I had a couple of business letters to post recently, so I thought I’d have a go with the Royal Mail’s online postage service. Several reasons really: I like trying out innovations I often run out of stamps I thought it’d look a bit more ‘professional’ for business invoices. I’d not yet got around to printing envelopes on my [...]
One of the perks of wrenching Techie Musings over to wordpress was that the spammers suddenly found themselves firing blanks. I watch the access_log as they fruitlessly POST to the old MovableType installation, which I’ve replaced in all the key places with a simple file which returns a 200 success status and little else. Unfortunately though [...]
I’m shocked to read that a lecturer at Universitat Politècnica de València has been fired for trying to speak about, and defend, P2p networks (See also /. and boingboing). There’s an internet brouhaha developing around this that I’m sure will garner a lot more attention to the university in question, and the recording industry tactics in [...]
BBC Backstage has launched, which enables people to make use of BBC content in innovative ways via their newly published API’s. There are some excellent ideas already. That the BBC is taking such a step is remarkable, and I’m sure it’ll result in even better uses for the already world-leading content they make available. (via [...]
It’s really a point of principle, rather than anything else. I have to fork out a chunk of money each year for hosting leyton.org, and part of that is to cover the bandwidth that is used. Whilst XCalibre are cheap for the UK, in the grand scheme of things I’m seeing better offers out there, [...]
Puzzling. Crap even. Hotmail that is. It treats any mail from gmail.com as spam by default, resulting in lost e-mail and frustration all around. The story is as follows: A friend is currently travelling and working in Germany. Said chap has a gmail account, and has used it to stay in touch with family and friends [...]
I’ve previously waxed lyrically about Zen Internet, but there’s news out today that an employee has been arrested for using stolen credit cards. I’m not about to scream and shout and cancel my connection: I’ve had such a great experience with Zen (including the 2Mbs service I’m currently using). Plus it sounds very much like a [...]
It worries me immensely that I find I’m able to do this on numerous occasions. I can possibly read your e-mail because your ISP has installed a poor piece of software. I’m not talking about hotmail, yahoo or the other ‘big boys’. No: They’ve got a bit more sense. I’m talking about the smaller ISP’s who [...]
There’s an interview with a link spammer over at The Register which will make for interesting reading for anybody who runs a website with a “Comment” function. With 2876 comments blocked and 2093 held for moderation (and only about 10 real comments) since I upgraded to MT 3.15 in January, it might give non-weblogger readers an [...]
Slashdot officially jumps the shark
I’ve been getting fed up with /. for a while now, but today it officially “Jumped the Shark“. They posted a made up quote from Linus Torvalds that was used to illustrate a point in an article at The Register. A point that was deliberately provocative and hard to believe, to draw attention to some [...]