Category Archives: Non-geeky

A general category for all posts except technical/geeky stuff, for those who don’t care for that kind of content. (For instance, the majority of my Facebook friends.)

Personal

Blog template change

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I’ve been toying with the idea of redesigning my website/blog for quite some time. I recently retired my old website and redirected it here to my blog. I’ve been considering replacing WordPress with something else, but I think for the time being at least, I’ll stick with WordPress, as it’s powerful and works well for me.

I decided I couldn’t be bothered to attempt my own design for the blog, as I’m not particularly good at design (back-end code is my area of expertise), so I’ve just picked a template I think is quite pretty and functional. That’ll do :)

Gaming

BF:BC2 AT4-only cockaround match

On Saturday I had a game of Battlefield Bad Company 2 with friends – it was a private match, AT4 rocket-launcher only.

I have to admit noob-tubing isn’t my style and I’m rubbish with the AT4 against infantry, but it was an amusing change.

DrunkinDunkin recorded a video of the game – I particularly like the part where I’m lit up like a fucking Christmas tree with tracers at about 06:00, shortly before being killed:

Personal

Blog moved to new URL

I decided that my old website was so hideously out of date (and hideously ugly) that it was time to retire the poor beast and move my blog from blog.preshweb.co.uk to www.preshweb.co.uk. So, my blog now lives here at www.preshweb.co.uk; all old links will be redirected automatically and eveything should Just Work ™, but if you spot any odd breakage, do let me know!

Gaming

Official Playstation app for Android/iPhone

Sony released an official Playstation app today for Android & iPhone phones.

Just downloaded it (3MB, which seems excessive for what it does so far), to give it a try.

The main feature that appeals to me is seeing who’s online before going and firing up my PS3… I sometimes log in to uk.playstation.com via a browser, but it’s a bit slow and clunky; I was hoping this would be much slicker.

The first thing that strikes me as an obvious omission – there appears to be no way to sort your friends list by online status (or sort by anything, in fact!), nor to filter to “show online only”, leaving you scrolling up and down looking for online icons, which is hardly friendly.

It does give you access to game reviews/news etc, but that’s nothing particularly special, IMO. I think quickly seeing who’s online and what they’re playing, to decide whether to hop in a quick multiplayer game or not, is the key feature of this app, and it really hasn’t been done well.

EDIT: a comment from Sony on the blog post linked to above:

yes we know about the friend list order issue and we are planning to address this in the next version.

So, looks like it should be sorted at some point :)

Photography

Where my photos end up…

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I tried out DuckDuckGo today, and of course one of the things you’ll often use to test a search engine is to search for your own name / online nick for a little bit of egosurfing, and I was surprised just how widely some of my photos from Flickr are used. Most of my images on Flickr are available for use under a Creative Commons attribution licence.

A few of my photos I found widely spread were:

I found this one at:

This image of my laptop turned up at, among other places:

The above image of my old Blackberry was used in a presentation someone gave on teaching keyboard skills to children, too.

This image of the pier in Rossport, Co Mayo (which I also uploaded to the excellent Geograph project) is currently used on the Wikipedia article on Rossport, along with the related Kilcommon and Sruwaddacon Bay entries.

Interesting to see how widely humble pictures can spread :)

Personal

Domestic appliance repairs in Stevenage & Herts

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Just a quick plug for my future brother-in-law, who has gone self-employed doing domestic appliance repairs in/around Stevenage, repairing cookers, washing machine, tumble dryers etc.

I knocked up a basic site for him, and figured linking to it from here would help Google find & rank it :)

Edit: I’ve also registered stevenage-appliance-repair.co.uk and pointed it to his site, to see if that helps. Maybe it’s time to practice SEO crap.

Motorcycles

Motorcycles in bus lanes trial in London

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Excellent news – TFL has announced an 18 month trial of allowing motorcyclists to use many bus lanes on London’s main roads.

From 5 January 2009, an 18-month trial will allow motorcycles, mopeds, scooters and tricycles – but not those with sidecars – to travel in most red route bus lanes.

Drivers of these vehicles will be able to use red route bus lanes currently used by cyclists and taxi drivers during operational hours.

There’s a couple of PDFs with info : list of bus lanes involved and questions and answers.

I think this is a sensible move by TFL, and look forward to slightly easier journeys!