Devil Works

I really do want to read TechCrunch, well most of it anyone, or possibly even just some of it. So like all good 2.0 bad boys I subscribed to their RSS feed via Google Reader and I can’t keep up with their rate of posts, everything is a full article. I don’t have enough time in the day.

Reminds me why I stopped reading Make, was too hard to filter out the stuff I’m not interested in.  I still drop by on a slow day and see what is happening.

Any one know of a digest version of TechCrunch or Make?

I’m about to hit 1000 followers on Twitter. To be honest I haven’t really taken the time to work out what it’s all about and the potential of it all, but the way it’s exploding at the moment I don’t want to miss the ride. Then again it could all just be another messaging flash in the pan.

Anyone remember when ICQ was huge? I think it was sometime before AOL bought it Though some people might not remember them either.

Finding affordable and useful domain names these days is getting harder and harder.

I’ve spent two weeks looking for the domain for a new project. I was open to spending reasonable dollars in the used market, but was also okay buying something off the shelf if it was easily remembered.

A couple of tools I found useful were Name Tumbler and Bust A Name.

If you know of any more useful domain tools please post them in the comments. I’ve got one more name to find for the fifth string in my bow and I’m hoping the search doesn’t take as long as last time.

I’m backing the truck up loading up this site and a few others and moving them to another host to save myself a few hundred bucks a year.

Sorry if anything is temporarily broken.

I’ve been hosting various websites since 1997 and have been caught in this trap before……. You sign up for a hosting provider, who at the time has the best deal and reputation for your needs at the time.  Over the intervening period of two or three years your hosting needs change and the cost of hosting has dropped but in the meantime you have developed a complex web of sites with custom scripts and large MySQL data bases. That are a massive pain to relocate.  And as the hosting bill isn’t that much of an impost you don’t worry about moving them to a cheaper but no less functional hosting provider.

Normally my trigger for a hosting move would be poor service, but this time it’s the realisation that $50 a month = $600 a year and that at the very least is a dirty weekend away.

I’m well and truly operating in Australia, but when I log into Gmail for the last few days I get this message:

We can’t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we’re called Google Mail here instead.

If you’re traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com.

Oh, and we’d like to link the URL above, but we’re not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

I hit refresh and my Gmail loads normally, why does Google think I’m in Germany ?

Hi

I’ve just logged into the blog after a very long lay off, I have many excuses.

• I bought a house
• I moved into said house
• I’m renovating said house
• I took a holiday
• Work has kept me at a computer screen for long hours so I avoided computers at home

Unfortunately during my absence there were some unsavoury comments that weren’t blocked by my spam filters. I think I’ve cleaned them up but let me know if I’ve missed any.

• I’m,

It’s getting harder and harder to find good domain names that aren’t yet registered. You can try the resellers route but if you’re trying to get into a hot topic then you’ll be paying through the nose for it.

However I have found this little tool which helped me get a reasonable new domain for my new project.  Actually it didn’t come up with the one I ended up using but it gave me an idea and I translated it into something that rolls off the tongue a bit easier.

I’m normally fairly blind to advertising on the web but Gmail’s contextual advertising caught my eye.

I was just looking at a brief email conversation I was having with my girlfriend about not sleeping very well.

Google has matched that thread with Nocturnal Incontinence…… who knew !

When I first installed Ubuntu I got a message saying that as my B43 WLAN was proprietary I would have to install the firmware myself.

So I did what I normally did and googled my way through a dozen pages with instructions on installing B43 wireless firmware that didn’t really help me.  I tried a couple of step by step command line methods and none of them worked without errors.

I’d resolved to hit the IRC channels on the weekend and see if I could get some help there.

I was perusing the menus and clicked a few things and now I have wireless working.

In brief here’s what I did

1. In the toolbar go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
2. Enter your password(almost like Vista’s UAC but not often enough to complain)
3. Click the search button and search for B43
4. Select B43-fwcutter
5. Accept everything that comes after that
6. Restart Ubuntu

That’s it, I know have working wireless.

It’s day three and so far I’m pretty happy with my move to delete Vista from my laptop and install Ubuntu.

To follow up on the last post

• the screen brightness issue seems to have resolved itself.

• I haven’t fixed the wireless issue yet, but I have found the instructions… I have little motivation when I’m house sitting in a house with no wireless.
•  I realised that while twittering was fun, it didn’t deserve the effort to get tweetdeck working at this stage. I can still use twitter.com if I need a fix.

Some other things I’ve noticed

• Booting up and shutting down are really quick. I used to flick the power button and go and do something else for five minutes while it kicked itself into gear. I’m now patient enough to wait the 30 seconds for Ubuntu to load.
• I tried hibernate mode and it froze. Then I realised that I can shut down and reboot in the time it used to take Vista to wake up from Hibernate. There is also a menu option for Ubuntu to resume where you left off after a log out, but I haven’t tried this yet.
• Some of the keyboard shortcuts are different, but the only one I’m missing at the moment is using the backspace key to go back a page in Firefox
• All the applications open a lot quicker, even when I have 10 Firefox windows to load, it kicks Vista’s ass.
• It comes with more games than any version of Windows I’ve ever had.
• Did I mention it’s so much quicker than Vista

I’ve still got lots more to learn, but almost everything I’ve done so far has been pretty simple once it’s set up. On the other hand, things on Vista are pretty easy to set up but a pain because they never work properly.

Overall I’m pretty impressed, before I installed Ubuntu I may have had a total of 20 hours linux experience and maybe 20 years of Windows experience, so I can’t expect it to be as natural to me as the Microsoft solution.

I really haven’t found a reason to go back !