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ASUS just announced that some of their top motherboard will feature “Express Gate”, actually a different name for Splashtop.

And boy, Splashtop is cool. Splashtop is a full Linux OS environment, pre-set with browser, email, Skype and other Internet applications which you can start using immediately after turning your machine on. There’s practically no booting as the Linux OS is running directly from the motherboard.

What does this mean?
Many of us, including myself, now got used to simply leaving their machines on 24*7 since when wanting to check email or wanting to run a quick Google search, we don’t want to wait the 5 minutes of booting into your Windows.
With Splashtop, you can turn your machine on and immediately do just that. Quickly, in and out. Only when truly wanting to work on your computer, you can proceed to booting your full OS.

I’m really impressed with this technology and will definitely keep it in mind and consider this very interesting feature when shopping for a new motherboard.

Here’s a quick and easy movie explaining Splashtop:

If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you know I’m working at Yoggie, a great company with great products.
As I’ve written before, Yoggie’s Gatekeeper Pico is essentially a USB-sized miniature computer running Linux and a full Internet security suite, so you just stick it into the USB port of a Windows machine and you are 100% protected without the need to install anything AND you actually save all those CPU and memory resources the typical security suite system hogs use.

This week Yoggie has announced a very exciting new product - The Gatekeeper Card Pro.
The Gatekeeper Card Pro is the same concept, but in the form of an ExpressCard card which you can simply slide into your laptop. You then don’t feel it and don’t even see it.
You actually have a full Linux security server running inside your Windows machine protecting it all the time.

The list of security components that Yoggie offers inside its products is a very impressive one:

* Anti-Virus
* Anti-Spam
* Anti-Phishing
* Anti-Spyware
* Intrusion Detection System
* Intrusion Prevention System
* Firewall (Stateful Inspection)
* VPN Client
* Web Filtering/Parental Content Control
* Transparent Email and Web Proxies
* Adaptive Security Policy™
* Multi-Layer Security Agent™
* Layer-8 Security Engine™

Find out much more at at Yoggie.com

Finally finished reading the fourth and final book in the Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove.
I enjoyed the series very much since it’s a great mix of real history, alternate history and science fiction.

The books, which took me quite a few months to read, tell the story of Earth’s countries locked in the height of WWII battles, when an invading alien force lands and attempts to conquer the planet for themselves.
Although the Race, a reptilian species, has the advantage of superior technology, their last information on humans was collected by a robotic probe during the 12th century. Their technology is only marginally ahead of what we have today, and much of their equipment relies on basic principles still in use. The “Lizards,” as their human antagonists quickly dub them, are extremely surprised that mankind has progressed so far since their probe visited Earth. No species they have ever encountered has advanced so rapidly: they thought the toughest military force on the planet would still be Crusader knights on horses.

The really cool thing with these books is how Turtledove, a historian, incorporates true historic events and figures into the storyline.
I, for instance, liked how the Jews (Mordechai Anielewicz!) played a major part in the events.

In any case, I recommend the series and have already continued on to read the Colonization Trilogy.

This is spooky.
Click the regular cartoon Homer Simpson photo below to look at a picture of what Homer would look like if he was a real person.

Homer Simpson rendered super realistically:

Shortly following the Nokia N95 post, here’s a quick tip about how to find the MAC address of your Nokia N95.
I needed it since I must explcitly allow every device, according to MAC address, that wants to connect to my Wi-Fi network router.

Simply enter *#62209526# and that’s it.

I’ve been writing quite a bit about my iPhone. That’s natural, it’s an amazing gadget.
However, as I’ve previously mentioned as well, there are some annoying limitations that makes me sometimes ditch the iPhone and use the Nokia N95.
I’m now in a long stretch of using the N95, and I like it more and more as times goes by.

First of all, contrary to the iPhone, it’s simply a good PHONE.
The iPhone is revolutionary and amazing, but lets face it - When all you want is to simply make a phone call, it’s too complicated. It’s not intuitive.
Even the speaker on the iPhone is shitty.
The N95, on the contrary, like most Nokia phones is first of all a damn good PHONE.

Second, the iPhone sucks as a PDA. I need a very good feature set supporting syncing with Outlook. I need all my contacts, meetings and tasks. The iPhone simply sucks at this, having only the absolute minimum in PDA/Outlook performance.
The N95, on the other hand, excels at doing that. The Outlook sync is awesome, works perfectly, and the PDA feature set is almost perfect.

And these 2 points above are just the beginning of why the N95 rocks. These 2 reasons are the 2 rock-solid major reasons why I lately prefer the N95 over the iPhone.
And there are many other great things that the N95 has and the iPhone doesn’t: GPS (!!!), decent speaker, radio tuner, open to any operator and much more…

Yes, the iPhone is amazing, and it’s a prototype of how the future of gadgets will look like - But right now, I prefer the Nokia N95.

Oh, before I forget, the reason I’ve even decided to post about the N95 is that I just had it smoothly upgraded from firmware version 12.0.013 to 20.0.015.
Simply used the Nokia Suite to upgrade firmware, and it was as simple as that. And it’s a very significant upgrade - including significantly improved memory management, a couple N-Gage demos with a link to download the full app when it’s available, search integration from the home screen, improved camera performance, and the list goes on;

So what’s new in this major version? Here’s a partial list:

• New Welcome application
• New camera software and tweaks from the 8GB model - FAR faster shot to shot time, with ‘Processing image message’ during any delays.
• Long press on camera button launches camera if shutter is open
• New My Nokia SMS tips and mobile web portal system
• Demand paging (for ROM applications) with 30 plus MB free RAM after booting.
• Search 4.0 integration on standby screen.
• N-Gage game previews (FIFA, Asphalt) and portal/shortcut to upcoming N-Gage client, as in N81 and N95 8GB
• Music player has a new visualization
• Assorted other minor tweaks, along the same lines as the N95 8GB, with video ringtones and theme animations

*NOTE * Please remember that a firmware update will delete all data from your C drive (internal memory). You should back up your data. You may also wish to perform a sync with your PC to ensure any data you entered on your phone is on your PC.

Another note: I’m of course using an Israeli Hebrew enabled N95 version from Orange. As I wrote above - Worked perfectly.

[Sources: engadget, allaboutsymbian.com]