adventures in geekdom

MacHeist Nano Bundle

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:11:00 +0000

This week, or at least for the next 4 days, MacHeist, (that site that gives you cheap software bundles) are actually giving away 6 Titles for free. Yes, free, you even get the serial numbers. I grabbed my copy on friday, I was alerted to it via Twitter (I know, there's a use for it sometimes?!).

Here are the titles, and yes, they are Full Versions.

ShoveBox
WriteRoom
Twitterific
Tiny Grab
Hordes of Orcs
Mariner Write

The one and only drawback at the moment is that MarinerWrites Serial will not be released until there have been 500,000 participants. So really, if you own a Mac you should be over there downloading and doing your bit so the rest of us can get Mariner Write.

iPhone Troubles! Apple is not friendly to victims of Thievery

I have yet to load these titles on to my computer, I have been battling with my iPhone this weekend. Apple, do not make it easy for you to resync your iPhone to a new computer. I'm sure, thankfully, that only a small percentage of users with iPhones ever have their computers stolen, so they dont have the option to "Deauthorize Computer" before Re-syncing their phone to a new computer. Personally, to get my iPhone to work (so I could load new applications on) I ended up having to

Download Senuti to get all my purchased music off
Backup my iPhone
Restore it to its original factory settings
Resync
Restore from backup
Re-download all the applications (including bought ones, and I dont know if I've been charged twice or not)
I'm not up to here yet.

Really, they should just lighten up about the whole only syncing to one computer thing. Its just annoying.

No Friday Funny....

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:12:00 +0000

Friday Funny is a Day Late

I dont even know if this is funny. I just looked at it and thought. WTF....Crazy Japanese. :)

Thief! What to do if your computer is Stolen

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:05:00 +0000

Number 1. Call the Police! Obviously!

Number 2. Give them your Serial Number for your computer.

Number 3. Sit down and have a good cry.

Actually, I wouldn't know what the right thing to do is, but I can certainly tell you what I did.

Monday afternoon my fiance came home from work to find a brick sitting outside our front door, the window smashed and the back door wide open and our flat trashed. Wonderful, Burglars, and us with no Insurance. M&^%$r F*&^&r !

Without going into the specifics, and putting aside the feelings of our personal space being heinously violated by a pair of opportunistic tip rat thieving C*&#s, we have learned a few lessons about security this week.

While Apple apparently used to maintain a database of stolen Mac's I've learned they no longer do. While there isn't a hell of a lot you can do to protect your laptop after it is stolen, there are things you can do before hand. Windows systems apparently have a number of programs, but for Macs the best thing I have read in numerous forums in the last 4 days is Undercover.

Because laptops are increasingly popular, and desktops are becoming smaller and more portable, computer theft has reached huge proportions worldwide. According to a recent FBI report, 97% of all stolen computers are never recovered. Many people we know have had their Macs stolen, often in 'safe' situations. That's why we developed Undercover: a unique theft-recovery application designed from the ground up for Mac OS X.

What it does? A number of things, including tracking it, taking photos of whose using it, making it behave erratically and enabling you to remotely kill it in a matter of speaking.

I wish I had have known about this program before, however, I also wish my laptop wasnt stolen either, and before it was stolen, it never actually entered my head that it might one day be stolen. So, that ends that sentence. My next laptop will definitely have a copy of this software on it.

What else can you do to protect your computer from thieves?

Disable Automatic Login.

Secure it with a Lock.

Secure your home.

Take out personal contents insurance.

or the obvious. Take your laptop with you everywhere you go. But even thats not fool proof.

eGames 2009 expo Review

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:42:00 +0000

This weekend in Melbourne (Friday thru Sunday) is the eGames 2009 expo at the Royal Carlton Exhibition Hall. Last time I went to the eGames expo was in 2007 when it was at the Exhibition Centre in Southbank (Geoffs Shed), we went on the Sunday, which is when a lot of the finals were being held for Counter Strike, Dead or Alive 4 and Guitar Hero. It was quite good that year, we managed to pick up a nice amount of freebies and there were a lot of up and coming games being showcased.... Assassins Creed, Tabula Rasa, Fury, Mario Galaxy, Naruto to name a few. True it was quite crowded and there was a bit of a line up to play games, but it took us an afternoon to work through the exhibition and we were still not through everything but were so tired we couldn't walk further.

This year we went along, bought tickets beforehand for the Saturday, and planned to get there at 10am so we could get the maximum amount of play time. I was a little concerned that the Royal Exhibition hall in Carlton next to the Melbourne Museum woud be a bit small compared to the massive expanse that is Geoffs Shed. We were all thoroughly excited to go though so it was really disappointing to rock up and find that not only was there no Nintendo Stage show or big Nintendo presence, there was no Sony and other notable names like EA, Konami, Activision were missing also. The biggest presence was Ubisoft, an their both which contained Red Space, Assassins Creed 2, Avatar 3D and the Popstar dancefloor for the Wii game. All quite impressive, but after previous years you couldnt help but feel overly let down, all in all it took about 20 minutes to walk around the whole exhibition and take it in. Intel had a stand for the Masters Games events and Australian Gamer were there too albeit with a small booth and minus Matt and Yug, who apparently provided a lot of the floor show in previous years as well. The biggest disappointment was Microsoft. Their Display was a truck, with 4 screens of the same game playing... not good! Considering Microsoft are trying to launch so many new features, one would have thought their contribution would have been of the bigger stands there.

Of Course there were the usual Anime Booths and Madman Booths and Education Booths (Cheers to the Monash University booth for giving me a Frisbee and the info on doing a PostGrad degree on the cheap), the consumer electronics show was also kind of ho hum, containing everything from Jim's Antennas to Speaker Systems, Home Automation and Plasma TV's.

The Cosplay Action was also very limited. I got some good pictures and spoke to a few people (The Halo guy spent 8 months putting together his costume and it looked amazing) but was hoping for more. Thankyou to all the Cosplayer's who let me take their photos and obligingly posed.

I've looked and there arent too many reviews around of the event yesterday or today, there didn't seem to be much in the way of twitter streams either. Vooks have a review of Friday and PC World have an interview with the organisers, Peter Barlow. Maybe he can explain why the event was so small this year... my friends and I had lunch in the elephant and wheelbarrow after and discussed at length possible reasons why we might be so disappointed "Where we being overly harsh?" "Did they have a reason?" "Could the same amount of gameplay been had with 30 dollars of rentals from the local video store in an afternoon?" and we couldnt come to any real answers, other than, no, we're not going back next year. Shame. :(

31/10/2009

Here's a Link to my Photos from the Day and Below is a YouTube compilation of the the Photos I took.

Please dont take my photos without linking back to this site or at least acknowledging that I took them, they mightn't be much but they're my "not much."

The Great Good Game Scrapfight

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:45:00 +0000

This almost qualifies for the the Friday Funny.

If you've ever watch ABC 2 on Monday Nights at 8:30 (the timeslot for those who are sick of Southpark on SBS, because Matt Stone and Trey Parker have just gone _too_ far lately) then you'll be familiar with Good Game "the show by Gamers for Gamers". Recently they just celebrated their 100th Episode and even more recently...as in this Monday just passed, saw a changing of the guard of sorts with a new presenter (A Girl!) Hex taking over the original Junglist, who had been presenting the show from the very first episode (If I'm right).

The whole cross-over was handled kind of badly, I wish I had a You-Tube video of it, there was a particularly funny part where Margaret Pomeranz ended up in the chair where Jung normally sits and laughs and says "You N00b Bajo". That made me laugh, however the rest of the show was fairly cringe worthy.

So anyway, it appears the Junglist's Axing has caused a bit of Angst around the Australian Internet's sites for Gamers, So far its had a mention on Kotaku, OzSource and ZGeek. Yesterday, Good Game released a statement via their forums about the reason behind Junglist's sudden axing, which was hastily retorted by Junglist himself, then it was responded to by Bajo and the production team and then it was on for young and old... apparently (I'm reading al this today). It was all getting pretty nasty when suddenly Rupert Murdoch's flying monkey's picked up the story and ran with it at News Limiteds news.com.au site.... where the comments are just going nuts, much like the forums at good game and the comments at Kotaku. It would also appear, that a rival reviewer from another network has weighed into the Good Game Forums and posted the following under Anon (My guess is its Yahtzee from the Escapist Zero Punctuation reviews and the Game Review show on PayTV).

"Hi GG crew, guess who. Better yet dont, I'm writing as anon for good cause, one should never be fratenising with the competition ;)

I was actually turning in for the night when I got a call about this situation, now 2 hours later my morbid curiousity is sated. I've got to admit I've saved this thread for prosperity, something tells me its going to be the thing of legend and a textbook case for future generations.

Let me be blunt. This is a death spiral, 'syd' (Janet I'm assuming, I'm afraid I'm not to l33t) I've no doubt this has been thrust upon you, but you need to get spin on this and for the love of god get some control over your hosts. Honestly it's going to take a miracle to pull the show out of this, I'd instead be worrying about careers, this one's going to follow people around.

Every change in a series has led to angering the hardcore base and the forums flaring up, its inevitable... what makes this spectacularly gruesome is someone seems to have forgotten the nature of your demographic. You might as well have run a series of promo's with the hosts tearing strips out of each other... forums are how your demographic communicate, and you can be guaranteed this has already spread further than these boards. I've even noticed a few posts comparing it to a family breakdown... sobering stuff with this demographic, and you were planning on trying to crack into the tween market?

I wish the very best for all of the team. It's a young group and despite being on the other side of the fence, I'm gutted something like this has happened to them. Best of luck to all."

Zgeek also have put in their two cents (Again, I'm guessing this is Pirate)

This is so lame. I just wanted to add my voice to the many who say this is a rotten idea. There was no need to get rid of Junglist. They could have added Stephanie Bendixsen without getting rid of him and achieved the same effect.

Junglist's reviews where the reason I watched the show. The other guy annoys me.

Epic fail by ABC management. You guys need to fire your marketing people because they obviously know nothing about their audience.

Just to prove that we are still living in the digital age, there's now a Save Junglist website, where you can sign petitions, fax the ABC and pick up a complaint letter to email to them.

The whole thing is probably an excersise in HR "How to not fire Gamers" as they will take their greivances to the entire internet, and any message board or forum they post on with degrade into nothing but a Flamewar.

Of course, I liked Junglist, and I am fairly sceptical about Hex's reviewing ability (the Forza review was bit childish) but I'm no hardcore gamer (in fact, rather than Casual Gamer mines more of a passing interest).

So Good Game may be shooting themselves in the foot. Then again, they might not be! But you cant deny, watching a scrap fight from the safe distance of the sidelines is always entertaining! As are some of the videos made from the fallout (below Hitler getting mad at Junglist's axing, from the Savejunglist Website)

Friday Funny

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:57:00 +0000

I found this site on Monday for the first time and thought it was hilarious and when I say hilarious, I mean I was laughing so hard I thought my ribs might crack more. However I looked at it at work (not a good idea because there seems to be an obsession with menstruation and vagina's) no its not porn, it Regretsy!

If you havent come across Etsy yet, you must be living under a binary rock, Etsy is an online handmade marketplace for all things crafty. Its most notably known for being stupidly over priced and some of the things people post on this site, like the Gem to my left is complete crap. I know there's a saying "One mans trash is another mans treasure" but this is taking it too far. Some other pearlers include the "Embellished tights" (Ripped to shreds) and the "Party Sweater" (Maybe if you were going to an acid party and needed something to trip off).

The funniest thing about Regretsy are the little comments on each post... they're truly what had me laughing the most as I perused it.

Just remember, this site is NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

Thanks Regretsy for bringing the Friday funny.

Which is better, Degrees or IT Certifications ?

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:42:00 +0000

I just got an email offer, from a users group, to sit for a particular Certification for a software for free.

I've asked my Boss, as its work related software, and he's for it, I think (he's being incredibly supportive).

Never having sat a certification exam before, I dont know what I'm in for, or whether its worth it.

I have a degree, I remember what getting one of those was like... (and I'll remember every year when that HECS letter comes to tell me how much I still owe).

...just wondering, what can anyone tell me about certifications (I dont care about MCSE's either, those are a dime a dozen as the saying goes).

Generally speaking I'm for continuing education, lifelong learning as the ILO (International Labour Organisation) terms it. So in that respect, I'm up for it... and the studying etc involved, and career-wise it certainly wont look bad on my CV (As my boss pointed out).

What do you think? Got a Certification? Was it easy to get? Is it relevant or just a shiny bit of paper in a frame (like my degree) ?

Friday Funny

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:24:00 +0000

From Tokyo Mango

Funny People in Japan dancing in Slow Motion to Nujabes track.

Sure it's not funny in the way other friday posts have been, but you're laughing with them...except at the Sumo at the end... I laughed at him.

(If you want to learn more about Nujabes head to my music blog Adventures in Sound)

Have a good Friday!

Apparently there's a Google Version of Me

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:58:00 +0000

If you were watching the ABC Last night, then you would have seen Hungry Beast, the new show in the 9pm time slot being produced by Andrew Dentons Zapruder's other films production company. They showed a segment on Google called Google is Me with the following tag line.

Google is an information collector, its ultimate goal is to make all information ever available online. That includes all of your information as well. Their official company philosophy is “Don’t be evil.” But what you think is evil may vary from Google's idea of evil.

IF you follow the link above you can view the entire segment online. After writing earlier in the week on how much I had integrated my web presence into Google's online apps lately, I thought it would be relevant to mention this segment... whilst watching it, it would be understandable to not be completely shocked and suitably angered about how much Google knows about every person, but really, its not much of a stretch to the imagination to realise just how easy this is, and how other sites, like face book for instance, or twitter, do exactly the same thing.

To be honest, I thought this oversimplified the case a bit and painted a bit of that sensationalist journalism paint to give their story a bit of the old "OMFG Look at what the mans doing to us now!" (Which is somewhat ironic given their story the previous week on the mechanics of tabloid Outrage Economies and they regularly lampoon shows like "A Current Affair")

Yes, Google keeps your Data, its programs are designed to keep as much information as possible, hence why they are buying so many new technologies (Skype, YouTube, SketchUP, Picasa, Adsense, Adwords, Analytics) and Developing their own too (Gmail, Reader, Wave). When you sign up to a new Service, you read the terms of service and if you dont like them, you find a way to work within the framework so that you can exploit the service to suit your needs. For Instane, Gmail always pushes you to Archive, rather than Delete your emails, whereas I knew from the beginning, I didn't want Google knowing that much about me, so I've always had a Delete what you dont want policy... as much as Gmail arcs up at me, I'm not going to change my behaviour.

At the end of the day, the choice about how much information you publish about yourself on the Internet is ultimately up to one person. YOU! You have control of your image and it's your own responsibility to control how much you reveal and how much you hide. If you want the world to know everything about you, if you want your identity publicly available for anyone who cares to use it, be oblivious and accept the consequences, someone will use what you leave there for them to use. Google or anyone else.

Getting things Done

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:51:00 +0000

You want to get things done? The answer is simple. Put down your iPhone. Turn off your Gadgets, Close down your Browser, Close down your email, Take the Phone off the hook and close the door to your office.

I guarantee you, this works...give yourself half an hour, you'll have achieved so much, then check your email, put the phone back on the hook...

Keep getting side-tracked? Have a diary or page next to you. For the day, write down 3 things you want to achieve, do them first. Only when you have done those 3 things can you move on to something else.

I have to do this at work, otherwise I get distracted... big time... "Wonder what's happening on Face book, better check", "Oooh, I'll just check twitter next" "Oooh, a link, better click on it" "Wonder if I've gotten any emails in the last 5 minutes" "Wonder if I've gotten any work emails": BAM!!! Its 5pm, what have I achieved. Sod all.

The solution, for me at least... have a clean desk, I clean it off at the end of every day, except for a little notepad of papers underneath my keyboard which I scribble notes on, and my diary which I write the 3 goals for each day and then when I get a phone call, a brief note, or each task. If I dont write anything down, I forget, simple as that....When ever possible I keep my iPhone switched to sleep and out of direct eyesight (however I dont always succeed at this).

Also, I dont eat lunch at my desk.... I need the time away...half an hour to 45 minutes... my eyes need the break....

Oh yeah and I avoid using Post It notes (that's another reason for the diary and the scribble paper) or printing anything out, I dont recycle paper unless I've used both sides of it....It helps control the clutter, so I spend less time procrastinating doing real work by cleaning my work area, and in a small way, I feel like its environmentally responsible.

This isn't really a geeky post, but sometimes, all these cloud applications, these gadgets, they are cool and helpful, but also distracting....so in essence it takes us longer to do what we need to be doing, unless you're super focused, and let's face it, not all of us are!

Googled Out

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:45:00 +0000

Some might say they're pimped out in one brand, others might say that's a poor choice of words and me, I would say I'm Googled Out.

I now have most of my services through Google. As the last one to join the collection was Google Chrome for Mac. Apparently the Developers version has been floating around for a while. So I jumped on that bandwagon to try it. Why? Finally got sick of FAILfox after I opened my browser this morning to find all my bookmarks had disappeared and all the data in Firefox had become corrupted. Totally irritating because I'd invested a lot of time into firefox, and the last year of our relationship has become increasingly slow and bug infested with long periods of me waiting for it to get its shit together and load my pages, meanwhile it began to attract more and more baggage and become higher maintenance thanks to its new persona's application. Look I dont really care what you're wearing firefox, just move quicker. As Obama said, you can put lipstick on a pig, but underneath its still a pig....

For the past hour I've been using Chrome on my Mac, and it hasn't chunked up yet, it hasn't crashed, it does suffer from the overlay's "What do you think I should wear, dear?" "Anything, they all look the same." But I managed to pick one "Outfit" that wasn't going to detract too much from the task of the browser (Yes, as you can tell I'm a Functional person, not a "Fashion" person) or get in my face... thank you Kid Robot. So I'm persevere and see how it goes. If it all falls in a heap, I suppose I could revert to Safari.

What are the other Google Apps I've installed this last week. Well Friday night I downloaded the Picasa app offline app for Mac, mostly because I was disgusted that iPhoto will not automatically upload my carefully constructed photo albums to Picasa Web Albums, its either Flickr or Facebook, and I dont like either of those options. As I stated last week, I dont want to leave a trail of garbage across the internet when I try on apps and then dont like them and then move on to the next thing, I find it akin to a teenager trying on all their clothes and discarding the ones they dont want to wear in a trail across the floor when they take them off.... its just not neat and tidy. Plus, it leaves you open for stalkers...and phishers and identity theft. Keep your home life organised so you can be violent in your design. Flaubert said that, and it works.

Picasa went through the iPhoto library and organised my photos according to the folders they're stored in in iPhoto and the Photo Albums. As it was late friday night, I didnt give it a chance to see whether it would upload them neatly but I'm assuming it will. I also noticed it has some nice photo retouching tools, much the same as iPhoto. These were helpful, as I'd just installed all the photos from my photo bucket site into iPhoto, and as many of them had been manually scanned in and uploaded back in 2000 (and stored on a Geocities page...wow, do they still exist?) alot of them looked terrible. The image filtering tools in Picasa ran enhancing filters over the top and made them appear a darn site better.

My next step is to cancel my Photobucket account. I always like to pick up my ditry laundry and put it in the laundry basket.

Teh Friday Funneh

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:28:00 +0000

I Love Dilbert, and this strip from a few weeks ago perfectly encapsulates the merger going on at the company I work for.

Or at least, trying to get anything approved.

So thankyou Dilbert.com this week for the Friday Funny

Portable Browsers: life savers!

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:01:00 +0000

I'm sure I've heard these spoken about before, but until yesterday had never used, why would I have to?

Well, it turns out that Google Wave (and my invitation came yesterday morning) only runs on Chrome or Mozilla browsers, in Internet Explorer, which is standard where I work, it is a big bag of FAIL. Whether or not this is a clever ploy by google to move the world on to their own browser Chrome remains to be seen (Considering its been out for PC for about a year and has only just released a Beta for Mac...good luck with that). A colleague mention that you can get Mozilla Firefox Portable app and it just installs to your USB Drive, so I downloaded it and installed and yes, its exceedingly small and works quite well...however towards the end of the day it did decide to chunk up, at which point I was forced to look into whether Chrome existed in Portable App format. It does, as Chromium, and from the comments, only works with Windows XP...handy considering my work PC is an XP machine. Google Wave works fantastically quickly with Chrome, not so quickly with Firefox. However Gmail, Google reader and Twitter and Facebook all work well with Firefox and Chrome also. I see the logic in having a portable browser you can run off a USB Drive, you keep your own bookmarks, you always have a browser, and if you're on a public terminal, what better way than to use Chromes private mode.

Have you downloaded a Portable App before ? Did you find it useful?

Google Wave

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:53:00 +0000

So last night my partner got his invitation to Google Wave....so being the geek he is, he signed up straightaway and started playing. When I got home he was just setting things up, and he was well impressed with it....in his words its a Facebook Killer. Of course, he got those magical invites...which is where I come in. I get one of those invites....Yay me! I'm so intrigued by this new phenomenon, just looking over his shoulder it looked pretty cool. Very shiny, very, very, shiny.

Now its time for me to play the waiting game for my invite to arrive.

Oh and how did he score the invite? I was asking the question this morning.... obviously Google did not just sense his "Awesome Powah!" as he likes to think... no he sent them a Haiku. Haiku's seem to be working well for him in competitions... years ago he scored himself a copy of Battlefield Vietnam the same way.

Once my invite does arrive, I'll be able to share some neat features of this new technology at the forefront, not the sidelines as I normally do, that'll be interesting! Stay tuned.

Also....additionally. I spent some time modifying the page layout last night, switching around the google advertising, signing up for Feedburner and generally making improvements.... if you like them, please comment! If you dont, well comment too! (But do that comment sandwich thing where its the bad separated by the two good comments, like a spam sandwich)

Picasa, Flickr or Photo bucket ?

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:46:00 +0000

I know Flickr is the All Singing, All dancing standard for online Photo hosting that everyone seems to use, and it has huge support and some wonderful features

but to this day I have held off from signing up, because I have a stack of photos hosted already at Photo bucket, and whilst I'm not that happy with its crowdy, ad laden interface

its served me well to this point.

Google's Picasa on the other hand links to my other Google services, like reader and blogger and Gmail etc etc etc, it has less adds and a nicer interface, and whilst I dont have an inbuilt functionality in iPhoto to upload to Picasa, I can get an uploader application from Google to do it. I know because I've used it and it works well. I'm stuck because I dont want to lose my photos (I've lost a number of photos of trips overseas in the past few years simply because they were not backed up appropriately and its sooooo frustrating) but I dont want to leave them scattered higgledy piggledy over the internet either.

... and I dont want them all on Face book.

This is all very difficult. A decision.... Oh dear.

I think I've mentally decided already to move them to Picasa and definitely move them away from Photo bucket. Thankfully Photo bucket has made this nice and easy for me by providing a Download to Zip file for Album by Album pictures and then a handy Delete and then Cancel my Account button.

If anyone has used Flickr and finds it far superior to Picasa and can share their experience in the comments, please, go for it.

iPhone Update 3.1.2

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:09:00 +0000

Just noticed this Article on Lifehacker, Via Gizmodo

New Update for iPhone:

Since updating to iPhone 3.1 my iPhone has been sporadically not waking from Sleep (completely frustrating) and when I do eventually rouse the sleeping beauty, the damn thing makes camera noises at me whenever I press the menu button.

The Update comes at a price though... 241mb. Holy Crap! Why do you need so much code to fix something like that, that wasnt even there before? WTF man.

Apparently it fixes other things to.... and according to Gizmodo comments, most people werent even aware of the sleep issue. C'est la vie.... some of us are just lucky I guess

Teh Friday Funny

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:52:00 +0000

I am attempting to start something like a regular post with this stuff.

see more Epic Fails

The Great Blog Overhaul Part 1: Adventures in Questioning

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:11:00 +0000

I've had this site going since 2006 or something, and I've never really put that much into it, or written anything with much gusto, however, having said that I've never really gotten much out of it either. In terms of Ad sense earnings, comments etc etc... its safe to say it's all been non event, except perhaps for the exciting day when someone offered to buy it off me (Yes that really did happen!).

So I'm doing some internal questioning of what I want to get out of it and if its time for some layout/content/technical changes. The whole problem is, in terms of skills required to make said changes I am sadly lacking that knowledge to put it all together into a nice whole.... although I see a lot of great blogs around, I get the feeling that these are having someone with skill or someone who pays for someone else's skill to put the whole thing together. As I have neither the skill nor the funds to pay someone else to do all the hard work in order to make the changes happen I think I'm in a bit of a bind.

What do think single reader? What needs changing? What could be done better? How could I improve? I'm going to put it out there for all comers to comment. Rather than outright flaming though, try to go for some constructive improvement suggestions.

You can get me on twitter (@rascuache) & email or comments.

The Age took away the quiz

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:12:00 +0000

So I complained

Dear John,

I am writing to you today to register my disgust at the removal of the Quiz from the back page of the Age.

I work in an office and one of the highlights of my day, is sitting down to lunch with my colleagues to participate in a round of Trivia from the this quiz.

In fact, a day without this quiz somehow seems "Empty" and unfulfilling. The Herald Sun, your opposition and what we here quite often refer to as "The Herald Scum" offers a quiz yes, however, it is generally what one might term "low-brow" as it includes, not trivia questions, but inane bs questions like "Who is Lindsay Lohan doing this week"....who care john, really, who cares?

One day, in a rush to get back to the office, a colleague even picked up a copy of the Australian.... by mistake...Age, Australian.... both Broadsheet, both sit near the counter of your average news stand, it's forgivable if you dont actually read the two papers. Now, the Australian also has a quiz.... its a "Have you been paying attention" type of affair, and generally means that one must have been either, a) watching the news, or b) reading the Australian before doing this glorified comphrension exercise. It was, to be blunt. Crap. Before coming to the table at lunch, one generally doesn't spend a good deal of time reading the paper in any great amount of detail.... why? Because we're working John. Having the Broadsheet sitting open on ones desk generally draws the ire of your boss and in the current economic climate, flying under the radar with things like productivity is preferable if you want to make next months' mortgage payment, or rent... you get my drift... having a copy of a newspaper open on your desk doesn't really inspire thoughts of "Wow, my employees are working really hard". So, having explained that you can see why the Age's Trivia quiz met the right balance of intellectual stimulation, fun and challenge, the perfect mix for a half hour lunch break and one lunch table.

So, why, today, of all days, when daylight savings Mocks us taking an hour of morning sleep, on a Monday. New South Wales is currently laying on the couch with a beer and a Sunday hangover, do you take our beloved Quiz and give us an Australian Style "have you been paying attention?" quiz. Why? Picture this situation, we're all sitting around the table, eating lunches, waiting patiently for the elected quiz master (the guy that bought the paper today) to finish his mouthful of banana sandwich and turn to the back page.... and then he looks for the quiz and says "I cant find it" ...there's an awkward silence, when we all pretend we're not screaming inside "Nooooooooooooooooooooooo" and we read the box saying that not only has our beloved quiz gone.... it may be gone forever! So, turning over to the aforementioned comprehension exercise we go through and give it a whirl. After all, it cant be any worse than the Australian quiz we did last week? Surely! Well.... it may not have been...THAT bad.... but one thing it did inspire was a word..... FAIL.

In fact, to make up for this Quiz FAIL we had to find the nearest copy of the Tabloid Herald Scum, and try to fill the gaping hole left by the Age's masterful, highbrow trivia quiz with the Scum's super quiz. We did it, and lets just say.... I feel, we all feel a little like Xtina Aguilera, a bit dirty. Like, if you tasted that thin film of sweat on her skin and it tasted like garbage.... garbage, with a hint of, narcissism and plated up Celebrity Master chef style. Does that image make sense? If it doesn't I apologise.... I always feel a little stupider having read the scum....

Anyway....please.... bring back the quiz, dont make its loss permanent. Bring it back as soon as possible John.... I can assure you that offices across Melbourne are lamenting its loss, and the camaraderie, team building and general harmony it brings to office lunch times. Its almost like the new smokers club or the less clichéd water cooler club... the lunchtime quiz club...otherwise, I just might actually have to WORK through my lunchbreaks John and quite frankly, I'd rather eat glass.

Best Regards

(ras)

Also, please dont print this, I dont want a steaming pile of vitriol on my shoulders from higher up the managerial chain if you get my drift.

News Net Wire 3.2 on MAC OS X

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:02:00 +0000

Ages ago, I used to use News Net Wire by Newsgator for RSS posting, however my main issue was keeping the blog links between home and other computers sync'd. To that end, I'd use Delicious Links. However, I then came across Google Reader and Bloglines last month and was quite happy with Google Reader.... but then what happened? News Net Wire, actually made their latest version compatible with Google Reader for complete syncing. This is in fact, completely awesome and what made me download and install the New version again. 3.2.

I have been using it daily for about 2 weeks now at home and using Google Reader at work. I have to say the syncing is really really neat. Although, it has been pointed out to me, that you can not in New Net Wire share a link with your Google Friends or people you follow or who follow you. I am the sharing caring type (especially when it comes to LOL Cats and Dilbert) so this is a bit of a minus in my book. There is always the next version though!

The thing I liked the most is that the syncing was immediate. One day, during a slow period at work I decided it was time to organise the Blogs into Folders and categories (great feature of Google Reader!) and was thinking, Oh shit, I have to do this at home to....but no! It was already there waiting for me when I opened up NNW at home. Same with any new blogs I subscribe to on either end, they just appear! I love it. This is how one's online life _should_ be, you plug things in and they just work...they just do! It leaves more time for reading and of course, looking at pictures of funny cats...cue pic now

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Friday Funny = FAIL

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:15:00 +0000

My Friday Funny Failed last time I posted it.

Laptop Batteries: to keep them plugged in at all times or to completely discharge?

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:05:00 +0000

One of my favourite Blogs yesterday posted a link to an article from smarterware.org about whether to keep laptop batteries plugged in at all times or not to?

Its a very interesting read and relevant, considering a lot of us now have a notebook rather than a desktop (oh the Freedom of wireless). How many people want to replace their battery before they have to? Raise your hands? No I didn't think so!

So, with Lithium Ion batteries, it appears, that it's recommended to drain completely and recharge your notebook battery once a month, and other than that, if in doubt, dont keep it plugged in 24/7 unless you want it to die quickly. Mercury Batteries, it appears, are a somewhat different story. As always, the stories differ depending on who you talk to, like a*&holes everyone seems to have their own.

Personally, I have always generally tried to keep it plugged in when I'm sitting at my desk at all times, however, because I am lazy and like to sit in front of television a lot with my notebook and I dont want to take the charger with me I tend to run it down to between 30% and 40% and then plug it in again. Very rarely has it switched itself off because I've run it down completely, now I am thinking I should schedule myself to run it to reserve battery power once a month and then recharge it, if this saves me some cash down the road I'm more than happy to oblige.

Now that I think about it, I just sold a Power Book G4 with a battery that was still going (Despite being more than a few years old) and you were still able to get at least 40 minutes of unplugged time out of it, which I think the new owner is getting currently. Just by nature of the way I was using it (not having it plugged in all the time) made it stay that way, still 40 minutes of unplugged time before the thing drains completely is pretty shit, and I did tell him he should replace the battery while the. I'd be interested to hear what others are currently doing and whether they thought their laptop battery was healthy or unhealthy?

I haz a Snow Leopard

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:39:00 +0000

The other week I upgraded to Snow Leopard. My quickest Operating System Upgrade Ever.

Thanks to the Awesome Price $39 AU (If every Operating System upgrade were that Cheap I would buy all of them legitimately). Snow Leopard has a raft of "nice" upgrades and small "tweaks" (Menus' look a bit nicer, black with a silver border) which generally improve your performance and experience of using a Mac, for instance, suddenly you'll notice your HDD reports the correct size.

Anyway, I just found another nice tweak, you can control which App opens when you insert your iPhone or Camera, instead of iPhoto opening every.single.time. It was published on Daring Fireball, which is one of the lovely blogs in my Google Reader reading list, but I found it originally on Life hacker, which I read more often. My reason for loving this is that I'm so sick of iPhoto opening automatically every time I plug my iPhone in to charge or Sync my applications. I mean, generally I just dont use the Phone's Camera for any photos I want to transfer.... I have a Digital Camera for that. But one commenter on Daring Fireball pointed out that he would like iPhoto to open only when he plugged in his iPhone, and when Plugging in his DSLR High End Camera he would like Aperture to open. Fair enough, you spend 1000 + on a Camera and you dont want some cheap software to do the editing and organising of your photos in a Half Arsed way, you want full control and cataloging abilities like you get in Aperture (or some other High End Photo Processing application).

So there you go, what do you think? Useful?

Google Reader Vs Bloglines

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:21:00 +0000

I've tried out various RSS readers over the years, in Email clients and in Dedicated RSS Clients and really, none has stuck. The main problem is always that once you leave your computer (as you do when you're switching between work and home and don't use the same computer all the time) you lose your list of interesting reading sites. Things like Newsgator are great if you have the same machine all day every day every day as I did last year whilst working for my last company and they very kindly gave me a MacBook Pro to use. Now however, I may be using several machines in our house, and could be anywhere out and about or at work and in the slow periods would like something to read. I've also noticed that certain blogs have these epic lists of blogs that look cool but would be a total pain in the arse to update except that they had names attached to them that seemed to be doing the work for them. Names like Bloglines and Google Reader.

So I went and signed up to Bloglines first in the hope of being able to add a long and impressive list of blogs to mine, Bloglines seems to have achieved saturation status and has become one of the standards in Online RSS readers but Google, which I'm guessing is relatively new, has the bonus of connections (I signed up and automatically, all the blogs I follow through Blogger, appeared in my reading list), something that would an extra process to set up with bloglines (Bloglines offers you the ability to Clip articles as you read, create your own blog and the offer of an Bloglines email address). But now I'm signed up to both and I want to dump Bloglines in favour of Reader and there's no delete account button, can't you slim down your web presence anymore by deleting things?

So here's my short version of things I like and Don't like in each:

Bloglines:

+'ves

Can clip articles
Supplies you with a list of suggested blogs you might like when you sign up
Gives you the option of having an email address
Gives you the option of having a blog
It's free
It seems well spread and supported
You can publish your reading list to your blog

-'ves

You cant quit
It uses frames, which seems outdated
You have to set up the additional blog and email address

Google Reader:

+'ves

All you need to do to sign up is log in once with your gmail address and password
It adds all the blogs you follow in Blogger automatically
Bundles (look it up, its like publishing a categorised reading list)
It has the "Cloud" Technology going for it
You can do just about everything from bloglines

-'ves

You don't have the immediate "Here are some blogs you might want to subscribe to:" Although they do have categories you can search.
Trying to find the start of a blog to read historical posts is a pain in the arse, as soon as you think you're at the bottom it changes your place and keeps loading posts and moving your reading spot.
Subscribing to Feeds is not as straightforward as Bloglines as its not quite as well established, you still have to search out the code for the RSS feed then have the reader open in another tab and copy and paste the link. I think this is Feedburners fault as much as Google. It just doesn't come across as space age as Google is supposed to be.

I'll probably end up sticking with Google Reader purely for convenience sake at this stage and probably watch out for more changes happening on the site as I figure out what neat Shit I can do to share stuff I am reading....seeing as I now have no excuse but to read more blogs. Especially since the Age plans to charge for its news stories in the future ( I wonder if more people will buy the paper if that happens? Little known fact, you actually get more news in the paper than online, for the most part its spell checked too)

Writers Block

noreply@blogger.com (ras) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:07:00 +0000

These days its becoming increasingly difficult to think of things to Blog about, because there's a certain knack to having an interesting and useful Blog, and its become apparent over the years that to have an interesting blog you must consistently update it, and for it to be useful, you need to have a speciality or capture some sort of Niche area which, further requires you to be actively researching. It's immediately apparent to me that this blog has neither consistency or specialty so there-fore it follows that it is neither interesting nor useful.

Social Media

My adventures in technology these days have become a rather dull series of sideline commentary on various technologies which attempt to takeover and run past me like sprinters whilst I try and figure out what the hell they're supposed to be used for. Twitter is the best example of this type of phenomenon, and although I am, very sadly, completely addicted to the technology now of receiving updates a couple of times a day in 140 character portions, I also have noticed that it has become completely awash with spam, porn, porn spam, advertising and pompous big noting and self promotion. I also am starting to hear about another new social media phenomenon called LinkedIn, which I've no idea about whatsoever. One of my friends is organising a conference in Melbourne in November about social media, perhaps I should attend? Probably not a bad idea, infact. Note to self. Get with times, attend social media conference.

Gaming

Recently I've been doing a bit of casual gaming, but more often than not I'm watching reviews of games and not actually playing them. My two favourite game reviews come from the ABC 2 Show Good Game, who this Monday celebrated their 100th Episode, and the Escapists review show Zero Punctuation, which has become my Thursday morning coffee ritual. I approach game reviews much like I approach Movie reviews, with the philosophy that I can watch reviews to know what's around and get the general idea of what they're about without actually ever having to invest the time into watching/playing them myself. Having said that I will occasionally go watch a movie, or play a game. Castle Crashers is one I've played a few times recently on X-Box 360, you can buy it from X-Box arcade and its much like the old Side Scrolling shoot/battle games of the 90's, except the character design and layout looks like a bunch of characters that have jumped off a Graff feature wall in some inner city laneway and there's alot of humour in the game play. You're a knight with magic powers crashing through Castles and Forests and Fields chasing after your Girlfriend who's been (*Yawn!*) kidnapped. But along the way you battle creatures with sacks over their heads Voodoo invoking rabbits with red eyes, run away from monsters whilst riding little forest creatures who appear to be propelled by poo. The sound track is addictive and only adds to the whole experience.

Modding

Not so much my adventure but my partner who has just taken advantage of the Homebrew Channel on the Wii to turn it into a Media Centre in an attempt to replace an array of machinery in our bedroom. On first glance moving the Wii from Lounge room to Bedroom was a good one. For one, there's an application which allows you to play DVD's in this Homebrew kit. Second, the Wii seems to display better on a smaller screen standard definition CRT TV than on the HD Projector, much less pixilation! Unfortunately its not been without its teething problems, as the Media Player application seems to be unable to play an entire episode of a TV show streaming from our NAS (Network Attached Storage) without crashing at the halfway point. I do look forward to playing emulated games in bed through, fingers crossed he gets his hand on a copy of Alex Kidd in Miracle world so I can finally fulfil a childhood dream and actually finish the damn game before I die of Old Age.