Category: Blog

Spoke with Steve about the Powermat induction charger that is being released today and is designed specifically for charging portable gear such as iPods, Blackberries and Nintendo DS portable consoles.

I think this type of charging is going to be the future of how we power up devices. It’s clean, simple and in most cases more energy efficient because the power switches off once the unit has been charged. The Powermat basic unit is $149, with charging cases for the different phones costing $49.95 each.

Had a few calls too, including one from Roy and one from Harry, both with the same problem with their LG sets. It seems that at a particular time of the night their television turns off for a few seconds and then switches back on. In Roy’s case it was only the ABC that is affected, while with Harry it was Channel 7. Sounds like a the timer on the set has been set and needs to be reset. This is more than likely the problem.

Clare wanted to know how to download her SMS’s from her new Samsung handset. She should be able to connect to her computer uses a USB cable, and download it that way. There will be instructions with the handset that should show her how to do it. This should be possible with most modern handsets.

Dave is have a burnt or dead pixel problem. This is when one of the small pixels on your LCD no longer works and you can see that on the screen, which can be very annoying. Most vendors have a policy on replacing a screen if too many pixels are burnt or dead. I doubt they would replace a screen over one pixel, but if a few go within a certain time frame, then they should remedy the problem.

Liz bought a phone of Ebay. She said it was an E71, which sounds like a Nokia, but there are some generic brands out there who ‘borrow’ from others, so it might not be. Liz wanted to know if it was possible to turn up the sounds on her handset because she couldn’t hear her husband properly. She should be able to do so by going to the ‘Settings’ feature on the handset. Within those settings is a ‘sound’ feature that allows you to increase the sound output loudness.

Paul wanted to know how to put movies on his iPod without buying them through iTunes. There are a number of MPEG compression programs available online that help you compress the files, and then can be loaded via iTunes.

I went on the Today Show and spoke to Lisa about the classification of video games, which is now a hot topic after the South Australian Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, has indicated will quit the post soon.

Gamers who want an R18 rating introduced to sit above the current top-end R15+ rating, point to Atkinson as the bottleneck in getting such Federal legislation passed. This is because all the States’ Attorney Generals have to agree on a piece of legislation to the bill and Atkinson has always said no.

Currently Australia is one of the few western countries that doesn’t have an R18 rating for video games, and there are seemingly reasonable arguments from both corners.

On the pro side, those of us who are 18 or older tend to see ourselves as mature and free enough to choose what games we would like to play – whether the game is too violent or has sexual content is irrelevant because we should be the masters of our own destiny. Retailers also feel they are missing out because a lot of people get copies of R18 games from overseas online sellers.

On the other side of the coin, critics want to know why people would want to play games that have explicit violence and sexual themes, such as the recent Modern Warfare 2 game that had one level where a player acts as a terrorist that kills innocent people at a Russian airport.

Where the government crowd might have it wrong is that almost all other media has an R18 rating already, so why not games? There was also a recent survey out of Bond University that showed 91 percent of adults want the rating.

It will be interesting to see if Atkinson’s replacement in South Australia will be the stumbling block that he was accused of being, and whether this thorn in gamers’ side will be put to rest.

Had a chat to Lisa about Tobin Attard, a little baby, whose picture was banned by the administrators at Facebook.

Tobin’s mother put the pic up on her Facebook page, but he was naked, so as well as taking the picture down, they sent his mother a warning email not to do it again or she might have her account suspended.

There are some out there that think this was over the top and being too politically correct. That’s an argument for another day, but what I will say is, that I’m glad that Facebook administrators are policing the site.

Not too long ago, we were giving them hell for not policing sites dedicated to children who had died under tragic circumstances, and the terrible messages that were being left on those sites.

We also have to remember that Facebook is owned by a corporation and they can have whatever terms and conditions they like, and if they think those conditions have been breached they are more than within their rights to act as they see fit.