Dom Barnes’s Blog

So I saw this story on Diggnation the other week and am writing to support the campaign.

So, on 24 March (Saturday to make it a bit easier), its Shutdown Day. Turn off your computer, step away from the keyboard, put down that mouse, and take your eyes off the screen.

This campaign has two main objectives.
1. Save massive amounts of electricity by having so many PC’s turned off. It all goes to help global warming (and you can’t deny its happening. There’s snow and sunshine in the middle of March)
2. Get some rest! Go outside, enjoy the sun/snow/rain/other weather, see some friends, or family, do those DIY things you’ve been putting off, get some GTD’ing going, tidy things, or just spend time with the kids. The main thing is to spend your day without your computer, PDA, laptop, or other devices. Hell, even go somewhere without the GPS. Try an A to Z.

I’ll be doing this, and I encourage you to as well. Add your name to the list, support this cause, and encourage your friends to as well.

Technorati Tags: Shutdown Day

There’s a lot of noise at the moment about Myspace and Facebook, and a few other services. They seem to be slowly declining.

Now I’m not the first to bitch about myspace. its a waste of mytime to be honest. Its a horrible web 0.1 website, which gets bombarded with horrible embedded music you can’t stop, horrible animated gif wallpapers (dancing hampster anyone?), let alone all the whiny kids who just go on about nothing all the time.

Now i haven’t tried facebook either, and doubt I will, but it seems similar. From what I gather you can tag people in photos, find old school friends (why? if I wanted to be friends with them still wouldn’t i be? forget them and move on), and generally waste time.

Now there are lots of other services you can use to get a even better effect. Flickr for photos, geotagging, Worpress or blogger for blogging, tumblr for throwing in random things online, twitter to leave “away messages” or just tell everyone what you’re doing at every minute of the day. Some of these are good, all of them seem to go their job better than deadspace ever could.

Recently, I’ve been using Virb. Its a well designed, much more functional, and easier to deal with social website. Its also a lot more band and music driven, so you’ll find a fair few indie and independent bands on there, like Bloc Party, Modest Mouse, etc. If you’re a band, you can post album info, band info, photos, shows, events, make announcements, upload songs for playing, or downloading, post videos, blog posts. Tons. Even if you’re not a band, you can do a lot of this stuff. It seems like a great place for bands to get their music to people. Its also ideal for letting people know about shows that are happening,  along with tons of other info. So good, I’ve signed the Douglas Furs up here. Its a bit sparse now but it will grow.

So have a look, add me or the band if you want, send me a message, check out the music in my playlist, and browse.

So I really like Scrubs. Its a cool show, and there’s a good video on youtube of this one episode so I thought I’d post it here. Enjoy.

Burn - Burn is an open source CD and DVD burning program that some have compared and said betters commercial software like Roxio’s Toast. Now I have Toast and its pretty good, but its very bulky. Burn, is a nice simple little app that will burn audio CD’s, data CD’s (for Mac, PC, Joilet, UDF, and DVD Video), VCD’s. SVCD’s, DivX DVD’s, normal DVD’s as well as burning disc images to discs (dmg, img, etc). Its pretty handy really. It will also create VIDEO_TS from video files for you if you want to share a DVD with friends over a torrent or something else. And you can’t beat the price. Its equal to about zero Alex’s (can’t find a link for this. 1 Alex = $700)

AppDelete - Think of Windows for a second (I know its a painful memory). Now imagine the Start button, Control Panel and that little thing called Add/Remove Programs. Your one stop shop for removing unwanted programs. Now skip forward to the simple life of Mac OS X. Goodbye windows installers. Hello drag and drop. Well now, what about all those open source apps you downloaded that you don’t want. And what about the plist files and cache’s and settings they created and dumped in your user Library. Well AppDelete takes care of those. Simply drag and drop (so easy isn’t it Microsoft) and AppDelete finds all those nagging files and moves them all to the Trash in one hand folder. Simple. No settings. No cache’s. No application. Lovely

Monolingual - I discovered this off Macbreak Weekly and its lovely. So simple. Question: How many languages do you speak? Now how many do you use on your laptop? If the answer is 2 then lucky you. If its one, this is for you. Why do you need all the program settings and files for Hungarian, or Bavarian, or Sweedish, or any of that? You don’t. Monolingual will ask you to choose some languages to remove, then go out and trash all those files that all the many apps have stored somewhere. The result? Nothing really noticable about from at least 1Gb of brand new free space to fill with episodes of Lost.

Smultron - Finally. I’ve been waiting to talk about this. Mainly cos the icon is a strawberry. lame reason. But it is a good program. At its basic level, its a replacement for TextEdit. At its most complex, its a good program for editing XML files, plist files, or do any coding whatsoever. It does colour coding automatically for each tag, which can help keep track of which ones are open and closed. It also handles multiple open files at once, and gives you a file list so you can quickly switch between them. It also supports Full Screen mode so you can focus without the constant distraction of Mail, Firefox other unproductive apps.

Transmission - Everyone loves BitTorrent. Whether it be for nice legal file sharing with Gran, or whether its for less legal needs. In my opinion Transmission is the best out there. It is up to date, its fast, well designed, fairly well customisable. You can set download speed limits between certain times, you can monitor folders and automatically start downloads (combine with an RSS feed and Democracy for a awesome way of getting those latest TV torrents). You have other options, [see this blog post] but I don’t find any of them as nice as Transmission. Azureus is multiplatform but its slow. BitRocket seems to have trouble reaching some servers. So check it out

Thats it for part 2. Part 3 to come shortly, when we look at Growl, MenuMeters and MAMP.

Don’t use tiscali. Seriously. Don’t. I do and I wish I didn’t. I got an email back on 29 July 2006 saying that my internet usage was excessive and that was my first warning. I got my second and final on 9 November 2006. On 8 December I got capped. My internet usage between 6pm and 11pm (when I’m at home. Useful)
So it got to 8 February 2007 and I was getting frustrated with my slow speeds. I did some speedtests and was getting 1.31Mbps, 1.55,1.59Mbps download, when I am paying for an 8Mb connection.
I called Tiscali support, and after first being cut off as I was about to speak to a human, I explained the problem and was told to keep my usage down for a week, and it would return to normal. Regardless, I emailed my problem to the address they told me to. I got my email bounced back. I went looking on the website for some help and found a form to complete, so I did and waited for a reply. On 15 Feb I emailed back as I had got no reply. Their auto-response said 3 days to reply. It had been 5. I emailed again on 16 Feb, 18 Feb, 19 Feb. On 22 Feb I got a reply from the online form. They said email broadbandservices@uk.tiscali.com and put “FUP Warning 1/2″ in the subject. So I did. And I waited. On 26 Feb I emailed back and waited. I resent it again on 1 March. On 2 March I emailed again, made a fuss about having to wait so long to get a reply. On 11 March I got this reply:
Thank you for contacting Tiscali Customer Support.

I understand from your email that you are experiencing slow speed connectivity.

I am forwarding your concern to the concerned department who will analyse the case and assist you regarding this. For further concern regarding this issue, I would request you to write directly to broadbandservices@uk.tiscali.com , stating ‘FUP Warning’ in the subject line. They will be able to check your line and do the needful.

If you have any other concerns, please feel free to write to us.

Regards,

Tiscali Customer Support

I’ve ALREADY done this!
So I replied to say I had done so and got no response. (wafs!)
So today I’ve emailed again. For the 13th time now. I still have had no formal response, and am still getting shit download speeds.
So for the love of god, don’t use Tiscali. Their customer service is appauling. You will find it difficult to get a decent answer on the phone, or by email.
I’m now moving and am gonna switch to cable and let’s hope our internet speeds will get back to normal.

Date: 10 March 2007
Location: Beige Room, Rich Bitch, Selly Oak

Its been too long since the last one of these, but don’t worry, we’ve been practising. To prove it, here are the dates we practiced: 10 Feb, 13 Feb, 22 Feb, 28 Feb, 3 Feb, and then 10 Feb.

What have we been doing? Well practising really.  Been trying to finish Birdclock, Just Woke Up, and also jamming, trying to get some new stuff. We had two, one which was based on the chords D and F (Douglas Furs? That was pure chance, I chose the chords) but despite some people liking it, it was voted off, so its hit the scrap pile. The other one’s chords escape me, but we did work on one this week, which went A, E, B, D (I think, can’t be certain without taking my bass out of its case) but unfortunately, it dawned on me (who then shared it) that that is the same as Just Like Heaven by The Cure, which we were planning on trying to cover anyway! So that quickly came to a stop, although we may be able to salvage it.

There were a few hiccups too, some dropped sticks, retuning (Nick, if you’re reading this, get a new battery), some joking around, and a broken sofa. Don’t ask me how, I just walked in to see it awkwardly broken, and James looking guilty!

I guess the main point of this post, cos not much else happened thats notable, is that we are booked in to do some proper recording. We couldn’t stretch to a full production set-up cos it was about £400 for 10 hours and we haven’t got enough completed material yet, but we’re hiring the Dance Studio and can record onto a minidisc so we’ll be doing that, then do some clever transferring to get it into an MP3 and maybe, just maybe, post it on here. Then maybe you’ll be able to hear a bass line in Birdclock.

Until that day (won’t tell you when), we have one more practice in the Green Room (new to us) which hopefully will be really productive.

[digg=http://digg.com/apple/64_bit_WEP_in_OS_X_Simple_as_0x]
I came across a need to do this last night as I was trying to get my girlfriends new Macbook onto the wireless router I have here. So I logged on to the router and found Key 1 and told her to type it in. Much surprise did i get when it denied access. So I tried again, and again, and nothing. So I tried changing the key, and nothing happened. I even tried a 128-bit WEP but nothing happened.

So I tried no WEP or WPA, and got a connection straight away. I checked this on my laptop, by deleting the keychain item for the WLAN, and re-entered it on my laptop, and got nothing. Bugger. No wireless now. Thank god I had a cable plugged in and at hand. So I hooked up and started browsing. I found quite a lot of sites with ideas, like MAC address filtering, but I didn’t want that. I only found one website which mentioned the solution. Luckily, one is enough.

Here’s what you do

1. Set up your 64-bit WEP as normal, and make sure Key 1 is selected.
2. Go to your Mac and enable Airport if its not already done so.
3. From the Airport menu, select the SSID of your network
4. When asked for a password, enter 0x (thats zero-x) followed by your WEP key, i.e. 0xFF12345678
5. Your computer should now connect with no problems at all.

Of course some people would say that you should use more secure methods, like WPA and MAC filtering, but I also have a WM2003 PDA here for sat nav and a few other reasons, none of which I can explain, and that barely supports WEP.

Hope that helps someone at some point.

Quicksilver - Its basically described as a way of creating functional sentences to carry out actions on your mac. You hit the key combo to bring up the window and start typing. At the basic level, its a great quick application loader, much quicker than spotlight. At its most complex, you can quickly select files from all over your mac and create an archive, or upload files to Flickr
Merlin Man is probably the poineer of selling Quicksilver. He’s how I discovered it. Its worth checking out the podcasts he does on Macbreak, 43 Folders, and The Merlin Show

Camino - It really is just another web browser. The Camino team split off from the Firefox team and begun a Mac browser. It doesn’t have some of the functionality of Firefox, like the extension support, but do you really need half of that crap? Probably not. Anyway, its quick, supports all websites Safari seems to slip up with (Google Calendar, Wordpress posting, Google Docs), and its free. Check out the latest stable version or get ahead of the rest with the nightly builds.

Firefox - You should know about this one. Latest web browser from Mozilla. It works on all major OS’s, it has tabbed viewing (what doesn’t nowadays), extension support, themes, the works. Worth looking at, even if you’re on windows. Its about 145% better than IE7

VLC - Its a media player. Its fantastic. It will play pretty much any video you throw at it without the need for installing any additonal codecs. Goodbye DivX downloads, XviD, and the rest. Does full screen mode, multiple audio tracks, plays DVD’s, has a nice onscreen display, and tons more I probably don’t know about.

Adium - Quack. The icon is a duck. How cool alone is that? Its a chat client. And it supports multiple accounts all at once. So you can login to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, gTalk, ICQ, Bonjour, .mac, SameTime, Jabber, Novell GroupWise, QQ, Gadu-Gadu and Live Journal Talk. Its really skinnable and customizable. Pick out from tons of icons, like Yoda, or Mario, choose your emoticon sets, chat windows preferences, it supports Growl so you get on-screen notifications when you get messages, it checks your email for you. The only thing I would like is a nice solid “Quack” when it starts, but that could be added. Its worth checking out. Get rid of AIM, gTalk and MSN Messenger, and start taking Adium.

Ok, thats part 1 done. First 5 covered off. Hopefully that gives you some information about the apps. So check them out and if you like them, spread the word.

[digg=http://digg.com/apple/Great_Mac_Apps_Another_list]Thought I would do a list of various apps that I really like and later I will come back and talk a bit more about them.

1.Quicksilver -  GTD must have, and all round great app, even as a Spotlight replacement
2. Camino - Open source Web browser, Cocoa app so bit better than Firefox. I’m using it right now
3. Firefox - because Wordpress doesn’t play so well with Safari
4. VLC - best video player I found. Plays practically everything ever made. Ever.
5. Adium - Good multi-chat program, gTalk, MSN, AOL, Jabber, others. Cute duck icon
6. Burn - Open source CD burning software
7. AppDelete - Get rid of all those hiding bits of data for applications. Fast
8. Monolingual - Remove unwanted language packs. Free up tons of space (I gained 1.63Gb! Others report up to 4Gb)
9. Smultron - good little coding app. Strawberry logo too!
10. Transmission - Torrent app. Handy, easy to use.
11. Growl - onscreen notifications from many apps (Camino, Transmission, Adium, Skype, iStumbler, Cyberduck
12. Flip4Mac - WMV plugin for Mac. Never touch WMP again!
13. MenuMeters - system resource monitoring for the menu bar
14. Sidetrack - Scrolling for older laptops.
15. MAMP - Test out a local version of your website, with mySQL, PHP, and much more
16. GimmeSomeTune - iTunes plugin. Shows Growl notifications for songs, and gets lyrics
17. Missing Sync for Windows - sync your Windows Mobile device if you have one (I have a PDA for TomTom)
18. Democracy - subscribe to RSS feeds, video feeds, torrent feeds, automatically downloads recent
19. Microsoft Office - because sometimes you need to accommodate Windows users. And Apple has no spreadsheet program. Yet

Wow, that list was longer than I planned. I might have to do a few posts to cover all those off. I’ll update this later with links.

Updated: Thought of another one
20. Onxy - Great app for cleaning cache’s, temp files and folders, and keeping things working smoothly

I’m afraid its true. The Douglas Furs have split up. You can now find a dedicated blog to just the Douglas Furs at http://douglasfurs.wordpress.com

So if you don’t care about my crap posts, pop over to there and have a read.