LIFE = DATA
Last night Bits of Freedom organized another Big Brother Awards ceremony here in Amsterdam. Prizes were awarded to companies, individuals and governmental institutions that had most threatened our personal privacy during 2010. Unsurprisingly, very few winners showed up to accept their dubious awards.
Below is the short film I made to kick-off the evening: LIFE=DATA
UPC wil dat je in de meterkast telefoneert
Onlangs heb ik internet van XS4ALL en telefonie van KPN ingeruild voor alles van UPC waar ik het volgende pakket heb besteld:
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Fibre Power 60
Standaard Telefonie
Digitale TV Royaal HD met DVR
Best een riante combinatie van diensten en UPC biedt ook nog 100% installatie garantie - dus dat zal wel goed komen, dacht ik. Wat UPC niet vertelt is dat ze alleen garanderen dat de diensten werken op het punt waar het kabelsignaal je woning binnenkomt. Bij de meeste nieuwbouw huizen is dat in de meterkast. In de meterkast sluiten ze het modem aan - anders kunnen ze niet garanderen dat je de snelheid en stabiliteit krijgt die ze beloven.
Prima, maar hoe zit het dan met computers, telefoon en de decoder voor digitale TV aansluiten?
Bye-bye my old friend XS4ALL
After much deliberation (actually, about two years of discussions between me and @merelzwart) I finally bit the bullet and cancelled our internet account with XS4ALL to fly into the future on dazzlingly fast fibre power with UPC for half the price :-/. I know, that emoticon just now should have been a smiley, but I have mixed emotions about the change of provider.
TweepMatch™
I love Twitter. In fact, I can barely imagine life without it nowadays. Although it is definitely a "Weapon of Mass Distraction" (which is how Obama recently described the iPad), it has also enriched my social life, not only on a virtual level. I've made new friends, keep up-to-date better with existing friends and even got a couple of paid assignments through Twitter. If you follow the right people for you, then it really can be a lot of fun. But how do you find those people?
GMail: Send and Archive – keep your Inbox tidy
Do you use GMail? If so, have you ever checked out the GMail Labs features, to be found under the little green beaker icon up in the right-hand corner? You should, as there are some great time-saving, productivity-increasing, visually-pleasing plugins to be found there. My personal favourite is 'Send and Archive'. Since activating it, my Inbox usually contains no more than about 10 messages and is sometimes even empty whereas it used to be piling over with 1000+ messages.
Bits of Freedom T-Shirt
It was a while ago now (but at the time my blog was in hibernation) so please excuse me for belatedly posting that the T-shirt I designed for Bits of Freedom (Dutch digital rights watchdogs) is available in both black and white. The text is in Dutch I'm afraid, but if you want to support a good cause (despite not understanding what the T-shirt says), you can order one at T-Junk for just €20.
Spotify
A couple of months ago streaming music service Spotify finally rolled out here in The Netherlands. After a few days of using it, I signed up for the €10/month Premium service so I didn’t have to listen to the adverts after every ten tracks or so (they really annoy me, which is the main reason I never listen to commercial radio stations). A few months into using the service, I shall share some of my thoughts on it.
GMail themes
Since this morning I discovered that I no longer need the Better GMail plug-in to give my GMail interface a new look, GMail now offers themes itself!
They look similar to the themes offered on google/ig and I am hoping that they open the doors to other designers so we have lots more to choose from. Below are a couple of screenshots from Google's first offerings (click to enlarge).
Quickest survey ever
Recently PayPal restricted my account because I needed to verify various information with them. They claim it's due to the European Regulations on Money Laundering - but there are people who think that's just a scam to convince us to give PayPal direct debit access to our bank accounts.
Hosting Zoom Can't Host WordPress Sites?!?
After a long correspondence with Hosting Zoom support, I have discovered that for $99 per year, it is apparently not possible to host a WordPress site at Hosting Zoom without problems. I've been experiencing 500 errors (internal server error) so frequently recently that my blog is barely reachable let alone 'writable'. Hosting Zoom technical support (who do, I must add, respond swiftly to support requests) claim that a WordPress script is using too much memory / CPU / resources / whatever. We're talking a FRESH WORDPRESS INSTALL here (one I installed for testing purposes alongside this one)!
Suzanna,
The WordPress script uses too much memory in a single PHP process for this specific shared hosting environment.Putting it bluntly, your hosting plan does not provide you with sufficient resources to allow WordPress to perform perfectly. Don't get me wrong, it's capable of running it - but not to an extent that you're able to serve multiple user's with.
HZ Support Manager
Huh? Multiple users?