#“Cloud Kids”

The kids use one of my old PCs to access all their favourite sites and print stuff off on a 10 year old Epson Inkjet. It’s a solid setup and they are happy with it. However, as it was a self-build, it never had a Windows licence and actually runs Ubuntu Linux.

I’ve always found it interesting that the kids could switch from XP to Windows 7 to Ubuntu on different PCs and laptops without comment. The reason of course is that they spend their entire time in the web browser. The old days of installing “educational software” from CD are long gone. It’s YouTube, Wikipedia, Nick Jr, Disney Playhouse, Webkinz etc etc. Everyone from the 3 y/o to the 10 y/o has that stuff mastered.

However I find myself in one-time-only agreement with Steve Jobs on a particular topic and that’s Flash. Either Adobe figures out how to improve its performance by 10x and reduce it’s resource hit by a similar amount or it’ll go the way of Wordperfect within two years.

Flash is a general resource pig on Windows but it renders Linux boxes unusable. Open three browser tabs on sites that have Flash-heavy ads and watch your dual-core machine grind to a halt.

As a matter of principle I don’t disable ads in my browser. People have to make a living and that’s how many of them do. But I’m afraid, as of last week, I have turned on Adblock Plus on my Linux boxes. The results are astounding. Suddenly my browser is usable again. I can race through Google Reader and open 100 tabs with minimal slowdown. But on principle, I will tweak the filters soon to only block Flash ads and let through the text and image based ones.

An hour ago I did the same on the kids’ Linux box. Again, an incredible change. All those Flash-riddled sites are now fairly usable with the Flash ads turned off and the CPU dedicated to playing the game(s) on the sites.

So Adobe is now responsible for reducing their customers’ revenue by forcing people to disable functionality.

I think we are going to see a fast and massive switchover from Flash for ads and kids’ sites to HTML5+h.264 in the coming 12 months with that switchover led by The Steve. I’m really not sure how Adobe can prevent it except through FUD or a complete screwup of cross-browser cross-platform compatibility in HTML5.

#“That Lidl car Stereo I mentioned”

#“The Iron Giant”

A new Top Parenting Tip, keep your kids up until 9pm watching The Iron Giant and they’ll all sleep until 8.30am the following morning.

Until last night I had only ever seen the start and near the end of movie so had thought it was a dark ponderous but meaningful piece by the director of one of my all-time favourite movies, The Incredibles. I was totally wrong. It’s light, funny, interesting and kept 6 of us (aged 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 41) riveted to the screen for an hour and a half.

They didn’t even mind that the movie was “old-fashioned” (1999) and set in the “olden-days” (1957).

It’s a rare movie that has something for every age with Toy Story being the exemplar of that. This achieves the same feat and manages to shoe-horn in a message there too.

LouderVoice Tags: review, rating=5, lv:group=entertainment, movie, film, classic, the+iron+giant, animation

#“Podcast-listening car-driving heaven, with Android”

I drove yesterday from Bandon->Lurgan->Bandon. Left at 8am, back at 10pm. The entire time I was entertained by many of my regular podcast chums:

• BBC Radio 4 - Material World
• BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time
• BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives
• BBC Radio 4 - Start The Week
• BBC Radio 5 Live - Kermode and Mayo Movie Reviews @wittertainment
• Irish Times Business Podcast
• TWiT - This Week in Tech
• TWiG - This Week in Google

And my first ever BBC Radio 4 Gardener’s Question Time. Shockingly entertaining. Or I’m getting really old.

But the tech side of it is interesting too. I run a HTC G1 Android phone with the @cyanogen community firmware. This makes it fast and far more powerful/useful than the official software.

I use the BeyondPod podcasting app (you can buy off-Market so it works in Ireland too) to grab the podcasts. Its killer feature is the scheduler. Every night it grabs the latest episodes of all my subscribed podcasts over Wifi or 3G. This is critical for the BBC podcasts as they only list the most recent show and only for a week. So if you use an iPhone and forget to sync, you miss episodes. Not me :-)

In 2008 I replaced the dying RDS 6000 car stereo with one from Lidl. Initially I listened to podcasts using USB thumbdrives or SDcards. Then I switched to using the Aux-in connected to my N95-8GB phone, then the same to my G1. The flaw with the latter ones is that if you charge the phones via the cigarette lighter and listen to audio at the same time, you get horrendous electrical noise on the audio.

My latest iteration is the best of the lot. The Lidl car stereo has A2DP stereo bluetooth. I always thought it was just for hands-free calling. But recently I accidentally paired the G1 to it when I was trying to pair a headset. Suddenly the playing podcast switched from the wired connection to bluetooth! I was amazed and, even better, I could happily charge with none of the car electrical noise going over the bluetooth (obviously).

Only downside? The bluetooth stack in the G1 is terribly buggy. if you pair both the phone-features and the media-features, then your audio will cut out every 10 seconds as the phone bit interferes with the media bit. So don’t pair the phone bit, just media. Not sure if this is specific to the G1 or it’s on bluetooth on Android in general.

This really is a fantastic podcast listening setup. Any time I need to drive anywhere, I just grab the G1 which I know is fully up to date, get into the car, start playing the podcast I want and it comes out over the car speakers.

#“How to cancel your O2 Ireland Mobile Broadband”

I assume there is some validation of this but anyhow, you just email your account details and the phone number of your dongle/BB-SIM to broadband.disconnections@o2.com

Let’s see if it works now :-)

#“Save a few bob on Sky TV”

I know we are early adopters/geeks but I think what we are doing with media consumption is a reflection of what will happen in the mainstream in the next two years.

Like many people we have been long signed-up to some stupid rip-off Sky package involving movies, multi-room and Sky+. it was costing north of 75 a month. We have slowly come to the realisation that we consume more and more content via the web with a simultaneous collapse in "normal" TV watching. I'd be surprised if I watch more than 2 hours a month of Irish TV but I still watch plenty of time-delayed BBC1/BBC2/Channel4 via Sky+. We haven't watched any I/UTV channels in over two years. We've maybe watched one movie a month on SkyMovies and haven't done BoxOffice in years (mainly because I disconnected the phone line to the box)

But I do love my US TV and look forward to Boxee some day signing global content deals with all the networks to distribute their programming on a PPV basis worldwide. Total disintermediation of the distributors and the TV stations who buy their content. I don't want my MTV, I want my IPTV. And I want it now. I want to see a list of House, Men of A Certain Age, Modern family etc etc etc on my Boxee box. Tick "Subscribe" beside each one and have them downloaded and paid-for within an hour of US TV broadcast. Hulu the way it should be. Except it's Boxee.

In preparation for this, I just rang Sky and dumped everything except standard programming like BBC and the Kids package. So Kids + Multi-room (for the kids) + SkyHD for 54 a month. New hardware but less dosh out every month. Result. And if the HD channels turn out to be a waste of time, we'll drop that fee too.

Rupert should start getting very very worried. One of these days he is going to wake up in Shady Pines with no-one paying for his newspapers' online content and only some die-hard sports subscribers on Sky.

#“Our Wordpress plugin list”

Our LouderVoice Business site runs on Wordpress. What started as a simple (albeit award-winning!) information site has now become a full blown CMS with access controls and tons of customisation. If you are thinking of doing similar, here is a list of the main plugins we are currently using:

• Akismet - Anti-spam
• Contact Form 7 - Simple Contact Forms
• Contact Form 7 widget - Contact Forms in your sidebar
• Custom Permalinks - Create your own URLs
• Deactivate Visual Editor - Deactivate the visual editor on specific pages/posts
• Disable wptexturize - Disable Wordpress screwing with your content
• FAQ-Tastic - Build FAQs
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - For RSS
• Google XML Sitemaps - Does what it says on the tin
• Live Comment Preview - Ditto
• My Page Order - Arange your page menus in the order you want them
• Search Everything - Search more than page/post content
• Subscribe To Comments - Keeps readers updated
• User Access Manager - Access Control to files/pages
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Beats the built-in WP one hands-down
• WordPress Database Backup - Set it on a cron job
• WordPress Exploit Scanner - Great tool by @donncha
• WP-Cycle - Image Gallery for sidebar
• WP Security Scan - Does what it says on the tin
• WP Super Cache - Speed up your site by 4 bajillion times. Again by @donncha

#“Symbian Users Can Now Check-In On Foursquare With Waze | Symbian-Guru.com”

#“What if your reseller went away?”

#“Commenting on Engadget: a human’s guide – Engadget”

via engadget.com

This should be mandatory reading for anyone even considering leaving a comment anywhere online.

In fact it should be force fed to all the teenage commentards on YouTube who are particularly socially challenged.