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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Checked out a site called savebuckets.co.uk today. Its claim is that it can search over a million products for the best prices. Within each category it certainly brings up a number of items, and the range extends from books to ipods, from laptops to bicycles, so certainly there’s plenty of choice.
However, it has a note right down the bottom of the left hand side where it says: If you spot a product that's missing an image, price, in the wrong category, or you have found it cheaper elsewhere, let us know about it and we'll get on the case!
I suspect their search engine isn’t quite picking up some of the clues. I brought up the books category, which was fine, as there were dozens of sections to it, and you could check the books in an area you preferred. However, included amongst these was the seemingly unambiguous Music and Musical Films category. The following five titles came up:
Western by Morricone
The soundtrack (on CD) to some film called Black Book
The Complete Book of Indian Cooking - I kid you not!
And two of the Harry Potter books on audio cassettes.
There’s a category called Women which turns out to have only one item in it: the
Ladies Fffrozen Boxed Stoked girls fragrance & 'Soul Surfer' book gift set, and that’s listed as not available. Fffrozen?
However, when I put in a specific title, it seemed to work well. The Book of General Ignorance, introduction by Stephen Fry, (which I've just taken back to the library today) brought up three versions of the book at three different prices.
Perhaps some of the categorizing hasn’t quite got its act together yet!
You come across some strange sites on the Web, but one of the strangest I’ve seen in a while is jesgamble.com, and not because it’s talking about Viagra, either! I don’t normally bother with the thousands of spam emails that arrive telling me where I can order the latest in male supplements (to put it politely) but it so happens that I found this site, which appears at first sight to be a blog, (note the homonyms) but I think is actually a place to read about where to get viagra online. Specifically one version of the big V.
I’m not going to tell you the name of the particular product, since, if you’re really interested, you’ll hive off to the site and check it out. Suffice to say, the half dozen ‘posts’ all come back to the same product with monotonous regularity.
It’s a rather cackhanded way of advertising, I think, though hardly original. (And I don’t mean any disrespect to the lefthanders of this world by my use of cackhanded, incidentally! Being partly lefthanded myself, I can be ambidextrous about my use of language.)
I’d like to know, too, how they came up with the name jesgamble. The only other references I can find to the word on Google all point me back to the site, in one way or another. With one exception, the jesgamble page on Inked Nation is the only one where everything isn’t related to Viagra. It was quite a relief to read about tattoos instead!
On Slashdot.com, an anonymous writer asks what he can do with a collection of old hard drives he has lying around. Apparently he’s taken them out of computers before they’ve been disposed of. He’s concerned about whether there’s still data on them that someone technical might find, and whether they have any other useful purpose.
The first response was obviously from someone who delights in going to the refuse dump and tossing lots of glass panes and semi-dismantled furniture and crockery pots into the bin – and hearing it all smash! His suggestion is to take a sledgehammer to the drives. Bit drastic, that.
Another writers claims that the following code will permanently overwrite the data: "dd if=/dev/dsp of=/dev/hd bs=1024". I make no claim to understand this piece of gibberish, but the writer is positive that it works, and that no ‘magic’ machine on earth will be able to reconstruct the information.
Others would extract the magnets, and make pendulum type devices that flicker when passing a magnet. Someone else says the magnets are excellent for opening rental and library DVD cases, but this sounds just a bit on the illegal side.
The head of a hard drive
Another person uses them as fridge magnets, which seems a bit of a comedown when you consider what a remarkable job the magnets have previously been doing. It’s rather like getting a surgeon to do your garden.
Someone else with a nice line in alliteration says he personally pulls the platters apart, runs over them with a vehicle, and then chucks each platter in a separate garbage bin. Someone commenting on this says: You should make sure the garbage bins are in a separate countries too. One of the countries should then be destroyed with thermonuclear warheads.
And finally, a comment on the beauty of hard drives: “I take them apart to admire the incredible workmanship that goes into them; the mirror polished platters and the wonderfully light head mechanisms that float so incredibly close over them.
Hard disks may be mass produced and cheap, but the care and perfection that goes into them would set most jewellers to shame. They are really works of beauty.”
The photographer entitled this: That Can't Be Safe!
I’ve been using a CD over the last few days to try and get to grips with Adobe InDesign – something I have to do for my job. Very frustrating. I have to flick back and forth between the two screens, and most of the time the thing goes too slow, so you have to give it a little kick to get to the next instruction. However, just when you need it to be clear and slow, it speeds through several instructions at once. And yesterday I found that two of the lessons were repeated!
DVDs and CDs are a good way of learning, because you’re forced to go at their pace (I tend to skim too much when I’m using a manual for basic learning). However they have their limitations too, and I’d always sooner have a hard copy of instructions as well as a CD/DVD
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Now that I’m back home in New Zealand I’ve begun selling books on Trade Me again. (For those who don’t know, Trade Me is NZ’s equivalent of eBay – in fact it wiped the floor with eBay in this country.)
So far the profit hasn’t been huge, but no doubt it’ll pick up again when everyone gets back from their annual holidays. (Going to work at the moment it’s so quiet I feel as though I’m in one of the villages called Crowle in England that we visited. They were both quiet as the grave, one even more than the other, in fact.)
Anyway, to keep track of my financial dealings, such as they are, I use Mind Your Own Business, which I bought thinking it would be easy to use and all I need. However, it’s not very good in terms of retail – or else I’ve got the wrong bit of the package. It produces umpteen thousand reports, many of which don’t seem to relate to what I’m trying to find out. I appear to make a huge profit, but the actual bank balance doesn’t agree. Or else I’ve spent it all while it wasn't looking
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I began reading a book by Philip Jenkins at lunchtime today – God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis – and like so many books of its kind (readable by the layperson, but academic in its approach) the text littered with footnote numbers. Annoyingly, as is the current fashion, the notes are all collected together at the back, so if you’re really interested in seeing where a quote came from or more about the paragraph in question, you have to be constantly flicking back and forth. Keep footnotes where they belong, say I!
Anyway, it’s what’s in the footnotes that I actually want to mention here. Once upon a time – only a few years ago, in fact – footnotes referred you to other books or articles, all of which would be in hard copy somewhere. Or, as they used to say in the old days: on paper.
Every second footnote in Mr Jenkins’ book, however, refers you to a website address, an URL (which means a Uniform Resource Locator, apparently – though that makes me none the wiser). This would be fine, except that trying to copy URLs from a book, especially when they’re complex, isn’t easy. I can see the future of footnotes being this
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When we were in the UK there was a large rest home – or care home, as they’re sometimes called – right in the village, just around from the old church. Unlike some care homes here in New Zealand it had only a small amount of garden or parking space out the front, I guess it had had to be crammed into the available area.
But if we thought it was in any way exposed, in Valencia, we stayed just along the street from an old people’s home. There was no garden, no parking, and you could look in the front windows (which were right on the street) and see everything that was going on. When I say there was no garden, it’s possible that one existed out the back somewhere, but this being part of the old town, it isn’t likely. It was a dangerous area for the elderly to go walkabout in as well, or to ride their motorised chairs along. The footpaths were very narrow, and the cars whooshed down the one-way street at considerable speed. I wonder what the turnover in clients is in that place!
I was reminded of this because of a site I came across on the Net where you can check out the care homes nearest you and see what they’re like. It’s a British site, so it’s not much good to me here in New Zealand, but I like the idea. Not that I have any real plans for going into a rest/care/old/people’s home if I can help it. I’ve visited them often enough to see that for some reason they tend to make older people deteriorate even faster than they would at home
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Some time ago I wrote an article on vacuum cleaners and I how I have a considerable dislike of them. You can find a link to it above.
I see that Dyson vacuum cleaners are still being touted as the best on the market. We had a Dyson once, and it worked for some time, but like all vacuum cleaners it wasn’t built tough enough to withstand the sort of treatment our vacuum cleaners get. I don’t think personally we’re any worse than any other people in our handling of vcs, but for some reason they just don’t stand up to the strain.
The Dyson site makes the vcs look like something out of the space race, but essentially they’re still the same model as what got done in by us. I’m a bit amused to find that one of them is pronounced as a lightweight that doesn’t lose suction. Well, what good is a vacuum cleaner that does lose suction. Crikey
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I came across a site called LifeHacker today which I’d never encountered before. It’s subtitled Tech Tricks, Tips and Downloads for Getting Things Done. Plainly ‘getting things done’ is one of their catch phrases as it occurs several times on the page I read.
I’d been alerted to this site because they listed ten of Google’s lesser-known utilities, and I thought it would be interesting to see what else Google had on offer. (In spite of a post I wrote recently carping about Google, I still have admiration for their innovations).
I’d only ever come across one or two of these utilities before, such as the WYSIWYG web page builder, and never actually used them. But most of the items are worth a look, and the LifeHacker site discusses each one in turn, and gives immediate links to them. (Google’s utilities aren’t always so easy to find, unless you go searching for them on Google Search, which seems a slightly odd way of looking for them
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330 Posts dating from January 2007
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