Two Spanish children are being treated for addiction to mobile phones, in what is thought to be first case of its kind in the country. The children, 12 and 13, were admitted to a mental health clinic by their parents because they could not carry out normal activities without their phones.

The children were failing at school and, behind their parents’ backs, were deceiving relatives to try to get money to pay for the phone cards. Both spent an average of six hours a day on the phone, talking, texting or playing video games.

Dr Maite Utgès, director of the Child and Youth Mental Health Centre in Lleida, north-east Spain, where the children are being treated, said: “It is the first time we have used a specific treatment to cure a dependence on the mobile phone.

“They both showed disturbed behaviour and this exhibited itself in failure at school. They both had serious difficulties leading normal lives.” She added: “When it reaches such a level of dependency it is not easy for children of this age to suddenly stop using the phone.”

Before they started treatment both had their own phones for 18 months and were not controlled by their parents.

“One paid for their phone by getting money from the grandmother and other family members, without explaining what they were going to do with it,” said Utgès.

The children have been learning to live without their phones for the past three months, but Utgès, a child psychiatrist, said they might need at least a year of treatment to get them off the “drug”.

Dr José Martìnez-Raga, an expert in addictions at a centre near Valencia, said the cases may be the “tip of the iceberg”.

“The parents have been very brave in getting the children treated. Like video-game addiction and other substance addictions, it is what is called a silent disease, as no one says anything about the problem,” he said. “This could definitely be a danger in the future.”

He said in cases like this children failed at school, were irritable, withdrawn and antisocial. “They only live for video games or, in this case, mobile phones. It also means they start hunting around for money, like drug addicts. They might steal or lie to pay for their addictions.”

Fears of mobile phone “dependency” have emerged in several countries. Japan has warned parents to limit phone usage because of side effects in children who overuse them. At least two cases have been reported in Britain of young people obsessed by their phones who became depressed when incoming calls or messages dropped off.

“I get about one or two calls a month from parents about this,” Mark Griffiths, a chartered psychologist at Nottingham Trent University, said. “A lot of modern things are not genuine addiction, it’s habitual behaviour. Not having access gives short-term withdrawal symptoms.”

A study last year by the children’s ombudsman in Madrid found that 30% of children between the ages of 11 and 17 felt “extremely oppressed” when their phone was taken away from them. Another study by the Spanish Institute for National Statistics last year found that 65% of children between 10 and 15 had a mobile phone. In 2004 the figure was 45.7%.

Utgès said parents should not allow their children to have mobile phones until they were at least 16.

We really like this simple zoom and screen capture utility- featured by the Download Squad.

A very small file that just does what it says. Useful for cropping detail of images or documents and then pasting them into that client report…

It happens to all of us. As we get older, we find it a bit harder to read the text on our computer screens, or make out fine details on digital images. OneLoupe can help. This tiny Windows utility (like, 22kb tiny), hangs out in your system tray until you need to zoom in on an area of your desktop. Then you just click the OneLoupe icon, move your mouse to the portion of the screen you want to zoom in on, and you too can see a highly pixelated version of any web page, picture, or other media.

The zoom window is resizeable. All you have to do is hit the up, down, right, or left arrow keys on your keyboard to stretch or shrink the window. And you can zoom in and out by hitting the plus or minus buttons or scrolling your mousewheel.

Want to save a zoomed image to your clipboard? Just hit B to save a bitmap and you can paste your image into any program.
Article from The Download Squad

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Tags: desktop, utility, magnifier, tools

Always ready to adopt Open Source alternative solutions the blog post below offer pointers to OS replacement for MS Visio….

I was just reading through an interesting post from Mike Kavis, in which he describes his efforts to use open source software as a way to avoid Microsoft’s products altogether. His post is a follow-up to another one he wrote about his, er, social experiment. Kavis became Microsoft-free by using products such as ThunderbirdOpenOffice for productivity apps, and Firefox for browsing. After chucking Microsoft Office, though, Kavis laments that “there is no answer for Visio.” I beg to differ. There is actually a truly fantastic free, open source alternative to Microsoft’s visualization and diagramming tool: Dia. Take a look at it here. for e-mail,

Dia is very similar to Microsoft’s Visio application, and was developed as part of the GNOME project’s office suite. For anyone going entirely open source, without any Microsoft products, it’s not a bad idea to use GNOME (which comes with a slew of applications) and Dia.

Take a look at the screenshot found at this link for the kinds of useful diagrams and flowcharts you can do in Dia. You can associate multiple diagrams with each other and work on them in tandem.

Also, at left is part of Dia’s pallette of drawing tools, which, as you can see, looks and feels very Windows-like. In fact, the whole program ties in with Windows conventions very closely so people coming to it with Windows application backgrounds will find Dia intuitive.

Like Visio, Dia can export diagrams to many popular file formats, including:

• EPS (Encapsulated PostScript),
• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
• DXF (Autocad’s Drawing Interchange format)
• CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile)
• WMF (Windows Meta File)
• PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
• VDX (Microsoft’s XML for Visio Drawing)

As you can see from the inclusion of WMF and VDX support above, Dia can be used to work with Visio, although it is possible to run into some compatibility problems. In general, if you collaborate with someone who happens to use Visio, there shouldn’t be many roadblocks to sharing. (Visio has a proprietary file format, but it exports to several formats that Dia reads.)

One other nice feature Dia has is that it allows you to print extremely large diagrams in parts on multiple sheets of paper, which can then be combined for a big view of, say, a really complex flowchart. Now, Mike Kavis can go completely Microsoft free, if he so chooses.

This TechCrunch story highlights the further development of Opera, one of our browsers of choice.

We use Flock for information and image retrieval for our projects, but prefer Opera as our ‘field browser’ of choice. Fast , lightweight and with accessibility features already there that do not need additional installation. Read more below…

Opera, the Norwegian-based web browser, has struck a deal with Haute Secure to include malware detection and blocking in the browser’s new 9.5 release. The new version is currently available as a beta, with a final release imminent.

Haute Secure makes software that aggressively monitors and alerts users to malware sites. Besides the version that is being integrated into Opera, Haute is also available as a free plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox. It differentiates itself from other blocking software by analyzing sites on the link level instead of at the domain level. This means that on very large sites like MySpace that contain a combination of legitimate material along with more sinister profiles, pages will be blocked on a case by case basis instead of simply banning the entire MySpace site. For more details, check out our review of their latest version here.

Opera, while not nearly as popular as Internet Explorer or Firefox, has managed to gain something of a cult following since its original launch in 1996. The browser is widely available on mobile devices (and even on the Nintendo Wii). Because Haute has been integrated into Opera’s base code, the security will also be included in updates for these other platforms. The malware protection comes in addition to phishing protection, which the browser introduced in 2006.

This is a great move on Opera’s part, though it isn’t the first browser to integrate some degree of malware protection – FireFox 3 has integrated a similar feature as well (though it uses a different service). Hopefully we’ll see such protection creep across all browsers until it becomes a standard rather than a feature.

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