This is what I see when I open an item belong to the Wired Gadgets RSS feed on Google Reader. After they became more annoying, disturbing and interrupting with every day, online ads are finally holding the throne.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Aging population is a serious problem especially for developed nations, and developers of the robot are hoping to help caregivers with the problems of nursing of elderly. According to RIKEN, caregivers on average lift patients from floor bedding into wheelchairs 40 times a day, adding that the elderly nursing-care population in Japan will hit 5.69 million by 2015.

RIKEN is set to test Riba II at nursing homes in Japan, and eventually bring the bear to market with price tag around $70.000, says CNET. Most important thing here is, this could be the first robot ever find its way into our houses! Japanese might just have been invented the very ancestor of T-800; the Homo erectus of Skynet :)

Check out the video after the break to see how Riba II operates.

Congratulations to them for sucking a little less than I expected.

I visit Android Market almost everyday, but never saw this till today. Looks like Google is trying to improve the search experience with filters on the Market. It is a nice touch, but it would be really great to see some other filters like download count or star rating.

And, it’s really weird not seeing anything related to “run free”, which obviously is my search term, on the result page. Apparently, they need to tweak their search algorithm a bit too :)

Because I always delete files with shift+delete combination, there have been several occasions in the past that I needed to un-delete the files which I mistakenly made disappear. In fact, once I deleted a directory containing all my close-to-finish PhD studies – years of work has gone in a blink of an eye! Thanks to Dropbox, which is a real life saver by the way, I was able to recover them all.

You probably know that files still remain on the filesystem in a masked state, even if you think you permanently deleted them. That in my mind, I always have a recovery software installed on my computers in case of an emergency.

An old version of UFS Explorer was installed on my PC when my brother asked me to recover his photos, and it certainly was my first shot. However, it wasn’t even able to find the deleted files on the memory card. Then I thought that I might need something newer, something more modern this time and tried FileRestore Professional. Although FileRestore was able to see the deleted files on the filesystem of the card, it can only read photos in a garbled form, which was useless.

It was obvious that the photos on the card were malformed somehow and I need to find something specific for photos. Something can carve the data from the memory card and turn it into a human readable state. While searching for such tool, I stumbled upon to TestDisk & PhotoRec suite. Instead their outdated latest stable, I downloaded the v6.12-WIP (beta) version. With that, I was able to recover all digital images from the memory card in a few moments with PhotoRec, without any errors.

TestDisk & PhotoRec suite is free (open sourced, GPL v2) software. It’s Windows version is actually a Cygwin port and it runs in command-line. But, don’t let that scare you, its usage is pretty straight forward. Before wasting your money on propriety software, give TestDisk & PhotoRec suite a chance. It worked flawlessly for me, probably will work for you too ;)

Anyway, here are the problems I’m encountering with Firefox 4 so far:

• It is slow.
  I read everywhere how fast Firefox 4 is, beats this on X test, smokes that on Y etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me. In my experience, Firefox 4 is a memory hungry piece of junk. I don’t care how fast is its new javascript engine or how effective its fancy hardware acceleration techniques, if it needs to consume more than half of the installed memory on my system to do that. I’m getting hard time to understand how a software, which drives the system to a swapping death, can be considered “fast”?
  I know, Firefox may seem slower to me because of my old PC and the plugins I’m using, but I’m not going to accept these as excuses. If I’m able to use the latest version of Chrome (+plugins) without any problems on the same computer and was satisfied with the performance of the previous version of Firefox, it’s the Mozilla to blame, not my PC.
• It fails to render Helvetica fonts correctly.
  Although it has been a known issue in the beta releases, looks like Mozilla didn’t care to fix it in the stable. Annoying.
• F6 is not working.
  I like using keyboard shortcuts and F6 was one of my favorites. It’s function was ( and still is on other major browsers like Safari, Chrome and Opera) to highlight the address bar for input. Now it only selects the current tab. Useless and annoying.

Unfortunately, they appear to left those good days far behind.

Here is what happened with my last order; I ordered four different items as a package. After couple of weeks, they told me that they couldn’t find the memory card reader I ordered, hence they split my order in two shipments. They sent the first three item after their message and told me that they’ll send the remaining item when it’ll become available.

A few more weeks later, I wondered about my card reader and tried contacting them through their online chat support. After waiting almost half an hour before I could find someone to talk to, I told my problem to the staff. She told me that they are still waiting for the supplier.

Thought since I have a pending order in the system, I might try adding a new item to my order. Since my first order has tracking because total was higher than $15, my pending order will certainly have tracking as well and I can use that opportunity to add free tracking to my new order, which was below $15 by itself.

Asked her that how long will it take them to get the item I was thinking add to my pending order. She told me that the item is out of their stock and she can’t give any ETA. Because the item I was thinking to add was listed as “in stock” on the site, I was surprised with her answer. When I asked her about this inconsistency between the site and her answer, she copy&pasted this fine-print from the footer of the site to me:

Note: Stock and Availability shown on this site is for your reference only. While we strive to provide the most accurate and timely stock and availability information, availability information may become out of date and may change between the time you added an item to cart and the time your order is received.

After her responses, I gave up the idea of adding a new item to my pending order and decided wait. And I waited a lot!

I’ve put my order on 24th December 2010 and they’ve send me an email only 4 days ago stating that my they’ve shipped my last item. Yes, exactly 89 days after my purchase. Considering item hasn’t arrived yet and probably won’t for another two weeks, it’ll take more than hundred days to get an item from DealExtreme.

I will definitely not buy anything from them in the future and I suggest you to do the same. There are a lot of alternatives, try them instead.

Wish the article published today on New York Times was a fine piece of satirical humor. On the contrary, it contains the sad but true facts about our ignorance on nuclear energy, from top government officials to the average Joe.

I quote:

“Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed in 25 years,” Mr. Gurbuz said Monday during an interview, referring to the Turkish government’s response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, fallout from which hit Turkey’s Black Sea coast.

According to a Greenpeace report published in 1996, Cahit Aral, the trade minister at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown, coaxed Turks to drink tea from the contaminated harvest, telling them that “a little radiation is good for you.” Mr. Aral, now 84, drank the tea on television to persuade compatriots to follow his example. The then-prime minister, Turgut Ozal, proclaimed that “radioactive tea tastes better,” while Kenan Evren, then president, claimed radiation was good for the bones.

Even without a nuclear reactor, Turkey in 1999 rated a level 3 incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event scale, classified as “serious,” when a container of highly radioactive Cobalt-60 turned up at an Istanbul junkyard, Mr. Gurbuz said.

You can read the full article here.

Unfortunately it’s just a concept and, since it’s designed by Billy May of Mozilla, we will never have a chance to see it in its physical form, probably not even a prototype. Being created by Mozilla Labs is not the only reason we will not see a phone like this anytime soon, there is also another big problem: nobody currently has a reliable battery technology to feed this greedy piece of machinery – well, not at least for a day :)

Here is what Mozilla Labs post says;

How does this relate to Mozilla / Mozilla Labs?

• Billy is a community member in the Mozilla Labs community and created Seabird in his spare time. Seabird is not a Mozilla or Mozilla Labs project but part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The Concept Series provides a place for the wider community to create and collaborate on projects which push the boundaries of the Web and the browser.

Does Mozilla have plans to produce a mobile phone?

• No. Mozilla produces Firefox for Mobile, the popular Firefox browser for mobile phone systems such as Nokia Maemo and Android.

You must see the impressive video presentation of the concept phone after the break.

[via reddit]

Facebook still says that “Your download is currently being generated. You will receive an email when it’s ready”, I will inform you once i got their zip.

Update: Downloaded the zip file generated by Facebook. Unzipping it produced a directory tree containing HTML files and hotlinked stuff in separate directories. When you browse your friend list using the sidebar navigation at “index.html”, you only see your friends names, without any other information about them, no emails! Also, no email’s in the “friends.html” page code either.

Looks like nothing is over :)