Tag Archives: Blog

Twitter Integration

Posted on by


After nearly a year of no blog posting which has been mirrored by a year of tweeting i’ve decided to integrate stony’s blog with the twitter account. This is thanks to a couple of plugins twitter tools which downloads the tweets every 15 minutes or on demand and social which links twitter and facebook into the blog. All tweets will be tweeted under the category interweb, with tag twitter and title begins with “Tweet:”

I am still going to try and post to the blog directly but with twitter posting to facebook, and having to post manually to facebook from the blog, why not post direct to the blog from twitter.

Replies on twitter are automatically linked into the blog and can be viewed as a link

Next stage is to link facebook into the blog but i’ll leave that for another day

Phone Hacking

Posted on by

The news of the moment in the UK is the News of the World Phone Hacking Scandal. With rumours that there are lists of 1000’s of celebrities, Government officials, criminals and victims who have had their phones hacked by journalists of the news of the world hysteria has hit the british press and the newspaper buckled under pressure and shut down.
Baffled by the reaction, I thought about the story, and suspect there is a fair amount of misunderstanding amongst the public. Especially when it comes to the question “What is Phone Hacking”. And the first thing to remember it is nothing like the underworld of computer hacking, virus writing, web page hijacking, or even phreaking to make free phone calls. No, what it is is simply playing off human lazyness and taking advantage of a functionality mobile phone networks introduced many years ago.
Almost every phone operator gives the option to check your mobile phone messages “remotely” ie from another phone when you do not have it with you. This is also the case for most modern answerphones for landlines.

For those who have not been following the stories, have a look on google news

For mobile phones it is simple:
1) You phone your mobile phone
2) Wait for the voicemail divert
3) Press the * key
4) Enter your PIN code

And your messages are read out as if you were accessing it from your own mobile phone.
The vast majority of users are (or until now) were unaware of this as they had no use for it and therefore would never go into their settings to change the PIN code.
Therefore, for most people the default will work – and this includes celebrities.
Clearly, you can’t initiate this plan if the person you are trying to get hold of answers the phone, so the ususal plan is to work in pairs where one person phones and if the person picks up the 2nd person immediately phones from another line and will immediately get through to voicemail. Meanwhile the original person phoning who got through to the person will give some excuse such as claim to be a sales person offering products that will be refused or that they have dialed an incorrect number opening the way for the other person who has got into the voicemail to listen through the messages saved, find out any numbers left by people who have left messages or even delete messages.

This BBC news site story has more info.
The guardian has a whole section of their website dedicated to it.

Out of curiosity I decided to try and hack my own phone having done a bit of googling to find the default pin codes.
The first problem i found was that I had actually disabled my voicemail which would explain why I hadn’t had any messages recently – not that i use it much. Next, having enabled it after 10 seconds of ringing I got through, followed the process only to find the default pins did not work, suggesting i had in fact changed the pin code at some point and have no idea what it is so good luck phone hackers getting into my voicemail!!

The Domesday Project

Posted on by

It’s been nearly 2 years since I last did any blogging – this has been largely due to a lack of time.
However, I’ve missed it and decided to get back into it.
So, I’ll begin with The Domesday Project:

This was begun between 1984 and 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book which for those not familiar was a book commissioned in 1086 by the then King of England, William I (More commonly known as William the Conqueror) in order to determine what land and property existed in the United Kingdom and who owned it. This was for the purposes of tax collection, but also served a useful piece of information from a social history perspective. While it is not fully clear how long the collection process took it is suggested that it took the best part of a year to collate this information into the book.
To celebrate the 900th anniversary the BBC asked schools across the country to create their own version and a snapshot in time named The Domesday Project. Being done by children and teachers they gave themselves 2 years to record the information. Created in association with Acorn Computers, all the data was entered electronically onto a purpose built computer system. Cutting edge for its time it was able to collect text, photos and videos but also would become the google street view of its time.
It’s biggest flaw was it was too cutting edge and the times weren’t ready for the technology.
The data was catalogued on a new storage medium – Laser Disc. Using a scsi controller, the player could be attached to a BBC Master Computer and when combined with a tracker ball (precursor to the modern trackball or trackpad). All in it cost the best part of £5000 which at the time was the price of a small family car. Therefore, sales were low and the project went into obscurity.

This week, The project hit the news as word came through that a part of the BBC had, 25 years on, managed to convert the data into a format that would be accessible to all for free on the web. The concern had come that not enough of the laser disc players existed and that the discs themselves had become corrupted because of a flaw in their design.
Several previous attempts had been made – firstly using emulation of the original BBC Master software on windows PC’s, then a version which did not require the emulation as the software had been re-written for windows PC’s. But finally, the ultimate which does not require any software be installed on the end user’s computer other than a web browser. The domesday1986 blog documents this while the Beebmaster Website shows the technology used to create/play the original discs.

The link for the successfully restored data can be found here:
Domesday reloaded

WordPress 2.8.6

Posted on by

Got round to doing the 2.8.5 update to wordpress last week and what do you know within days there’s a new update.
At least this time i’ve implemented it straight away.
Can’t remember if i’ve said before, but the automated updater within wordpress makes this an absolute doddle to do.
Much easier than when you had to download the files, delete the whole blog and upload it back again.
This method is done in 5 minutes and even walks you through a backup of the sql database.

As aleksandr might say “simples”:

comparethemeerkat

WordPress 2.7.1

Posted on by

As usual i’m being slapdash with upgrading my blog’s software
But hopefully from now on you won’t see these posts because i’ve installed new plugin at the same time as doing the update which is called WordPress automatic upgrade. With this plugin whenever there’s an upgrade it will do the backup and installation through the wordpress admin pane for me without having to download files, backup and ftp myself which should keep me up to date.

Anyways, am currently with the latest release, haven’t seen anything too radically different other than it’s fixed a bug i had in the admin pane to do with plugins. But do drop me an email if you spot anything.

WordPress 2.6.3

Posted on by

As usual I’ve been slack with upgrading my blog’s software, and it’s only been a few spammers signing up that has prompted me to upgrade things. And again, I’ve refreshed the ip2nation database & plugin to cater for any unusual countries or ip addresses. Things seem to be working, but as usual if you spot anything odd drop me a line and i can do some investigation.

The main reason for my post though is I’ve just installed an autotagger (I haven’t been tagging my posts in the past) and want to see whether it works.

With a bit of luck if I drop some keywords in it should add the relevant tags

How Much Is a Site Worth?

Posted on by

stonysleep.com has been running for a while (10 or 11 years I think), admittedly not in blog form for all that time.
Now, there’s a website called yourwebsitevalue.com which values a website based on various criteria. Back in July we were worth less than $50, but I went to it today and was surprised to see the value zoom up to $208:

How Cool is that!?! Though am a little surprised what’s happened in that time to cause that. Perhaps google has finally got round to indexing all the blog so put a higher pricetag on it.
Anyways, check it out i you have a website or are curious how much some of the more well known sites are worth

Frankenstein Mac

Posted on by

My Powermac G4 Case Mod from 2003
I was talking to MacHeadCase yesterday about future computers, and we were comparing what each of us had. It was then that I realised that I’d never talked about my Mac on this website and/or blog. So I got my digital camera out, a Sony T-1 and built a little page about my Mac and what i did to the case.
It’s a bit of a mishmash of a computer now – many of the components have been upgraded, and being the first tower case computer i’ve owned, am reluctant to give it up, and want to upgrade it as much as possible.
It’s quite old though now – bought it in August 2000 as a 1st generation Powermac G4, with a 450MHz processor, Zip Drive, DVD ROM, 20Gb Hard Drive and 128mb RAM.
It now has a 2nd hard drive: 120Gb Maxtor, a DVD±RW in addition to the DVD ROM, 640Mb RAM, and no Zip Drive. I’ve added an extra 4 USB ports, and a wireless network card. The original ATI rage Pro graphics card was replaced 4 years ago for a NVidia GeForce 2MX, but that is now due for replacement – i think a Radeon of some description will be the best.
At some point i will want to replace this mac, possibly with a Powermac G5, but they are expensive, and don’t have dual optical drives which drives me nuts. Perhaps I’ll go for a cheaper 2002 edition of the Power Mac G4 Desktops or as I’ve threatened for many years buy a Windows Computer because it’s cheaper and easier to upgrade.