• Allmyapps Bulk-Installs Your Favorite Apps, Makes System Rebuilding Less Painful
• How To Tag Your Friends In Photos On Flickr
• 3 Tools To Easily Backup Your Flickr Photos
• Ten gadgets to make Google Wave more productive – and fun!
• Top 5 Sites For Free Sound Effects Downloads
• How to Really Browse Without Leaving a Trace
• Top ten DIY photography tips – Crave at CNET UK
• Google Sitemaps FAQ (Sitemap Issues And Errors)

Now you can, try out Mobbler. If you let it connect to the internet all the time, it will scrobble in real time, or if you want to wait until you’re in WiFi range, just leave it running in the background in it’s offline mode, and it will queue up everything you play, then scrobble as soon as you tell it to connect.

MP3 tag editing

If you download many podcasts, you’ll often find that some of them aren’t tagged properly, and so don’t show up in your MP3 player where they should. There are two ways you can deal with this. First is the manual method with a graphical application. My recommendation goes to MP3TAG. It is a highly flexible system which can handle all the tag fields you’d need to handle, including cover art. It can also fill in tag information from systematically named files, and vice versa, as well as pulling tag data from Amazon and the CD internet database. When I was organising my 1,800+ MP3 collection, I was able to tag and rename every file with a ridiculous amount of ease.

Manual tag editing is all well and good for occasional jobs, but when you need see to podcasts that your computer gets every week, it can get repeative and time consuming. Therefore you need an automated method. The best way to automate a task is to find a command line tool for which you can write a script and execute on your operating system’s scheduler.

This is were ID3 Mass Tagger comes in. This is a really handy little utility, pointed out to me by fellow blogger, Pokeh. Fortunately the author makes versions of this for most operating systems. I run a script on my Ubuntu laptop for synchronising my podcasts with my mobile phone, and I’ve been able to incorporate this into that script to correct all my genre tags.

MP3Tag in action

References:

• ID3 Mass Tagger Homepage
• MP3TAG

The BlueTrek Bizz Bluetooth Headset

This is a basic headset, as reflected in the price, so don’t expect it to compare with the likes of Jawbone headsets. However, it does have some novel features which make it worth considering. As far as call quality goes, I’d say it’s adequate. During testing, I found that the person I was talking to sounded slightly muffled, compared to my handset’s speaker, and the same applied to my voice quality too. There was sufficient clarity there, but it could struggle to cope with lots of background noise. I think this is true of many Bluetooth headsets that lack noise cancellation though. Build quality is good, it’s completely plastic, no metal, but feels solid enough. It only has a single button, which you hold down for different lengths of time to switch on and off, and to initiate pairing.

BlueTrek Bizz being worn

Moving on to its novel features; the first is that the ear piece will slide away to reveal a USB plug. This is so that you can plug the headset directly into your computer’s USB port for charging. I think this is a really nice feature as I hate having loads of cables hanging around. Although, be aware that the ear piece is tethered to the device via a plastic wire which has to bend out of the way when you connect to a port. Therefore, you  need to have sufficient space around your ports, or that wire will start to lever the device out of the port. You may need an extension cable, just as a spacer. Fortunately, the Bizz comes with a short USB extension cable, although I didn’t like it because it was made of a very rigid plastic, making bends or twists impossible.

Recharging the BlueTrek Bizz is as easy as plugging in a thumb drive

Saving the best till last, this is the first Bluetooth headset that doubles as a Micro SD/SDHC card reader. When you remove the ear piece, you can see a small slot above the USB plug, which your Micro SD/SDHC cards slide into. It’s a spring loaded push-eject system, like on most mobile phones. Being a combined device doesn’t compromise it’s performance though, as my own testing showed. The test consisted of writing an identical set of files to the same class 2, 16GB Micro SDHC card, on both readers. The file set consisted of 26 MP3’s, averaging at 48MiB each. As you can see from the chart below, the difference in read and write speeds were negligible.

Micro SDHC Performance

Now for the negatives, the Bizz only has one button, there’s no volume controls. You have to adjust volume via your handset. I know any volume control isn’t hands free, but not being able to completely control a call via the headset is disappointing. As mentioned earlier, there is a plastic wire tethering the ear piece to the main body, so you don’t loose it while connected to a USB port. This is fine, although it gets in the way when you’re plugging it, creating a fragile connection between the device and whatever it’s plugged into.

Conclusion

If best possible audio quality is your top priority with a Bluetooth headset, then this isn’t the headset for you. However, if you want something that combines two accessories into one device, then the BlueTrek Bizz is definitely worth a look. Just think, no would suspect that you have up to 16GB of data stowed away inside your ear!

If you want to see more of the Bizz, including the packaging and contents, see my photo review on Flickr, and watch my video review below.

References:

• BlueTrek Bizz [MobileFun.co.uk]
• BlueTrek Bizz English Manual [PDF Download]
• Bluetrek.com
• My photo review [Flickr]
• My video review [YouTube]
• Bluetrek Bizz: The spork of Bluetooth headsets [CNET UK]
• Bluetrek’s Bizz Bluetooth headset improves your memory [Engadget]
• Review: BlueTrek BIZZ Bluetooth Headset [Pre|Central.net]

• Musings on maintaining Ubuntu: Caveats for audio in 9.10
• Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks: Karmic FAQ
• Google Analytics Hack – obtaining full referring URL
• Tech Scraps: Average file size within a directory
• I iz « Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?
• Out of lack of interest, « Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?
• Hmmm. You make « Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?
• Doit.im Is a Cross-Platform GTD Task Management App – GTD – Lifehacker

I think this is a little better than the privacy mode of IE8 and Incognito mode of Chrome, because it works retro-actively and you don’t have to have some special mode running to use it.

One caveat, I’ve found in my testing of it that it will leave one entry in your history, just linking to the root (i.e. www.site.com) of the site you were on. Although one trip to the “Awesome Bar” with your Delete key will fix that.

Retain your visitors by using related post thumbnails!

A while ago I was doing some research into how I could better design the layout of my blog to encourage new visitors to read more posts, rather than just bouncing away (i.e. leaving after reading one post).

I already used a plug-in called YARRP (Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in), to show a list of posts that were similar to the one the reader was looking at. Although I found this blog post describing how you could customise your related posts layout to include thumbnail images for each post.

Depending on your PHP & CSS skills, the customisation could either take you 20 minutes to implement, or a whole evening. It also depends on what formatting problems your theme has would would need working around. In my case, I think it took me five hours, on and off. My CSS skills were a little rusy, and my theme had an issue which made different posts have different issues. So it took a lot of systematic experimentation to mess around with CSS margins to make sure everything stayed where it was supposed to be!

Note that you need to be self-hosting to be able to do this one.

You’ll be able to see the results of my implementation of this at the bottom of the page, and it I have noticed an objective benefit in having done this. According to Google Analytics, comparing the month before and the month after making this change, my bounce rate fell by 4.4%, my page views per visit ratio increased by 3.4%, and my average time per visit went up by 25%.

Doing this hasn’t gained me more visitors, but that’s not the point. From where ever they come, this layout change is designed to make your visitors stick around and see more of your work. Going by the above results, it really does seem to work.

So, all that’s left to say is thanks to Zach at buildinternet.com for posting about this, as it’s been a good help to me.

References:

• Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress

As the winter draws in, it’s time for wrap up warm with some open source goodness, as the October 29^th release date of Ubuntu’s latest version, Karmic Koala, draws near. So, let’s take a look at what’s new!

Running the installer from the Live CD is the same user-friendly set up that Ubuntu always has. Although in addition to drive encryption that came in with the last version, there is now an added option to format your hard drive with the new Ext4 file system, a new version of Linux’s native file format.

Once the installer gets running, you get to watch a presentation of screens telling you all the key features of the operating system. This something Windows has had for years, and is a great idea to educate new users on just what they can do with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu's new informative installer

Once you’re into the Ubuntu desktop, everything will be familiar if you’ve used previous versions. Although, you can see straight away a fresh set of icons have been used, and the default wallpaper is much brighter than previous versions.

Browsing the applications and system menus gives you a view of the key new features to Karmic.

The default IM application has been switched from the long-standing Pidgin, to a new but very similar application called Empathy. I expect few users will really notice the difference here.

Ubuntu's new IM client, Empathy

In the applications menu, you will find the “Ubuntu Software Center”. Desktop Linux distributions have long had software to deliver applications to you. Ubuntu’s has been the “Synaptic Package Manager”. Although Software Centre gives you a far more user friendly interface. The distinction of having a single section named “Free software” hints at Cannonical’s long term goals of being able to deliver commercial software to the Ubuntu desktop. This is a boon for developers. Until now, Linux’s repository method of delivering software has been a mixed blessing for them. The aspiration of new developers is to get their work into as many repositories as possible. However, commercial developers have shied away from this because Linux repositories have offered little opportunity for generating an income.

The Ubuntu Software Center

Confusingly, there is another existing application called “Add/Remove Applications” alongside the Synaptic Package Manager in the System/Administration menu. This appears to offer the same software set as Synatpic does, although again with a better user interface, including popularity ratings.

Ubuntu's Add/Remove Applications window

Finally, we have the addition of “Ubuntu One”, Cannonical’s other embryonic software as a service. Ubuntu One is a Dropbox like service (utilising Amazon S3), available to all Ubuntu users. For free, everyone gets 2GB of storage, but this can be expanded to 50GB for $10 (US) a month, although I couldn’t find where you are meant to authenticate your account. You can also access your files via the web and share specific files and folders with specific individuals. The eventual aim is that you will be able to synchronise all of your application settings across multiple Ubuntu computers. This is a promising service, but from my own research I have yet to find any information about privacy and encryption, which are essential to me for any on-line storage service. On the other hand, the Cannonical deserve kudos for finding innovative ways to generate more income from their desktop operating system.

Ubuntu's "Ubuntu One" cloud storage running.

You can find more screen shots at my Ubuntu 9.10 Flickr gallery.

If all of this has caught your interest, then go Get Ubuntu!

• 500 Internal Server Error
• naan studio: Win a personalized tile by tweeting about Echofon
• Bluetrek – Headset BIZZ User instructions
• More Free Social Media Icon Sets! UK Web Hosting Uk Web Design | Evohosting
• Linux: Access 100+ Games Instantly With DJL – Make Tech Easier
• ASCII Code – The extended ASCII table
• Twave: Google Wave + Twitter
• Google Wave: A Complete Guide
• 3 Tools to Discover & Install Awesome Linux Games
• Google Wave 101 – Wave – Lifehacker

• FilePermissions – Community Ubuntu Documentation
• Linux permissions

http://lifehacker.com/387709/usb-autorunner-quick+launches-thumb-drive-apps

S60 & Linux

I have had another article published on AllAboutSymbian.com. This time I wrote about how to maintain connectivity between your phone and computer after switching from Windows to Linux.

This is based on my own experience after switching exclusively to Ubuntu Linux, and having spent time working out how to still support my mobile phone.

Topics covered include: how to back up files, transfer photos, synchronise your music and connect to the internet via your phone.

If you’d like to read it, here’s the link:

- A survival guide to Linux and S60 -

Nokia Share Online with Furtiv's added social media gateways for Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube

Furtiv, a new internet start up in Helsinki, is creating a service to be a social media gateway, making it easier to send content from your phone to all of the various social media websites.

Their first beta project is an addition to Nokia’s Share Online application. Most new Nokia handsets come with the Share Online application allowing you to upload photos to Flickr, Ovi and Vox. Furtiv uses the API from this application to create gateways to more websites, like Facebook, Picassa, Twitter (via Twitpic.com and Vid.ly for video) and Youtube.

They are using the open Atom standard to achieve this, and they implement it in such a way that you don’t even need to have an account with them. Furtiv’s presence is completely transparent, once you get everything set up by visiting http://furtiv.mobi on your Nokia browser. Further instructions on getting set up can be found here.

I’ve tested this service out and it works perfectly. To qualify this, I tried it along with other readers from AllAboutSymbian.com who read about it there. Possibly coincidence, or possibly with us all flooding the service, but there were some early teething troubles. This is to be expected with any new system, although the Furtiv team had it fixed again surprisingly quickly, so kudos for that.

The benefits of this service are clear to see. Being able to plug-in to existing services on your handset saves having to install any extra phone applications. It also saves you having to figure out how to use e-mail portals and mobile site uploads. Every site you could want to upload to is there in your phone’s own services. This has the potential to remove more inertia in the way of the proliferation of social media, especially for non-technically inclined users, which can only be a good thing. Not withstanding Facebook becoming littered with as much mindless content as can be found on Youtube!

You can find Furtiv on Twitter, @furtiv, and read their blog and FAQ. Thanks to @rafeblandford from AllAboutSymbian for posting a heads up article about this.

• OnlineOCR Converts Your Scanned Documents to Editable Text – Conversion – Lifehacker
• Create A Virtual Machine Clone of Your Existing Hard Drive [Windows]
• Mounting a Nokia Phone a Little Bit Easier : the new topyli standard
• Plugins list – A wordpress plugin to list the plugins you are using | Nutsmuggling
• Email Service Guide – Interview with Jeremy Howard of FastMail.FM
• Forum Nokia – Quick Start
• An Exhaustive Guide to Saving Your Smartphone’s Battery – Battery – Lifehacker
• How to Get USB Working in Virtual Box on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex
• Linux_Downloads – VirtualBox
• html redirect

This is for Canon cameras to enhance and customise their standard software. Such things you can do is record video for an indefinite amount of time (instead of a 3 minute limit like on my Powershot), or take photos every few seconds, or get additional on-screen information, and much more.

Apparently you can even add games!

I haven’t used this yet, but I fully intend to.
Edit: Appears my A510 is a bit too old, some hacking may be required!

1. Reliability.
   Of course Ubuntu can go wrong but only when I mess with it. Meanwhile, Windows seems to go wrong all on its own with no help from me!
2. Settings are easier to find.
   Everything you could need to alter is either available through the “System” menu, or right clicking a particular object. Windows requires you to drill through multiple layers of menus.
3. Boot speed.
   Compared to Windows, the boot time of Ubuntu is stunning. See for yourself.
4. Disk space.
   Ubuntu takes at most a quarter of the disk space that Vista and Windows 7 takes. That means you have more drive space to use for your own files.
5. Operation speed.
   Windows soon slows down, Ubuntu doesn’t seem to ever slow down. Everything works as quickly as it did yesterday.
6. Applications are easier to install.
   In Ubuntu, you have the “Synaptic Package Manager” which gives you a point and click interface to choose applications to install – think of it like an App Store. Unlike Windows, where you have to hunt the internet for a .exe to download, then run it yourself. In Ubuntu, it’s an all in one operation.
7. Desktop effects.
   Thanks to a system called Compiz, Ubuntu has more snazzy desktop effects than Windows or Mac OSX have ever had. You can set up the combination that is perfectly useful to you.
8. Regular releases.
   With Ubuntu, you have the equivalent of a service pack every six months. Between those releases, on average, you’ll get bug and security fixes every week.
9. The command line.
   This is a controversial one as I wouldn’t suggest novice users jump right into using the command line (but I would encourage you to learn!). Although, I like how I can achieve – with a single line of code – something that would take a few minutes of point and click work. Windows has a command line, but it’s just not as useful.
10. No DRM, i.e. no Windows Genuine Advantage.
    Because Ubuntu is free there’s no nasty DRM to get in your way when you’re installing the system, either on your own computer, or taking your Ubuntu CD to your friend’s computer.

Get Ubuntu!

Password Maker

If you were following the tech news last week, hopefully you’ll have heard about the surge in leaked and phished passwords from Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. CNET UK covered it twice.

This brings up the thorny issue of how to effectively manage all of your passwords. Some people have one strong password they use everywhere, others will do this but append something for each site. Other people, who frankly scare me, use simple things like “password”, “12345″, “67890″, etc.

What exactly is a strong password? The more random and unpredictable a password is, the stronger it is. In other words, predictable passwords are easy to remember, and easy to crack.

Randomly flaying your fingers at the keyboard will generate a random block of text. Although, you need to recall this random text sometimes, but how? You could keep them all in a file, but this is no good, because if someone gets that file, you’re sunk (same goes for paper records). Even if you use a password manager which keeps your passwords in an encrypted file, they’re still there in a file, which if obtained, could be decrypted by brute force.

The Password Maker Firefox add-on.

A while ago, I listened to Floss Weekly interviewing Eric Jung from the Foxy Proxy project. During the interview, his involvement with a free and open source project called Password Maker was mentioned. Password Maker works by generating a cryptographic hash of both the domain of the website you’re logging into and a master password of your choosing. Thus creating a different piece of pseudo-random text for every website you use. There are lots more settings so that you can finely tune what goes into the password, but don’t worry about those just now.

To put is simply, you never have to find or recover your passwords, because they’re never stored, they’re just generated for you when you need access to them.

The best way to use Password Maker is in the form of a Firefox add-on. However, if you’re away from home, or whatever, there is an on-line version and a mobile browser version, which you can even install on your own website, if you have one. This best security aspect of this is that your master password isn’t stored, and the hashing algorithm is already open, so there’s nothing to hack.

If any one of your site passwords are compromised, it is easy to create a new one by using a new master password. Furthermore, so that you’re not having to remember different master passwords for different sites, I would take one compromised password as an excuse to change ALL of your passwords. Changing your passwords is inconvenient when you have a lot of accounts on the web, but Password Maker makes it easier to get into the habit, especially with the Firefox add-on.

The recent news pushed me into finally doing this, although I had been putting it off due to  the fear of trying to make it work with my mobile browser. Although thanks to Opera Mini 5 now supporting text selection and tabbed browsing. This makes the mobile browser version a viable method for advanced password management on your phone.

Well now you can! Twitterfeed is a new service which allows you to give RSS addresses along with your Twitter log-in details.

For example I have a YouTube account and a LiveJournal blog, I have set up Twitter feed so that whenever I update either of these, a Tweet is made to my Twitter account.

Also, they deserve some extra brownie points, because they support OpenID!

Nokia E55

I am very pleased to say that I now have a mobile phone review published on CNET UK.

They have created a new review section called “You Review”, for readers to write in-depth reviews of products they’ve tried out.

The phone I have reviewed is my own latest handset, the Nokia E55, which I bought a month ago from MobileFun.co.uk.

Click here to read the review on CNET UK.

If you enjoyed that, you might also like to see my E55 Gallery on Flickr.

Imagine trumpets playing …

http://www.davidgilson.co.uk/publications/

Wordpress

If you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog, I hope that you are thinking about security. The best thing you can do is to use the automatic updates so you always have the current version of Wordpress.

One of the most pernicious hacks someone can do to your blog is to access to your wp-admin folder. This folder contains the back-end PHP pages of your site where you control everything and write your posts.

Via your web-host’s control panel you might be able to password protect this directory, although that could still be brute forced. An alternative method, which is well documented (see reference links below), is to create a “.htaccess” file in your wp-admin directory, with which you can limit access to a specific set of IP addresses. E.g. your home IP address and your work IP address. See the references below for links on how to write this.

This method is perfect for locking down and restricting who can access your admin pages without having to go through any sort of manual authentication. I held off doing this for a long time because my ISP assigns dynamic IP addresses, and my Netgear router needs frequent reboots. So my IP address changes a lot, so I’d keep getting locked out of my own blog!

To get around this, I thought of a script I could write to keep my wp-admin’s .htaccess file automatically updated! You could even use this if you took your laptop away from home and connected on another network, as your laptop will have your ssh keys installed. Try to stickto using a secure VPN though, just on principal

Sorry, it’s a bash script, so if you use Windows you’ll be stuck unless you install the cygwin environment and PuTTY. If you use a Mac, I’m sure you can switch on the bash shell.

Without further ado, here’s the script:
Note: make sure you have cURL installed first.

#! /bin/bash
# Auto-update .htaccess in http://your-blog/wp-admin/
# Run this from cron on a short interval.
# This will grab your IP address, and then rewrite the
# .htaccess file and use scp to upload to your server.
#
# David.R.Gilson 3rd October 2009
# http://www.davidgilson.co.uk
# I distrobute this under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.
# http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

cd ~

# Grab your external IP address.
ip="$(curl www.whatismyip.org)"
ip="$(curl -s checkip.dyndns.org|sed -e 's/.*Current IP Address: //' -e 's/<.*$//')"

# Write the file.
echo "AuthUserFile /dev/null" > htacc.txt
echo "AuthGroupFile /dev/null" >> htacc.txt
echo -e "AuthName \042Limit wp-admin access\042" >> htacc.txt
echo "AuthType Basic" >> htacc.txt
echo "<LIMIT GET>" >> htacc.txt
echo "order deny,allow" >> htacc.txt
echo "deny from all" >> htacc.txt
echo "# Whitelist home router" >> htacc.txt
echo "allow from "$ip >> htacc.txt
echo "</LIMIT>" >> htacc.txt

# Copy to server
scp htacc.txt [YOUR SSH LOGIN HERE]:"~/www/wp-admin/.htaccess"

# Clean up
rm htacc.txt

Once you’ve pasted all that into a file (I named mine htaccessupdate.sh), remember to make it executable by typing chmod +x htaccessupdate.sh.

References

• script to get the external IP address
• adding strings in bash
• BASH escape characters
• Protecting the Wordpress wp-admin folder
• Three tips to protect your WordPress installation
• Protect Wordpress From Hackers Safe wp-admin folder
• cURL
• PuTTY
• Cygwin

• Repair Damaged Drives With Linux | PC Plus
• Linux: Improve Your Battery Life With PowerTOP – Make Tech Easier
• Ubuntu packages | Kdenlive
• How to install Skype on Ubuntu
• Estimate Distances with Your Arm and This Rule of Thumb – measurements – Lifehacker
• TWiT Live – The Official TWiT Wiki

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/add_folder_to_windows_xp_start_menu.html

Firefox

Using web-mail is great, you can get to your email from any Internet connected computer and you don’t have to worry about saving all your email when you get a new computer. There’s one thing about it that isn’t so great; that’s when you click on an email link in your browser and it starts loading up the built-in email application that you probably don’t use. Wouldn’t it be good to just click an email link and be taken straight to the composition page of the web-mail service you use?

Well, with Firefox there is a way to set this up. It does require you to have some information about your particular mail service, I’ve tried to cover the most popular ones here. Roughly speaking, the following process is going to do: 1) Unlock Firefox to accept a different mail service, 2) Make Firefox load some code so it knows about your desired mail service, 3) Select that mail service as the default mail client, 4) Re-lock step number 1.

Note, that if you’re using an up to date version of Firefox and you use Yahoo or GMail, then you only need to follow step 3.

Step 1.

Start up Firefox and in the address bar type “about:config“, and if you haven’t done this before, you’ll see a warning page. Then you’ll see a very long list of settings, at the top, in the filter box type (or paste from here) “gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost“, that will filter us down to a single line, which you’ll see is set to “false”. Just double click it to that it is set to “true”, and the line will go bold.

Allowing Firefox to accept a new mai service.

Step 2.

The next step is to paste a line of code into your address bar that is specific to your mail service. Here is a list of the mail services I’ve been able to find the code for:

• Hotmail
  javascript:navigator.registerProtocolHandler('mailto','http://hotmail.msn.com/secure/start?action=compose&to=%s','Hotmail')
• GoogleMail/GMail
  javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")
• Fastmail
  javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","http://www.fastmail.fm/action/compose/?mailto=%s","FastMail"
• Zoho
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","http://mail.zoho.com/mail/compose.do?extsrc=mailto&mode=compose&tp=zb&ct=%s","Zoho Mail")

Once you enter this line, you’ll see a button asking you if you want to add the application. Go ahead and click it.

Adding your web-mail service as a new application

Step 3.

Next, for Windows & Mac users you need to go to your Tools menu and click Options, Linux users go to your Edit menu and select Preferences. When you get the pop-up box click on the Applications tab, and in the search box type “mailto“. This will give you a single line which has a drop down box, which should contain an option for the web-mail service you just added in step 2. Select it and click close.

Selecting your web-mail service.

Step 4.

This is simply a reverse of step 1. Open a new tab and type in “about:config“, then filter down to “gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost” again. Then double click the same line as before. You should see it be set to false and the bold effect switch off.

That’s it! The next time you click an email link you’ll be taken straight to the composition page of your chosen web-mail service. You might have to log in, but as soon as you do, you’ll land on the compose page. Well done

References:

• Firefox 3 default mailto – FastMailWiki
• Tech Support Forum – View Single Post – [SOLVED] Making Hotmail the default mailto in Firefox 3
• Set Web e-mail as default Firefox e-mail
• How to Change Firefox Default Email Client to Gmail, Yahoo AOL or Zoho

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While not a total stranger to the cyberpunk genre thanks to film, Neuromancer was the first cyberpunk book I have read.

Having only just read it in 2009, the abstract notion of jacking in to the matrix (i.e. internet) does not seem as far fetched to me as it must have done when the book was originally written.

Through many parts of the book I felt as if I was loosing track of what was going on. Although, I think this is partly intentional, as Gibson expertly crafts his words so that you feel as if you are in a dream like state. It is no coincidence seeing as how the main character, Case, often takes drugs, and is the cowboy who jacks his mind into the matrix throughout the book. The descriptions of Case’s experiences while jacked in to the matrix are well described, which is helped by the use of primitive shapes and colours. The most trippy parts of the book are when Case’s time on the matrix are interrupted by a powerful artificial intelligence called Wintermute. These are very much like dream scenes, and they are not always explicitly announced in the text. Therefore, as the reader, you will find yourself trying to discern reality from virtual reality.

Most of the way through the book, besides the futuristic setting, the book looks like it will be about a criminal plot, which is in contrast to the book’s esoteric undertones of virtual and altered realities. However, you’ll find later in the book that something equally abstract is orchestrating all of the real world events. Which in itself I think blurs the conceptual lines between the real world and the on-line world.

Twenty five years after it was written, this is still a relevant and engaging book.

View all my reviews >>

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• Ext3 file system overhead disclosed (Part 1) | www.lisnichenko.com

My recommended settings for FEBE (click to enlarge)

More people are starting to comment on how Firefox is becoming a slow browser, with all the Add-Ons and the time it take to start up. I have found this too. I think that over time your profile acquires lots of settings and little bits of code here and there, left over from add-ons you may or may not be still using. The best way to deal with this, as with many computer problems is to wipe out and start again. This doesn’t mean I suggest you loose all your saved passwords and bookmarks though.

When I did this with my Firefox profile (which was many years old), I did it the manual way. It didn’t take me long, but you would need to know what you’re doing. I have since found a Firefox Add-On called FEBE (install from here) which will automate the process for you. Although IMHO, you still need to give it some thought when you are changing its settings. You can back up so many things from your profile with this, that you could end up defeating the object of clearing house! Remember, our aim here, is it wipe out as much of your old profile as possible without loosing the things you really need, like your bookmarks, passwords and Add-Ons.

You can set a schedule for FEBE, set whatever suits you. I am trying out having it do a back up everytime I shutdown Firefox, this does slow things down though. You can set daily, weekly or monthly backups. Or even just schedule a reminder to tell you to do it manually.

My recommended settings for saving the most important things with FEBE are in the above screen shot.

Now, in the event that you need to rebuild your Firefox profile due to some sort of fault and malfunction, that is still in your FEBE backup, then you need to  manually rebuild your profile. *Deep breath*, this is going to take a little while, but follow my instructions and you’ll get there.

How to manually rebuild your Firefox profile

Step 1: Backing up all your data.

Bookmarks: To export your bookmarks, simply export them to a HTML file. You do this by clicking “Bookmarks”, then “Organise Bookmarks”. Then in the bookmarks organiser window, click “Import and Backup” and select the “Export HTML” option.

Passwords: To save your passwords I recommend using a Firefox add-on called “Password Exporter“. Once it’s installed, run it by loading up the Add-Ons menu from the “Tools” menu. Find it in your list of Add-Ons and click “Preferences”, and then click “Export Passwords”. The rest should be self-explanatory.

Add-Ons: I’m afraid there isn’t a simple point and click way to do this that I trust. So, click on the “Tools” menu and select “Add-Ons”. Then get a text editor, word processor, or even a pen and paper and take down all the names of the add-ons you have. Now would be a good time to ask yourself if you really need all of them. Only write down the ones you really do need.

Step 2: Create a new profile.

With Firefox, you may not know, but you can have multiple configurations, or “Profiles”, for Firefox. You need to run Firefox’s profile manager to create a new profile. To get the profile manager started up, follow the instructions for your operating system from this page. Then, further down that page, follow the instructions for creating a new profile.

In addition to those instructions, leave the “Don’t ask at start up” box blank. Then every time you start Firefox you’ll get the profile manager, which is useful while we might need to fall back to your old profile.

Finding Add-Ons within Firefox

Step 3: Restoring your old data.

Here we’ll pretty much do step 1 in reverse.

Bookmarks: Just as before, click your “Booksmarks” menu and select “Organise Bookmarks”. Then in the next window, select “Import and Backup” but this time choose “Import HTML”. You’ll then be asked to select a file, so just navigate to where you saved your bookmarks file and select it.

Paswords: Just as before, go to the Add-Ons menu, and click “Preferences” for the Password Exporter plugin. This time click the “Import Passwords” button, and then select the file that you saved them into before.

Add-Ons: This is the slow part. Get that list you wrote before, then go back to the Firefox Add-Ons menu. Fortunately we don’t have to browse the web to replace your Add-Ons. If you click on the “Get Add-Ons” box, and use the search box to search for each of the Add-Ons you wrote on your list. Within five or ten minutes you should have everything back. Although you’ll have lost all your Add-On settings. Unfortunate, but could be for the best if you’re not sure how or where your profile was corrupted!

If you’re sure you’ve done everything right, when you next start up Firefox and get the profile manager, you can delete your old profile, and re-tick the “Don’t ask at start up” button. Although don’t delete your old profile until you are sure you don’t need it anymore. When you do delete it, consider using some sort of file shreading application, as all of your browsing history and passwords are stored in there!

So, here’s my review of the S60 Twitter app, “Tweets60″, at AllAboutSymbian.com – Link.

• How-to skype video Intrepid Ibex – Ubuntu Forums – This short guide assumes you have installed skype on Intrepid Ibex and that your cam is identified by skype under the options video menu, but the test fails to start your cam.There is a commonly used work around to preload libv4l and start skype to get video working:
  Code:

  LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so skype

  Try that command in your terminal. If that allows you to use video in skype, you may want to create a launcher rather than enter the command each time you want to start skype. The above command will not work in a launcher. You will need to create a script as described below.

• Get BBC iPlayer on your Nokia E52 | NokNok.tv – The Nokia E52 has only just graced the market. In fact, it’s that new we’ve only just got our hands on the Nokia E52. However, that hasn’t stopped the first BBC iPlayer widget from appearing. With this basic app you’ll be able to catch up on all your favourite shows from the last seven days. Find out more about how to get BBC iPlayer on your Nokia E52 after the jump…The Guys over at S60 Mobile have put together a widget that allows you to watch BBC iPlayer on your Nokia E52, as well as the Nokia E55 or Nokia E72. Apparently, this is the basic version of the app that has been modified to allow you to watch streamed BBC TV shows here in the UK.
• Hands-on with the Nokia E55 (or how I learned to live with half a QWERTY) | last100 – I’m generally a fan of Nokia’s business focused Eseries smartphones, while for day-to-day use I require a device with a QWERTY keyboard (preferably a portrait one). Combine the two and the Nokia E71, released around 18 months ago here in the UK, is as close as I’ve got yet to the “perfect” smartphone — I even named it in my top ten Digital Lifestyle products of 08 — although, obviously, it’s far from perfect. Perfection is, of course, a moving target in the world of smartphones.
• Wiki.com – Pan Multi Wiki Search Engine
• Convert PDF to Word (DOC) — 100% Free! – Using our PDF-to-Word conversion technology, you can quickly and easily create editable DOC/RTF files, making it a cinch to re-use PDF content in applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect.
  Best of all, it’s entirely free!
• PPA for sunab – kdenlive stable – Fix for incompatibility between Kdenlive and Ubuntu 9.04
• Top 5 Linux Video Editor Software – I’m looking for a free video editor similar to – Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple iMovie, Final Cut Pro or Microsoft Movie Maker under Linux Desktop operating system. My tasks are pretty simple such as cutting, filtering, and encoding tasks etc. Can you provide me a list of FOSS software which can be used for video capture and video editing purposes under Fedora or Ubuntu Linux desktop systems?A non-linear editing system (NLE) is a video editing (NLVE) or audio editing (NLAE) system which can provide editing method for video clips or frams. You will be able to access any frame in a video clip. Non-linear editing is done for film and television post-production. However, the cost of editing system gone down and non-linear editing tools (including software) are now within the reach of most home users.

Open a new tab and type in the URL about:config

Now, on the filter line type in layout.spellcheckDefault.

This will filter the list of setting down to the one you want, now, change the value of this setting to 2. Then Firefox will tell you how bad your spelling is, EVERYWHERE!

Happy 1st Birthday Blog!

A year ago today, my website as it is now, went live. People always say this, but it is hard to believe that a year has gone by – that I’ve actually been writing for that long. Ah, you got me, I have had a couple of breaks. Although, in that time I’ve managed to clock up over 190 posts, and with around 460 comments there’s been a lot of chat (mostly thanks to Spotify!).

Still though, this has been a fantastic experience. It is helping me to stay active and hone my writing skills. It has also helped me rediscover how much I actually enjoy writing.

There’s a few people I should thank. Nate Lanxon for suggesting that I switch to using Wordpress, Ryan Hitch for hosting this site, and my mother Carol for listening to me go on about my ideas. I’d also like to thank everyone who regularly reads me (you’re an exclusive group!) and who has linked to me over the past year.

What’s for the next 12 months? I am going to continue to cover the same general topics as I do already. I’m planning that Tip of the week will close at the end of the 2009, but I’m hoping to write more hardware and software reviews. Tips may come back in a less frequent but more in-depth form. I am hoping that I can develop writing relationships with other sites too, so you may find that I have less actual posts on here, but instead posting links to what I’ve written elsewhere. All this is subject to change

Once again, thanks for reading and supporting me.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Idiot is a book you can loose yourself in.

The book does finally come together in what I can only describe (without spoiling) as a heartfelt conclusion. However, the bulk of the book follows a loose pattern of plot movements, almost meaningless meandering, and profound philosophical observations about life and the human condition. It was the latter, even more than the plot, that kept me reading this book. It was so striking to me how these observations (which I understand to have contributed to the creation of the existentialist movement) are as valid today as they presumably were when they were written at the end of the 19th century.

The main character, The Prince, is the subject of the book’s title. People refer to him as an idiot because of his epilepsy. Although, it is evident that he is far from an idiot, and many characters in the book realise this too. However, he is perhaps still worthy of the title as, he is pure in spirit to the point of naivety, for which I had a great deal of sympathy. Kudos to Dostoevsky for making such a straight laced good guy someone who you want to keep reading about!.

View all my reviews >>

• Facebook Lite Beta – Like Facebook Was When It Was Good – There is no other quote that one could use to lead into a story like this except, “It’s like deja vu, all over again.” Thank you, Yogi Berra.Really, what do you do with the number one social networking site after you’ve added so much crap, like Facebook Apps, Facebook Ads, more quizzes than you can shake a stick at, Farmville, YoVille, Whateverville. People in general seem to love all those bells, whistles and doodads. If they didn’t, would Facebook and the independent developers keep putting it out there?
• 4 Cool Firefox Tools That Are Not Addons – Firefox has a plethora of extensions and themes available that enhances its capabilities and appearance. They get all the attention all the time.Let’s today shift the focus slightly towards a few external Firefox tools that can be used to optimize Firefox:
• 15 Popular Codes For Smiley Faces & Their Meanings – Smileys represent the human face and all its possible expressions that correspond to our various moods. They have been around for decades, but the internet brought them real fame.Online, smileys are a powerful way to transport emotions. The typographic smileys are generally known as emoticons. Placed with care and read with an eye for detail, they clarify the meaning of a statement and improve interpretation.

  Meanwhile, chatters across the globe have developed a huge selection of emoticons and smileys on most instant messengers. If you always want to hit the right nerve and never pick the wrong expression, use our emoticon guide to popular codes for smiley faces.

• Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird – Today I started using the desktop email client Mozilla Thunderbird again. Gmail is an excellent email application but if I am out and about with my netbook and I have difficulty finding a wireless connection, then the ability to download all my emails beforehand to Thunderbird is a lifesaver.Synchronizing your Gmail email messages with Thunderbird is a breeze by using IMAP. Every change you make in Thunderbird is more or less instantly reflected in your online email account.

  But what about your Gmail contact book, your Google calendar and Google Reader RSS feeds? Although Thunderbird offers their own versions, I wanted it instead to synchronize with my Google accounts and keep everything updated as I made changes. The thought of having two versions, one in Thunderbird and one online, was not very appealing.

  Here’s how I finally managed to do it.

• 5 Sites for Free Online Star Wars Games – A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…..And so begins one of the pinnacles of my childhood – Luke Skywalker fighting the evil Darth Vader. I can still remember playing Star Wars games in the school playground where we would take turns playing the Jedi Knight. We would get the pleasure of beating the hell out of the poor soul who had ended up getting the part of the hapless stormtrooper, chasing him around the playground while he shouted “right, it’s my turn to be Luke Skywalker now!“”

  Nowadays, you can still play Star Wars but, as with everything else these days, it has moved itself online. Here are some online Star Wars games you could play (and I don’t mean the drinking game). OK granted, they are not as good as the paid PC games but if you have a spare 5 minutes to kill, these freebies are good enough to satisfy your Star Wars fix.

• Get Cool Website Icons and Buttons For Free At IconFinder – I find myself using the same crappy buttons on websites because that is all I have. Everyone knows that buttons and icons are a integral part of any website. So it’s always back to the drawing board and start making new icons!Time and time again I have to create custom icons and buttons for clients. Now with IconFinder that is a thing of the past. IconFinder is a search engine that will return icons or png files with free website icons. They allow you to change the background of each from either black, white or transparent as well as filter results for a commercial website or just for personal use.

  Let’s take a look at Icon Finder:

• How To Easily Share Links on Twitter with TBUZZ – While browsing the web, have you ever come across a cool new site, web tool or article that made you say to yourself “man, my Twitter followers really need to know about this!”?I know, “need to know” is rather relative. There are those out there who think the whole world needs to know when they’re eating a taco, sitting on the couch in their PJs, or, even scarier, DRIVING to work (wait until you’re stopped to tweet, PLEASE!). But I think we’ve all been there – is there an easier way to share links on Twitter?
• 12 Solid Tips To Enhance Your Twitter Reputation – Whether you are a freelancer, employee, professional, or a business, it is becoming increasingly important to manage your Twitter reputation. In this article, let us see what is meant by reputation in the world of Twitter, and how you can use free Twitter tools manage and enhance your reputation.
• Netgear DG834G ADSL Modem/Router – Uses of the Netgear DB834G including access its telnet server.
• Blade vs Twilight -
• Image Your Hard Drive using dd | LinuxWebLog.com – I have backed up my system to an external ximeta drive using “dd” and the well-known linux live cd distribution, Knoppix to boot from. Below are the steps in brief:1. Boot from the live cdrom distribution.
  2. Switch to root.
  3. Make sure NO partitions are mounted from the source hard drive.
  4. Mount the external HD.
• Linux Harddisk Monitoring with SmartMonTools (smartctl) – If you see harddisk errors in the kernel log file ( IDE harddisk errors: DriveReady SeekComplete Error status=0×51 DriveStatusError error=0×04) it’s probably too late to install SmartMonTools and you’d better replace the harddisk.SmartMonTools monitor the harddisks in your server/workstation and will most likely alert you before the drive will die.

  Install SmartMonTools from source or install a pre-compiled package (e.g. deb or rpm) for your system. I will not cover the compilation and installation from source, since every good distribution contains a SmartMonTools package.

  After installing, you can check your harddisk with the command “smartctl”.
  First check if your drive supports SMART at all:

• Using DD for disk cloning – Server Fault – here’s been a number of questions regarding disk cloning tools (yes, I did search for it) and dd has been suggested at least once. I’ve already considered using dd myself, mainly because ease of use, and that it’s readily available on pretty much all run of the mill bootable linux distributions.To my question, what is the best way to use dd for cloning a disk. I don’t have much time to go around, and no test-hardware to play with, so I need to be prepared, and it’s pretty much a one-shoot chance to get it done.

  I did a quick google search, and the first result was an apparent failed attempt. Is there anything I need to do after using dd, i.e. is there anything that CAN’T be read using dd?

• ITV Player Problems? Catch Up without Silverlight • Caught Up Firefox Add-on for PC, Mac & Linux – Caught Up solves the technical problems and annoyances of watching TV via the ITV Player video-on-demand service by allowing you to watch ITV programmes (or nearly any video on the ITV site) quickly and easily with your regular media player.Unlike the BBC iPlayer, if you’ve used ITV Player you’ve likely become frustrated with programmes not loading, the inability to fast-forward or rewind (except in large increments, followed by about 90 seconds of adverts each time), the ends of programmes getting cut off, the small screen size offered and the requirement to install Microsoft’s wonky Silverlight browser plug-in.
  Using Caught Up from an ITV programme page.
  Watch any show with a couple of clicks

  Adding Caught Up to Firefox fixes all of these issues!

My project is called Operation Clearance, it is me & my family clearing out our house of all our old unwanted possessions. My aspiration is to own as few items as is practical. I was partly inspired by the 100 item challenge, although I’m not holding myself to a firm number of items. Instead, I’m challenging myself to get all of my possessions into a single Ottoman (not including my clothes, but I’ve already given them an equivalent treatment). If you think I sound crazy, then think about the last time you moved house, now compare that memory to how it’ll be for me when I move, which I am planning to do in the near future. You see, not so crazy now, eh?!

What was the tech aspect of this? I discovered while excavating some of my cupboards a stack of  CD-ROMs, mostly games, with a few applications. So here I had a stack of discs I’m unlikely to use, potentially taking up valuable space in my Ottoman, that wasn’t good. So did I simply throw them away, or did I keep them? Y‘know, just in case. Well “just in case” is the enemy of any clear out, so my answer was to cheat!

Squeezing all these discs into Micro SD makes me happy.

I decided I would take an ISO image of all the discs and save them to a Micro SDHC card, then throw the discs away! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is possible to create a file, based on any physical drive, which is an exact bit for bit copy. Your computer can then “mount” the file as if it were that same real physical  drive. Given that you can currently get Micro SDHC cards with capacities of up to 16GB, you can fit an awful lot of CD images on them. Best of all, the physical size of a Micro SD card compared to even one CD is practically non-existent!

If at this point you’re wanting to ask me why didn’t I try trading in or selling these games, then let me answer you in advance – Firstly, I couldn’t sell them as I’d already dumped the boxes for them last year. Secondly, since I was keeping “back up” copies for myself, I thought it would be of questionable legitimacy to sell them when I still had copies for myself.

The only gotcha with this idea was that all of my games had copy protection, which prevented me using the universal ISO format. Fortunately, help was at had in the form of Slysoft’s CloneCD. They generously offer a twenty one day trial, and I only needed one day to image my discs. So I confess, I didn’t buy it. Although in the future, if I want to re-burn these images (which are proprietary to Slysoft applications ), I promise you Slysoft, I will buy a lifetime licence!

At this point in the story, I really must launch into a rant. To image these discs, I really shouldn’t have needed to use a specialist application, but I did because of DRM. My story is yet another text book example of how DRM makes life harder for legitimate uses of media, while the real illegitimate copies are being freely traded across the internet. So, thank you very much to all computer game companies, your copy protection measures hampered my legitimate project, while not preventing the “piracy” you impotently sought to defeat.

Deep breath, relax …

Now, if you want to try clearing your shelves, then I really recommend you do as I have. Further to this, many years ago, I MP3 ripped all of my music CD’s, so I’ve been able to throw away those CD’s too. Anything to reduce the number of individual items clogging up your shelves and cupboards. George Carlin wisely said that a house is just a place for our stuff, and every now and then we have to get a bigger house just to fit in even more stuff. So join me in getting rid of all your physical media. In the age of terrabyte hard drives, physical media should be dead if we all had any common sense.

The Spotify application and its "home page"

You have no doubt heard about Spotify, in fact given the amount of e-mails I get asking for invites, I’d be amazed if you haven’t. In my opinion, Spotify plays a crucial roll in the world of on-line music distrobution. Before you commit your money to buying a whole album, I believe, you have a right to try before you buy. Much to the chagrin of music companies, illegal file sharing perfectly fits the roll. You get the try the album with no hassle and no money changing hands, and then, as long as you’re honest, when you’ve made your decision, you can choose to delete the album, or go and buy it from a DRM free online music store. To me, doing this, while of questionable legality, was the nearest on-line alternative we had to the headphone booth in your local music store.

However, Spotify came along and took away all the grey area of illegally sampling music. With Spotify you can stream music across the internet and listen to it as much as you like. With adverts if you pay nothing, and without if you pay £10 a month, we’ll return to the premium service below.

That is not to say that Spotify is perfect. When it first started it was more perfect that it is now. Since it’s been going, the record companies have been stamping their ignorant size 12 boots all over it, so that we now have region restriction on some albums, while others have been pulled completely, even though Spotify are constantly adding more and more tracks. To the record labels I say this; the more restrictions you put onto a service like Spotify, which you should be thanking your lucky stars for, the more you will push people back towards illegal file sharing. It’s a simple mathematical matter of convenience. Spotify is actually more convenient than getting music via file sharing. If you prevent people listening via Spotify, they will by simple human nature, opt for the next most convenient option. Sorry, but it’s a fact of life and you can either work with it, or be burned by it. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s how things are.

Now, lets look at Spotify premium. For some people who would spend hundreds of pounds a year on music, and hate the adverts, then this £10 a month could represent good value. Speaking for myself, I just don’t get that much new music, so £10 a month is an expensive option for me, just to block adverts, which to be honest, aren’t that intrusive (and if I’m saying that, then that means something). So I will stick with Spotify making advertising revenue from my listening, and I think the majority of Spotify users are the same.

Spotify Mobile running on Android

The next generation of Spotify is a version for your mobile phone. As of today, we know that Spotify Mobile is available on the iPhone and Android phones. So hopefully, we will soon see it available on other platforms like Symbian.

I find the prospect of the mobile Spotify being a premium only feature somewhat self-defeating. However you look at it, paying to effectively rent your music, never has been, and never will be, a good deal for the consumer. I don’t see the added value of a mobile application is going to change this. Let’s prove this by contradiction. If you weren’t prepared to pay for Spotify premium on your desktop, but the addition of a mobile app would change your mind, then you are effectively saying you’d be willing to pay £10 a month to have an application on your phone. I find it hard to believe anyone would fall into this category.

Conversely, if Spotify made their mobile application available to everyone, they would be expanding their prospective advertising audience. Advertising revenue must be valuable to them, given that it’s unlikely many users pay for premium. Speculatively, they must only be surviving on advertising revenue, with the addition of some venture capitol.

To conclude, please Spotify, reconsider the mobile application. We all love you, and want to use your service, but £10 a month for no ads and a mobile app is too much. Just mirror your desktop business to the mobile world, and everyone wins.

P.S.
NO, I don’t have any Spotify invites to give you, but I will make a blog post, if and when I do

• WordPress › Blog » How to Keep WordPress Secure – A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later.

  Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

• DingIt’sUp: Notifies You When Website Goes Down – Here is another online tool that can monitor any website you want and alert you when it goes down or comes back up. You can set it to alert you using text messages (SMS), Twitter or email alerts. Works simple, just type in site’s name, select how you want to get notified and then click on ”kthnx” button.
• Pingability: Receive Alerts when your Website goes Down – Check the status of your websites, name servers, web servers, and mail servers with pingability. This web service monitors sites to make sure they are up. When the site suddenly goes down, Pingability notifies the owner by sending an email or a text message to the mobile phone. With a free account you get about 750 checks per month (one check every hour) and you are able to track as many websites and servers as you like.
• BasicState : Monitor Uptime Status of Your Website – BasicState is a free service that monitors your website for availability 24/7. If for some reason the website doesn’t or takes too long to respond, BasicState instantly alerts you via email or SMS message. Unlike most of the free uptime monitoring services which run checks every 30-60 min, this one does it every 15 minutes. So if there is a short outage it has a better chance to record it.
• Observu: Get an eMail Alert When your Website Goes Down – Want to get an email alert when your website or blog goes down? Check out Observu. It is a free and simple website monitoring service that can continuously monitor your websites for uptime. Whenever one of your sites goes down you will be immediately alerted via email. There is no limit to the number of sites monitored; simply register and add as many sites as you want.
• Firefox 3 default mailto – FastMailWiki –
• Tech Support Forum – View Single Post – [SOLVED] Making Hotmail the default mailto in Firefox 3 – Instructions on how to add Hotmail as a mail application in Firefox
• [SOLVED] Making Hotmail the default mailto in Firefox 3 – Tech Support Forum – Instructions for how to add Hotmail as a mail application in Firefox
• WizzMob – News, Hints and Tips for Smartphones » Nokia E52 and E55 Internet Radio – The new Nokia E52 and E55 sadly don’t have the Nokia Internet Radio application built in, but there is away to get it.

  Download Internet Radio direct from Nokia here http://europe.nokia.com/NOKIA_MASTER_NOKIA_COM_5/Explore_services/Nokia_Music/download.html

  Choose the version for the 6210 navigator, this is a full S60v3 FP2 version (don’t try the E75 version as it is only an update and won’t install)

  (Direct link to file is mirrored here Click to Download Internet Radio)

  Once downloaded and installed, goto Menu/Media/Radio and you will be find that Internet Radio had been integrated into the existing Radio application alongside the FM one, works great.

• id3 mass tagger – Don't you just hate editing ID3 tags? Well, I did.

  I haven't yet seen a program that had enough intelligence and automation in it. I don't want to have to use "copy-paste" 15 times in a row, or spend 15 minutes copying track titles by hand. There are some GUI programs that try to make life easier, but choosing from / setting a predefined set of options doesn't give enough flexibility, imho.

  This is more like what I wanted:

  id3 -2 -a "Some Artist" -n %1 -t %2 -l "Some Album" "*. *.mp3"

  Oh well…

• Download Multiple Flickr Pictures in a Batch [Original Images, not Resized Thumbnails] – Digital Inspiration – Allagappan from NIT Trichy is looking for some Flickr mass downloader tools to help him choose and download Flickr images in bulk from flickr.com website to the hard-drive.

  It's so surprising that Flickr doesn't provide an official tool for downloading images from their website but thanks to the API, Flickr enthusiasts have developed some excellent Flickr Photo downloading tools and our favorite is Downloadr.

• Renaming a set of files to 001, 002, … on Linux – Stack Overflow –

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Favorites\Links

The Links folder is also available the Start Menu if you enabled the “Favourites”, unsurprisingly as a sub-menu.

So my suggestion is, if you have folders that you commonly visit, via lots of clicking, why not put a short-cut to them in your link’s folder.

Then also, try putting another folder in your Favourites menu called “Applications”. Then you can put short-cuts to commonly used applications. This is kind of replicating what the QuickStart toolbar is for. Although if you have some applications you want quick access to, but don’t want them taking up space on your Quickstart menu, then this can be like a secondary QuickStart.

Tux, the Linux mascot

I’ve been living in Linux for just over three months, so I thought it would be interesting to report on how I’m finding it.

The first thing I need to stress is that I really do think that the GNOME desktop environment is ideal for non-techie users. You can have “GNOME Launchers” which are just the same as Windows “Quick Launch” icons. The Windows “Start” menu idea is extended more logically as you have three menus “Applications”, “Places” and “System” all self-explanatory and logical for a new user to find what they’re looking for. One little criticism here for catering to those migrating from Windows; to open these menus from the keyboard you have to hit Alt+F1, rather than simply hitting the Windows key (know as the “Super key” to Linux/Unix operating systems). I think having the Windows key launch these menus, by default, would be more useful to novice users who are used to the Windows desktop.

The Super (Windows) key

That covers novice computer users, but for slightly more advanced users, Linux of course has lots of freedom to configure your environment. So much so that the limit to which you can customise is only practically limited by your own skill and willingness to learn. Also, there are the 3D desktop effects. These can mimic those found in Windows and OSX, but there are lots more effects, more than I’ve had time or cause to explore. Some are simply for show and I have chosen to them switch off, most notably the rotating desktop cube and the wobbly Windows. Although the ones I do find genuinely useful are the “Shift Switcher” (particularly for flipping through windows on all desktops), and the  enhanced desktop zoom. Other subtle effects for minimizing and maximising windows just add another layer of class to your overall experience.

A BASH terminal

Now, you can’t talk about Linux without mentioning the command line. I accept that this is not a tool for novice users, and that there is a command line interface to Windows too. Comparing the CLI’s of both platforms,  have to say, subjectively, that the Linux/Unix CLI just makes more sense to me then Window’s pseudo-DOS CLI. If I were trying to do tech support for a novice computer user of Linux, it would be a last resort for me to tell them to open the command line. Having said that, I think that if you are doing your own research into a technical problem, the ability to copy and paste some code from a trusted website into your terminal is much more efficient than following some Windows guide with a long set of “point and click here” type instructions. I am neither a computer science grade user, or a novice user, I’m probably somewhere on the advanced side of a medium level user. As such, I have really enjoyed having the command line and writing bash scripts and cron jobs to automate tasks for me. During these three months, it has really made me feel like I was using a computer again rather than just a glorified internet appliance, which is what computing of recent years seems to have turned into.

It is all these things that I do through scripts that I now find Linux indispensable. If I were to go back to using Windows full time, I’d probably need to run a Linux virtual machine all the time, because equivalents all of my bash scripts would be a lot more complicated to set up in Windows.

WINE IS NOT AN EMULATOR!

Now for some negative points. I don’t game that much these days, but occaisionally enough to make it a consideration. I’m particularly partial to a game of Team Fortress 2. Now, this game even taxed my laptop in XP, but I did manage to make it run in WINE, but it wasn’t the best gaming experience I’ve ever had. A 800×600 window which slowed to a halt whenever I got into any point-blank range action. Even Cedega was a let down as it wouldn’t even let me install Steam, which is a MASSIVE over sight for a program focused on enabling Windows games in Linux.

Having said that, there are some very nice open source games supplied with Ubuntu, out of the box, which are fun to play if you just want a 15 minute distraction.  My current favourite is a Lemmings clone called Pingus (yes I know, not exactly fun for all you FPS fans!)

Also, compatibility with new hardware is something that worries me. I don’t know what the current situation is, but I know my laptop is only so well supported because it is old. I am currently looking at replacing my laptop in the next 18 months. Since I want to use Ubuntu as my main operating system, I’m going to have to do more homework than I otherwise would, just to make sure the hardware is supported without me having to do a load of command line hacking that would be beyond my current ability.

So there we have it, my experience so far of living with Linux. To sum it up, I’m happy, I don’t want to switch back to Windows. The only reason I’m keeping Windows around is to run software for my smartphone, for using Chkdsk on some of my removable drives, and in the future I’ll use it again for gaming.

I’m posting this guide as I discovered that when I tried to explain to friends on Facebook how to do this, I couldn’t quite get the message across. So, like the old saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words!

Cleaning up Facebook - Click to Enlarge

All of the following instructions refer to the left hand column of the Facebook site.

1. Expand the column by clicking “More”
2. Notice the little grips that appear on the right of every item in the column.
3. Using these, drag all the the types of post you are interested in (e.g. Statuses and photos) to the top, making sure that they all rank above “News Feed”.
4. Once you have dragged up all the types of posts you want to see, click “News Feed” (this will then re-display all post types rather than just the last one you clicked on).
5. We are done! So click “Less” to close up the patient.

• OfflineIMAP – WikiStart – Software.Complete.Org – OfflineIMAP is a tool to simplify your e-mail reading. With OfflineIMAP, you can read the same mailbox from multiple computers. You get a current copy of your messages on each computer, and changes you make one place will be visible on all other systems. For instance, you can delete a message on your home computer, and it will appear deleted on your work computer as well. OfflineIMAP is also useful if you want to use a mail reader that does not have IMAP support, has poor IMAP support, or does not provide disconnected operation.OfflineIMAP works on pretty much any POSIX operating system, such as Linux, BSD operating systems, MacOS X, Solaris, etc.

  OfflineIMAP is a Free Software project licensed under the GNU General Public License. You can download it for free, and you can modify it. In fact, you are encouraged to contribute to OfflineIMAP, and doing so is fast and easy.

  For more information on OfflineIMAP#039;s featureset, see the OfflineIMAP manual (link below).

• IMAP Backup Tool imapbackup.py – tamale.net – This program incrementally backs up IMAP folders to local mbox files. New messages are appended to the folder#039;s mbox file. It is a Python program, originally by Rui Carmo. I have updated it extensively.
  Features

  * Downloads all IMAP folders
  * Stores messages in mbox, mbox.gz, or mbox.bz2
  * Each folder downloads to its own mbox file, eg. Inbox.Drafts.mbox
  * Downloads only new messages, appends them to the mbox file
  * IMAP4 SSL, supporting client and server certificates
  * Accesses IMAP account in read-only mode. Does not affect message #039;seen#039; status.

• Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress | Build Internet! – In this tutorial you’ll learn how to increase pageviews by adding thumbnails to related posts using the popular YARPP plugin and Wordpress custom fields.
• Rich Related Posts Wordpress Plugin – Rich Related Posts plugin facilitates related posts functionality where posts can be enriched with groups of links to blog posts (or other sites), defined by headline and thumbnail.RRP is a powerful CMS solution to quickly and easily create multiple groups of rich related content with images using tools such as combination search/entry fields and element units consisting of headline + permalink + image url. Shortcode can be instantly inserted into posts, and can even be used in sidebar text widgets.
• A Perfect World – Great Free MMORPG – When the god Pan Gu created the first sentient beings, they were still flawed. Instead of peace and harmony, these beasts sought violence and quickly turned against each other. The god Pan Gu acknowledged His mistake, having created an Imperfect World, and wiped them out completely with a great flood.It was then that He created three races from his own being – the Humans from his spirit, the Untamed from his body and the Winged Elves from his blood. After creating these three races, Pan Gu vowed never to interfere again. The three different races lived, not in perfect harmony, but in occasional conflict. Tensions built up and wars were fought for the lands of the world.
• 5 Best Free and Open-source Real-time Strategy Games for Linux | TECH SOURCE FROM BOHOL – StarCraft and Red Alert are two of my favorite real-time strategy (RTS) games. Though these games are closed-source, they are still playable in Linux through Wine. Recently, I have tried a few free and open-source RTS games and was really impressed with some of them. The best thing is that I can play them instantly on my Linux box without the need for Wine and without having to spend a single dime.If you are into real-time strategy gaming, I highly recommend you check out these Free and Open-source RTS games:
• ARound – Over the last year many so-called quot;augmented realityquot; applications have been popping up, specially on the Android platform. While the concept is not new (research on the proper field of Augmented Reality dates back to the #039;90s), it has generated some media attention lately.Unfortunately there is no mention so far of any similar application* on Symbian smartphones, so this project aims to fill the gap by providing a prototype application featuring the use of sensors, camera and location based services.

  [*] Though we could consider Nokia Research Center#039;s MARA project (2006) as the first attempt to bring this functionality on a Nokia smartphone.

This is an extraordinary search engine, that lets you sketch a drawing with your mouse, and will then bring up many vaguely matching photos stored on Flickr.

Nokia Booklet 3G

On Monday I saw the announcement of Nokia’s entry into the Netbook market, the “Booklet 3G” (promo video here). My first thought went to Nokia’s Maemo powered tablet devices, the N800 and N810. I instantly assumed that this would be the next generation hardware for Maemo. Alas no, it is likely running Windows 7. My knee jerk reaction to that is frustration.

Before I go onto my little tribal operating system rant, let’s go over it’s reported specification. The best information I can get so far is: 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 120GB hard drive, bluetooth and WiFi, none of which are surprising for a netbook. The nice additions to its hardware come from its mobile phone heritage, because it has built in 3G and A-GPS. Other premium features are: a single-piece aluminium body, a high-definition glass screen (resolution unknown), and a HDMI port too. But will its little Atom CPU have the power to render HiDef video? Oh, and Nokia are claiming 12 hours of battery life. Still, even if you scale this down to 60%-70% for real world usage, it’s still pretty impressive.

Going back to Maemo, according to an article by Ewan Spence on Allaboutsymbian.com:

“Maemo is unfortunately not compiled for the Intel Atom processor and the work involved for a smallish project would have been prohibitive. So the call was relatively easy – Windows”

It is widely reported that Windows netbooks have outsold Linux netbooks. Some say this is because people want the familiarity of Windows. This is a reasonable theory, and could well be right. Although, knowing from personal experience, that even my own mother can barely tell the difference between XP and Ubuntu, I wonder if the outselling has more been due to Microsoft putting pressure on netbook producers? I really do think this is a shame for the Maemo platform.

Another advantage for Nokia in using Windows on the Booklet 3G is that they already make their “PC Suite” software for Windows. So Nokia can (and have in their promo video) tout the pitch that this device will easily sync with your Nokia phone. But isn’t this an old and tired way of managing your devices? Perhaps I’m wrong, but I thought the way forward was for us to sync our PDA-like software & hardware in the cloud – a platform agnostic future. At least, that is how I’ve been doing it since 2007. Given that I can sync the calendar and contacts in my phone via the internet to the Ovi servers and view all this data on Ovi’s website, I thought this is how Nokia wanted me to do it too.

If we think about the limited performance of netbooks, doesn’t Windows seem an inappropriate choice? I know Windows 7 is highly optimised and is miles better for a netbook than Vista, or even maybe XP. Although, think about your real life experience of using Windows, apart from all the anti virus and malware protection you need, it just slowly over time gets ground down with little bits of software and code here and there. You need a mobile device to be fast and snappy. So while I could well be proved wrong, I just don’t think Windows is the best option for something like this, but then I haven’t heard any feedback from the Windows netbook users about long term usage. I know, I know, you’re all screaming at me right now, “But Windows 7 has been optimised for netbooks”. Well it may well have been, but Windows is Windows, and it will acquire digital gunk over time, and I don’t think the little Atom CPU’s will cope with it, even if a fresh install of Win7 runs lovely on it.

Then, software aside, are Nokia arriving to the now untrendy party too late? When netbooks first came out, they were smaller and cheaper than laptops; it was a compelling purchase. Now though, most netbooks cost almost the same as a basic laptop, but lack the performance. So rather than getting a cheap little computer, you’re looking at spending the same amount of money and asking yourself which is more important, miniaturisation or performance? Given all the bells and whistles in this offering from Nokia, I can’t believe that is going to be by any means low-cost.

Therefore, are netbooks still a worthwhile purchase, and in the long run, isn’t installing Windows, rather than a bespoke Linux, an ultimately troublesome choice for end-users?

EagleTec 8GB Nano

When it arrived in the post, I was very glad to see that it was in sensible packaging. It was still the usual toughened plastic that you have to utterly destroy to get into (not good for the second hand market), but for once the packaging was not oversized to the content.

Packaging

On the rear of the packaging a lanyard is included, if you wish to dangle the drive from a key chain, or whatever. I can see the use of dangling flash drives, but it’s something I’d never feel comfortable doing. The only other part is the plastic casing which covers the USB connector. Both the body of the drive and the case are seemingly black, but closer inspection reveals it is a very dense translucent blue plastic (we’ll see the purpose of this later).

Views of the drive with case removed.

As you can see here, the drive is almost all plug! It is just about identical to the receiver to the Logitech VX Nano mouse, and similar “Nano” Bluetooth adapters. What is quite stunning about this is that it has 8 Gigabytes of storage! There is a another model with only 4GB, and EagleTec also make a Micro SDHC reader in a similar form factor. The drive roughly measures 5mm x 19mm x 14mm, as shown here:

EagleTec8GBNano Dimensions

Size Comparison

When I first connected the drive to my laptop, I was surprised at how much of a tight fit it was. Given it’s small size this makes it tricky to remove, but it’s perfectly doable without causing damage to either device. When you connect it, there’s a red light inside which comes on constant to show it’s alive (I told you we’d see why it’s made of translucent plastic), and it flashes when it’s working.

The red LED on the Nano drive.

It’s hard to not stop and stare when the Nano drive is plugged in, because there’s hardly anything to see! This form factor is ideal if you want ultra compact data storage to carry around with you, and I imagine it would be particularly well suited for netbooks ,where ordinary thumb drives will disproportionately stick out of the side of the device.

This drive is not without its compromises though; you pay for the miniaturisation in two ways. At £28 (UKP), it is by no means a cheap drive for its capacity. Its performance is also compromised, as shown below. I’d say this drive could struggle to keep up with a similarly miniature micro SDHC card, depending on the class and quality.

EagleTec 8GB Nano Performance

I ran this test on my Ubuntu laptop, using the rsync command line program on batches of files of varying sizes, as indicated in the chart’s legend. I was so surprised by the small file write performance, that I re-ran the test, but got almost the same result. So it would seem this drive suffers from having to stop-start a lot.

So, while it is no speed demon, it is the smallest drive you’ll find out there, which is exactly what caught my interest. I’m looking forward to see if they can make a 16GB drive in this form factor.

Related Links:

• My Flickr Gallery for the EagleTech 8GB Nano Drive.
• EagleTec Ultra-Tiny USB Flash Drive – 8GB [Mobile Fun]
• EagleTec Nano flash drive makes losing data easier than ever [Engadget]
• EagleTec Nano 4/8GB Flash Drive is Pri-Tay, Pri-Tay Small [Gizmodo]
• EagleTec USB Nano Flash Drive [Geeky-Gadgets]
• The EagleTec USB Nano flash drive: it doesn’t get much smaller [Crunch-Gear]

• Quick tip: Batch resize and convert images in Linux – You can batch resize and convert images in Linux from the terminal using ImageMagick. The first step is to install ImageMagick. You can download the ImageMagick from the ImageMagick homepage or ImageMagick is widely available in the repositories and can be downloaded using apt-get install imagemagick.There are a ton of commands available from the ImageMagick guide. I will walk you through the most commonly used commands: resize, convert, and quality (compression).
• 10 Firefox Add-ons To Find Friends On Social Networks – It is a strange irony that a wall message, a tweet or a scrap sounds sweeter than a chime of a doorbell. Call it the social networking phenomenon. We have all been touched by it and for me, at least personally, social networking has proved to be a succor (not sucker!) in trying times. And in happy times too as I have managed to reach out and connect with long lost friends and make new ones across the globe.If you take stock of your own friends list you will surely find that at least half of them have come through the lost and found power of social networks. And if you take stock again, you will find that our online habitat is mostly a few of these social networking sites and of course, the omnipresent browser.
• How To Download Free Movies For Your PSP – One of the virtues of having a PSP is the ability to play media on the go. Whether you’re in the car, on an airplane, or just enjoying your coffee break.If you’ve cracked your PSP, you can get nearly all films working on your device, but otherwise, your movie watching is entirely limited to MP4 files.

  Today we’ll have a detailed look at PSP movies, and lay out the different possibilities for obtaining them; download sources and convertion.

• Nokia Tips | Beginners guide to Symbian phones Nokia Menu Codes – On this post, we’re going to talk about Nokia’s mostly unknown menu codes.
  Most people don’t know about these codes because most of them are not even listed in your Nokia device’s Manual.
  To use these codes, you have to go to your Nokia Symbian Device’s standby home screen and dial it in (as if you’d dial a normal number).
  They come in very helpful at certain times, so here there are.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Nokia Tips – 10 Tips to stretch your battery life on your Nokia Smartphone – Ok, let me explain why post can be a life saver. There are times when one has use the phone all day and the battery is off course suffering from the heavy day usage but you still need to get that call or that email that is really important and this is when these tips will come in handy to stretch out the battery to the max so you’re able to get that important communication.
• Figure out svchost.exe with svchost Viewer | Rarst.net – Had mini-discussion about Windows services with Noah (check out his fresh tech blog) under setting up family computer post. svchost.exe is one of the most confusing aspects of issue – it acts like container process so it is hard to see outright what services are inside.svchost Viewer is small utility that shows services currently run by svchost (was found and bookmarked a while back from WinExtra post on svchost).
• S60 Mobile – News, Hints and Tips for Smartphones » Basic BBC iPlayer widget for Nokia E52, E55, E72 – The BBC can take some time (if ever) to allow new devices to access their TV catch up service iPlayer.This widget is the original basic one allowing you to view streamed versions of BBC programmes in the UK, sorry no downloads or radio in this version.

  Modifed to allow it to work with new devices such as the E52, E55 and E72, it will also work with older devices including the Nokia E75 and N82.

• Piwik: Open Source Google Analytics Alternative – oogle Analytics may be free, but it is still based on proprietary technology – which means you only ever get reports on the things that Google thinks are necessary and some of those reports are aimed at people using Google#039;s other services (managing campaigns on AdWords, for example). Further, using Google Analytics means that you#039;re tied to Google#039;s TOS. Enter Piwik, which aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad server alternative to Google Ad Manager [Ed: which we just started using on RWW].While OpenX has been around a while and has good traction, Piwik is fairly new and under the radar. It surfaced first as PHPMyVisites and is only at version 0.1.5, which is a sign that it is still for the highly committed.
• WordPress Security – Slides from a WordCamp presentation on defending your wordpress blog against hackers.
• Analytics Talk » Blog Archive » Count Me Out! – To keep your Google Analytics data pure you should remove all traffic generated by yourself or others that may not be real visitors. For example, if your company has a large call center you should remove the traffic they generate because it will skew your analytics data.To remove this data we usually use an exclude filter based on IP address, host name or geographic location. While this is effective the results can be a bit ‘broad’. What I mean is you may not want to remove ALL of the traffic from an IP address, host name or geographic location.
• How do I exclude my internal traffic from reports? – Analytics Help – If you want to exclude internal traffic from appearing in your reports, you can filter out a specific IP address or a range of IP addresses. You can also use cookies to filter out visits from particular users. We#039;ll explain how below.
  To exclude by IP address:
• How to stop Google Analytics from tracking your own visits – instant fundas – If you use Google Analytics to track visitors to your websites, it’s important to have Analytics filter out and exclude your own visits to your sites in order to get a true picture of your sites’ visitor count and demographic. You might be visiting a dozen pages on your site everyday and all these visits and page views can grossly inflate the visitor data of your sites. Unlike tracking services like Statcounter and Sitemeter, Google Analytics does not have an easy way of excluding your visits, particularly if you are on a dynamic IP.
• GRC’s | ’ Vitamin D Research – “Vitamin D” is in quotes here and above because it is not a vitamin at all — it is the most powerful steroid hormone in our bodies. Though it is surprisingly crucial to both our developmental and ongoing health and well being (as the many clinical studies provided below demonstrate), it is present in it#039;s so-called “active form” in concentrations of only 20 to 50 picograms per liter of human blood (a “picogram” is a trillionth of a gram).So just a very tiny bit of this stuff goes a long way!

The least-fuss solution is TwitPic.com. You don’t need to set up an account, and you can either submit pictures through the website, or by e-mailing in (with a PIN endowed e-mail address). The picture is then posted, and a short-code link posted to your Twitter account.

However, beware with this because since you have no account, you have no control. Which means you cannot delete posted images!

A more sophisticated solution is Twitxr.com. Here you can set up an account, and similarly post by web or e-mail. Posting on the website allows you to include a location for the photo. Twitxr is much more of a picture-centric Twitter site in it’s own right, as there are individual users, and you can all follow each other, as well as having your own public page.

A further advantage of Twitxr being more of a site in its own right is that it can plug into more than just Twitter, it will also post update to your Facebook (and I think even Flickr).

Check them out.

USB charging my phone

1. USB Charging
These days, the chances are, when you’re at home and at work, you’ll have some time at the computer. What you may or may not know is that USB ports provide power, as well as carrying data. So my first suggestion, and my everyday charging method, is by USB, with a neat & tidy little retractable USB charger. I got my 2mm Nokia charger from Mobile Fun.

Retractable cables are great for saving space, although I have found that you need ot handle with with care because they can become quite fragile. With the charger I use, I occaisionally have to wiggle and turn it before my phone announces that it’s charging. Not great, but I do prefer it to a proper USB cable.

In the future, USB charging is going to become more common place. One of the worst things about mobile phones has been all the different types of connector. Last year all the major phone manufacturers got together and agreed to use a common standard, which was “Micro USB“. This has the added advantage that it will be one single port for plugging your phone into your computer (some of us do this!) and for charging. That is, you’ll be able to use your phone’s data cable to charge it from your computer’s USB ports!

Charging my phone with the PowerPal

2. The “PowerPal”
For times when I’m going to be away away from the charging station that is also called my laptop, I can run my phone from an AA battery, by means of sexy looking chrome tube, known as the Power Pal, which I also bought from Mobile Fun (I’m not advertising, they just sell handy stuff!). This comes with a selection of popular charging tips which plug into the top of the tube, and should charge most things, but do check before you get one! As you’ll see from the picture there’s a bright blue light to show it’s working. This light is fine in daylight, although in a dark room, say if you’re charging over night, the blinking light can be rather distracting.

The advantage of this thing is that you can buy AA batteries from anywhere, so you are never short of an energy source for your phone. It is slower to charge than USB because it’s charging current is 300 mA, rather than USB’s 500 mA.

I could power mine with any old AA battery, but I choose to use the USBCell, so that I can even top this up from my laptop’s USB ports too!

Update: I have done some further testing with the PowerPal since I originally posted this. I was having some trouble getting as much charge out of it as I expected. Although after eliminating other possible factors I think it must be the electronics of the device itself. I let my Nokia E51 get down to one battery bar, and charged it with the PowerPal using an Energizer Lihtium AA battery. Once the AA was discharged, my E51 was still only showing four bars (out of seven). The E51’s battery is 1000 mAh, so I would have expected to get at least one full charge out of any good quality AA battery.

So, without further ado, here’s my first review …

Forever Fifteen by Kimberly Steele

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Forever Fifteen is the novel with which I attribute my new found joy of reading. It is also the only novel I have so far read which I have wanted to read a second time.

The book is about a 600+ year old vampire called Lucy (Lucia to be precise) who was abducted and turned during the 14th century, at the age of 15. Forever frozen with the face & body of a fifteen year old, Forever Fifteen. The book is primarily set during the 1980’s, but has frequent flash backs into Lucy’s past as a human and then a new vampire.

One of the things I enjoyed most about this, besides Kimberly Steele’s writing style, is the attention to detail of how a vampire would actually survive in the modern world. This was the first book I came across where vampires can go out in daylight, thus removing the biggest difficulty.

There is of course a love story here too, two in fact. In the flash backs, we see the tempestuous and eventually abusive relationship between Lucy and Sebaastianus, the vampire who turned her. In the 1980’s era, we find Lucy finding possibly the love of her life with school boy John.

There will be inevitable comparisons of this book with the the Twilight books, given the latter’s mainstream success. If I were to draw any comparison between the two, it would be that while the Twilight series is clearly aimed at teenage girls, Forever Fifteen is by no means a book for adolescents. I said above that this book concerns itself with the practicalities a vampire would face, this has to include sex and death, which Forever Fifteen tackles, while Twilight self-censors itself around those topics.

The book does have a satisfying ending, but it is an incomplete story as there are two more books planned. They are as of yet unfinished.

I not only recommend this to fans of the vampire genre, but I would also (and frequently do), recommend this as a first vampire book for anyone interested in the genre.

View all my reviews >>

• How to Move WordPress Blog to New Domain or Location » My Digital Life – For blogger who self-hosts the WordPress blog publishing system on a web hosting server with own registered domain name, sometimes, you may decide to reorganize the blog link URL to make it tidier or to reflect new focus or theme of the blog. If you decide to change the URL or link location of your WordPress blog due to changing of domain name (such as from http://www.old-domain.com/ to http://www.new-domain.com/) or the blog to another directory location (such as from http://www.domain.com/ to http://www.domain.com/blog/), there are some steps that should be done to ensure the proper migration and no breaking links.
• mysql primer – creating a database – mysql create database command – mysql show databases command – In this section of the MySQL primer we will learn how to create a database.The commands for creating a database in Windows and Linux are the same. However, the prelimnary commands in Linux are slightly more complex. Since this tutorial is meant for the complete newbie, I#039;ll discuss the Windows and Linux systems separately.

  BignetWe#039;ll create a database called employees that contains details of employees of our company Bignet. The details we plan to store would be names, salaries, age, addresses, emails, birth dates, hobbies, phone numbers etc.

• Import MySQL dumpfile, SQL datafile into my database -
• Moving to Freedom: HOWTO: Installing and Running WordPress on Ubuntu GNU/Linux – Step right this way for instructions on setting up your own instance of WordPress using Apache 2 (with mod_rewrite), PHP5, and MySQL. I’m using Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), but I suspect this will apply to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) also.You may already know that WordPress is free blogging software, Apache is a free web server, PHP is a free server-side scripting language, and MySQL is a free database, but maybe like me you haven’t used the supporting “AMP” pieces that much and would like to get WordPress running with a minimum of fuss and bother.
• 8 Regular Expressions You Should Know – Nettuts+ – Regular expressions are a language of their own. When you learn a new programming language, they#039;re this little sub-language that makes no sense at first glance. Many times you have to read another tutorial, article, or book just to understand the quot;simplequot; pattern described. Today, we#039;ll review eight regular expressions that you should know for your next coding project.
• How to Run Multiple Linux Distros Without Virtualization – Make Tech Easier – A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on How To Run Multiple X Sessions Without Virtualization, which demonstrated how you can run multiple desktop environments at the same time on the same computer, and switch between them at the push of a button. I admit, this was somewhat of a warmup for the real show – how to run multiple Linux distributions at the same time without having to deal with the drawbacks of virtualization software.
• How to Easily Upgrade your Firefox to 3.5 (and future version) in Ubuntu – Make Tech Easier – Have you ever feel frustrated when Mozilla releases a new build for their software (especially Firefox) and you are still stuck at the previous older version, simply because Ubuntu did not (and do not intend to) add the newer version of software packages to the repository?
• Extend Your Laptop Battery Life With BatteryCare (Windows) – How many of you out there know about proper laptop battery care? There are so many urban legends and myths regarding batteries that it is hard to know what is real and what is not.Way back when, it was very bad to leave your laptop plugged in and charging after the battery was charged. Nowadays this is not the case because the computer switches to a trickle charging mode when the battery hits 100%. BatteryCare not only gives you a glimpse at a glance of your available power including the time you have left it also does some neat tricks that can help you extend your laptop battery life.

  After downloading and installing this small application you will have a new system tray icon. Mine is all the way to the left. It tells me that my battery is 95% charged and can operate for 2 hours and 36 minutes at the current rate. This is a HUGE improvement over the normal battery meter you see in the middle of my system tray.

• All About Symbian Gallery: Nokia E55 – The Nokia E55 is Nokia#039;s thinnest ever Eseries device (9.9 mm), but still manages to pack in a lot of functionality. It has a 20 key – half QWERTY keyboard (two letters per key), a 3.2 megapixel camera, an integrated GPS (with compass) and a 1500 mAh battery. There#039;s also tri-band 3G (HSDPA and HSUPA) and WiFi connectivity, 35 mm audio jack and ehanced messaging software.
• Nokia E55 – a set on Flickr – A Flickr photoset from @aas detailing the upcoming Nokia E55 and it#039;s innovative keyboard #fb
• How To Automatically Rename Photos With Dates They Were Shot – You know the feeling that comes to us all one fine day. You open your pictures folder and see a graphical stew of pictures which you have never bothered to rename and arrange. In this cluttered mix, you can’t tell between the snap you took of your birthday party last year or this year. During these driven up the wall moments, you wish that you had been a bit more systematic from square one – systematically renaming the photos when you transferred them from the camera to the P