Tag Archives: irishblogs

The worst targeted spam ever!

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I honestly thought that spammers had gotten smarter about making sure their emails were taken seriously. Even the most geeky and anti-marketing of developers will realise that big red and bold text, center justified, looks like something out of the last century. I hope for the sake of their business that they put more effort into their backup service.

This email, which I received twice in the last week is just a joke. I would have immediately marked it as spam and forgotten about it but it mentioned WordPress and obviously my email address is on their list of WordPress bloggers. I wonder if they read my blog?

At least they didn’t CC everyone like an Irish guy did a few years back.

If you want me to look at your new service, write me a nice friendly email, address me by name, email me from your own email address, talk to me about something you’ve gleaned from my blog or my twitter stream so I at least think you’re a friendly individual and I may even check out your site.

Android Battery Saving Tips

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Battery usage on all so called “smart phones” is almost universally woeful. Big high-res colour screens, fast processors, sound, wifi and 3g networking all consume gobs of battery power.

Here are some battery saving tips for Android phones. I’m going on a long flight in a few days time so I’ll be trying these tips out before I go!

  • Go into Settings->About phone->”Battery use” to see what’s chewing up your battery.
  • Turn off haptic feedback. That’s vibration alerts when you press your screen. Turn off vibration as a notification too.
  • Apparently 3G uses more power than wifi so make sure wifi is always on. (Settings->Wireless and network->Wifi Settings->Advanced->Wifi sleep policy and select “Never”). My Galaxy S switches to 3G when the screen blanks by default but apparently this is a big battery saver. Only when you have a wifi network around I guess.
  • Always press “BACK” when you want to exit an app.
  • Turn off GPS. If your phone uses the cell network to find your location turn that off too.
  • Turn on power saving, and reduce the screen timeout so it goes black faster.
  • Turn off wifi when you leave your house or work. That stops your phone trying to connect to a network.
  • Turn off bluetooth when you don’t need it.
  • Turn off 3G and use 2G. (Ugh, slow!)
  • Turn off background data and syncing.
  • Turn down the brightness on your display.
  • Don’t use your camera.
  • Don’t use a live wallpaper, what’s wrong with a static picture?
  • Don’t use a homescreen widget that pulls data and updates all the time.
  • Task manager are generally frowned upon but some apps misbehave and don’t close properly. “Watchdog Lite” is a useful app that tells you how much CPU each app running on your phone consumes. Beware closing apps too much. They may look like they’re running, but they’re not. Android keeps them in memory, so they start up quickly next time.
  • Get Juice Defender off the Market. Besides a ton of battery saving features, the like of which I’m still trying to understand, it has a handy widget that will disable mobile data completely. Nice!

I’d love if Android phones totally disconnected from the Internet when I closed the browser, Tweetdeck or whatever app was using the network. My old Nokia 5800 did that. It connected each time I opened the browser and had wonderful battery life.

So, what other tips can you suggest for power hungry smartphones?

Update! With wifi and the 3G radio on the other night 6% of battery was used over about 6 hours. I switched off wifi and 3G (using Juice Extender) and the phone only burned through 2% of battery power over the same period last night.

Nokia 5800 Long Term Review

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Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a smartphone and portable entertainment device by Nokia. It was introduced on October 2, 2008 and released on November 27, 2008. Code-named “Tube”, it is the first touchscreen-equipped S60 device by Nokia. The version being s60v5. It’s part of the XpressMusic series of phones, which emphasizes music and multimedia playback. The touchscreen features tactile feedback. (Wikipedia)

I’ve had a Nokia 5800 for almost a year now. I was really excited when I bought this phone last year. My first touchscreen smartphone! It took some getting used to, having mostly been a Nokia S40 user. It didn’t take long, and in fact now I try to press the screen when I use older phones!

The phone itself does all the usual things and frankly, there are many in-depth reviews out there. Here are a few:

I love this phone. It’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. It’s not perfect by any means but the pros outweigh the cons!

  1. I love the on-screen keyboard for entering texts. It will switch from portait to landscape mode when you turn the phone on it’s side. When I first bought the phone I could use predictive text in both portrait and landscape mode but the latest firmware upgrade changed that. In landscape mode I can’t use predictive text now. That sucks.
  2. The GPS works reasonably well though. Using Windows or Mac OS X software you can download maps for your area to the phone. Unfortunately the GPS chip in the phone is Assisted GPS. It makes a network connection almost every time it needs to find it’s location. I actually bought a data add-on simply because the phone seemed to “leak” data for no apparent reason but it was probably because I had loaded Nokia Maps.
  3. Nokia recently made their navigation system free of charge and it works, sometimes well, sometimes not. Unfortunately it sends us driving in round about ways on occasion. Our journey may be directly down a road but the map told us to cross the river, drive for a bit and then drive across a bridge further up!
  4. The camera is decent enough. It has a flash too. There’s a plastic cover over the lens on the back and unfortunately it cracked. I bought a cheap cover on Amazon but now the light leaks from the flash so I usually disable it when I can.
  5. Reception is very good. Phone calls don’t drop very often, and texts go through all the time. Data calls drop occasionally, and will drop back to Edge if required. No “grip of death”! (har har, bet you’re all sick of that now aren’t you?)
  6. My favourite apps would have to be Gravity, a Twitter application, and Opera Mini for browsing. Opera Mini loads the mobile version of Gmail and Google Reader quickly and display them with little lag. There’s also the free Youtube app which is excellent but I prefer to use a computer for watching videos. I also have numerous free apps and games installed, almost all from the Ovi store.
  7. The Ovi store is Nokia’s application store. It’s basic, but it’s quite good. You can search for apps, and sort and display by different criteria. Only want free apps? There ya go! Installing is a sinch, but it would be nice if they made reviews more accessible. You have to click through to them.
  8. Battery life is pretty good too. If you’re browsing the net and making phone calls it’ll last well over a day but add GPS and suddenly battery life drops like a bomb. If it has to hunt for a signal that hurts too unfortunately.

So, there it is. The Nokia 5800 is an excellent phone. It’s not perfect but I can heartily recommend it.

My next phone? I already bought it. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S, an Android powered smartphone. While the 5800 is an excellent phone it’s showing it’s age. Using the new phone is like moving from Windows 3.11 on a 486 to Windows 95 on a Pentium. Hmm, time to update my analogies?

Who's abusing your website?

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I wanted to know what IP addresses were hitting my website. I’d done this before and it only took a moment or two to recreate the following commands. Still, here it is for future reference.

grep -v "wp-content" access.log|grep -v wp-includes|cut -f 1 -d " "|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|less

This code:

  • Excludes “wp-content” and “wp-includes” requests.
  • Uses “cut” to cut out the IP address.
  • Sorts the list of IP addresses.
  • Uses “uniq” to count the occurrence of each IP.
  • And finally reverse sorts the list again, by number of occurrences, with the largest number at the top.

You’ll probably find Google and Yahoo! bots near the top of the list, but I also found the “Jyxobot/1″ bot was quite busy today.

The MU forums are moving

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The MU forums will shortly be closing up shop.

WordPress 3.0 integrated everything that MU always did so it’s better to consolidate the forums too. There’s a MultiSite forum on WordPress.org and any queries about upgrading or problems using WordPress 3.0 should go there.

The old forums aren’t going anywhere but later today or perhaps tomorrow I’ll be making them read-only. You’ll still be able to browse the forum, and Google will still index the wealth of information already there but posting will be disabled.

So, thank you to everyone who contributed to the forum over the years. You helped make WordPress MU great.

WordPress 3.0 Domain Mapping 0.5.2

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I’ve just released WordPress Domain Mapping 0.5.2. This plugin allows you to map any domain on to your WordPress 3.0 or WordPress MU website.

New in this release:

  • WordPress 3.0 support.
  • Added “domains” page for superadmin to add domains to any blog. The user’s domains page can be disabled by the superadmin too.
  • Added support for “www.” prefix in front of domains.
  • Allow dashboard to redirect to mapped or original domain.
  • Better support for SSL
  • Translation file added for localization.

For security reasons remote login is now disabled if the dashboard is redirected to the mapped domain. There is a tiny chance of a man-in-the-middle attack during redirection, but it’s just as likely to happen when you’re logging in and sending your username/password to the login form. Call me paranoid.

I would like to thank Ron and Andrea who were a huge help developing and testing this release. Andrea has written a great post on creating a network in WordPress 3.0 plus instructions on upgrading from WordPress MU. Great stuff!

WP Super Cache 0.9.9.2

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WP Super Cache 0.9.9.2 has just been released! This version works with WordPress 3.0 and adds a number of new features and bug fixes:

  • Cache Preloading will cache every post on your site.
  • A cache tester that will check if your homepage is cached.
  • Much better support for mobile plugins.
  • Mod rewrite rules can now be updated from within the admin page.
  • Lots and lots of bugs fixed. See the changelog for more details.

Preloading creates lots of files on your server so if you have many thousands of posts please be aware of this. Filesystem limitations may cause problems if you use a flat permalink structure. For example, ext2 or ext3 only allows 32,000 directories in a directory. If you have more than that number of posts you may run into problems.

The plugin does not preload category or tag pages but because your single posts will be cached you’ll find the load on your server will be reduced. Uncached pages will be served more quickly and your visitors will have a quicker and better experience on your site.
You may also see an increase in site traffic if your server was previously underpowered!

Update! I just released 0.9.9.3 to address the (mostly minor) bugs that were reported overnight. If you don’t notice anything wrong there’s no need to upgrade.