The Sound of Silence

March 31, 2010 | Comment

It has been a bit quiet round here lately partly due to pressures of work but also because I have been making a few changes.

Back in January 2008 I wrote about the fact that I had accumulated 15 domains. The last time I checked (2 minutes ago) this was up to 30. Some are dormant but the vast majority have web sites associated with them spread over a number of providers. This was becoming a time consuming and costly exercise to manage them all. So I decided to do something about it. I rented a dedicated server.

With the … Read the rest

Google Street View Star

March 15, 2010 | 1 comment

Last May I wrote about working from home and seeing the Google Street View car pass my house. Now, some ten months later, the results are in and the pictures have been uploaded and there I am at our window, standing like some shadowy Norman Bates.

You can quite clearly see that I am holding a cup of tea but it also looks like I have positioned it to protect my genitals! Maybe I misunderstood those articles about Google taking your privacy and thought they meant privates!… Read the rest

Sony Reader

February 15, 2010 | 2 comments

So I have joined the ranks of people that are ebook readers only in my case not Amazon’s Kindle but Sony’s Pocket Reader – you can see it in the picture on the left on the top of the pile showing MacBook, Netbook, eBook (can you see what I have done there?).

Anyway rather than give yet another review of the device (which I love) I thought that I would put down some of the things that I have discovered since getting the device at then end of last year. Some of these will be obvious, others not so, I … Read the rest

Clipping to Evernote from iPhone Safari Browser

January 17, 2010 | Comment

One of my favourite tools is Evernote, the note taking application. I regularly find snippets of information on the internet that I want to retain and come back to later. Evernote provides a number of tools that sit in the browser allowing you to clip directly to your account. This is enormously helpful and I have always wished that I could do the same from the browser of my iPhone. Well, I discovered this weekend that you can. Rather than repeat the tip you can go here to see what you need to do.

Perfect Evernote bliss has finally been … Read the rest

Rule 1: Don’t Call Your Product “Unbreakable” If It Is Not

January 12, 2010 | Comment

My advice is never give a live demonstration if you can possibly help it and never, never, never claim a property that the product doesn’t actually possess. Advice that Sonim would have done well to have heeded before handing over their “unbreakable” mobile phone to a reporter from the BBC.

The reporter, Dan Simmons, looked pretty embarrassed about having smashed the screen of the device and Somin’s CEO laughed about it and everyone is blogging about it but “unbreakable” it obviously isn’t.

You can see the video of destruction here.… Read the rest

Your Own URL Shortener

January 11, 2010 | Comment

URL Shorteners are all the rage these days what with bit.ly, tinyurl.com, flic.kr and the rest. They take the incredibly long URLs that are generated from tools such as WordPress and turn them into something shorter and more manageable. So, for example, the URL for my last post on my top tech of 2009 was http://www.spokenlikeageek.com/2010/01/07/top-tech-of-2009/ but sending it to bit.ly it becomes a more manageable http://bit.ly/7fozBD.

So why bother? Well Twitter is one driving force. With only 140 characters to play with a full length URL like that shown above would leave you very little to play with. … Read the rest

Top tech of 2009

January 7, 2010 | 3 comments

For the last few years Michael Arrington has been producing a list of the top tech that he has regularly used in each year and I thought this year I would give it a go. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2009 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

A lot of my life is spent in a browser and this year I changed over from Firefox to using Google’s Chrome. Why? Because it is fast. In fact it is the faster browser I have used and speed is important to me. I don’t … Read the rest

TweetNotebook

December 24, 2009 | Comment

In what must be one of the greatest acts of egotistical self-indulgence a couple of weeks ago I ordered a TweetNotebook.

For those that aren’t familiar with it the TweetNotebook is a notebook with a random selection of your tweets printed at the bottom of each page and with your Twitter icon printed on the front along with a customisable quote. A selection of pictures of mine are left and below.

Well mine arrived this morning and I have to say it is just fantastic and much better than I expected it to be. Why? Well for a start … Read the rest

A Better Perspective

December 17, 2009 | Comment

I consider myself to be a power Googler. Not only can I bang in keywords but I can also use boolean operators and search operators, such as filetype: & site:. However, I discovered yesterday that this all counts for nothing if you don’t know what it is that you are searching for.

One of my clients is going through a website refresh and was looking to put some screenshots on the home page but they wanted them to appear to be disappearing into the distance, rather like that shown in the picture to the left.

No problem I thought. I … Read the rest

BBC iPlayer on Nintendo wii

December 14, 2009 | Comment

The BBC has been doing a sterling job with its iPlayer making it available in all sorts of places. I had an opportunity to try out the Nintendo wii implementation over the weekend and I was pretty impressed.

To date all my iPlayer watching has been done on a computer of some description or another (or very occasionally on my iPhone). What was great about the wii was that I was able to hook it up to the TV and get access to programmes on the device they were originally intended for.

While the picture wasn’t broadcast quality it was … Read the rest