AVG Anti-Virus Free No More?

In PC Magazine website there is a question and video about AVG Anti-Virus not free anymore because the version 7.1 was discontinued on January 15th.

My answer: It's not true.

In 2006, Grisoft announced that AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition version 7.1 would be discontinued on January 15th, and suggested that the users download the new version 7.5. Of course the direct link on their ad is to the pay edition. But they also released the Free Edition version 7.5.



I've been using AVG free edition for my home PC. Around end of 2006, after a few times reminded by the announcement that always popped up whenever I started the computer, I downloaded the free edition version 7.5 but did not install it until January 2007. I am now using the free edition version 7.5.

So far I have no problems using AVG. Although the free edition only provides basic services, but it has the essential features such as regular scanning, email scanning, quarantine, and automatic updates.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition can be downloaded here.


Link to the news: PC Magazine: AVG Free No More?



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Performancing 1.3.5 for Blogger Beta

Moved to Blogger Beta and am testing my Performancing on my Blogger Beta account. Bisa nggak ya?





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Japanese Encoding Support for Non-Japanese Mobiles

For exchanging emails with my friends and family in Japan I use my built-in email client on my mobile phone, since my Japan-based friends use their mobile phone (push) email address. Here in Indonesia as far as I know we haven't had such a service from our network providers here (but it must be coming soon for new mobile phones are ready with push emailfeature).

Apparently there are issues arise:

1. I cannot read emails sent from Japanese mobile phones due to the "unknown format". It has to be something to do with the character encoding.


2. Although many Japanese mobile phones can read my email messages, some phones cannot read them (invalid message). It must be, again, the character encoding issue.
   
   

Looking for tools for Japanese character support for Indonesian mobile messaging is difficult. I asked the phone maker and they cannot accommodate it. My phone only supports English/Western and Chinese inputs. It doesn't help. I then found a mobile email client software called iCJKMail, which supports Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character encoding. It is made generic to support many mobile phone brands. And it works well on my phone. It also supports multiple identities and SSL, which my phone's built-in email client software doesn't (well it does but it won't allow me to access Gmail)!

iCJKMail uses registration key and requires you to pay for subscription. I subscribed to the Japanese version and pay less than US$5 every month.

Although so far it can only read those encodings (no inputs yet), I found it very useful. Now I can read emails my family and friends send from their Japanese mobile phones, and the usually incompatible Japanese phones can recognize emails I sent using iCJKMail. I can also download picture attachments, although cannot attach any yet. With iCJKMail now emailing them is almost as live as SMS, and it's pretty satisfying considering the character encoding and wireless technology differences between Indonesia and Japan. Besides, since I subscribed to iCJKMail, they've been doing updates, bug fixes, and adding new features.

There is another workaround for sending an email to a Japanese phone so it is recognized by the incompatible phones. I must insert special characters that are available for the Chinese input on my phone. I usually use them to create at least one emoticon, such as: ♪（＾▽＾）／　or　（☆＿☆）
(I wrote those using Japanese IME for Windows) so it changed the encoding to Chinese, which apparently is supported by those Japanese phones. But for viewing Japanese encoded emails, I can only use iCJKMail.

Sometimes when the connection is not good, accessing mailbox or sending emails using email client software (built-in or iCJKMail) takes so long it results in time-out. I tried sending emails as MMS messages. When inserting text, I must remember to insert those special characters, otherwise my message will result as an invalid message on the incompatible Japanese phones. MMS supports delivery and read reports--it's good to know my message has arrived and been read. But my MMS messages never arrived satisfactorily because I got the report that the photo cannot be viewed.

So again, using the built-in email client software plus the special characters, or just using iCJKMail to type and view messages is the best workaround I found so far.

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Firefox Blogging Add-on

Just upgraded my Firefox to version 2.0, and installed a blogging add-on called Performancing. This is the first time I'm using it, I want to test it. In the editor there is no menu/icon to change the font style. Somehow I lost the Title field on my Blogger's text editor--whenever I'm writing a post, there is no title field, so my posts have no title. There was once, but at some point in time it's gone. I don't know why and haven't tried to find out why. Or maybe since I changed the template (the pink one). I removed my old blog (which had titles) and created a new one using the pink template, and it had no title field.

OK it's getting late, gotta go now.

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