The Geekorium

Home of Rex Havoc, Space Adventurer and other assorted Geekeries.

  1. Bozo, the Clown Communications Minister

    “This is probably the single greatest breach in the history of privacy.”

    Steven Conroy on Google’s (accidental) collection of unsecured (and essentially public) wifi data from people who don’t know how to set a simple password on their wireless Internet connections.

    Conroy
    I once caught a clue THIS BIG! Then I let it go.
    By kjd.

    Really, he needs to stop talking if he ever wants anyone to take him seriously in a technological capacity ever again. Can’t he just have a 13 year old check his speeches before he gives them so they sound at least vaguely knowledgable?

  2. Fluffy Oat Pancakes

    Here’s my favourite pancake recipe. It’s excellent with some good quality yoghurt and fruit instead of maple syrup.

    Recipe: Oat Pancakes

    Summary: These pancakes are tasty and healthy

    Ingredients

    • 1 cup rolled oats
    • 1 cup milk
    • 1 egg
    • 1 tbsp sugar
    • 3/4 cup wholemeal self-raising flour
    • 30 grams (1 1/2 tbsp) butter/marg
    • Pinch of salt

    Instructions

    1. In a medium bowl mix oats, milk, sugar and egg. If you do this a while before the rest of the recipe, the oats get so soft it’s like eating air.
    2. In a large bowl pour self raising flour and a pinch of salt.
    3. Melt butter
    4. Pour wet ingredients into flour and mix well.
    5. Heat a small non-stick pan on the lowest heat.
    6. When hot, pour a serving-spoon or two of pancake mixture. Swirl pan to make even round pancakes.
    7. The pancake will cook slowly. When the top starts to bubble, flip the pancake over.
    8. Serve with yoghurt for a healthy alternative to syrup.

    Quick Notes

    It’s vitally important that you have patience with pancakes. Don’t put the heat up too high! The slower you cook them, the fluffier and lighter they will be. These pancakes seem like they will be bitty, but have faith — they are as soft and smooth as any other, more so! And they taste divine.

    Cooking time (duration): 15

    Number of servings (yield): 4

    Meal type: breakfast

    My rating: 5 stars: ★★★★★

    Microformatting by hRecipe.

    I’ve worked out the Calorie count for these pancakes. If you use 1/5th the mixture per pancake, you’re eating roughly 890kJ or 215Cal. If like me you add 2 tbsp it’s only an extra 10Cal per pancake. A 1/4 cup of choc-chips adds an extra 100Cal to each pancake.

  3. My Sister is Funny

    Wishing I’d made a list of all the “type these for security purposes” words to use for fantasy band names. Spend Brandies are going to ROCK.Mon May 24 04:59:34 via webCarlynne Nunn
    mygirlbetty

    Due to me not using Twitter any more, I can’t just retweet this, so I’m blogging it instead. Overkill: yes; necessary: yes.

  4. Google Wave Live and Available for Everyone! Including Google Apps users!

    Today at the Google I/O Conference (the same one that Google Wave was announced at last year) Lars Rasmussen gave a brief update on Google Wave. The biggest news is that Google Wave is now available for any one to sign up without an invitation. This makes it much more likely that large groups will just get started collaborating on Wave without having to coordinate Wave invitations for everyone. While the service was invite-only it had the appearance of being a “tech elite” product. As more people found uses for it in group situations (classrooms, meetings) the need to make it easy for the people that actually wanted to use the product to do so became obvious.

    In a guest post on the Huffington Post, Lars explains:

    For this reason, today we opened up Google Wave to everyone. You no longer need an invitation to use the service. Simply go to wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you administer a Google Apps domain, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost. Google Wave is now officially part of Google Labs, the same place my team launched Google Maps close to 5 years ago.If you tried Google Wave earlier and found it not quite ready for real use, we think you’ll find that a lot has changed, and now is a good time to give it another look.
    Lars Rasmussen in the Huffington Post

    Did you catch that second part? That was the other half of the announcement: Google Wave is now live for all Apps for Your Domain accounts! If you are using Gmail or Google Calendar on your own domain name, you can now use Google Wave too, and it integrates fully with the normal Google Wave experience. Those of you who have been waiting for this since launch, or since Linkoping University announced it for their students, well wait no more!

    It took about 3 hours from the announcement to being able to add Wave to my own domain account. Setup is a breeze. Click the “Add more services” link on your App Dashboard to install the Wave Preview. Then get Waving!

    Don’t forget to Wave @ me and add josh@nunnone.com to your Wave contacts.

  5. Wave This API released. Plus Official Chrome Extension and Bonus Unofficial WordPress Widget

    A few weeks ago, I noticed a new feature of Google Wave that allowed a user to easily send websites and content to a new wave to easily share with others. The feature (called “Wave This”) was not officially announced at the time, and I was asked politely not to say anything more at the time until the team could officially announce it.

    wave-this-buttons.png

    In addition to this, the Wave This function has an official Chrome Extension. Install the extension, and you can send any page to Wave with a click!

    Finally, you can also use an undocumented Wave This feature to add a Wave contact button to your sites. At the top of my page I’ve added a “Wave @ me!” button that starts a new wave with me as a participant so you can easily contact me in Google Wave. To add the button to your own site it’s as easy as filling your details in the code below:

    <a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+via+[Your-Site-Name]&r=[fill-in-your-@-wave-address-here]" title="Contact me in Google Wave" class="vt-p"><img src="[your-button-image]" alt="Wave at me!"></a>

    The &r parameter for adding a recipient isn’t listed on the API page and support might be pulled or altered so use at your own risk. Additionally, be aware that the Wave This function currently defaults to the Google Wave Preview account only, so if you use a different client (a Google Wave for Domain Apps account for instance, or Novell Pulse) you’re out of luck for now.

    So there you have it! A new API, an awesome function, and my modest widget. Have at it! Make some buttons!! Start spreading Wave!!!

  6. Wave This Widget for WordPress

    Announcing the Wave This Widget for WordPress. Install this widget, add it to your sidebar and let your visitors share your posts easily on Google Wave!

    The Google Wave “Wave This” function takes the title of a post and a short description and starts a new wave for you to add users to. It uses the “Wave This” API.

    Wave This!

    This sidebar widget adds a button to individual post pages that sends the post title and exerpt to Wave. If you haven’t set an exerpt the widget uses the default one generated by WordPress for each post. The default button is 300px wide to allow for larger sidebars. Please resize the button using the widget options.

    : Added the official button options from Google.

    More!

  7. Favicons

    Quick plugin plug1

    A bunch of favicons
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/ / CC BY 2.0

    Favicons are those little icons that websites display in the address bar (or in the open tab in Chrome). They’re usually about 16 pixels square (which is tiny) but it adds a bit of professionalism to your site, and lets people figure out which site is yours if they have dozens of tabs open. You can get plugins for photoshop that will let you save files as “.ico” files so you can create a favicon.ico file. Then you can upload your file to your website and link to it and… well it’s easy, but kind of annoying to get right.

    Enter Shockingly Simple Favicon:

    Shockingly Simple Favicon
    A simple way to put a favicon on your site.matias s

    Install and activate and follow the instructions on the configuration page. The page includes better information than I’ve provided here, and a whole bunch of ideas for creating your own favicon.

    Go to it!

    1. see what I did there? [↩]