“FON is giving away free routers in the European Union! If you live on a busy street and would like to become a Fonero send FON an e-mail with the view from your front window before May 12th. The offer is valid for up to 100 winners.”
How very handy indeed… Busy location, free router, spread the love if you’ve got it!
See also my previous post on FON explaining a little more about the setup.
Some turnaround since yesterday – John‘s RoadDeaths.net has launched this morning and will be looking for community support and involvement. Hopefully the blogging community can help raise some awareness for the site and draw people’s attention to it and drive the point home about the carnage on our roads…
As part of the ongoing development of KilkennyMusic.com, I’m looking to start a range of Podcasts over the summer months with various acts and bands that will be passing through the doors and the site. Should be a fun experiment for myself and hopefully bring some more attention to both the site itself, raise awareness of the name – and of course the bands involved!
Anyway, I came across some Podcast Promotion Tips via Small Business Brief which some people might find interesting. Its still all new to me so I do anyway…. 🙂
Caught this one yesterday and it amuses me…. Yes folks, you can now get web two certified! If you’ve got rounded corners on your site, have a blog, or maybe stuck in a CC license, or talk about anything mobile then you might just be Web 2.0 certifiable and never knew it!
What people get away with….
I read Michele’s post over the weekend on adjusting his WordPress theme to the MW1 theme (Monetize The Web) which is based around simple support for AdSense.
Seems to work well – paste in your own AdSense code into the building blocks (pages used as includes in the templates), and presto, you’ve got neat inline contextual ads – one after your first post, one after your second, and one after your last.
K2 (which is what I’ve based the CI3.5 theme on) works a little different in that it uses a seperate loop file to control the displays of posts, asides, comments etc. However, a little bit of tweaking and I’ve ripped out the AdSense support, gravatar support, and recent articles links and ported them to K2, dropping them in at the right spots along the loop. At least now you’ll get a little more effective ad placement with K2 running….
Following on from his excellent idea for this morning, John has already commenced work on establishing Road Deaths, a new service based off Google Maps for highlighting the locations of road deaths for the year across the country. Following the bank holiday weekend, the figures for those killed on the roads this year has risen to 140 and will inevitably break the 300 mark by the end of the year as current trends continue. I think this will be a great resource entirely and will hopefully highlight, at least via the web, the black spots around the country.
The site will initially concentrate on the year so far (2006) before working backwards in time. Bookmark it, keep an eye on it – I know I will.
One of the most interesting uses of Google Maps to date comes out of the New York Times who have secured the records for every murder in the city – and plotted them on Google Maps.
It covers a period of 2003-2005 which includes over 1600 murders in the US.
John’s suggestion – Google Maps for traffic deaths in Ireland ©. That’ll show people….
Enough is enough.
I feel the captcha is coming back in unless theres someone out there with a name and address for me so I can track down whoever it is has been bombarding the blog this morning with spam comments. Think I’ve broken a hundred at this stage since being offered Viagra with my breakfast, auto loans with my lunch, and God only knows what else in between.
Can we jail spammers? Or make them use dialup? Can we?
Following an earlier post on how secure ones password is, I came across this interesting article. Whatever about fingerprinting, or retina scanning for user-logins, there’s something just damn interesting about biometrics and its advances when it comes to ultimate security. But what if your thoughts could be your password? The concept is based on using brain-wave signatures as “pass-thoughts” to allow access to secure devices.
Possible? Certainly something to think about for the future….
Via Reuters…
Seems like the big guns in Europe are out to stomp out piracy, something which is still a problem in this country be it movie, music or software. The punishment? At least four years in prison and a €300,000 fine. So far, the ruling, which should be approved in place of existing laws throughout all member states is only looking at those items available commercially (physical property for sale), and not download via online services or P2P services.
One amazing figure coming out of China is that they reckon that 90% of their DVD/Music/Software market is pirated goods. Anyone got that figure for Ireland or know where to get it?
Different jobs call for different rules…. If you’ve never come across the W3C Accessibility Guidelines I would suggest a read… Time for an educational lesson today!
In brief…
The above points, explained in detail are available here from Sitepoint. You might also want to take a look at the W3C’s own site, or even Microsoft’s Accessibility Website
Its about bloody time, but prepare to be rapped.. thats all I can say! Mind you, if eBay opened up their feedback via a nice little API then we wouldn’t have any problems now, would we? I say fair play, bring it on, and I hope to God that it works well….
Over recent years I’ve gone from 5 letter passwords, to 6 and 8 letters, to a combination of letters and numbers to my current 12 character hybrid of letters and numbers. Yet no matter how big or strong you think your password is, or how you feel nobody could possibly guess the date of birth of your late great grandmother, or the nickname your best friend’s sister had in primary school – its always good to see how fast that password can be broken.
Password recovery speeds looks at timing for Brute Force attempts on your password… definitely interesting reading! Having studied various security attacks and methods of password protection and encryption, if you find it interesting, you’d do well to give it a read.
Blogosphere splogosphere… David Sifry is at it again and has announced that the State Of The Blogosphere… is strong! Praise be to God and all that. The statistics are interesting, keeping in mind that they are primarily based on what Technorati is tracking – which is quite a lot (over 35 million blogs at this stage).
The stats in brief…
Read the whole of the article right here at Sifry’s Alerts
Tom Raftery points to Webaroo in a post today, a company who are in fact giving away copies of the Internet on CD. Bit late for an April Fool’s at this stage but it seems quite true… and quite interesting all the same! Years we spent in college taking the piss about burning a copy of the Internet onto CD and selling it…
…I guess not any more!
A hacking story this, missed it one yesterday but it seems like Gary McKinnon, who denies the allegation of doing over a half million euro worth of damage to Nasa and military systems by hacking in 2002 may well be facing a lengthy spell in Guantanamo Bay. If the trial goes ahead, George Bush himself is within length to execute Military Order Number One – detaining McKinnon in the US for an indefinite period.
McKinnon claims that he had been trying to expose bad security systems for some of the nations top computer networks across 14 different states while looking for government held information on UFOs.
But $700,000 worth of damage and a spell in Guantanamo Bay? Hardly…
April 7th I attempted to register a discretionary (non-trademarked) .eu domain, was told by a particular US registrar that I was successful only to find out yesterday that the domain had outstanding pre-registration attempts with other registrars and eventually slipped to one of them and not me.
Not happy to have forked out good money for a bunch of domains I would have used (legitimately I might add) I promptly emailed their customer support to explain my case. Low and behold Paypal informs that my credit card has been refunded for each domain I brought a case for… Makes my Wednesday morning that much better!
As of this morning there have been over 1.3 million .eu domains registered – and fair play to the Germans, they’ve managed to register half of them alone!
Registering my own name went though in a few hours but three discretionary names I’ve attempted to register (and have paid for) are still pending since Friday. The mind wonders…
Update 1 : For your information, as of time of posting, Irish users have registered a total of 17,283 .eu domain names. (Via Eurid)
Update 2 : Kenmc.eu is now live… (and pointing right back here)
So the .eu domains were unleashed yesterday and I’ve already started shopping. Nice to have a chance at taking a domain to play with that was previously unavailable. Registration process is quite simple and my first domain, kenmc.eu (which will simply redirect to here) was approved within a few hours, being a natural resident of the EU. Outside of that you’ve either got to be a business or have your trading offices in the EU.
Sean McNamara came up with a nice swoop and picked himself up Sean.eu… go figure. No doubt the registrars will be having a fun time with the new wave of domains being rolled out across the web.
A project that closely involved in from a work related point of view is now taking emails ahead of its beta and full launch periods.
dbTwang is a new resource for guitar enthusiasts and collectors which will launch in 2006. If you’re interested, why not pop along to dbTwang.com and leave your email for notification ahead of the final launch.
Great to see it coming along….