AOL Celebrates Third Anniversary With Weblogs

AOL celebrates the third anniversary of its acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. this month. In 2005,Weblogshad a large portfolio of niche blogs targeted at business and professional users, in addition to a general readership.Since then,Weblogs has honed itsportfolio to 29blogs focused on major consumer passion points such as technology, autos, finance, video games and travel.Since 2005, Weblogs hasseenworldwide unique visitors climbnearly 1,000% (122% annually, on average)and page views riseover 1,500% (154% annually, on average), according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix.

Interactive Mirror dazzles onlookers, never lies

It was just a month ago that Alpay Kasal of Lit Studios was impressing us with LaserGames, beaming all sorts of fun, interactive visuals on the wall. Now, with a few tweaks, he’s turned that projector around and made a two-way mirror into a sort of digital portal. “Interactive Mirror” uses the same basic mouse emulation as LaserGames — it seems to lack multi-touch but offers some interesting ideas, like showing how a custom T-shirt would look if you were wearing it. That’s potentially useful, but its primary function seems to be inducing childish wonderment in your friends. If the wide-eyed participants in the video below are any indication, it seems to do that quite well.

10 things your IT guy wants you to know

1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.
2. Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you; all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me; you don’t want to start a call that way.
3. I am ok with you making mistakes, fixing them is my job. I am not ok with you lying to me about a mistake you made. It makes it much harder to resolve and thus makes my job more difficult. Be honest and we can get the problem resolved and continue on with our business.
4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me. I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just cant always fix everything.
5. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give me some time to get to your problem, it will get fixed.
6. Emailing me several times about the same issue in the same day is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying. Emails will stay until I delete them, I won’t delete them until I’m done with them. I will typically respond as soon as I have a useful update. If it is an urgent issue, let me know (see number 5).
7. Yes, I prefer email over telephone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for me to list out a set of questions that I need you to answer than it is for me to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and while I’m waiting I can work on other problems.
8. Yes, I seem blunt and rude. It’s not that I mean to, I just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. I assume we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, I will tell you. I don’t care that it was a mistake, because it really makes no difference to me. Don’t take it personal, I just don’t want it to happen again.

(Note: This article was not penned by me. I found it here. But, that blog has been deleted by the author. So I am recreating the post here. If anyone know the name of the actual author, please do let me know. I would be happy to give credits to him/her.)

M2400HD: BenQ’s New 24” Full HD LCD Screen Available in Japan Next Month

BenQ announced the November 1st availability of their M2400HD, a 24-Inch LCD screen. For around 420€, it features a 24’’ panel with 1920×1080 resolution, a brightness is 300cd/m², a contrast ratio of 1,000:1 (with a DCR of 10,000:1), a response time of 5ms, and AMA (Advanced Motion Accelerator) and Senseye Tech.
It also comes with an USB Hub (three ports), a 2Mpix web camera, and HDMI/DVI-D/Mini D-Sub interface.

Gmail’s Canned Responses is E-mail for the Lazy

The makers of Mail Goggles, the popular application for drunk people, have announced their next Labs innovation: automated e-mails.

“Canned Responses” allows you to harness filters on incoming messages and create a stock pile of automated, cookie cutter responses.  And you don’t even have to click “Send,” as Gmail will do that for you as well.

The new feature was designed based on feedback from users in Google’s forums.

Canned Responses could be pretty useful for those clever enough crack the math of Mail Goggles and send out a drunk e-mail.  While you recover from that hangover, let Gmail handle the e-mail apologies.

Sonilex is slimmer than the PS3 and like, totally plays Tekken

Hey there, budget-conscious gamers: the Vii didn’t quite pan out the way we’d all hoped, but we just want you to know you still don’t have to spend $500 or wait for a PS3 Slim to hit the shelves to have a gaming experience worthy of 2008. Just pick Sonilex — it’s a fraction of the size of the PS3, and at around 32 bucks even the most stingy gamer can splurge for it. Word is 41 “NES games” have been released for Sonilex this year alone (probably piled into that odd-looking cart on the left there), including, incredibly but really, the unauthorized NES port of “Tekken.” After all, the game cart says “2008″ on it so you know you’re getting the absolute cutting edge of NES games — like, ones that were never even released until just now, okay? No word on Blu-ray though. That’s a deal-breaker if you ask us.