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.
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.
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)
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.
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…
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.
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.
Thought it might be interesting to post some statistics from February.
AwStats reports:
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.
Got up close to an air ambulance today. Also you’ll notice that I’ve added something into the blog to better intergrate it into flickr.
