Netflix vs Lovefilm

May 13, 2013 | Comment

I can’t remember the last time that I bought a DVD having moved over to streaming a while ago so I thought I would take a look at the two biggest services in the UK to compare their content. I decided not to look at streaming quality, price or any factor other than catalogue.

I order to be a little bit objective I decided to look for the top films of 2010 and 2011 as chosen by Total Film Magazine. The results are shown in the table below.

As you can see, in this very small sample, there was no … Read the rest

Is Google Keep a Keeper?

March 22, 2013 | Comment

20130381_170369-CapturFiles

So Google have released a new product roughly one week after axing a raft of others including Google Reader, much to the angst of the general tech public.

Google Keep is a note taking application allowing you to keep important information in your drive for searching and reviewing at a later date.

It is similar in thought to Evernote but without any of the usefulness of it. As it says in the image above Google Keep is just a bit too simplistic right now. All you can do is create a note with a title and some text content and … Read the rest

Twitter Patent = Death of App.Net?

March 21, 2013 | Comment

So Twitter have finally been granted a patent for, well, Twitter. They applied for the patent in 2007 and it has only just been granted given that these things take a while to work their way through the system.

From what I understand the patent is pretty widely worded and could be interpreted as many things and cover all multitude of sins, however, if it covered things that look like Twitter then APP.NET should be worried.

APP.NET looks and feels like Twitter and the only major difference is that it is a paid service with a limited free account also … Read the rest

Documenting MySQL Tables in MediaWiki

March 11, 2013 | Comment

The last few companies that I have worked for we have setup an internal wiki that everyone uses to hold information about all aspects of the business including, of course, the technical team. We use MediaWiki for this mainly because it is easy to setup and is also familiar to users through Wikipedia.

One area that we try and document is the database structure. Having this on hand and searchable in the wiki allows new employees to quickly get to grips with it and makes us all more productive.

The issue is that creating the MediaWiki tables by hand is … Read the rest

Recognising the Opportunity: I Could Have Written WordPress

March 5, 2013 | Comment

Over the last few weeks I have been moving the content from one of my other sites, The Williams Database, to WordPress. This means that all my sites are now running on what I consider to be the premier content management system but if I had acted differently a few years ago that might have not been the case.

In 1996 I launched a fan site to the Williams formula one team. In those days there wasn’t much of an internet to speak of, connection speeds were slow and access was costly but it was new and great fun. … Read the rest

Using Google Docs to View PSD files

February 18, 2013 | 3 comments

Spotted this on Twitter today and thought it was a great tip for those, like myself, that occasionally get sent Photoshop images for review but don’t have Adobe’s software to open the file.

It would appear that Google Drive has the ability to read and display PSD images along with the more standard office documents.

More details from Digital Inspiration.… Read the rest

Google Authenticator Bug

February 1, 2013 | 1 comment

I am a big fan of Google’s Autheticator app which adds 2-factor authentication to a number of popular apps including Dropbox, WordPress, LastPass and, of course, Google accounts.

Since my mother-in-law’s GMail account was compromised and she wasn’t able to recover it I have considered the use of 2-factor authentication as mandatory rather than a nicety.

What this means in practice is that in order to access your account you need something that you know (the password) and something that you have (your phone). This should considerably increase your online security as if anyone does get your password they still … Read the rest

Embedding docs

January 17, 2013 | Comment

In my previous post I included a viewer that allowed you to page through PDF file. This used the Google Drive (nee Docs) Viewer.

You may already be familiar with this for viewing attachments in GMail and documents in Google Drive but you can also access it directly using the snippet of code shown below:


<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8p1gAHHCMytS3ZrazdoRWVZVmc/preview" width="640" height="480"></iframe>

According to the documentation Google Drive viewer allows you to preview over 16 different file types, listed below:

Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP)
Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV)
Text files (.TXT)
Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML,

… Read the rest

Roll your own Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi

January 7, 2013 | Comment

Following the success of hooking up my Raspberry Pi to my BT Home Hub the next step was to do something useful with it.

I am a very active user of cloud services, particularly Dropbox and Google Drive. Both work well but in order to gain additional space you have to pay but what if you could run your own service and add as much storage as you liked? Enter ownCloud a Dropbox lookalike that you run on your own server.

In my case the server is my Raspberry Pi and a 500gb harddrive attached providing the storage and it … Read the rest

Time to re-evaluate Flickr

December 18, 2012 | Comment

The blogsphere is all abuzz with Instagram’s proposed change of terms of service from the middle of next month which some have already dubbed “Instagram’s suicide note”. Basically the changes give Instagram (or parent Facebook) to sell your pictures of which you get no portion of that sale or any choice in the matter.

You can read a good summary of the situation over at c|net but I am already considering whether I want someone else to have such control over work that I produce and I am thinking that I don’t. I still have a Flickr account that I … Read the rest