No more Internet pornography in Egypt

Blocking porn sites is not the main issue here, there are ways to circumvent censorship and if people want to watch porn, and they do, they will resurrect VHS.

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A chart fromGoogle Insightshowing the search for the term "sex" and "سكس", originating from Egypt and from 2004 till now. The annual dip in search, marked with the red R, coincides with the month of Ramadan.

This ruling is like legalizing the monitoring of …

Jaiku: No more international SMS

Jaiku announced yesterday that they will support SMS to the US only. Jaiku was down for more than 24 hours because they were converting the software to an open-source version called JaikuEngine.

They will also stop feed-fetching which was a nice feature that created a Facebook like mini-feed (or FriendFeed like) on the users' homepage to follow the activities of your friends on other sites.

In short, Jaiku now is going to be pretty useless …

Facebook scale is scary

There are 100 million people around the world using Facebook. This number is from the official Facebook blog. They don't mention the number of active users. But it is safe to say that they are a lot.

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I will describe an evil idea to control the decisions of a great number people that doesn't involve any intrusion on their privacy. They will be oblivious to this interference.

You probably know that Facebook, among other things …

How to listen to live streaming internet radio in your car

You can listen to live streaming internet radio if you have a mobile phone with a 3G connection. The phone should be able to run J2ME MIDP applications (most do). Download and install MFRadio. It is open source and free. MFRadio can only play Mp3 streams.

The second step is to be able to connect your phone to your car stereo. This is highly variable, so you will have to find this out on your …

4 years of Gmail

Gmail logo

4 years passed today since I signed up for a gmail account. I received an invitation via Blogger. This was about 3 weeks after Google announced the 1GB inbox.

This secured my best email address:

At that time, this was a mindbogglingly huge webmail inbox. Yahoo! & Hotmail offered few MegaBytes for each user, as far as I can remember nothing more than 5MB.

Gmail was also under attack from people …

Anyone can lose a memory!

Any of your digital devices that carry a removable storage, like a flash disk, SD card etc.. can get lost.

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Photo by edans.

They are getting smaller and smaller. And the chances of losing one is probably inversely proportional!

I lost a couple of SD Cards (each 1GB in capacity) in 2007!

!A simple solution

Simply create a plain text file named

__FLASH_DISK_OWNER.txt__ with the information you think is necessary to help the person …

هوس الويكي 2008

من GlobalVoices كتبت أميرة الحسيني:

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يكتب المدون المصري ميدو [إنكليزي] وهو المنسق العام لمؤتمر ويكيمينيا 2008 و مشارك مواظب على موقع ويكيبيديا باللغة العربية:

“بعد اشهر من التحضير, اختيرت الإسكندرية أخيرا لاحتضان ويكيمينيا 2008 وهو المؤتمر العالمي السنوي الرابع لمنظمه ويكيميديا. اختارت لجنه تحكيم ويكيمينيا الإسكندرية على عرضين استثنائيين من
اتلانتا وكيب تاون. وسوف تستضيف أسكندرية الحدث في صيف عام 2008 في مكتبه الإسكندرية التي تم أعاده بناءها حديثا.”

ويكتب زيرو افكت [إنكليزي] في مدونة …

Facebook sucks?

It is wrong to think that following your friends online will introduce you to new ideas, opportunities and information. However, if you spend the same amount of time reading other people ideas but following a certain topic that interest you. This will probably expose you to more information, viewpoints, ideas, etc..

Curiosity killed the cat!

I don't know were did the above proverb come from. But I know how curiosity came to exist. It could …

Google maps mashups

Created mashups of several weblogs.

Omraneya

Your favourite cheap automated Egyptian blogs aggregator. BTW, not all posts appearing on the main page will be displayed on the map. The admin's favorited posts only, as there is no way I can find the RSS of the whole thing.

Omraneya + Google maps

Global Voices Online

This one is pretty cool. Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project. Basicly a selection of what bloggers around …