Sometimes, I like the sound of the rain, the ocean or the river while surfing the Net, watching TV or while sleeping.  However, I don’t live near the ocean nor the river.  It doesn’t rain all the time either.

I came across this iPhone / iPad / iPod app (application), Ambient Nature Sounds.  It’s cheap, costs only $0.99.

You can mix the sounds to your liking and set a timer to automatically stop the sounds/s.  Overall, it’s a simple app but it’s useful.

I purchased a Macbook Pro recently and so far I am loving it.  However, there are some things that I miss from Windows or IBM-based PCs:

1. Page Up / Page Down keys
2. Home / End keys
3. Double-click to maximize window (On a Mac, this minimizes the window and I get killed by this all the time so I just disabled it.)
4. Visual Themes! (Apple is so strict with their visual styles eh?  I was hoping to get the OS X Tiger look, to no avail.)

I thought this was going to be a long list.

Later.

A new Google Chrome beta is out.  They say it’s 30% faster, yadda, yadda, yadda.  So far, I only see 2 things I like that matters to me as of now:

1. It now sports a truly working “visited link” color which I found annoying before.
2. Themes! (enough said)  Granted, I don’t think the public can submit themes just yet but the initial set of themes are groovy.  User-submitted themes are mostly crap anyway.

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I  have always wondered what the difference is between Sleep and Hibernate options provided by Windows Vista.

I’ve found out (more of confirmed), they have a common purpose: save the last known state of your computer and quickly load it when awaken.  When you resume work, the last known state is restored.  You don’t have to undergo the slow process of powering on your computer. Read more »

IE8 is finally out of beta.  Aesthetically, IE8 has improved – the bulging tabs (for tabbed browsing) are replaced by a more subtle gradient version.  Functionality-wise, I believe there’s nothing significant to note about.  The other browsers have most, if not all, of them.

In my opinion, browser wars are now reduced to performance (page rendering speed and crash prevention), security (passwords and other private data) and user interface aesthetics.

I’m happy with the aesthetic improvement of IE8 but I still don’t like that the refresh and stop buttons are on the right side of the browser.  I have stopped using IE (as my favorite browser) when Firefox came along.  I still use IE8 for testing though. Read more »