Note From The Editor | featured news

I’ve had the ASUS Zenbook for a couple months now. One of the most annoying things to me was all these gadgets that came with the laptop. They appear on the desktop. I don’t know about you, but I like my desktop free of stuff. I was able to disable every gadget except for PowerWiz.

I was looking all over the web for an answer because it’s increasingly annoying that I have to disable the gadget whenever I boot up the laptop.

As soon as I heard that Samsung is coming out with a smartphone with a 5.3” screen and a stylus, I became interested. The Galaxy Note runs Android 2.3 on a dual core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor at a resolution of 1,280x800-pixel. The camera is 8MP. All great specs.

I’ve only heard of Andrew Breitbart when I was doing research for starting Wopular. I learned from Wikipedia that he helped Matt Drudge pick headlines for the Drudge Report during the early years. For the longest time, I had thought that Drudge ran his site all by himself.

I also learned that he had helped Arianna Huffington start the Huffington Post, but left when Huffington’s politics went towards the left. He later started Brietbart.com and a handful of other politically slanted sites.

Because of the shorten NBA season caused by the lockout, this is the first time the telecast of the NBA All-Star game went head-to-head with the 84th Academy Awards. I thought the basketball game would get crushed, even with Linsanity in attendance - technically, he was only in the Rising Stars Challenge which took place on Friday.

Who’s bright idea was it to go head-to-head with one of the biggest tv events of the year? Couldn’t the NBA have done it the week before or after the Oscars? Maybe TNT, which televised the game, thought it’s good counter-programming.

I just started noticing this recently. It’s a nice touch. Before, you would have to go into a specific comment moderation page to keep track of comments. Now, it’s all tied into your profile page, just like when someone likes or comments on your status updates.

Months ago, I converted my commenting system to Facebook’s. I had my reservations before. Most of it is that because it’s javascript based, the comments will not be crawled by Google. All Google sees is the javascript code, not the actual comments.

The LA Times reported that the world’s largest social network Facebook filed papers for its IPO today. Here are some stats from the article: “845 million users; 483 million daily users; annual revenue of $3.7 billion; $1.8 billion in operating income and $1 billion net income.”

It didn’t mention the number of users in the U.S. though, which is more important. Oversea traffic is cheaper and harder to monetize, even though that’s where most of Facebook’s growth is coming from.

I used to have Swype on my HD2 when it was running Windows 6.5. It came with it. It’s the best smartphone keyboard I’ve used so far. If you don’t know, with Swype, instead of pressing on the letters on the keyboard for each word, you swipe on the letters that make up the word. Yeah, it sounds weird at first, but once you get used to it, you can’t live without it.

Because Binh, Popcorn, and I had been blogging for months for Movies With Butter (a.k.a. MWB), we decided to apply for inclusion in Google News. I tried applying for Wopular, but I didn’t make the cut because they don’t accept one man shops. With MWB, we have three and because of that, we made the cut.

One of the great features of the Kindle Fire is that it's fully-integrated with Amazon.com's one-click payment system. Buying e-books, streaming movies, magazine or newspaper subscriptions, apps, or anything else on Amazon is just a convenient one-click process. That's nice, until your kids get their hands on it and goes on shopping spree in the appstore.

Here are two things I did with my Kindle Fire before handing it to my kids:

1. DELETED PAYMENT METHOD ON THE AMAZON'S WEBSITE

I have no use for it myself. I'm already running Android on my HD2, which has a 4.3" screen. Getting a tablet for my use seems redundant to me.