Author: Neel Mehta

Can’t get enough Angry Birds? Play it online

Playing Angry Birds 1-1
A red bird crashing into a structure, killing a pig in the process

If your phone’s battery keeps dying on you because you spend all your time playing the wildly popular mobile game Angry Birds (or if you’re too cheap to buy Angry Birds), you should be pretty excited about this latest development.

You can now play Angry Birds online here. Here’s what you need:

  1. A decent browser (more on that later)
  2. Adobe Flash (sorry, iDevice users)

As the URL (chrome.angrybirds.com) might hint, Angry Birds works best in Chrome. I’ve tried it on several browsers and here’s what I’ve found:

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Microsoft buys Skype

Skype logoMicrosoft has bought the popular IM/voice chat application Skype (well, not just the product, the whole company) for $8.5 billion, making it Microsoft’s largest purchase ever. I find that a little funny since Skype actually made a loss of $7 million last year.

But, when you think about it, it makes some sense. Skype has 663 million user accounts (of course, not all of them are active) and about 8 million paying users – obviously not very many, but it’s still some.

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Bing: the little engine that… couldn’t?

If you’ve bought an electronic device in the last year, you’ll notice that Microsoft is hawking its search engine Bing more than I hawk my products. (On a totally unrelated note, download Cabra, my free and open-source flashcard program.)

That’s all well and good, since you’re allowed to advertise, but Microsoft really goes to the extreme:

  1. Microsoft signed a deal with Blackberry so that Bing would be the only search engine available on Blackberrys.
  2. My sister bought a new computer and was offered a free song download if she searched with Bing.
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Forget flash drives with Dropbox

I’m sure this happens to a lot of people: you have an important file on your flash drive and you need to hand it in, print it out, or take it somewhere else. Only problem? You lose your flash drive. It’s happened to me far too many times.

So that’s why I decided to eschew flash drives and emailing stuff to myself and use the power of the internet.

I found Dropbox, which lets me access my files from anywhere as long as I have an internet connection. I don’t even need a flash drive any more; I can just store everything I need on my Dropbox account.

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A slightly radical proposal for schools

I’ve often been asked the question “If you could be king of the world for a day, what would you do?” First of all, I’d make myself king permanently, but that’s not the point. Here’s my slightly radical proposal that would be the second thing I’d do if I were king for a day.

I’m part of a club that takes out the recycling in our school in the morning. Let me tell you, we collect a lot of paper: if I collect the paper of maybe 15 rooms that haven’t had their paper collected in a few days, I can fill up a whole trash can. Not the small trash cans you have in your house, I mean ones as big as janitors use. That’s a lot.

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Trouble at the PlayStation Network

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ll have noticed that the PlayStation Network, which provides online gameplay and digital game shopping for owners of PlayStation 3 and PSP devices, has been down since last Wednesday. Their on-demand streaming service, Qriocity, is also down. There’s been a huge buzz about it for the last week, but it’s hard to cut through the buzz to get the actual information. I’ve done a little digging, so here are some of the basics.

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Seeing “Friday” in a different light

If you want a break from the tech talk…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, you’ve probably heard of (and had the misfortune of listening to) Rebecca Black’s Friday. You know, that song with the 13-year-olds driving cars and the nasally teenager wondering where to sit? That one.

After a shocking experience (more about that later), I’ve had to start questioning why I (and pretty much everyone I know) hate the song. Breaking it down:

  • The lyrics are junk, but most pop songs have meaningless lyrics anyway.
  • The tune’s pretty catchy, no faults there.
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