Mahbub Rabbani

Mahbub Rabbani covers consumer technology for Tech BD — phones, apps, operating systems and the platforms most of the country uses daily. He writes the site’s how-to guides, and tends to judge a product by what it costs to live with rather than what it costs to buy.

Technology

WhatsApp will let you pin your favourite Channels to the top — a small fix for a feature that grew faster than its inbox

Five months after WhatsApp Channels launched, following more than a handful means the ones you care about get buried. A pin icon spotted in…

19 Feb 2024

Technology

14 February: YouTube is born, the QWERTY man is born, CTR becomes IBM and ENIAC meets the press — one date, four foundations

On this day in 2005 three ex-PayPal employees registered a video site that now has 2.5 billion users; in 1819 the inventor of the…

14 Feb 2024

Technology

Google Maps is getting a chatbot: ask it for “a quiet café with good Wi-Fi near Dhanmondi” and it reads the reviews for you

Google is testing a large language model inside Maps that summarises what millions of reviews and photos say about a place, answers…

4 Feb 2024

Technology

30 January: the man who invented the mouse was born, a computer found its first prime numbers, and Windows Vista arrived

Douglas Engelbart, born on this day in 1925, demonstrated the mouse, hypertext and video conferencing in a single 1968 presentation that…

30 Jan 2024

Technology

Six weeks after the first deliveries, a Cybertruck owner has posted its first faults: misaligned panels and a turn signal that misbehaves

Tesla handed over the first ten or so Cybertrucks on 30 November 2023. After about 80 km, an owner known as Nan reported panel gaps along…

15 Jan 2024

Technology

Google is putting Chrome on the dashboard — Android Auto gets a browser, battery forecasts for EVs and, alarmingly, Microsoft Teams

At CES in Las Vegas Google announced that Android Auto will run the Chrome browser, starting in Volvo and Polestar cars, along with live…

12 Jan 2024

Technology

31 December 1999: the night the world waited for its computers to think it was 1900 — Y2K, the bug that cost hundreds of billions and, because of that, did almost nothing

Programmers had saved two digits by writing years as “99”; when the clock turned to “00”, planes, banks and power plants might read it as…

31 Dec 2023

Technology

Make Instagram tell you to stop: how to set a break reminder, a daily limit and a quiet mode — the three settings buried under “Time spent”

Instagram has had a “take a break” reminder since 2021, but it is off by default and four menus deep. Profile → menu → Settings and privacy…

29 Dec 2023

Technology

Messenger turns on end-to-end encryption for everyone — a billion users, four years late, and the first time Meta cannot read what Bangladesh’s biggest chat app says

Since 2016 Messenger’s encryption has been an opt-in “secret conversation” almost nobody used. Meta is now making it the default for all…

7 Dec 2023

Technology

5 December 2005: Bill Gates spends twelve hours in Dhaka — BRAC, icddr,b, the prime minister, and a promise that Windows would speak Bangla. And, ten years earlier, IBM’s Deep Blue

The world’s richest man landed at 7:30 am with Melinda Gates, toured BRAC and icddr,b projects funded by their foundation, met Khaleda Zia…

5 Dec 2023

Technology

YouTube is testing view and like counts that tick up while you watch — no more refreshing, and a small shift in how a video looks popular

In a test spotted by Android Police, the numbers under a video update in real time — views counted as people watch, likes appearing as they…

3 Dec 2023

Technology

1 November: the day Bangladesh’s software industry got an address — the ICT Incubator opens at Karwan Bazar in 2002; the DV lottery goes online in 2003; Tim Cook is born in 1960

In 2002 the science and ICT ministry took seven floors of the BSRS building at 12 Karwan Bazar — 70,000 square feet, always-on power and…

1 Nov 2023