Graham Robinson

New site, new blog

// July 31st, 2010 // No Comments » // Website, Wedding

If you’re seeing this then you are viewing my new website on my new web host.

My last website had a lot of problems with WordPress (the blog that powers this site) and it has stopped Amy and I from posting as much as we would like. We couldn’t install plugins nor upload photographs without going through a large number of manual steps, and it isn’t worth it.

So while the Internet was working out where to find my new site I decided to update it! Hopefully the pictures and tweets will be a bit easier to read (seeing as I update those a lot more often than this site). Bloggingit and Robinsonic will follow shortly (once I’ve told my parents their site is moving).

Hopefully once I’ve sorted the wedding site out I’ll update that too.

Web tweaks

// August 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // Website

I thought I might have another change of scenery here. I like this theme and might play about with backgrounds later.

I’ve removed the twitter feed as the latest ‘tweet’ is in the top right hand corner. Click on the birdie if you want more!

Just a logo to sort out now.

Social Networking Two point oh

// January 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Website

I’ve got accounts on quite a few places that I really never use. I have this blog, facebook and twitter. The blog takes a long time to update, facebook has very few people on my friends list and twitter seems a bit too open to me.

So I might try and get a compromise of being careful about what I post but have the three intergrated. So now messages to twitter will appear on the right hand side sidebar of this blog plus as a facebook status.

I’ll still be using the blog for writing more than 150 characters, but hopefully even when I don’t post I won’t look like I’m dead.

Turning pc on and off by mobile phone

// July 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Computing, Website

Achieving something good today…

I’ve been looking for a way to get access to the files on my PC without wasting power keeping my computer on 24/7. The easiest way to do this is to keep the PC off all the time and find a way of turning it on without being in front of it.

The way I achieved this was by

Turning on Wake on Lan on the computer
Forwarding port 7 on the router to my computer
Installing a PHP script on a webserver that sends a ‘Magic Packet’ that turns on the PC
Slightly modifying the script to ask for a password

And for turning off the computer

Installed Switch Off
Set Switch Off to start as a service
Turn on the web interface of Switch Off
Turn on authentication
Forward the port in Switch Off options to my computer on my router

So I can now grab my mobile phone and, with very little data, type in mywebsite.com/switchon and mywebsite.com/switchoff (obviously the real links are a bit deeper and hidden than that)

Five Years

// June 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // Website

If you look at the archives at the right hand side you can see how far they go back to.

I’ve just noticed that it goes up to June 2003, which means this blog has now been up 5 years. Happy birthday blog.

Photographs

// June 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // Holidays, Website

I’ve started to tag up my photographs ready for Flickr, but I can’t geotag them until the weekend. So it won’t be long until I can upload them.

My dolphin picture didn’t come out as well as I hoped. This is all I got in the end…

Geotagging – Flickr Maps

// May 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // Computing, Website

I’ve been having a play with photo maps in the last couple of days, playing with applications and website widgets that show maps. I’ve tried trippermap on www.mediaguy.co.uk/map.

The biggest problem I’ve found is that the best photo site bar none is Flickr, that’s where all my photos are and just about everyone else in the world. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and Yahoo maps are rubbish; you just can’t zoom in at all.

Example: Best quality Yahoo map | Best quality Google map

So Google Maps (and Google Earth) are the best mapping sites on the interweb, but I’m going to use Flickr. I’m obviously not the only person with this problem so other people have combined the two! Yipee!

I’ve got into the tagging / geotagging lark. Hopefully tomorrow my datalogger will turn up. It’s a very small GPS that simply records where you’ve been. Once you have taken some pictures you download the photos to the computer, download the datalogger information and then some software looks at the date and time of the photo and where you are. Magically every photo knows where it is on the map.

When we go to Greece hopefully we will have a proper map, and I’m really looking forward to showing it off.

WordPress

// April 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Website

Well obviously I’ve been playing with the site. Apparently this is a very popular theme but it has a lot of customisable options, making it perfect for me.

I might put my own picture back up or put something Lynmouth-y up to make it look nicer. I’ll decide later.

Statistics

// March 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // Website

Thought it might be interesting to post some statistics from February.

AwStats reports:

• 1294 Unique visitors
• 11613 Visits (8.97 visits/visitor)
• 28449 Hits (2.44 Hits/Visit)
• 451.82 MB of bandwidth used (out of about 8,000 limit)
• Most popular day was the 5th
• Most popular time is 17:00-18:00
• 10,809 hits were made on the homepage
• 168 people visited http://www.mediaguy.co.uk/lacie-ethernet-disk-mini-home-edition via Google or another link
• 40% of people use Firefox
• 233 people found the site directly from Google
• Second most popular search engine was MSN Live with 31
• Top 5 searches were ‘mediaguy’ ‘graham robinson’ ‘hipserv 1.6′ ‘ lacie home edition’ and ‘lacie hipserv’
• Someone in Modern Languages has been reading, but I’m not going to use my powers to find out who, that would be naughty

It’s Hot

// August 5th, 2007 // No Comments » // Gaming, Personal, Website

Laura, a Spanish lady I work with, would be very happy today. For her ‘too hot’ is around 40 degrees. For me it seems to be any day in Summer where there is no cloud.

What is a shame is that if we were still in Lynmouth right now it would be beautiful. We would probably be in Coffee Mill with an ice cream under an umbrella with a nice sea breeze. Here, with all the cars and the noise, it just doesn’t work as well.

But enough of complaining… although that is the main reason for having a blog…

I’ve got a few more games now. I was reading about how most games that you buy last about 12 hours from start to finish. I have played world of warcraft in total for about 800 hours; there just isn’t a finish in that game. When you have timescales like that to compete with it’s hard to find single player games but I’ve now got Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars and Stalker Shadow of Chenobyl. Should be fun and more importantly they have pause and save buttons.

Last thing for the day is to mention RSS. If you have google as your homepage you can press that little ‘iGoogle‘ button in the corner and make your own google homepage. You can find little RSS feed buttons and add them to the google homepage. This means that when you open up your homepage you can find which of your favourite sites have new stuff on them. My site’s RSS feed is to the right and called ‘Entries RSS‘ and you can also find RSS feeds on the BBC for things like news and weather.