The Perceptus Back Story » free

Does Google Apps for Domains work in China?

leonard — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:13:10 +0000

Today I got a call from someone whom I helped setup with Google Apps for domains. Primarily, he’s using Google to handle his email – it’s pretty much the exact same system that powers GMail, but under your own domain name. We use it too for perceptus.ca email. It’s awesome. You can use the excellent webmail interface, and IMAP for full desktop and mobile email applications. Plus, it’s free if you don’t need very many user logins.

If you have a vanity domain for yourself, get Google to host your email. You won’t find anything better, especially for $0.

Anyway, my client is in China, behind the world’s biggest firewall. And he can’t access his email. His web requests get forwarded to weird places. Ironically, he sounded rather pleased, since he’s actually on vacation, but it did raise some good questions.

Does Google Apps for Domains email actually work in China? I don’t know, it might be a weird forwarding bug. I’m not there now, so I can’t experiment with it. If someone reads this and can confirm success or failure with Google Apps for Domains, that would be excellent. Unfortunately, this is some info that I can’t seem to find on the Internet.

As an aside, in trying to figure this out, I stumbled on Google’s Transparency Report. It’s a fun way to see if Google services are blocked in different countries at any given time.

I wonder if any of Perceptus’ websites are blocked in China?

A great user generated video about Naque for Unique Names

leonard — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:56:04 +0000

We were absolutely floored to stumble upon this great video about the Naque for Unique Names website!

This clever young fellow, DamageTutorials, seems to really enjoy creating his usernames with unique-names.com.

Not only is it a better quality video than we would ever be able to make, coming from us it would literally be self-promotion. When this fellow does it, it’s much more believable.

Thanks DamageTutorials! You made our day.

Update: Rats, it appears that DamageTutorials’ YouTube account has been deactivated. We’re hosting the video here on the blog, we can’t find contact information for DamageTutorials… so if you happen to see this, drop us a line.

Here’s the original YouTube video embed, though, it probably will never work again:

Check out the video DamageTutorial’s – Unique names – Thinks of a username for you in seconds on YouTube. Make sure that you turn on your speakers, the narration is quite good.

Free Computer Burn-In Software

leonard — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:04:28 +0000

I thought that free burn-in software would be easier to find.

Every now and then I cobble a computer together from parts, or I have to diagnose a PC that is crashing from time to time. Unfortunately, even though a PC can boot, it doesn’t mean that it’s stable and ready to go. The tool for this job is burn-in software.

I used to use the free-as-in-beer version of SiSoft Sandra, but over the years it has gotten rather bloated. Anyway, SiSoft Sandra is more geared towards benchmarking a computer rather than stress testing.

Today, I found a great little tool that seems to do a good-enough job of testing the CPU and RAM – it also puts a modest amount of load on the hard drive.

The free tool that I am currently recommending: CPU Stability Test by Jouni Vuorio. It seems to run fine in all current versions of Microsoft Windows.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,7146-order,1/reviews.html

It’s a bit old, circa 2000, and I can’t find a current website for it… but it works. There are several “high-quality”, i.e. non-spammy, websites that host CPU Stability Test. Just Google for it if the link above goes stale.

There is still room to find a better free utility, but for now I’m satisfied. But, if you have other suggestions for free burn-in testing software, please leave a comment!

Update: A free utility for testing memory (i.e. looking for bad memory sticks) that runs inside Windows – http://hcidesign.com/memtest/. If you’ve got the ability to reboot the machine, then use Memtest86.

PSI’s free English to Chinese Dictionary v. 2 is released

leonard — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:04:39 +0000

A couple months ago we released the first minimally useful version of our free Chinese to English dictionary.

Well, after a couple months of use, it was decided to re-do it, this time keeping the full Chinese characters. Now you’ll have a chance of being able to use it to order from a Chinese only menu! Unfortunately, it now requires that a Chinese font be installed also, but you can steal a copy from your desktop.

If the first version was minimally useful, this version is generally OK.

So, get your free copy of our CEDICT based Windows Mobile English to Chinese Dictionary now.

Christmas Bingo Cards

leonard — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:51:57 +0000

So, the holidays are in full swing now. Traffic to our web based bingo card creator is up significantly. Hundreds of people are printing free bingo cards from print-bingo.com every day. A few of those people are upgrading to our premium services.

If you want your own set, you can visit our site for our fully customizable word list for Christmas Bingo Cards. In less than a minute, you’ll have a PDF on your screen that you can print to your printer.

Basic use of the site for printing a few dozen cards for your classroom or party is completely free – that’s not just a Christmas special, either.

P.S. If you are reading this and use our site to create some custom bingo cards in languages other than English, please, please, post them to our forum. We’re working on some uber-cool language functions for 2008!