• Make: Panasonic
• Model: DMC-FZ38
• DateTime: 2010:08:20 22:13:16

Posted via email from meJamie

We picked up Fuzzy Leopard from Farnham Sevices A31 (http://jfi.me/V). We didn’t realise this was a Members Only Cache and I don’t know if you need premium membership to see the link I’ve given.  Anyway, Fuzzy Leopard wanted to be photographed lounging around in trees.  Jen, the littlest Winjer took the photos.  Her definition of Tree might be slightly different to you or I!

Posted via email from meJamie

GC1MQTD — Farnham Services A31 is a members only Travel Bug Hotel.  When we got there, it contained three other Trackables.  A Fuzzy Leopard that wants to be photographed lounging in trees and a 2007 Red Jeep Travel Bug “Tamarac River (MN)” tag with no hitch-hiker attached.  The girls decided to take the two with hitch-hikers.

We’re now in Cornwall after a further 4 hour drive, so hopefully we’ll find some good trees for the leopard and a comfy cache for the Jeep!

Posted via email from meJamie

A1 Wetherby
This service area is fairly new.  There are Disabled Spaces across the front of the main building that have bollards restricting their length.  The good news is that there are more spaces in front of the adjacent hotel.  The front of this building has a VERY wide pavement.  This allows us to reverse the ‘van right into the space and out the back without obstructing the pavement in any way.

The service area itself was has a couple of Coffee bars  (Costa) and a food area doing the traditional English Breakfast.  There was also a Roll shop, Marks and Spencer and a Newsagent.  It’s not huge but the fry up was good!

M1 Trowell Services
Situated between junctions 25 and 26 on the M1, Nottingham is the closest city to Trowell Services.  For us, this was just a quick loo stop so I was really pleased about the available parking.  The Disabled Parking formed an L shape at the main entrance.  Luckily for us, the way these spaces are positioned created a few ‘longer than usual’ spaces.  There was plenty of room here to park the Motorhome.

I’ve added a couple of pictures to try and show the parking available.  Please add to the comments any hints or tips you’ve come across whilst driving the country.

Posted via email from meJamie

Sayontan has added another new version of his fantastic theme Suffusion.  I’ve just implemented the new style on this site (only the header has been Jamiefied), just so I can see how it looks.

meJamie

For a while I have been cross posting all my posts to a Posterous site.  Posterous is a blogging platform that tries to make the whole process of blog writing as easy as possible.

One of the ways they do this is to encourage posting by email.  I simply added an email sending plugin to WordPress and every post I write gets posted automatically.  It’s fairly cool, but recently I just wondered why I was doing this.  I decided that it was because I could!!  It didn’t really do anything productive for me.

From this week I’m going to change meJamie and create a Geocaching log site with it.  Since Posterous can be used to post anything by email, I think it would be the ideal platform for logging my Geocaching activity whilst I’m out “in the field”.  I can’t see the site being all that exciting to anyone but me, but you never know!!

Posterous can also “Autopost” to a huge number of places, so you might even see the odd thing pop up here!

Background

So, some activity in the background.  Not much up front.  Ahh well, lets see what the holidays bring.

Speed Dial

The first of these was a Firefox Add-On called Speed Dial.  It is similar to the Chrome home page but allows you to configure the sites you use the most.  Almost everything can be customised, the number of ‘Dials’ on a page, the number of pages and the images used to represent them.

This add on effectively removed the need for my bookmark collection.  I transferred all the favourites I use on a regular basis and reduced my bookmark bar to one button.

Instapaper

The second app was Instapaper.  This is one of a range of apps that are designed to save web pages for later reading.  It is very simple to use, involving one click of a bookmark to save a page and another click to retrieve your reading list later.

In theory this is all that’s needed but there were some features offered by other apps that started to look attractive.  Unfortunately all of these services went down the now familiar route of offering an iPhone app and nothing for anyone else.

Instapaper redeemed itself by offering a very mobile friendly web page.  It can be accessed using any of the mobile browsers available and works fairly well on all of them.  Not as good as a dedicated app, but better than anything else on offer.  Until now!

Read It Later

The most attractive competitor to Instapaper was Read It Later (RIL).  It offered a Firefox Add-On as well as an extension for Chrome.  Unfortunately though, it didn’t look too good on my Touch2.

Yesterday this changed and for me, it’s put RIL well into the lead.  Hakan Serce published his first beta of LateReader.  It’s available from FreewarePocketPC.net, directly from his website or from the XDA Developers forum.

This is a first release and, as such, does not have the full feature set planned by the developer.  However, his plans go well beyond the basic.  This release already does everything I would consider essential.  So the future should bring something really special.

At the moment this WinMo app is not mentioned on the RIL website.  You can find it using the links below.

References

• Read It Later:  http://readitlaterlist.com
• Developers Website:  http://cbeg.es/9b
• Download LateReader from FWPPC:  http://cbeg.es/9a
• XDA Developers:  http://cbeg.es/9c
• Instapaper:  http://www.instapaper.com
• Speed Dial:  http://speeddial.uworks.net

Related articles by Zemanta

• Instachrome Brings Instapaper Clipping to Chrome [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
• On Read It Later (marco.org)
• Blog — Why Instapaper Will Never Be Booted From the iTunes App Store (technologyreview.com)

What’s Available

There are several worthy contenders when it comes to online note writing.  These vary in complexity but most people will probably find all they need in Evernote, the market leader.

Evernote has the full trilogy of Desktop, Web Based and Mobile applications.  They cover most of the Smartphone operating systems (not just iPhone) and have browser integration that works both on and off line.

Unfortunately though, they don’t support IE6.  Not a problem if you can install the Desk Top programme but this is another facility that is not available to me at work!

The alternative I’ve opted for up until now is good old Email.  I have a fantastic little app on my Windows Mobile called Thought.  It is set up to send an email to a single address.  So I can open the app with one click, write the note and send it with another click.  Off goes the email!  Combine this with Gmail’s ‘plus’ and label features and I can have the note highlighted in my inbox.

This is good.  But, all the notes are given the same priority and it’s a bit of a guddle trying to separate them from my normal emails

Enter Ubernote

I had seen Uberbnote in the passing a while ago but never gave it much thought.  Second time around though, it really caught my eye.

Ubernote is web based.  It doesn’t have the apps that Evernote does but this makes it much simpler to get going with.  There is a special ‘mobile’ url that creates a mobile friendly environment and there are extensions available for Chrome and Firefox.

When using IE6, they post a friendly note about your use of an outdated browser.  Once that’s gone, the system works perfectly.  All notes can be tagged and searched for in a simple, user friendly UI.

End Note

Of course, there are loads of other options out there but these are the best I have used.  I did like Google Notes which had a nice slick interface but although it still exists, I am a little unsure of using it since Google withdrew support.

For now, it’s UberNote instead of email.

Let me know if you think I’ve missed something better.

References:

http://UberNote.com

http://Evernote.com

http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Thought/ (Note:  This was MUCH cheaper when I purchased it through Windows Mobile Marketplace.  Once purchased, WMMP doesn’t let you see prices so I don’t know if this is still the case.  Worth checking though!).

Just after I started looking, Facebook changed their site substantially.  They introduced a whole new way of integrating with their site.  The thing is, they have not been that good at telling developers how to use the new system.

In some ways it is now a lot easier.  You can add a couple of lines of code to your sites header and then use various plugins to add Facebook functionality to your site.  Of course, the modular elements of WordPress’ themes and plugins make this really easy to implement.  That is, if someone writes the plugins!

Since the changes that Facebook have made are relatively simple, there are a huge number of plugins available to add this new functionality to your site.  The thing is, a higher volume of plugins does not guarantee quality.  In fact, many of the plugins are dreadful.

I’ve picked out a couple to try, so the next few posts will be used to test the plugin and then attempt to review the set up process.

The really scary bit is that the first victim, the one that loses their email account, has no idea this is happening.

How is it Done

In this case a small malware program was deposited on the host computer, this can be done in any number of ways and no-one is completely safe.  Then, the program starts logging all the keys that are typed and sends the results back to its Master.  Using more software, the thieves try to identify passwords by looking at the keys pressed after an email address is entered.  Simple eh!

How To Stay Safe?

One way is not to enter your passwords using your keyboard.  Of course, you should also make sure you don’t use the same password for all your online accounts but that’s a pain, so here’s a way to kill two birds.

LastPass — is a password manager that stores your passwords securely online.  They are encrypted and then stored so not even LastPass knows your passwords.  The beauty is that there are plugins for most browsers (including mobile), so the whole process can be automated.  Every site can have a different password but you only need to remember one, and if the theives get that, it’s useless!

SuperGenPass — is even more clever.  This is a small program kept as a bookmark on your bookmark bar.  When you go onto a site you need a password for (eg GMail), it recognises the domain (google.com).  You then enter a master password — always the same one — and the script combines the domain and your password to generate a new, secure password.  The password is never saved, it’s simply regenerated each time you use it.

So, with both of these systems you can continue to use the one password that you do now but let the programs swap it for something more secure.  Plus, because both programs automatically fill in the password field for you, the key loggers can’t guess what your real password is!

References

LastPass:   http://LastPass.com

SuperGenPass:   http://SuperGenPass.com