Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Are you sure you want to close these 10 tabs?

Monday, May 30th, 2005

Why smart people defend bad ideas.

3D game to AutoCAD to real life product

Well, do you want to have just one argument, or were you thinking of taking a course?

How to write a business proposal.

Congrats to Donncha

Monday, May 30th, 2005

Engaged! Well done. Everyone I know of late seems to be getting married or having kids. The pressures on. Now I just need to change some silly laws…

Seriously though Donncha, on that page I note it says:

Related Stories (she, said, yes!)

* Penis Causes Terror Alert
* Past History.. clean up after you!
* Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5
* Bill Cullen: Golden Apples
* Grandma Eats Cannabis

You trying to say something about your penis being a weapon of mass destruction or that when your kids have kids the Mrs. is going to be doing drugs or your life is going to be like Bill Cullen’s? Odd.

Whack a TD – Fun in the Dáil.

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

This is Brian Greene’s idea really not mine. Brian mentions that TDs don’t seem to turn off their mobiles when in the Dáil.

the whack of electro magnetic radiation hits the audio cables of the mic and is recorded for Oireachtais Report or broadcast live on Dáil Beo (TG4)

So, a nice afternoon game can be played by all those lazy ass students who stay at home to watch useless TV. Watch this on TG4, when they see a TD speak, find their number and ring it. Finding a mobile is a piece of piss these days with Google et al. Or a bit of social engineering when ringing party HQ will easily get you the number. Mobile rings and that nasty obnoxious fuzzy noise will piss off the TG4 sound engineers. Fun!

Journalism and commentary

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

Can bloggers become the old style journalists? Or will we see journalists fork into factual and factual with commentary type journos. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that we will see a few of the quality and probably not so quality citizens join the ranks of journalists. Blogs allow and almost default to people adding in their own commentary to news stories. Just look at Planet of the Blogs for commentary on the latest world news.

As more and more bloggers graduate into journos will more and more news stories become opinion pieces?

More reading on this:
Jeff Jarvis – Editor of News Gatherer.
Jarvis on new business models for news.
Open letter to Journalism school grads. Not very positive.

Tiny Music – The Intel sound and more

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

We are the tinyMusic makers. Interesting report on the people and the thoughts behind the tiny pieces of music we hear day in and day out.

Going Postal Code

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

A lot of interesting thoughts online now at the moment in regards to the post code system which the DCMNR wants to roll out.

Antoin weighs in with his thoughts. Antoin has been monitoring and commenting on this for a long time now. Good analysis going on.

A chapie on boards.ie Gives his views and provides an insight into the An Post sorting system. Bureaucracy gone mad. I love his analogy.

Tesco deciding to implement a huge optical scanning system that can recognise products by reading their full lables rather than a cheap fast laser that reads the barcode on the bottom.

United Irelander thinks it’s a bad idea though doesn’t give any concrete reasons as to why apart from cost. But doing everything in Government costs money, and if they brought in a policy of remaining static we’d see this would too cost even more.

Gerry O’Sullivan thinks it’s a good idea too. For courier companies it will be a godsend. Right now An Post are at an advantage in that the knowledge about a lot of locations seems to be only contained in the heads of the local postmen. That’s not a good way of running a business. It’s the mindset of a monopolist.

Other applications for postcodes would be an Irish version of Fax your MP. It would also make things a hell of a lot easier for Wireless companies that want to do site surveys.

Productivity / Geeky crappy stuffy

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

Geeky Stuff:
Why adsense for feeds is a bad idea (at least for now). Matt Haughey makes some very good arguments for not putting ads into RSS feeds for now.

WinAmp Plugin for the iPod. About time this came about. If I do go for an iPod this will make life easier.

Greasemonkey and business models.

Productivity stuff:
12 ways to think differently

Ticking email in Outlook. Part of the Getting Things Done school of taught. A good way of filtering work and tackling issues using Outlook.

How to become an early riser. Deffo need to go through this and see will it work for me.

Back to the blogging thing

Sunday, May 22nd, 2005

After a week of meetings in Dublin for IrelandOffline it’s time to start getting back into blog reading and blogging.

Podcasting:

Podish is an idea from Liam Burke which allows Irish people to podcast and not worry about where to upload their content or worry about paying for it. Blurb:

Podish involves Irish people embracing podcasting without having to pay to upload their items, all they need is their mobile phone. The mobile allows people to easily record an item/issue in the news that they want to express their opinion on, or maybe be adventurous and interview somebody or do a sound seeing tour of their town area. The possibilities are endless.

Podish will make a nice edition to the sphere. Would be handy if it could get some space on a sidebar on Planet of the Blogs.

Keeping to the Podcasting theme Tom Coates talks about the much anticipated BBC podcasts and how the BBC has put up an easy guide to podcasting up on their site.

My own opinions on podcasting is that it’s a fascinating area of citizenship jouranlism and we’ll see this become more popular. It’s very rough right now and I’m sure it could evolve into something more complex or quite different. What I’d like to see is people able to upload their own podcasts as audio comments to news stories on websites along with a written summary or transcript of what they saw. Stick in a few tags too while we’re at it for the tagging enthusiasts.

Speaking of tags, Feedster are adding the ability for readers to add tags in their feeds. Handy to see a “Tag This” form at the end of posts on some blogs. It doesn’t feed into technorati though. I’m sure a little bit of greasemonkeying might allow interaction with technorati or del.icio.us.

New iPod ad – Inspired by my dance moves

Monday, May 16th, 2005

I too can dance the funkey chicken with my iPod.

Sony PS3 to get it on with Apple iTunes

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

As a follow-on to my commentary on Russell Beatie’s post saying Microsoft will win the DRM war, Engadget is now rumouring that the PS3 will support iTunes. This would make sense but I feel it would need to be a necessity anyway, no new thinking went into it, more a self-defense mechanism. It must be a huge humbling experience for Sony who invented the walkman and made music totally portable and personal and now they have to become the bitch of the iPod and iTunes. I hope they learned their lesson in complacency.