Blog

The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

Internet

Terrible Reader Updates & NAS, Media Player Gadgetry

Categories Geekery, Internet, Rants, Technology

A few months ago I criticised Google's upcoming interface design for Gmail as being bland and not user friendly. It seems in the past week that in rolling out this design across all their products Google has taken the remodelling knife to my beloved Google Reader.

I've loved using Google Reader for over five years as my main web and RSS aggregator, but their recent update has really irked me. I was expecting the colour-washed interface (which is still terrible btw), but to the point of making link colours the same as normal text, terrible text-size scaling, and the … Read more →

Rant: Why Wash the Colours Away?

Categories Geekery, Internet, Rants

iTunes left menu interface comparison, new washed out version 10 colours on the left, the previous version on the rightIn terms of computer and application interfaces (either hardware or software) I'm pretty critical of a lot of 'fashion' or 'trendy' changes that have absolutely no practical improvement, and especially those that are in my opinion completely unpractical.

Years ago I criticised Apple's fashion of white that permeated to most other technology manufacturers and into society in general.

Now it seems there is a general shift to washing away colours from program interfaces. One thing we were taught in interface design at uni (although that was a while ago), is that in addition to logically and easily shaped and recognisable … Read more →

Mass emails & Canon purchases

Categories Geekery, Internet, Movies, Technology

In the past week I organised for the inaugural Bribie e-newsletter to be sent out using a professional email service. I ended up using MailChimp, which, other than the very amusing images of monkeys delivering mail, is also a fantastic service for this kind of thing as they provide a free service for less than 2000 subscribers and a monthly send limit of 12000 emails.

You can see the online version of the newsletter here, and if you are interested in getting put on the list, you can sign up here.

It was an interesting experience; since … Read more →

Internode Pricing Woes & Construction Begins…

Categories Geekery, Internet, Life

Recently it's been very disappointing to see my ISP, Internode, revising it's Naked ADSL plans in a very downwards direction. The price-point that I'm on now ($60/month) fetched me 70GB of quota when i signed up just over a year ago, then later last year moved up to 150GB for the same price. Now they're making users on that plan pay an extra $10/month to keep the same quota, or take up the new plan at the same $60 price-point which only includes a measly 30GB of quota.

Partly the reasons given for this almost unprecedented decrease in value is … Read more →

Google+ starts to take shape

Categories Geekery, Internet, Technology

Google+ LogoIn the past few weeks Google has unveiled a decent competitor in the social networking market to Facebook. Following their rather weak previous attempt in the form of Buzz well-over a year ago, it seems Google have finally thrown a bit of weight and money into developing a decent Facebook competitor.

At the moment the service is what Google calls a limited 'field trial', which for me begs the question: has Google dropped the term 'beta' for describing these types of pre-release versions? Maybe keeping Gmail in a state of perpetual beta for years means the term had lost it's … Read more →

Getting On With It

Categories Football, Gaming, Internet, Life

I played indoor for the first time since the surgery last week and also today. I spent both matches goal-keeping throughout, and one thing I seem to be making a habit of in all my matches goalkeeping is turning the ball back into our own goal.

They aren't own-goals per-se (they are more deflections), but still incredibly frustrating. In today's incident, I made a good save, turning the ball onto the post, but the ball bounced back off the post and hit the arm that I saved the ball with and then went straight back into the goal :(. Very … Read more →

Firefox 4

Categories Geekery, Internet

Firefox 4The past few days has seen (finally) the release of the next major version of Firefox: Version 4.

This has probably been one of the longest release cycles for the browser (not that i've minded much), but they have changed a tonne of stuff.

The most noticeable change is the complete user-interface redesign. They have really tried to clean up the interface, and like Google's Chrome browser, tried to eliminate as much 'chrome' space as possible.

Whilst I don't disagree with eliminating wasted 'chrome' space, i don't believe in doing so just for the sake of it.

The perfect example … Read more →