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The cart whisperer

// April 28th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Funnies, Tech

If you haven’t heard about Liberty Fillmore, better known as “The Cart Whisperer”, then I suggest you pop over to his website at No More Abandoned Carts.

From a tender young age, Liberty could talk to carts. He listened to their problems and helped heal their shattered hearts. Now, 44 years later he brings the plight of abandoned shopping carts to the fore. You can get in on the action and fight for the rights of all abandoned shopping carts. Check out the website, grab the feed, view Liberty Fillmore’s Facebook profile or play the rest of the YouTube videos and put your cart abandonment issues to rest.

Watch the full trailer on YouTube or download the shortened high-res .Mov (20MB).

While you’re at it also check out this project of real stray carts – The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. The site has over 200 photographs and a very interesting way of classifying the “strays”.

I want a Garmin nuvifone

// April 7th, 2008 // 9 Comments » // News, Tech

Clearly I’ve been working too hard, ‘cos I missed this news release back in January already. But better late than never to say I want a Garmin nüvifone.

Garmin has gone and created a touchscreen device that combines a premium phone, mobile web-browser, and personal navigator into one sleek package, the Garmin nüvifone. Granted, on looks alone it may not be an i-Phone killer but it is really in a class of its own.

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Desktop utility monitors Eskom load shedding

// April 6th, 2008 // 6 Comments » // News, Tech

Those of you active on Facebook and other ‘media‘ may have seen this, but I thought I’d also share this with the regulars (hi mom!) still reading this blog.

By now we are all painfully aware of Eskom’s scheduled power cuts or load shedding and as frustrating as it is, it’s just something we’ll have to deal with for the foreseeable future. Until we all do our bit to reduce at least 10% of our power consumption, rolling power cuts will be part of South African life.

That being said, it also helps to be prepared for the scheduled load shedding and since Eskom‘s website is as helpful as the vehicle licensing call-centre, we have to rely on one of many websites to keep us informed.

One such website is MyEnergy, that provides a nifty (and very small) desktop monitoring utility that allows you to keep track of Eskom’s schedules for multiple locations.

This is great, as you can track the schedules for say Northriding (home) and Sandton (work) and many others from the same utility.

In addition to allowing users to monitor schedules of relevant locations, MyEnergy Monitor allows users to specify custom actions to take upon the detection of a scheduled power outage. These include a simple desktop notification, automatic computer shutdown and, for system administrators and developers, windows event log writing.

Once downloaded and installed, the MyEnergy monitor is quite simple to use and as stated above, gives you access to a couple of nice features. Thus far it’s been quite a novel and I’m interested to see what the week brings.

Keep track of updates via the MyEnergy blog or the MyEnergy Facebook group.

Happy camping…