Matty's Blog

The Magic Stuck Pixel – YouTube

For a while, I’ve used upload.riotnet.co.uk to upload my images and what-not, but now I’ve decided to shrink the long name down, to something shorter. And why not make it public as well, what could go wrong at 3:26 in the morning?!

http://flupl.com is the site
http://flupl.me.uk is the development blog.

I wonder where this will go…

Really!

As someone who is in further education, (i.e. sixth form / college), I am entitled to a NUS (Students Union) discount card, which entitles me to discounts on driving lessons (used and passed), Mcdonalds (why?) and more.

Two examples which have really annoyed me is Staples (office superstore) and Apple (does it need explaining?).

Staples, went to buy a present for someone, presented my student card, then he asked me for proof that I was 18, otherwise he couldn’t apply the discount. That was really really annoying. Ok it was a cheap printer at £28, but still..

Apple, because I am sick and tired of eMac G3’s and the school doing bugger – all on replacing them, I somehow got the cash to get one. Phoned up the local Apple reseller, asked if there was education discount, he said yes, but he also said I had to be 18 to get a discount. I was like what! He also agreed it was an annoyance, but he couldn’t do anything about it, Apple policy and all that.
Yet, I can order off the Apple website (via the NUS site) and get the same discount (15%) without prompting for me to be 18 or over.

Idiocracy strike me down!

For (what I assume) messing up my dedi installation. I haven’t tinkered with it for a few weeks now apart from change an apache setting (the chances of that killing my server is astronomical). So for Debian Lenny to start randomly dying every 10mins to 7hours, … sigh

Yeah I’m happy, happy as a bunny about to be eaten by a flying christmas tree.. DON’T even get started there

I found this extension a while back, and I modified it slightly to remove the bar at the bottom of Chrome since it had no use and was annoying. I still credit the site in my modified version.

http://www.mark8t.com/2009/09/22/adblock-extension-for-google-chrome/ is the original topic.

http://lol.mattyribbo.co.uk/Adblock-Mark8t.crx – Click the link and install. You need to have extensions enabled.

Note: My version is based off 1.1, I might modify 1.2 at a later stage, but I see no reason so far, all the ads seem to block very well.

Jailbreaking your iPod touch (or iPhone for the rich morons… oh so sorry did I just say that?), can be daunting, but blackra1n makes it so much damn easier!

http://blackra1n.com/ to download it, for Mac and PC. It’s as simple as loading the program, click “make it rain”, plug your iPod Touch or iPhone in, and it does the rest! And it works!

RC3 works with the latest (3.1.2).

Trying to update iTunes today, and it was moaning it can’t find itunes64.msi in /Local/Temp/IX0001SA/ or something like that. As a result, I couldn’t remove iTunes, update iTunes, repair iTunes just because that file was missing. Lovely.

Trawl through the internet for assistance, Windows Installer CleanUp Utility. This program doesn’t just remove the program from the list of programs installed, it removes the Windows Installer information with it. Once that information has gone, just install iTunes again, and everyone’s happy.

If only iTunes would work now….

It’s the functionality that you had on WinAmp, which I liked very much, and somewhat similar to WMP (before Windows 7 removed the taskbar), iTunes, has none. OK you could hover over the iTunes tray icon (if you enabled it, but even if it was you’d have to unhide it because you don’t touch it).

I’ve seen various plug-ins trying to enable this behaviour, but none works as well as iTunesSnarl, which is just fantastic.

(Links to the software below)

First off, you need Snarl, a program which is the Windows equivalent to Growl for Mac (there is Growl for Windows, but it’s not as good). Easy to install, admittingly the Snarl control panel is a bit daunting and could be better, but it’s not that bad.

Secondly, iTunesSnarl, which is linked on the snarl website. Just set it up, install it (making sure iTunes is off), and job done. Don’t need to configure anything else on iTunes or Snarl, it just does it. Start iTunes, start playing, and you get notified of what is playing. Superb.

One thing iTunesSnarl does better than say the iTunes Growl plugin (windows or mac) or some others I’ve seen, is that if you flick through tracks, it doesn’t litter your screen with songs that have passed. iTunesSnarl just keeps it on the one notification, which is what really makes it stand out.

Highly recommend this. Of course, you can get Snarl to work with other media players such as Spotify, last.fm, SongBird, and more. http://www.fullphat.net/applications/mediaPlayer/index.html has the ones available. Not just media players, there’s volume display, battery notifications, time, and others.

Link to Snarl : http://www.fullphat.net/index.php

Link to iTunesSnarl: http://earlybirdapplications.com/products/3-iTunesSnarl

Want to go simple and efficient, so there we go.