Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Posted on January 23, 2010 - by John

Poll Results: boards.ie are the moderators fair

Here are the poll results for my post on boards.ie are the moderators fair?  The poll has now closed, and I thought it only fair the share the final results. (Click to enlarge it)

Posted on January 22, 2010 - by John

boards.ie hacked – time to change your passwords!

If like me and most web surfers, you have membership to a rather large number of websites which require a password, you probably have a common password you use for them.

I like to keep a common password for sites I don’t mind if someone finds out the password and unique passwords for the important ones. This may not work for you, but each to their own, but even if you do this and someone gets access to data on a website you use, you will need to change it.

Boards.ie was hacked yesterday, boards.ie “as of April 2009 the site has over 1,000,000 visitors a month, 220,000 registered accounts, more than 1,000,000 threads and more than 15 million posts.” (source: wikipedia)

Imagine being a hacker and having access to everyone’s password! While boards.ie do say on their website “While our investigations indicate that individual user accounts are not in danger we have taken the step of changing all user passwords. “, it is a warning to all surfers, mix it up a bit when it comes to passwords.

I find using symbols and numbers and ‘non words’ is a good idea. But at the end of they day you need to use something that you can REMEMBER, but is hard for others to guess.

Posted on December 21, 2009 - by John

What’s new in wordpress 2.9

There is a lot of under the hood changes, but some interesting changes to the media components, such as an build in image editor!

Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

Video

Posted on December 18, 2009 - by John

The Future of News – Mark Little

Mark Little (needs no introduction to Irish people), is about to leave RTE, talks about the future of news, and the role of social networking, a very well presented piece, worth a full watch.

Mark Little, Presenter of RTE”s Prime Time and a former RTE Washington correspondent, will give a lecture on the future of News Media, to the IIEA’s Digital Future Group.  Mr Little recently announced his decision to take a year’s leave from RTE to set up his own global online news service. LINK & video below

Posted on December 18, 2009 - by John

O2 Prepay / Top Up Mobile Broadband

O2 has finally launched prepay broadband, the prices are not bad at all. Very handy if you don’t wanted to be tied into a contract! The prices are looking like 20 euro for 30 days of use, capped at 5GB of usage. The cost of the modem is starting at 69 euro. Nice idea for a Christmas gift.

Press release

O2 today announced the launch of a mobile broadband service for prepay customers. The new service offers prepay customers a viable alternative to fixed broadband, providing a fast and easy way for them to get Internet and email access, whether they are at home, in the office or on the move.

O2 Prepay Broadband is available from €3.99 for a 24 hour pass which includes 500MB of data usage or €19.99 for a 30 day pass which includes 5GB of data usage. Mobile broadband modems are available from €69.

Customers also have the opportunity to try out O2’s mobile broadband service before making a final purchase decision, under O2’s innovative ‘Try Before You Buy’ initiative. Customers can borrow a mobile broadband modem for a 72 hour trial period. When the trial period is over and if the customer is happy with the service they can return to the store and choose the pricing option which best suits their usage needs, whether it is on prepay or contract.

Commenting, Anthony O’Neill, Head of Marketing Strategy, Telefónica O2 Ireland, said, “O2 Prepay Broadband is a welcome addition to our already extensive broadband portfolio. We are confident that our great value offering combined with our dedicated broadband customer care team and our high speed network will prove extremely popular with prepay customers.”

In 2008 O2 completed a multi-million Euro upgrade of its 3G / HSDPA network to offer customers faster speeds.

Prepay Broadband is now available from all O2 outlets nationwide including Carphone Warehouse. It is also available online at www.o2.ie

Posted on September 7, 2009 - by John

C64 Commodore 64 iphone app – the return!

I must say I get very nostalgic from time to time. And thanks to the iPhone I can now go back to the wonderful days when I used to hook up a white keyboard to my television set. Yes the commodore 64 is back, iPhone style.

I am going to install this app a little later. As far as I can tell the app, which was originally rejected by apple’s approval process, allows for in app game purchases.

However it does come with some build in games, four to be exact! If you are interested, I know I am – Link here (iTunes link)

Key Features

Original Commodore 64 game graphics
- Original SID sound
- Auto-save, to continue exactly where you left off
- Realistic joystick and beautifully crafted C64 keyboard
- Portrait and Landscape play
- Vertical and Fullscreen gaming (auto rotate for iPod users)
- and much more…

Video

Posted on August 31, 2009 - by John

iPhone Apps for the serious iPhone addict!

In my usual style of listing the greats, here is a small list of great iPhone applications, I have slanted this a bit to include Irish applications, listing is not my preference just the way I did the list.

Eirtext Pro

Looking to send FREE SMS messages? Using the data connection and your allocation of free webtext messages you can send FREE text messages from your iPhone using this incredible application.  I have this app in my iPhone dock ( the four icons on the bottom of the screen) because I use it so frequently!

I’m with O2 so I get 250 free text messages a month, that is nothing to be sneezed at.

The interface is simple, easy to use, and elegant. This app had some serious thought process involved in it’s development. There is support for Meteor, Three, Vodafone, O2 and other SMS systems including O2 UK.

You can save your text history, optional settings include: auto CC, vibration and rotation. A new feature which I find incredibly useful is “info while typing”. This displays the number of characters you have used,  number of messages this SMS has used,  and your remaining monthly allowance!

If you are interested in this application, I suggest you download the Pro version, which costs a very small amount of money, less than 3 euro I think, you will save a fortune on SMS messages. It is worth noting that you need a data plan in order to send messages, check with your operator, chances are you have one.

Facebook

I wrote this post some time ago, since then Facebook has released the latest version of their app, so I’ve done a re-write, so much has changed! With the new version, comes a host of tasty features and a new layout. You could really say that this is, in itself,  a new application. The restrictiveness of the previous app is lifted. The main screen gives you a set of icons, namely:

• News Feed
• Profile
• friends
• Inbox, Chat, Requests
• Events, Photos and Notes.

There is also a horizontal bar to alert you to new notifications, you can scroll to a second page, which allows you to bookmark your favourite pages, or profiles. I must say I do miss the bottom buttons which were on the previous version, they made navigation easier! This is not the applications fault but I really miss being able to use  my facebook programs, in addition to the build in ones. Still it keeps you up to date!

Color (colour) Splash

I had heard about colour splash before, but I recently upgraded to the latest iPhone which has a much better camera, so I though I would give this one a try. If you like to take pictures with your iPhone, then you will love this one. I plan to use it for editing some great pictures on my next holiday to Asia. Colour splash allows you to convert an image to gray scale, but select part of that image to keep in colour. The usage is simple, using your finger you select what you want  in colour. You can see an image I edited using colour splash above. This is great fun for playing  around with. It would also make some interesting profile pictures for your Twitter, or Facebook account! It’s not  free but it is low priced.

Sky News

Sky News has made a pretty great application. You can read the latest news, and watch the videos. With the usual sections, such as business, and showbiz, you can’t go wrong with his application. It is well laid out, easy to use, and as you would expect from Sky News is updated regularly! I myself have not had a simple crash, it seems to be a great useful application. I have not however tested it over 3G, as I have easy access to wifi. So with that in mind, I would imagine it uses a good bit of your iPhone data  allowance, comment below and let me know if you use it on 3G!

TwitterFon
There is a hell of a lot of iPhone applications for Twitter out there. Many of my friends use TwitterFon so I tried it out and continue to use it today. Like the other iPhone apps above this one is easy to use. A screen for your friends timeline, @mentions, DM messages, and a search function. I believe there is also a paid version, in this version there are advertisements, but they are non intrusive. I have not used any other Twitter application so I really cannot compare this to them, however it is simple and does the job. Support for mentions and DM as push messages would be a super addition to this app!

My Bill for O2.ie customers
This is one for O2 customers. I would award  this Irish iPhone app of the year. The O2 website can sometimes be a little slow. This applications makes it easy to see at a glance  the balance on your account, the un-billed balance, the remaining minutes, messages webtexts and so on. With the recession and all it is nice to keep and eye on your spend!

Have I missed any interesting iPhone apps that you cannot live without? Comment below and let me know what they are, and ask how could I have missed them? If you give your own little review I will update this post.

Image Gallery

Posted on August 22, 2009 - by John

Boards.ie Are the moderators fair?

There is an update to this post found here

Being a moderator on any forum can be difficult – it is a hard job, but what about one of the most popular sites on the internet boards.ie.

I do think boards.ie is a wonderful site, one of the best in Ireland! This poll is to find out user views on the moderators. Feel free to take part, or not. You might ask why I am writing this? I noticed a few twitters with a big opinion on this, and I would like to see what people really think. I myself  have a few issues with they way things are handled, but I do realise that these people give their time to this, and the site is a vault of information!  It must be difficult to manage so many users.

[polldaddy poll=1899882]