artiss.blog

Category: Life

Random thoughts on life

  • I Need A Hero.. a day earlier

    My plan WAS to order the Hero tomorrow for delivery on Friday at work. However, I had a nagging feeling that I should check this assumption first.

    And I was right to – T-Mobile will only deliver to your home address.

    A quick phone call revealed that they delivery next day before 1am if they receive the order before 16:45 (their website said that it’s a 2 day delivery). At this point it was 16:40 and I realised my wife would be home until 1am tomorrow but not on Friday. You’ve never seen an order rushed so much before (but I did remember to use Quidco to get £35 back!)!

    So, instead of there now being 2 days remaining, it’s now 1.

    But, can I resist getting home tomorrow and not using it (the reason for this is because, I believe, the Hero wants to connect you, via a non-secure Wi-fi connection, to register your user details as soon as you start using it. I can do that at work but not at home. Well, not without turning off encryption temporarily.)?

  • 3 days to go…

    Anybody who follows me on Twitter (or Facebook) will know that I’ve been counting down since yesterday. Today is 3 days to go.

    To what?

    Yes, it’s finally come around. My contract with Carphone Warehouse and O2 has been cancelled and expires in a couple of weeks – time to get a new one. And the HTC Hero it will be. Or, rather, the G2 Touch, which is T-Mobiles name for it.

    T-Mobile it is simply because of the cost. Where everybody else is insisting on £35 a month for a reasonable number of minutes and text (and unlimited data) for 24 months, T-Mobile is offering it at £27.50 for 18 months. In all cases, the phone is free. With a £35 Quidco cashback, that equates to £460 over the contract period. This compares to £680 at Vodafone or Orange and £760 with 3.

    On top of this, I also need to consider selling my Nokia. When doing something like this I’d recommend using the MobileValuer site which can compare the various companies that pay cashback for them. At the moment my N95 is worth £122.51. Again, factor in cashback from Quidco and the final tally is £122.51. Take that off my contract and my bill over the next 18 months is £337.49. Not bad.

    Now I’m trawling through the huge number of sites that recommend Android apps to see what I’d like to install – I plan to make a lot more use of this phone than my N95, which I didn’t really get on with. It’s very confusing though, with many people recommending different apps – trying them together I suspect is going to be the best way.

    Naturally, expect to see my own lists sometime soon. If you have any of your own that you’d like to recommend, then please let me know.

  • How to get incompatible Firefox add-ons to work

    Firefox 3.6 has been released and that means, once again, that you might find some of your add-ons don’t work. Now, this isn’t Firefox just wanting to cause problems for us all, but for genuine security and stability reasons.

    None-the-less, if you need to get an add-on working, then there is a (relatively) simple way to do it.

    • Download the .XPI add-on file
    • Change the file extension from .XPI to .ZIP (because that is what they really are)
    • Double click the .ZIP and you should see a file called install.rdf
    • Drag this file out of the zip, to your folder or desktop
    • Open the .RDF file with Notepad
    • Find the line that contains maxVersion and change the 3.5 to the current version of Firefox
    • Save and close the .RDF
    • Drag the edited file back into the .ZIP
    • Close the .ZIP and rename it back to .XPI
    • Double click the .XPI and it should offer to install to Firefox

  • Daily Fail

    It’s easy to poke fun at the Daily Mail. And just as easy to get angry at it.

    It’s for these reasons that I usually leave it up to many other blogs to pick over its rotting carcass and shriek hysterically at it. One such blog highlighted one of those “light” show business pieces where they were, well, insulting the ex-cast of Friends by pointing out the fact that they’d aged.

    After coming across the original Daily Mail article today something in particular took my notice…

    Before signing up last year to another sitcom called Cougar Town, things had become so bad careerwise that Miss Cox, who played Monica Geller, applied for a licence to work as an estate agent.

    Was it that bad? Well, seconds later I had my answer courtesy of Wikipedia… she was playing a “real estate” agent in the aforementioned sitcom. Coincidence? I’m guessing not. Although no word as to whether the Mail have somehow mixed her fictional and real life characters or whether she applied for a licence so that she could “try” the job that she was acting out. Indeed it was the fact that most actors do the latter that made me look it up.

    Who’d have thought that the Mail wouldn’t have taken a few seconds out from their busy schedule of bigotry to check it out for themselves?

  • Another satisfied customer!

    After a mild rant back in December about some of the support queries I get (with regard to my WordPress plugins), I’m happy to say that I’ve had the pleasure to work with someone who has actually been helpful, responsive and, more importantly, replied to his emails 😉

    A Dutch gentleman named Bas de Meijer reported a couple of problems via a comment on one of my plugin pages. One I was able to resolve quite quickly and update the relevant plugin, the other was, erm, more difficult to pin down. This was related to another plugin and turned out to be due to me using a PHP command that didn’t work in PHP 4 (which he was using). As far as I know this command is the only one of this type that I’d used and it was a simple job to modify it to something else and get the compatibility. However, to actually work out what it was I had to send Bas a number of different versions of my plugin, each with more and more debug output being added.

    The result was the two plugin releases announced last night – indeed, even adding Technorati to Simple Social Bookmarks was his idea. Thanks Bas. But, then again, he seemed to enjoy the experience just as much….

    Thanks again for the great job you have done. Not only by designing the plugin, but also by spending a lot of time to debug it with me. It is much easier to say ‘it should work, so you must be doing something right’ or ‘well, upgrade your system’. But you really wanted to make it work. That suites you.

    It was a pleasure helping you. I know from myself that I rather would solve the problem, than to switch to something else.

    So come on, those who have a problem, report it, but never respond back to me – I don’t bite!