Ken McGuire

Author: Ken McGuire

  • Of clothing and technology

    Popgadget reads that Levi, the jeans maker, have announced that they’re launching a new clothing line (or line of jeans I guess) which will see the pockets of the jeans lined with an ipod dock and control joystick.

    In fairness.

    Supposedly it will make your ipod more or less ‘invisible’ and hide that ‘iPod bulge’ in your pocket. Sort of begs the question, “is that an iPod in your pocket or are you….”, yeah you know what I mean. Hell if they can wire a bluetooth earpiece into the thumb and pinky finger of a glove they can do whatever they like with a pair of jeans!

  • Compare and contrast stats

    I was lucky enough to get in on Google Analytics before it shut everyone else out (can you call yourself lucky?), but anyway, I’ve been tracking my blog with both Analytics and StatCounter, as I mentioned yesterday. On yesterday’s performance alone (for an average day so far, keeping in mind that I’m picking yesterday as the stats would be available in Analytics), I noticed almost a 100% difference between the two, with Analytics reporting over twice as many unique hits and total pageviews for the day than StatCounter.

    Anyone else noticing this?

  • Google Video Open For Business

    Its been a couple of days since Google’s keynote speech at this year’s CES but Google Video is up and running (the store part of it). If you hurry now, you can nab yourself a 45 minute episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine for only $1.99!!!

    Yes, that was sarcasm.

    Still, good to see it up and running! Wired.com is also reporting that users can set their own prices for content that they submit for sale, which could be quite interesting to some Irish organisations currently exploring options for delivering film content online? All this provided of course that the content creator gives 30% of generated revenue to Google itself…

  • More funding for Riya

    I blogged a bit about Riya late last year and TechCrunch is now reporting that they’ve just sealed a further $15 million bucks from an existing investor.

    For those of you who don’t know anything about Riya, check my previous post here. Their background is in facial recognition, tagging photos the way you tag your blog, or del.icio.us links so you can search your photos, and others, based on faces, locations, backgrounds etc. Word has it they’re still taking alpha testers too if you’re interested.

  • Jesus and iPods

    I don’t even own an actual iPod (in the sense of the word) but yet find myself posting about them again. This time of course, its entirely humerous, designed to lighten up your rainy Tuesday afternoon. Thanks to John for pointing this out.

    It begins…

    You know he has one.

    You know it’s the big 60GB model, loaded, flawless and gleaming and radiating a strange liquid ethereal glow and couched in a beautiful custom rainbow-colored biodegradable case made of clouds and eagle feathers and wine. And of course Jesus gets his iPods wholesale, given how he and Steve Jobs go way back, back to the time when Jobs was a scruffy twentysomething geek ever praying for revelation and God finally gave Jesus the green light to inspire the first Mac!

    And so it continues….

  • Socio-Techno convergence too serious?

    Random blog surfing for the evening brought by to sem | antics where I came across this blog post, Twelve Signs You’re Taking Socio-Techno convergence too serious.

    In the short time I’ve been blogging (ok, I set up in October last but I still feel like I’m new to the whole thing, it takes a while to warm up) I was alarmed to find myself laughing along, because I knew what they were on about. You normally see these type of posts in the case were “you were a kid of the 80s if…” etc.

    Read on though, for tech bloggers it should be fun!

  • Favourite Tech Things

    Everyone’s got their favourite techie things so I thought I would ask about, while sharing mine.

    I browse the internet with Firefox and blog with WordPress (1.5). .I’m running Windows XP on a PC I custom built a year ago which has geeky technie neon lights lining the inside of the casing (which has a lovely clear panel at the side too…). With Windows running and me browsing the internet, I tend to stick on Winamp to tune into some Internet radio (and by tend to I mean always). If I’m simply playing a CD or watching a video I’ll throw on Windows Media Player which is busting at the sides with extra codecs for different media types.

    When I get stuck into my blog (either kenmc.com or nflview.com) I have some handy plugins for WordPress running (here you go Kentar…) which include a good Technorati plugin, a handy del.icio.us plugin, a trendy autolinking plugin, and an extremely useful image uploader for posting my blog entries.

    The ads on the side of my blog are served up by Commission Junction and Tradedoubler, while NFLView.com uses a combination of Commission Junction and Google AdSense for the American market.

    I also track my websites statistics across 4 fronts – those provided by AdSense, CJ.com, Statcounter & Google Analytics.

    So there’s some food for thought!

  • iSee You

    What has a 3.6″ LCD screen, a rechargable battery, and can record DVDs, TV and a few other bits?

    Must be the new iSee, the iPod Video Recorder. I don’t actually own an iPod in the sense of the brand (still got my 20gb Creative Zen jukebox going), but this looks like a pretty good gadget. It won’t work with your 60gb 5G iPod, or anything below 4G, but anything inbetween is a peach – seemingly. Check it out over at Gizmodo.

  • Handsfree Skype

    Gone are the USB cables and being tied to the desk for Skype… nice one. Motorola released a bluetooth headset for Skype a while ago, but I came across this Skype handsfree unit this morning. It’s manufactured by USRobotics, who made my lovely 14.4k modem all those years ago, should retail for around €40, looks well on the desk….

  • Blogging the NFL

    I mentioned earlier in the week that I had launched NFLView.com, a blog catering for the NFL (or at least people with an interest in the NFL, American Football). Interesting statistic that 48.5% of the visitors in its first week (launched on December 31st) were from the US, the remainder made up of Canadian, Irish and UK, technorati providing some good assistance in driving folks into the site.

    It’s as much a test for myself and blogging combined as it is a chance for me to rattle on about the NFL seen as nobody around here is interested, hmmm?

  • Optimus Keyboard Release Date

    Remember the fancy keyboard I was on about before Christmas? The optimus, with a button for EVERYTHING? Well, the fancy keyboard, just got a fancy release date too… February 1st of this year 😀 (cheer’s Sean) Good things come in small packages eh?

    If you missed my first post, check the link above or see more on the Optimus keyboard…. it looks pretty sweet!

  • Going Dutch?

    DigiDOoooh, a blog post with a picture in it! Now there’s a change!

    Anyway… the Dutch government edged ahead of the Irish government in terms of technology for the new year as they’ve launched DigiiD, their plan to get everyone into the country under the one ID for all public related services (passport, welfare) etc. I’m not exactly up on reading Dutch but if you want to have a go, check out the official website here.

  • Sweet photos its Javascript!

    Want to show people photos from your blog, or website, but don’t want to go with popping up windows, trying to dodge popup blockers, avoid iFrames, standalone pages… and do it all in a way thats still snazzy?

    Check out Lightbox JS, which does all that, placing images above your current page, not within which in turn frees you from the constraints of the layout, particularly column widths.

    It also keeps users on the same page as “clicking to view an image and then having to click the back button to return to your site is bad for continuity (and no fun!)”. Looks pretty sweet to me…

  • Dell playing with fire?

    Dell are playing with fire… and hopefully they won’t get burned. Their research reckons that 40% of PC users are in it for gaming… interesting figure. I got a price from Dell just over 12 months ago for a gaming machine at €1800 ex VAT and went off and built myself one for about 30% of the total cost, but thats getting away from it.

    They’ve launched their new gaming monster, the XPS 600 Renegade (photo courtesy of Newsgab). It looks savage. It boasts 4… yes, 4 GPUs (graphics processing units) providing three times the resolution of high-def XBOX games.

    It looks snazzy, prob gonna cost an arm and a leg if it comes in a brochure to the office although, and again according to Dell, their current XPS600 (not Renegade) is one of the leading machines for PC gamers. It’s nice and colourful tho…. 😉

  • Further to design matters

    Further on the whole issue about me redesigning the theme for my blog, I came across this article by Darren Rowse this morning in relation to how you design a theme for your blog and what you want to achieve from the design.

    Is it to

    1. To generate income from advertising streams
    2. Reader loyalty
    3. Personal satisfaction

    Makes for a worthy read on your Saturday morning!

    Edit: the article was written from Dave over at PSPCulture.co.uk

  • Tonight : KilkennyMusic.com Presents

    KilkennyMusic.com presents, tonight in Cleere’s Theatre Kilkenny, Itchy Trigger Finger with very special guests Clergy and additional support. It’s gonna be loud, it’s gonna be rockin’ and if you don’t know what KilkennyMusic.com is already then why not head over there to check it out!

    Tickets are €5 on the door, with the night’s music starting from 9pm… be there (ah go on….)!

  • Irish Blog Awards kick off

    Let the games begin! Picked up this post today announcing that nominations are now open for the Irish Blog Awards and will remain open for a few weeks. There’s a good number of categories on offer including best blogger, best blog post, best personal blog etc. You can nominate yourself or anyone of your preference (Irish) so why not pop on over to the Irish Blog Awards and see what all the fuss is about!

  • iTunes picks for you?

    Browsing over at NewScientist earlier today, I came across an interesting article, being music minded I guess it “struck a chord” with me – come on, you know you like the cheesy joke! 😉

    Anyway, a new technology in the workd could let your computer recommend new music you might like based on an acoustic analysis of the tunes it already knows you enjoy. By analysing the characteristics of a song – like timbre, rhythm, tempo and chord changes – then comparing it to a database of a million songs, the software can recommend similar pieces of music, and even rank them by characteristics, like their key or dance-ability.

    If you’re familiar with WinAMP (which I use in the office…. ah Club 977!) you might have heard of the MusicMagic Mix plugin (which generates playlists for you based on the similarities between a particular song and your entire music collection), I’m guessing it will be something along those lines – which is pretty genius in my opinion. If your iPod could predict what mood you were in and suggest music based on that…. now that’s something I’d pay to have!

  • Back To Building Computers

    Something I love doing and don’t get to do too often (because of the cost involved) is to build computers from the ground up. Sure, when you know what you’re doing it doesn’t take long at all but it’s nice knowing that your computer is working (and working right) because you made it so!

    So this evening, having put away the few pennies for the rainy day, I decided to break open the piggy bank and start ordering my pieces. I’ve added pretty much everything I need except for a new monitor. I’ve got a few 17″ CRTs knocking around which will do for now but I’m looking at a duel monitor setup down the line, or at least moving the home PC over to flat-panel TFT.

    So for those of you techie-geeks that are interested, the machine will be housed in a black Chieftec case w/400W psu (firewire, usb 2.0 and audio sockets on the tower), holding a 3.0Ghz chip (EM64T w/2mb cache), 2 gigs of RAM, black issue two drive setup for dvd/cd and dvd±RW (16x dual layer), 200gb HD (SATA2), 13-in-1 multimedia drive bay and a few additional extras.

    Should take the load of the machine I’ve got at home which seems to be finding it harder and harder to get up in the morning!

  • KENMC V3.0

    Ok colour-loving and hating people… lets have your feed on this one! Spent an hour or two throwing this theme together, finding colours that work and match, something simple and bright that removes the oppression derived during the week.

    Oppression! 😉

    Anyway, food for thought is this theme. The header background is based on the ‘A New Spring’ theme, which is used over at Your Daily Feed this is my completely wild derivation of it, which I’m quite proud of actually. Maybe a little bit of work to do on the sidebar, but the Stylesheet is pretty much sewn up.

    Try find half life now why don’t ya! With a little bit of A/B testing in mind, your comments and crits are sincerely appreciated!