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.

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

News

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

O2 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

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

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

Yield

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

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]

Twitter has become such an important information stream, that if you don’t keep an eye on it you can miss some interesting  stuff, and have to wait another 20 seconds for it to appear on other websites!

Yes, many many times Twitter has the news before any of the blogs, and news sites. So if you want to be clued in keep an eye on Twitter.

Twitter

I suppose this is not surprising, everyone and their mother is twittering. But what brought my attention to this is that I asked someone, how they heard about a very unusual piece of news that the posted on the O2 forum. And the response is, it’s all over Twitter! In the ‘where have you been’ expression.

So there you have it another life lesson.

If you feel like following me on Twitter follow@johnmryan.

Also that piece of news I was referring to above can be followed here.

However I really was expecting something special this year in terms of device design. But Apple like to take it slow.

It is no secret that the success of the iPhone is down to excellent touch screen which is unique to the iPhone. However, features which have been on mobile devices for years now are only now happening on the iPhone, and yet it is selling very well indeed. There have been many missing features users expect from their mobile device. Take for example  MMS  which is has only recently been officially supported on the iPhone.

Recent updates has meant the  iPhone is getting closer to having a backpack full of features to keep every geek and business person connected to their virtual lives.

What is new, under the hood? There is of course the much needed better ram , graphics and more, let us boil all that hu-ha down and say the ‘s’ in iPhone3Gs means SPEED, the iPhone 3Gs is a much faster creature. In terms of extra features, below is what has peaked my interest, if I miss anything that has you excited please add your comment, and I will try and keep the list of features updated.

Push Notifications

Push Notifications

Push notifications are used by applications to alert you of new information, even when the application isn’t running.

What was requested for a long time on the iPhone was the ability to run applications in the background on the iPhone. For those of us with no idea what this means, allow me to explain, when you close a 3rd party application on the iPhone, it is closed completely, so say for example some sends you an IM message, you will not know about it until you reopen the application again.And while you still cannot run background applications because it would slow down the device (apparently). Apple have invented push notifications for the iPhone which is the next best thing (again apparently).

What this really means is that, for example even if you exit an application you can still receive notifications when you get an update or a message for that application. You can then relaunch that application and view the message. As per the image, the notification can be a small message or a number badge showing the number of updates for the application; it may also be an alert sound to draw you attention to an update.

Camera

iPhone 3Gs Camera

The new 3-megapixel camera takes great still photos, too, thanks to built-in autofocus and a handy new feature that lets you tap the display to focus on anything (or anyone) you want.

Everyone is excited about this 3-mega-pixel…

If you want to take a great photo then use a camera, but you won’t always have your camera with you when a great shot comes your way,  and chances are you will have your iPhone 3Gs clutched in your right hand.

Until now using the iPhone to capture any moment was pretty pointless due to the awful picture it would take. So Apple  in there infinite wisdom have tweaked the iPhone to make it an almost useful camera substitute.

Basically the camera on the 3Gs is a 3-mega pixel auto-focus camera. Meaning you can now focus on subjects simply by tapping them on the screen. More interesting than all this is you can now use the camera to take and edit video footage. You can then forward this directly to youtube… not bad really! This will do doubt increase the popularity of this device no end!

Copy & erm.. Paste?

Cut, copy, and paste words and photos, even between applications. Copy and paste images and content from the web, too.

It is interesting that it has taken this long for a simple function like copy and paste to make it to the iPhone, but apparently it required allot of time…
For me that is the most interesting elements that comes with the new iPhone 3Gs device, but if you would like to discuss the iPhone 3Gs head to this website for a discussion.

For accuracy purposes here are the specs of the device.
iphone 3Gs Specs

But you can turn this on, here’s how you do it.

1. Click on settings at the top of your Gmail inbox.

2. Under the general tab scroll to the bottom of the screen to browser connection options.

3. Select https, and click on save.

4. Did it work? You should now always see https in your URL bar!

I know this is simple but you can now securely send emails!

I was paying them for 20MB at 48 euro, and getting 2-3 MB when it worked over the past 2 months before that I was getting great speeds in fairness to the company, and as I had friends using it also, it was a good deal!

It seemed like UPC could just not  give me an answer as to why it was no longer working. I did however get a ‘pick and mix’ of ‘answers’ such as: the modem not working (it was), congestion on the line, the line is being repaired today, there are too many users in your block of flats, one engineer told me they were waiting on planning permission to repair a line, one told me they were replacing those lines – the day after it was working again, the day after that it went down again.  Two promised to call me back ,and never did, although one guy did when I asked for his name when logging the call. The automated callback guy called me (as they normally do to confirm an appointment, a great service really – if used correctly) and said, “I understand your issue has been resolved, is this correct”…??? NO!

Expensive broadband in Ireland

Little did I realise, when I cancelled UPC  how expensive broadband DSL still is today. All the adverts made me believe that it was now inexpensive. But when you remove all the addons (or bundles), add the VAT, and throw on the line rental you are left with the real prices.

I am willing to spend 40-45 max on DSL broadband (I don’t have cable TV anymore -so I need a good connection for on demand and youtube). And I am not interested in land-line calls, a mobile phone is more than enough for me there.

After calling eircom to connect the line (25 a month – unless you select a package, and until you move to your broadband provider). I am left with these options, when I stay in the 40 euro area and remove anything to do with making a landline phone call.

Smart Telecom – 5 MB for 41 euro
Eircom – 1MB for 45 euro
Digiweb: 7MB for 40 euro. (Activation Fee€49.95)

* All prices include line rental i’m told.

Digiweb a possible winner?

Ideas & suggestions welcome, as it will take Eircom until July 3rd to turn on the line!

We all know Microsoft wants to be Google, it wants to be Google really bad!. Bing.com  is a real effort by Microsoft’s search engine people – an effort to be seen as an reliable alternative (wannabe replacement) to Google’s search engine.

Will people be saying “Bing it” instead of  “Google it” unlikely, but it is nice to think that someone is trying to give Google a run for their money.

It still needs some work, and is by no means a finished product. I do find it funny that when you search for bing on bing.com the results do not include Bing.com website! But when you search for google on google.com – you know where I am going with this…. right?

Apple have announced iPhone 3.0 software, so out of all the announced features which are you most looking forward to?
Visit the forum topic now to have your say.

Is it not a form of spam? OK maybe spam is a bit extreme. I signed up to follow Sky News, and this morning I got a thank you with a direct link to their website. It is not enough that I followed them on twitter? They also wish to push their site at me.

It’s just my morning rant, but direct messages should not be automated. Does this bother anyone else, or am I alone here?

Micro Blogging

Britney Spears: # Bio Yes! This is the real Britney Spears! We’ve got updates from her team, her website and yes, even Britney herself!
Stephen Fry: # Bio Dancer, couturier, superheavyweight boxer, neo-plasticist and rapper
Barack Obama
Wil Wheaton: # Bio I’m just this guy, you know?
Jonathan Ross: # Bio Number One Twitter Detective.
More here