Categories
Net Politics and activism Retrospectives

Ancient political history

Trivia for you: Back in prehistoric times, when most of you had never heard of the Internet and barely anybody used the Web, and way before Twitter and Facebook, I blogged the 1996 Federal election campaign. Several times a week I’d add something new, including a spoof leader debate transcript, a Hippy Party manifesto, Ron  ... [More]

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Net

Rating comments

A day off today. Rather clear out junk from the house, I’ve tried installing a comments rating system. If you like a comment, you can click the green Thumbs Up; if you dislike it, you can click the red Thumbs Down. Looks like it won’t let you vote on a comment posted from the same  ... [More]

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Net

Hold that thought

Working on the server. If you have a comment, hold that thought. Update 3:40pm. OK, that was easy. WordPress upgraded, and switched to a different server. Re-delegating now… if you can see this message, it’s worked.

Categories
Net Politics and activism

Reference works part 2

In 2007, a week or so after Kevin Rudd became PM, I took a look at a bunch of online reference works, some free, some corporate, to see how many had updated their articles on Australia. The score was 2/5 getting it right, with Wikipedia and Britannica having been updated, and Citizendium, Encyclopedia.com and CIA  ... [More]

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Net

The timewaster

The curse of the Internet and the short attention span — there’s too much stuff to look at. So I check my email. Then I have a look in Google Reader. What’s Twitter doing? Okay. Facebook? My turn in Scrabble yet? Might check a couple of the news sites and see what’s happening. And the  ... [More]

Categories
Geek Net

ISP shopping part 2

An update on my ISP shopping post from a couple of weeks ago: Netspace rang me up to discuss my concerns (they found the post themselves), and to let me know there was some progress on resolving them: Advice of network outages — they said there is already a project underway to advise of outages  ... [More]

Categories
Net News and events

The Age’s new home page

This is what appeared on The Age’s home page this morning (with my additions). They explained that there’s a new video tab, which you’ll see when the lead story is best told in video. Eh? How is Ultimate Fighting in any way to be regarded as the lead story? Unless Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott  ... [More]

Categories
Melbourne Net

Navigation

A few years ago I did a comparison of the results from online trip planners. Here’s an update of sorts. I tested 247 Flinders Lane (which is an address on a one-way street, in an area with lots of turn restrictions and pedestrian streets) to see what the various navigators would do. For the destination  ... [More]

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Net

ISP shopping

I’m ISP shopping. I’d been considering it anyway, as I’m still using ye olde ADSL1, and in the past couple of years, ADSL2+ has become available in my neck of the woods. I’ve been using my current ISP, Netspace, for about 7 years, I think. Over that time they’ve been pretty reliable, but not without  ... [More]

Categories
Consumerism Net

Finding an ATM

Having moved offices to Latrobe Street, I wanted to know where the nearest ATM is — that is, those of my preferred (no fee) banks, St George or Westpac. The St George ATM/Branch locator will only show five results — including Westpac ATMs. Searching postcode 3000, it shows me those closest to the the corner  ... [More]

Categories
Net

Searching for Google

Google has announced (somewhat early, and amongst other things) the top Australian searches of 2009. Most popular searches of 2009 Facebook YouTube Hotmail eBay MySpace Google Yahoo Gmail Bebo Seek So plenty of people search for Google in Google, despite the idiocy in doing so, and more significantly, the inherent dangers:

Categories
Net transport

A new tool for spying on the neighbours

Yesterday’s great website discovery: nearmap.com, which shows high resolution (and recent) satellite pictures of Melbourne and other places — a leapfrog over anything currently on Google Maps. And I discovered that Ormond station has its official three-letter code, OMD, written on the top of it. How odd; I wonder why? View it at nearmap.com Alas,  ... [More]