Solar Chargers

Have you ever bee in your car and needed to charge your phone or other gadget? Sometimes it can be a real hassle trying to find a way to charge it when you have other phone service devices plugged in the cigarette lighter. Solar chargers for gadgets are becoming more common, and convenient. There's the mPowerpad that charges multiple devices, for example. But for those that want a little style, there's the XDModo Solar Window Charger. The charger has USB and mini-USB outputs. Odds are most people will use the USB since that's the charger end of most smartphone cables – be they for Android, iPhone or others. The battery inside has a 1300 mAh capacity – most smartphone batteries average around 1500 mAh, so it's pretty close to the full charge. That said, after it charges up during the day, it can keep your phone going through the night, or supplement the battery when it runs low. The output is five volts at 500 mA, plenty for charging anything but an iPad. The maker, Xindao, is in Europe. You can purchase it online for about $65 but you'll have to shell out for shipping to the U.S. – about $65 as well.

Google in India

I found a rather interesting article about the continuing battle of social networking and search sites with censorship in India. It shows that some people are not willing to budge on these issues.

"Google India has removed web pages deemed offensive to Indian political and religious leaders to comply with a court case that has raised censorship fears in the world's largest democracy, media reported Monday. The action follows weeks of intense government pressure for 22 Internet giants to remove photographs, videos or text considered "anti-religious" or "anti-social." A New Delhi court Monday gave Facebook, Google, YouTube and Blogspot and the other sites two weeks to present further plans for policing their networks, according to the Press Trust of India. For India's more than 100 million Internet users, the government says, U.S. Internet standards are not acceptable. The case highlights the difficulty India faces in balancing conservative religious and political sentiments with its hope that freewheeling Internet discourse and technology will help spur the economy and boost living standards for its 1.2 billion people."

First of all, I wonder just how far it would extend. Would it include internet phone services since they are using the internet as well? Secondly, who is to decide what is deemed "offensive" or even anti-social? I guess if it is decided by the people, then that would be the definition of a democracy. It seems like people are throwing words around that they do not even understand the meaning of. What are your thoughts on the issue?

Do Not Call The Geek Squad Just Yet

If your computer seems to be on the fritz, you might want try a couple of things by yourself first. If your internet phone connection is not too great, try restarting the computer or moving to spot where you can get better signal if you have a wireless internet connection. When you go online and constantly get spam messages with a ton of pop-ups, there is probably something going on in the background. It might be some simple hijacking malware, so you tell them. Just download Malwarebytes and Spybot Search and Destroy, and run them. It'll be fixed with virtually no effort on your part. One of the best reasons to try doing some of the things yourself is that if you take it in somewhere, it will cost you a pretty penny. I've heard prices range from $40 to $150 per hour. If your local shop falls into those higher rates and your repair is going to take three or four hours, you're now talking about a bill that's equal to a brand new tower. Last of all, you need to come to terms with the fact that you might lose some of your stuff.

Merging Your Data

Most people today have more accounts than they know what to do with. They range from different emails and social networks to internet fax and internet phone services. It would be more convenient to be able to connect and lump some of them together. Google, of course, is one of the first ones to jump on the idea. The changes, which take effect March 1, will remove some of the legal hurdles Google Inc. faces in trying to link information across services from Gmail to YouTube to the Google Plus social network that replaced Buzz. More than 70 different company policies are being streamlined into one main privacy policy and about a dozen others. Separate policies will continue to govern products including Google’s Chrome Web browser and its Wallet service for electronic payments. The company said the new system will give users more relevant search results and information, while helping advertisers find customers – especially on mobile devices. The changes follow the shutdown of Buzz last month. After its introduction less than two years ago, the social networking tool was ridiculed for exposing users’ most-emailed contacts to other participants by default, inadvertently revealing some users’ ongoing contact with ex-spouses and competitors. Google has since made Plus the focal point of its challenge to Facebook’s social network. In the first seven months since its debut, Plus has attracted more than 90 million users, according to Google. To promote Plus, Google recently began including recommendations about people and companies with Plus accounts in its search results. That change has provoked an outcry from critics who say Google is abusing its dominance in Internet search to drive more traffic to its own services.

Internet Control in India...Again

The internet is one of the most important things in the world today, that you cannot actually touch, interestingly enough. A lot of the world's commerce depends on it and many businesses use communication services such as internet phones and emails over it. That being said, I found an article today about the lawsuit that has been going on in India. Here is part of it:

Internet giants Google and Facebook told an Indian court on Monday that it is not possible for companies to block offensive content that appears on their websites, in a case that has stoked fears about censorship in the world's largest democracy. Google and Facebook are among 21 companies that have been asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material, after a private petitioner took the websites to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

At the heart of the dispute is a law passed last year in the country that makes companies responsible for user content posted on their websites, requiring them to take it down within 36 hours in case of a complaint. The case was originally filed in a lower court, but the companies have appealed to the Delhi High Court, challenging the lower court's ruling asking them to take down some content. "The search engine only takes you till the website. What happens after that is beyond a search engine's control," Neeraj Kishan Kaul, a lawyer for Google's Indian unit, told a packed High Court hearing on Monday. Siddharth Luthra, a lawyer for Facebook told the court it was not possible for the social network to "single out" any individual on the basis of religion or views and said the users should be held responsible for content they post.