Martin's World » Internet

Lefora Forums

martin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:47:54 +0000

Thanks again to BBC Click I have discovered a great new service on the Internet. Lefora is a free forum service that lets you create a discussion forum service for your own communities. It’s really easy to set up, customise and get started.

So why do I need a forum? Well I’ve been secretly working on my own little project and now it’s time to start getting users on board. Using Lefora has enabled me to concentrate on my own service and not waste valuable time implementing another forum. You can check out my forum at rondayvoo.lefora.com. Oh yeah, my little project is at Rondayvoo.com. Feel free to check it out and use the forum to tell me what you think!

If you want your own free forum just click on :

free forum hosting by lefora

How to record Skype

martin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

IT Conversation’s Doug Kaye has prepared a detailed guide for recording Skype conversations for use in Podcasts. Click Here…

Warning Label Generator

martin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Another top tip from Webscape on BBC Click. You could have great fun with this Warning Label Generator

Zeroconf / mDNS / Bonjour

martin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:30:16 +0000

I have just discovered a whole area of IP based LAN technology I knew nothing about until this week! It’s known by various names including Zeroconfig, mDNS and Bonjour and I think this has the potential to completely change home networking.

I have been toying with setting up a DNS server at home to resolve all the host names for the machines on my local LAN, but in my research I spotted a suggestion to use Zeroconfig instead. After a bit of digging I realised this stuff looks very good.

What ever you call it, Bonjour essentially does 3 things: IP address allocation without DHCP (in the range 169.254.x.x), host name resolution without a DNS server or local hosts files (Multicast DNS) and dynamic service discovery (which is more than just IP address lookups, this is IP address, protocol and port; so a device could, for example, advertise it has a live camera feed available via http on a particular port – very slick).

It appears that Apple are leading this effort and brand it under the name Bonjour. So Mac’s already have this technology built in. If you’ve used iTunes and accessed a shared iTunes library on another machine then you’ve already used Bonjour, even if you are on Windows. On Linux there are a couple of implementations, howl (which seems to be almost dead) and avahi/nss-mdns. I installed the latter on my Ubuntu server and it works perfectly.

For Windows, Apple have released Bonjour for Windows. It looks like it just does printer sharing but it definitely also does host name resolution via mDNS. The other good thing is that it a free download. I don’t suppose Vista has it built in, it would be so unlike Microsoft to actually follow a standard espcially since this one is designed by Apple.

The architect behind the whole thing is Stuart Cheshire from Apple, and there is a good video of him presenting Bonjour and zeroconfig on Google Video.

Some other good links are :
http://www.ifcx.org/wiki/LocalNetworking.html (good overview)
http://avahi.org (Linux)
http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/nss-mdns (Linux)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour (Mac and Windows)
http://files.zeroconf.org/rfc3927.txt (IP address allocation)

Pandora – Free Personalised Web Radio

Site Administrator — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:37:33 +0000

Another recomendation from the BBC’s Click tv show is Pandora. Pandora is very clever. You start by telling Pandora the name of an artist or a track you like then Pandora starts playing a stream of music which is similar. The concept is very simple but the technology behind it looks quite sophisticated. Once your “station” is playing you can train Pandora by adding extra artists or by using the thumbs up and down buttons as each track plays.

So obviously I created a station based on Massive Attack and then added Portishead and Faithless to it. I have called my station “The Trip Hop Lounge” and it can be accessed by anyone (just click the link). Pandora really works because before long it also played tracks by Dubstar, Cabaret Voltaire and Tricky.

The really interesting thing about Pandora is that it is playing music that I like from many artists that I have never heard of before. I have already ordered two CDs by Curve just because they keep playing on my trip hop Pandora station.

46bliss – In A Long Time

Site Administrator — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 18:28:51 +0000

Wow, I really like this. I heard this track on Adam Curry’s show on “Podsafe music“. Adam and Patricia obviously have very different tastes to me. I must listen to more of 46bliss and see if they have a CD.

Cyborgname.com

martin — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 22:30:30 +0000

This is just a little bit of fun I saw on this week’s BBC Click Online. Visit Cyborgname.com and try it with your own name. I’m looking forward to a bit of nocturnal troubleshooting…

Flickr

Site Administrator — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 11:09:59 +0000

I have started using the online photo service Flickr to share my photos with friends and family. It has some really nice features, like viewing security, excellent slide show in your browser and these cool Flickr badges (check out the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist in the sidebar) . The service is free if you can live with a 20MB per month upload limit, although you can pay $24.95 per year to increase this limit to 2GB per month (and they remove the adds from your pages). I’m using the free service. I wish the slide show images were a little larger and the UI could be a little less confusing to someone who hasn’t seen it before, but all in all it’s a great service.

Systm

Site Administrator — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:21:12 +0000

I first heard about this new Internet-TV show on the “This Week In Tech (TWiT)” Podcast. Kevin Rose, one of the presenters of Systm is a regular guest on TwiT. Systm just released their 2nd episode. This episode is all about building a Linux based MythTV PVR. They go into quite a lot of detail and explain stuff quite well. The first episode showed how to build a box of tricks that would pick up wireless video cameras. This show is very cool and is very professionally produced despite being free to download. You will need a Bittorrent client to download the show, I’d recommend Azureus. If you like Systm you should also check out From The Shadows.

MAKE Magazine

Site Administrator — Fri, 06 May 2005 16:26:35 +0000

I first heard about O’Reilly’s new magazine through a podcast on IT Conversations and from the former Engadget guy Phil Torrone. Apparently this is O’Reilly’s first magazine publication. It’s all about geeky techy projects and it’s full of ideas for things you can build.

I looked up the Make Magazine web site and found you could order a subscription to the mag but it was all in the US and I thought it could end up getting complicated. On another visit to their site I noticed that you could also buy a copy from Amazon.com, I checked on Amazon.co.uk and sure enough they had it too, only £6.96 plus shipping (at least it is in £’s).

So what it’s like. One word – complicated. Well at least it is complicated for me ! There are two really interesting projects, hanging a camera from a kite to take aerial photos and a DIY mag strip reader. The kite project looks completely overkill but I might have a go at the mag strip reader, watch this space.

Overall, despite not necessarily wanting to do all the projects, it is a very good read and I will definitely order the next issue.