Technology Bloggers

Improve your cooking experience with an app

22nd August 2011 26 Replies RonF

Having a tough time inside your kitchen? Cooking is not an easy task, especially for those who feel it is strenuous and time-consuming. Favorite Recipes is the app that changes those notions and adds a new dimension to the overall cooking experience.

Developed by CulinartMedia Inc. for iCook2day, Favorite Recipes has a bunch of delicious recipes with clear explanations on how to prepare the dishes. Their collection is divided into categories like soups, salads, seafoods etc. On choosing a particular recipe, you can easily add it to the menu list by checking the orange circle given alongside.

Preparing a dish is really exciting as each recipe has awesome images and details like cooking time, preparation time and the level of difficulty. You can see the ingredients for each recipe and easily add them to your shopping cart by checking the required ingredients.

There is an option called ‘Serve‘ on the top right corner of the screen. It indicates the quantity of ingredients needed to cook a particular dish for a certain number of people. This ingredient calculator provides options to cook for only 4 or 6 people. It would have been good if there was more flexibility so that users could have a wider choice, may be from 2 to 10 people.

I also noticed that the app crashed in this particular area when I tapped the ‘Cancel‘ button.

The ‘Directions‘ tab gives you an explanation of the steps to be followed while cooking. You can see the text version in the landscape mode and text with associated images in the portrait mode, which is a cool idea from developers. The ‘Shopping List‘ is a convenient option to collect all the ingredients you need to purchase for different dishes. You could place your order via Email or take your list along with you when you go shopping. Ingredients which you already have at home can be easily removed from your list.

‘Menu‘ option is similar to the add to favorites section, where you can add recipes to the menu thereby deciding on the dishes you will be cooking for the day. Apart from all these great features in the app, there is a collection of Chef Michael’s cooking videos! This section has a list of dishes with detailed videos on the making of each recipe. It’s quite less in number and I feel a version update with more new recipes and videos would be welcomed.

This app is well-designed with beautiful photos of finished recipes, high-quality videos and some interesting features. The developers should have kept the user’s perspective in mind while developing the app’s interface. Apart from some minor bugs like the app’s tendency to crash, Favorite Recipes is a much recommended one!

You can download the Favorite Recipes app here.

Is One-Factor Authentication Really Sufficient?

20th August 2011 6 Replies Alan

In the analogue world, we identify ourselves by our national identity card which consists of basic information such as name, address, date of birth, and a unique ID number.

However this cannot be done in the digital world. Whenever you go online, even your name is not commonly used for identification. What commonly used is the username and password and these two are the basic criteria of a one-factor authentication.

The one-factor authentication is also known as ‘something you know’. Today we have more than one factor when it comes to authentication and it is applied by using a software or hardware device as part of your authentication. This make up the second factor and it is known as ‘something you have’. There is also third factor which is still not popularly used is the third factor or also known as ‘something you are’.
The reason of having so many factors in authentication is that the one-factor authentication is not sufficient for a sensitive transaction’s security. It is vulnerable to the traditional ‘Brute-Force’ attack that it is still useful today simply because computers today are extremely fast and it can even be done not only using CPU but also GPU.

The other weakness of one-factor authentication is that it is extremely vulnerable to ‘Password Reuse’ attack. There are not many users who change their password frequently or use different password for different online account. As a result, any username and passwords that are hacked can be possibly used from time to time on different website.

So now, do you perform your online banking transaction with just username and password? Think twice before you put your online banking account at risk.

Even for certain two factor devices, they are vulnerable to phishing attack. With the increasing cybercrime rate, we should focus more in our IT security. Especially for online banking account users, do think of your safety if you are still with one-factor authentication on that.

Why you should use and update CommentLuv

19th August 2011 30 Replies Christopher Roberts

Just to let you know this is my (Christopher Roberts’s) 50th post on Technology Bloggers!

CommentLuv is a fantastic plugin which helps commenters get more out of their commenting experience.

Technology Bloggers has the CommentLuv plugin installed and enabled. This means that when you comment here, you get to ‘show off’ one of your recent articles by ticking the CommentLuv box, and because we are a dofollow blog, that also gives you a dofollow link back to your article.

I believe that using CommentLuv makes your commenting system more fair, and therefore increases your commenters, good PR and subsequently traffic.

As a commenter, to use it all you need to do is input your URL in the normal URL field, and then tick the CommetLuv box. If you are a registered CommentLuv member then the plugin will go to your feed and bring up your latest posts. If you are not registered, it will spider your site for an RSS feed and then return the posts from that.

So CommentLuv is great for commenters and blogger. But what’s the customer service like? Well the reply to that is fantastic!

Earlier in the week there was a CommentLuv update (2.90.8) but all wasn’t good. On Wednesday I realised that all comments were showing the CommentLuv text, even if the CommentLuv box was not ticked, or a URL present.

I fiddled with the settings, but it didn’t seem to work. So I contacted the CommentLuv team for support. Now in the past I have contacted plugin owners and it has been weeks until I got a response. However it took Andy Bailey (the plugin author) just 11 minutes!

He left a comment and saw the problem.

He then quickly updated the plugin and sent me it via email, asking me to beta test it, to check the issue was resolved. His second comment (below) shows that it was 🙂

Now unfortunately this means that you now need to update to CommentLuv 2.90.9. Okay, Technology Bloggers is to blame for the update, sorry folks, but hey, it works great here now 🙂

Going to comment? Give CommentLuv a try.
Got a blog? Why not install CommentLuv on it?
Already using CommentLuv? Please update to 2.90.9 🙂

What are your thoughts on CommentLuv?

Thank you Andy Bailey from all of us here at Technology Bloggers 🙂

Technology Bloggers

Championing responsible innovation in partnership with the Bassetti Foundation

Technology Bloggers

Championing responsible innovation in partnership with the Bassetti Foundation

Improve your cooking experience with an app

Is One-Factor Authentication Really Sufficient?

Why you should use and update CommentLuv