Stabeler.com

Looking for a high quality Skype Phone with video - Asus EEE Videophone Aiguru SV1

Posted: Thu 18th Jun 2009@15:31

I have become a regular user of Skype, and have started to get frustrated with having to use my PC for commincation, because I don't want it on all of the time, so I recently came across this product, which looks fantastic!

The Asus EEE Videophone Aiguru SV1 supports video calling, has built-in wifi, it has rechargeable batteries and seems to have a very nice interface. It has LAN support via an RJ45 cable port, and has microphone and headphones jacks.



When I get some money, I hope to buy one... or put it on the wedding list ;)

Location Based Gaming

Posted: Thu 28th May 2009@11:49

I've been thinking recently about location based gaming - of course, this is not my PhD topic, but I have some ideas about how to integrate my PhD into it. I came across this cool mobile phone/location based game called Tourality which, seems to have been well thought out, and has an interesting set of challenging games, based on user generated templates. It doesn't seem to have had much take-up just yet, meaning there aren't any templates for my home town, or in Dublin. So I have created a pub crawl template for Dublin city centre for starters.

I hope they bring out an iPhone version, as this would take advantage of all those new iPhone users :)

Ado and I have had some ideas for a something similar, but with some much more interesting features and gameplay... watch this space...

Update your feeds :)

Posted: Fri 17th Apr 2009@12:06

I've changed the feeds for this site to go through feedburner, apparently I'll be able to track who actually reads my stuff!
So, the feed for the blog posts is now:

http://feeds.stabeler.com/StabelerDotComBlogFeed

the feed for the recent added photo galleries is now:

http://feeds.stabeler.com/StabelercomRecentlyAddedGalleries


I'd appreciate it if you would update these in your readers :)

Where should we go on honeymoon?

Posted: Sat 11th Apr 2009@23:25

I've been trying to find a suitable honeymoon destination for Laura and I when we get married in July. Laura's only stipulation is: somewhere exotic ... and on budget and sunny and warm and snorkling - so, I was looking at going back to Thailand, that would be cool, but we have been there before, and whilst there is an awful lot we didn't see, it would be nice to go somewhere else ... I looked at the carribean, that seems pretty nice, but I only seem to be finding all inclusive holidays, but maybe thats just the way it is there ... and its expensive .... what about mexico? too expensive? ... perhaps egypt ... anyone have any ideas?

Facebook Licence agreement changes

Posted: Mon 16th Feb 2009@12:42

Licenses

You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

If you own or control a website, you may place Facebook's share link button, logo and/or text (a "Share Link"), including all trademarks therein, on your website for the sole purpose of enabling users to Post links or content from your website on the Facebook Service. By offering a Share Link on your website, you agree, represent and warrant that you will not place a Share Link on any page containing content that would violate these Terms if Posted on the Facebook Service. The rights granted in this paragraph may be revoked by us at any time in our sole discretion, and upon such termination, you will immediately remove all Share Links from your website.

I just had an interesting conversation with a colleague regarding recent changes in Facebook's licence agreement (above).

Worryingly, Facebook, seem to claim rights to everything and anything that is deemed 'User Content'. It is not clear from their terms of service page when this was last updated (they claim 'Date of Last Revision: 39848.'. Googles Cache shows a version that is dated the 4th Feb 2009.

If you notice, even by sharing content in Facebook, by means of a share link, they claim copyright over the content of the shared data...


According to this consumerists article, the following couple of lines were removed in this version.

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

And the following added:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

Oh and you are bound by a thing called Mandatory Arbitration which is Eloquently illustrated here.

I'm not convinced its a recent change at all, but I have been considering closing my Facebook account anyway. Perhaps its always been like this, as lets face it, I don't often read EULA's.

When I think about it, any service that stores data about me, is going to have some control over that data, and probably is going to use it for their own purposes. We should not accept promises to 'do no evil' as famously said by google. Because, one day if not now, someone WILL do evil with our data.

Perhaps we should all have personal servers, like Want et al suggests in The Personal Server: Changing the Way We Think about Ubiquitous Computing. In which we explicitly control access to our personal profile data.

Painfully ill-informed, scare-mongering, rude and irresponsible - Jeni Barnett vs MMR

Posted: Wed 11th Feb 2009@12:19

I just read this well written post, linked to by Stephen Fry about a radio broadcast hosted by Jeni Barnett, regarding her views on the MMR vaccine. I managed to find the recordings of the show on you tube, and listened to the whole lot. (Part 1,2,3,4, 5 - about 40 mins in total)

I found it to be a little one-sided, and when the presenter was speaking to someone who agreed with her, she gave them leave to talk freely, but the ones who were against here (seemingly informed, and from a medical background) were cut off mid-sentance and not allowed to voice their views.

I was particularly appalled at Jeni Barnett's closing conversation (Part 5) with a Nurse who administers the MMR vaccine, and seemed to know what she was talking about, who was cut off, and accused of frightening people (along with the department of health). This actually made me quite angry!

I happily notice that this has been brought up as an Early Day Motion in parliament against the dangers of ill-informed media scaremongering.

Some interesting information about this from the author of original post is here.

How to get BBC iPlayer working abroad

Posted: Sun 4th Jan 2009@18:19

I live in Ireland, I pay for and get BBC channels with my Cable subscription, and was a licence payer in the UK when I lived there, but want to watch some of the online material that BBC iPlayer provides, and found that I was not able to access it from my location.



I have access to a server in the UK, and figured I could use it as a proxy serve, but found an easier way to do it using an SSH tunnel.

You will need an account on a server in the UK that supports SSH connections.

For Windows you will need - PuTTY (easiest bet is to download the windows installer), and a web browser that supports proxies, for this example, firefox.

Open putty, and put the address of your remote server (e.g bigbadweb.co.uk), then click on Connection->SSH->Tunnels, where you should add '1080' in source port (it can be any unused port number you like, but remember which one as you will need this later), then select 'Dynamic' from the radio buttons below and click 'ADD'. You can then save the session if you like, then/or just click open. Optionally you can also select 'Local ports accept connections from other hosts'.



You will then be connected to your SSH server where you will need to login. Keep the putty window open for as long as you want to use it.

This sets up an SSH tunnel connection to the server, which can be accessed using local port number '1080'. This means that you can connect to the local port and make it act like a local proxy server, making any host/site you connect to think that you are connecting from your server.

In Firefox, select Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->(Connection) Settings, then select manual proxy configuration, under SOCKS add localhost, and port number '1080', then 'OK', 'OK'.




You should now be able to access BBC iPlayer!


For linux, to open an SSH tunnel, you simply need to run the following command in a terminal.

ssh -D 1080 username@sshserveraddress.com