Categories
Geek

Remembering the days we used to review WiFi hotspots

I’m reposting a piece I wrote together with Eva Gubat from 2006. This was a time when the blue & black Linksys routers were a status symbol at home because the “next frontier” was being able to add WiFi to your home. It was the age of Apple’s iBooks and PowerBooks — of being able to flex working from a coffee shop. I remember browsing PinoyExchange or MaPalad and the forums would have a list of “friendly” establishments that had free WiFi and allowed you to plug your laptop.

Many phones didn’t have WiFi back then so getting online on a portable device meant having to use a PocketPC or something that ran Palm OS. These were the final days of Symbian S60 and Nokia, which Steve Jobs would then deliver the final blow with the launch of the first iPhone a few months later.

This piece was part of an ongoing series that featured such friendly establishments offering free WiFi. Tech magazines at the time didn’t cross into lifestyle, but publishers soon realized that it was the lifestyle sections that attracted the budgets, so we had to be fashionably geek. Oh how times have changed.

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Categories
Geek

What marketers can learn from GoTyme Kiosks

If you’ve been to a Robinson’s in the past few weeks you may have noticed an ATM-like kiosk with the “GoTyme” branding. For the unfamiliar, GoTyme is one of the newer digital banks in the Philippines forged as a partnership between the Gokongwei Group (hence Robinson’s) and Tyme.

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Categories
Digressions

The Alabang Creek Canal Bike Trail

There’s a bike route I’ve been following more often. And the irony is the trail is within a mall.

The Festival Mall canals are really something else. In a way it reminds me of the huge ponds of the former QUAD (now Greenbelt) in the 1980’s and Virra Mall but on a larger scale. Festival Mall’s humongous expansion extends the mall towards Asian Hospital with new outdoor areas around a forum that follows the freshwater Alabang Creek as it makes its way out into Laguna de Bay. The creek itself isn’t a sight to behold, and to be honest I have doubts of how “safe” that water is as I’ve seen freshwater fish floating dead in some of the more stagnant waters. But easily accessible bodies of water are a rarity in the urban sprawl, and in this case — it IS the urban sprawl.

Read on to see the photo gallery.

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Geek

I asked ChatGPT if AI will be the future of tech reviews

I asked ChatGPT if AI will be the future of tech reviews. This is what it said:

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Categories
Digressions

The bike that saved me

I never really thought about year-end goals until I checked my Strava account. Ever since my wife got me a bike last year, I’ve been trying to clock in rides every week. Some days I have daily streaks of 20km rides. Other times, every other day but longer distances of 30 to 40km. In the beginning I used to come home with aching legs but as the time passed, I have been breathing better, making less pit stops, and exerting less effort on my rides to go faster.

It wasn’t always like this. I spent most of my 30’s finding an excuse to not exercise — or at best to try to be inspired by those “from couch potato to hero” motivational workout regimen. There was a short time before the pandemic I got into kettlebells, but again, knowing me, I could not last. I fear gyms in general because despite all the movement, I’m stuck in a room.

Fast forward to the pandemic.

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