Visit my new blog eBookster.  There, I will discuss eBooks in general but I will also write about other subjects that is related to eBooks.

What could be better than this?

While driving this afternoon, I was tuned to an AM radio station (DZMM to be exact) when the radio commentator (Vic Lima?) talked about an Egyptian woman who was buried alive together with her children by her own husband simply because the wife was reading the bible.  According to the radio commentator, the woman died but days after the “burial”, the kids were dug up alive – and that a “man in white with wounds on his hands” had fed them all throughout their ordeal.  Right then and there I was thinking “bullcrap!”.  But given that the the radio station I was listening to is part of one of the largest TV/Radio/Print company in the Philippines, I still gave it the benefit of the doubt.

Now, their TV station is almost done with their primetime newscast, there is no mention of anyone being buried alive in Egypt nor in any country for that matter.  A quick Google (my best friend online) with the keyword “egyptian woman buried alive” yielded me this result.

In short, the long story I heard in the radio is simply that: BULLCRAP!

In a span of a little more than a week, I received a lot of SMS SPAM from one particularly annoying company and to top it off, I just received an SMS-based scam!  Here’s the latest SMS SPAM I received:

From: +639152037070

Need cash fast? For employees, self-employed and professionals. Borrow 30K to 1M! NO Collateral, NO co-maker, NO pretermination charges! For the requirements, pls text bak or email chinatrust.loan@gmail.com. Apply via fax or email. 2-5 days processing. http://chinatrust.sulit.com.ph - CLAIRE

Here’s another SPAM:

From: +639152780189

Good day! This is to inform you that you need to claim and activate ur REWARDS AND PRIVILEGES at Prudential Market Resource Corporation – Rada branch, makati city ASAP. This is in line with our Thanksgiving program, of which, you are chosen to receive a: 1. FREE scholarship voucher fr0m Datamex Institure of Computer Technology 2. FREE protection policy 3. A minimun of 5 RAFFLE COUPONS for a P50,000 CASH RAFFLE PROMO. For m0re details and for ur claiming code which you will need upon claiming, pls call today at 8935642, 8944388, 8942416, 8403968, 8934142 and look for Ms Ethel Sumaylo. Thank u! (pls disregard if n0t interested)

and finally a low-life, scum-sucking scammer sends this:

From: +639278531195

by SMSCaster.com:>hon d2 ka mag reply load mo ako 900pesos

My SMS inbox had been relatively clean for the past 5 months or so and these SMS only started to come in after I gave my cellphone number to a certain credit card company…  I’ll do a little sleuthing and will report back what I dig up.  In the meantime BEWARE!

It’s the buzzword that’s been going around since… well… a long time now.  “Cloud Computing” has had some sort of a revival with the Apple iPhone.  I for one has been unknowingly doing this thing for a long time now.  I’ve been doing some articles and submitting them using Google Docs, I’ve been storing pictures and videos through Flickr, Multiply, Picasa and other social networking sites. My bookmarks are stored at Google Bookmarks and now I’m dabbling with Microsoft’s Office Live service.

These things had been a virtual impossibility a few years ago because the bandwidth required to do cloud computing is a bit hard to come by.  But now, I realized that at least half of what I do on the computer, I do in the “cloud”.

Cloud computing is a godsend for netbook users (like me).  By providing software as a service (SAAS), cloud computing has somehow made a netbook with limited storage to still become useful.  My netbook, an Asus Eee PC 701 with a 4GB of storage is quite usable despite that “handicap” because I can still do word processing using Google Docs, I can still store images online, even store large files through online backup services.

While rushing to finish a project today, I received yet another SMS SPAM:

From +639063338535

Goodnews! As part of Prudential Market Resource Corporation agency initiated sales promotion. You have been chosen [insert my real name here] to receive a Free Datamex Scholarship Certificate from our Goodwill Buendia Branch Office. For more info on how to claim said items. Pls. call 7516837 to 38 or 8904878 within 24 hrs upon receipt of this message and look for Ms. Nicole Lopez. We are available to receive your call frm 10-6pm. Thank you.

Why do I consider this an SMS SPAM?  The message does not conform to any of the provisions of the National Telecommunications Commission’s Memorandum Circular No. 03-03-2005 (Rules and Regulations on Broadcast Messaging Service) and 03-03-05A (Amendment to the Rules and Regulations on Broadcast Messaging Service dated March 15, 2005).  I will not further elaborate on the contents of the two memorandum circulars I enumerated but suffice to say that if I receive another message from the same sender with a similar content, it will go directly to the NTC.

I think I already wrote about Photorec in my old Talkin’ Tech blog but I never had the chance to use it first hand.  But early today, one of my large capacity memory card which I used with my Eee PC somehow got corrupted and I had been trying to find ways to recover at least some of its content when I remembered this nifty little application.

I simply downloaded Photorec (which, BTW is bundled with another utility called Testdisk) and ran it on my defective flashdrive in within a few minutes, it recovered a lot of the files I have in the memory card!  The process was straightforward and most of the recovered files were readable (read: usable).

So, if you have accidentally formatted your memory card, fret no more – recovering your precious photos is a snap with this utility!

A few laptops ago, when wi-fi was a still novelty and Apple laptops were still a rarity, I started a small blog called Talkin’ Tech.  I was inspired by the ramblings of Leo Laporte in TWIT.  That blog was mildly successful (at least I thought it was) and some people actually found some of my posts useful.

The things I wrote about on that blog was mostly about technology with a lot of inputs from Engadget and Gizmodo.  I also posted some articles that tied in with the things I wrote for the local magazine Mobile Philipines.

Since I have moved on to a new phase in my career, expect a lot of InfoSec-related posts in addition to the usual things found in my old blog.   So that’s it.

The tech-talker is back after a looong hiatus.

I am reviving my original Talkin’ Tech blog but this time, I opted to use Windows Live Spaces as my host (obviously).  This is actually an experiment to see how the Windows Live service works and if I can use it in lieu of the Google services I have been used to using these past few years.

A lot has happened since I last posted in the original Talkin’ Tech blog.  I have been promoted to a managerial post and with that came a lot more responsibilities – the main reason why I had to take some time off from my (almost) daily blog post.  The time off took away the momentum I had so I felt the need to re-start everything.

I hope I can sustain this new endeavor considering the toxic workload that I handle in my day job.