N900 Sharing

February 6th, 2010

Since my earlier post about sharing photos from the N900 I have discovered Pixelpipe, which includes support for Gallery2 uploads as part of a huge array of supported services. You can read more about Pixelpipe and the N900 here and here.

Sharing photos from N900 to Gallery2

February 1st, 2010

I recently treated myself to a new mobile phonecomputer, so I bought a Nokia N900 which eXpansys eventually shipped to me. Now to the point, you can easily share content to Facebook, Ovi, and Flickr but I maintain my own Gallery2 installation and I wanted to upload my photos there as well. Luckily the sharing infrastructure is pluggable, so all I needed was a plugin which I found. :) Configuring it was a bit of a headache so here is how I did it. Read the rest of this entry »

One enormous footer

January 31st, 2010

Lloyds TSB Bank plc. Registered Office: 25 Gresham Street, London EC2V 7HN. Registered in England and Wales, number 2065. Telephone: 020 7626 1500.

Bank of Scotland plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 327000. Telephone: 0870 600 5000

Lloyds TSB Scotland plc. Registered Office: Henry Duncan House, 120 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 4LH. Registered in Scotland, number 95237. Telephone: 0131 225 4555.
Cheltenham & Gloucester plc. Registered Office: Barnett Way, Gloucester GL4 3RL. Registered in England and Wales, number 2299428. Telephone: 01452 372372.

Lloyds TSB Bank plc, Lloyds TSB Scotland plc, Bank of Scotland plc and Cheltenham & Gloucester plc are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
Halifax is a division of Bank of Scotland plc. Cheltenham & Gloucester Savings is a division of Lloyds TSB Bank plc.
HBOS plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 218813. Telephone: 0870 600 5000

Lloyds Banking Group plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 95000. Telephone: 0131 225 4555

This e-mail (including any attachments) is private and confidential and may contain privileged material. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender and delete it (including any attachments) immediately. You must not copy, distribute, disclose or use any of the information in it or any attachments.

Telephone calls may be monitored or recorded.

I removed the double line spacing as well!

Why do I bother?

January 31st, 2010

Updated my desktop from Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ 9.04 to Ubuntu ‘Karmic’ 9.10, the upgrade process worked flawlessly. Sadly the number of regressions has kind of taken the shine of the various improvements to the distribution.

The big kicker for me is the breaking of VLC and/or Gnome Screensaver, now VLC fails to suppress the screensaver in full screen which is kind of useless when you want to watching anything over 5 minutes long. To workaround this I use gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit to prevent the screensaver from activating, and set a command to kill that after 2 hours. The next problem I’ve observed is that even when the suppression and the film have both ended, the screensaver still doesn’t want to activate for ages; leaving my desktop burning the image into the screen until I lock the screen myself. Not a problem but I often hit the hay with a film on and usually fall asleep midway through, got up yesterday morning to find my desktop sat there still being projected from my display. LP #428884.

My second gripe is Flash player under a x86-64 installation using nspluginwrapper and the x86 Flash player provided in the repositories works, what’s so bad about that? Well you can’t actually click on any controls on the Flash object, which kind of rules out embedded YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc. roll on <video> with Ogg Theora. I resolved this by purging the packaged Flash and nspluginwrapper, and then installing the native 64 bit alpha version from Adobe.

Finally Firebug 1.5 doesn’t support 64 bit builds of Firefox, which to be fair Mozilla don’t support so I don’t really have a problem with this. You need to get an older release from the 1.4 branch, I’ve heard that the 1.6 alphas work again.

Good grumbling done for the morning!

December Desktop

December 30th, 2009

How customer service should be

December 14th, 2009

Awesome and entertaining customer service from IWOOT!

I’m sorry to hear about this, but thank you for letting us know.

I’ve just sent a request for a new one to be sent out to you, so you should receive it soon.

There’s no need to return the broken one, we wouldn’t want the posties to be carrying around broken pottery in their bags – they have enough to complain about! Just take care and dispose of it safely.

I hope this helps a wee bit?

PHP function: is_serialized()

October 23rd, 2009

I needed a way to detect if some values were serialized or not, annoyingly PHP does not provide a method for this. I’d also rather not perform unserialize() on everything to check for a serialized string in the name of efficiency, so instead I came up with a simple function to detect serialized data. The result of my endeavours is a function that checks a string for basic makers of the PHP serialization form, it only checks the variables type and not any deeper values inside arrays or objects, if this preliminary testing is successful then unserialize() is invoked to provide the final proof. The unserialized form is available as an option argument passed by reference and the return value is a boolean, true for boolean or false otherwise. You can find the function on Gist or below. Read the rest of this entry »

Vacuum Firefox on Ubuntu

October 15th, 2009

It was suggested to me to use vacuum places to improve my Firefox awesome bar performance, as I’m still using Firefox 3.0 which is packaged with Jaunty; I do have 3.5 installed I just use it for testing sites at the moment. However realising that I didn’t need an addon a single line of bash will probably do what I want I headed to Google and found an explaining it all and a suitable one-liner to optimise all my Firefox SQLite DBs.

You will need the sqlite3 package installed and you should close Firefox prior to running the command.

for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done

September 2009 Desktop

September 8th, 2009

My desktop September 2009
My Windows desktop September 2009

HP strikes back

July 31st, 2009

Hewlett Packard, and others, strike back with ever more excessive cardboard gluttony; the Register has the details.

BT packaging

BT’s feeble attempts at a cardboard indulgence.