The Playground

A new meme is making the rounds that is fun and actually very good. The Buzzfeed version says:

<blockquote>New meme: here's a totally random way to make your new random band's new random album cover. Post one! Go to "Wikipedia." Hit "random" and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to "Random Quotations" and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on "Explore the Last Seven Days" and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.</blockquote>

And here's mine:

Name of Band: Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man

Album Title: Out of a Job

Album Cover:

Posted to Internet Stuff at 4:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

 

If you have loads of unwanted tunes on your PC then there's now a way to get cash for them. Bopaboo is a new marketplace that provides users with a legal way to buy and sell digital music, and offers you a place where you can make money selling your previously purchased digital music. To get started, you upload your unwanted MP3s, set up an online store, and name your price. Sellers can promote their Bopaboo Store on their own websites or social networking profiles. Unfortunately, the Private Beta is available only to users from the United States.

Related articles

• Make Some Extra Bucks: Sell Your Unwanted MP3s
• bopaboo: Legal, Chaperoned File Sharing

Posted to Internet Stuff at 8:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I spent the better part of tonight cleaning up around 50 posts on Toni's Corner of the World that weren't displaying in the monthly archives properly. The headings were there, but that's all. When I checked to see what the problem was, it seems that all the entries that had ASCII code inserted had errors, and I had to use the character instead of the code. In most cases it was an apostrophe, or three dots, or a copyright symbol. For some reason I ended up with that black triangle with a question mark in the middle.

  While I was fixing those errors I came across lots of bad links on the older entries. I upgraded to Movable Type 4.2 recently, and changed the format for the entry names. Instead of 0005328entry_list.php they're now called entry_list.php (without the leading numbers), and so any links to other entries were returning the dreaded 404 page. I've managed to clean them up from September 2006, but I'll need to go back to December 2004 and check the links on each entry. A time-consuming task.

Checking your entries for errors is a normal part of site housekeeping which we all need to do from time to time. Usually I don't look at old entries on my blogs and it's easy for errors to go unnoticed.

Posted to HTML Stuff at 9:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

The image on the left is a system-wide snapshot from October 25, followed by a snapshot from today. Obviously the spammers are loving my sites more and more, because the default on all my blogs is to delete the spam after 14 days. There's definitely been an increase in the number of times I've been hit.

TypePad Anti-Spam is doing the best job of all the anti-spam tools I've used on Movable Type over the last 4 years, and I've used quite a few different approaches over those years, sometimes relying on MT but most often relying on plugins or a combination of plugins, including comment challenges. I posted how pleased I am with TypePad Anti-Spam very recently, and have written numerous posts on the virtues of other plugins over time, but I can't stress enough just how good this latest Movable Type product is. I've had no spam comments, but plenty of trackback spam, and TypePad Anti-Spam hasn't missed a beat marking the nasty ones.

Posted to Movable Type | Plugins at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If your internet connection seems slow or you're just curious about your download or upload speeds, it's quick and easy to test and compare your results.

Speedtest.net is a broadband connection analysis tool with a huge selection of geographically dispersed testing servers. Speedtest.net measures the performance of your broadband connection. At the end of each test, you are presented with the download (the speed of data from the server to your computer) and upload (the speed of sending data from your computer to the server) bandwidth speeds. The tests are performed completely within your web browser over HTTP (just like normal web browsing).

Out of curiosity, I took the broadband speed test tonight and was impressed with my results. The interface is graphic, so you can click anywhere in the world to check your speeds. My first test was close to home and fairly quick. I was surprised with the second test, being half-way across the world and the download speed was quicker. After checking the result summary page, however, I was disappointed to see that my connection speed is only half as fast as other users who have the same ISP, and only one-third as fast compared to an Australia-wide comparison.

Posted to Internet Stuff at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If you're like me, then you have a mile-long list of programs that start when your Window PC boots. You can delay some non-essential programs so they don't run until later, making your Windows boot a whole lot faster.

Startup Delayer allows a user to place a delay on each of their startup programs, so that they each have time to launch before another begins making demands on the disk and CPU. It is very simple to use, just drag a program from the listing to the white bar below. A line will appear indicating how long it will be from startup before this program begins. Drag another program to a different spot, and there is a second line. Drag the lines around to lengthen or shorten the gaps. You can also choose to autospace each application. Any program not explicitly delayed by you starts up normally.

Posted to Windows at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If you're a Twitter user and you want to know who's talking about you or your site, then TweetBeep is for you.

TweetBeeps will send you an email when a tweet matches your keywords. This sounds like a great idea for tracking lots of discussions. It will even search for a mention of your site if the link has been shortened with sites like tinyurl or urlshrinker.

You can add alerts for your name, your nickname, your website, your product, your company, even your passion.

Signing up is quick and easy. You can base your alerts on a domain, or on keywords, and add as many as you like.

Posted to Internet Stuff at 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |