In 1994, I recorded an album. It was a home recording job, but wasn’t completely a solo effort. The vocals were all me, and – I think – all of the instrumentation, except what was sequenced. I also did a lot of the engineering, but it was recorded in the midst of a party weekend in Brighton & Home, with lots of friends helping with button-pushing, tweaks and advice.
Tag: internet
I have a love-hate relationship with my local GP Practice. The people are all generally great, but the bureaucracy of medicine sometimes seems more important than actually treating people.
And so my websites have moved again, although it is five years since I last went through this.
I am amused by what I typed then…
I’m about to move my domains to a new server, and I couldn’t help notice that 3 of them are shifting a large amount of data, which I couldn’t explain.
Back in April this year, I wrote to the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) for “official guidance on GDPR for purely personal, non-commercial, use of data”. I made the point that much had been published about how GDPR applied to organisations and companies, but I had failed to find anything that applied to data handling for social clubs.
This is in respect to data I hold with regard to the forums I administer and mail-lists I run, all purely social activities, involving people who had explicitly joined up.
I have been playing with Alexa Skills for some time, and having great fun.
Until recently, all of my skills were private. If you design an Alexa Skill but never publish it, it remains in Dev – it is accessible to all of your own Echo devices, but not to the outside world. This is actually extremely useful, as you can write your own personal skills to do quite specific tasks.
I’ve been using a number of web integration tools to do various tasks, ranging from cross posting from one social network to another, through to on-line automation. I think many people may be familiar with IFTTT (If This Then That), but the two relative newcomers, Zapier and Integromat are less well known. I thought I would do a quick comparison.
A web integration tool can be used to link two totally different systems. An easy example would be “Whenever I tweet, post it to Facebook”, or “Whenever someone posts to this page, send me an email”. But it can get a lot more sophisticated – I currently have automations set up that watch for specific YouTube videos and copy them to my Plex account, so they appear automatically on my home TV system; I have recently come up with a system that lets me log my medications via Alexa, and record them in Google Sheets.
So I took the Echo Dot, a very old phone (running Android KitKat), a SIM from GiffGaff that I ordered Thursday and which arrived yesterday, plus various cables and adapters, and went outside in the sunshine to play with my car.
More techie fun. It’s actually fairly easy to do, it was the idea that was brilliant (is there an emoji for an exploding head?)
Plex media server has a “watch later” function, that can be used for watching *selected* YouTube videos. See a video while browsing, and want to watch it later? Simply open the video page and click a browser bookmark. When you next open Plex, it will be listed under your “watch later” items.
Good grief. Just received a very pleasant email from the good folk at Intus Healthcare, who supply me with CPAP equipment for my sleep apneoa.
Turns out that Google are hassling them over a link I have in my blog sidebar. They interpret the links as advertising spam because they appear on EVERY page of my blog and the website is not about sleep apneoa.
For a few years, now, I have used a cheap FON wifi access point to provide limited (internet only) access for any visitors, separate from my own wifi access.
By default, a FON device offers two networks – one private and one public. In my case the private network is POSHGAMES, which my friends use; the public FON network is one that *anybody* can log into if they have FON credentials. The good part is that by hosting FON access, you yourself gain free access to any other FON point in Europe, which also includes many BT access points.
I’m in the midst of changing the provider of my Virtual Private Server from Webfusion to Tagadab. This is mainly due to Webfusion being sensationally unhelpful in advising me on how to migrate my VPS (hosting several websites) away from the old server, running software past end-of-life. Their answer was that I should simply open a new VPS account with them, and keep both old and new accounts open while I stumbled through the migration without assistance.
Tagadab, on the other hand, provided heaps of helpful information to my enquiry, plus a 7 day trial for £1 (later extended, for free, to 10 days). Which means – with their help – it was easier to migrate to a server run by a Tagadab than migrate within Webfusion’s offerings. Plus I am going to save a fiver a month.