A while back I went on at some length about how the manufacturer of a tablet I had just purchased was trying to wriggle out from under the terms of their own warranty. I launched a Twitter offensive – not an overwhelming one, though I did have some help from my friends 😆 …but it appeared to have paid off. Last week I received the following e-mail. … Read more
Bear with me, for I have grievances to air. This gets ugly. … Read more
We’ve had another one of those trapped-on-the-hill-in-the-house-by-copious-amounts-of-snow-and-ice events this week, which can be fun when it’s day one and it’s just snow…
…but becomes an everyone-in-the-house-simultaneously-becomes-cranky-with-cabin-fever crisis on day three, when everything’s coated with ice and you can’t. go. anywhere.
Fortunately, a friend of mine drew my attention to something that’s kept me at least a little bit happy today. … Read more
I was in a car wreck over the weekend, which has knocked the wind out of my sails a bit. I was the only person in my car, and I walked away from it, so as sore as I am, I think I rolled a good saving throw against Getting Smooshed. The thing that sucks is that it was a pretty good weekend, marred by one big bone-jarring BOOM. But let’s focus on the positive (yay), which brings me to my big purchase of the weekend…
For many moons I have been searching for a decent arcade emulator for my Android tablet, and there just wasn’t one. There was a Neo-Geo-only emulator that I tried and couldn’t get to run on my little flat friend (not surprising, as it’s a budget model rather than a luxury model), and besides… Neo-Geo only? Really? Nah. But now the folks who made MAME available for the iPad right around Christmas last year – and managed to keep it in the Apple App Store for all of about 72 hours before it got yanked for being a dirty filthy emulator – have also given the world a magical thing: MAME4droid. Behold.
Dear Laura who presumably lives in Fayetteville,
I’ve got your 4GB microSD card if you want it. You forgot to remove it when you returned a Sylvania Android tablet to Hastings in Fayetteville. (My wife, in what can best be described as a long-simmering fit of envy over my tablet, bought one of her own today.)
For whatever it’s worth, you forgot to use the “factory reset” option to wipe all your private data from the device. I realized this when I saw that the tablet was already localized to Fayetteville, and then went to add my wi-fi router to the “approved” wi-fi points on the tablet and saw that there were a lot of other wi-fi points already “approved”. Just for laughs I decided to see if whoever returned the tablet without wiping it had left an SD card in the slot. Yep, you did. Man, I’d be pissed if I did that – even if I didn’t want the tablet anymore (really, it’s kind of a neat little gadget if you’re not expecting it to be an iPad – you should’ve given it a chance), I would’ve been able to use the card for something else like my phone. My wife got an 8GB microSD to go in the tablet; she doesn’t need the one you or your folks paid hard-earned money for.
What’s more, I didn’t look at anything that you had on the card or the tablet. I simply wasn’t interested. I wiped the device memory and put the card away in a little microSD case. I’d hope that anyone else in this situation would do the same thing, but I think we all know that’s not too likely. I’m one of the good guys.
If you want the thing back, let me know. Seriously. I’ll mail it to you.
You’ve got to be careful about this stuff, folks. Despite doing the right thing and not looking at anything more sensitive than the machine settings, I already know that Laura in Fayetteville owned this. If I’d looked at the SD card, I bet I could find out all kinds of things. But I’m the kind of dweeb who averts his eyes when someone’s typing their password or punching in their PIN. If you don’t take the security of your private info seriously, how do you expect the next guy to, no matter how well-intentioned the next guy may be?
In the meantime, Mrs. Green is really enjoying Laura’s Android tablet. 😆… Read more
It’s been a stormy weekend here, so it’s a good thing the tablet‘s been charged up, just in case the lights go out and we get bored. (We’ve got four nervous cats and two nervous dogs in the house – what are the odds of boredom there?) I tried out a couple of Anrdoid emulators on my tablet, and here’s what I found out. … Read more
As promised, though it took long enough to finally happen, my replacement Sylvania tablet arrived last week. Though I gather the company has already discontinued the item (my guess: they wanted to cash in in time for Black Friday 2010, and then they beat a hasty retreat when stuff like the Motorola Xoom started peeking over the horizon), this is a slightly newer model, upgraded to Android 2.2. Ahead of the new machine’s arrival, I invested in a couple of modest extras for the anticipated replacement. … Read more
The replacement for my Sylvania / Digital Gadgets tablet is here. First impressions:
I like Android 2.2 very much.
The damn thing charges so much faster when you plug the thingie into the AC port rather than the headphone jack.… Read more
After a few phone calls today, I can report that, hopefully, I finally have a little bit of resolution in the nagging case of the non-functional Sylvania wi-fi tablet. If you recall, I got it on special on Black Friday, and within a month it was falling apart from the inside. Since shortly before Christmas I was trying to reach the New Jersey-based outfit to whom Sylvania has farmed out all support for their tablets and netbooks, to no avail. … Read more
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