My forray into Podcasting

I’ve recently been given the opportunity to participate in one of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. The Global Geek Podcast is currently without a Mac expert, so I’ve volunteered to step in and provide some content on a regular, or irregular basis (depending if they like me!).

My first segment will appear (I think) on episode #56 of the GGP due out next Monday. It’s been fun trying to test out my limited Garage Band knowledge for something useful!

If you’re interested, tune into the GGP this week. Dave & Tim always have lots of great information on the latest sites, services, tools and news from around the ‘net.

Moving In…

Well, I’ve finally made the switch and moved the blog over to its new home at kdmurray.net. The reasons for the switch are mostly personal, and partly practical. Suffice to say I like the new name better, and it’s a much shorter URL.

Please enjoy the new site, let me know what you think, and don’t mind the dust as the tweaking continues over the next while.

For those of you subscribing subscribing to the blog, please use the Feedburner feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kdmurray as it will insulate you against silly little things like my changing the domain name.

Nifty Plugin Manager for WordPress – Pluginstaller

In developing the new site (more info soon I promise!) I’ve been scouring the ‘net for the best and brightest of plugins for WordPress to not only improve the site and content, but to make my life easier.

Enter Pluginstaller.

This WordPress plugin created by Henning Shaefer revamps the Plugin screen in the admin panel and provides a method for downloading, updating and activating plugins.

In my opinion, the two features which make Pluginstaller so effective are:

It’s ability to download and install a plugin from it’s original source
The re-organization of the plugin screen, separating the activated, and inactive plugins.

This was one of the first plugins I added to the new site. Definitely going into the WordPress arsenal for the other projects coming up this summer.

ISS Gets a New Set of Wings

I’ve been meaning to post this one up for a couple of weeks now, its a shot of the International Space Station taken from the Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis on STS-117. It’s a great shot of the station which looks much more symmetrical now that it has a second set of solar panels providing additional power for all of its modules.

Download Full Size (1.9 MB)

Found the original image on the APOD website for June 25th. You can read more about the photo in their article.

In addition, while poking around the Internet I found some amazing shots taken by Tom over on CollectSpace. These were taken from his backyard using a telescope. Quite remarkable.

Enjoy!

Dubious Milestone: Spam 10K

Just the other day, I noticed that my Akismet Spam filter for the blog had blocked it’s 10,000th Spam comment. That’s a lotta spam.

It’s amazing to me how much Internet bandwidth must be consumed by spam-bots posting to blogs and forums. The official Akismet website hosts a segment they call the Spam Zeitgeist. I’ve included a screenshot of the stats as they are at the time of this post. Currently 94% of all comments processed by Akismet-enabled blogs are spam. That’s just wrong.

Since the folks from Akismet started measuring the number of Spam their nifty little tool has caught back in March of 2006, it has eliminated over 2.03 Billion (yes, with a “B”) blog spam messages. That’s an average of over 135 Million every month!

Thank You Akismet for keeping us all safe!

MP3 Ringtones for your Treo 700wx

This is something that had been plaguing me for several months since I acquired my Palm Treo 700wx. Overall I’ve loved the device and found it absolutely indispensable. There are of course a few niggling details like the lack of a scroll wheel, but overall I’ve been really happy with it.

One thing I couldn’t figure out is why despite it’s ability to play MP3 files, there didn’t seem to be a way to set them as ringtones. With MIDI files, there was a context menu option to make this happen, not so with MP3s. So I scoured the Internet looking for something, anything which would give me a lead. After finding nothing, I was thoroughly prepared to give up.

Then it hit me, why not browse through the phone and see if anything twigs. After only a few minutes of searching, I stumbled upon the answer:

Under the folder: /My Device/Windows/ there is a folder called Rings.

Just place your favourite MP3 file in that folder, and it will show up on the ringtone list. *sigh* The tough ones always turn out to have the simplest of answers.

Finally I can sit back and smile when people call, and I can hear the sound of Transformers changing into their robot form.

Transformers – A Classic Updated

Last night was my opportunity to check out the new Transformers Movie. Being a child of the 80′s who grew up with Optimus and the boys I have been looking forward to this movie ever since I saw the first trailer over a year ago.

I’m not one that likes to have the classics messed with. So I was understandably apprehensive when I saw Optimus Prime was lowered and tricked out with lights and flames. Having seen the movie now, none of that bothered me. Admittedly, I’m not quite as big a fanatic as this guy.

The film is action packed and brings back oh so many memories of childhood. Many of the names are the same from the old series, though some of them have assumed new forms, Devastator and Frenzy to mention a couple.

Recommendation: Go See Transformers. It’s well worth the time and money to catch this movie on the big screen. This is destined to be one of the classic action/sci-fi movies of all time.

To tide you over until you can go, check out the revised trailer and theme song done by the boys of Black Lab. A masterful job.

MyOpenID and WordPress

I just found by chance today a new service, and a wordpress plugin for that service!

The service is MyOpenID.com, which provides a persistent login mechanism across websites which support the technology. This allows you to provide only your MyOpenID.com user account name to sign up for certain sites/services. This “single-sign-on” technology can greatly reduce the number of times you have to enter a password while surfing the net.

Add to that the fact that Dr. Nic Williams has recently blogged on his site about a plugin for WordPress which will allow you to accept sign-ups from MyOpenID.com users without them having to go through all the steps to create an account for your site. Great Find!

The MyOpenID.com service will allow you to have more than one “persona“. This means that if you have a separate set of websites you visit (say the Online Play-by-Post Star Trek role playing sites) you can easily keep those worlds separate while using the same ID.

This is definitely making the list of plugins for the new site!

Evaluating for a new site

I’ve recently decided to move the blog, and give it a bit of an overhaul. So I registered a new domain and over the last day or so have begun to plan out the new site.

There are a few things I would like the new site to do other than simply host the blog. I’d like to link in to my projects on SourceForge, my Flickr account and a few other things, but ideally I’d like to manage it all from WordPress. To that end I’ve downloaded nearly 30 new plugins to try out. Add that to the half-dozen or so that I find indispensable today and that’s quite the plugin’d WordPress instance.

It led me to wonder, what are your favourite WP plugins? What have you discovered that you just can’t live without?

I’ll post more here as I sort out how I’m going to migrate everything to the new site…

Canada Day mini history lesson

Well, here I am, 12 whole minutes late for my Canada Day post. It’s now July 2nd in most of the world, but I’d just like to take a second to reflect on the fact that it’s been 140 years since Canada was first declared a country under the British-North America act of the British Parliament back in 1867 creating the dominion of Canada.

Over the next 115 years several other iterations of the BNA act would be passed in the British House of Commons at the request of the Canadian Parliament. This continued until the Canada Act of 1982 which gave Canada sovereignty over its own constitution.

There’s a mini history lesson. It’s now 22 minutes into the 141st year.

kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: July 2007