Consumer alert: Lightspeed ISP scam?

This is to tell anyone out there thinking of Lightspeed Communications as a substitute ISP: “you’re going to have to fight for your rights”.

My experience with Lightspeed Communications – an ISP in Bahrain - started mid July 2010. I subscribed to their 1Mb service mainly because of the 20GB threshold and BHD 15/- price. At the very start I had tested their video streaming with no problems using Youtube. Good results were also achieved when I used http://speedtest.net. But this lasted no more than two weeks, and since then the service was nothing like what it started with. The benchmarks again proved this, and as they were a small player, I naturally smelled a scam.

Why not to buy an iPad (for now at least)

From the number of people I have seen purchasing iPads with a lot of uncertainty in their decisions, I’d like to raise the following counter-argument for those contemplating a purchase before they dive head-first:

1. Problems expected to be rectified in the next generation of iPads:
   • No multi-tasking.
   • No video conferencing, as there’s no front (or back) camera.
   • No external storage support (USB,SD)
   • 1-inch bezel adds unnecessary size and weight. For me, it’s just too heavy for one-handed holding above a few minutes.

Automatic forwarding now available in Hotmail

Have you ever wished you could use only a single e-mail account and forward mail from all others to it automatically? You could always forward Gmail messages automatically to any other account. But today, Hotmail users can also - at last - break free!

I was one of those dreaming of a day to come when I could move between e-mail providers as I wish while receiving e-mail automatically forwarded from all my other accounts. When Gmail allowed this, I was forced to consolidate my accounts to Hotmail, as Hotmail at that point only allowed automatic mail forwarding within the Microsoft controlled domains (@hotmail.com and @live.com).

If you can type, you can make movies

You may already know about creating 2D animations with speech bubbles online using Pixton. But here's the next step forward; Xtranormal is a web-based service that offers the ability to create 3D animations (with camera angles) and audio added using a text-to-speech engine. Their motto: “if you can type, you can make movies” emphasizes the latter feature, though you could also opt to upload your own recorded audio instead.

A screenshot of the online editor can be seen above; elegant and feature-rich. They also have a more functional editor in the form of a downloadable application (called State) that runs on your PC. For a taste of the results, view the impressive demo videos on their website.

Technorati Tags: xtranormal,animation,web 2.0

Annotated slides from your screen actions

IORAD (www.iorad.com) is - despite it's name - a very user-friendly web application that's just released. It utilizes your screen actions (while - say - teaching a skill) to automatically create annotated "walkthrough" training slides.