Author: Olly

Home Security Measures

We’ve recently moved into a property we bought in Mansfield, and so far its been amazing. Its not the biggest and best house in the world – but its ours.

The last few weeks have seen various house upgrades such as new carpets and freshly papered and painted walls – but one of the next items on my list is a solid, professional home security system.

I want at least 3 cameras, fed to a DVR that is high enough resolution for the images to be used in a court of law. I’m also going to be installing carpet grippers along certain fences to aid in protecting my stuff – i have spoken to the police who have off advised me which fences not to put them on – he didn’t say much about the others 🙂

I’ve also read that using spikey plants like the “Spanish Dagger” in your garden is a great way to protect against burglars – totally legal, they look awesome and if someone jumps over a fence to steal your warez they get some very sharp spikes in their bottom.

14 June 2013
Syncing my Social World

Hello 🙂

So for ages i have argued with myself about how i should use the social networks that are available to me – i use about 6 quite regularly but i feel that i repeat myself or end up writing the same thing, on a few of them, and i only have the same friends/followers on most of them anyway.

I’ve been pondering over an idea to simply use each social network for the things it does best (or what it started out doing) and then bringing them all together using one of the 6.

Here is my plan, i think…

Firstly, YouTube and Miso don’t really come into the plan (as such) as they are specific social networks and you cant really do what you do on these on the likes of Facebook or Twitter. I will however bring these into one of the more generic ones so that all my social activity is linked.

I am going to use Twitter to chat, talk, and post quick messages (that’s what its made fo’) and i’m going to start posting all my images through Flickr (again, that’s what its made for) but of course each of these social networks will link to the other, so Flickr will notify Twitter that there is a new image, which will in turn post to Facebook)

Foursquare will continue to be my location based social network – i used it before Facebook introduced the ability to check in.

Im going to try and only use Facebook to show my updates from everything else – i’m going to (try to) sack off adding updates directly to it and only use the app for replying to any notifications.

And i’m afraid coming in last place – is Google Plus. I do use it and i’m trying to use it more, but at the moment the only thing it really gets used for is the instant backup of all my photos. I do use the communities and find it more of a nerdy social network than anything else – i guess i need to expand my nerd crowd a bit more 🙂

Its all going to take some planning as if i’m not careful ill have multiple updates on the same networks for the same information – ill draw myself a nice diagram later!

Let me know how you use your social network accounts – do you link them up? Do you use any cool tools or apps to enable you to never miss a trick? 🙂

29 May 2013
Skype Payment Scam – Explained

I’ve been around these parts (the Internet) since I was 13, and over those years i’ve noticed lots and lots of cyber scams in various shapes and forms – I find them funny to be honest as they are usually so poor, it amazes me people fall for them..

I received a funny one today – thought i’d screenshot it and explain how its easy to tell its a scam;

From the top down, firstly, the title of the email has a space before the exclamation mark. This is not proper grammar, and a company as large as Microsoft/Skype wouldn’t make such a schoolboy error.

Next, the email address is “support@numberbook.com” which a) isn’t a Skype email and b) is sod all to do with Skype or Microsoft (MS own Skype now innit)

Moving swiftly on, the wording of Skype and the orders@ email address are formatted so that its not picked up as an email address by spam filters, having a question mark instead of a fullstop and then not including the next full stop (before the UK) is again a huge error, and no reputable company would do that.

The next part down is the same, the email addresses formatted so it still looks like an email, but spam filters wouldn’t be triggered.

And finally, the last part of the email is the nail in the coffin IMO – PayPal is one word, not two – no official email from a huge company would make such an error – plus the “Pay Pal” link points to;

hXXp://www.elrinconoculto.com/config.html (link nulled so you cant click)

…Which is obviously not an official PayPal domain 🙂

8 February 2013
Stupid 123 Reg Web Forwarding FAIL

We use 123 reg for our domains as we have so many and they are the cheapest UK based domain name registrar! However the saying “you get what you pay for” really comes into play as the control panel and general support you get from them is dogshit.

I wrote a very popular post back in 2008 about their domain name auto renewal shambles – now, its the web forwarding that is gonna take a beating.

I have a customer who has collected a few domains along their business life, and only one of them is active – so he wanted to (in a search engine friendly way) redirect all his spare domain names to his main site so they were not wasted. Initially, its quite confusing as the control panel will let you set the forwarder and appear like its all set up and working even if the nameservers of the domain are set externally – so the 123 reg forwarding isnt even being factored into the equasion at this point.

After finally reading some instructions (im a man, i dont do instructions) i realised you needed to reset the nameservers to 123-reg’s nameservers, so that the local settings would take effect. I did this, and left it a few days so DNS could properly do its thing – checked them all this morning, and they are resolve to a 123reg page – none of them forward.

Ok – now im starting to get pissed off.

I re-checked all domains, all nameservers were reset and all were set to forward to the main website – so what was the problem?

I figured the best thing to do would be to properly read the instructions (im a man, when forced to read instructions i skim read) and noticed a little line in it that had until now evaded my sight…

So wait…

I have to reset nameservers, create the redirect, THEN edit the DNS and add in some IP address?

Would you like to make things any more confusing? I mean im OK editing DNS I do it a lot, but if my mum wanted to forward a domain she would be up shit creek – not good, 123reg!

I’ve since gone in and edited this IP address – but if you are having problems like I did, then make sure you actually read everything as, despite it being totally retarded – there are guides to help you through the shambles.

21 January 2013