May 13, 2008 Mark O'Neill 46 viewsOK, I’m not sure how I’d feel about this one if I got it on my eBay profile! Is it a compliment? Ha! Ha!
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May 13, 2008 Mark O'Neill 81 viewsI’ve always been amazed that Saturday Night Live STILL hasn’t got around to getting a decent Hillary Clinton impersonator yet (their Obama guy sucks too). Maybe they should hire this woman? She has got the Ice Queen down to a fine art!
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May 12, 2008 Mark O'Neill 46 viewsMake Use Of finally rolled out its first podcast last night and I have to say we are all pretty happy with the results. Jason has a great voice and he has done an excellent job putting it all together. What a pro.
We are hoping that in the long term this brings us more RSS subscribers and a higher profile. It’s one thing to read words on a page but to actually hear the writers talking and to put a voice to the name, that’s something else entirely. It will also hopefully encourage the writers to contribute more to Make Use Of as the podcasts will promote them more and give them a higher profile online (hopefully).
I will be the guest on next week’s show (6 days from now). Here’s hoping I don’t mess it up!
listen to the podcast | digg the podcast
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May 10, 2008 Mark O'Neill 101 viewsI’d love to know how this one got past the BBC editors. Check out the headline :
Of course this is what they were REALLY talking about….
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May 9, 2008 Mark O'Neill 54 viewsAttention gamers: do you have a hard time firing? Perhaps you’re suffering from a medical condition called P.D. (Projectile Dysfunction). But worry not, there is a cure: Stroyent (humanifil killemal).
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May 9, 2008 Mark O'Neill 88 viewsA contestant on Deal or No Deal focuses so hard on trying to guess which steel briefcase is the best that she fails to notice who is holding them. To be fair, “game show winner” isn’t exactly the most intellectually demanding way to strike it rich.
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May 8, 2008 Mark O'Neill 60 views
One of the flip-sides to the whole Wikipedia drama is that it seems to have sent a surge of traffic to ReadWriteWeb, which in turn pushed it onto Yahoo Buzz. Some of that traffic made its way back to NowSourcing as well.
I started to read some of the comments on ReadWriteWeb but to be honest I am tired of the whole issue now. I never expected the whole thing to blow up the way it did and in a mental sense, I’ve already moved on. My next article for NowSourcing will be out soon and I am busy preparing other articles for other blogs.
The bottom line is that I wanted to make a point. I made that point and then I moved on. Certain people chose to drag me back for a fight and I chose to defend myself. But now I am marching on again to new subjects and new discussions.
Onwards and upwards!
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May 7, 2008 Mark O'Neill 104 views
It seems that if you have a website or a blog, and you need a free lightweight javascript MP3 player to play files then Delicious has one that you can use free of charge. It’s called playTagger.
You can get it here and you can see it in action by going to the MP3 page on Delicious. Just click on the small blue arrow to the left of the link to start the file.
It’s easy to install on your own blog. It’s just one line of script! It’s so easy even I can do it.
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May 7, 2008 Mark O'Neill 61 views
Last night, as I was about to log off the computer, the Windows Update logo pinged on the XP status bar to inform me that there was an urgent update to be downloaded. My heart sank because a) it was close to 3.00am and I wanted to get to bed and secondly I knew what the update was. Sure enough, when I checked, it was Windows Service Pack 3, the Romper Stomper Patch from Redmond.
Lifehacker did a nice summary of the technical advantages of SP3 (which I can barely get my head around). But on the surface, you’ll notice no changes whatsoever really. I don’t understand why people are having multiple orgasms over it, I really don’t. Especially when this morning, when I switched the computer on, Windows tried to revert all my settings back to Windows again. “We notice you’re using Winamp instead of Windows Media Player! Would you like to change back?!”
NO I F**KING DON’T!!!!!
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May 7, 2008 Mark O'Neill 231 views
photo credit: unimatrixZxero
I am still a little taken aback at a post that I wrote a few days back and which appeared today on NowSourcing about Wikipedia. It was about German Wikipedia’s decision to publish some of the posts into a book and sell it for $32 a pop.
I wrote the post and said basically that I didn’t think that it was ethical of Wikipedia to do this. OK well I went a lot further than that. I might have said that Wikipedia was “shafting the writers” but at the end of the day I still feel I was making a valid point. As a professional writer, I have come across many people, both online and offline, who try on a daily basis to scam writers into working for free. So you could say the Wikipedia scheme hit a nerve.
But not compared to the nerve my article hit.
As soon as the article came out, the comments on the blog post started. No biggie there. I answered them and moved on. But one guy really got into his stride and the personal attacks started. Again, no biggie. I have a thick skin. I’ve been verbally attacked before. It just rolls off me now.
Brian Wallace, webmaster and owner of NowSourcing, put a link to the blog post on Twitter and it got picked up by ReadWriteWeb. This led to more traffic - and more attention.
Then the abusive emails started. Very abusive. Now I’ve had some very abusive emails in my time but some of these made me stop and pause for a moment. They basically implied that I should stop writing and have sexual relations with my mother instead.
Then the Skype phone calls started. I got a Skype phone call from a whacko who told me that the sh*t that came out his dog’s ass has more intelligence than me. I mean, what do you say to that?! Thank you? The calls kept coming in to the point that I had to put Skype on “Do Not Disturb” so they all instantly went to voicemail.
Speaking today to other writers who have criticised Wikipedia in the past, it seems that this is nothing new. It seems that as soon as you criticise Wikipedia in any way, the big guns get rolled out and you get trampled on. But if these flat-footed idiots had any sense, they would realise that the best way to get rid of me, and critics like me, would be to SHUT UP and wait for us to go away by ourselves. But to come stomping in, screaming at me, threatening me, giving me verbal abuse….that makes me wonder the following :
Why is Wikipedia a taboo subject? Why is it impossible for us to have a civilised constructive discussion like mature adults without resorting to personal vicious attacks?
Thanks to their unbelievable crassness, I am now determined to stick around and do some sniffing around to see what else I can find. Thanks guys for the tip.
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May 3, 2008 Mark O'Neill 122 views
photo credit: muammerokumus
The Google Operating System has an excellent post on how to download entire Google help files which you can either print out or save to your computer as either a HTML file or another file of your choice (such as a PDF).
Google’s help pages are extremely good but they are normally a rabbit warren of links, links and more links. But by adding ?fulldump=1 on the end, you can have it ALL on the same page and you can then save the whole lot to your computer.
As GOS points out though, these help pages are frequently updated so if you do save a copy of a help page to your computer, it will be out of date pretty quickly, although the fundamentals will always be the same.
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May 3, 2008 Mark O'Neill 101 views
A large list of Greasemonkey scripts to modify the way you use sites like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Flickr and more. The one that really kicks ass is the script that auto-deletes all your direct messages from your Twitter account. Hoo-hah.
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May 2, 2008 Mark O'Neill 98 viewsIf you know someone who can’t stop Twittering, maybe you should send them their own Twitter e-card?
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May 1, 2008 Mark O'Neill 130 viewsWell I went back to the regular Skype interface today after months of using the Pidgin plugin. At the beginning of the year, I was trying in vain to consolidate everything under one roof and I liked having all my contacts on one list. So when I found the Skype plugin for Pidgin, I imported all my Skype contacts over. All the buddy icons went with it and I generally found it nice to have everything bundled together.
But after a while, it started to irritate me. You can’t make calls through Pidgin so when someone called me through Skype, both Skype and Pidgin would clash with one another leading to one of them crashing. Plus the plug-in imported EVERYTHING over which meant I had to delete my 150 or so regular phone numbers from my Skype list which was intensely annoying. Then when I chatted with a Skype contact through Pidgin, a Skype chat window would open too duplicating the chat messages…..
But the upshot of it all is that I missed the Skype user interface. It is very user-friendly and easy to use and although Pidgin is also very good to use, I still prefer Skype. So I went back to it today. I just have to begin the tedious task of re-entering all those phone numbers again!
I am even considering returning to the Google Talk interface too….
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May 1, 2008 Mark O'Neill 152 viewsI often get mocked for liking Robbie Williams’ music (except for Americans who say “Robbie who?”) but I happen to think that Robbie is one of the few singers today that can actually sing as opposed to the multitude of “singers” out there that just mime.
Plus I have an empathy with Robbie because of his manic depression which he talked about with Stephen Fry on the programme “The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive“.
Anyway, here’s today’s song which I am listening to while I surf the net for stories. Robbie’s “Tripping” performed live in Berlin.
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ... Posted in YouTube, music No Comments »
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Embedding FriendFeed in a WordPress Blog : idly [dot] org | |
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A great Wordpress plugin to put your Friendfeed entries on your blog - http://snurl.com/28qgx | |
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A printable Tweet sheet with all the Twitter commands on it - http://snurl.com/28pe2 | |
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Twitter Tweet Sheet — JasonTheodor.com | |
| Make life easier by automating all your Twitter invites | ||
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@fuzzygroove but where do you write the message? In the "search for song or artist" box? | |
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Copyright Better Than Therapy & Mark O'Neill 2006 - 2008
