Posts

I recently got a hold of my Christmas present in advance, a new Nokia 6234 from Vodafone Ireland. I did a short video test, maybe this could be the start of my VideoBlogging career: Well maybe not! But I do hope to have more videos on my blog! The video is of me describing my living quarters and about my laptop. I needed to be a bit closer to the phone as hearing me is difficult sometimes (not so in real life!), but basically I just point out what you see and explain the phone won’t sync address+calendar with my macbook :-( (My old phone did just that :-) ). I don’t really mind, bluetooth works a charm and I can exchange files between it. All I need now is a super 2GB mini memory card, for some quick music on the go! ...

I managed after ages of trying hard, to get my NAT transverse to work :-) !! This means the computer sitting in my house should be reachable worldwide at dueyfinster.com. It’s login screen is from Ampache music center, a php+mysql solution to a large music catalogue such as mine. It means (for those who can login :-) ) that my whole collection is streamable, downloadable, rateable and generally all round goodness and what you’d expect from a top class open source media+web application! I am excited about this, as I have already tried it from a remote family members house. Unfortunately it does not work too well half way across the world in the US (speed is *really* slow I have been gleefully informed), but I am not too bothered, upgrades in speed will come with better broadband (which may be years, this is Ireland). I am trying to restrict peoples usage of it at the moment, as I really do not want a letter from my Internet Service Provider! ...

We all want to stop spam and phishing domains, it hurts the Internet and confidence in it. Their is a lot of debate on this issue, even from the registrars. But I believe, as I know there are probably many out their like me, that the Irish Domain Registry have taken this one step too far. One only has to look to Slashdot to see what the rest of the world thinks about our backwards, censorship-driven domain registry. My favourite rule they have about domains is perhaps the one which requires the least amount of bureaucracy: ...

I have a Wiki for messing about! I haven’t found a purpose for it yet, but I’d like to have it all set up incase one day I turn out to need it (maybe for collaboration or something?). If you have any skill at themin' MediaWiki (the most popular wiki software, run but Wikipedia, no less) please, please get in touch! I would do it all myself, but my time is constrained at the moment, but I will eventually do it myself I suppose ;-) ...

Looks like Mactivate got it wrong, it wasn’t the heatsink, as referred to by my earlier post. Looks like I have seen good advice from the Web, never buy a first generation Apple product, until they work out the kinks! I guess Mactivate have been snowed under with heatsink problems, that they never bothered to check other parts of my Macbook, since it is such a common problem.They have ordered me a new “logic board” (I am guessing the PMU like I thought it was ;-) ). In other news Apple released a firmware update for those poor unfortunates that have been suffering Random Shutdown Syndrome (or RSS) for short :-D ). Hopefully I should have it back by this Tuesday (November 7th) plus a new heatsink and logic board…. fingers crossed anyway! ...

Turns out my prediction wasn’t quite correct, it was not the Power Management Unit (PMU), it was the heatsink. Mactivate have informed me they have one on order from Apple, so it will take a bit longer than I anticipated to get my Macbook back. I found this strange as I had not experienced random shutdowns like the ones that have been widely reported across the web. it was like I described in my earlier post, something to do with the battery not being able to charge. Then again, I am no expert on this and their is wide evidence (over 1600 people have identified heatsink as a problem in their Macbooks) that the heatsink is a definite issue. Sounds like good or bad I will have a lot more to say about Apple Computer in the future, thats why I have decided to add them as a category. ...

Reading my favourite tech news site: Slashdot ( /.), I see the Internet Explorer team have sent the Firefox Team a nice cake: One comment I read said it all really: Seems even the IE team knows that IE is dead. As for the ex-lax, bugs, pubes in the cake of course none of that is true. Those things would only be possible if someone at Microsoft actually made the cake, and that’s not how MS does things. They knew they couldn’t make a good cake so they just went out and bought a cake from someone who already knew how to make one and then stuck their logo on it and called it theirs. ...

Well first of all, there has been some blog updates, inspired no less by my Grandfather! He’s at a fragile old age, so he can’t read the screen all too well. This is not a problem however, as he sets all fonts to 16 and higher in Firefox (which is out of beta and into version 2.0!). That got me thinking, as I really struggled to read this page being marginally away from the screen, as I am a [Keratoconus][] sufferer. As a result, I have enlarged all fonts in my blog, in an effort to make them more readable… I encourage everyone to do the same, or at least follow the [web standards][] so that it can be properly auto resized by browsers. ...

This Ladies and Gents, needs no introduction, for you all know George W. “Dubya” Bush. What you may not know is the Daily Show, which is a popular news satire show in the US. If you have time I recommend you have a look on YouTube for more videos…

I haven’t posted in a while :-( Ah well here it goes: Well we’ve all seen the news Google has bought YouTube for a reported 1.65 Billion US dollars, the deal was reportedly sealed at at Dennys in California (gotta admire that style and sophistication). I think its way overvalued Youtube, at 24m per employee! We all know it serves 100m videos a day, but it has been living off measly venture capital and hasn’t got a verifiable steady income stream, which I guess is where Google enter with Adwords…. ...