do real well indoors and it sometimes blurs the left side of the picture.

When we were home for vacation this summer I looked at a replacement – a Canon S90 – but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend the bucks. So I just shopped and drooled. A few weeks after returning to Taiwan I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I started looking at it here. Too expensive!

Then one day online I discovered that the S90 (and it’s main 3 flaws) had been upgraded. The Canon S95 had been released. Now I was really obsessed! I started looking around Taipei and learned a couple of things:

Cameras, regardless of price do not come with international warranties. The warranty is only good in the country of purchase.

Some Canon dealers in Taipei get (some of) their cameras through channels other than Canon in Taiwan, outside of the country of Taiwan. Therefore, if you purchase the camera through them and you have a warranty issue, Canon Taiwan will not perform warranty work on it. It is called parallel importing.

So, after all the looking and learning we decided to go for it and saved $70 over the price of the “official” Canon Taiwan product. The shop we used will provide the one year warranty for the camera.

We’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to really get to know it very but have played around with it a little bit.

It is a very powerful pocket sized camera that we hope will provide us with many memories.

A thorough list of features

I may be late to the party but I want to share with you something that, if you don’t already use, you should download, install, and begin using right away.

It’s called LastPass. It is a password keeper. It is, according to security expert Steve Gibson, “it“.

I discovered it last week and replaced the program I was using (KeePass). This thing is so slick, the features so complete, the ease of use all you want it to be, and the cost is perfect – FREE! I was reluctant to give it all my info like it wanted because I wasn’t totally convinced it was as safe as I needed it to be. However, I just finished watching on YouTube a really long and thorough explanation of all the security details and am convinced it is infact the best thing since sliced bread. If you’d like to know more about security and how it works the video is very informative without being too technical.

If you are like me and tend to be a little lazy when it comes to passwords, check this thing out and I believe you too will be convinced that this is the best way to be smart about passwords and website logins. After you check it out let me know what you think.

Did I mention that it is free?
Oh yeah, it also runs on any platform – Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, Blackberry, Palm, etc, etc.

If you tried to visit our blog over the weekend you were most likely greeted by something other than the blog. Our web host was hacked on April Fools Day and they had to take down all of the sites that they host. Every customer had to have their files re-uploaded from backups. It literally took all weekend. I’m glad I was not them. I’m sure they heard an ear full. I’ve tested almost everything and it seems to be in normal working order for now.

We’re still testing the blog and how it works. There should be a link above this – other than the title.

Sorry to bother you

Well, over the last week I’ve spent more time than I could afford trying to get the blog back up and going. I think I’ve restored most of the tweaks and 85% of the older posts. There is still a time gap from November 12, 2008 until Sept. 22, 2009. Fortunately(?) we didn’t post a lot during the last winter and early spring. Unfortunately, if we want those posts back on the blog we’ll have to re-enter them one by one.

So if you see some weird posts appear in your feed reader or over at Facebook, they may be blasts from the past

P.S. I’m trying out a new plugin that should put a tagline at the beginning of the RSS feed that will let people who are reading on a feed reader or Facebook know that it is really a blog post and it will provide a link to our blog. This should be the first post that will have it. . . . We’ll see how obtrusive it is ~

One of the newsletters I read had a link to this video. It is just under 5 minutes long. Well worth the time. More videos are available at their website.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPt8ElTQMIg

Thanks to the terrific and blazingly fast support of the plugin author I was able to get the “gallery in a post” thingie working. See the post below this one.
If you click on one of the pics it will come up larger on the screen as a layer on top of what you were viewing. Underneath this larger pic is a more detailed description of it. When you hover your mouse cursor over the larger picture right and left arrows appear near the edges of the picture. This allows you to click on the arrows to go forward and backwards in the group of pictures. When you reach either end the arrow for that direction does not appear. It’s really simple.

Tech stuff – the two WordPress plugins it takes to make this work are:
PhotoJAR and Lightbox
Thanks again to the PhotoJAR author for the quick and accurate help.