Then there are 2 other models : regular Kindle without keyboard present and Kindle Touch with infrared based touch screen. It is obvious that the last model is my total favorite. The reason is following: I love both touch screen and e-ink for my reading device. Button based interface is clumsy for my tastes and I do not use keyboard that much.
Thus my choice is quite obvious. I am planning purchasing Kindle touch when it will be available in Baltic countries (only regular Kindle is), and for media consumption I will use my laptop or maybe Ipad.

The controversy with reimage is that it is relatively costly. Also, It had some unfavourable reviews (by Steven Burns, whom I highly respect, on WOT forums). However, more than half a year have passed, and they have claimed that Reimage was heavily improved. Also, they have contacted me as the owner of 2-viruses.com for promoting it. So, I have decided to test it on one of our testbeds.

First of all, the install procedure is really 2-fold: you download small installer, it downloads remaining program. Such installers are easier to distribute for the owner, but have important drawback for fixing heavily-corrupted PC: you can not install program without internet easily. And fixing internet connection is one of the most important tasks for such tools.

The interface looks nice, and I have not noticed excessive scaring like Steven  described in former version. However, lots of things are for show only: The nice bars for showing your hardware properties compared to average, etc. All the information was displayed minutes before the bars in text format already. Also, the results are not accurate. For example, the 3-5 years old 2.5Ghz celeron has “average” computer speed.

The PC used for testing ReImage was freshly reinstalled. On particular PC, it found one problem only : that Microsoft Installer crashed sometimes. All other scans came out clean. I can accept as having no false positives. Funnily enough, the PC used for testing was infected, but its Virus scan came out clean as well (it had Security Tool infection, for testing purposes). So its virus scan is not the best.

In the end, it suggests to fix that particular problem.

After clicking that button, you are required to enter your email and forwarded to a webpage where you are asked to pay 50 E for fixing microsoft installer problems, where fix is far for guaranteed (it depends on programs which caused the installer to crash). That is a bit too much for my taste

Overall, I can not recommend Reimage for now, even if it might be good and useful couple years in the future.

For example, it affects Google Maps in Android phones. If you have tried updating this application from outside USA (and several lucky countries), you could not find it in the market. You get Google Maps with your phone, you get it updated during system updates. But you can not get an update through Android Market here – the application is unavailable.

And I do not know any good reason why Google does this. It is not payment collection issue: Google maps is free application. The navigation is one of the few services whose availability is problematic worldwide, so it could be disabled outside USA/UK, that would make more sense. Even then, some workarounds are posted.   The issue is not the driver’s original country, but the maps and understanding the routing in the countries.

There are plenty of other services where country-based availability does not makes sense whatever sort. For example, Google Places, Google Buzz, which is available through web interface anyway. Any user could use it through web at limited functionality.

Sigh. I do not expect an explanation from Google about this. I guess we will have to wait and see if something changes, or other applications will take its place locally.

This week there is an exciting opportunity to win a free map of your choice from Ndrive. You need to do following:

1. Download Ndrive on your phone, use it (7 days – all maps free).

2. Register at AndroidForums.com

3. Write a comment at android marketplace and rate Ndrive. Mention your AndroidForums username as well. It is required that comment would be made from your phone (to identify your phone I assume).

4. Write in the thread dedicated to the contest in Android forum: http://androidforums.com/android-applications/116315-ndrive-contest.html . You will have to register there.

Simple, eh ? The best part is there will be more than one winner, in fact it is promised that there will be more than 20! You will be contacted in AndroidForums by administration staff if you win.

I would participate myself, however, I have purchased all the maps I will need in the close future myself (Western Europe + Eastern Europe) .  They are worth the money. And even better if you get them for free

For router, I have picked Asus RT-N16 router. The key features that won me was support for 802.11n Draft, which allows communication at speeds up to 300 MB/s instead 54 MB/s. Also, gigabyte Ethernet support is nice too. Additionally, it claimed good support for concurrent connections e.g. during torrent download. RT-N16 has 4 LAN and 1 Wan sockets, which is enough for home environment, though one would need a hub or two in bigger office.

Asus RT-N16 came packed with 3 antennas, power supply, network cable, instruction manual and useless installation CD. The CD is useless as router can be configured through network interface. Default IP is 192.168.1.1 (like usual) and login/password is admin:admin. This should be changed, even if the router cannot be accessed from WAN side by default. I would strongly recommend going through network setup wizard to set passkey for wireless network. Also, I changed network type to WPA2-PSK with AES encryption for better security.

Not everything went seamlessly for me. I had several problems connecting to administration interface and connecting to WAN (dynamic IP). Apparently, router lags when it tries to connect to WAN interface and will not respond to LAN during that time. After some changes, I got an error message like this:

You have set the wrong dynamic or static IP address for your RT-N16. Refer to the diagnosis.

Sure enough, the IP was dynamic and received correctly. The problem was in faulty Cat5 cable in my apartment, so I had to move router into another place which is not as convenient as old one. After that the problem disappeared and router worked as expected.

Another issue is that you got single field to enter DNS addresses that are passed through DHCP server to client PCs. Personally, I do not want router to cache DNS requests, so this caused me some headache. I will see if I can enter 2 IP’s into single field there.

Overall, I can recommend ASUS RT-N16 for people that like having fast wireless and ethernet network at home for reasonable price (~95 USD at amazon at the moment). You might get some quirks, but I think they will get fixed with firmware upgrade.

Ndrive Installation is quite straightforward. One downloads application from Android Market, and then selects maps one needs. I would recommend downloading maps using Wireless network rather than 3g as it would be (probably faster). Ndrive East Europe maps – 300Mb, West Europe – 2Gb, so it takes a while. Afterwards you are ready to use it. I assume that all software versions (Iphone, windows Mobile and Android) uses more or less same maps as long as you got latest software version.

Most of the settings can be controlled in Ndrive settings menu as well, including voice used, what is shown in maps and so on.

Here is my experience with Ndrive on my Nexus One phone:

The good:

1. Ndrive is the most easy to install and use Android navigation application outside USA and couple other selected countries (11) due to fact that it is free (only maps are paid). One does not has to deal with Google Checkout.

2. Works quite fast on Nexus one – no crashes, no problems for now.

3. Speed camera location integration is very nice feature.

3. Strangely enough, Ndrive price for East Europe (30 E) is smaller than any of the single maps of East European countries (45-ish ). I guess there is mistake in its Android purchase interface, as in website the price is bigger.

4. Seven day trial is a very nice thing.

The bad:

1. Poorly updated maps (at least for East Europe) and speed camera locations. Camera map is 1-2 years old, other maps are about the same age as well. This might be an issue for people that rely on GPS navigation only.

2. No good enough way to temporally silence the navigation without silencing anything else on the phone. There should be an icon to stop all sound from navigation.

3. Had problems on finding a way to fast-forward simulation mode. It is not very well done.

4. (UPDATED) There is a lack of routing modes. 2 times I were routed through roads that are not asphalted. This means that the travel was slower than anticipated (Non-asphalted road speed limit is 70, however it is highly non-recommended to drive at 7o km/h on most of them). These routing modes Ndrive should address.

I still need to test if Ndrive works well with trapster running, as Trapster speed trap database is much better. As it is single commercial navigation available for download here, I can not compare it to other Android applications except hacked Google Navigation which would not be fair. I would like to try Copilot as well, but if they do not want me to buy their software – oh well. I am perfectly happy with Ndrive for now.

You should give Ndrive a try if you are looking for Navigation on your Android phone.

However, there are aspects of my phone where I see large possibilities towards improvement

1. Data exchange over USB. I needed whole month to make it work with drivers I had to download and using USB debug mode. This is not something end-user should do. I have read that Nexus one is quite sensitive in respect of USB socket, however that is not something that should concern end users. This should be not a beta – product.

2. Touch screen sensitivity. It is too poor for high end smartphone. Droid gets much better touch sensitivity than Nexus one. Also, nexus one scree is almost unusable in sunlight, although I can survive with that.

3. Sound quality. Sound quality is lacking in HTC phones. That is one of the worst drawbacks of HTC overall, after owning Sony Ericsson especially.

4. Please, Google, open paid apps worldwide. I am happy to pay dollars for apps. May developers would be happy to develop paid local apps.

5. Internet tethering. Should work without any paid apps, as I get that on my 3-year old phone without any paid apps as well.

6. I can live without flash as long as you provide html5 video play work on android. Not only in full-screen, but in window mode as well… or at least clickable. One has to use workaround for now – javascript or serving specific code for android users.

7. I would like to choose which contacts I want to see in my nexus one contact list. This is especially important for Buzz users. Also, skype integration would be kinda nice, but I guess it is asking too much.

Thats all I am asking for now… Is it too much ? I do not know.

You see, each time I scroll or type something, my PC froze for couple secs each 10-20 sec apart. The drivers were ok, windows 7 install is fresh as well. So I could not pinpoint the problem. I ruled out hardware malfunction as there is no custom hardware (except blueray and more ram) in this Dell XPS model. Speaking about the Blueray/dvd writer, the freezes might have affected writing process as the single dvd I wrote was unreadable.

Lastly, I found the problem. My laptop came with Mcafee preinstalled. Even if I had no plans on buying it, I havent removed 14 day trial at once. Well, that was the mistake. Apparently, Mcafee was behind PC freezes all along.

I am not planing to leave my dell unprotected though. I will go with ESET smart security probably, as I have good experience with it. Its detection rate is better, and I expect my PC to be more responsive than with Mcafee. There are other good software around too, like Kaspersky, Avira, Avast.

Nexus one box included the phone itself, 110v charger, usb/htc connection cable (can be used for charging as well), headphones and case for carrying. The phone is shipped with 4G sdcard.

The first impression – it rocks. I am not a big fan of Iphone and nexus one is just my kind of phone: good design, I can easily operate it in one hand (most of the time), very fast and lots of applications. The camera is very good as well. Additionally, the Android os will get multi-touch support as well soon, which will be quite nice add-on for galleries and browser.

Additionally, I like the contact management in my google account. This saved a lot of time – I exported my contacts to vcf in my old phone, uploaded to PC and imported to my google contacts. As an additional bonus, Android offers nice integration of contacts from various sources : google addressbook, facebook, etc.

There are still some glitches that should be fixed:

a) Sometimes touchscreen is not sensitive/wont work, especially on edges. After couple of tries it starts working again. Annoying, though.

b) There are major issues with bluetooth connections – it pairs, but fails to connect with some equipment, including handsfree in my car. I’ll have to read about it more and maybe I’ll get it to work. Maybe there will be an update by android team.

c) There is not a big choice for some niche applications, like GPS ones. But Copilot looks promising (if they got good Lithuanian maps for Android).

d) Sound quality is slightly worse than my old K800i.

Now I just need to wait for OS update to get multi-touch and I will be really happy .

Slow PC Fighter website claims that running Slow PCFighter will increase PC speed up to 40%. That might be true on really badly supervised PC, but I would not expect such things on each PC.

Slow PCFighter free scanner installation was quite quick and easy. The download is around one megabyte. What impressed me, it recognized my Windows as 64 bit one and installed correct version of application itself.

The scan is was quite quick and found around 2000 errors, mostly missing files or empty registry keys. It had not shown any false positives, which is good.

The free version of SLOW PC Fighter removes 25 registry errors, which is quite little compared to errors it found.

Verdict: I would definitely give it a try to see if there are lots of errors in the PC. It might be useful and safe to have this product if you hate reinstalling windows like I do. The downside is that you would have to purchase full version as free scanner is not too useful except for trying the product out.

You can download Slow PCFighter here.

First there are 3 types of software I might use: web-based services, server based newsletter/mass mailing applications and PC software.

web-based mass mailing services are quite expensive for bigger lists. For example, icontact.com offers plans costing $699.00 for 100 000 users per month. Aweber.com is about the same (at least for smaller plans). It would be a good choice for a smaller permanent list.

Also I can’t tell how well web-based services would perform under my constraints. I need Lithuanian encoding, handling weird email addresses of One.lt – popular Lithuanian social network with emails that uses its own email engine. And it has its own spams filter as well.

Another choice would be installable php scripts that would offer mass-mailing or newsletter handling. A clear choice would be phplists – a free php script for that. It looked very promising at first, however I met couple problems. First, it is not as user friendly as you would expect from distributed php software. I had to change lots of things in php scripts manually, even disabling test mode or changing encoding. That is not acceptable. Second, its import scripts suck. I have not managed to import mailing list properly even after I removed couple checks. Overall, its interface is lacking and I would not recommend this software for no-techie.

I have tested PC software as well, for example SendBlaster. It was quite promising except the way how it handles international encodings. I have received empty letter in my spam box.

So, the question remains open : should I try to make something working from phplists, search for its alternatives or use our in-house mailing system.

Hootsuite (Hootsuite.com) is a very good web-based twitter account manager. It is very feature rich:

1. Multi-user multi-account management. Very useful for corporate twitter accounts.
2. Multiple columns, tabs for columns, custom groups of users. This is quite important for bigger accounts. In fact its interface is quite similar to tweetdecks or Seesmics, thus I got used to it quite fast.
3. Tweet scheduling functionality, which might be important for some
4. Feed integration (similar to twitterfeed)
5. Ping.fm integration for upgrading fb and other accounts.
6. Own url shortening service which is quite reliable and provides statistics. Also adsense integration in it.

However, there are some issues in Hootsuite that I would like to be changed or fixed:

1. Separation of groups from tabs/columns. I might want to put same group of people in multiple tabs (as I need to see them more often).
2. Better FB integration. I use Seesmic for reading FB as well as I don’t have time to check website often. Full integration with stream API would be very very nice.
3. Some things bug in groups. For example, tweets of some people are excluded when I add them to groups even if they are in main view. This is because some users do not appear in twitter search. However, this information would be easily recoverable from home stream. Or I do not get a reason for separating groups from keyword search.
4. Custom color schemes. Yeah, I am picky.
5. Ability to clean up column once it is read, or a way to distinguish between tweets that are unread.

Will I use it? Yes, definitely. Hootsuite is a very nice software and I see lots of potential in it. However, I cannot abandon desktop client in hootsuites favor yet.

The downside of AlertThingy is lack of columns and limited Facebook support. Thus after a while I started looking for another client and found a remake of twirl – Seesmic Desktop. Since it supports both twitter and facebook (even multiple accounts) I am very happy with its performance. It is Adobe Air program, thus not OS based.

The best of Seesmic is that it is developed actively and does not crash that often. There are issues, as adobe Air is not too efficient with memory. But most of them will be fixed with time. I still like tweetdeck design more too, tho differences are not so significant.