Month: October 2008

How do you start yours?

Browser, that is.

I was rather interested to hear what people used as their ‘home page’ in their browser – ie the page that loads when you first open your browser. Firefox makes this more interesting with its tabs, which allow you to start several sites immediately, each one in a different tab.

Personally, I start with my webmail (Gmail running through Google Apps for your Domain), Google Reader, FriendFeed, and the admin dashboard for this blog. I asked others on Twitter what they like to use, and here are the responses I got:

  • @dominiccampbell iGoogle
  • @rohan_london my ‘fox fires up with gootodo list and googlereader. I then have facebook, twitter and gmail addons so I can scope updates
  • @simonwakeman gmail, blog admin, statcounter, ping.fm
  • @justingsouter I use Session Manager in FireFox, and invariably have web pages from previous browsing session…
  • @paulhenderson 6 tabs BBC news, Cricinfo, Bloglines, ruralnet|uk, delicious & twitter
  • @watfordgap igoogle can access everything else from there
  • @citizensheep With all the tabs I had open in the previous session. Usually includes Gmail, Twitter and MonkeyGTD

Interesting mix… what do other people use?

Macbook Wireless Problem

I love my MacBook, I really do (although I am rather tempted by one of these). However, of late I have been having a really annoying problem it and my home wireless broadband.

I generally turn off the router during the night, to let it cool down and whatnot, then switch it on again at about 8 in the morning. The mac gets turned on then to deal with with any email etc that has come in, then I get the lad ready and do the school run. When I get home, the mac is fired up again and I start work.

Then we get to around three in the afternoon, when the Mac suddenly gets disconnected from the wireless, and any attempts to reconnect are doomed to ‘time out’. There’s nothing wrong with the router, and when I start up my lumbering Acer Aspire, which runs Ubuntu, it connects fine. If I am lucky, the Mac will be talking to the router again by about eight in the evening.

This is profoudly annoying. Does anyone know what might be happening here?

Hacking domains

Domain hacking is defined by Wikipedia as:

an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full “name” or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.

What does that mean? Well, it means taking the elements of a domain name (that is, the thing you type into your browser’s address bar) so that it spells out a word, or something similar.

For example, Delicious used to be found at del.icio.us – with the last element (known as the ‘top-level’) of the domain (.us, for the United States) forming part of the name of the site. Sadly, it’s plain old delicious.com now.

I recently registered a domain from the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands – which ends in .gs. The domain is vebrig.gs – can you see where I am headed with this? 😉

I’ve created an email address on my domain which is simple ‘d’ – so in full it looks like d@vebrig.gs which kinda spells out my name. I know this is very sad, but I like it!

By adding a sub-domain to vebrig.gs of da I can get the web address da.vebrig.gs which again is quite a neat hack. Not doing anything with the site right now though!

So, the main point of this post, other than making it clear to everyone what a total dork I am, is to let everyone know that the best email address to get me on now is d@vebrig.gs. My old one still forwards onto me, though, so don’t worry too much.

Now all I have to do is update all my social networks with the new address…

Bookmarks for October 12th through October 15th

Stuff I have bookmarked for October 12th through October 15th:

5 years of MySociety

I had an enjoyable time at the MySociety shindig last night at The Hub in King’s Cross. There were lots of cool people there, and I got the chance to bend people’s ears about digital mentors, which was fun for me if not for them.

David Wilcox has a great post about MySociety, including a video from Tom Steinberg back in 2003, pushing the idea of a ‘Civic Hacking Fund’. I think I prefer the name they ended up with.

Simon Dickson likewise muses on the impact MySociety has had on the development of government webby stuff in the UK:

You can do a tremendous amount of good with relatively little money, as long as you have good people involved. People who understand the context, who have a feel for the technology, and who have a passion for what they’re doing. That’s been the very basis of MySociety’s success, and (I hope) my own here at Puffbox.

I also got the chance to catch up with Amy Sample Ward, who works with NetSquared in North America helping non-profits get the most out of technology. She’s now based in London and will be doing her best to help UK NFPs catch up. It’s difficult not to be caught up in her enthusiasm to make things better, which is great. Again, David Wilcox has don the interview, which I’ve embedded below.

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