Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Get Free POP/IMAP from GMail

Published on May 30, 2008 in Info Tech. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

[Nairobi, Kenya]
I REMEMBER when I used to be a Yahoo! Canada email whore. I had the choice of downloading my mail via POP in any of my favourite email clients like Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus or Outlook Express.

Anyone with a yahoo.com email address didn’t get this privilege though. Instead, you had to pay something like $19.95 per year, which also increased your email storage to 1Gb. And Hotmail teased you a bit by allowing you to download your email into Outlook, but no luck if you were using a competitor’s email client. Thank you Microsoft! Back then, it would’ve taken a miracle for netizens to get free POP and IMAP service. In fact, Hell would have to freeze over first.

Hell freezes over…
Well, I was shocked when Google first announced it’s revolutionary GMail service. The fact that they gave you 2Gb of space totally screwed Yahoo and Microsoft. But they also included a lots of FREE goodies that everybody else was charging for. Overnight, paying for POP and IMAP services became a thing of the past. I haven’t looked back since.
In short, I’m a GMail addict. Yes, I still have my Yahoo Canada email addy, but I’m in love – with GMail. It’s like meeting the woman of my dreams who’s smart, sexy, witty, creative, dignified, a great cook, charming, yet “naughty” under the sheets. Once you find a woman like that, you can never let her go. Ditto for GMail in the realm of email hosting. Yep, I’m hooked for life.

POP vs IMAP…
To quickly find out the differences between POP and IMAP, just peek this blog post on the GMail blog. For those of you blessed with a constant, reliable broadband connection, IMAP is the way to go. In all honesty, now that Google gives me a whopping 6771 Mb (6.8Gb) of storage space, I haven’t used POP/IMAP services in a looong time. What’s shocking is that I’m a power user and I’ve only used 10% of my space so far.

Besides, I’m here in East Africa so I just check GMail on my Nokia 6070 via Safaricom or Celtel’s EDGE/3G/HSDPA mobile network. I surfed to gmail.com/mobile and downloaded a tiny, slick app right onto my Nokia that feels like a tiny desktop email client. Heck, it’s fast as hell!! Those Google programmers sure know how to write “gooood” software that goes down nice. :-)

You are currently using 728 MB (10%) of your 6771 MB


Well, at least I know of a top notch POP and IMAP service that’s free when I’m ready to use it once again. For now, I’m quite happy using GMail either in the Mozilla Firefox browser or on my Nokia.

Now, imagine being on a safari or hanging out somewhere remote in Kenya and you’re still able to read your email since most of the country is covered by EDGE…and the cost is only something like 10 or 12 Kenya Shillings per megabyte. That’s a paltry US 20 cents for sending and receiving a ton of emails or web browsing. Simply amazing!

Thank you Safaricom, Celtel and Google.

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MacBooks rock, mega patch for OS X

Published on May 29, 2008 in Info Tech. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

[Nairobi, Kenya]
AFTER SEEING the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro machines at Elite Digital Solutions‘ (aka AppleCentre) Sarit Centre and 3D Peponi Plaza locations in the Westlands section of Nairobi , I’m now seriously contemplating ditching my plans on purchasing a Toshiba or Lenovo notebook with either an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD 64bit chip. Damn it, but those Mac notebooks are slick, super stylish and just so yummy running its flavour of BSD Unix (Mac OS X) under the hood, which provides it with loads of power, security and scalability. Quite frankly, anyone who knows operating systems will tell you that the BSDs are vastly superior to Linux, which has been a media darling for a very long time. Oh well!!

By the way, Elite just happens to be “Kenya’s 1st Apple Reseller” according to the business card I got from Nash Bilkhu (Apple Sales & Support Executive) who happens to be a chill super kool dude that’s passionate about Mac computing.
His company also gives lots of FREE workshops on using Macs to the max…such as learning GarageBand, iLife and other kool Mac apps. How many computer stores around here actually do that??

Decisions, decisions…
In fact, my good pal Samantha Phillips — author of the best selling book, Blonde Ambition, and Managing Director of Bedouin Camp (Samburu, Kenya) — is interested in the MacBook Air and asked me to visit the AppleCentre and give her my unbiased opinion.

Well, although the Air is the thinnest laptop/notebook in the solar system, I still prefer the MacBook Pro. Come on Samantha, it’s just a tad heavier but you get tons of included hardware that you have to pay extra for the privilege of owing the super thin Air. On the other hand, I’d quickly steal an Air laptop from the AppleCentre if no one’s looking. I certainly wouldn’t throw it out of my bed (er off my desk) :-)

Better than sliced bread…
What, you’re still not convinced about how amazing these MacBooks are? Then take a peek at these enticing ReviewStream MacBook reviews. Are you now convinced that these notebooks are the greatest thing since the invention of electricity, the transistor, flight, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project? I knew you’d see things my way. :-)

Nobody’s perfect…
But alas, updates are nothing new in the PC world and I guess this is also the case on Apple’s platform. No worries though…it’s still not as bad as buggy Windows XP/2000/98/ME et al. I’ll give Vista a little credit, but it’s just annoying a lot of people right now in regards to device drivers and being too restrictive. Heck, I’d run Windows Server 2008 as a workstation OS if I were you. The word on the street is that it makes a dynamite desktop OS without all of Vista’s aches and pains. Anyhow, this article on ZDNet is a must read for all you Mac folks out there:


Oh…
I wrote here how annoyed I was with the Mac Finder. I still prefer the Windows Explorer for file management any day of the week. And you Mac folks can take that to the bank. I think it’s because of the idiotic idea of “someone” at Apple who felt that there would never, ever be a reason to have 2 buttons on the mouse.

Well, now we know how stupid that was. But I still have much respect for ya Stevie boy. So much in fact that I’d do almost anything for one of your MacBook Pros with: 17″ screen, a 2.5GHz Penryn Intel Core 2 Duo, 6MB L2 cache, 2GB RAM, 250 GB hard disk, Gigabit Ethernet, and a ton of other goodies that just makes my mouth drool. And Steve, did I tell you how sexy that metallic silver finish looks on it? Heck, forget about skirts…gimme the damn MacBook Pro…now!!!! :-)

Happy computing!

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