It's been a while…

How time flies.  I could say that it doesn’t seem like nearly four months since my last post but, in fact, it does. It’s been a busy time and I’ve just not had much to say for the blog. Either that or there hasn’t been the time to gather  my thoughts sufficiently to say it coherently.   Feeble excuses, I know.

One thing of note has been the purchase of my first ukulele; a lovely little soprano model with a beautiful sound. As a total beginner, I probably sound pretty bad to anyone listing to me play, but I’m not downhearted. Just a few chords and I have enough for a fair attempt at a tune I’ve even started another blog for this (it’s new and the URL may change but I’ll keep a link in the side bar)

On the tech side, I’ve continued my adventures in Smalltalk, Processing, Ruby and Android, upgraded two PCs and moved them to Windows 7, with a dual-boot Ubuntu/Win7 set up on my laptop.  I’ve also entered the crazy world of Arduino in all its wonderful geekiness, which links very nicely back to Processing. More on these exploits in another post.

I have a Kindle, the the WiFi-only version (no 3G).  I’ve been a reader of eBooks since the late 1990s, beginning on a Palm 3c and then other Palm devices.  I always liked the concept, but not to the exclusion of real books: to have so many books at your fingertips.  The early Kindle and other readers were tempting, but I resisted. With the latest Kindle, the accolades it has received and the amazingly low cost, I finally bought one.  It is wonderful!  I’ll post more on this.

So, what has prompted this return from blogging limbo? Well, until recently the blog has been hosted in WordPress.com, their free and most excellent service. I paid a small annual fee to have blog.3dbloke.com redirected to the WordPress.com blog, and this came up for renewal. I’d been toying with the idea of moving to self-hosted WordPress.org blogging and already had a HostGator account (for other reasons) that I could use. Even so, time was short and it’s only now that, finally, I have the blog migrated and running with WordPress.org.

The move was pretty painless, although a little frustrating having to wait 7 days for the domain transfer.

I’m looking forward to exercising a little more creative freedom on the blog admin side: perhaps a personalized theme and some nifty plugins. I can return to the WordPress books that have been gathering dust for the past several months.

Bye for now.

 

Time to Drop the "Two Thousand"

Ten years ago, in the run up to the New Year of 2000, I had to accept that I was one of a tiny minority preferring to call the new year “Twenty Hundred“.  The news media, in particular, seemed always to refer to it as “the Year Two Thousand“.

One hundred years earlier, the year was commonly and very naturally referred to as “Nineteen Hundred“, so why not “Twenty Hundred“?

 

HTC official: Hero to get Android Eclair "early next year"

If, like me,  you’re waiting for Android 2.0 or 2.1 to hit your HTC Hero, you may be interested in this tweet from HTC, posted yesterday, 11 December:

 

OpenDNS: part of my "safe web" toolkit

Anyone with a home computer attached to the internet will have antivirus and web security software installed.  This generally does a good job and includes “black listing” features for undesirable web sites, as well as parental control settings.  Until recently, I felt that was enough.

 

Hassle-free control of your child's computer time

If you have kids, particularly teens, you know the scenario.  Your child just has to go on the computer.  It’ll only be for an hour.  Two hours later and she is still on-line, and can’t stop now because she’s in the middle of a quest with three other players, and, and…