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This post is not about the new iPhone

Jun 10, 2008 | Current Events, Gadgets 'n Stuff

Seriously … it’s everywhere and I’m over it already. I just don’t see what all the hype is about. (Actually, I can’t see much of anything right now – I stupidly stuck my mascara brush in my eye this morning while trying to text from my phone and now it’s damn sore and everything looks a bit blurry.)

All I have to say is bravo to the Apple marketing team – they have once again done an outstanding job of reeling in all the trendies =)

Moving on …

Now, THIS is more my cuppa, the Nokia N96 – a real sexy little numba:

http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2008/02/14/hands-on-with-nokias-high-rolling-n96/

And then there’s also the new E-series:

http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2008/05/07/nokias-e66-and-e71-in-the-wild/

I’m a Nokia fan. I’ve had a Nokia handset right from the early brick days, apart from the time I tried out a Motorolla MPX 220 for a while and completely hated it. My current N95 is a fantastic phone (I just need to upgrade the firmware) – I love the 5MP camera (one of 2 cameras on the phone!), the radio, the media player, easy connectivity, all the functional apps and cool games I now have on it, and the GPS is pretty awesome too.

OK, ‘nuff about phones. I need to eat and get some work done before I head off to gym just now.

‘Cause gadgets are kiff

Jun 9, 2008 | Gadgets 'n Stuff, Websites

As you know by now, I’m a true gadget gal – a sucker for all things new and clever and I’m also a bit of a closet geek … shhhhhh, keep that to yourself please =)

So today I was jumping around the interwebs and came across something I’m really glad to have accidentally discovered and I thought I’d share it with you.

Nudjit is a site that publishes gadget reviews for South Africa.

Personally, I think that’s a fantastic angle and very helpful as so many gadget and tech sites and feeds that are anywhere close to being good simply don’t cater for us here on the Dark Continent.

“The site aims to inform, entertain, and alert South Africans about the gadgets that are available to us. Our gadget reviews don’t just highlight the technical aspects but will also judge how well they work, where one can get them, and if our local technology infrastructure can actually support these electronic toys.

The site offers detailed written reviews, quirky video posts, aggregated gadget news from all across Africa, user ratings, and hot links from popular gadget sites from around the world.”

Nudjit covers a wide range of topics and includes product info from all the top brands – as it applies to the South African consumer. Gotta love their tagline, can’t get more SA than that =)

The main gadget categories are:

  1. Audio/Visual
  2. Computing
  3. Gadget News
  4. Gaming
  5. Mobile
  6. Photography
  7. Software
  8. Stuff (GPS / Household)

Although the site looks like its fairly new, and some of the content is a weeny bit thin at this stage, I think it has huge potential and I’ll definitely be subscribing to their feed to follow all their latest gadget news. The latest post is by Justin Hartman, author of Chapter 7 of the new SA Blook and co-founder of Afrigator.com. He’s in Berlin at the moment, attending the “HP Connecting Your World Conference” and, as part of the journalist welcome pack, he was given a pre-release HP iPAQ 910c Business Messenger phone! Lucky bugger =) Anyway, you can scoot over to Nudgit and read his first impressions of the phone.

The site design is clean and the layout is beautifully simple – you just can’t get lost on it! That’s important for me – I don’t have time to navigate my way around complicated designs that are fencie just to show off the designers’ skills – nothing chases me away from a website faster than a nav system that tests my problem-solving skills. Nudjit isn’t one of those sites …

I enjoy that the reviews and comparisons are subjective and honestly written and because they offer more than just the bog-standard technical specs, they are both informative and entertaining. Site users can also leave comments and ask questions, which is a great interactive feature, and one that is quickly becoming the norm amongst succesful online businesses.

And I also happen to know that the chaps behind Nudjit are extremely knowledgeable and are greatly respected in the tech and web world so I am quite happy to trust their opinions.

Thanks guys, well done!

This may help you

May 18, 2008 | Gadgets 'n Stuff, Work

I’ve been having big problems with my laptop over the last few days. For some reason that I couldn’t figure out, the cpu usage kept shooting up 100%, even with no applications running and I could do absolutely bugger all! So frustrating – I couldn’t even run a registry cleaner or spyware scan because there just weren’t enough system resources.

I struggled for 2 days to try and sort the problem out. And I was starting to panic – every hour that went by was another precious hour of work being lost, time that really couldn’t afford to be wasting with stupid PC problems. I get so hacked when the machines start playing up, it’s so friggin’ frustrating because we totally rely on them for every aspect of the business and when they give hassles, the business suffers. I feel so helpless because I don’t know enough to fix them myself.

Eventually, after much gnashing of teeth and tugging of hair, I managed to get into IE and Google “100% cpu usage XP” and I managed to come across a solution, thank goodness. I was expecting to find some really complicated, technical workaround that I’d have to call a professional in to do for me, but luckily it was a really simple problem and fix. All it was was a document that had got stuck in the print spooler a while back. The minute I cancelled it, everything was fine! AAARGH!!! Can you believe it? Something so small and simple caused so many problems and so much irritation …. Now I have to work double time to try and catch up.

Anyway, I thought this may help someone in the future. So if you ever find that your PC’s cpu usage suddenly spikes for no apparent reason, and you run out of system resources, check your print spool!

To do this:

  1. Go to the Windows Start menu and select “Control Panel”.
  2. Find and open the “Printers and Faxes” option.
  3. When that opens up, have a look in the “Documents” colum next to the printer names.
  4. They should all be on zero, but if one of them shows a number, it means there’s one or more documents stuck in the print spool.
  5. Double click on the printer name to open the print spool window and click on the offending document.
  6. Then, from the menu, choose Document > Cancel.

That’s it!