Archive for 'General'
Where Are 12 Missing “Tuck In To Tech” Listeners?
November 9th, 2008. Published under General. 3 Comments.
I started listening to this weeks episode of Tuck In To Tech (awesome new site coming soon!) called “Blister Packaging…why? Just why?” [download]. Anyway thats slightly by the topic. So the co-host, James announced that he had an “angry” to get off his chest. I was intrigued! But I was shocked to hear that he was blaming Alistair for not producing a good enough show and losing 12 listeners 
. One point to remember is that I helped Alistair by co-hosting the episode from 2 weeks ago. So really I can twist it to say that 12 listeners just like me!
Anyway I am not trying to pass blame :p. So instead I am asking you, the readers, where have the 12 listeners gone? Are you one of them? If so please leave a comment.
On a separate not please submit your answer to the poll below.
[polldaddy poll=1091910]
NFL International Series: London
October 27th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
I had the great pleasure of going with my dad to Wembley stadium. There was some confusion about if we could get our tickets! My dads friend bought them from TicketMaster, they failed to deliver the tickets to her address and that meant we needed her and her ID to collect the tickets at the stadium! How ridiculous! Anyway she was stuck at gatwick airport after getting back from holiday so we didn’t have her or her ID when collecting the tickets, just her credit card. This is not fraud by the way! We know her and she bought the tickets and my dad paid her back!
Anyway we got to the ticket office and managed to get the tickets after a bit of convincing. So then it was into the statium! The atmosphere was amazing, we all got three flags.
The Sterophonics started us off with their new single and then my favourite track of theirs “Dakota”. Then Neyo sang the american national anthem so well, Joss Stone sang ours, not easy to sing along to with all her high pitch melody!
Then the game started. Thats all your getting about the game!
At half time we had a stripped down New Orleans Mardi-Gras. I have a few photos attached.
The whole evening was amazing and I would do it again when it comes back next year. The actually game was more entertaining with last yeat. The New Orleans Saints have a new fan!
Over 1500 People Using Funny Signs Facebook App
October 19th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
Funny Signs was my first Facebook application, it was as simple as I dared make it! I wanted to just learn the Facebook API.
But today the app lept over the 1500 user mark. That means that over 1500 people currently have it on their profile.
Ok so what is Funny Signs? Basically get a random funny road sign whenever you or anyone visits your profile. It automatically add a random funny road sign from the database. You don’t need to do anything at all, just add the app to your page.
Please check out the app and let me know your thoughts. Also if you have any signs let me know by e-mailing me using the contact page.
I won free web hosting with EveryCity!
October 15th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
If you are reading this the chances are that you have come from the EveryCity website. If you have then please take a look at my blogroll to see web apps I have done recently.
So how did I win? Well I just wrote down my details when I was at the Future of Web Apps in london. I generally think I am an unlucky person and “good things never happen to me”, but I was suprised to receive an e-mail from EveryCity saying I was a runner up and won a years web hosting!
I do have an web app in the pipeline that will be hosted with them. Along with probably moving my existing web apps over to their service.
Subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with what I am doing! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/ollieparsley
Also check out EveryCity if you haven’t already!
I’m a disappointed Mac fan
October 14th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
Earlier I was following the Apple Keynote at the “Spotlight turns to notebooks” event. I was so looking forward to having the rumors confirmed about the $800 notebook, brick and blu-ray.
Whenever there are rumors about Apple products the chances are that they’re true. But today I was disappointed to hear that only one of the 3 big rumors was true. I am the sort of person that does not have alot of spare cash and so the big savings on a cheaper MacBook would have suited me fine. I wouldn’t care if it didn’t have blu-ray and wasn’t carved out of aluminum.
But I was disappointed to hear that the price had come down a bit, but on the expensive MacBook. I will admit that it looks awesome, the trackpad is a great touch (pardon the pun). But they will still sell the same white plastic MacBook at the same price. Which for the spec is a ridiculous price at £719.00.
So as you can see this has not made me a happy mac fan. It has just made the little bit in my brain saying “Apple is just after money and is a walled garden” that little bit bigger. I still love my iPhone but I don’t see myself getting a MacBook until they lower the price or someone pays me enough to get one.
What was your take on the MacBook announcement? For more Mac news have a look at The Mac Cafe.
Future Of Web Apps: Expo In Brief
October 10th, 2008. Published under General. 2 Comments.
The expo floor
The biggest difference between this event and the other carsonified “Future of …..” is the fact there is an expo floor. This year was similar to last year where you have some big names with expensive looking expo areas, going all the way down to the low budget startups. All of these give away free stuff from pens to t-shirts. Also there are competitions galore. Microsoft was giving away and xbox and YuuGuu are giving away a MacBook Air!
On top of that Microsoft had a “Surface” demo that you could get your hands on. Along with that were some xbox machines for playing Grid or Guitar Hero.
Eye catchers
I wondered round the expo and approached some of the the companies exhibiting and these were the ones that I thought were really good.
- PhoneFromHere. They have a simple but clever service where you click a link on a website and it will instantly ring a landline number for free where a real support person or contact can answer.
- Zembly. Apart from the free shirt they have a great app that makes it easy to create Facebook apps. They do this by intergrating as many API’s as possibly and they are interested in using TwitterLeague’s simple API in a new feature they are building called “bring my API”.
- YuuGuu. They were giving away a MacBook AIR, what else do you want from me? :p
Expo floor video
Below is my Qik video of the expo floor. Sorry for the dodgey camera work!
Favourite iPhone Apps: Part 2
September 21st, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
As I said in the “Favourite iPhone Apps: Part 1” I knew that my list would change some what. So now I am going to compile my latest favourite apps and show which have stuck around and which have lost their novelty value.
Another change since last time was I have now spread onto another page of apps. I have used 3 pages (Which is quite a low number). But if I don’t use an app for a while or lose interest I delete it.
Twinkle
This is the only app that survived my top 3! Twinkle is made by Tapulous, who also make Tap Tap Revenge. It’s a Twitter application that originated in the installer.app on the old jailbroken iPhone. I used it briefly because I actually used Hahlo, a Twitter web app. The simple reason was that it worked faster and looked better. But being a web app it was prone to problems.
I have kept this app on my phone since I first got the device. I use Twitter all the time and to me this is by far the best free Twitter client on the iPhone. There are a few problems with it but version 2.1 of the software is currently being approved by Apple, it should be out any month now!
iFooty
This app was created by a couple of guys who obviously love football (soccer to you americans). It is exactly what you need from a football application. I am a die hard Reading FC fan and love keeping up with how their are doing, latest news, upcoming fixtures and results. This app does just that by using all the information from the BBC’s football website.
The only time I see myself not using this app is if a better one comes out. Or it’s just the end of the season and there is no news to catch up on!
Remote
This app is developed by Apple, this annoys me a bit as they have built in extra functionality into iTunes to make this work. Which other apps obviously do not have! Anyway, I have only really started using this app over the weekend. I have a mac mini on my desk and was sitting with my Windows laptop on my bed coding away and wanted to start the lastest Diggnation podcast episode. All I did was go to Remote, find the podcast and click on it. It then started playing on the Mac mini, through the speakers. Simple as that!
But my girlfriends dad used it just to annoy her. He would sit downstairs while she was upstairs on the internet. He would randomly start playing Abba really loud! That of course is the fun way to use it
That concludes my latest review of my favourite apps on the iPhone. I will no doubt change my thoughts again! Subscribe to my RSS feed to be kept up to date.
What are your favourite apps? Leave your comments below please
Changing your Twitter username
September 7th, 2008. Published under General. 3 Comments.
I was watching the keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk at the New Media Expo. He was talking about personal brand and the fact he regrets getting the @garyvee username. The reason for this was that it had not relation to his e-mail addresses or other usernames. For example his e-mail address is garyv[at]winelibrary.com and his website is garyvaynerchuk.com. Obviously this has no relation to his Twitter username. An example of this is use is when a fan tries to e-mail him at Wine Library after seeing his Twitter account, if the fan tries to e-mail garyvee@winelibrary.com it will not get to him (I assume they have set up an e-mail forwarder in this case), but you get what I mean.
Anyway when I signed up for twitter I used a username I use for everything “olliedude2k”. I started using this name in the year 200 (y2k etc) and just use it for everything. As I am starting to pick up, and use my name as my brand I have used the username “ollieparsley“. For instance this site is ollieparsley.com, my viddler username is ollieparsley etc. So using @olliedude2k on Twitter seems to be counter productive as noone could make the link between olliedude2k and Ollie Parsley.
Anyway when I initially realised that i just signed up a separate Twitter account using the name @ollieparsley. I then posted one tweet with a link to my @olliedude2k account.
It was than after seeing Gary’s keynote I went straight to some websites and saw what the impact of name changing would be. There are some points that I needed to know and looked at the list of effects the name change would have.
- You do not lose your followers or people you are following
- Everything about your account stays the same (except your username)
- People replying to your old name will NOT get to you.
With that in mind I decided to take the plunge. In my case I have 2 Twitter accounts and really just wanted to swap the names over.
Changing Twitter username
Please follow these instructions carefully. The aim of this process is to simply change your username and use a second account to capture possible tweets to your “old” username.
- Set up a user with the username you want to change to
- Open up a separate browser (for instance I used Firefox and safari) This is because you can have 2 accounts open at the same time. If you do not have 2 browsers just log in and out of each account instead of swapping browsers.
- This stage needs to be done quickly. If you have a popular username there is a change it might get take in the few seconds between swapping names round.
- Log in to the new account and rename by just placing a letter after it. For instance I put ollieparsley2. Then save it. This allows your current account to use the username.
- Log in to your current Twitter account and change the username to the new username. For instance I changed olliedude2k to ollieparsley. Save your changes.
- Swap back to the old account (remember you changed the name). So I logged in as ollieparsley2.
- Change the username to your old name. So I changed ollieparsley2 to olliedude2k.
Now you will have successfully swapped your usernames over. Once done put a message on your old account saying you changed your username etc. Also don’t forget ot log in for the new week or so to check noone has messages the wrong account.
All you need to do is make sure people are using the correct username and also make sure that any web address links point to the right username.
If you have any questions please use the contact form. I really hope this was useful, any comments on this post area welcomed.
TwitterLeague Has Launched
August 29th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
I have been quite for a week or so now and that is because I have been working on a secret project that I didn’t want to tell anyone about, except for the odd tease on Twitter!
I set myself the task of creating a web app in 7 days and in that time I have created TwitterLeague, the site where you can create a league of any Twitter users that is based on Twitter follower counts. For instance check out this link to see the Diggnation League. WordPress.com is rubbish at being able to embed anything so instead I have an image of the Diggnation League for you to see.
For now it is in invite-only beta and therefore needs an invitation code inorder to login. So I have on here just for the readers of this blog! But hurry, there are only 500 invites!
Go to twitterleague.com and enter the invite code: ollieblog
Let me know what you think of the site.
Guest On “Tuck In To Tech”
August 27th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
Earlier today I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Tuck In To Tech podcast that’s hosted by Alistair and James. This week James was on holiday so I was invited to be a guest.
The podcast is based on discussions about the latest technology news, with focuses on web apps, iPhone apps, gaming and conflicts about which is better, PC or Mac! I am a subscriber to the podcast as it is just my cup of tea, guys talking casually about technology.
The following quote is from the about section of the Tuck In To Tech the website:
Broadcasted by two 18 year olds from the north of England, the show briefly covers some of the top technology news from a UK perspective. With the guys’ light hearted banter and coverage of obscure news this show is a must-listen.
It was great fun and thanks to Alistair for making me feel welcome. You can listen to the podcast below. Hopefully I will be linking up with James and Alistair in the future and you will be one of the first to know when I do!
[audio http://www.mypodcast.com/fsaudio/tuckintotech_20080827_1124-284608.mp3]
You can subscribe to the podcast using the following links:
Let me know what you think by commenting below or using the contact form.