technology

Annoying iPhone Feature (another one)

mike — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:19:19 +0100

One of the small changes that came about from the latest iphone update is a repeating sound alert for when I receive a text message. Having a repeat reminder is something I can see as being useful in certain situations, when you're somewhere busy and noisy for example. However, I often just have my phone out on a table, and when an SMS arrives, I just read it off the screen as it conveniently lights up. When the phone chirrups 5 minutes later, I think "oooh another message", only to be terribly disappointed to find its the same bloody message all over again. Very tedious.

The world of Twitter

mike — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:38:13 +0100

As regular readers will have observed, I have recently adopted the use of twitter, which is defined by wikipedia as a "free social networking and micro-blogging service". Lots of buzzwords and the sound of my non tech friends running for hills screaming in fear that I am about to bore them with lots of words of no interest to them whatsoever. Admittedly I don't think many of my non-tech friends read my website, as they still cling to email and porn as their only real use of the internet, but just in case, please bear with me ...

Wrong Day to Die

mike — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:31:02 +0100

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have noticed that there has been a load of press about the LHC turning on today. It's pretty exciting that we have such a large experiment going on, it's a feat of extremely impressive engineering with some potentially fascinating consequences for physics. Sadly a lot of the press has instead been concentrating on concerns that it might create a black hole or that we could get switched into another dimension.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

mike — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:06:52 +0100

It seems that the spam module I have installed on this site is still preventing legitimate content. Temporarily, I have disabled the spam module so as to stop people having their posts eaten by the site, which must be very irritating (sorry Charles!) Of course, if I wind up with a lot of spam, I will turn the comments off completely instead, but hopefully it won't be that bad for the short period whilst I try and fix it (I figure I'll be able to take a look tomorrow, I am going to try a fresh install of the module).

Archives finally back online

mike — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:59:08 +0100

Hooray, after procrastinating for ages, and then running into trouble with database versions, I have finally imported all my old blog posts into the drupal database. The only way to browse them is to use the page links at the bottom of the blog listing ... the calendar browsing isn't working so well at the moment, and I can't be arsed to try and fix it. The important thing is that all my data is in one format again, for the first time in a good couple of years.

So close, and yet so far

mike — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:41:39 +0100

I spent a bit of time over the weekend trying to work out how to import all my old blog posts (pre-New Zealand) into the website. Sadly it didn't all work out, as the version of mysql i have on my laptop doesn't match up with that of the my hosting provider. So now I have to work out a different way of dealing with the import. A little disappointing all in all ...

Website update

mike — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:43:49 +0100

Today, I woke up in the mood to sort out my website. So that is what I have done. Much of the change will be completely invisible to you, as it has mainly been about updating the backend software to a more recent version - I am now running drupal 5.10, instead of the antiquated (and probably insecure) 4.7.2.

A website update

mike — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:59:28 +0100

A slight change to the website, as I have decided to start leveraging all those wonderful social networking type tools that are out there a little more, rather than trying to do it myself. This mainly means that the gallery is not going to be being updated anymore, and I will be using flikr for my pics, and I decided that I would sign up for twitter as well, for those little updates in life which has become quite appealing to me after following raettig for a week or two. This is all a part of preparation for updating the website soon as well, I simply couldn't face all the tedious faffing around that will inevitably arise from having to deal with gallery integration and the like.

iPhone shuffle mode

mike — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:37:05 +0100

recently I found that I was having a problem with my iPhone that meant that it would not play albums in order, and kept on shuffling it. Clearly I had inadvertently hit a setting without meaning to, but I couldn't find it for love nor money. A quick google though, and I've found out how to sort it ... when a track is playing, tap the artwork, and icons for repeat play and shuffle appear, so you can turn them on and off there. As usual, it's easy once you know how ;-) Edit: nice clear description of the interface (and a critique) can be found here

Enough about everyone else, what about me?!

mike — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:44:31 +0100

So lots of posts of linkage lately, but not so much about me ... so this will be one of those nice and self-indulgent updates, where I shall cover the gamut of exciting things that have been occuring in my life of late. The Saturday just gone marked the third Saturday night in a row with a serious sesssion of Rock Band going on. I've got seriously into the singing, really throwing myself into it. I'm not sure I am necessarily all that good, but I've been getting respectable scores on some songs, and frankly it's so much fun it's well worth it. Sarah is probably the best singer we've had on it overall I reckon, although Dan and Jo were the big surprise at my birthday party!