Have you tired turning it off and on again?
I'm in the midst of finally turning my attic space from a spare room with office set-up to a proper workspace with sleeping facilities. Over the decade since I moved in, success unclutterings of downstairs and the bedroom have left the attic laden with lots of boxes, a sagging bit of ceiling panel and the shelves I found in a skip 15 years ago. Next weekend is a long one, so I'm planning to refit the difficult end of the room (the bit with the sagging panel), but I'll still need my PC. So this morning has been spent shoving sofas around downstairs and setting up the PC in the corner on the new desk.
All went well till the final stage. I successfully moved sofas without finding extra kills under them. I got the PC downstairs and didn't drop the heavy monitor. I disconnected the wifi bits as the temporary workspace is about 2m from the network router box and I've a CAT5 that will reach. I connected everything up...and got 'local connection only' on the network connection. A call to a 25p/min helpline produced the following answer: switch the router off and back on again. And it works!
The IT crowd were right.
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Posted @
12:17 pm
on
Sunday, May 18, 2008
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Wiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!
I'm writing this via the Wiimote, the Chap having enabled the interweb channel so we can get the BBC iPlayer through the TV. This means I can read my google reader via my TV - woo!
Labels: geekery
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Posted @
11:16 pm
on
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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Martha Jones, M.D.
Yes, making Doctor Who Sims and then trying to get them onto their perfect career path is an epic waste of time. I know that. So my Captain Jack is an adventurer, my Fitz is a musician, my Sam Jones is a political lobbyist and my Martha just became a doctor (having previously been fined for inappropriate behaviour with a patient - probably all that snogging the Doctor business).
I know I should be doing other things but I already cycled five miles, did some laundry and tidied the garden this morning*...and I need to get Anji onto the business woman career path...
*ETA: oh, and proof read a short story before it goes up to the BBC high heid yins for approval.
Meanwhile: Sébastian's new kill count:
- Rodents:
Rats - 1
Mice -3637
Voles - 11 - Birds:
Sparrows - 5
Dunnocks - 1
Robin - 1
Wood-pigeon - 1
Uncertain - 8 - Other:
Frogs - 1
Unidentifiable remains - 3
Labels: doctor who, geekery, seba's kill count, time-wasting
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Posted @
12:56 pm
on
Sunday, March 30, 2008
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Vote early and vote often
Not in those primary thingies, but for a new font for the grouch (and associated sites):
Labels: geekery
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Posted @
11:03 pm
on
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
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Here It Goes Again!
I've started building my wordpress version of magslhalliday.co.uk (see the test site here). The idea is that, by migrating my old skool html pages, the grouch and the long-languishing moosifer jones reads blogs onto wordpress I end up with a single cohesive site containing everything you might ever need. Except fluff-friends on facebook. The design will remain similar as I still love the background pattern (I got a shock the other month on seeing the original pattern design on a postcard in Paperchase). I'm going to tweak about with fonts, having just spent a few minutes reinstalling paint shop pro and downloading free fonts from dafont. And I'll be sorting out a good tagging system. It'll be a while before it goes live, and then it won't be where the test site is (so don't bother bookmarking it). But it's something I'm looking forward to sorting out.
In the meantime, here is Here It Goes Again by OK Go. Yeah, it's old, but it's still compelling:
Labels: geekery
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Posted @
2:32 pm
on
Sunday, February 03, 2008
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I love it when a plan comes together
Ages ago, I messed about with both twitter and facebook. Two of the new social web-apps (programs like Gmail which run on a server and you access via the web) which were generating a lot of buzz at the time. Twitter is popular with Web 2.0 geeks but not with Real People, whilst facebook is the opposite. There was a twitter plug-in for facebook, but all it did was add a twitter box to your profile. So, due to the social weight of it, my facebook expanded and my twitter lapsed. Until last week.
Before I start explaining, here is a quick glossary.
Phew. Trust me, that's the hard bit.
Last week I was reading Micropersuasion's guide to setting up a Portable Personal Nerve Center. Which sounded waaaay more than I need in life. But a link led me to this post which has a section on how to add a 'to do' list to Gmail. Why would I even want a 'to do' list in Gmail? What's wrong with my notebook, or scraps of paper, or the back of my hand? Mainly, the fact that I forget to look in/on them whereas I log into Gmail all the time (except at work, obviously, hem hem). I use Google Calander, but I can't see that from work. There's no point looking at it in the evening only to realise I should have done something on the way home.
The short of it is that I did the following:
What this means is that I can also access my RTM 'to do' lists via SMS from my mobile using twitter commands sent to the rtm account (full details of how to do that here). So I can add something to the list whilst on the train, or download my list for the day when nowhere near a computer. If I send the SMS "d rtm !tod" to my twitter account, I get a text back with the list of things scheduled for today. So I dug up my twitter sign-in and set that up to. If I send a text saying "d rtm buy cat food" then the task "buy cat food" appears both in my RTM webpage list and in the Gmail one. So I've killed two web apps with one SMS.
This is one of the joys of Firefox (as expounded on by Mr Fry): the open source software means you can add on functions as you desire.
Exciting, huh? No? Oh.
Having re-enabled my twitter account, I decided to see if the twitter app in Facebook now updates the facebook status as well as the flickr one. It does. You need to click on a button which says something like 'Update my Facebook Status' but it does. So now I can send a text like "on train, reading Bauderlaire and eating crisps" to twitter and it'll update both my twitter and facebook statuses (stati?). And when I saw the twitter status has an RSS, I used Feed Digest to pick up my twitter status and display it in the side bar here.
So, what have I achieved? Apart from upping my geekiness? I've now interconnected various web-apps (GMail, RTM, Facebook and Twitter) and a website (this blog), so that I can maintain all of them via text messages from my phone. As I get a bundle of texts included in my contract each month, this is cheaper and far less frustrating than needing to find free wifi spots (not that I have a laptop) or trying to browse the web on my lovely old moto pebl phone (which I have no desire to upgrade).
I am so excited by this, I did a diagram (click to enlarge). Highlighted things are automatic actions which were previously done by hand (via the web) and which are now done via a single text from my phone. The one thing I would recommend if you're doing this is to switch off twitter's notification system before you get driven mad by txt alerts in the night.
Profiles:
Twitter: magslhalliday
Facebook: Mags L Halliday
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Posted @
5:41 pm
on
Sunday, January 06, 2008
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Dork Talk
Just when I start wondering if the Guardian on Saturday is worth the £1.50 price tag, it gives me a supplement on Baking (I happily admit Dan Lepard, their weekly baking columnist, is prone to causing me to cook far more cakes than I should) and a such an excellent review on a new piece of technology that I actually want to buy it. I'm not going to, mind. I have a long history of never quite loving portable music players even if they are the bestest thing ever.
My Sony Walkman was primary used on trains (where its batteries always ran out somewhere near Four Oaks, the radio never got a signal and you always needed a pen in case you had to respool a tape). It did give me an abiding memory of being huddled up in many layers as the train juddered its way into Birmingham in the snow, with 'A New England' by Kirsty MacColl playing. My CD walkman was cheap and never liked doing anything very much. I only have an iPod because the chap gave me his Mk1 when he got a Mk-whatever-it-is: I'd not got one before because a) I'd have had to hack it to work with the old Win98 PC and b) years of never loving portable music players meant I doubted I'd find this new thing any more fun. I still only take it with me about 1/3 of the time: its primary function is playing mp3s from my PC in the attic downstairs in the lounge/kitchen via the little iPod docking speakers and thus saving me from burning CDs.
However, the Guardian did a rather smart thing during their sly revamp of the Weekend magazine: they've employed Stephen 'luvvie' Fry as their tech writer. His Dork Talk column is a delight because he cares not only about the specs of a bit of technology but about how we interact with it physically and emotionally. He's a Mac fan (the only reason he bought the second ever Mac sold in Europe is because Douglas Adams beat him to the first) but isn't too evangelical about it. This week, he tried a Windows only Eco Player by Trevor Bayliss. And adored it. He writes so enthusiastically that my gut response by the end is "want one!". I don't need it but it sounds fun. Also, that pesky "running out of juice" thing which has always annoyed me about portable players is resolved as you just have to spend a minute winding it up again. How smart is that? No need to drag around power leads or spare batteries, and when the oil and electricity run out in the future and we all revert to Survivors-style living, I'll still be able to listen to the Pipettes.
Fry, like Ben Goldacre (another good Saturday columnist), publishes his Guardian columns on his blog, so you can read them - and comment on them - for free. Although not, as I do with the magazine, in the bath.
ETA: ooooh! My web-host has wordpress 2.3.1. available for install! Geeky joy ahoy!!
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Posted @
12:21 pm
on
Sunday, November 25, 2007
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Musical chairs
After some umming and ahhing, I've decided to stick to just iTunes. This means giving up a player I've used for ten years or thereabouts but iTunes has a trick Winamp doesn't*. ITunes's smart playlists mean I can use the 'comments' field like a tag. So last night I wrote "garage, lo fi, j-garage, covers" in the comments field for Long Tall Sally by The 5,6,7,8's, and the track was instantly added to a playlist of all tracks with "covers" in the comment field. Along with Marc Almond's Like A Prayer and The Delgados' Mr Blue Sky. Admittedly, that is a strange playlist but the key thing is that it is automatic: I add the comments and the playlists are built in the background. Web 2.0 functionality, oh yes.
*or, at least, I haven't found it yet.
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Posted @
7:18 pm
on
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
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Annoying Things About Vista #1
Yes, I did mean to click on the application and yes, I do trust the source: please just install iTunes.
So far:
Firefox downloaded and made default (so no more IE).
Firefox drag de go add-on added.
Firefox greasemonkey added (but no scripts yet).
ipodRip downloaded (install required installing an earlier .NET).
Bitorrent downloaded (hem hem).
VLC all format video player downloaded as Windows Media Player didn't like *.avi.
iTunes downloaded.
Audio Grabber downloaded.
There's a slight snafu with ipodRip in that all the music has been ripped using the five digit code as the file name, which means some time spent double checking things. I'm debating Winamp: I've been using it for the best part of a decade, but I'd have to maintain playlists in both it and iTunes. I had a workround tool for the Win98 PC which enabled me to transfer Winamp playlists straight over to the ipod. ETA: winamp allegedly talks to first gen ipods now...
Still to do:
Filezilla (ftp program).
HTML-Kit (website coding program).
Flickr uploadr (plus various greasemonkey scripts).
Last.fm (inc ipod widget)
Paint Shop Pro install disk to be found.
AVG-Free installed and Norton removed - could be a bugger, this.
Old MS Office CD to be found as one glance at the wp in MS Works means I'll be digging out the older software.
I'm not sure if I need the Nikon software: I've been treating my camera as a normal external drive for ages so I'm not sure I really need fancy sofware when I have explorer and flickr uploadr.
I reformatted moosifer 2* six months ago, so I am worryingly pulling the list of software needs straight out of my memory. The chap claims I have a rubbish memory, but knowing all the software to install to restore your preferences is pretty damn good, I think.
*this is a retro naming. My first PC was called 'alien workshop'. The second had no name and this new one is moosifer 3. I think I may need to work on the naming convention there.
In other geekery news, Wordpress 2.3 is out. I've been planning to use that as a reason to do version 4.1 of the site (same design, better coding, integrated blog and static pages all on magslhalliday.co.uk. I'll need to migrate nearly four years of blogging, but it looks like it'll be a wet winter anyway.
Labels: geekery
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Posted @
6:48 pm
on
Monday, October 01, 2007
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Dead mices
Sébastian's new kill count:
- Rodents:
Rats - 1
Mice -2830
Voles - 10 - Birds:
Sparrows - 4
Dunnocks - 1
Robin - 1
Uncertain -67 - Other:
Frogs - 1
Unidentifiable remains - 3
One reversed a recent trend for being beheaded by having an intact head but no sign of the body. The other was exceedingly plump and curiously intact. Carrie kindly suggested it was pregnant, which is a bit horrible.
Another dead mouse was my PC. Well, actually the main power supply died. As it was quite an elderly PC which had things such as a special workround to enable me to talk to an ipod via Win98 etc, it was sad to acknowledge it was truly gone. But now I have a shiny new one using a "buy now pay later" scheme from the chap. After an hour I'd convinced Vista that there is a wifi link, downloaded Firefox, downloaded my favourite add-ons for firefox and generally started the rebuilding. My music should be simple, once I can get ipodRip to work under Vista, but the floppy disk backups of all my writing may take longer. What with not having a floppy disk drive.
Labels: geekery, seba's kill count
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Posted @
6:25 pm
on
Sunday, September 30, 2007
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Coding: fun for all
I am still working on learning Wordpress for the archive. I'm starting to crack PHP and the CSS and HTML elements are the usual stuff so that particular terror is fading. I have some boring stuff involving templates based on category IDs to work out, and the joy of creating descriptions for them. I'm quite enjoying doing the companions' descriptions but it'll still be a long slog.
Katrina: Trojan priestess who didn't see the airlock coming
Labels: doctor who, geekery
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Posted @
9:33 pm
on
Sunday, April 22, 2007
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Take me to Your Reader
I'm not sure why I'm a chronic early adopter: I think it's the lure of new tools with which to fritter away my time. Del.icio.us? I was there. Flickr? Gimmie! Last.fm? Got it and scrobbling away. I consider YouTube as rubbish due to its appalling tagging tool (whilst still having an account so I can favourite Life on Mars fanvids and cat weight-lifting).
The beta-du-jour at the moment is Google Reader. I've been using bloglines for years, but am increasingly unsatisfied with its ability to mess up the feed notifications especially on those from flickr.
What is a RSS reader?
You might have noticed websites increasingly have little orange things saying RSS Feed or XML or Atom or Subscribe!, or the like. What that means is that you can sub to the page: when there's new content, you get a notification. That can be a little notifier beeping on your toolbar which, when you click on it, takes you to your RSS Reader, or it can be some sub-function of your email client (for example, on Thunderbird). You'll see them called RSS Aggregators sometimes.
Here's a definition etc from wikipedia
I need an online RSS reader though, as I like to be able to access it from anywhere in the world. And the chap's, obviously. So I want to go to a single website, log in and see which of the hundreds of websites I read has new content. That where bloglines came in, and where Google Reader seems to be taking over.
I added a cross section of feeds a couple of nights ago (some from flickr, some from blogger, some wordpress and some LJ) and it seemed to handle them happily. Having now played with the beta some more, I'm transferring all my feeds across. Then I'll run them in tamdem during March - a month with lots of travel and so lots of chances to check it on a variety of PCs and browsers - and see which one wins my loyalty. My predilication for betas means I'm leaning towards Google Reader already.
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Posted @
8:29 pm
on
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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It's a Thingy, A Fiendish Thingy!
LibraryThing seems to be pretty much exactly the tool I was looking for 18 months ago, back when I ended up creating moosifer jones' reading to enable me to tag books instead of using all-consuming (which I never liked). So far I've only transposed my to be read list from del.icio.us to Library Thing, plus added my most recent reading. There's the odd thing I'd tweak if I were designing it (like being able to select multiple books from the results when you use the Search funtion in Add Books) but otherwise I think it looks great.
Labels: geekery, reading, tagging
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Posted @
1:18 am
on
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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meta geek flowers
Before you all start thinking the sun/chap/travel/beer have turned me away from occassional outbursts of geekery, here is a rather lovely web tool.
At this site, you put in your URL and get back a rather pretty map of your site. What I particularly like is watching the clusters bloom as it builds up. So if you put http://moosiferjonesgrouch.blogspot.com in then you can watch first a large purple flower bloom and then, just as you think it's over, a yellow mophead explodes in a corner. Try it with your own site...
Then, because all geeks love flickr, you can post your screengrab there with the tag websitesasgraphs to join all the other ones. There's something bizarrely fascinating about these floral patterns, the way in which sites seem to fall into three broad catagories: the linear and simple, the hyper-organised, and the clearly planned but subsequently sprawled.
Yep. Still a geek.
Labels: geekery
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Posted @
12:09 am
on
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
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