Monthly Archives: May 2007
The Wireless Menace!
There’s been a lot of excitement in the media lately about the alleged dangers of wi-fi equipment. But it seems the truth is much more sinister than even the most hysterically ignorant bad journalism[1] would have us believe. Read it for yourselves:
The Truth About Wireless Devices
[1] Not that I have an opinion or anything….
Related posts
Slightly quieter month
After April’s posting frenzy, I seem to have slowed down a wee bit this month. I’ll blame it on being away in Manchester at the beginning of the month. Or something.
It seems to be shopping season
Hmmm. It’s probably all my fault for mentioning StumbleUpon last month. It’s just been bought by eBay, or as they rather sweetly put it, they’ve “joined eBay”. I’ve no idea why eBay have bought it, apart from the fact that they’ve got so much money that they might as well offer it to any geek project that looks vaguely interesting. Hard to see how they could make any money out of it without actually breaking it – if it started to include adverts around or between sites, lots of users would give up on it in disgust…
Not only that, but another geeky service that I’ve mentioned, last.fm, has been acquired by CBS. That’s less bewildering, but still makes me wonder why companies are throwing away oodles of cash again…
Offers for Losing it[1] in excess of £125,000,000 will be considered 
Update: StumbleUpon is no longer part of eBay.
I never did trust trees…
It’s the way they hang around in groups, whispering to each other, planning and plotting. Here’s proof that they’re up to no good:
Neatorama » Blog Archive » A Bicycle Eaten by a Tree.
Mind you, I’m not that keen on bikes, either.
Comment Quicktags Reloaded
Just the other day, I noticed that the upgrade to WordPress 2.2 had caused some unexpected breakage on my comments form. The button that inserts links into comments was declining to do anything of the kind, and was throwing up JavaScript errors referring to “quicktagsL10n”. Now I’m not a coder, but I know that “L10n” is geek for “localisation” (10 letters between the l and the n, see?), so I figured that this was some new code to make translating WordPress into other languages easier. Now that is, of course, a Good Thing, but it was a bit of a pain for me.
My quick and dirty solution[1] was to edit the quicktags.js file back into a form similar to previous versions, which made things work and stopped the nasty JavaScript errors.
But now there’s a proper solution! The trouble is caused by the Comment Quicktags plugin that I’ve been using for years. Being an old plugin whose original author has moved on to other things, it didn’t understand the L10n thingy, and so it broke. As is so often the case with WordPress thingies, somebody has stepped in and weaved some magic. In this case, the credit goes to Ibrahim Ali Faour who has released Comment Quicktags Reloaded. If you’re using WordPress 2.2 and you’d like your quicktags to work on your comment form, this is what you need.
Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for another useful suggestion. 
[1] Not being a coder, that’s the only kind I could come up with
LOL
I recently alluded to the engagingly bonkers lolcat phenomenomenomenon. Like all good bits of internet silliness, it’s being stretched, twisted and twiddled in all sorts of directions, including a few that would make H P Lovecraft wince[1].
However, I think that I’ve found the pinnacle of lolcattery[2]. Mix the whole silly locat thing with that other geek obsession, Star Trek[3], and you get LOLTrek. Click, laugh, enjoy.
[1] It’s a geometry thing.
[2] I just made that up. I’m probably the 3,565th person to do so, but I don’t care, so there.
[3] The original series, of course
Quiet day
Hmmm. May seems to be ending by getting itself confused with March. Cold wet and windy. Though that might have been caused by today being a Bank Holiday. So, I spent more time working through that Photoshop book, which was quite enjoyable.
Back to work tomorrow…
Google is God, Apparently
Oh dear, oh dear, I must stop clicking that StumbleUpon button. The latest click led me to the, err, Church of Google, with its, err, convincing Proof Google is God. All very silly, but for real laughs, you need to see their Hate Mail, which appears to consist of quite genuine messages from people who
- Don’t recognise humour when they see it
- Think that anything that mentions the big G must be owned by Google
Sounds like a good sequel
Random pressing of the StumbleUpon button led me to the wonderfully named Snakes on a Blog, in particular this suggestion for a sequel to Snakes on a Plane, a movie whose title tells you all you need to know, and saves you the trouble of actually watching it. But I suggest you have a look at the suggested sequel. It sounds like a movie that would actually be a lot of fun.
Mouse calibration
Now this is something most computer users probably never give much thought to: proper calibration of their mouses, err, mice, I mean meeces. Fortunately, there’s a simple test you can carry out without the need to contact your nearest IT person, and I suggest that you give it a try:
