I thought the other day, that it would be interesting to see what words people place between the words I and you on Twitter. For example, how often people said “I love you” compared to “I hate you” etc. I knocked together a script that polls the public timeline every minute and records any new [...]
So, the Dell Mini 9 came with Ubuntu 8.04 on it – and our challenge for after work today was to get Mac OS X running on it – and we thought we’d found some pretty foolproof guides and examples, so we gave it a go. Firstly, the Mac image on the USB stick refused [...]
The new Dell Mini 9 arrived a couple of hours ago, and it isn’t half small! As I said before, it has an 8.9″ screen, but that screen is by no means low-quality. It’s very crisp, incredibly clear and amazingly bright with the backlight turned up as high as it will go. It came with [...]
Back in January, I turned 21. Around that time I was looking at the myriads of Netbooks that were out and about in stores, with the thought that perhaps I could ask for one for my birthday, or to ask for some money towards one. However, I couldn’t make my mind up and choose which [...]
Using some handy SQL queries, I’ve pulled together the following statistics from 2006 to the present.
I upgraded the memory in my Mac yesterday evening, from 1Gb (in two 512Mb DDR2 sticks) to 2Gb (two 1Gb DDR2 sticks). It’s always a bit nerve-racking doing anything to the Mac, as it’s so tightly put together and not easy to replace parts if they go wrong. I took some photos of the Mac when it was apart.
I’ve been looking recently for a decent app that I can use in Mac OS X Leopard to keep me up to date with the Twitter notifications of my friends, but I’m quite picky when it comes to apps that I have running on my desktop constantly.
When you realise that, yes, Dan Hadland might be getting excited over the prospects of lots of new networking possibilities in your own house, but that you’re getting quite excited about it all too.
Then it must be true. Stop using IE or Safari and start using Firefox. Great stuff. Genius, he is.
Last night I saw Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End for the second time, and today Dan and I watched a most of Pirates of Silicon Valley, a film about the history of Apple and Microsoft. I saw At World’s End on Sunday night with Dan and Kita, and then again last night with [...]
There are a number of methods that I’ve used in the past to work around Microsoft Internet Explorer’s downfalls. But which one is actually the best? Conditional Comments Conditional comments are the method I’ve used most in the past, and they provide quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to design. It involves producing [...]
Sleeping Monkey is launched! I’ve moved my blog to a separate domain, and given it a new look and a new title. The idea of the new design is that it can change colour according to the picture, so it may change without notice! I don’t know where the name Sleeping Monkey came from, other [...]
A few days ago I dual booted my laptop with Ubuntu 7, and it’s a surprisingly nice operating system. The interface is nice (once you get the right screen resolution!), it runs smoothly, and it’s fully customisable. I remember Toni blogging about Linux once and saying how the fonts were fuzzy or something. They were [...]
I’ve created a plugin to do what I had previously hacked a plugin to do, so now it’s a much nicer and much better solution. It’s downloadable from this site, but bear in mind that it has no documentation, etc. It was made purely for this site, though if I could be bothered to write [...]
The comment avatar script which I wrote for this blog has spread far and wide! Yesterday I recieved an e-mail from a guy called Josip, wanting to use the script on his blog, so I spent a very productive evening helping him to get it working! Unforunately it’s a bit of a hack so it’s [...]
I was reading this post on FreelanceSwitch.Com about Taking care of your internet persona. It’s a site designed for Freelance Web Designers, but I thought that it also applies to many people nowadays. A survey on BBC Five Live showed that more and more businesses nowadays are Googling applicant’s names to find more information about [...]
And by that, I mean the honest truth. I’m starting a comment-based poll, please comment on this post with your answers. Which of these two skins do you prefer (click to view the blog in the theme): 1. All That Jazz 2. Ben Cardy Web Design Honest answers, please. Don’t feel you have to vote [...]
When designing for myself? Or is it just a “personal creative block”? It’s always very hard to design for myself a site that I am happy with, and designing one that I will be happy with for more than a couple of months is nigh impossible. Why? Why do I find it so hard to [...]
I hope everyone had a happy Easter! I have a fair amount to blog about (I think) but I’ll try and keep it short :P I bought my new record deck a week ago today :) The Pro-Ject Debut III from Richer Sounds. Set it up the next day in my room at Uni and [...]
My blog has been re-born. And like all new born babies, to start with, it’ll be naked. That’s because today is Annual Naked Day, so tomorrow, you can see the new skin!! Exciting times, huh.
Lots has happened since I last blogged… I’ve been getting a bit slack recently! I’ll try not to write too much in this one but I can’t promise anything… Housing We met Adrian on Saturday the 24th, the day after I last blogged. He came to Jamochas and Dan, Ruth Clare and I looked over [...]
I have just added a new feature to the website: comment avatars! You can upload an image that will display next to every comment that you make. There are, however a few restrictions with the system: The image is recommended to be 80 pixels wide by 80 pixels high, and square. If this is not [...]
Not literally naked myself, I hasten to add. I’m joining in with the First annual Naked Day – “In the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures, April 5th will be a day of nakedness for all webmasters to remove their style sheets from their website for one [...]
Was the film we saw this Orange Wednesday. You can read the full synopsis of the film at IMDB, but basically Nicholas Cage sells his soul to the Devil in return for curing his father of cancer. The father gets cured, but dies in a motorcycle accident on the same day, and Cage becomes the [...]
But WordPress kept rejecting the post last night, so just go read Dan’s blog…
Don’t get the NetGear “recommended” router if you live in halls. Here’s a test we performed during normal usage of the router today. 14:30 Test commences, no internet access 14:32 Router back up of its own accord 14:47 Lose access to Internet 14:49 Router back up due to unplugging the router and plugging it in [...]
I am pleased to annouce that my site is now fully XHTML 1.0 Strict valid!! Wahoo! Didn’t take too much work actually, luckily. Though now I have nothing to do at work I’m quite bored again…
I’ve made some slight changes to the site, updated the portfolio, added external links and the lightbox script to the images in the portfolio, so should prove a smoother experience for all! Not that you guys will notice it… The aquarium yesterday was good, though its really hard to get good photos, when I can [...]
I thought colours were supposed to work together if they were mathematically worked out? I have a Photoshop Action (I can never remember where I got it from otherwise i’d link to it… aha, here!) that, given a starting colour, works out all the complementary etc colours to match the first one. But look at [...]
Far away there in the sunshine are my aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they may lead. I see that on the poster on my wall every day, and it reminds me to keep on trying.
Ineke, Dan, Kita and I did lots of walking today… We went down to Gunwharf around noon, then walked along the coast all the way round to the D-Day museum. We followed the “Millenium Walk” for as much of it as we could, that took us from the Wight Link ticket office through Old Portsmouth [...]
Well, in multiple colours actually, but our blogs are back! We have moved to our brand new host, the DNS’s have propagated (at least to JANET) and now our sites are back up and fully functional! Hopefully there should be less down time and more lovely up time :) Thanks, Marc, you’re a star! I [...]
I apologise if there is going to be some down time on this site, and Dan’s, and Kita’s, and Ineke’s. We’re moving hosting, which is quite a bit of effort! But it’s gonna be worth it!
Nifty little calendar type thingies on the left of the headers – you can’t miss them! I noticed them on Veerle’s blog (though she uses ExpressionEngine not WordPress) and thought they looked cool. So today I decided I’d try and impliment my own, and I know they’re not as good as hers, but I still [...]
Clare Ruth said she betted I’d blog about getting rid of all the global variables, and now I have!! I have finally got my coursework for Introduction to Computing (a C program) to a standard Chi Nguyen would be proud of himself! Yesterday I showed it to him and the first thing he said was [...]
Toni’s blog drew my attention to the following test on tone-deafness. It’s really interesting! The page says “The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct.” and I got 80.6%! Woo! Give it a go yourself. It might take a while to load, it did for me. Tone Deaf [...]
Yup, that’s right, I’ve now ported this blog to wordpress! I hope some of you noticed the change! If you’d like to update your links to my blog to http://www.bencardy.co.uk/wordpress rather than textpattern, it would be good, but if not don’t worry as it will automatically redirect! Welcome, WordPress :)
In response to a previous comment by Toni, hyperlinks are possible in comments! You just have to use the following format: “linktext”:url There are also the following options: **strong** ????citation???? --deleted text-- ++inserted text++ ^^superscript^^ ~~subscript~~ !image url!
Well, not really an addition, but a change anyway. Remember the old category list on the left? Well, now it’s changed! I wrote some PHP code to get the categories out of the database, and how many posts there are in each, then it lists the categories on the left with the font size relating [...]
Fedora’s Logo On recommendation from Dan, I am currently installing Fedora 5 over my old Ubuntu 6 installation on my desktop. I have yet to know how good it will be as it is still installing! We shall see. Maybe Fedora will be better at wireless networking that Ubuntu was… but I won’t know because [...]
Are boring. And thats basically all I have to say on that matter, other than the fact that we were there for 2 and a half hours and not much happened. Plus I didn’t like the fact that there was a *non-member* there! Anyway, I rang Novatech again this morning to double check about returning [...]
I realised today, when playing around with getting my N64, NES and SNES to work on my laptop through the Freecom TV card, that I am a fool. I needed an analogue and digital card so that I could recieve the analogue signal produced by the consoles and use it to play the games on [...]
I bought a Freecom DVB-T TV USB Stick today – enabling me to watch and record Freeview on my laptop from a USB powered aerial and reciever. It’s a great piece of kit, only costing a tad over £30. It came from Novatech, and using their FastTrack service meant I could order it over the [...]
Well, I wasn’t too happy with Blogger. There were certain things about it I didn’t like, things I wanted done differently, so I tried some new blogging software. First on the line up was WordPress – but there was a bug in the editor which really annoyed me, so I couldn’t have that! Then came [...]
WebRadiance is finally online! The web design and development forum has been in the pipeline for ages, and was finally launched at midnight last night. As I have the privilege of being and Admin, I’ve watched it grow from and idea in people’s heads to a full blown custom skinned Invision Power Board site… Much [...]
Its been almost one week since I had my train tracks removed! Not that many people have noticed tbh, most people tend to not notice I had them before, but notice that something is different! I’m lying in bed atm, sending this from my phone. Me and Ineke are going to the cinema tomorrow, for [...]
There’s a website been launched that basically forces people to download Firefox if they’re using IE whenever they visit your site… Ok, so its not that strong, but it could be powerful! Plus it earns you money and its one in the eye for Bill Gates… Linky. Oh, and here is a link to Bill [...]
