Widsets is another application I have found on my travels. It’s a Java based thing which gives you a dashboard onto which you can put different widgets added either from the dashboard itself or via the website.
The strange thing is, I’d have thought this would have taken off a lot more than it has. There isn’t even a widget for Facebook which you’d perhaps expect. There’s a few mini-games like Sudoku, Minesweeper and that Helicopter game. There are a hand full of one-site RSS readers, like the BBC News one or the Techcrunch one. But apart from those few, nothing really jumps out as being amazingly useful or interesting..
It’s pretty slow to load up and slows down again in order to connect to the Internet to see if you’ve picked any more widgets since you last loaded it and to update the content of the RSS readers. It seems like a bit of a let down all in all. Oh well..
P.S. I finished writing this a couple of nights ago and scheduled the post to be published automatically. At the time of publishing, I’ll be at Alton Towers
If you’ve ever played Liero, you’ll know that worms-style real time games are a lot of fun. Take that and mix it up with the graphics from Chase Ace 2 and you’ve pretty much got Teeworlds.
There are less weapons than Liero had back in the day, just the close-quarters hammer (which reminds me of when you pick up the hammer in Super Smash Brothers), a pistol, a shotgun, a laser gun (think rail gun from Quake but it ricochets) and a grenade launcher. You can’t make tunnels into the maps either..
There are clients for Windows, Linux and Mac which is always a massive plus for these type of games. The amount of online servers running is decent, you can easily jump into a game (trouble is, they’re all pros and if it’s your first time you get absolutely annihilated as you try and figure out the controls). I changed jump to up, rather than space but whatever floats your boat. I noticed a couple of graphics glitches when connecting to a couple of servers but most of them seem fine. Anyway, it’s really addictive and a lot of fun. Don’t waste too much time on it!!
I have found a killer app for my phone. This is one reason why I went for the N95 8GB in the first place, for software like this to crop up and make it well worth the investment! WalkingHotSpot turns a wifi-enabled smart phone (like mine) into a wifi router! They’ve just released a trial version. It’s pretty much install, fill in a couple of settings and run. It sets up an ad-hoc wifi network, which can be secured if need be. The trial version allows only 1 connection at a time. I had a small issue with it not working initially but I was using the wrong Internet connection settings on the phone, oops. (Everything else connects via the other lot of settings, so who knows what the difference is.) It works like a dream now, so I might be able to use a bit more of that monthly 120mb I get from Vodafone.
I noticed when I loaded sionide.net, that the header image was quite poor quality. Apparently most 3G/GPRS traffic is filtered through a lossy HTTP proxy in order to cut down on the amount of traffic you use. It was also fairly slow when I tested it just now but I don’t live in an area covered by 3G..
No more messing about with annoying sharing the phones Internet connection over Bluetooth or across a USB cable, something I never even bothered to get working because it looked so.. needlessly complex. This is the perfect solution for “proper” Internet, when out and about.
Okay, I know the site isn’t really dead but it’s dead to me…! *cries* And only because I live in the UK. Pandora got threatened asked nicely to stop people from outside the US using their service a while ago. Quite a long while ago actually so this is news to no one but…
I found a replacement.. kind of. It’s not the same but MeeMix.com does the same kind of thing as Pandora used to. Sure, you could get on a proxy server based in the US to circumvent Pandora’s IP filtering but I’ve found that to be extremely unreliable and slow.
Guess how I found Meemix though? Via a Facebook advert. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing! The interface is kind of clunky and overly flash-based. They’re trying to make it more of a social network type site which is horrible so steer clear of that bit of it. I don’t know if it works using just user responses to decide what song to play next or some elaborate algorithms but hey, it works in the UK so whatever.
Actually, MeeMix has some pretty neat stuff which Pandora didn’t have.. The “mood control” bit allows you to fiddle with two settings which change the selection of tracks. “Surprise Me” and “Pulse”. The higher you set the “Surprise Me” slider, the more likely songs selected are going to Surprise you. *BOO* <- Not like that. The higher “Pulse” is the more the selections go “party time” and the lower it’s set, the more relaxing. Also, MeeMix has integrated YouTube videos of the current song a click away and believe-it-or-not a bunch of links to share the content on your favouritesocial network.
It’s okay, but it’ll never fill the void Pandora has left behind…
Now there is something I always ask myself, is there anything worth watching on TV tonight? Probably not but I can never remember what night the Apprentice is on or when…
My quest to find a decent application or website for TV listings has been going on for a while now… But I think I’ve finally found something I like!
Available from Sourceforge, for Windows and Linux it’s a pretty neat piece of software that’ll has an annoying manual method of selecting channels which took me ages. It also takes ages to download updates from wherever their TV listings are sourced. It’s a good idea but no offence, it’s ugly.
If it’s only a few select shows you want to know about, including ones from America. This one is good because you can filter by show rather than channel but not everything is on there. It tends to be only popular shows, Lost, 24 etc..
It’s simple and looks pretty good, shows are colour coded by genre and best of all you can select what TV package you’ve got (Virgin in my case) and it’ll display all your channels so you don’t have to go through and manually select them all. Hovering over a show gives a bit of information about it.. You can extend the grid to show up to 9 hours of TV all on the same page and you can check out what’s on up to a week in the future.
Haha, see what I’ve done there.. Like Valerie.. If you don’t then nevermind! Moving on..
Bit of back story first. Many moons ago I started a wiki for the Questionable Content community to document a fictional handbook for the AnthroPC which is often featured in the comic. Pintsize in the comic is an AnthroPC. Kind of a personal computer, with a personality, a little robot which on occasion does all the things a normal PC does. You must read the comic to understand…
I also made an album in my Gallery install to showcase some QC wallpapers made by the community.
Anyway, all that was back in 2005! When sionide.net was hosted on a different server. So what happened? Well, sionide.net had to move servers and there wasn’t a backup. Hence the reasons for moving the blog to the root directory amongst other things. The wiki had kind of died and was over-run with spam (p.s. I hate wiki spammers almost as much as blog comment spammers, if not more!) The gallery was dead too..
And it turns out, the two topics I started on the Questionable Content Forum are *still* on the front page with now over 40,000 views each, people are running into my site and hitting 404 errors looking for the AnthroPC wiki and Wallpapers gallery.
It’s good news for those people and anyone who reads QC because they’re BACK!!
I’ve installed a Mediawiki and this time, I’ve installed a spam filter so we’ll see how that goes. After a few tries at installing Gallery2 I gave up. It’s impossible to install, there’s too much stuff that can go wrong. I almost had a working install using version 1.5.7 but it wasn’t generating thumbnails properly. Possibly something to do with imagemagick, I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve gone with Plogger this time.. A very simple PHP based gallery which actually installed first time! …Enjoy.
This might be the start of a new meme type thing, or perhaps just one that’s been done hundreds of times before. So, take a screenie of your desktop and trackback to this post… We’ll see how many tidy and untidy desktops we get linked back.
How tidy is your desktop?
Mine isn’t! ^
They say a messy desktop is very reflective of a messy personality. Actually they don’t but it sounds like something “they” would say! For me it is only partly true, I’d say. My desktop is covered in mainly downloaded video/audio/image content, screenshots (ironically), scripts I’m testing at the moment, folders full of stuff I have yet to properly organise nicely into my home directory, random files of interest and just rubbish! Time for a spring clean I think…
My friend Max is a curse on Ubuntu. Whenever he’s near my laptop, something goes wrong, something crashes or doesn’t work the way it normally does. It’s okay though, I have the same effect on his Vista monstrosity.
It’s nice that Ubuntu supports bluetooth out of the box, I have had a little bluetooth icon in the notification area since I installed but what does that actually do? Right-clicking it gives some options and a “Browse Device” window which throws up an error when you try and connect to any nearby bluetooth device. Something like this;
“obex://[nn:uu:mm:bb:ee:rr]” is not a valid location.
I was trying to bluetooth a file to my phone and Max’s phone. Well, you’d assume it would be fairly simple, something like right-clicking on the file, then Send To, choosing Bluetooth and then selecting a device. No. Not by default anyway. To get this functionality I had to follow these instructions.
Well, the latest K2 nightly build works nicely with WordPress 2.5 and the upgrade went smoothly! Don’t worry, I had plenty of backups just in case it all went Pete Tong. (speaking of Superstar DJs, I’m going to see Armin Van Buuren in Nottingham at the end of May! Get in!)
Must admit to loving the new WordPress, a lot. So much has changed and it’s all for the better.
I’ve only lost my “Asides” post list from the right-hand column there. Nevermind about that for now though, I didn’t use it all that much.
Akismet has caught 52 spam for you since you first installed it.
Spam is probably one of the things I hate most about the Internet. I despise it, who doesn’t?! It’s a lose-lose situation and yet it thrives. Companies out there are paying people money (probably quite a lot too) to spam which while not illegal is a really unethical business practice but where’s the return on their investment? Unless I’m the only person who doesn’t click on all the links in my spam emails and comments? How can it be worth their while spending all this money for something which 99.99% of their target audience are going to ignore… and so some people go to extraordinary lengths to filter spam, the spammers still slave away figuring out ways to do their evil deed.
It’s interesting watching the spam start to build up on here since it has moved to the new location. I got hit by 20 or so very similar comment spams yesterday and 5 since I removed those just now. Akismet was doing a perfect job of protecting against them but no spam filtering system can be perfect and it let one through the net, I suppose I can’t complain though.
It’s shocking that, according to Akismet statistics, only 10% of blog comments are ham (aka. not spam!)… So keep sending me your ham, not literally obviously - that wouldn’t work. Just be aware, I’ve got comment moderation enabled for your first-time ham comments but any comments after that should get through without a hitch
I have found a killer app for my phone. This is one reason why I went for the N95 8GB in the first place, for software like this to crop up and make it well worth the investment! 
Spam Increase
Spam is probably one of the things I hate most about the Internet. I despise it, who doesn’t?! It’s a lose-lose situation and yet it thrives. Companies out there are paying people money (probably quite a lot too) to spam which while not illegal is a really unethical business practice but where’s the return on their investment? Unless I’m the only person who doesn’t click on all the links in my spam emails and comments? How can it be worth their while spending all this money for something which 99.99% of their target audience are going to ignore… and so some people go to extraordinary lengths to filter spam, the spammers still slave away figuring out ways to do their evil deed.
It’s interesting watching the spam start to build up on here since it has moved to the new location. I got hit by 20 or so very similar comment spams yesterday and 5 since I removed those just now. Akismet was doing a perfect job of protecting against them but no spam filtering system can be perfect and it let one through the net, I suppose I can’t complain though.
It’s shocking that, according to Akismet statistics, only 10% of blog comments are ham (aka. not spam!)… So keep sending me your ham, not literally obviously - that wouldn’t work. Just be aware, I’ve got comment moderation enabled for your first-time ham comments but any comments after that should get through without a hitch