Category Archives: Internet

Google Gears enabled Sites.

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Google GearsRecently I’ve been enabling Google Gears on sites that support it, most notably I’ve enabled it on the WordPress backend of this site which means appears to fix some loading issues I had when I had a dodgy internet connection.

I’ve also enabled it on my Gmail account where its improved my email experience a lot. My biggest problem was when SAIX is having international connection issues which is when Gmail tended to get a little flake-y which is a problem as I use it as my primary email client. I’ve decided to not install Google Gears in Firefox but rather switch to running Chrome, Firefox is still my favourite browser but Chrome feels faster when running Gmail and I can easily pass it different proxy settings which is nice when I’m moving around from one client to another.

Next up… I’m busy enabling it on Google Docs, can’t wait to see how that goes.

Podcasts and Walking

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I try every morning to go for about an hour walk with my Fiance’, it helps wake me up for the day, gets the blood pumping and hopefully ease me into the whole exercising everyday thing.

I’ve found having something to listen to helps make the time go by quicker, I tried listening to the radio but I haven’t found a station that I like. They either play silly music I don’t like, behave a little stupid or start taking calls from random strangers who complain about stupid things.

I like music but I prefer it in the background while I’m doing something else to being the only thing I’m doing. This morning I decided to try something a little different and put a podcast on my cellphone (which is what I’ve been using to listen to the radio on.). I haven’t listened to any podcasts in a while so I wasn’t exactly sure what was out there and started looking around. I don’t want something to “heavy” as I’m half asleep at that time in the morning, its got to be something light hearted, funny and at the sametime interesting… ideally I would like to learn something new while going for a walk.

So I tried a Stack Overflow podcast with Geoff Atwood and Joel Spolsky and it was actually very good, I’m not sure if I actually learnt anything but it was entertaining the recording quality was very good and time did fly by. I know in the past I used to listen to LUG Radio which I enjoyed too. If my morning commute to work was longer (its currently less the 5 minutes) I would listen to more podcasts.

If you know of any good podcasts leave a comment and I’ll go look it up.

Proxy servers in Google Chrome

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Network Access MessageAt the office we have a weird Windows 2003 install running the ISA Firewall/Proxy which sits between us and the outside world, for some as yet unknown reason we get brown “Network Access Message: The page cannot be displayed” error messages occasionally when visiting websites (like the example on the right.). I haven’t been able yet to find the cause, but it gets frustrating when some sites are inaccessible for no reason.

In order to get trouble free internet I installed a linux machine with a squid proxy, now the problem is that I don’t always want to use the squid proxy as it comes with its own internal network issues on our network.

After a bit of research I found that Google Chrome can be made to use a defined proxy by supplying a command line option. I created a new shortcut for Chrome and set the target too:

“C:\Users\Dale Nunns\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –proxy-server=192.168.0.20:3128

That makes it use my squid proxy (192.168.0.20:3128) when ever its started from that shortcut. Another nice option that I stumbled across awhile ago is to add “-incognito” to the end to start the browser in incognito mode.

Wine & Twitter

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wine-twitterTwitter is pretty weird, I follow a few people… people that I actually want to hear from or that mention things that interest me. For me Twitter isn’t a marketing tool or anything like that because at the moment I don’t have anything to really promote, for example? I hardly ever mention this site on Twitter because I’m not trying to drive tons of traffic to it. For me Twitter is a way to “catch up” with other people and find out what they’re reading, thinking about or doing.
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Bookmark All addon for Firefox

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I use Firefox alot, its open all day and by the end of the day I normally have between 20 and 40 tabs open. Often I would like to bookmark the tabs, especially when doing research on stuff, so that I can come back to it later but its often not important that I bookmark it with any kind of description a date is normally more than enough.

Up to now I’ve normally just hit CTRL+SHIFT+D (Bookmark All Tabs) and type in today’s date, this had worked but it is a little cumbersome and sometimes I mis-type the date.

A few days ago I set out to find a plugin that does this or find the info needed to write one, after alot of searching I found a add-on that did exactly what I wanted.

Here is the Addon page on Mozilla.org, it’s called “Bookmark All” and allows you to add a button to your bar that basically bookmarks all the currently open tabs under a folder (that you select) with today’s date and time.

Uploading Pictures to Stuff.za.net

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My new phone (Nokia N78) has the ability to upload pictures taken to Flickr, so this morning I created myself a flickr account, configured the phone and tried it out.

It’s pretty cool, I can take a photo with my phone and then select an option and upload it straight away to Flickr. I’ve also found that Flickr can link to this blog, so now I can take a picture, select an option… type a short message and presto the image taken is uploaded to Stuff.za.net. It’s actually pretty cool, and it seems to work well. I must admit that I’m now slightly tempted to get Flickr Pro account, although I think I’ll wait a bit and see how much I use it first.

BTW you can see an example of all this wizardry with the OMFG post.

Generating PDF’s using Javascript

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Stumbled across this code to generate PDF’s clientside using Javascript.

It works, although it didn’t work in Firefox 3 correctly, perfectly in Google Chrome though. The idea is pretty awesome though, I wonder what other formats could be created this way… Going to keep an eye on this project and see how it develops, could be useful perhaps for a site where server side PDF generation is not available or not possible?

Google Image Search – Similar Images

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If you visit Google Labs often, then you’ve probably seen the new Similar Images Image Search entry.

I use Google Image Search alot, normally to find an image of something quickly or to see what a person, car, item etc looks like. The new Similar Image search is a step in the right direction, although there are alot of things they could do to improve it.

I would love to find out if they’re comparing the images or if they’re comparing the surrounding META data? Or is it a combination of both? I don’t think its based purely on the image, because occasionally a false positive shows up that doesn’t match the other images at all.

The similar image search is a step in the right direction, but I think they could improve the image search function alot more. It would be cool if I could upload my own image for them to search for, but of course the problem with that is if they’re using the surrounding meta data the uploaded image wouldn’t have that.