Doing some tidying up…

May 30th, 2019 by Ciarán No comments »

I’ve removed all the Tweets from the blog – you can still get them over on Twitter of course. I’ll be doing some more tidying up around the theme, etc., at some point too.

Spotify launches in Ireland

November 13th, 2012 by Ciarán No comments »

Image representing Spotify as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Spotify has launched in Ireland finally!  I’m using the 30 day Premium trial for now, but I’m seriously tempted to go for the €9.99 monthly subscription.  I’ll explore the library of content they have in the first month to see if it’s justified.

Interestingly they also cater for purchasing the tracks if you really want to have them forever, and those are DRM-free 320kbps MP3s just like 7digital provides.

Another cool thing they have is embedding playlists, such as for Muse‘s album The 2nd Law below.  Just hit play and it should start streaming 🙂

I’ve enabled the Facebook sharing stuff for now, let’s see how much it spams my timeline or not 🙂

 

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How to make Google Chrome use the right local Google site for searching

February 8th, 2011 by Ciarán No comments »

Like most Google Chrome users I use the address bar to quickly search Google by entering my search terms instead of a web site address and hitting Enter to do the search. Chrome will try to work out where you are located and use the local version of Google if it can, which is great – except that sometimes it gets it wrong, or makes a choice that doesn’t suit you, and no matter what you try you can’t change Chrome’s choice.

I came across this problem after a trip to Italy when Chrome decided that it would continue to use http://www.google.it as the default localised version of Google for searches I entered in the address bar. No matter what I did with settings in the Options dialog, I couldn’t stop Chrome giving me results in Italian, with Italian options, menu items, and so on. From the investigations I did about this problem it became clear that this is a fairly common problem, but there was no obvious fix. So, I was left to my own devices to sort it out – and thankfully I did 🙂

» Read more: How to make Google Chrome use the right local Google site for searching

Blog updated to WordPress 3.0

June 17th, 2010 by Ciarán No comments »

Following today’s release of WordPress 3.0 I was able to quickly and easily upgrade my blog via the Tools | Updates menu on the Dashboard. I love how WordPress makes it so easy to perform these kinds of updates for plugins, themes, and the core CMS 😀

Halo: Reach Multiplayer Trailer analysis

March 3rd, 2010 by Ciarán 2 comments »

Bungie have just released the “MP bomb” that Marcus Lehto referenced yesterday – it’s a trailer showing some multiplayer action from the Alpha build of Halo: Reach, and it shows of some new features we’ll see in the public Beta in May. You can read about it and download HD versions direct from Bungie.

I’ve stepped through the video frame-by-frame and came up with the following observations:

  • 00:13 – 00:15 From the Loadouts bit, I think it’s clear that jetpacks, active camo, and sprint are all armour abilities.
  • Also looks like the radar shows you the name of the area you’re in e.g. “Slipway” (00:15) , “Yard” (00:21) – should help with team communication 🙂
  • 00:22 The bit where the Spartan survives the Ghost ram, looks to me like the Spartan does some kind of power punch to the ground or something that kills the Ghost? As kidtsunami points out on the HBO Forum the movement of the Spartan is very reminiscent of the action in the Halo 3 CGI trailer where Master Chief triggers the bubble shield
  • The Covenant weapon at 00:48 looks like a plasma grenade launcher or rocket launcher with tracking projectiles 🙂
  • Human grenade launcher at 1:03.
  • You can see the armour ability icon “recharging” the jetpack ability at 1:05 – a small circle around the icon.
  • 1:09/1:10 some kind of new gametype where you have to blow up the generators? It’s marked with a “C”, and it’s definitely called a “Generator” in the text that comes up when you blow it up. A Territories variant?
  • 1:12/1:13 – Phantom airstrike taking out the tank?
  • 1:16 is definitely some kind of Covenant equivalent of the Spartan Laser.
  • 1:17 you can see “Revenge” come up as he headshots the guy – is this a new medal?
  • 1:20 – DMR looks like one head shot kills.
  • Looks like the Covenant Laser is back at 1:23 (top-left, targeting the tank).
  • 1:24 Guy that lands beside the “May 3, 2010” shoots the human grenade launcher towards the camera

Conversation about the video is progressing in this thread on the HBO Forums 🙂

Halo 3: ODST Review

October 11th, 2009 by Ciarán 4 comments »

So it’s two and a half weeks now since I dropped into New Mombassa, and I’ve emerged into the dawn of the new day, campaign complete. I’ve also spent some time repelling endless waves of Covenant, and so I thought I’d share my thoughts on the ODST experience. Read on, but beware – spoilers may lie ahead…

» Read more: Halo 3: ODST Review

New Blog Theme

October 9th, 2009 by Ciarán No comments »

I’ve updated the site to use the Cordobo Green Park 2 theme by Andreas Jacob, and it’s much nicer than what I had before. It took a bit of playing around with the sidebar widgets to get them set up just as I want them without overriding the standard ones included in the theme which I quite like. I tweaked the header CSS to include an image as well as text in the logo, and to reduce the font size for the h1 – h4 tags (I felt the blog post titles in particular were too big) but apart from that everything’s standard.

The only thing that went wrong with the upgrade was my mistake with upgrading the Fresh From plugin so I lost all the old tweets that it had imported. They should upgrade it so that it asks you if you want to keep them. I did a bit of tidying up on the user registrations too – all spammers with no comments at all, so I deleted them and switched off registration. You can now comment without registering – though noone really wants to anyway based on how things have gone so far 🙂

My twitter feed is acting up

July 1st, 2009 by Ciarán No comments »

Looks like my twitter feed as imported by the Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter plugin is acting up and posting multiple copies of each tweet. Will need to look into this, and tidy up the posts 🙁

My tweets are now included in my blog

April 8th, 2009 by Ciarán No comments »

I just installed the Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter plugin for WordPress so that I can capture my tweets on Twitter as @anlaochsiorai in the blog here as blog posts. I’ve found myself microblogging via Twitter from my GPhone more often than posting regular posts here, so thought it would be good to capture them all in one place. As usual the plugin search and installation worked really well from the new Dashboard in WordPress 2.7.

I ended up tweaking the code of the plugin a little to remove the “Fresh from Twitter:” prefix to all the post headings, and I also increased the number of words extracted from the tweet to make the post title from 3 to 6. I found that if I kept the setting on that shows the profile picture it was messing up my page format since it was adding a <br clear=”both” /> tag which pushed the post metadata and other posts below the end of my sidebar 🙂 Switching the option off leaves the posts with just a small Twitter icon which I actually prefer the look of, and doesn’t mess up the flow of the page.

So, on with the microblogging!

RSS feed problem fixed

February 16th, 2009 by Ciarán No comments »

I ran into a problem that seems to come up occasionally on the WordPress support forum – blank lines at the beginning of the RSS feed XML file for the site which causes problems since it’s no longer valid XML. A quick look at the support forum pointed me in the right direction. It turned out to be blank lines following the final ?> line in the functions.php I had added to my custom theme to add widget support to the sidebar. This file gets loaded and parsed for every request to the blog, including for the RSS feed, and the blank line is actually seen as an intended part of the output – like the regular HTML you see in PHP files. Removing the blank line sorted the problem out.