Added what looks to be an awesome plugin for creating a mobile version of the site. If you’re viewing this through an iphone / ipod touch or android phone you should see the new style (you can turn it on and off at the bottom of the page).
Obviously, I can’t check from Android, if you can, let me know if it works.
This is the plugin home page – WPtouch
Spam comments have changed over the last few months. When I first started the blog the spam comments were essentially heavily laden with links to other spam sites. Either blatant (just lists of links) or thinly disguised (long diatribe of text with links spread throughout). Recently though, there’s been an increase in short comments in which the spam is just a URL link of the submitter. The comments all have the same thing in common – ego-stroking.
They cover the following types,
I guess some people get suckered in by the ego-stroke and are encouraged to approve the posts where they would normally ignore them. Since my ego is already the size of a small mountain I need no further strokage and so am immune. Or maybe it’s because I’m not as easily fooled. Or maybe my self image is so bad I can’t for a moment believe any of the comments are true. Whatever the reason – they still don’t make it past the spam filter on the site.
Soon we’ll be seeing the following class of spam,
I’ll hold out against those as well I think.
I’ve had a hate / hate relationship with printers from the day I got a thermal printer for my ZX Spectrum and it has lasted throughout my entire computing career. There have been two highlights in that period, my Panasonic KXP1124i 24 pin dot matrix printer which I purchased around 1991 and my HP LaserJet 4L which I purchased sometime around 1993. Those printers served me well and they just worked (mostly), the LaserJet made it around 10 years. Every other printer I’ve dealt with on a home user level or at work has been painful and annoying. Printers see me coming, they refuse to work, they jam, they eat paper, they randomly drop words, they do everything in their power to make turning electricity into print as painful as possible.
I had the HP LaserJet 4L for an age, and it kept going and going. Eventually we sort of stopped needing a printer and it sat for a very long time unused. Then we got a very cheap Inkjet (I forget why) which was terrible, and refused to print more than a few test pages. We went back to using the LaserJet but it was showing it’s age. We got another one maybe two Inkjets, the last one was a Lexmark all-in-one, which seemed okay, but after only a few weeks the ink in the print heads dried up and caused issues. New cartridges worked for a very short time and then did the same thing, we relegated it to a scanner and then moved it upstairs. The LaserJet came back out – but now it had sat for a long time, and the cartridge was struggling, it gave off a pretty serious burning smell when used and the noise sounded like we were using small cats as paper, flattening them with the rollers.
We gave up on printing. Who needed it anyway? Spengler said print was dead in 1984 and I was beginning to believe him.
Then along came roleplaying and suddenly I need to print stuff again. Character sheets, maps, encounter tracking sheets. I wasn’t about to be thwarted again. I know a friend who’s technical opinion I trust very well likes HP printers and has had one without issue for a little while so I started looking at those. If I was to avoid having a 10 foot USB cable or buying a cabinet then it only made sense to get a wireless one. HP do quite a nice little all-in-one (the C4585) and we just got back with it – very impressed so far, I hope the ink cartridges hold out.
NB: If you own an HP C4585 and they suck, don’t tell me. I don’t care. It’s too late. I bought it already.
Thought I’d see if you can use the wordpress app to write posts off-line and what do you know, you can. We’re just on our way to weekly d&d (4th ed.) and the m1 north bound was slow bit it’s cleared up now. My fighter made it to level 5 last time we played but various events transpired against us and it’s been a few weeks since we got together.
Probably a lot of downtime things in this session, dead companion to replace, gear to restock etc.
O2 (in the UK) can’t be very happy? I can now call any other skype user from my iPhone for free as long as I have a wireless connection somewhere. It’s not as easy to receive calls, you need to be logged into Skype on the phone and you can’t run 3rd party apps in the background, but if you know someone’s calling you via Skype you can be ready for it. And making outgoing calls for free to other Skype users is the real cost saving I guess.
Sound quality seemed pretty good as well.
I bet the Skype charges for calling real phones are cheaper than the O2 network charges as well, I may look into that.
As I said, I’m impressed with the iPhone – the only annoyance so far is that when using Windows Explorer to delete photo’s from the iPhone, it crashes (the phone, not Explorer) and resets. It’s a soft reset, don’t lose anything, but it means the only way I can remove pictures is by deleting them on the phone. Apparently it’s only an issue with XP – Vista and Mac’s are fine.
It’s going to be annoying if I take any substantial number of pictures though.
Thought I’d check out the wordpress app, seems pretty good.
Wrote my first WordPress plugin today (for www.bookthing.co.uk), it’s a pretty simple plugin architecture especially if you’re not trying to do anything too clever. I just wanted a shortcode (some text you put into a post which is expanded by a plugin) to read some values from some custom fields and include them in the article footer. It saves having to paste lots of formatting HTML into each post and lets you just suck content from the custom fields.
I was surprised I couldn’t find a simple ‘template’ style plugin on the WordPress site, maybe I was just using the wrong search terms. It’s the kind of thing that would be very useful for building common information boxes for reviews, etc. Anyway, I hacked together a 59 line php file, of which around 1/3rd is info and license to read two custom fields and whack them into a div.
Took about 9000% less time than I expected.
We bought a second controller for the PS3 today (took back some games we had for the Wii, got £24 for them, and used that to aid in the purchase of the controller, and bought our Tesco groceries with the £25 we had in Tesco vouchers, and used the £25 we saved on the controller, and Lego Indiana Jones). We’ve spent about 4 hours playing LittleBigPlanet two player and I’ve not laughed and cried so hard in years.
Lego Indiana Jones is fun two player, but it’s also more high-stress than LBP – which is just fun and crazy and stomach-achingly funny at times.
I did quite a bit of standby and call out (and a little overtime) in November and December and due to various timings, all my claims got stacked up and paid in February. Which was good news because I needed to pay off the dental work on the visa card and think about organising the rest of it. But it also meant we had a little spare cash, and that was added in to the reduction of my mortgage by £100 and not having to pay council tax this month. So I decided to do my bit to end the recession by spending and not saving ((this is my regular behaviour as well, but during a recession I have an excuse)).
After wavering a lot recently about Blu-Ray, and deciding not to get a PS3 when I finally did go for Blu-Ray but to get a dedicated player, I did a complete about-face this morning. Playstation 3 bought from Tesco (proof that supermarket points schemes work, price was roughly the same as other places, but we get points at Tesco that we can buy food with when the vouchers come through). I also bought the Matrix Blu-Ray set (needed something to watch on it), and we got LittleBigPlanet free with the PS3.
Got it all home, disconnected the optical audio from the Sky+ box and plugged it into the Playstation ((so, no more surround sound from Sky+, which I think we’ve used about twice since we got the surround sound system)), and it was all up and running. The PS3 did some updates (two, I think), and LittleBigPlanet tried to do some, but it got a big confusing, and then finally worked.
We watched bits of the Matrix and were awed by the clarity and the colour and the detail. I also put our original DVD Matrix in and tried it with and without the PS3 upscaling. I even took some photo’s to try and show people how clear Blu-Ray is, because I can’t find any good examples online. While I was looking at the photo’s I noticed the Matrix Blu-Ray pictures were a totally different colour to the DVD. Seriously, much more blue and green. I was a little worried, was that normal?
Then I played LittleBigPlanet for an hour or so – looks like it might be fun. Between levels the screen goes fully white though and after that hour I was getting a headache.
We eventually settled on watching the Matrix tonight to really see how good Blu-Ray was, and to try and convince myself the colours were okay.
And then I remembered – our TV sets preferences on a per-input basis, so the HDMI2 channel we were watching the PS3 through was set to all the defaults. Those defaults include Backlight set to 100, Contrast and Colour are also pretty high. On my regular setup I run Backlight set to 20 (yes, 1/5th of the default) and Contrast and Colour differently. In fact, I don’t use any of the TV defaults. I set them through a lot of playing around when we first got the TV and again recently using a THX calibration section of the Star Wars DVD’s, so I’m pretty happy with how they look, and they don’t give us headaches.
Setting those values on HDMI2 has left us with a much kinder Blu-Ray image and none of the retina burning sensation that the defaults give you. Also, some searching online showed that the 2004 DVD for The Matrix (and also the Blu-Ray print) have a different colour setup compared to the original DVD release which is the one we own. So, those two things together make me much happier, the on-screen image is now less obviously different, and where it is different I know it’s because the print is different this time around.
If you were ever wondering, can upscaling DVD players really give you Blu-Ray quality images – the answer is no. Maybe with newer DVD’s that were created with upscaling in mind they may come closer, but comparing the original Matrix release and the Blu-Ray release is like comparing the granularity of gravel and sand.
Really pleased with it. Also glad I bought surround sound first, rather than Blu-Ray.