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Questionable Content Gallery/Wiki

Published

Simon

on April 16, 2008

in Comics and Internet

. 1 Comment

Pintsize!

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.

Bambuser

Published

Simon

on April 12, 2008

in Internet, Nokia and Video

. 0 Comments

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.

Firefox Extensions I Can’t Live Without

Published

Simon

on April 8, 2008

in Firefox and Internet

. 1 Comment

Adblock Plus

I think everyone has this on their list. Adblocking is a definite must-have.

Auto Copy

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.

CustomizeGoogle

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..

Google Browser Sync

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.

Smart Bookmarks Bar

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.

Fission

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.

Tab Clicking Options

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.

Tabbrowser Preferences

Yet another too set in my ways to change. This extensions adds a bunch more options to the standard

Tabs Open Relative

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.

—

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.

Muxtape Recorded

Published

Simon

on April 6, 2008

in Internet and Music

. 1 Comment

I’ve made a mixtape, over at muxtape.com - ~~inspired by~~ just copied the idea from Glenn. Heh…

Check it out at http://sionide.muxtape.com/ - it’s a mixture of a few tunes I like, quite a mixture of genres. I hope you find something on there you like.

Facebook Find

Published

Simon

on April 5, 2008

in Internet and Rants

. 2 Comments

Time for the first of many rants on sionide.net, inspired after finding this rather interesting little gem on Facebook…

http://www.facebook.com/mobile/?phonebook

and I wish more people knew about it! I don’t know how many times I’ve been invited to those ridiculous groups where some bumbling fool has lost or had their mobile stolen or dropped it down the toilet and so requires everyone’s phone numbers. If you ever want to have a drunken laugh prank calling people at 4am, go on Facebook search for “phone numbers” and narrow the search to Groups only. Displaying 1 - 10 out of over 500 group results for: phone numbers Yes, people actually post their supposedly private phone numbers on publicly available web pages?! Dial 141 followed by a random phone number and tell whoever picks up they’re an idiot for posting their number on Facebook.

Years ago, you’d need to purchase an odd looking gadget to backup the contents of your sim card. These days, phones are smart, they can connect to the Internet and back themselves up! But I appreciate not everyone is going to bother with backing up.
So if everyone used the built-in mobile phonebook feature of Facebook, put their mobile numbers on their profile and restricted that information to Friends Only (assuming, of course, people don’t actually friend randoms) then the ~~world~~ social network would be a much better place.

Blood, Sweat And Tea to hit the Airwaves

Published

Simon

on April 2, 2008

in Internet

. 0 Comments

Originally uploaded by Random_Reality

Wow. One of my favourite books, “Blood, Sweat And Tea” by one of my favourite bloggers, Paramedic Tom Reynolds has been adapted into a play for BBC Radio 4 starring one of my favourite actors, Martin Freeman /and/ Liz White (her off of Life on Mars if you didn’t know). I can’t wait! Tune in this Friday at 9pm or catch it on Listen Again.

p.s. I posted this from inside Flickr. There’s a “Blog this” button. Quite clever but I’ll have to add links and stuff afterwards, let’s see how it turns out.

WordPress Upgrade Woes

Published

Simon

on April 1, 2008

in Blog, Internet and Life

. 2 Comments

A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now.

And it looks very appealing too!

If you’re using K2, as I am - don’t upgrade to WordPress 2.5 just yet. It breaks because K2 doesn’t use WordPress widgets, in favour of it’s own set of widgets. It’s a good thing I backed everything up this time!

The upgrade causes this error…

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget()

when you try to display the admin dashboard. I googled a bit and found a post which kind of fixed the problem but not quite. The altered code appeared at the top of every page. After jumping in the #wordpress IRC channel to see what was what, I was advised to restore the backup and wait. So that’s what I’ve done and what I will do.

UPDATE

Well I waited and got impatient because WordPress 2.5 just looks that good! And it is!! I upgraded my K2 to the latest nightly version and then upgraded WordPress, it worked fine. Read about it here.

In other news…

I’m packing my bags to head home for a week. My train is at 1pm (BST) Tuesday and if you like, you can track the progress of my journey via bliin.com - zoom to Norwich and look for the green circle moving south! It’ll be updated in real-time using the GPS in my phone. I have a draft post about bliin which I’ll finish off and publish sometime when I’m back home.

Zemanta

Published

Simon

on March 28, 2008

in Blog and Internet

. 0 Comments

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!!