hintofsarcasm
am i still ill?
Archive for Technology
August 18, 2008 at 19:27 · Filed under Technology
After probably six months or so of being out of action, I finally decided to take a look at the bug that was causing comments on Hintofsarcasm not to work.
I realised that I made a decision some time ago to change the name of the comment post script, wp-comments-post.php to something that the spam-bots could not get their hands on so easily and install a captcha.
When I removed this captcha system in favour of a hash based JS plugin I completely forgot that I had set all requests for wp-comments-post.php to redirect to Google, so, after deleting the file and re-uploading it a couple of times, checking out the database and the form I finally got a lightbulb above my head and remembered the redirect. Duh.
So, you can all go ahead and start commenting again. That means you, Dan.
ps. InsideCardiff.com is making a comeback.
February 26, 2008 at 18:38 · Filed under Technology
Since I don’t drive, whether I eat or not is reliant on a supermarket delivering to my door.
As part of an advertising campaign by ASDA earlier this year, statistics from the independent grocery shopping website mySupermarket.com were used to prove that ASDA were cheaper than Tesco on hundreds of items, despite an identical television campaign by Tesco claiming the same about them compared to ASDA just a few months prior. In fact, the Tesco price checker is still online and claiming to have 2274 items cheaper than ASDA, so, with two of the major players sending conflicting messages, who actually is the cheapest supermarket to shop from?
According to mySupermarket comparisons, when shopping like for like, ASDA is the cheapest of the 4 supermarkets (Tesco, ASDA, Sainsburys & Ocado (Waitrose)). This is probably the fairest comparison to use, as when taking into likening ’similar’ items (ie. own brands), there can be big differences, in size and weight or in quality which make the matches inequitable.
I had never considered using another supermarket, I was stuck well in there with Tesco, believing that they were the best value, plus of course their service wasn’t too bad, but then after some bad experiences (three failures to show, in fact), I made the decision to investigate alternatives, which is where mySupermarket came into the frame.
When shopping initially signing up with the website, you have the ability to import your favourite items (items you have bought before) from Tesco.com, you then choose from these and it will fill your trolley, all the while keeping a running comparison total from other supermarkets. If you are choosing own brand items, it will choose comparable own brand items. As you can see in the above graphic, my shop at ASDA will save me a cool £40 over my usual choice. This is a grocery shop for a single person for about three weeks, so the savings could potentially be much higher if you are shopping for a family.
Low prices aren’t the only thing to think about when making your grocery choices, because of course, if your driver regularly turns up with items missing, broken or just doesn’t turn up at all, wasted time, effort and eventually the need to go out and buy products elsewhere could completely negate the point of shopping around in the first place.
In summary, using this website could save you a small fortune, but do choose your supplier carefully, I have not used Sainsbury’s or Ocado, but I did switch to ASDA for my February shop and was quite pleased. With only a few missing items, which the difference was quickly refunded to my card, I shall be using them again this month. I don’t feel the need to rush back to Tesco.com any time soon. Being the biggest doesn’t necessarily make them the best.
December 11, 2007 at 12:36 · Filed under Technology
Just when we thought that Facebook could not put a foot wrong, rather like Google of the first five years, they overstepped the mark with Beacon and now James over at The Laboratorium has come up with interesting reasoning to condemn Facebook and Blockbuster for breaking the law by collecting and distributing video rental information in an ‘opt-out’ scheme, incriminating stuff. And if the sums of Mark from Mashable are anything to go by, the two companies could be in some substantial trouble if the any number of people decide to start class action lawsuits.
October 23, 2007 at 04:08 · Filed under Technology
With TV-Links being raided and shut down in a blaze of glory, it leaves us to ponder the question, who is next?
This weekend, TV-Links.co.uk was closed down in a joint operation between multiple European police forces, FACT, Trading Standards and other government agencies, for being an intermediary to copyright theft.
Whilst “Sin”, from Cheltenham, Gloucs, owner and creator of the website, was spending his weekend at Her Majesty’s pleasure, police in the Netherlands were pulling plugs on servers hosting the site and coppers in Ireland were busy arresting forum moderators on the same charge, aiding copyright theft, all the while, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the google billionaires who are hosting the material, were undoubtedly sat around drinking cold brewskies in their multi-million dollar mansions, left to only guess what was going on across the pond.
TV-Links.co.uk was a site where you could get an alphabetised list of television shows and movies with links to free video hosting websites where you could watch said content. The TV-Links website did not actually host any of this content itself, merely linked to it at Youtube, Stage6, et al. However, these links have landed its owners in deep water.
This begs the question, if they can be taken down for showing us where this content is, why are those who are actually hosting the copyrighted material getting away with it, apparently scott free, and, what does this mean for almost the entire internet community who habitually link to videos on Youtube and others? Could my door be broken down at any moment?
I would have to be sat in the ‘Linking is not illegal’ camp that is gradually forming, the petition for the release of ‘Sin’ and the reinstatement of TV-Links is now at almost 1800 signatures in just two days. I do have admit though, there are some other, more sinister questions raised by this, which once again throws the whole ‘Deep Linking‘ debate back into the limelight.
If you just link to something illegal, are you really not breaking the law? What if TV-Links was harbouring links to child pornography? Because they were just linking to it, would that abstain them from any blame or make them completely innocent? Would anybody be fighting their corner then? I can guess this would be a whole different story then.
How this story will play out is left to anyone’s guess at the moment, as this is undoubtedly a unprecedented move FACT and not something that has gone through the British legal system, not of this level of profile anyway. We shall just have to wait and see.
August 14, 2007 at 12:42 · Filed under Technology
Direct2Dell, the corporate weblog of the Dell computer company has announced that they are to roll out Linux pre-installed systems outside of the United States, available to order immediately.
Ubuntu 7.04 will be factory pre-installed and, because of the wide hardware compatibility with the OS, the systems will be almost completely identical in hardware configuration to Dell’s Windows offerings.
If you see the below configurations, built using Dell.com/uk, you will notice that both are almost exactly the same, the one difference being that the Ubuntu system comes with a slightly improved graphics card, for the reason that their usual standard Intel based board has issues within Ubuntu. The same or a comparable card was not available from the Windows system builder.
Installed with the same graphics card, in my estimation, would increase the price of the Windows system by approximately £20, bringing it into line with the cost of the Ubuntu machine (based on the 256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE being available from Dell in the USA for an additional $50 (£25), and that being a higher powered card than the 128mb 8300GS supplied with the UK Ubuntu machine).
This begs the question then, that why is it (slightly) more expensive to buy a Dell computer with a free, open source operating system, than it is to have Windows Vista (Home Premium edition), a commercial package?
We can estimate the cost to the consumer of having Windows pre-installed by Dell at around £55.23, this figure can be ascertained by the compensation that was being handed out to users who last year chose not to accept the Windows license when starting up their new Dell for the first time, removing it and installing Linux.
These are the prices quoted by Dell for the two, comparable bar the graphics card, systems.
 |
 |
| With Vista |
With Ubuntu |
If you add £20, to compensate for the graphics card, to the Microsoft based system and then remove £55.23, it is still more expensive to buy the free OS version. This would drop the price to £376.90, for an OS’less machine. All you have to do then is load up your own copy of Ubuntu, available for free from Ubuntu.com.
All of this means that deal are making approximately an extra £51.46 on each new Ubuntu machine that they sell.
My advice to potential Dell / Open source buyers, buy a standard Vista machine, get your rebate for not accepting the license and formatting the HDD, get a copy of Ubuntu for free and save yourself a nice wad of cash.
July 20, 2007 at 07:43 · Filed under Technology
Blackle is the energy saving search site.
Based on Google, the customised engine uses black as its primary colour scheme, which is apparently more energy effective.
According to their website, they have already saved approximately 96,728 watt hours of electricity.
This is all based on the theory that a black background use less light to output the a bright colour (ie. white) and thus less power, which is a fact, in CRT monitors.
However, on LCD screens it will have little or no effect as the backlight is constantly on and to display black pixels, the monitor merely blocks the backlight, rather than switching it off.
Every little helps though…
February 11, 2007 at 16:16 · Filed under Technology
Whilst searching the web for a new mobile phone and contract this week I came across a programme called Orb. Orb sits in the systray on a Windows based system and allows access to media files housed on that computer through a web-based interface. Orb is completely free to download and use, which is highly surprising given the advanced nature of the software.
Photo, video, audio, documents and even live television (through DVB-T) can be accessed from anywhere that has a high-speed connection and a web-browser, which is pretty much most places these days. This is extremely handy for me, since I have somewhat of a ‘fetish’ for video, audio and photography and it’s all stored on my home PC.
I’ll paint you a picture of what I currently have and therefor why Orb is so useful to me, connected to this one computer I have 6 hard drives; 4 internal and 2 external totalling 1.8tb. The larger 5 of these are cram packed with movies, television shows, mp3 and my photography (The smallest if the boot drive, just Windows XP and installed programs on there).
Unfortunately, I’m hardly ever at home, so accessing this media from elsewhere (ie. when using a wi-fi access point on my laptop) is cumbersome and unsecure. I have a webserver setup which allows me to browse the files and I also have remote access available to it, but neither of these methods will allow me to watch videos or listen to music without downloading the entire file first which obviously is not ideal.
This is where Orb comes in.
It’s all very intuitive, once you have chosen what you want to watch, the video file is streamed whilst being re-encoded on-the-fly by the host computer to suit the connection speed of the access point being used.
There is a choice of formats to use when viewing videos, either Windows media, Realplayer, Quicktime, 3gp or even an in-browser flash player.
I’m still to come across a type of file that has not been able to be re-encoded and streamed by Orb, which I’m very impressed by, I’ve tried DivX, Xvid, Wmv, Mpeg2 and Avi so far, and they all work perfectly.
Audio follows pretty much the same premise. You choose a song or create a playlist and Orb on the host computer streams it after re-encoding. Orb supports most, if not all file types too, including DRM’ed audio files (iTunes etc.)
Fill up a playlist, press the big green play button on the web interface, an asx file is downloaded and launches into Windows media player and your music starts playing. Skipping tracks is supported, so if you put something on there that you don’t actually want to listen to, just skip to the next track.
Photo viewing is a pleasure, browse the folders as they appear on the drive, search or tag. Images are initially displayed as a thumbnail but once double clicked become full browser window sized in a lightbox. The functionality is also there to create a ‘playlist’ of photos which when played form a slideshow in the browser window.
But, I here you ask, what has Orb and finding a new mobile phone got to do with each other? Well, mobile network Three UK have recently launched their new ‘X-Series‘ handsets, starting with the Nokia N73. Three has come to an agreement with Orb that they develop a mobile compatible version of the web interface.
I received my N73 yesterday and have been playing around with Orb today and have to say I’m damn impressed. For an extra £5 per month Three will give you unlimited data transfer between the handset and Orb (and other programmes that come with the X-Series line, including web-browsing, email, etc.).
The interface on the mobile is clean, fast and easy to use and streaming video and audio works well when in an area of good 3G coverage, which to be honest, with Three is pretty much everywhere that I spend my time. The network has really improved over the two years since I last used them as my provider.
So far I have tested the service by watching a full episode of Torchwood. On my drive at home the file is >600mb but Orb managed to stream it at 68k to my mobile without skipping once and the quality was good. I will point out that I was sat in one place with full 3G coverage whilst trying this out.
I believe that I will mostly use the service on my mobile for viewing photographs stored on my hard drives as I have over 17,900 at the moment and am forever wanting to show off my latest shots 
Has mobile media taken a step forward with the joining of the UK’s first sole 3G network and Orb joining forces? I think it may have and I’m sure that there is a lot more to come too.
February 6, 2007 at 14:25 · Filed under Technology
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a PR firm who are working on behalf of mobile phone manufacturer LG. I was told that a new handset would be coming onto the market in February, as part of their ‘black collection’, which started with the Chocolate and was asked if I would like to try out a pre-release version and present my findings to the blogosphere. A request that I accepted.
I decided to hold off on posting, feeling that a rushed review would serve no purpose over any others found on the web, written by guru’s who simply pick the phone apart by it’s spec sheet. I really wanted to present my findings as a user, someone who has had extensive experience with using the handset as a consumer like any other. I hope you find my notes of use.
The first thing that you notice when you see an LG Shine is that it is very glamorous. The silver is striking and you just want to touch it to see what it is made of, sterling, steel or plastic.
I believe it is made of stainless steel. It certainly is quite scratch resistant, so this is a major plus. Even after spending days in my pocket, being rubbed up against coins and keys, it has no visible marks on it.
The Shine is a slide handset, which has become a small problem. With greasy fingers, as there is no dedicated grip to push the phone up, it can be awkward to get it into the open position and once you do, you’ve left countless finger marks all over the screen, requiring a rub on your trouser leg to clear.
The phone is packed with features, a lot for the size.
The camera is of good quality, incorporating Schneider Kreuznach optics (quoting from the same page as Carl Zeiss and Nokia here, methinks) which make for high resolution shots and a great macro mode. Unfortunately, it is brought down by having a really pathetic zoom rate. Even when zoomed all the way in it really isn’t any closer in to the action than normal.
Bluetooth is de facto, as with any handset these days.
MP3 player is built in, but with just under 50mb of internal storage in the 2G flavour, there isn’t much room to breathe, but of course, MicroSD cards are optional and cheap.
The keypad is sturdy, the keys are average size, but you do really need to use fingernails to press them, which, for those who are like me and enjoy a good old munch on them quite often, can become a bit of a problem. Not something that a few days of willpower won’t fix though.
Consequences of the fiddly keypad are that text messaging becomes quite cumbersome, and the ‘hang-up’ button is right there above the 3 button. On many an ocassion I have been in the middle of a long SMS message and pressed the dreaded red button, only to lose the whole message, and it’s doesn’t get saved to drafts either!
The screen is one of the biggest plus sides to this phone, it is very high quality, a good size and the clarity is unbelievable. Photos displayed are shown clear and bright, as are the menus. It is far superior to any other that I have used over the years.
Now for my least favourite part of the handset, the scroll wheel.
I could not get on with the wheel at all. I found it unresponsive and tricky to use and the buttons either side of the wheel (not the softkeys) even more so. They are way too small, even to be used with fingernails.
In the image above, you can see that 5 buttons have been put into one very small space.
Soft key on the left (with the slit), then a button, then the screen wheel, then another button and then the right soft key. The buttons next to the scroll wheel are the offenders that I spoke about above. They are used for navigating left and right through menus.
Although, one redeeming factor is the menus are designed in such a way that you do not actually need to go left or right if you don’t want to, going down or up far enough will eventually take you to the icons on the left or the right of where you currently are.
Negative part over, I have thoroughly enjoyed using this phone over the past few weeks. As many of you will know, day to day I use a significantly different handset to this, the Nokia N91 (pictured to the right with the Shine).
I have found that although the LG model is a very sophisticated piece of kit and very desirable, the advanced functions that come with the Nokia N91 are far more suited to my lifestyle (4gb hard drive, wi-fi, html browser, etc.). You really do have to decide what type of phone you need and what suits you.
If you like to look swish, but don’t spend too much time navigating the menus, connecting GPS receivers and browsing the interweb, then this may just be the phone for you, it really is the Prada bag of mobile phone handsets. Expect a horde of WAG’s to be snapped by the paparazzi and adorning the pages of Closer, Heat and Hello with their LG Shine’s in hand.
See more pictures
Looks 9/10
Features 6/10
Useability 5/10
Overall 7/10 - I do like this phone.
January 29, 2007 at 11:07 · Filed under Technology
When it was first launched, Virtual Earth from Microsoft was nothing more than a Google maps clone, with older aerial photographs.
Then came the ‘Walk the streets‘ function which was very impressive, but never actually made it into full production and has remained in ‘Preview’ mode and thus still has only limited availability (San Fransisco & Seattle) which makes it untenable.
Finally though, the Microsoft Live development team have come up with something unique and worthwhile. Birds eye view mapping.
Using Virtual Earth, users can now see images from a Birds eye view of most major (and quite a few minor) cities and towns in the UK in their web browsers.
The images are much closer and more detailed than the aerial photography that was used previously and the shots are far more recent.
I have analyzed the shots taken over Cardiff and have come to the conclusion that they were taken sometime in the early summer of 2006. Perhaps May or June.
Here we see Cardiff Castle, as viewed from the South, looking North.
Another great feature is that you can change your vantage point, you can choose to look from any point of the compass. The magic of this is that the map is not simply rotated, but seperate photos have been taken from each different view. If you are looking from the North to South, you can see different sides of buildings, etc. It’s all very impressive.
Here we see Cardiff Castle, as viewed from the North, looking South.
The images have more than likely been taken from an aeroplane, or perhaps even a helicopter, which has clearly spent a lot of flying time shooting all of these high quality images.
The software is impressive too, as AJAX applications go, this is pretty neat, and being written using AJAX, no dowload is required to view the maps. There don’t appear to be too many glitches, especially when using IE7. I have come across the odd few, but nothing too major, certainly nothing that inhibits the use of the website.
Bravo Microsoft, you have outdone yourselves this time.
Microsoft Virtual Earth (Live Search)
January 27, 2007 at 17:24 · Filed under Technology
Talking to the BBC, Youtube founder Chad Hurley has confirmed that a scheme will be rolled out in the next couple of months that will “reward creativity”.
Youtube are clearly using this to give users an incentive to make their own videos and not to upload copyrighted material.
The money will come from the advertisements which are displayed when a video is viewed on the website, this is another system which the Youtube team are working to re-vamp, more than likely taking away the banner ad system which currently graces each page to be replaced by rolling advertisements before or after the video.
Revver, an alternative to Youtube, has already started a revenue-sharing system like the one proposed by Youtube, but it’s user-base is nowhere near as large as it’s rival and thus the impact has been limited.
So, does this mean that my videos could start making me money enough money to quit my job and become a full-time Youtuber?
Well, no, and not just because my videos are awful, but because the amounts that the user will actually receive are likely to be very low, even less than 1/4 of a penny per view would generous.
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