Absoblogginlutely!

Be your own WiFi operator.

By Andy on Friday, September 19, 2003

Its amazing how many blogs you get a chance to read and comment on when you can’t sleep! Rob has written some software that can be uploaded to a Linksys WRT54G wireless access point that forces people to go to a html page of your choosing when they first use your access point. This is similar to the way commercial wifi providers work. You would then normally sign up for a limited period of access, but in this case you would probably acknowledge the accesspoint owners “welcome” and info page before continuing to surf. A neat hack – shame it won’t work on my netgear box although I guess it won’t be long before something like this will get hacked to work on other machines.

http://nocat.net/download/NoCatSplash/

Spam

UK bans spam – or has it?

By Andy on Friday, September 19, 2003

Report from the BBC reckons that the UK has banned Spam messages. The main flaw that I can see is that it doesn’t take effect until December, will only be of use on emails sent from the uk (ie 0.0000000001% of spam) and will not count for business address’s. Whats the point of excluding business address’s when there is so much screaming about the millions of pounds being wasted by staff having to deal with spam emails? Does that mean sending to sales@ or info@ is a loophole spammers could exploit as they could claim they are sending it to a business address? With the catchall facility most emails have, then emails to these address’s are going to get through. This is similar to the ICSTIS stance on spam sms messages to the mobile where they won’t take action on complaints i’ve made because its a business mobile (as if the sms messages were business related OR the spammer realised it was a business mobile? Likely story).. I really wish the people who lived in the Ivory towers of lawmaker land would open their doors and get some real life experience!

No email – phone

By Andy on Friday, September 19, 2003

It made the news on several places when email was banned at Phones4U. Seeing as though its a phone company you would have thought they’d have rung each other up anyway! Apparently the boss reckons they waste too much time being tied to email so he’s banned internal emails. From what I’ve seen from the emails that have been sent to me by someone working there (he no longer works there) most of the emails are likely to be funny jokes and flash cartoons and links to more of the same on web pages. It will be interesting to see if they move towards Instant Messaging – something we are looking at, informally, at the office with remote users starting to use it to communicate instead of email.

Real Life

Hurricane Isabel experiences

By Andy on Friday, September 19, 2003

The BBC have a page where people can write in with their experiences on the hurricane. Most people seem to say its just hyped up a lot. I’m particularly interested in this one as it is expected to hit right where we went on holiday 2 years ago in North Carolina, so the towns they mention, such as Kitty Hawk, are places that I know (its where I learnt to hang-glide)

Funny Pages

Optical illusions.

By Andy on Thursday, September 18, 2003

After commenting on my post with the letters jumbled up, I visited Infinite Diversions and came across a load of optical illusions. Some of them are really freaky, others don’t seem to do anything, and others just give you a headache!

Web Browsers

New Bookmark manager?

By Andy on Wednesday, September 17, 2003

With the combination of at least 6 browsers that I need my bookmarks kept in sync, NetSignet might do the trick – I’ll play with it later.

Real Life

gibberish????

By Andy on Wednesday, September 17, 2003

From techsupportalert newsletter:-
“Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.”
How weird was reading that?

Blogging

Feedster Features

By Andy on Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Feedster are announcing 30 features, one a day are to be released. I liked the comment made that someone said ah…..features – we used to call them bugs. Worth keeping an eye on!

Music

Guster shows.

By Andy on Wednesday, September 17, 2003

The bloke of Netbloke, mentioned the band Guster with a link to their site. Their site is pretty interactive with a lot of flash bits but using flash well rather than just because. The diary is annoying in that it opens each day in a new page, but the audio player is pretty good. You can listen to full tracks via the flash interface with a neat “birds eye” way of playing the tracks. The bird is also used for navigation a lot and just try clicking it on the main page. AND the best bit is for the short-of-cash people you can download live shows from Archive.org and live shows always make the best recordings of an album.

Blogging

Zipped Pages?

By Andy on Tuesday, September 16, 2003

I know Neil zips his pages and so does Chris (as he asked if I could switch it on for helsby.net (but I think he meant absoblogginlutely.net)) but on reading up about it, there are two scary reads that talk about 2KB of data going missing, which is certainly one way of compressing the data! There is also the Browser Compatibility issue where css files could not be downloaded and Netscape 3 doesn’t even see the file at all! (and i’ve had 38 hits from Netscape