At Home with John and Debbie

… and Sandy reminds me about Twitter.
Twitter is a peculiarly simple thing. If you ignore the technology, it’s basically micro-blogging. That is, it lets you publish a short piece of text, which gets a timestamp, and is broadcast for anyone to see. And that’s pretty much it. An individual entry is known as a […]

I mean who wouldn’t. Look at that cheeky ‘hot secretary’ smile. The saucy bob; the perfectly curled eyelashes, and that pencil behind the ear denoting efficiency. Hubba!
Sandy, at IWantSandy.com is a ‘virtual personal assistant’. Really, ’she’ is a cross between ‘Eliza’ the old and unconvincing AI conversation program, and an online calendar, contact list […]

There’s a new release of Thunderbird, Mozilla’s rather nice email/news/RSS application.
Things didn’t look good at first: after installing, it would run momentarily then disappear. Apparently this is because I installed it over a previous version — I had to delete everything from C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\ and install again. That’s quite poor, and the installer […]

At the dinner table the other day, Tom asked me “So what’s the big deal about Flickr?”. He’d been trying to get to grips with “Web 2.0″, and something he’d read held up Flickr as an example of what “Web 2.0″ is all about.
A little hint about “Web 2.0″ and “The Semantic Web”: lots […]

I’ve adapted a Perl script for uploading to Flickr, to migrate pictures from Fotopic.net to Flickr.
If you’re interested in the script, there’s more about it here.
But the main thing is, there will be a lot of oldish pictures showing up in my Flickr pages in the near future.
Update! Look at all my sets!

Fellow Wordpress users and Google trackers might be interested that I’ve just installed a Google Sitemap Generator plugin for both this blog and the new travelogue pages.
A sitemap is an XML document that tells Google (or anyone else that cares to look) what pages are on your site, and how often they are likely […]

… and while we’re on new software releases, yesterday Google released its Google Earth software for Windows. This is a new release of what was known as “Keyhole” before Google acquired it.
Essentially this is an onscreen globe, skinned with satellite imagery of Earth, which you can zoom into and explore. Detail is streamed from […]

Reading more Mac advocacy, here, I found mention of Picasa 2. It’s a picture browsing and cataloguing tool for Windows, it’s free and it’s owned by Google (for whom I have brand loyalty).
So I tried it.
It turns out to be very good indeed at what it does. It applies the novel labelling and […]