You know that annoying auto-correct feature that changes all of your swear words into more benign language? Well my new(ish) Android phone didn't really come with one. I mean, it did, but it only had a dictionary containing proper nouns from my address book. Great when I'm trying to spell names like Galifinakis, not so great when I'm trying to spell  deoxyribonucleic-acid, since my own spelling skills have been crippled by years and years of using word processing programs with spell check.

DISCLAIMER: Truth be told, I was never really good at spelling. Derp.

DISCLAIMER TWO: Oddly enough, deoxyribonucleic is one of the few words that I can spell, but the spell-checker built into Google Chrome is telling me it's not even a real word. Thanks a lot, Google.


But this post isn't just me complaining about my phone. No, not at all. You see, it got me wondering, why would the Motorola Triumph, a "budget" phone by today's standards which ships with Android 2.2.2, but still way beyond the power of my previous Android's, would ship with an integral feature crippled - a feature that has been a mainstay of "smart phones" before "smart phones" even existed? (I'm thinking about some of my "flip phones" circa 2004 - 2005 which had a wonderful text predictions / spell check system called T9)


Now for a stretch...


Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. which you know as Foxconn, is a Taiwanese manufacturing company with their most famous factories manufacturing iPads and iPhones in China. One of their facilities in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, manufactures Motorola's handsets. The conspiracy is that Foxconn deliberately installed firmware on the Triumph that had a crippled spell check to 1) Make their big bank roller Apple look better, and 2) get some revenge on Motorola, since they dropped Foxconn.

In any case, Foxconn doesn't build Motorola phones anymore, and Google now owns Motorola, taking out one more step between Google and Android consumers - which means one less middle man to fill your phone with bloatware and spyware. (Please note it's less spy and bloat-ware, not zero spy and bloat-ware)

In bigger news, I have an upcoming blog post about smart homes, and their features that you can expect to be in every home in a few decades time, a trio of noodle recipes (as soon as Brandi gets around to collaborating with me on the third one) and possible a way long over due post to my cybernetics blog. God, I'd really like to work on that blog, but I won't allow myself to post to it will-nilly, like I do this one, and I need time and quiet to do it properly - things that I don't really get. I'm okay with that though. I really can hardly stand to spend time away from my wife and daughter even if it's just to do homework in the other room, so serious blogging is on the back burner.

Parallel Universe Twitter

So by accident I seem to have found a website running a parallel Twitter. I think it's a phishing scam - they want you to log into it so they can hijack your account.

See, the thing of it is, I'm logged into Twitter, so if this parallel website were legit, I'm pretty sure my login token would carry over, like when I log into Twitter, it carries over to Twitpic.

Anyway, here's the address: http://199.59.148.20/ NSLookup says it's domain name is r-199-59-148-20.twttr.com, and twttr.com redirects to www.twitter.com, but the source is the same, so it's a decent copy, unlike the Facebook clone I blogged about recently that was clearly a product of Metasploit.

Anyway, don't log into it.