Topic: Technology
Councils Turn Street Lights Off
According to the BBC Pembrokeshire is about to become the second county to turn some of it’s street lighting off in order to reduce it’s energy bill. Apparently the lights that have a special timer photocell fitted turn on when it starts to go dark and then shut off at Midnight. Then at 5.30 in the morning come on again for the last few hours of darkness. There has been the usual banter about how turning the lights off reduces safety and increases crime but looking into the story the lights being turned off are ones in rural and low risk areas and quite frankly apart from staggering back from the pub and a night workers who really needs street lighting between Midnight and 5.30
There is also a brief mention about how much CO2 is being saved by doing this, which is nice but we all know the real reason is to save a few quid on the electric bill and good on them. If it keeps the council tax down during the current spate of high energy prices then it has got to be worth doing.
Now I just wish Walsall council would implement this with the street lights outside my bedroom window.
You can read the article here > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/7650110.stm
Facebook! And Why It’s A Steaming Heap Of Junk
Last night I was trawling for one or two people on the Project X Presents group that I wanted to add as friends on my Facebook profile. Thankfully they where right next to each other and a few short mouse clicks later and the requests had been sent. Scrolling down the page a bit further I stumbled upon another member of the collective that I wanted to add, so I clicked the “Add as Friend” link and was presented with a red dialog box telling me that I had exceeded the limit for adding friends and I had been blocked.
No indication of how long the block would be or why. So here I am almost 18 hours on and I still can’t add this one person to my friends list. Apparently the act of adding two people has made me a digital leper on Facebook.
It seems that on a site where the point is that you form your social and work networks the very act of creating those networks would allow you to add more than two people at a time. In my opinion the site is just rubbish, but unfortunately everyone uses it and Myspace just sucks more.
!Update It’s now almost two days since I could add friends in Facebook, I tried just minutes ago and still get the same message.
The Lifeblog Is Back
After a bit of hacking about I think I may have solved my lifeblog problems and am now back in action with the more regular short posts. The only drawback is my mobile is only 2.5g (Edge) so uploading the pictures takes an age, but once Ive worked out the one or two bugs it’ll be awesome.
Oops downtime malarky
Sometime early yesterday morning my website and email accounts vanished from the Internet. The cause turned out to be scrambled DNS settings caused by moving the domain registar from my prevous and now non-exisitant one to the very cheap and good 123reg.
Thankfully the problem only effected my personal site davelodwig.co.uk, none of the other properties including my clients were effected by this.
Full service resumed around 16.00 GMT.
First Post (From My PDA)
This is the first post from my PDA, I’ve had the thing a while but never really used it to post. Mostly because it takes ages to type anything in. I managed to find a stowaway keyboard on Expansys for £4.50, these things are normally at least £50 mind you I did have to hack the thing to get it to fit my newer iPaq.
Oh well, now I’ve got to fix the PDA templates for my blog so that I can view the thing properly.