To counteract the fact that I’m using Kubrick, the single most common Wordpress theme (by virtue of being the default) I’ve started to develop different themes for different categories. The first I’ve implemented is PHP which now has a different colour scheme and a different header image.
Lloyd’s TSB are current offering “over 150 more days of Interest”. The will you pay you interest from the day money goes in until the day it goes out. Since most banks don’t do this sounds like a good deal, but a lot people won’t gain from this.
It only applies to current accounts you see. The Lloyd’s TSB Classic current account offers 0.1% AER. If you pay in more than £1000 a month you can get the Classic Plus current account which offers 4% AER but that requires you to use online banking. And even then that rate is only on balances up to £5,000 (back to 0.1% after that). If you get an ISA or high interest savings account with an AER of 4%, 4 days interest is more than 150 days interest at 0.1%.
Bottom line, don’t change to Lloyd’s TSB for this reason alone. PS - Banking isn’t exactly common on this blog but I walk past the damn advert every day.
I should have a category for “odd things I’ve found out” perhaps.
To all you non=British people, this post may make little sense.
When is Boxing Day? The popular answer is December 26th. Which is usually true. What most people don’t realise is that Boxing Day is a mobile holiday. Technically it occurs on the first weekday after Christmas Day. Boxing Day could conceivably fall on December 27th or 28th then.
It gets better though. If a bank holiday falls on a non-working day (another holiday or a weekend) the next day becomes a bank holiday. This is why most people don’t realise Boxing Day moves, they think it’s just the bank holiday status that moves. But it also leads to a peculiar situation. If Christmas is on a Saturday or Sunday, the Monday afterwards is Boxing Day and therefore a bank holiday. The Tuesday is then also a bank holiday because of the lost holiday of Christmas Day - after Boxing Day. How strange.
Sky offers movies and sport content to subscribers with a service they call Sky by Broadband (clever name). The downloaded content is DRMed and you can only keep it for 28 days but it’s good quality. The interesting thing is it uses a private peer-to-peer to distribute it.
It’s a smart move by Sky since it saves them lots of bandwidth. I was worried about whether TalkTalk would limit Sky by Broadband. It all depends on their reasons. If they truly have bandwidth problems then they should since it’s quite a large consistent bandwidth hog (since even after downloading it can continue uploading). If they actually just want to limit illegal behaviour with P2P file sharing then they’ll leave it alone since it’s legit.
Well yesterday I left my computer on all day (I wanted to try Orb from work). I didn’t realise that closing the Sky program didn’t actually stop it downloading. When I came home all the movies had downloaded (my bandwidth usage was up to 5 gigabytes for the day). Not only that but my download speed had stayed consistently at about 250 kb/s. Since my router is reporting my connection as 2.2Mbits/s that’s almost full speed. In the middle of the day.
So it seems TalkTalk don’t (yet) limit Sky by Broadband traffic. Of course it would be easy to reach their 40GB a month limit doing that every day…
Windows Live is the name for the new set of technologies software and computery goodness Microsoft is developing.
A lot of the components aren’t especially related, it’s just a brand name of sorts. Part of it is Windows Live Mail, designed to ultimately replace Hotmail. As of this morning, it doesn’t work on Firefox. You are greeted with the normal Hotmail interface and a message saying due to various problems they’ve rolled back to a previous version meaning Firefox users have to use Hotmail Classic. Well it is beta (and they’ve said it’s beta instead of releasing it and then finding these problems) so I’ll let them off.
Following my theme of silliness, 2L is a programming language with only two operators. And since these operators act on a virtual data store without accepting any operands, it only allows three characters (the two operators and space).
You could argue it has five operators since the first one is overloaded four times…
Ever heard of Internationalised Domain Names? They allow you to register domains with non-Latin characters (i.e. Unicode). They actually do a bit of cheating but I’ll let you find that out. In the meantime check out these interesting addresses showing that just using Chinese or Arabic characters is not the limit IDNs.
Quick warning, they don’t work in IE without a plugin and to see them in their true glory you need Opera…
browsers, Unicode, Punycode
With my broadband connection came a wireless network. So I tried browsing with my PSP. And it is a lot better than I expected. Except when browsing my own blog :(
I figured the easiest way to make it work was to send it the XHTML Basic version. So you should now be able to browse my site with a PSP without any hassle :D
Detecting a PSP is really easy. It sends a custom HTTP header: HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER which contains the firmware version. Just check if that header is set. In PHP you just need to do:
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER'])) $psp = true;
You should have noticed that the area code 555 is used a lot in films. Hopefully you also know this area code does not exist. It’s there just to be plausible but not actually require a real phone number.
Well the film Silent Hill may have a funky alternative for the internet. When people browse the web in films you can often see file:// at the beginning of the address bar, a sign they’re loading files from a hard drive. The ones with a little more thought use a real domain that really exists that can also be used for marketing.
Well, Silent Hill went somewhere in between. In the film a character is seen browsing a website that ends with .web. It obviously doesn’t exist but it is plausible enough to not be annoying.
Have lots of video, audio and/or a TV card? Got a good internet connection (more importantly) with a good upstream connection. Going on holiday or otherwise away from your computer but still somewhere with access to the internet? Then get Orb.
Orb is a cool utility for streaming media from your computer to the internet. Essentially it’s just a program that acts as a web server and a web interface that connects to it. With it you can stream any media on your computer (including TV tuners and web cams) over the internet. Most legal problems go away because the media can only stream to one person at once.
I have plain old ADSL internet access with 288 Kbps upstream and it works fine. So go try it :P