A Google Sized Problem

August 6, 2012 | Comment

As of June 2012 Gmail has 425 million active users. That’s seven times the population of the UK and one and a half times the population of the US, so it’s a pretty sizeable number of people. I am an active user, the rest of my household are users, as is my mother-in-law. This gives a good idea of the cross section of people using Gmail: young, old, male, female, tech-savvy and not so.

About a month ago my mother-in-law’s Gmail account was hacked but not only was the password changed but also all the reset data. This is … Read the rest

What I Love About Kickstarter (And What I Don’t)

July 31, 2012 | 1 comment

I am addicted to Kickstarter. There I said it. They say that the first step in overcoming any addiction is admitting that you have a problem.

For those not in the know, Kickstarter is a crowd funding site where entrepreneurs post project ideas and the general public gets to back projects that they like. Projects are pretty diverse from technology to music to art through to design so there really is something to everyone. Backing levels usually start at $1 and projects have between one and three months to reach their funding target. Project offer a range of backing levels … Read the rest

iSub Mobile Client for Subsonic

July 10, 2012 | Comment

One of the great things about the move to music downloads is that music on the go has really become much more practical. iPods and other such devices (I can’t think of anything other than iPods but I’m sure that they must exist) mean that you can carry around with you so much more than when having a Walkman meant carrying tapes and swapping them around. However, my music collection is too large even for an iPod Classic so being able to stream my music from a hosted server with a large capacity hard drive is ideal. I could have … Read the rest

Coding on the web

June 26, 2012 | Comment

I ceased to be a professional developer a number of years ago but I have still continued to dabble either when things needed doing at work or for my own amusement. I started out working on COBOL projects and the obscure FOCUS before I retrained to the wonderful PowerBuilder. Nowadays it is almost predominately PHP and a little bit of mobile development with Rhodes. I have never really been one for dedicated IDEs preferring to use a rich text editor such as Notepad++ on Windows and TextWrangler on Mac.

Recently I have been working across a number of … Read the rest

WordPress 3.4

June 15, 2012 | Comment

So the latest version of the WordPress blogging and CMS platform, on which this and so many other sites are based, has been released. Version 3.4 brings a number of new improvements such as the really neat Twitter integration you can see below. To get this to work you simply need to cut and paste the tweet URL into the editor and you are good to go. So to get the block displayed all I had to do was include the following:

https://twitter.com/spokenlikeageek/status/213251531871490048

I have been playing about with WordPress more and more since the hacking incident, mainly to … Read the rest

Who’s Stolen my Cursor?

June 12, 2012 | Comment

I started to notice yesterday that when on Google Chrome after a couple of second of inactivity the cursor would disappear. A quick search shows that people have been reporting this issue as far back as 2009.

Further investigation seems to show that the issue is caused by having certain websites open (including this one). Others have suggested that the culprit is the Flash plug-in, although I am not convinced of that.

Has anyone else had this issue? Do you see the problem when Spoken Like a Geek is open? I would be interested to know so leave us a … Read the rest

If This, Then That

June 11, 2012 | Comment

Sometimes the Internet throws up a really simple but great idea that makes life much easier. If this, then that or ifttt to be more accurate, is one such idea.

ifttt allows you to create tasks where an action is carried out on some event. So, for example, when an email is received from a certain email address a copy is then forwarded automatically to another account, or when the Guardian tweets that the latest Long Good Read is available the text is sent to Instapaper. These are two examples but given the long list of services that ifttt … Read the rest

What I Don’t “Like” About Facebook Marketing

June 2, 2012 | Comment

It seems quite popular at present for companies to ask me to “Like” their page on Facebook. In some cases you are asked to do this in order to receive something, maybe an entry to a competition or perhaps a free download. Sometimes I will purchase an item and when the order confirmation email arrives it will have a line asking me to “like” the company or product. Either way this makes me pretty uneasy.

I have no issue with exchanging my details in return for something but what I don’t want is to have some sort of implied endorsement … Read the rest

Why I’ll Not be Using Google Drive (and it’s got Nothing to do With Terms & Conditions)

April 27, 2012 | Comment

So this week Google finally got round to releasing its cloud storage option, Google Drive. Within hours of them doing so the internet was ablaze with outrage over the terms and conditions and just exactly what they could or could not do with your files once they are uploaded. Many used this as the primary reason for not using the service and instead sticking with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive etc. I have, for me, a much more compelling reason not to use Google Drive – app support.

I have just over 20gb of storage with Dropbox, all of which I have … Read the rest

WordPress “Plugin upgrade Failed” Solution

April 4, 2012 | Comment

One of the (many) things I like about WordPress is its ability to be able to automatically upgrade both the core installation and the plugins. This can also be one of the most frustrating part of WordPress too.

Those that have attempted to update their plugins using the automatic option may well be familiar with the following:

Unpacking the update

Deactivating the plugin

Removing the old version of the plugin

Could not remove the old plugin

Plugin upgrade Failed

Searching the forums reveals lots of frustrated users and very little in the way of solutions. I was one of these … Read the rest