Sky+
Posted: Fri 8 April, 2005 Filed under: Geeky 1 Comment »We’ve now got Sky+ installed in the house. (Well, if I’m honest we’ve had it since Tuesday, it’s just I haven’t really been around to play with it yet) We went for the Sky Multiroom malarkey, which is all very nice too – although I suspect that having a widescreen TV in the bedroom is a sign of either a) more money than sense, or b) two people who’ve moved in together having had seperate homes beforehand.
The other part of this though is that at the moment we’ve got both Sky+ and TiVo downstairs, which isn’t worth doing. So tonight TiVo will be moving upstairs. The problem is that it’s a bit big for the unit upon which the TV is residing, so I may need to find some strange way of doing it. I wonder if I can stand TiVo on it’s side? Hope so, because that’s the plan at the moment…
Bandwidth
Posted: Sat 2 April, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky Leave a comment »I waffled on a bit earlier in the month about the joys of bandwidth, and how my useage on d4d™ had suddenly shot up – which I then realised was primarily due to installing WordPress, as now everything goes through the site, rather than Blogger’s remote access joys.
During March, I ended up going just under 1Gb over my bandwidth limit. So that’ll cost me about £1.50. No great hassle, really.
Anyway, observant readers will have noticed that the other thing I’ve done is halved the number of posts on the front page of d4d™. Instead of 20 posts visible, there’s now “only” ten. The reason I’d had so many was because I couldn’t get the archives to display everything, but since installing the “Custom Posts per Page” WordPress plugin, that seems to have been fixed. So, back to a sane number of posts on the front page, and we’ll just have to see what that does for the bandwidth issues.
Helpful Messages
Posted: Wed 30 March, 2005 Filed under: Geeky Leave a comment »As some readers will know, I regularly despair of error messages, particularly those provided by Microsoft, who seem to have raised user-hostility to an artform when it comes to anything more geeky than standard Windows™ operating systems.
Today’s special message was “Internal Server Error. (0x0)”
Upon searching through shitloads of files and database tables, it turns out that “(0x0)” actually translates from Microsoftese into “I can’t find the database table that this page is referring to, therefore the selection you require from that table can’t be obtained. You’re shit out of luck, sunshine. Now go fix it like the good twonk you are.“. Or words to that effect.
As you can see, this is obvious and completely legible. Well, it is if you live in some weird alternate reality where shorthand is the lingua franca.
Twunting about
Posted: Wed 30 March, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky 4 Comments »You know, sometimes my bank just makes me despair. WAY back at the start of the year, their online banking system started coming up with a little news item about how they’d be opening the system to more browsers (this being the system that, until recently, still recommended you use IE 5 or Netscape 4.7, as it was a browser that’d been tested, and wouldn’t run on the more up to date, more secure Netscape 6/7 or IE 6) and making it all more accessible.
The dateline on that was February 28th of this year.
The news item is still there, only now it says :
Digital Banking
We’ll be making some improvements to our Digital Banking service in the near future. The service will be easier to use and more accessible for customers with disabilities
More information on these changes will be available soon.
So – a month late, and still waiting. Useless tossers.
Countdown Begins
Posted: Fri 25 March, 2005 Filed under: Geeky Leave a comment »In one month’s time both West Wing Season 5 on DVD and John Connolly’s new novel “The Black Angel are released.
Not that I’m counting the days or anything. Honest.
Reorganising
Posted: Thu 24 March, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 3 Comments »I’m not going to do it with most of the site, but thanks to the joys of CSS positioning etc., I’ve now made d4d™ into a “content first” page-load.
What this means – if you’re interested – is that rather than the standard way of loading the page in order (i.e. title first, then (in this case) the colour-switcher, then navigation, then all the content, it now loads in the order content, navigation, colour-switcher, title.
Having looked at that order, I may have to do a bit more twatting about – but that’s for later.
Anyway – this change means absolutely bollock all for most of the time. However, when you look at the site through a mobile phone, or a non-standard browser, it means you get to see the important stuff first. Always a good thing.
Firefox Update
Posted: Thu 24 March, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, News 1 Comment »I’m sure most people will know this anyway, but it’s worth pointing out that Firefox 1.02 is now available for download here. It fixes a couple of security issues and the like.