skippy.org.uk

Before Christmas the company I host with (iFuse Hosting) was taken over by a company that no one has heard of, a magical holdings company called Yomura Holdings. who don’t have a website, don’t show up in Google (other than stories of them buying up loads of small hosting companys). as such we were still sure they were a figment of our collective imagination. But they did keep sending emails telling us that our service would improve and reliability would be better.

Well since they took over the mostly reliable iFuse hosting has had a number of extended outages, and response to support tickets and emails is non existent.

Things have got even worse recently when they invoiced my for my hosting fees, I went to try and pay them but have they wanted to take my money? have they responded to my trying to give them money? well no. so unable to contact them (they have no contact details in the public domain that I can find) my account has been suspended.

Due to my set up not being the normal set up on the server, (thanks to Ross being Awsome when he did work there) everything other than CamCrew.co.uk still works

Now with a lot of digging and poking it seems that Yomura Holdings is a part of LTT, Libya Telecom and Technology who have a twitter account, so I am now waiting for a response from them.

I store all my images on my mac in iPhoto 09. and as you can guess this has resulted in a library that is a little on the large side.

One general accepted way to speed up iPhoto is to vacuum the database using the inbuilt sqlite command. this is a bit like defraging the database and reducing the stuff contained in it.

1. Open Terminal and type cd and a space
2. Drag your iPhoto library into the terminal window and hit Enter.
3. Copy the command “for dbase in *.db; do sqlite3 $dbase "vacuum;"; done” and paste into the terminal window.
4. Hit carriage return, wait till the line prompt comes up and your finished. The larger the library the longer the time the vacuuming will take.

Mine took just shy of 15 minutes (did I forget to say I had a large library?) all in all it didn’t speed it up any where as much as I would have liked.

Another way of recovering a few bits of a second from iPhoto slowness is to remove the photo counts next to each album and library in the left-hand pane. The task of updating these counts whenever you modify your images appears to cause iPhoto to slow down sometimes.

To disable the item counts

1. Open iPhoto’s preferences,
2. Goto the General tab,
3. Uncheck the “Show item counts” box. (there may be a delay of a few seconds).

That may show an improvement for you; it also may not.

If iPhoto continues to be annoyingly slow for me, I may get desperate and try Fat Cat’s iPhoto Library Manager to see how that works with my iPhoto collection.

On the Weekend Loupie, a few of TermiSoc and I went to see the SteamPunk exhibit at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. The trip was suggested by Stewart Starbuck as he was going to meet up with a group of Steam Punk geeks from Brass Goggles, and invited others from TermiSoc to come along for a Trip. so all in all there were 6 of us intrepid adventurers; As well as the three mentioned there was bma, Laces, and Sayyan.

The exhibit itself was in a small gallery on the basement level. along with the steam punk exhibit there was a work shop to learn how to make steam punk jewellery and an area where you could play with Maccano.

Apart from the size of the gallery, everything else was really cool. We went for lunch in the (well according to Laces) the Burning Baby, or as the rest of us called it The Eagle & Child. a small pub of No notability at all

The Eagle and Child was once a favourite watering hole of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They often met for discussion (and argument) over a pint.

On the bar wall is a signed note to the landlord written in 1949 stating that J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis have drunk to his health. well we mostly stuck to one drink each.

[View with PicLens]

While at the University of Plymouth studing, I came accross a peice of software that was used to keep all the machines clean and free of student installed crap. The University installs a application on every one of there terminals called Deep Freeze by a company called Faronics; It is about £22.50 for an install licence (you get 30 days of trial).

I have had a play with this software before, and based on that trial I have had a go at installing it on my parents computer; in the hope that it reduces the time I have to spend keeping the computer clean.

Deep Freeze works by freezing all the data on a patition and removes all changes made everytime the computer is re-started, to avoid wiping out all userdata I have the Documents and Profile folders on a diffrent patition.

I hope that at the end of my trial that it will have worked as well as I hope it will.

Although for those times support is required I have installed Cross Loop, fundimently Cross Loop is VNC wrapped in an easy to use userinterface that allows you to connect to another computer without needing to open up firewall ports and such; making it easy for parents to allow me to connect to their computer remotly.

For some unknown reson, since my dad bought the full copy of My Heritage’s Family tree maker the computer has been running slowly. and taking an age to do anything (well that could be because its a 1GHz dell box, with 512 meg of ram. but that should be more than enouth to run Windows XP Pro.

As part of the re-installing software I had to choose a PDF application, and as we all know Adobe Acrobat reader is never the sensable choice. Previously I have used Foxit’s Reader which has been light and always done what it says on the tin, being that it claims to be:

• Foxit’s NO BLOAT PDF Reader
• Small download, fast, accurate rendering

However what it doesnt tell you is that every stage of install it will try and install crap you dont need, and that you have to make sure you de-select from the install. I am not sure how this behavure sits with other people,. but I consider it very anoying.

I have included the Screenshots from the install process below so you can see what it looks like:

[View with PicLens]

Also on this note:

• SUN -  I do not want the Yahoo bar with my Java
• Microsoft – No I dont want any extra crap when I am forced to use MS software
• Apple – Why on earth would I want Safari with my iTunes?

I am sure this list of Grrr will grow.

Some one in deepest darkest TermiSoc Twittered about Project52; and as such I had a look

Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

And because this site so often is devoid of new content I have decided to sign up both this site and PhilipMcGaw.com to the challenge. This all coming from some one who has posted about 5 times in the last 3 years, so please wish me luck.

A fair while ago I bought a Three.co.uk Huawei E160G data card. on Pay as you  go. this would have been over a year ago, and since I am o2 customer and have the simplicity £20 contract, with unlimited internet.So why do I need a second number for Internet. When I used to have my HTC Touch I used WMWifiRouter to make my phone into a mobile hotspot. it is an awesome bit of software and does everything it says on the tin.

Jethro Has previously told me that there is no point to unlocking Mobile Modems as data only sim cards always come with them, however I just want to use mine when I really need internet and not as well as a mobile phone.

To unlock the Modem (I try to avoid calling them Dongles) your first port of call is getting a copy of Mobile Partner, this can be downloaded from here.

If You like pain you can try talking to the wonderfully unhelpful droids at Three [3] – (Hutchison 3G UK Ltd) but am not a huge fan of Phoning expensive phone numbers I use the 0800 358 6796 (or 01442 456050) that they try not to list.

This is where talking to the Droids gets interesting; as Three are not willing to have call centres in the United Kingdom they have all of theirs in India. and the script that they has tells them that the modem can not be unlocked. After getting through to the UK call centre (really the sales department) They tell me that they are willing to ‘unlock’ the device for £14.00 but this requires me to book it in for repair and will take 7 days (Phone 0843 730 500 (or the numbers above) and try and get through to the Pay as you Go Retentions Team.

So with that path not really viable, onto option Two: Option two seems to be much easer, as I found this on Ebay, follow the instructions as laid out by Grumpy Grayhound, and wait for the email back with the code in it.

Less than 24 hours (in my case 2 hours) you receive an Email with all the information you need in it, including links to the software to de-brand your modem.

Once the Modem is unlocked you need to change a few settings, however they are as follows for all UK mobile networks: (Found on this site).

So We now have a Mobile Skippy just in time for running away to the frozen north,

I am now running Skippy.org.uk on Wordpress MU with a domain mapping plugin.

This should all now work nicely (well we can hope). but if it does this will allow me to make easer and quicker backups of my sites along with making security easer to manage.

For those of you who remember what the Internet looked like in 1997, you will know the following. Hotmail was not owned by Microsoft, Yahoo was the only real search engine, BackRub Google had not yet been launched; Myspace, and Facebook were not on the Internet. forums were few and far between.

There was Bolt.com an American web site that didn’t suck (in the beginning) and it was really the only place to hang out.

over time it started sucking, and some time a few years back they brought out a Bolt2.com that sucked lots, and in an attempt to move the Regs from Bolt to Bolt2 they killed Bolt. oh and then they got sued out of existence; (read more on wikipedia)

Today i receved the following message via email

Bolt.com is Back! And it’s packed with new Features and Upgrades!!!
Hey Skippy,
We just wanted to let you know that Bolt is back! Come see your old profile and friends.  And check out Tagbooks and all the new features just launched!!
Looking forward to seeing you around the site,

Now unfortunately it is not bolt that they brought back, they revived Boltfolio a site that well.. Sucks.

So Close yet so Far; they failed to get the revival right.

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The reason Vista sucks is that it doesn’t need to be any good, because people will get it anyway. – Ben A’Lee

And i agree, Vista is so sucky that it did not last 10 days on my desktop, yes it was shiney, but it told me i didnt know how to use my computer, and locked me from doing things i wanted to do (all those files on a NTFS drive belong to Skippy, (XP install Skippy) not you Skippy, you need to log in as an Administrator, Mr Skippy of the Administrator group to change ownership to Skippy, from Skippy. that is not the only time that the rediculus security muck things up thing bugged me.

When using the computer, and you want to change your networking settings, do you want to wait for the screen to go gray, and then have to click a box which should have been marked "get out of my face, i know what i am doing!"

As for "easer and simpler file sharing" well the danm thing didn’t remember that the wire that connects it to the network is a trusted network (its a Desktop….) and my network has only trusted devices on it. so turing of the share //hlin/skippy$ every boot annoys the hell out of me.