I’ve been a subscriber to the RSS feed over at Startup Skills for quite a while now, the authors insights on creating a start up and online advertising in general and Google Adwords in particular have always made interesting reading; but one day they stopped. Instead of just pontificating about what you could do he’s been busy actually creating and running a company. AdGooroo, “an advertising intelligence service that tracks competitors’ online advertising” and helps you get the most from your own Google Adwords certainly warrants a close eye if you use Google for ads and a perfect starting place to find out what it’s all about if you don’t. Read on →

I’ve been doing some research on the available FireFox extensions for a very small side project that may or may not appear. During my travels I spent some time investigating the quite excellent Adblock. I bet you can all guess what it does. What was slightly more amusing was the Adbar extension, this adds text ads that no one gets paid for, to FireFox; it is very similar to the unregistered Opera browser. Read on →

Over the last couple of days I’ve become quite taken with a FireFox extension called WebmailCompose ( WebmailCompose XPI) This addin for FireFox (although it has an issue installing on 0.9.3) and Mozilla overrides the default behaviour of mailto: links and instead calls your webmail application of choice. By default support is provided for, among others, Gmail (WOO!), Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and you can even add your own service of choice with a little knowledge of URL formats. Read on →

I’ve been a Terry Pratchett fan ever since I bought a copy of “The colour of magic”, he was a master of constant jokes, diverse and interesting characters mixed together in a fantasy world which had enough commonalities with our own to add an extra twist to the tale. If one thing stands out from that sentence it should be the word ‘was’, while the quality of the recent stories (Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch) is, if anything, better than the earlier books the newer books including Going Postal are very quiet on the humour front. Read on →

Occasionly you will pipe or cat a file to the screen or a program will die and the screen will begin to show gibberish when ever you type anything (I don’t mean the usual gibberish that most people type on a command line :)) If you use putty then you will see the word ‘PuTTy’ appear contantly. The quick way around this is to type ‘reset’ and the screen will begin to work as expected again. Read on →

After you’ve been using a Unix (or logging into one via putty) for a while you’ll probably encounter a key combination that locks the term and leaves you unable to do anything. You’ll hunt around the keyboard pressing combinations until you sigh in despair and try Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D to kill the current command or the current shell respectively; and they won’t work. After some more key-bashing you’ll get lucky and the term will bomb out. Read on →

For those of you that don’t know it, and even for those that do, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that is based upon Debian but with up-to-date desktop packages such as a modern Gnome. The distro itself has received a lot of good press and looks very promising. But that’s dull. No one cares if it’s technically excellent or it meets the needs of a large number of people (I may soon be running this on my Linux laptop so my views on this are pretty transparent :)) What is more interesting is controversy and differing opinions. Read on →

This is going to be my last TV post for a while now, I promise! While in general I don’t watch more than four or so hours a week of TV (mostly comedy shows like Have I got News For You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks) the magical combination of an always on ADSL connection, Torrentcasting, a new 250GB harddrive and two monitors (one for work and one for playing TV shows) has rekindled an interest that was almost destroyed by the ending of Angel, FarScape and Wonderfalls. Read on →

While I’m on the subject of genre TV (One more post after this one I promise :)) I’ll mention a program that is actually well worth setting your TiVo / Torrent downloader for; Lost. With J.J. Abrams of Alias fame on the creative team this show might actually get past the first dozen episodes (unlike the tragicly killed Wonderfalls) and have a chance to tell its story. The basic idea is very simple, the survivors of a plane crash are forced to live with each other on a remote island, but the execution is excellent. Read on →

I finally had a chance to sit down and watch this over the weekend and while I wasn’t as blown away as I thought I’d be (I had stupidly high expectations) it was still very good TV and tied up a lot of loose ends that the series never got to close. While four hours may have seemed like a long time in which to have one last outing, when you look back at the series and examine the three episode arcs such as “Kiss the princess”, “Liars, guns and money” and “We’re so screwed” they gave any Sci-fi film a run for its money and, for me, were defining achievements for FarScape. Read on →