January 2009 - Posts - Play Things

January 2009 - Posts

Spammers use meltdown to diversify beyond Viagra

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
Observe this little snapshot from my Gmail spam folder: Spammers, those nimble footed fiends, have already tapped into the global meltdown to trap gullible email users. With the ILO stating that millions of jobs maybe lost due to the downturn spam producers are already making relevant changes to their packaging. Astute email readers who occasionally...

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Gmail goes offline - Why it matters...

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
The blogosphere is abuzz with a recent announcement on the Gmail blog. After some speculation, Google has finally come out with the fact that offline access to Gmail is being rolled out to English language users of the ubiquitous communication platform in the days to come. Like most Gmail tweaks offline access needs to be activated from the Labs tab...

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Obama still a "miserable failure", says Yahoo

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
Just one moment before you leave heated, right of centrist, liberal comments. I am not referring to his performance. Obama's been President just for a few days and I am sure we will get plenty of chances to make digs at his presidency in the days to some. Instead I am referring to another complicated, sucky legacy item from the Bush administration...

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Punish Ramalingaraju with eggs!

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
It was so inevitable that it is banal now. But there is, finally, a flash game to help you get over your Raju-rage . In a blatant rip-off of the 'Throw shoe at Bush" gag that we wrote about before, and became prime-time newsroom comedy for all of us here, there is now a game where you can throw eggs at Ramalingaraju at www.nailthethief.com...

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Is Analysis the new News?

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
Today my inbox was bombarded by a number of links all of which, after sifting and sorting, appeared to come as the fallout of two stories on the Internet. Both stories had to do with the precarious future of newspapers in the context of the challenges posed by the platform that is the Internet. The first was a blog post by Guardian’s Jeff Jarvis dated...

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Making the Internet Pay the Bills

Posted by Krish Raghav at 
History has been made today, if buzz on the Internet is to be believed. American journalist Jeff Jarvis , writing for the Guardian, writes that the L.A.Times, the much beleagured paper seeing cuts in circulation, a strained buyout , and criticism in the wake of layoffs , now earns enough through online ad revenue to cover it's 'entire editorial...

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Ramalinga Raju website sinks without trace. Almost.

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
Very early after the Satyam imborglio broke out yesterday a mysterious website appeared within hours that proclaimed support for Ramalinga Raju. The site then, equally mysteriously, dissapeared by the end of the day. www.ramalingaraju.com now no longer works and and points to an error page. But for a few hours this morning the file system of the site...

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Indie-pendence Day

Posted by Krish Raghav at 
It's strange to think of a list of nominees as exciting and wonderful, since a lot of these award lists, dominated as they are by big names and bigger budgets, are more vindications of personal opinion than excitement in some form. But gaming has it's own little niche of magic here. The Independent Games Festival. (The IGF is an annual celebration...

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Beatles music for free... NOT

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
Being a part of the minority, of 11 people or so, who don't particularly like the Beatles, I was not particularly saddened by this piece of news on NRK's website. NRK, in their own words, is the BBC of Norway. I assume Beatlemaniacs hit by the economic downturn will be most saddened: Yesterday we wrote that NRK is podcasting all 212 episodes...

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Mammooty's blog starts in style

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
Among other things 2008 will be the year movie stars and other important people began to take to blogs with great fervour. The latest to join the bandwagon is Malayalam superstar Mammooty. (If you are a Delhi Metro commuter, he is the guy on the South Indian Bank hoardings at Tilak Nagar station on the blue line.) His blog is just one post old . But...

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2008 ends with a flurry of tech blunders

Posted by Sidin Vadukut at 
Remember the ominous final days of 1999 when we all celebrated the passing of the year with the certain knowledge that at the stroke of midnight the Y2K bug would kick in and planes would fall from the sky, bank accounts would be wiped out and, thank god, our academic records would be purged from the databases of the CBSE forever? And then nothing happened...

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