bitful

A post from Overyourhead into my Google Reader, about delays in a Spanish airport, with the word 'delay' in Spanish.
And, right below it, that day's Spanish 'word of the day', which was… 'Delay'.
Either a very odd coincidence, or Google is getting more and more powerful these days.

At some point this afternoon, searching for 'ditsy' on Answers.com made Google return Jessica Simpson merchandise as sponsored links.
It does not any more now, but I took a screenshot to prove it. Click on 'all sizes' for the original version where you can read all the text.

For the lucky ones among you who are unaware [...]

Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 People Need to Shut The F**k Up about the Mobile Web,
in reply to
Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks.
I totally agree with the content (but perhaps not the tone) of the top article. I consume cartloads of mobile content every day (on T-Mobile "unlimited - as long as you do [...]

Two days into my holiday my mobile phone reset itself and was wiped out.
I back up all my contacts daily with my desktop and online once a month, so information was not lost and easily retrievable away from home.
However, my notes on how much I had spent so far, on what, and how to split [...]

This graph shows all the music I have listened to in the past six months in a pretty visualisation.
Click on the picture to view it at Flickr, then click on 'All Sizes' and select the original picture for maximum detail.
From lastgraph via plasticbag.

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Emoze is a free service that pushes email to your mobile phone.
I have used its first version for months. This version needs Outlook to be up and running on your machine at home.
A week ago I switched to the new version of emoze that pushes email directly from Gmail, with no need to leave your [...]

I was searching for info on how to dump entries into a database via a csv file (or something like that), and Google's autocomplete revealed that the world is a sad, sad place.

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How to [...]

I recently found out that Facebook should not be used as a platform for work-related interaction.
I was at the gym on my lunch break when a colleague's status update came through on my mobile:
(Name) is wondering why oh why drivers choose the last possible moment to take the J6…
I thought 'computer drivers' (we were at [...]

I subscribe to 112 RSS feeds (blogs, news, friends' social network contributions), which I guess is about average. I usually manage to go through all of them at least once a day (usually at 6AM for about half an hour).
Of course I do not read them all. So how do I choose?
A lot depends on [...]

Don't you just love social networking?
I was looking for Soho Pride's rescheduled date (it was going to be tomorrow but was moved to 19 August) and found the Soho Pride Upcoming event. I clicked on 'I'm attending' and joined the list.
So far, we are going to be four. I'll bring the quiche.

It's been one month since I was at Hack Day London. The memories are still vibrant, and here is a list of links about it, for me to remember and for you to discover.

Del.icio.us tag: hackdaylondon
Flickr Hack Day pool discussion
Backstage.bbc.co.uk Hack Day blog
Hack Day on the Guardian Technology blog
Tom Coates' Hack Day review
Hack Day London [...]

If my iPod had GPS, it would adjust its volume and music genre according to where I am, the time of day and some manual settings.
It would detect one of my gym locations and switch to my sports playlists provided it was 7am or 1pm.
It would increase its volume if it lost reception, 9 times [...]

Email on the go does not necessarily involve a Blackberry, a server that pushes email to you and a costly subscription. You can achieve pretty much the same if you have the following:

a desktop machine running Outlook
a mobile phone that syncs with Outlook - any Windows smartphones or pocket PCs will do
emoze installed on both [...]

Sometimes you may get a 412 error in WordPress:
Precondition Failed. The precondition on the request for the URL /wp-admin/post.php evaluated to false.
This is more often than not a result of your host running mod_secutiry, an overzealous (yet useful) utility that filters incoming data. Some people found they could not post an entry with the word [...]

Don't sneer - not everyone is as web-savvy as you lot.
So yes, these days anyone who's anyone in social media circles is jumping Twitter's ship and moving over to Pownce. It's sort of like Twitter, but with file share (messages, links, files, and events). It's sort of like IM, but you can send files to [...]

When I 'undesigned' this website, I removed the links to the last five del.icio.us bookmarks from the right-hand side column and started looking for a more elegant and flexible solution than the (otherwise very well working) del.icio.us daily blog posting functionality.
It took me a while, but I finally managed to find, tweak and implement it. [...]

I used to log on to Windows Money every single day (sometimes twice a day) to download transactions from my bank accounts and log all my cash expenses.
Clearly, that was madness. I have kept a log of everything I spend every day ever since I can remember, first on paper notebooks, then on Filofax printed [...]

Over the past few months I have been fascinated by data/stream aggregators and have subscribed to many such services to see what they would do.
Some that I have been enjoying pottering around in are:

Tumblr
Profilactic
SuprGlu
iStalkr
Dandelife

(Have you also got the feeling they are running out of good names?)
And here is what my scattered activities across the web [...]

I have installed a plugin that displays links to archived similar entries below each post. The past is coming back and biting my behind. Not sure I like it.
For a while now I have been wanting to display some links to similar posts below each entry. I had explored a few possibilities but I wanted [...]

My del.icio.us tags are getting a bit out of control, so I tried using Matt Biddulph's stem identifier, but my bookmark thows a 503.
I did a quick search and I could only find The Amazing del.icio.us Stemmer, suitably renamed by the author The Broken del.icio.us Stemmer.
If you have any suggestions, the comment box (or my [...]

So last night I upgraded iTunes to v. 7.3 (the iPhone update). Why I did that, is totally beyond me (I'm very happy with my Windows Mobile thank you very much).
Anyway, I thought, new version, always good practice to update… Although, working in software product development myself, I should have known that sometimes it is [...]

Amazon.co.uk have just sent me this email:
Dear Amazon.co.uk Customer,
As you've recently bought or browsed dance or electronica CDs, we thought we'd let you know about our new releases and bargains. Visit our music store to find out more.

And this is how I found out that both Cross (Justice) and Attack Decay Sustain Release (Simian [...]

On the way home tonight (two tubes, one person under a train, a bus and a short walk) I clicked on a URL in an email on my phone to read a friend's message on Facebook, and the T-Mobile nanny informed me that
Content Lock has barred this service because this site is rated 18. [...]

I recently read somewhere that in 10 years time multitasking will not be considered a quality any longer.
Over the weekend, I saw all the people (including myself) at Hack Day listening to presentation, developing their own hacks at the same time, IMing people, twittering, checking email, taking photos, uploading photos, tagging photos, searching for similarly [...]

Head's a bit fried from all I saw. Limbs ever so slighly numb from the walking about helping out. More info as I get a couple of brain cells to interact.
Just a few links for now - got to rush to work:

Official Hack Day blog
Hack Day London unofficial Wiki
hackdaylondon tag on del.icio.us
My Hack Day London [...]

Going a bit mad, removing all colours and images and fancy things from bitful.com.
So here are the former bells and whistles recorded for posterity.
Just in case they are missed.

You know those times when you look around you, and there's stuff everywhere (mostly tat), and you go Right, where's the bin?
You know those times when you take one last look at yourself before going out, and you realise you have caked on the sluttiest makeup you could find, and you try and blend it [...]

The default WordPress search widget used with the default WordPress Kubrick theme displays the Search button on a new line. I don't like that.
I spent a fair amount of time looking for a fix, then looked into it myself and found that:

you need to remove the return 'br' tag in wp-includes\widgets.php (line 411 in WordPress [...]

I wish I could write a post on how to manage multiple online identities.
The truth is, I thought I knew how, but I don't any more.
All I have done so far is maintain two identities, one as bitful and one as my firstnamelastname. Two Flickr accounts, two email addresses, two websites (firstnamemylastname.com currently being [...]

Dave Winer (RSS/XML pioneer/evangelist) on interplanetary data storage:
I'd like to pay a few bucks to beam my thoughts to a nearby solar system that might have intelligent life.
Back in the 70s, I thought it was really cool when they sent a satellite into the cosmos bearing a copy of the Magna Carta and Declaration of [...]