To brighten the place up a little bit, I have put in some new header graphics. There are four at the moment, and load up in a random order thanks to the WordPress god Matthew Mullenweg‘s dead simple PHP script.

Hopefully a new one should load up each time you visit; to force a change you will need to do a hard refresh, i.e. holding ctrl-F5 at the same time.

Here are the original photos, before they were mucked about with to fit in the header gap.

No doubt more will be added in time.

“I want a Freeware Utility to…” is a great page: essentially a massive list of freeware and open-source software, listed by task. Very useful.

Technorati Tags: freeware

So, Scoble is going to start moderating comments. Fair enough – given the amount of abuse the guy receives on there, I am only surprised he hasn’t done it before. It’s a shame, really, that a chap who wants to keep things open and involve himself with other people has to do this because of a few people who take the mickey. Oh well.

The more interesting point, in my opinion, is that Scoble is going to have another person contributing to his blog. Bubba Murarka, “lead program manager on the Windows Live search team”, is going to blog-sit over the next week. It’s interesting in that Scobleizer is so obviously connected to just one man that it might be a little weird having someone else producing content for it. Let’s hope Bubba doesn’t balls things up royally over the next week!

Technorati Tags: scoble

Is this sort of thing:

If you’ve ever wanted to play any of the Civilization games by Sid Meire, but were not look to shell out the cash for it, check out FreeCiv. This free GNU alternative to the popular series is just as good and just as fun.

This game can be played alone of against anyone over the internet.

Download it today! (for free of course!)

read more | digg story

As well as getting on the front page, this also gets deposited in the RSS feed. I mean, who on earth hasn’t heard of FreeCiv? The issue with having a situation where stories that appear on the front page brings with it some sort of kudos is that people will deliberately post in order to get there – and presumably there is some “you digg my posts, I’ll dig yours” going on too.

This story just isn’t news to anyone.

Is now apparently live, here. Too slow to access at the moment though.

Mike Arrington has a review, I’ll do one when I can get it.

[tags]google, google calendar[/tags]

I have been playing around with various content management systems recently, and found most of them to be pretty unsatisfactory. I basically wanted a solution that could combine a blog type of news site with an integrated forum. I was so frustrated with systems like Drupal and Mambo, which were just so damn hard to configure (for a nitwit like me, I’ll admit) that I was looking up ways for WordPress and phpBB to share a user database – something that is probably even harder to do.

Anyway, how I didn’t come across this before I do not know, but PHP-Fusion is the answer to my needs. It’s lightweight, easy to install and configure, and comes with various nice themes installed already, so it really does work straight out of the box. Brilliant stuff and highly recommended.

[tags]PHP-Fusion[/tags]

The Museum of Modern Betas has issued a list of the ‘biggest’ beta services out there, as measured by the number of times they have been bookmarked in del.icio.us. One of the ones it points out, that I hadn’t come across before, was Remember the Milk, an online to-do list manager.

It really good! You can have to-dos in Personal, Study or Work categories, and then tag them individually too. You can send tasks to other people, or share them all. Creating tasks is dead easy – just typing the title into a box – and then you can customise it, like setting reminders, priorities and adding notes, as much as you want to afterwards.

I had previously been using Backpack to manage my to-dos, but I will definitely be giving Remember the Milk a tryout for the next few weeks.

As usual with these services, they have a blog and a forum. The other cog in the machine of Web2.0 support, the documentation wiki, isn’t evident though!

[tags]Remember the Milk[/tags]

The latest announcement from Michael Robertson’s Ajaxlaunch is eyespot – an online AJAXy video editing service. Sounds cool, though I don’t have any video clips to hand to try it out on.

Seems a departure from the other Ajaxlaunch stuff though, and it doesn’t fit in with the style of the other apps.

[tags]eyespot[/tags]

I took my first steps with Linux this week. At the start of the week, I installed Ubuntu on my old Toshiba laptop. It installed beautifully, and ran very nicely. Very quick to boot up indeed. In fact, I really, really liked it – especially as I am likely to be using the laptop mainly as a typing machine, the speed and efficiency of Ubuntu was very appealing.

But I have one other use for the laptop, and that is as a testing ground for web stuff. I wanted to get Apache, PHP and MySQL running on it, so I could play about with stuff like WordPress, phpBB and MediaWiki without running up hosting fees or being tied to being online.

As far as I could tell, I couldn’t get those three packages on my Ubuntu setup without web access and downloading them from a repository – and this laptop isn’t hooked up to the web, at least, not yet. That’s a headache I’ll face some other time. It would appear that the price paid for the clarity and speed of Ubuntu is a lack of options for extended use.

So, I installed Mandriva 2006, from 3 CDs compared to Ubuntu’s one. I chose to install everything I could from the start, and soon had a working WordPress install on my laptop. As a beginner, I was delighted. But Mandriva clearly has its own problems – it’s really slow to boot up, and generally the KDE setup it uses is a lot flabbier and slower that Ubuntu’s Gnome. At the end of the day, though, it does what I want it to do, so I am sticking with it for now.

I ought to reiterate though that I was really impressed with Ubuntu, especially for beginners – and by that I mean beginners with computers, not just Linux. From an easy-peasy one CD install, you have every kind of application you could feasibly want from the off. An excellent choice for quickly setting up a working, fully operational system. No doubt that’s why the Ndiyo chaps use it.

I am left with a few issues with Mandriva though. I had to fiddle about to get it to stop crashing on bootup – graphics cards issues. This, for some reason, has left the laptop booting into text only mode, requiring me to enter the kde command to load the window manager. Also, logging out of KDE at the end of a session only returns me to the command line too. The shutdown now command works to a certain extent, but I still have to hold the on-off button to get the machine to switch off. If any one has any ideas on this, let me know.

[tags]ubuntu, mandriva, linux[/tags]

I have installed Blogbar in the sidebar of this blog, which you can use to search the site. The theme I use, Contempt, dosn’t appear to have a search bar included, though doubtless I could conjure one up if I could be faffed.

I would like to know, however, how I can change the search engines used in the search.

Technorati Tags: blogbar

update: I have since ditched Blogbar – I was irritated by the search opening in a new window. I just pasted in the php for calling up the default search form. Much more simple. DB 16/04/06

Zoho looks like it offers some interesting online applications, the word processor looks especially good as is an alternative for those who can’t get Writely accounts at the moment because of the post Google purchase embargo on new users.

[tags]zoho[/tags]