Kev

I've been using the new design for about a week and overall I think it's an improvement, but I've been griping non-stop about the chat/contact area hogging space even when you drag it down as small as possible.

This comment started out as another one of those gripes, until I decided to make one more attempt to hide the chat area for good. Turns out that clicking on the speech bubble icon closes the contacts list/chat area. Can't believe it took me a week to try that.

I'd suggest having a look at XFCE. It's similar enough to Gnome that you probably won't struggle to get used to it.

It's also been more stable for me than recent versions of Gnome and as a bonus it's much lighter on system resources.

>On Android, voice dialing requires you pull out the phone and press a button

That might be a quirk on your particular model of phone or headset, or maybe it was fixed with 2.2. The N1 definitely supports the headset button for voice commands.

I think that it's disingenuous to point out the many ways to call a function across half a dozen languages while completely ignoring how many ways there can be to say something just in English.

Think of playing a text-based adventure game and how frustrating it can be trying to work out the exact phrase the designers had in mind. To make this work you'd essentially need a machine that could converse with you to build the program - the way that an engineer talks to a client to draw up a specification - which would be very cool.

I like your idea for an editor add-on. Snippets taken one step further.

> "Draw a red circle" is enough to get a red circle.

Yes, but once you have to say "Draw a circle in this shade of red, give it a black border this thick, make it this big and put it at these coordinates" things are starting to get unwieldy. After a few different circles I'd probably start longing for draw_circle(fill_colour, radius, (x,y,z), border_colour, border_width).

Edit: Added function arguments to make the comparison less biased.

You can avoid entering spaces by lifting your finger when it isn't touching the centre area. It disrupts the flow significantly when you do so but it does let you stop half way through a word without putting in an extra space.

After playing with it for a while I think that it's an interesting idea. I'll stick with it until I'm familiar enough to make a fair judgement but it's difficult to imagine 8pen being as fast as the standard keyboard - there's just too much movement involved for every character.

Yes, that reminded me of http://pomegranatephone.com/ - which is old but brilliant.

I agree that not including the price in the article is silly.

At the same time - the price is one click away in the liliputing article linked below the video. They also tell you to visit the link to get the price, no video-watching necessary. Hardly a 'wild goose chase'.

And here's the link in question: http://www.liliputing.com/2010/06/huawei-s7-android-tablet-a...

I'm sure that I'm not the only one here who's seen people who should know better email encrypted files with the password in plain text in the email body.

The simplest solution that I've managed to come up with so far is to send the encrypted file and then send the password via a different channel. So you email the encrypted file and then phone the person to tell them the password. Or host the file at a login-required https URL and provide log in details over the phone.

Of course those approaches are only justifiable for information that isn't too sensitive. Once you have to worry about people tapping your phones and intercepting your email then you really need tech savvy recipients. Of course, I'm hoping that someone in this thread will mention a solution that proves me wrong.

Using https just means that your connection to the server is encrypted. Your email will still be sent between mail servers unencrypted unless you encrypt it separately.

It would at least make extracting the bullet easier by keeping the fragments contained in fabric. Dragging the fabric along with it would probably slow the bullet down a lot faster too - meaning shallower penetration.

Reminded me of the theory that Mongolian soldiers wore silk shirts because it made extracting barbed arrows easier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_armour