Opera: Flash as a video container makes very little sense.

All I have to say is: HTML5!  HTML5!  HTML5!

I have heard zero noise about this one. Hm, maybe I should say I’ve heard no “buzz”…

For a few months now I’ve been using an application called Nimbuzz on my Blackberry as well as on my ASUS netbook. I just downloaded it to my Mac today, completing the hat trick of machine usage.

Multi-IM is kind of my “holy grail”. Like many people I have friends et al. scattered acrosss all four major networks (Windows Live, AIM, GTalk/Jabber, Yahoo!) and I would prefer to talk to them all with one client. On Windows I’ve used Miranda (good, but hardly shrink-wrapped) and Pidgin (an icon of stubborn open-source thinking if ever there was one). Yes I know about Trillian but I think it’s hideous and elegance, frankly, is a factor for me (both visual and UI). Which of course is where Miranda and Pidgin both fail—Pidgin is rigid to distraction, whereas Miranda is the opposite: so customizable as to be a nightmare to set up and upgrade coherently. Thus Nimbuzz was a great panacea on my XP netbook.

As for Blackberry? Well—it’s not exactly 100% integrated (messages don’t show up in your unified Inbox) but it’s free, and that is good enough for me.

For Macintosh, Adium is everything which Pidgin is not, but it’s been in a seemingly eternal beta for the latest version. Hence the decision to move over and take a look at Nimbuzz there, too. And the client does look a little “porty”, i.e. foreign, but hey—that’s something that can always change…

Bottom line: the company appears to be Dutch—but with a significant Argentine presence, which I find interesting; and the client is solid and connects to all the major networks as well as Facebook. So if you’re looking for a free multi-IM client for Windows OR Mac OR Blackberry, Nimbuzz is there—and you could do worse.

Oh, and for the record: it appears the client is promoting a Skype-like network. Until I know other people on Nimbuzz, however, that part is not of much use to me. So maybe this article will change that a little.

Well the painful issue has been resolved—solely due to independent research, of which many half-solutions combined to make a full solution.

Eventually I managed to “cheat”: I had a security password, so after using the umpteen utilities on my PC like AppLoader and J_Loader, I simply forced the phone to wipe itself out (and get out of the endless reboot) by mis-entering the password when it connected to my PC.

What joy!

Only eight hours of my life…

Oh and make sure to download the OS direct from your wireless provider.

So within an hour or two of that update, my two-week old Curve 8530 suddenly starts endlessly rebooting.

I’m in the process of hacking it back into a usable state (hope it works)—but this just proves my point ever so much more.

RIM: you suck. Blackberrys are great only if you’re a corp user who never has to deal with the ugly side.

As a consumer user? Hell on earth if something goes wrong…

A***holes.

So I finally get my iMac back from Best Buy–who seem to take two weeks to replace a hard drive, and to somehow make my fans run high all the time (gotta figure that one out later). This all after I called concerned last week when it seemed according to their automated system my machine had been “ready for final inspection” for five days, and got the Geek Squad jerk^H^H^H^Hclerk telling me “you need to hang on”–like I was some impatient five-year-old. Good on the ol’ social skills, Geek Squad Guy.

Luckily Time Machine saves me here and the Mac is more-or-less back to the state it was in two weeks ago. Except for the fan noise. Which from iStat, appears to be the CPU’s fan (not the hard drive’s).

However–I’ve now got to re-sync my Blackberry to the Mac, and it looks like there’s a software update! From version 5.0.00000001 to 5.0.000000000000011. No issue with doing that right?

Well… do the update (which takes f***ing forever) and whaddya know but it somehow has stripped my of my BlackBerry Messenger; my Twitter; my “Keyboard Lock” (some security nazi’s choice somewhere, no doubt)–and has randomly stripped out settings on some apps (like WeatherBug). Leaving me with hours of work to get my phone back to the way it was.

Thanks RIM! Thanks Best Buy/Geek Squad! You’ve reminded me exactly why my model for the future remains Brazil.

And people wonder why Apple is wiping the floor with these clowns. Sucking less often means you’re still the best, it seems…