A new kind of computer. Chromebook to be launched on June 15.

AVG introduced Internet Security Home Edition with 2 years of update and protect a total of 3 computers at a special price of RM 43.33 per computer per year (RM 260 for 3 computers and 2 years of update).

AVG Internet Security Home Edition offer complete security protection against all of the most serious Internet threats, including viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, hackers and spam. Now available as a special offer for up to 3 home computers at a special price. It is also compatible with Windows Vista!

Best of all, the AVG Internet Security Home Edition is also compatible with Windows 98 and that make a suitable Internet Security solutions for old computers.

AVG Internet Security Home Edition can also be purchased online

CUPERTINO, California—March 29, 2006—Apple® today announced a software update for the iPod® nano and fifth generation iPod, allowing customers to easily set their own personal maximum volume limit. The software update also gives parents the ability to set a maximum volume limit on their child’s iPod and lock it with a combination code.

“As the leading provider of digital music players, Apple continuously brings iPod customers innovative and easy to use solutions,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide iPod Product Marketing. “With the increased attention in this area, we want to offer customers an easy to use option to set their own personal volume limit.”

The new software update 1.1.1 is available immediately as a free download for the iPod nano and the fifth generation iPod from www.apple.com/ipod/download. The new Volume Limit feature works with any headphone or accessory plugged into the iPod headphone jack as well as the iPod Radio Remote. For further information on safe listening with iPod, please visit www.apple.com/sound.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning desktop and notebook computers, OS X operating system, and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital music revolution with its iPod portable music players and iTunes online music store.

Something important to prevent hearing damage. Hence Nono owners may want to upgrade the software ASAP.

Full Article

I was at the computer store to try out the portable speakers for iPod and tried two models, one from 2GO and the other Logitech , both of around RM 220 range. I found that mm22 from Logitech offer better sound quality and bought the mm22 for RM 220.00.

mm22 from Logitech come with three holders that can be used to hold my iPod 20Gb and iPod Nono 4GB. Pictures as follow:-

Logitech mm22 with iPod Nono 4GB

Logitech mm22 with iPod 20GB

iPod or MP3 Players’ holders

All components can be arranged and placed in a nice trendy contaner for travelling.

With most information stored in digital format. Having an automatic backup system is critical these days to protect your data. I have been a happy user of Vice Verso Pro 1.3 at home and have recently upgrade to Vice Versa Pro 2.0. The best feature that attracted me to upgrade is the ability of VV 2.0 to backup locked and open file.

Can ViceVersa synchronize, backup, replicate files and folders? YES *
Can I visually compare folders to see the latest changes? view YES *
Can I use it with USB disks, flash drives, hard disks, DVD, CD? YES *
Can I use it over the Local Area Network and VPN? YES *
Does it track file conflicts (files changed on both sides)? YES *
Does it track file deletions properly? YES *
Does it copy / backup locked file, open files? details YES *
Can I schedule it to run at a specified time interval? view YES *
Can I schedule it to run in “real-time“? YES *
Can I run it on all Windows platforms, including servers? YES * ‘
Is it easy to setup and use? YES *
How many customers are using ViceVersa? 10.000+ *
How much data can ViceVersa handle? 1000GB+

Read More on Vice Versa Pro 2.0

While performing s search on Apple, I came across this interesting and motivating speech by Mr. Steve Job of Apple. Read on ….

Full Text of Speech by Steve Job of Apple

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Got got hold of a new iPod Nano 4GB.

When compared to the old 20GB ipod that I have, Nono is much smaller and lighter. Battery of the Nano last for about 14 hours compared to 8 hours of the old 20GB ipod. Managed to squeeze in 1101 songs into the new Nano which is only a portion of the music collection in my library. The 20GB ipod can hold all with still some space to spare.

The downside of Nano is that it can only be charged via the USB connection whereas the 20GB ipod can be charge via power adaptor.

The has been some report that the screen of certain batch of ipod is susceptible to scratch and may crack. Was told that Apple will offer replacement only for unit with cracked screen. So we shall see from here how long the screen of my Nano will hold.

Apple iPod 20GB is a good MP3 Player as far I am concern. For once , I am able to store all the songs, sone 3000 of them, in my CD collection to a single iPod. Song from those from the 80’s and current pop song can be retrieve from the iPod with ease. The iPod also made CD changer in my car obsolete. In my earlier car, I used to transmit the song to my car audio system via a casettte adapter.

The audio system of my the other car Volve S80 however come without a cassette player and I am forced to look for a FM Transmitter. Look around and finally got hold of the Griffin FM Transmitter. Configuration and setting of frequency through the playlist is a bit tricky but the worst set back is the poor sound quality it transmitted when the car is moving. With such set back, I finally stop using the Griffin Transmitter in my car and instead I used it now at home to transmit the song to my FM Receiver. By placing the transmitter close to the receiver, the sound quality is infact good enough.

Griffin recent launched the new FM Transmitter that some with LCD screen and a knob for setting the desire frequency. Read more at
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/itriplcd/index.php. Setting of frequency is no doubt become much easier but yet to check our the sound quality it offers.

My unit of Griffin FM Transmitter was purchased at a price of RM 199.00.

Tekkeon Road Warrier is another FM transmitter which can be consider but the price tag is well in excess of RM 400. I was told that Roas Warrier, as the name implied, is a better option for transmitting song from iPod to the audio receiver in car.