Disney bought LucasFilm did they? They’ll ruin Star Wars will they? Doubt that. Even fans consider the prequels a low point and I’ve never been a fan of the series myself so this Star Wars Titanic parody made me chuckle.
SMBC posted this on the facebook page: “Worrying that Disney will ruin Star Wars is like worrying that a second iceberg will dive down to hit the Titanic.”
Star Trek all the way. Fight! (via)
I’m a big fan of Swype, an Android keyboard that allows you to swype your finger across the screen to type so when I read on Android Police that Android 4.2 would have a similar feature, and you could install it on a pre-4.2 phone I jumped at the chance.
It’s very similar to Swype, picking a word is better and worse. It’s better because it doesn’t block the text window like Swype would on long messages, but it’s not as good at spacing or even guessing the right word sometimes. That latter complaint may improve with time if it learns how I type.
It works fine on my Samsung Galaxy S 2 and didn’t need root access to install. There are download links and instructions on the post above.
While on the subject of Android bits and bobs, go look for SwipePad too. It runs in the background and if you swype your finger in from a designated corner or edge of the screen a menu pops up allowing you to run a new app or widget. Hat tip to the commenters on this post.
I’m standing at my desk again, and also have a use for my physical media and books again. You won’t prop up a monitor on top of two dozen smartphones..
Killing Floor joined the Steam Workshop recently and one of the items added there is a Portal gun that fires real portals. I’ve subscribed to it, must give it a go later!
Since early September Facebook has been spamming me by text message. Each message comes from “FACEBOOK”, but I don’t have them in my phone contacts. By ringing them I found out the SMS message came from 32232665, apparently a number they use in many countries. The call never connected so I don’t know if there’s a human at the other end.
The first message read
Over 150 million people have used the Facebook friend finder. Find the people you care about: http://fb.me/….
while the following three messages are like the one pictured above:
There are 9 people you may know on Facebook. Send them friend requests: http://fb.me/…
I was travelling when I received most of the other ones. I’m sure I received at least 1 of them while in Heathrow. I don’t have the Facebook app on my phone, but I had created a test Facebook account. It was many months ago and I had forgotten I added my phone number there to try out their sms integration.
If I had noticed those settings I guessed I wouldn’t be contacted. After all, the account wasn’t under my name and I had used a x+yyyy@gmail.com account to signup so people wouldn’t find it by searching for that my email addresses.
Lastly, any SMS communication to someone in Ireland has to be accompanied by instructions for stopping them. Also go read A Consumer Guide to Dealing with Unsolicited Direct Marketing by the Data Commissioner:
you were given a simple cost-free means of refusing the use of your contact details for direct marketing purposes at the time your details were initially collected, and where you did not initially refuse the use of those details, you are given a similar option at the time of each subsequent communication.
The creepy thing about Facebook is that they have matched that account with my main account. Maybe it’s because I may have logged into it with a browser I used for my main one, or because of the gmail address I used. I get regular emails from them saying, “John, you have more friends on Facebook than you think…” or “Do you know X, Y, Z?” where x, y and z are people on my friend’s list. It’s really, really unsettling, even when I have a notion of how they do it.
So, should I make a complaint to the Irish Data Commissioner? Maybe they can convince Facebook to add STOP instructions to their SMS texts.
Most of the time I’ll ignore the crazy and stupid comments that appear on Youtube but while listening to Bill Nye on this video I glanced at the comments.
Oh no. It’s true. Youtube makes you stupid.
As part of the Potato Sack promotion last year a number of indie games received updates featuring content from Valve games. I didn’t take much notice of them at the time but I just found out that The Wonderful End of the World got a secret level with companion cubes! Love the cover of the similarly named Portal song!
I’m a big fan of Xchat (Windows version), an IRC client I’ve used for over a decade in Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Here’s some tricks that you might find useful if you use IRC:
Hide the join/part/quit messages. If your IRC channel is busy you’ll know how annoying these are. The xkcd wiki has instructions for other IRC clients.
All channels: /set irc_conf_mode on
One channel: Right click on a channel, “Settings->Hide join/part messages” (src)
Hide the “UserX is known as UserY” messages. Users have scripts or use ZNC that will rename themselves when they go away or disconnect from the proxy. On a busy channel this can generate a huge amount of text.
Settings > advanced > text events
highlight “change nick”
in text box below, highlight that text and delete
press enter
click “ok” (src)
Many more tips here of course but I think the first tip above is the most useful, at least for me!
UPDATE! I have just updated the plugin version number to 1.2. Thanks to everyone who tested it!
A new version of WP Super Cache is almost out and here are the changes in this full page caching plugin for WordPress.
OH! Hang on. Almost out? Yeah. I’m going to release it tomorrow but I would love a couple of hardy folks to try it first. People on the forums have been using the development version for several weeks without incident but I would really appreciate it if a few more tried it before the general public gets it. You know what to do, I don’t need to explain. Here’s wp-super-cache.zip. This is the version running on this very site right now and it’s very stable. Go at it! I’ll update this post in the morning, UTC. Thanks.
So, those changes eh?
If you have problems the first place to look should be the forums (or try here too where things lived for a long time). Chances are someone else had the same issue before you and maybe they fixed it.
