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Monthly Archive for March, 2008
Source: WikipediaI am writing this entry to test Zemanta - it’s an extension for WordPress and other blogging platforms which automagically suggests images (from Flickr) and links to related articles on whatever you’re writing about. Seems like pretty clever stuff to me. It’s a very simple install, no messing about with WordPress plugin installs, it’s just a Firefox extension.. So after writing 300 characters it goes and looks for suggestions or you can force it to look for suggestions. At the bottom it comes up with suggested links and tags, when I click “Apply All” it added links to Zemanta and WordPress above all by itself. That’s pretty neat. It has found some related articles, such as the one on Techcrunch from which I found Zemanta in the first place. Clicking it makes that “Related articles” box down there appear. And now let’s add an image. There it is over on the right, simple! This post is officially Zemified!!
Been working full time these past couple of weeks, got a few posts in the pipeline though. This blog isn’t dead yet! For some reason the visual editor on my WordPress install decided to not work and I couldn’t be bothered with fixing it but it’s working again now.
In other news, Chris Moyles, (self-proclaimed) saviour of Radio 1, is off on holiday for two weeks. I’m not a huge fan of Scott Mills either, so does anyone have any morning radio suggestions?
Gotta love WordPress… With the K2 theme I’ve mentioned previously, you can have a category known as “Asides” for just posting random short entries which don’t require a whole post of their own - you can see mine over on the right of the page, I’ve renamed the category to “By The Way”.
However, what’s the point if these Asides still appear in the RSS feed? I figured the whole point is they’re out of the way, tucked over on the right there… Luckily, WordPress is very easy to customise and it was simply a case of popping some code in a file to remove Aside entries from the feed which I found after a quick bit of googling. 
720p video rocks!! Such amazing quality!
Thought I’d write about my current hardware situation, which is really quite dire…
Sphinx - Novatech Saturn Pro
Specifications
- 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium
- 512mb RAM
- 40GB Hard Disk
- Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)
Sphinx was my main laptop, I say was because I can’t really use it any more. I’m pretty sure it’s got a problem with cooling because it slows to a stand still after 10 minutes use and having any more than a couple of programs running is difficult. I’ve seen the CPU temp rocket to like 90 degrees which can’t be good. But it is 3 years old so, perhaps coming to the end of it’s useful life. I still haven’t upgraded to Gutsy yet either.
Zombie - Sony Vaio PCG-7V1M
Specifications
- 1.66 GHz Intel Core2
- 2 GB RAM
- 140GB Hard Disk
- Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy)
Why the name? Well my housemate declared it dead and proceeded to claim for a new one on his insurance. Tut tut.. It’s got a major dent on the bottom, right where the RAM is - surprisingly, the RAM still works okay. It’s also missing the UP key which is a bit of a pain.
The right shift key is also broken, it works but keeps becoming detached every now and again. Apart from that, it’s in perfect working condition! I think his major problem was Vista, it ran like a dog. Everything was ultra slow on it. Since then, I took it apart, cleaned it out with a can of compressed air (fun!), there was so much dust and crap inside it. He had a habit of leaving it on his bed, covering the heat sink, no wonder it ran so slowly. I’ve now wiped it and installed Ubuntu 7.10 to find it runs perfectly, as you’d expect with those kind of specs, even Compiz with all the flashy effects etc…
More hardware another day I think.
In this day and age, many people have said the future is the mobile Internet. My phone has a web browser (2 actually), even my old phone had a web browser of sorts. Of course, the other thing to boom during 2007 was social networking. And cameras on phones now are so advanced, people aren’t forking out for a separate digital camera. Even my old phone had a better camera on it than my parent’s old digital camera and the 5 mega pixel camera on my N95 means I won’t be buying a proper digital camera any time soon…
So, what do you get when you mash all those things up? Wouldn’t it be handy to be able to upload photos from your phone directly to your favourite social networking site?? No mucking about with USB cables or bluetoothing your photos across to your laptop which is just frustrating. So what’s the solution?
ShoZu is one such service I’ve found. When I first tried it before Christmas, the application was very intrusive - asking if I wanted to upload every single photo I’d taken, as soon as I’d taken it, when the answer was usually no. So I ditched it. But the latest version has got rid of all that and is definitely heading in the right direction now. Now it’s simply a case of firing up the ShoZu application and selecting which images from my gallery I want to upload. My account on shozu.com is linked in my Facebook account, allowing me to upload photos straight from my phone! It’s not just Facebook either, ShoZu also supports uploading videos directly to YouTube and other supported sites include Flickr and even your own FTP server. If you’re not on an unlimited data plan, ShoZu will even compress your photos so they won’t cost too much to upload. I tend to stick to using the wifi to upload photos, saving my data for other things..
It’s brilliant to be able to upload random photos, of whatever, wherever, whenever, without it taking a bunch of effort. One-click mobile photo uploading.. The future of the Internet is here!
p.s. I read that ShoZu kept uploading photos taken after someone’s phone was stolen, which helped a bit in identifying the culprit! Haha, see http://shozu.vox.com/library/post/26112007044.html
What a cracking film, pretty much all that you need from a quality British flick. Unfortunately for Jason Statham he does seem to play the same character in every single film he’s ever done but that doesn’t stop me from loving him! Definitely worth getting on DVD when it comes out, if you’re into 1970s cars and bank robbing.
Comment Spam
Previously, when I moved my blog from sionide.net/wp I thought I’d avoided the hundred or so comment spams I was getting daily- however, even when I wasn’t actively posting I noticed a few random comment spams trickling through. These bots just don’t stop do they? I’ll stick to Akismet now, it seems to do a good job. Also, please be aware comment moderation is enabled so don’t post twice. I shall look into other spam fighting techniques and report back.
No, I’m not going to climb the mountain. After much umm’ing and arr’ing, too’ing and fro’ing; I’ve settled on the K2 theme for this blog. K2 is a take on the infamous Kubrick theme, with loads of added functionality which I’ll be mucking around with in due time. I think it looks pretty cool as well.
I’m going to see The Bank Job tonight, I’ll post my thoughts later…
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