Facebook, Twitter and the entire digital world is abuzz with Diablo 3. Our copies (for the office) arrived today. Wooot!

I warned the Marketing team that weird excuses will not be valid for absences tomorrow! Lolz!

Anyways, here are more pics of the obvious excitement!

Bye! Gotta go home early!!!

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, my mother-in-law, and to my wife! And of course, Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms and your moms too.

Here’s a practical “virtual” gift that you can give your mom, a short guide on HOW TO OPERATE A WINDOWS-BASED PERSONAL COMPUTER. It will only take a single click to share this either on your own Facebook wall or just send my article’s link/URL to her via chat or email.

Oh, if your mom wants to use a Mac, don’t fret, lead here here.

Thanks!

Don’t forget to share!

He’s either a Android fan or simply confused. An 11-year old boy in the US urinated on a gaggle of Apple Macbooks in his school causing them to be “damaged beyond repair”

According to this news report, this incident happened at the Upper Allen Elementary school. Total damage is projected at $36,000.

Police “charged the boy with institutional vandalism and criminal mischief and are turning him over to the Cumberland County Juvenile Probation Department.”

Sigh.

Don’t forget to share! Thanks!

It was just a matter of time. Samsung has finally surpassed the mammoth that was once Nokia. Recently Nokia fired its Sales Chief due to lackluster sales performance.

Samsung is now hot on the heels of Apple, its closest rival.

Nokia has to do a lot of catching up. I really think that their reluctance to embrace new technology (still sticking to the old Java OS) was their downfall. Now, they have a gamble: partner with Microsoft and try to make a comeback using the Windows platform for mobile.

Exactly what I said when I posted my top 2012 tech predictions last January.

The battle is heating up.

Where are you placing your money on?

As a geek, we’re bound to have a lot of websites or blogs, blogs or sites for our hobbies, for our professional work, and maybe even a site for a startup where we dream of earning millions someday. Finding a reliable AND affordable Website Hosting provider is key.

As a site owner, it’s crucial to have a reliable host so that your site stays online 24/7. Downtime equates to money (and opportunity) lost. We don’t want that, do we? Now, for starters, what should we look for in finding the best web hosting service?

Here are a few tips:

• Reliability: Be sure to check out if your host is near to most of your target audience. This means that if you’re in the US, the best (and fastest) node, would be (of course) a host with physical servers located in the same country (or continent).
• Technology: Your host should have the latest software and hardware that should meet your requirements. Most are either Windows or Linux based. As a geek, you should already be leaning towards one, yes?
• Speed: There are fast hosts and then there are the slow ones. One of geekzkrieg’s favorite is InMotion Hosting due to its 99.9% reliable uptime. And yep, they are FAST!!! They also have a friendly team of tech support dudes so you can always count on help anytime. (Yep, the help’s fast too. And that’s a good thing!)
• Help: Which brings us to the next topic: finding help. When your site goes down, has a glitch or has the hiccups, it’s important that tech support is within your fingertips. Find a host that offers great 24/7 support and also has toll-free numbers where you can call and get help as soon as possible. Customer service in the hosting industry is always a great measure of success and is one of the criteria which gets them more customers and a free “word-of-mouth” referral.
• Affordability: If you’re not a geek billionaire (yet), you have to watch the cash flow. Finding reasonable rates isn’t a problem. Just check out the many options through Web Hosting Reviews

I guess that’s it for now.

I hope these tips help. We wish you the best and we hope that you find the best Website Hosting service that’s right for your needs and your budget.

Peace!

It took almost a year to negotiate with the top telcos in the land. Now, PLDT and Globe landline users can get daily RSS or full-article voice “read-backs” of my blog articles! Talk about awesome technology!

The county’s premier telcos have unveiled their latest technology.

With an investment of over P500 Million, they are allowing bloggers and other websites to have their RSS feeds and even full articles to be retrieved via their landline networks.

And I’m so lucky that the blog of yours truly has been picked among those to do the pilot program beginning today!

Just dial 1-800-GMT (1-800-468) from ANY LANDLINE!

So awesome! Thanks to the executives at the top telcos for putting their trust in me and the blogging community.

This is indicative of how resourceful the Filipino can be when it comes to ICT and Internet technologies. Sweet!

And oh, don’t forget to share!

Thanks!

Here’s good news. One of my favorite PC RPG games, Baldur’s Gate (the first one was released back in 1998 by Bioware and Interplay), is now being redesigned as an “enhanced edition”. Also, it’s been confirmed that it’s also being released for the iPad platform! Yowza!

In an announcement at the official Baldur’s Gate site last March 15, it reads:

“Atari, Wizards of the Coast, and Overhaul Games are pleased to announce work has begun on the Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II. Since its initial release in 1998, Baldur’s Gate has entertained millions of fans around the globe, and has received countless awards. This classic saga of mystery, intrigue, and adventure has set the standard for Dungeons & Dragons® computer roleplaying games ever since.”

And don’t forget, it’s also coming out for the iPad platform.

If this is anything like the new RPGs out there (Dragon Age and Skyrim come to mind), then this is worth the wait.

I hate to admit, but as a longtime videogame AND a table-top D&D player, I really am biased towards 4E. But who knows? Since Wizards of the Coast designed 4th Ed with the pretext of online and video games in mind, then it MIGHT be a good system.

When will it be out? Summer (US) 2012. So that’s around September or October here.

With Diablo 2 already announced and this one in the final stretches, 2012′s going to be the year of the retro-games!

Peace!

So, it’s NOT called the “iPad 3″ nor “iPad HD”. Tim Cook, Apple CEO, just finished his keynote for the launch of the “New Ipad” in San Francisco today. There are 6 main new features of the new tablet which created much anxiety in the tech world. I just finished watching the live feed and live tweets of the launch event (no video livestream though).

New iPad Features

• Retina Display: 2048 x 1536, 3.1Million pixels, 44% better color saturation
• A5X Quad-Core processor: Twice the speed
• 5 MP camera: Similar as the iPhone 4S
• HD 1080P video recording
• Microphone: for note dictation. Siri (TBC)
• 4G LTE: for awesome, blazing fast speeds.

It’s priced the same as the iPad 2! Expect the price of the iPad 2 to be lower and a lot of second-hand iPad 2′s to be sold now.

How much?

Here you go:

It’s going to be sold March 16.

Pre-orders starting today.

The only downside? It’s a bit heavier, said Tim Cook.

*Images via Engadget

Apple is good at keeping secrets. All we can do is speculate on what changes the iPad 3 will bring. But it’s only a day away and here’s the rundown so far…

What are the major changes you may ask? Let’s go through it one by one

• Resolution: Almost all rumors are consistent. The iPad 3 will have sharper images on-screen. Doubling the resolution from 1024 x 768 to 2046 x 1536. This means that there are FOUR (4) more pixels on the same amount of space than before. This will make the retina display sharper than ever and more HD games will look awesome! The “cons” here is that you’ll have to live with bigger file-sized apps since the amount of data to run those kinds of apps and games will blow-out.
• Speed: With faster resolution, you need faster chips. This means a faster processor. That’s for sure
• Memory: That goes hand in hand with the processor
• Battery: Rumors from leaked photos of the internals of the iPad 3 hinted at a battery bigger than the iPad 2. This will translate to a longer battery life! Wohoo! That’s good news indeed.
• Price: They say that the iPad 3 will be priced the same as the iPad 2. This means that we can expect a lot of low-priced sales and promos for the old iPad 2 after the announcement. When the iPad 2 was launched, prices for the original iPad dropped to $100 (approximately P4,500 to P5,000) less. It’s a safe bet to assume that this will be the case for the iPad 2. If the basic 16GB model retails in Greenhills for around P22,000 to P24,000 maybe we can expect it to retail at around P17,000 to P21,000 after the announcement. That’s good news for those with a budget and are not ready to shell out big bucks for an awesome tablet.

Lastly, the web is rife with debates on how Apple will “NAME” the iPad 3. Some tech writers are betting that it will be named similarly to the iPhone 4S since the new features are not that radical from the iPad 2. Hence, names such as “iPad HD” are in the grape vine.

But, it’s only a couple of days ’til CEO Tim Cook finally proves who’s right or wrong. All eyes are on San Francisco on that day.

I can’t wait!

USB flash drives are cheap. Dirt cheap in fact. For a couple of years, it has evolved from being a techy gadget to a normal device that’s prevalent in society… and (almost) everyone has one. But, is it the end for the USB stick pretty soon?

Kit Eaton’s article says yes. The USB will soon be a thing of the past.

He writes:

To understand why, you’ve only got to look at how ubiquitous they are now. They’re a handful of dollars at your convenience store, novelty designs compete with austere ones, and they’re thrown around like confetti as promos at tradeshows. Any tech that’s got to this level of commodity is due to be banished to the history books. It’s just the way of things.

The author then cites two reasons which may lead to the USB stick’s demise

1. The growth of mobile technology
2. Cloud storage (in this case, Dropbox).

It’s more convenient to just drop a file into Dropbox and then have it in the “cloud”. You may then retrieve that same file from any PC.

I started to use Dropbox around a year-and-a-half ago and I can say that it really helped and lessened my need to lug my USB drive with me.

But I think that USB drives will still be used as storage media. Until everyone has blazing fast mobile connections and the ability to put bigger files on mobile devices, then the common USB flash drive may be with us for quite some time.

Keen on seeing how cloud computing and Dropbox upgrade their systems and services in the near future, though.

If you want to try DropBox, you can GET A FREE ACCOUNT HERE.

Cheers!

Don’t forget to share! Thanks!