Recently in Computers & The Internet Category

Right now, I realise that the website has suffered from one of my usual lulls of activity. As always, a number of factors create these gaps. This time around it was work, being ill, difficulties managing time and a lack of appropriate motivation.

My job being as it is, teaching children, it often means that evenings are accounted for by marking books, planning future lessons and other uninteresting things. Accompanying this is a cloud of tiredness.

The long and the short of it is that these lulls will happen and I'll try to minimise them.

It was with that in mind that I stumbled upon BlogPress, an app for my iPhone allowing me to blog when and wherever I happen to be. So there may be more things posted here, for better or worse! This post starts the BlogPress era, long may it continue!

(Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone)

Location:Leeds, United Kingdom

idiomag is a constantly changing music magazine catered to your individual needs. How exciting!

Unfortunately, you do need to give it some prodding in order for it to find out your requirements and interests, but you can do this fairly easily. Especially if you use Last.fm to log your listening. (My Last.fm page)

I've written many times about how useful Last.fm is for finding out about new music, but it's the third party uses for the information that really make the plug in useful. In this case, idiomag take your Last.fm profile and find articles about the artists you listen to. My most current mini-magazine is shown below.

Helpful, huh?

Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi-5... all social networking sites. Meaning that friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people, can get in touch with again and see what you're up to. But it's not all stalker based nonsense, even in online gaming communities, people can develop circles of friends that are spread all over the world. And Buddymapping helps you keep tabs on your virtual contacts.

Using Google maps, this site helps you to create your own personalised maps and then invite friends and contacts to pin themselves to their location, adding a picture, e-mail or web address and even a link to their MySpace or Facebook pages.

I'm thinking of setting one up for my Facebook page, and for here (most likely to be added to the About Me section). Apparently, people only need to click the orange button to add themselves to the map - they don't need to register.

Let me know what you think.

[via BBC's Click]

Ever found yourself needing to change a Microsoft Word document or spreadsheet remotely? No, neither have I. But knowing that you can word process on the move through an internet browser, is a piece of information worth having I think.

And so steps in ThinkFree. You will need to register, then you can choose to upload any documents you want to be able to work with.

Plus, you get 1GB of free space, and if that's not sufficient for your needs (but I can't think of anyone it wouldn't be), there is a paid for service that provides much more storage space.

Once you load a document you can choose to open and edit it with many of the features you see on your desktop word processor. The site's software is compatible with most basic MS Office features.

So there, you it. A really handy website for anyone who needs to edit documents on the move!

[via the BBC]

After losing most of my summer holidays and September for updating the site due to the database getting corrupted, and the stupid host I used to have not being around anymore to give me a backup, I'm here again.

Lots of things have happened. I've moved to another host, and then had to move again because the one I moved to was just as bad.

I've had to go through a legal process of reclaiming the ownership of this domain because the company I originally registered it with put it in theirs instead of mine...

I've done 7 solid weeks of teaching. I've had a visit from OfSTED.

Been hard.

But, onwards and upwards... let's see where life takes me.

This is a shame... I was looking forward to using this! It seems their plan wasn't quite as fool proof as they had wished...

A campaign by Lycos Europe to target spam-related websites appears to have been put on hold.

No one at Lycos was available for comment on latest developments in its controversial anti-spam campaign.

This post follows from this post...

This entry was originally part of a separate, personal blog. I've merged them together now to make life easier.

All the dates that the entries were originally published and posted comments have been preserved.

This sounds like a bit of a laugh...

Update: see this entry for more details.

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.