Categories
Internet Lebanon

Broadband finally arriving to Lebanon?

I just read this article on Agenda Culturel (french – click here for the english translation).

Apparently they are going to start laying the fiber optics cable required to deliver fast broadband to Lebanese internet users. The article says we should receive speeds of 15Mbps soon.

With all the political problems and the fact that there is no government to approve the future steps of the plan I doubt this will happen, but we can only hope!

Categories
Internet Lebanon

Lebanese Parliament Scheduled to Vote on Law that Could Curb Online Freedom

Draft of the Law, Facebook page against the law, More info about the Law, Naharnet Article.

Categories
Computers Gadgets Internet

The iPad

apple ipad

People are excited to get an iPad but I can’t really see a reason to buy one, specially not for 999$ from Lebanon. The only time I wish I had one is when I am going to the bathroom since it has a bigger screen then my HTC Hero so it would be easier to browse the web on it. I don’t think I’ll ever use it to watch videos or just browse the net from anywhere else. Any laptop or notebook would be better at that in my opinion.

Categories
Internet Lebanon

Google Knows Everything?!

Found those quotes by Rafik Hariri on google news after the football match our politicians played! I guess google missed a thing or two in 2005!

From this error I guess what google news does when looking for quotes is try to find a full name for some last name that is followed by a quote. For example all the articles contain: “Hariri said: blabla”. Since most of the articles are from foreign news outlets they have a summary on where does Saad Hariri come from containing “Rafik Hariri died in a …” so what google does is that it looks for the full name of a person inside a bunch of articles and assumes he’s the one giving opinions.

Categories
Cell Phones Internet

Alfa and Web 2.0

Today i noticed a new section on Alfa’s website, a media corner. The media corner is basicly a list of links to Alfa’s pages on different Web 2.0 websites. The idea is very interesting! they currently have a Youtube page, a Twitter page and a Flickr one. The Twitter page is the most interesting one in my opinion, I checked it and they are posting information about updates and replying to user coments. I don’t have a twitter account yet and I don’t think I’ll open one any time soon but it’s nice to see Lebanese companies using web 2.0 to better reach out to customers!

Categories
Internet Lebanon

Google Lebanon is here!

We finaly have a version of google made for Lebanon! www.google.com.lb! Does anyone have any info about it? Do you know what the 4th language is?

Categories
Funny Internet

Mix Faces

I found this cool website today that enables you to choose 2 or more faces and create an “average” out of them! it’s fun to try and mix the faces together and see the result you’ll get! The best thing about it is that you can upload your own faces too! Did you ever wonder what would the average of Michel Aoun and Samir Geagea be? Now is the time to try it just visit the site and mix them together! (and share your result with us, i was too scared to try that mix :P )

Categories
Internet People

Lebanese Official Exams Archive

While checking the softwares room blog I found this interesting website in their links section. The website contains an archive of Lebanese official Exams tests from 2004 and some useful educational links. Check it out and give it to people you know that have an official exam this year.

Categories
Computers Internet

How to transfer your MSN messenger emoticons from one PC to another

A couple of months ago I got a Laptop and moved everything from my desktop to it, the only stuff I couldn’t move were my custom MSN messenger emoticons. I tried to enter via another username to the other PCs messenger and send the emoticons manualy but it didn’t work since each user has its own emoticon collection.

Yesterday I found a little tool that does half the job for me, this wizard (direct download link) will extract emoticons, display pictures and background from any MSN account you want and put them in a folder you select. You still have to manually re-create every emoticon but it’s better than nothing!

Categories
Funny Internet

Screamin’ Beans!

Since the politicians decided to spend the week screaming at each others on TV, half of my plans for the weekend were canceled due to the “situation we all know” (quoting the mail sent by my university to tell us we have no classes) so I spent a lot of time on the internet. One of the stuff I found was this little game with screaming beans, check it out, the only difference between the beans and the politicians is that at least you can shut the mouth of most of the beans :P .