Category: 2003-2014 Archive
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Internet freedom in Jordan: the beginning of the end?
Whenever journalists, investors or ordinary people ask me: why has Jordan been able to shine in the region in the field of technology, web business and web content, one of my standard answers has always been: our relative freedom and our open internet policies. Over the past decade, Jordan has been steadily building a reputation…
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Oh harsh and gentle Amman, when will you smile?
A story about love and life in Amman unfolds on an outdoor screen on an unusually hot summer evening. Behind that very screen, the lights from thousands of windows glimmer. It is there, on those hills, where the story plays out. But the hills of of Amman where not the only backdrop of the story…
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my new year’s book buying binge
Looks like Prime Books at Baraka Mall is doing a clearance sale. I was lured into the store by a “50% off” sign. I walked out with so many books, a shop assistant had to actually help carry them to the car. Most of these books will end on the shelves of company’s library. The…
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Google’s design mess: Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich adds to the problem
That lock screen looks promising, doesn’t it. That’s how Google’s newest version of Android looks. It is a major release of Android, and one of its major features was to supposedly make its design “lovable”. As Android’s design chief Matias Duarte himself said: people sort of respected Android, but no one loved it. Its latest…
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Upgrade your European Nexus S i9023 to Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.03
Happy to report that I have just successfully upgraded my European GSM Nexus S (i9023) to Android 4.03 Ice Cream Sandwich, manually. I didn’t want to wait for the Other The Air (OTA) update to be rolled out in my territory (Jordan). I was a little reluctant to use the instructions on Android Central because…
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Talent of community: sketch-a-talk videos animate Arab Spring themes on Ikbis
What happens when you interview a diverse bunch of Arab activists and new media geeks one Skype, edit all of it dow to a few minutes, get an amazingly talented cartoonist, mix in a video camera and some video and sound editing dudes? Ikbis has been experimenting with “community produced videos”. By pulling in different…
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The Nokia N9: a phone for real rebels (and normal people too)
The Nokia N9 has a strange story. It’s an exciting story. It’s a sad story. It’s an amazing story that is still unfolding. But if you walk today into any of the shops of Amman’s “mobile phone district” near the 7th Circle, you might not even feel that there is a whole saga around the…
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Taj Mall opens: the (still dusty) crown of Jordan’s shopping?
The opening of a major mall in Jordan in this post-financial-crisis era is certainly an event to watch. We live in very different times compared to, say, 2005, when we were awash in Gulf money and grand real estate dreams. Can developers and retailers pull off another mall in a market were people are…
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Testing Ecto
Just downloaded Ecto 3, the latest version of my favorite blogging application. Let’s see if it works.
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Shopkeepers from hell: How Amman takes out the fun from shopping (and what this says about us)
Shopping in Amman often can be an unhappy experience. In many shopping situations, one has to deal with one of the following traits (or a combination of them): unfriendliness, ignorance, rip-off, lack of empowerment, arrogance and sheer stupidity. Take, for example, the latest shopping incident my wife had to endure. Around a week ago she…
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A universal logo for human rights: vote for your favorite now
A few months ago I was appointed as a jury member of an amazing global design competition. The aim: to create a universally accepted logo for human rights. Peace has its symbol. Religions have their symbols. Global non profits and corporations also have their all-present symbols. But universal human rights, which have become part of…
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Can’t install Mac OS X Lion, because of “no Recovery HD” problem? This might work
I am writing this blog post just to find some meaning in the agony of three frustrating nights trying to install Mac OS X Lion on my kids’ Mac Mini. The Mac Mini (running Snow Leopard, updated) has a Bootcamp partition on which we have Windows XP installed. This seems to be the source of…