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United Kingdom

English Teenager Invents a Better Doorbell 363

Several readers have written with word of a new doorbell, invented by 13-year-old Laurence Rook. What's so special about a doorbell? This one lets you answer the door from wherever you can receive a call from its embedded 3G chip; to your in-person caller (facing the doorbell), that means it sounds like you're answering the door over an intercom system, even if you're really across town. Pretty clever way to make it harder for a thief to know if a home is actually occupied, though Rook says that he initially just wanted a system to avoid missed packages.

Comment Re:Stores are often named for what they sell (Score 1) 425

In addition to the other valid points others have mentioned over in the Mac side of the pond we do refer to applications as "apps". The file extension is even .app. Obviously its not exclusive people use lots of words depending upon their computing background and knowledge. executable, binary, app, application, etc...

Comment Re:Does it explain the sucky battery life? (Score 2, Interesting) 248

Sonds like the firmware got corrupted. My wife took her 3GS (1 year old to the day) in to the apple store last night. A tech looked at it, found it reported ~8 hours of battery life but 700 days of standby time. Obviously this was not right, found the firmware was corrupted and asked if she would permit a wipe and restore. Apparently this caused some errors in the back and a few min later he came back with a new phone for her.

As it was the last day of the included warranty it only cost us a few minutes of our time. Note that as it was the firmware that was the problem she could not do a full restore from her computer. Just reinstalled apps, some restored data some did not. And had to re-setup to her liking.

Comment Re:7 hours easy, 8 should even be possible (Score 4, Informative) 454

Over 50% of Apples hardware sales are laptops, has been for many years now. Apple still only represents some 5-10% of the market though. I got a MBP (the first sealed battery model) last year and was ecstatic when my first charge lasted for over 10 hours. No tricks, wi-fi on, installing apps, applying patches etc. Of course now after a year I see 5-7 hours in my day-day usage.

Comment Re:Sony Timer (Score 1) 147

Some trophy enabled games failed to init properly (Heavy Rain is one such game) and would quit. While others would load and play fine. I played Fallout 3 sunday evening but the catch was it zero'd out my local trophy data, as if I had never played the game. Not sure what would have happened if I earned one during my playtime that night. If anyone is curious now that everything working again I restored my trophies by launching the game (init to 0%) then quit and re-synced my trophy data with the PSN servers. This restored all the missing data.

Also there were reports of some fat PS3's that were not effected by the bug at all. Just like the new slim models.

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