Chris Moyles

Best description of Chris Moyles yet, courtesy of Peter Robinson in today’s Guardian:

[his] technique seems to revolve around talking over the top of records as if in the grip of some sort of Tourettes-esque chat karaoke affliction

Dell iPod

Tom’s Hardware Guide reviews the Dell Digital Jukebox - the dPod?

Their general conclusions - buggy and somewhat crippled; my conclusions - ugly, ugly, ugly…

Hardware hacking for geeks

From O’Reilly comes a book that was obviously written with people like me in mind - Hardware Hacking Projects For Geeks. I’ve only just realised how empty my life has been without an internet toaster…

Rather good social networking paper

Via the increasingly-interesting Futurismic, a rather interesting paper by Eric Gradman about social networking systems, their limitations, and what can be done to overcome them. Despite being written as a term paper, it’s actually very readable - and as an overview of what social networking sysems are and why they’re still something of an imperfect art, it’s really rather good indeed. So good, in fact, that I’ve pinged it off to BoingBoing. We’ll see what they make of it…

Dreamweaver FTP problems

As a note to self, and whoever lands up here through a search engine:

If Dreamweaver MX starts throwing up errors like this:

Dreamweaver cannot determine the remote server time. The Select Newer and Synchronize commands will not be available.

The file listing in the Remote View will be blank as well.

To fix this, check the Remote Settings page in the Edit Site window - ‘the Use Passive FTP’ box should be checked so that the connection uses passive FTP. Problem disappears…

Spam or not spam?

If a company that previously had permission to email me then has that permission revoked (by going through their published unsubscribe procedure), does that make subsequent mail spam according to the new legislation?

RSS in government

The RSS in Government site does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin - info on how RSS is being used in government around the world. Depressingly little from the UK, of course…

How to ping Yahoo

Jeremy Zawodny explains how to ping Yahoo.

Endnote ponderings

I wonder if there’s some way of exporting my Endnote databases (or something similar) into a reading list that can get posted in a sidebar?

Wifi in libraries

Wi-FI Networking News, purveyors of fine wifi-related news to geeks everywhere, brings news of moves afoot to install wifi in public libraries.

Damn fine idea, if you ask me - while PCs in libraries are a great idea that’s sated my craving for broadband in the past, there’s never enough of them. York’s City library is a case in point - I don’t think I’ve ever been in there and seen a PC free.

Even better would be if rural libraries could then be used as base stations for local community wifi networks - if they’re connected to the Net for UK Online access (or whatever it’s called these days) that implies that there’s a Kilostream or something similar running into the premises. Share that around the community, and bingo, you’ve got widespread broadband availability.

The trouble is that bureaucracy will get in the way - the last attempt to get a wider use for a library connection that I’m aware of failed because “public services couldn’t be seen to be subsidising services for private individuals”. They giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other…