FixMyStreet.com is one of the coolest websites I’ve found in a long time.. The other week I noticed that a street light on my road remained on during daylight hours and seeing as I had nothing better to do, I set about trying to get it fixed. Wayne told me about fixmystreet.com so I thought I’d try it out. You can register a fault on the site by selecting the location on the map and it does all the leg work involved with emailing the council about it. Interestingly, it doesn’t use Google Maps but a more detailed map which includes stuff like trees and pretty much any building so you can pinpoint the precise location of a problem with much greater accuracy than Google Maps would offer. You can upload a photo along with your report.. So that’s what I did, I got an email from the council confirming that they’d logged the problem. Low and behold about a week later a van came around and they fixed it.
Archive for the 'Internet' Category
I just registered a Twitter account, if only to make sure I got my username before someone else does, known as “land grabbing” - some say this Twitter lark is the new Facebook but I’m not so sure. Maybe I’ll use it, maybe I won’t. It’s pointless without anybody to follow or be followed by..
In other web 2.0 news, I’ve stopped uploading photos to Facebook because the 60 photos per album limit is just annoying. I’m moving over to Flickr for random photo uploads from my phone, using ShoZu of course.. So, check out my photo stream.
Blog integration of both Twitter and Flickr to come when I can bothered setting it all up!
It’s got clients for Windows, Mac and Linux which means it’s better than other similar projects like Joost which doesn’t support the same channels either.
(p.s. I’m also demonstrating the NextGEN Gallery plugin for Wordpress in this post.. Hence the web2.0 style full-size image if you click it, nice!)
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 
Liero Screenshot (Wikipedia)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 favourite social network.
It’s okay, but it’ll never fill the void Pandora has left behind… 
Why don’t you come on over Gallery!?
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!!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you… The AnthroPC Handbook and the (new and improved) Questionable Content Wallpapers Gallery.
Thank you!
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.
What’s Bambuser? It’s another random application I found which allows my phone (and 62 others) to stream live video to the Internet. Works best over wifi of course, but I’ve not yet tested it on the GPRS/3G connection. According to the website it shouldn’t be a problem but the quality isn’t going to be as good. The lag from real “real” time to video on the page is around 5-10 seconds which is pretty good.
All live streams are recorded and saved to the site, I’ve put a little demo video below to show the video/audio quality. It’s very quick to install and very simple to use. The site isn’t that widely used at the moment so when you start streaming live, your video is on the main page so basically, make sure you’re doing something interesting. I saw a user on there recording an album and streaming them mixing and editing it live so that was quite interesting to watch.
I read YouTube is to start offering live video this year as well. I wonder if they’ll be using the same sorts of technology?
Maybe I’ll start doing a “vlog” or two.. We’ll see so stay tuned.
I think everyone has this on their list. Adblocking is a definite must-have.
This copies selected text to the clipboard automatically, I’ve had this extension for so long I find it really annoying to use a Firefox install without this feature.
Removes Google ads and such-like but one of the coolest features of CustomizeGoogle is it allows you to stream search results, this means it will download a page of results, then as you scroll to the bottom it will download some more. So you just scroll till you find what you’re looking for. Genius..
I have a few different machines and a whole bunch of bookmarks, settings and saved passwords etc. Google Browser Sync allows me to keep all my machines up to date with my latest bookmarks, very handy indeed.
This extension removes the labels from the bookmarks on the bookmarks toolbar just leaving the favicons, this is mainly a space saver. I always move the bookmarks toolbar to the right of the File/Edit…/Help menus so having no labels next to the bookmarks there saves even more space and looks pretty neat too.
Another space saving extension, this time meaning you can remove the status bar at the bottom of the browser for that little bit extra screen real-estate. The address of a link and the loading bar appears within the address bar, similar to Safari.
This is another extension I’ve had for so long I can’t not have it now, I’ve got it set so that double-clicking on a tab closes it. I’ve just done it that way for years and I can’t browse without it.
Yet another too set in my ways to change. This extensions adds a bunch more options to the standard
This should be default behaviour in Firefox. This means when you open a new tab or middle-click a link within a page to open a new tab it opens to the right of the currently selected tab, as opposed to opening at the far right of the tab bar. I usually have quite a few tabs open and this extension means all the tabs from a particular activity are kept together, it makes browsing a lot easier.
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Unfortunately because a couple of these aren’t yet supported for Firefox 3beta, I haven’t upgraded yet although Firefox 3 is looking very nice. I participated in a recent test day. They ask you to download the most recent nightly build and do a bunch of different things to test the browser, then you report back via a web page if everything happens the way it should or if you encounter errors. I didn’t have any issues with the tests I did - which is a good thing but as they say, a successful test is one that finds a fault.
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