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
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.
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.
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.
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.
and I wish more people knew about it! I don’t know how many times I’ve been invited to those ridiculousgroups 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.
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.
What’s 
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