Notes from Sven Latham
My good online friend Simon Kittle has just launched a new company and an interesting product to go with it. The company is Lionkey Technologies and the product is called My Inventories. It is aimed at the homeowner; landlord; tenant, etc. market and is essentially a domestic inventory tracker. Which is very cool.
It looks like a good idea – I wish Simon the best of luck and remind him that by placing this advert on my blog he is legally bound to give me 20% 40% of the earnings.
First week of uni has been hectic. I’m a little annoyed about how many last-minute changes there have been to the schedule, but the lectures themselves have been good and very interesting.
The other thing I’m also glad to be back into is the DJing. For those who don’t know I DJ on the local radio station, Surge. Now for some gratuitous advertising 🙂
You can catch Sven on the radio every week, Sundays 1-3pm (The Sunday Show); Mondays 6-7pm (I produce Open Mic) and Tuesdays 8-11pm (Sven, Chris & Em show). All times are BST. Tune in 1287AM in Southampton area, or over the net at www.surgeradio.co.uk.
Gratuitous advertising in place, I expect everybody to listen now 🙂
Finally got that awful ‘Post from Blogger API’ message to go away. All is good in my life now.
I keep getting requests for p3p.xml on Blogwise, as well as one or two requests recently for a Privacy Policy to appear on the site (which I agree is quite important).
So, I looked at the W3 P3P page, then ended up running IBM Alphaworks’ P3P Policy editor – this has got to be one of the most complicated bits of beaurocracy I’ve seen in a while!
I think my policy is quite simple – I never re-sell or make public email addresses, they are used as contact points (and shortly, unique logins) in case of problem/update and any stats I make are completely anonymous. Cookies are used to retain user preferences…basically the good innocent use of cookies and emails. 🙂 I have no idea how to encapsulate this in the P3P standard!
Maybe one day I’ll revisit P3P but until then I’m just going to put up a human-readable copy of the above!
Found via Hessis weblog, the url2bmp program looked like a quite promising solution to my ongoing problem of how to reliably capture snapshots of websites for Blogwise (see example here).
Unfortunately it doesn’t get around Internet Explorer’s annoying popups and prompts for things like Japanese language support, that has been dogging me for ages. I’ve tried using the Mozilla/Firebird engine in a home-grown app a while ago but couldn’t get the DDI calls to work properly.
Pinch punch first of the month. It’s Oct 1 🙂
This month is going to be a good month. Blogwise will be celebrating its first birthday at the end of this month. It’s also extremely likely that this month will see the number of blogs top ten thousand, and the number of page impressions tip 100K. Woo!
I’ve set up Spamassassin to place all my spam into a seperate ‘spam’ mailbox (genius huh?) which appears as just another email folder on IMAP in Outlook. So, basically, I can browse through the spam quickly to spot false positives. I also set up Outlook to auto-delete after one week. Can’t have the critters filling up the place!
If you have a Nokia 3650 and are using some kind of bluetooth connection to it you’ve probably found that when you try to connect to it from the computer it crashes, probably taking explorer with it. It sucks. This assumes the drivers are installed, as well as mRouter and your phone software.
This is an annoying consequence of the way the connections are made. Basically when you connect to the Nokia 3650 it’ll immediately disconnect and try to initiate a connection back to your PC. My Bluetooth thingy can’t cope with this and usually crashes.
The solution lies in how you connect in the first place, and which COM ports are allocated. If you right click the Bluetooth icon in the system tray and choose ‘Advanced Configuration’ you can check/tweak which COM ports are used. By default (I think!) Incoming connections come in on COM3 (Local Services tab) and outgoing on COM4 (Client Applications tab). If they aren’t like this you ought to fix them (and then probably reboot).
Now, double click the mRouter icon in your system tray. You should get a list of Connections, many will be labeled ‘Bluetooth’. Make sure COM3 is checked. Then, make sure COM4 is checked. If COM4 is already checked de-select it then re-check it
Basically the process of checking COM4 initiates a connection to your phone. When prompted (assuming you haven’t paired and authorised the connection), the phone will connect back on COM3. Therefore in your PC Suite use COM3 as your phone comms port.
If you found this article useful let me know. I spent ages trying to figure out how to connect my phone. Then ages more trying to figure out how to connect in such a way that it didn’t crash Explorer on the way!
Ok. I’ve finally done it. After getting something like 150 spam emails Friday I’ve decided to switch on my auto-delete Spam filter. It’s not quite deleting them – merely putting them in another mailbox for access should it screw up. So far it seems to work very well. There’s always a nervous tension when you start up your mail server again in case it loses email on the way (of course, it’ll all be set up ok won’t it 😉 ….). Then, a few minutes later, a batch of spams came in and were immediately filtered. A kosher email sent by a friend appeared in my inbox correctly.
For those who want similar success. I’m using SpamAssassin and Postfix for mail + filtering, and refered to Geekly.com for tips.
If you haven’t seen it yet Dead Like Me is a quite remarkable new TV series about George, an 18 year old girl who is hit by a toilet seat from Mir, and is sent to the afterlife on the first episode. She then discovers that her new role is to be a Grim Reaper. Cracking comedy, with very clever plot twists and storylines that let you enjoy it as well as become engrossed in the sometimes quite emotional storylines.