Paul O'Flaherty

Three is the magic number… at least for tech support

I  picked up a Huawei E160G USB Modem for the 3 network and must say that I’ve been happily impressed with it so far (despite 3’s crappy 10GB usage cap).

I’m sitting here writing this, in the office at work, which is a complete cell phone dead zone. I have zero reception in here on my cell phone, nor do any of my colleagues and we all have different services.

Yet, here I sit with my 3 modem seeing 4 bars (out of 5) on HSDPA. Most impressive.

One issue I did have was that after purchasing the modem I had to go to my3.three.ie in order to register and activate it and couldn’t as that particular site has been down all day.

A quick, toll free call to 3’s tech support (in India) sorted things out and thankfully the techie at the other end of the line decided to throw the manual out, listen to what I had to say and didn’t make me walk through the usual steps of uninstall, restart, install, restart etc.. etc..

I was up and running in minutes and even managed to enjoy a Skype video call with Sara tonight without any apparent lag or lack of quality.

I am a happy chappie!

Moderator gets me excited about its future

Moderator is an Adobe AIR powered desktop client, written by Daniel Dura, which allows you to moderate your the comments on your WordPress blog without having to fire up your browser and log in.

At the moment it’s features are very basic and beyond the ability to see gravatars next to the comments awaiting moderation it offers no real benefit that can’t be achieved by simply receiving email notifications.

But what really excites me about Moderator is its potential and the future roadmap:

While the near term will be focused on application polish and fixing bugs, some features will be added soon and include replying to comments, viewing unmoderated comments from multiple blogs, and popup alerts to notify of incoming comments.

I will also modify the theme of the application to more closely align with the theme of the WordPress administrator. Also, as soon as 2.7 is release, this application will support the comment moderation methods that will be included. That should eliminate the need to even install the WordPress plugin. All that would be needed would be the desktop client itself.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on the this one!

Lets take Last.fm offline

Just in case anybody from Last.fm happens to have grace this blog with their eyeballs let me put out a shout for a little feature request.

As I’m working nights now at a place with no internet connection I’d like the Last.fm application to remember what music I listened to and then scrobble (that’s what you call it right), er… sync it with the Last.fm servers when I do get online.

And while we’re at it, lets have the plugin take played track information from devices which are capable of passing it on when synced with something like Windows Media Player, or iTunes.

Just a thought!

I know I love the interent. But I remember why I love work!

There’s about six hours left to go on my first nights shift in my new job . I’m already 9 hours in (out of 15, an extra hour tonight, so I could be shown around before being handed the reigns) and must say that it has come a minor shock to my system to remember what “real” work feels like again. I think I’ve spent to many years just living off the internet and had forgotten the realities of physical labour.

Yet, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a very good thing. It’s good to remember the satisfaction that comes with doing an honest and physical days, or in my case, night’s work. So far tonight, I have done a lot of work and I am very satisfied with myself right now.

The eagle eyed among you may be wondering why I haven’t yet revealed the name of my new employer. To be honest I’m not sure that I want to and it’s not due to any shame at the work I’m doing.

Hell, why would I feel any shame? I’ve cleaned toilets, mopped floors and spent months on my knees cutting lettuce to make a living and what I’m doing now is a means to an end rather than a career.

That end, is to get the extra cash I need for moving to the US, to Sara, but I think it would be frowned upon by my employer if I was to reveal the name of the place.

Still ,it has been an interesting first night here in what is essentially a hotel which has been converted into temporary home for an ever changing stream of male refugees.

My duties here are many and varied, yet the one which was almost instantly called into play tonight was that of security, when a scuffle threatened to break out between four refugees from four different countries, of varying religions, over…

Well, it wasn’t over religion, national pride or any of those paper weights of nationalism that the modern media beat us into mental submission with day in and day out.

It was over shoes. Or more specifically, having them removed from the room as one of the four occupants apparently could “smell” them, while the other 3 couldn’t.

The situations was easily diffused and I can’t help feeling that it was simply a matter of male posturing as 3 of the lads involved were spending their first night here while the 4th has been here for a considerable while at this point.

If this is the start of it, then I can’t help but wonder what the coming weeks will bring as I work here in this ever changing populous of male testosterone. It’s bound to be interesting.

For now however, I must finish up this post as I have more duties to attend to. When finished, in about 6 hours, I’ll be hurrying home and after a few hours sleep will get on with my day job before returning here for a 14 hour night shift.

60MB of storage for just £1599 (USD $2808) – Memory Lane!

Remember the good old days of computing when speeds were measured in MHz instead of GHz and the BBS (Bullletin board systems) ruled supreme?

Well this advert for a Supra hard drive for the Amiga with a whopping 60MB capacity might bring back some of that nostalgia.

At a mere £1599 ($2808 USD) this 60MB hard disk was a steal in 1987 and was guaranteed to make you the envy of every geek in the neighborhood.

If you’re wondering where I dug up this little beauty of an advert, I’ll tell ya!

It hails from the November 1987 edition of “Your Commodore”, which is just one of a pile of old computer magazines I came across today, when clearing out some boxes from my childhood, stored in my grandparents attic.

The pile of magazines included issues of ZZap! 64, Your Commodore, Commodore Format and Commodore Force.

You can see some of the pile included in the picture below, and yes, that is sellotape holding some of the covers together.

Don’t tell me I was to only person who had a hard time removing the cover tapes from the magazines without ripping them?

Yeah I was quite the computer enthusiast (must resist saying ge… geee.. geeeiii… geek! Damn it!) growing up and one of my earliest computers was my beloved Commodore 64.

I had all of the models of the C64 at some point, from the original chunk doorstep design, the slim line version and even the C128D. Ah, geeky nostalgia!

Other gems which I dug up, included an old C2N Datasette for loading the tapes on to the C64, my Cheetah joystick (will avoid all jokes about the hours of pleasure I had wiggling my stick) and a box full of games.

Wow, all this talk about the C64 has got me hankering to play some of those old titles that I used to enjoy.

It’s amazing how far gaming has come since I was growing up, yet I think that in some senses the process of being a gamer on a machine like a C64 thought me something that today’s consoles never will.

Today’s consoles are practically instant. You pop in the disc and within a few seconds you are killing zombie hordes or waving your Wiimote around like a drunk pervert at the line to see Santa Claus at Christmas.

Back in my day (geez, I didn’t just say that! Tell me I didn’t just say that!) we had to decide what we wanted to play and wait 30 excruciating minutes for the thing to load from a cassette, which may or may not work first time and very often we would have to wait 5 minutes or more between levels as new data was loaded in.

Imagine the outcry from the “instant on” generation (not a viagra joke, I promise!) of today if they had to wait for a game to load, let alone rewind the tape to a place THEY were supposed to keep track of in order to repeat a level when they die! Heaven forbid!

Enough of my longing for the days when men were men, cars were bicycles, horses were sheep (and well ridden) and we had to walk to school barefoot in the snow and it was uphill in both directions!

I’m off to download a C64 emulator, a bunch of games from Lemon 64 and set myself up to use all the power of my dual core laptop to play games which a wrist watch could run!

Brighten up your day by FAILing

Some days are simply tough to get through! Then someone sends you something, that makes you giggle like a hyperactive smurf high on a massive laughing gas binge and all is well with the world!

Cruel as it may be, there’s nothing quite like laughing at other peoples misfortune and idiocy to bring a smile to your face.

Thanks Sara, for brightening my day and introducing me to my new favourite site: FAIL Blog.

Here’s a little taster of things on FAIL Blog that will surely brighten your day!

ziePOD rocks zie World

ziePOD is a really cool podcast aggregator which I am absolutely loving. Pardon me for saying so, but “This shit is the tits!”.

After putting up with the bloated iTunes and its bevy of background installed crap as my podcast catcher on my Vista laptop, I finally came to the conclusion that I needed something lighter and smaller and responsive.

I started my search this morning by sending a shout out to my Twitter peeps and Andrew Terry responded by recommending the excellent Juice. I love Juice and used it extensively on ‘nix however there are issues getting it to work reliably on Vista so I took my search elsewhere.

Miro was another option that I considered, but the size and functionality of the program would equate to driving a thumbtack into a piece of wood by hitting it with a sledgehammer.

So, a little Google searching turned up ziePOD. It’s slick, light weight, has tons of great options, a very usable interface, integrated podcast directory and, well, it kicks ass.

My only worry about ziePOD is that there hasn’t been an updated release in 11 months, which while a commentary on the lack of development of this excellent project, is also a sad commentary on the state of podcast catching clients in general.

Find your next web host with Web Hosting Geeks

Finding great web hosting has always been an issue for me and you may remember some of the major issues I had with One.com which resulted in my entire site being down for more than a mere few days.

I’ve had a need again recently to find great reliable web host for some new domains and in my search for good web hosting I came across Web Hosting Geeks.

Web Hosting Geeks is a very simple concept at heart but is an incredibly useful tool and could potentially be invaluable for anybody wanting to avoid some of the issues I’ve encountered when signing up for hosting over the years.

Those issues have involved everything from limited server space and crippling bandwidth restrictions, to poorly setup MySQL and PHP installs which have resulted in the inability to install commonly used CMS’s such as Drupal.

At it’s core WHG reviews and rates web hosts and encourages users to submit their reviews and ratings of sites.

So, lets say you were interested in finding out what Inmotion (they’re current number one ranked web host) is like. A quick visit to the page will give you an immediate overview of how the WHG users feel Inmotion measures up.

The first thing you’ll see, besides an overview of the packages offered by the web host in question is a graphic showing how the host is rated and how those ratings break down into different categories such as, user-friendliness, space offered, tech support etc.

If you don’t feel like trusting the over all scores, you can scroll down the page to see what how the individual users reviews the service and the scores they gave when doing so.

All in all, this adds up to a great general overview of what you can expect from a web host and how it’s users feel about the level of service they have received.

If you are looking for a new web host for your site, or even looking for web hosting for the very first time, then Web Hosting Geeks could prove to be an invaluable first stop and enable you to make the best decision about which host to use before you part with your hard earned cash.

Can’t speak it, can’t write it! Shut up, you Facebook using twat!

I just posted a tweet about Facebook asking me (and hundreds of other users) to help translate the service from the American dialect of English, English (US), to the original English, English (UK).

I’m not going to get into the argument about which version of the language is correct, needless to say, even though I’m Irish, I must admit that English belongs to the English and the version of it spoken by Americans is a dialect (at best).

Frankly that is a discussion I have with Sara day in and day out and as such will be in my life until the day I die.

Yet, oh dear god please don’t let me go off on a rant here, but….

Some spare tit started a thread on the application about which version of English was the best.

Except for a handful of people, out of the hundreds who have so far participated, the vast majority of idiots (damn, did I use that word?) could not speak or type English in any form that was recognizable as, or representative of, the language they were trying to defend.

Let me say this only once: “If you are going to argue a point about which version of a language is best, please ensure that you can actually speak it”.

Now, that I’ve said that, let me raise a middle finger in advance to any grammar anorak or spelling obsessed git who dares to have a go at me in the comments. Be warned, I’m cranky!

Eric, where do you stand on this?