Burger King bribes people to ditch Facebook friends

Burger King US has released a new Facebook application that gives users a free Whopper when they delete 10 friends from their profile page.

Brilliant. Although disappointingly it only works if you’re in the US…

Usually when a friend is removed on Facebook, no announcement is made, however the Burger King application creates an update to inform the deleted friend that they have been “sacrificed for a free Whopper” on their wall.

Over 50,000 friends have been sacrificed so far according the website whoppersacrifice.com where you can also download the Facebook application.

First of what I feel may be many posts about Lotus Notes

Why do I need to know what database I am connecting to? Why do I need to have a degree in computer science to change the default browser?

I’ve got my lovely new MacBook Pro in the office so need to set up a whole heap of preferences in Notes – of course not all the preferences are in preferences some are within individual tasks.

Current problem is trying to set up a mailing list – should be a fairly simple task but so far having checked about 800 menu items am unable to find it. The nearest I have found is Groups but with a description that includes ‘Multi-purpose’ groups are the default group type and used in most situations. They can be used for access control and email purposes. I’m a little wary of breaking the internet!

New Apple MacBook Pro 17″ from £1,949 or a Mac for £17,000

Mac Pro with all the options including two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Mac Pro with all the options including two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Mac Expo has started and I was hoping they might have brought out a new mid range MacBook or a lower price for the Aluminum MacBook but sadly not. So whilst checking out the new MacBook Pro’s with their 17″ screens and funky new built in battery with 8 hour span between charges I wondered idly how much one computer could cost. For the price of a small house in some less desirable neighbourhoods you can buy a top of the range Mac Pro with dual 30″ screens and lots of processors, RAM and terrabytes of storage. A snip at a little over £17k and yours for around £550 a month which is more than a lot of peoples mortgage payments!

Of course all of this is great but I haven’t won the lottery yet so I’ll make do with my trusty (although battered and bashed a bit) MacBook.

Brrr


It’s official the Arctic chill has arrived. I woke up in the middle of the night and it was chilly so chilly I had to take a grab of the weather temperature on the iPhone provided by yahoo. Now I know severe weather warnings have been issued as temperatures in the UK dipped as low as -11C (12.2F) overnight but I never really believe it in fact normally I sleep through the coldest of the weather – like modern day hibernating.

The BBC seem to not be showing the weather at all today and just says Freezing Cold- maybe it’s so cold it’s broken?

The Arctic weather is expected to keep its grip on the UK, with lows of -10C (14F) forecast for southern England and Wales into Wednesday.

Yahoo year in review 2008

As mentioned in the top searches from 2008 on google top tens though work well as proven editorial technique alongside top trumps and image galleries.
So it’s no surprise that Yahoo have also created their top ten lists of searches for 2008 – although rather than being a zeitgeist they call it a buzz or year in review 2008.

No surprise either that the results are similar top ten news searches on yahoo in 2008;
1. Hurricanes
2. Caylee and Casey Anthony
3. Election 2008
4. Pakistan
5. Pregnant Man
6. China
7. Iraq
8. Shelley Malil
9. Patrick Swayze
10. Afghanistan

On a slightly more morbid note though they have the top 10 farewells as stated by yahoo

“Everyone’s time comes up sooner or later, and a personality’s passing prompts respect be paid to his or her legacy. Departures that shock the Web world-like that of wildlife expert and…”

1. Heath Ledger
2. Bernie Mac
3. Paul Newman
4. Randy Pausch
5. George Carlin
6. Estelle Getty
7. Tim Russert
8. Brad Renfro
9. Isaac Hayes
10. Boyd Coddington

Head on over to Yahoo Buzz the year in review 2008 for more top tens including the celebrity brat pack, economy, politicians and olympians.

New Time Capsule with iTunes library sharing…

The pre-Macworld Expo rumour mill has not been as mad as usual – probably due to Steve Jobs not delivering the keynote – but 9to5Mac reckon there will be an internet-based media server from Apple.

The rumoured Apple media server, would be based on Apple’s existing Time Capsule, an ARM-based 802.11n WiFi base station and backup system. To which would be added AFP-based file sharing, iTunes library sharing, a MobileMe tie-in for remote access (possibly with personal MobileMe subdomain), and the ability to share media with a Mac, AppleTV, iPod Touch, and iPhone “both over the Internet and while at home.”

Of course most of us with an Apple TV and an iPhone and a Time Capsule have been trying to get this to work with third party applications since they got them so it’s nice to see Apple finally listening. Shame they will no doubt want us to shell out more for them as I doubt there will be a TimeCapsule software/firmware update to allow the extra functionality.

iPhone 3G jailbroken (beta)

The iPhone Dev Team released its iPhone 3G unlocking utility, yellowsn0w, on the first of the year although it’s still a beta.

If you’d like to crack your iPhone with the beta remember version 0.9.4 beta works only with iPhone baseband 02.28.00, that’s the version installed by iPhone 2.2 Software Update, Apple’s most recent firmware update. So before you start use yellowsn0w, make sure to use iTunes to upgrade your iPhone to 2.2.

If you’ve used QuickPwn to perform a basic jailbreak before and you use Installer to load apps then you should be able to use this beta with no problems – otherwise I’d advise waiting until the non beta version is ready as I’m sure there will be better support available then when they are not concentrating on the new version although there is some basic help available now

Allegedly you won’t notice anything about it other than that your third-party SIM now works.

I’ve not tried it yet as I’m not going anywhere that needs a different SIM – always my big gripe when I am in Australia with the iPhone. I’m likely to wait to the 1.0 release.