Mobile Carrier Charges

This is an old box which contained a Nokia phone from a now defunct Esat Digifone. Irish Businessman Denis O’Brien started it and sold it to BT and made a fortune (and after got embroiled in a tribunal on accusations of impropriety). It is now called O2.I thought we got ripped off now with call charges now, how nostalgia can prove one wrong: ...

May 19, 2011 · 1 min · Neil Grogan

Waterfall

Took this picture while out walking my dogs. It was taken not far from Leixlip Louisa Bridge Railway Station, not far from Leixlip, Co. Kildare. It was taken with an iPhone 4 and edited in Instagram.

May 14, 2011 · 1 min · Neil Grogan

Cleaning your PS3's fans?

Below is a neat trick to clean out your Playstation 3’s fans if they become a bit noisy. Before I have used a can of compressed air, but this method is really neat and definitely lowered the fan sound emanating from my PS3. <embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/JhU4_Rm0GQU&fs=1&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed> Thanks goes to my former classmate Alan Smith for alerting me to this, Thanks Al!

May 11, 2011 · 1 min · Neil Grogan

GeoCampus

For my final year project, I have done a web application on the concept of replacing traditional web applications. I picked an area I was deeply interested in, smart phones. I am an avid iPhone user and I have bought Android phones also, they are great devices I can’t imagine not having now that they are here. As part of my thesis I touched on the old way to develop apps, using Symbian C++ or J2ME and we’ve come a long, long way since then. For those interested, I will publish copy of my thesis after November 2011. I won’t publish it here just yet, as the examiners have yet to pour over the contents and grade it. ...

May 9, 2011 · 2 min · Neil Grogan

Sennheiser HD595 Review

During last summer I purchased a set of Sennheiser HD595’s - a great product for Audiophiles. I have to say for someone who constantly listens to a lot of music - good headphones like these are a must. They are expensive for sure, but Sennheiser do seem to have a great durability and solid build quality. This is my first set of such high quality headphones, so bear that in mind - I can’t speak for other manufacturers in this space. ...

March 5, 2011 · 3 min · Neil Grogan

iPhone 4 Review

I purchased the iPhone 4 shortly after its release in Summer 2010. I have obviously been so quick to review this device, the iPhone 5 is upon us! My philosophy for reviewing items is you have to live with them. Well boy have I lived with my iPhone 4! As I write this on it, I do marvel at how good the hardware is. I’ve dropped this extremely expensive device on occasions too numerous to count, so luckily it is designed well. ...

February 18, 2011 · 3 min · Neil Grogan

Thoughts on IPv6

A multitude of websites have been reporting the impending doom of ipv4 exhaustion, which is going to happen soon. All the top level address’ will be gone, but the regional registries will still have stocks of address’ in to 2011. As a user of ipv6, I thought I could share sone thoughts/insights on the events ahead… Below is a very good video which one of my favourite tech shows, Hak5 made with an IPv6 Consultant, Joe Klein. ...

February 9, 2011 · 3 min · Neil Grogan

Output Percentage of File (Bash code)

I wrote this script recently for a friend in a job who needed to output a certain percentage of a log file, but no more and no less. This was in Linux using bash, so I had a go at writing a solution, which you see below. Posting this up in case it’s useful to anyone else! # !/bin/sh # Public Domain, by Neil Grogan 2010 # Script to output last 30% of file by lines OLDFILE=&quot;oldlog.txt&quot; NEWFILE="newlog.txt" PERCENT=0.7 #Use wc to count lines LINES=$(wc -l $OLDFILE | awk '{ print $1}') #Linespercent = 2 decimal places, lines by percent, round to whole LINESPERCENT=$(echo "scale=2; $LINES*$PERCENT" | bc | xargs printf "%1.0f" ) # Use tail to get last 30% and output, can use tail -s with sleep time to have it run on sched. tail -n $LINESPERCENT $OLDFILE >> $NEWFILE

February 5, 2011 · 1 min · Neil Grogan

Blogging like a H4x0r

Apologies to those visiting my site recently because: It hasn’t been updated recently I have been changing hosts with it Let me explain both of these! I have been searching for a good blogging engine ever since I have started blogging. I have yet to find the perfect one :) Some have come close in completeness (WordPress) or price and ease of use (blogger), but none has been all-encompassing. I messed around with a blogging engine called Jekyll about a year and a half ago, but I never ended up deploying it. I had my website most recently on Google Sites, and the ease of use was pretty good, but themes-wise it was pretty frustrating, also they force an ugly footer on all pages, yuck. ...

January 31, 2011 · 3 min · Neil Grogan

My Top Chrome Extensions

Below I present some very useful extensions I use while using Google Chrome, in no particular order. Adblock Blocks ads just like Firefox extension and makes the web less junky to look at. You can whitelist good ads, and an argument could be had your harming websites revenue stream, but a lot of nasty tricks such as spyware, malware have used ads as a vector to spread. Not least the dishonesty some sites use in splitting up articles in to 10 pages to pump ad revenue. KB SSL Enforcer ...

November 22, 2010 · 3 min · Neil Grogan