Geeks invented the internet. And for many years it was inhabited solely by geeks and academics. Over those years a number of unwritten rules arose which controlled the way people used the internet. The unwritten rules were passed on to newcomers who saw the wisdom of the rules and continued to follow them. Everyone followed the rules and all… Continue reading Pointless Battles For Geeks
Category: tech
Opentech 2008
The full schedule for Opentech has been announced. There are three tracks of talks and it looks like that I’ll need a couple of clones in order to see everything that I want to see. The previous Opentech conference (was it really three years ago) was a lot of fun and I fully expect this one to be… Continue reading Opentech 2008
Apple Shopping
I’m not sure why, but I always come out of the Apple shop on Regents Street feeling slightly disgruntled. It’s like I’m visiting some strange planet where I don’t understand the customs and I know I’m never really going to fit in. The staff don’t help. I know they’re all really helpful, but at the… Continue reading Apple Shopping
FireEagle
I’ve been dabbling with Yahoo!’s new location service FireEagle. Well, when I say “dabbling” I really mean “looking at it and thinking that I should really get round to trying to write something that uses it”. All I’ve actually been doing is updating it (when I remember) to tell it that I’m at home or… Continue reading FireEagle
More Planets
Over the weekend I found time to rebuild the rest of my missing planets. I’ve resurrected Planet Balham (Atom), Planet Westminster (Atom) and Planet Doctor Who (Atom). They all have Atom feeds available as well. This has been an interesting test of Perlanet (my simple planet-building program). When building planet davorg, I was only using… Continue reading More Planets
Recording TV Revisited
It’s over two years since I wrote my piece on ways to record TV programmes. Quite a lot has changed in those two years, so I thought it was worth writing an update. The biggest change for me is that at home we’ve dragged ourselves into the 21st century and have stopped recording programmes on… Continue reading Recording TV Revisited
Sun RSS Fixed
It finally looks like The Sun have finally fixed their RSS feeds. It’s only three months since I first noticed the problem. In that time I’ve emailed them a number of times on the subject. They haven’t bothered to reply to my mail, so I don’t know if they even read them, or if someone… Continue reading Sun RSS Fixed
Getting Organised
It’s a new year, so I’m making my annual attempt to get more organised. To help me with this plan, yesterday I: Upgraded to Hiveminder Pro (on the basis that if I pay for a product I’ll be more likely to use it) Starting playing with I Want Sandy (a service that I had signed… Continue reading Getting Organised
RSS in Firefox
Firefox (and, I assume, most other modern browsers) does some clever magic when viewing RSS feeds. It doesn’t show the raw XML, but instead shows a neatly formatted version of the page along with a button allowing you to subscribe to the feed in your favourite feed reader. That, at least, is how it’s supposed… Continue reading RSS in Firefox
Hating Computers
Right now I’m hating all computers with a fierce intensity. You all know about the server disk crash. I’m still dealing with the fallout from that. In addition to that, on New Year’s Day I upgraded my main desktop machine to Fedora 8 – with the result that the wireless network (which is how that… Continue reading Hating Computers