About Dale Nunns

I live in Cape Town, South Africa with my awesome wife and cute cat Domino. I'm a software developer, hardware hacker, some time cook, wannabe writer, chief bottle washer and tamer of dust bunnies.

A new way to stalk friends, family and ex-girlfriends.

FacebookSo do you sit and Google friends and family to see if they’re still alive, arrested or done anything worth knowing about? (If you don’t… then neither do I and all this is a thought exercise.)

Well now from the socially enabled, Web 2.0 world comes the greatest tool since the creation of the web and Google in helping find lost friends and family that you can “web stalk”… Facebook.

Hello My Name is Dale and I’m a Facebook Addict. (mmh wonder if there is a group on Facebook for Facebook addicts….)

Every day starts and ends with me checking Facebook to see if I have any new friends, who’s poked who and who uploaded what. I haven’t gotten to the point that I update my status every five minutes… yet. But I am running out of people to search for and add to my friends list. So if you know me, met me, or like me… and are single and female 🙂 add me to your friends list.

Google add’s face recognition

Rachael Leigh CookIf you spend alot of time online you’ve probably read about this

Google has added face reognition to Image Search. It’s not officially available yet but you can enable it with a change to to the search url.

What exactly does it do? If you do a search for say Rachael Leigh Cook you’ll see that you don’t only get pictures of people but other odd pictures too, but if you do the search again with the modified url you’ll see that you only get pictures of faces, and the pictures are mostly of her, that s pretty awesome. You can tell it worked because the number of items found have substanously decreased from 24,200 to 3,130.

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LOL Cats

LOL CatIf you’ve spent any time online lately you’ve probably noticed or seen something about LOL Cat’s. (Wikipedia Entry) Last night I found an awesome site with tons of pictures…

So if you’re mad about cats (and a few rabbits, hamsters, mice, dogs and other furry things.) its an awesome waste of time. Go to:

I Can Has Cheezburger?

K2 & WordPress 2.2

If you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and use the latest K2 theme you’ve probably noticed some oddities. On stuff.za.net only the header loaded, a temporary fix was go back to an older version of the K2 theme.

After a quick search I found the cause of the problem, its the Sidebar widgets. Turns out that the code that K2 use for the sidebar widgets and a new feature in WordPress 2.2 are slightly incompatible and this ends up breaking everything. But as usual someone else has got a fix, just took me a few minutes to find and apply.

You need to download and install this plugin which when activated disables K2’s widgets. As usual let me know if things appear broken or don’t work properly.

We need new words…

It must be because I have a sick mind or something but I just don’t think the word “probe” should be used in headlines. I was reading News24 and I saw the headline “UKZN probing two professors.” my first thought was… they’re doing what to them? Can’t they use a word like investigate? I think it should read “UKZN investigating two professors”, I realise its a few letters longer and probably doesn’t have the same shock value but it some how sounds a little “cleaner” doesn’t it?

And then there is my pet hate, on Facebook you have this thing that allows you to send a ping/message to someone on your friends list, but they’ve called it “Poke”. So what’s wrong with this? Take a look at the picture on the right, note that I can click “Poke Wilma!”, the problem with that? So imagine the discussion I had with her boyfriend, “Dale: Can I poke Wilma?”, “Boyfriend: YOU WANT TO DO WHAT?!?!?!”. I rest my case.

Guitar Hero II

Guitar Hero IISo I’ve been playing Frets on Fire occasionally on my PC and it’s pretty cool but it’s lacking “something”. Frets on Fire is a Open Source version of the game Guitar Hero. One of the biggest problems has been trying to use the keyboard as the guitar, it just doesn’t work.

So while wondering around the mall (I do this a lot it appears) I stumbled upon Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360, the cool thing about this is that the Xbox 360 uses plan USB controllers so “In theory” all I needed to do was buy the game+controller and get the controller to work on my PC. After purchasing it I’m not sure exactly what went through my mind, but on further wondering’s around the mall I noticed that Xbox 360’s were on special… and well yip you guessed it I became the proud new owner of a Xb0x 360.

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