Shopping for the Turtles

Posted November 20, 2008 by Stuart Jones
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The Milang Campus and the Milang Old School House Community Centre have been selling t-shirts, badges and jewellery to help the schools efforts to save the turtles of Lake Alexandrina.

The turtles have been dying due to Tube Worms, now entering the Lake due to the rising salinity. The worms create a coral-like encrustation around the shells of the turtles. If left, the turtles eventually become too heavy to swim, or are completely encased and not able to exit their shell (or re-enter the shell leaving them vulnerable to attack). You can read more about the issue and what the school is doing to help here.

Over at moshcc.com.au we were looking for a way to help, and thanks to PayPal we have been able to set up a section of our site to help with the fund-raising.

I was able to set up the page in no time, and you can go there now and make your purchase. Once you do, the children at Milang Campus will pack up your order and send it off. There is also the option to make a donation.

Save the Turtles on moshcc.com.au

Save the Turtles on moshcc.com.au

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When Signals Fail

Posted September 9, 2008 by Stuart Jones
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The addition of a digital set top box to my living room was certainly money well spent. Reception of the analogue signal is fuzzy to non-existent for some channels where I live, but now I can see all the SD and HD channels from Adelaide in crystal clear widescreen (although my telly is not HD … just a cheap little widescreen LCD from Kmart)

I bought the HD box before Christmas last year, so why am I writing about it now?

Well, there’s a critical hour in the week, 7:30pm on a Sunday, when I need to be behind my couch watching ABC1. Yes, it’s Doctor Who, the one show airing now that I will cross flaming hot coals not to miss.

It seems that some freak of nature, atmospheric conditions, the time of night … or whatever extra-terestrial force … is disrupting the digital signal of the ABC at critical times such as this.  Twitter Fail Whale anyone?

Now, I can’t sit through Doctor Who, with sound cutting out, and the picture freezing and pixelating all over the screen.

Enter my saviour: ABC iView

ABC iView - Internet TV Service

ABC iView - Internet TV Service

This service is a browser based TV catch-up service. Pick the show you want to watch and you can catch up on an episode up to a month later. Episodes of Doctor Who are available for two weeks after airing on ABC1.

iView will test your connection speed

iView will test your connection speed

Watch some of your favourite shows from the ABC as well as news, docos, and a couple of animated series in full screen glory. Just be aware of your bandwidth. It’s unfortunate that services like this, as well as the recent release of TV shows and movies on iTunes, are hampered by the fact that Australians are so limited by over-priced internet plans with tiny usage allowances. The average Barry down the street will go for the “cheap” $20-$30 plan giving him 400mb a month (up + down!!), so services like this are going to scream through peoples usage if they’re not aware.

Watch in full screen

Watch in full screen

Leaving aside my rant on bandwidth costs, this is really a great service provided by the ABC and has been designed beautifully. Is easy to use, the quality is fantastic, and having hooked up my Mac Mini to the TV I can sit in comfort and catch up on Doctor Who later in the week.

Well done Aunty!

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A Day-Off Discovery

Posted July 2, 2008 by Stuart Jones
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Being stuck in bed, having taken the day off work with a queasy tummy, a sore throat and a voice alternating between “Squeaky Voiced Teen” and Barry White, I took the opportunity to tune in to the live taping of Net@Night. It’s one of the podcasts I listen to (along with a few other TWiT podcasts) to keep up with what’s happening online and in the tech world. (see the shows taped live at twitlive.tv)

Net@Night is hosted by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur, and today they were interviewing Giovanni Gallucci, co-founder of Viewzi


I really like the idea behind Viewzi. Simply put, it is a visual way to search online. But what’s unique about it, are that the different “views” that you can use to search. Each view can pull in results from different sources, be it Google, Yahoo, Amazon or a particular site, such as the Celebrity Photo View, which pulls images from specialised photo sites. Gallucci referred to this as “smashups”, or search-mashups.

In the interview, Gallucci also mentioned that by using the site’s open API developers can create their own views. Making the site a platform for all kinds of search interfaces. Also, there will be the ability to embed views into your own site.

So through my coughs and sniffles, I’ve found a new favourite site… It’s searching made easy, and visual. So much better than scanning through endless pages of text results… and the possibilities for developers are endless (meaning more spiffy stuff for we the users!).

Don’t take my word for it though, go listen to the interview: http://twit.tv/natn59

And visit the site to try it yourself: viewzi.com (and let me know what you think in the comments…)

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The slides.

Posted June 10, 2008 by Stuart Jones
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These are the slides from my presentation at Connecting Up 08, some may lack meaning without the audio to go with them, but the general idea is there.

Apologies for the blank slide 7, I uploaded this three times to try and sort it out…(even re formatting the original slide) but no luck. It was a slide of many many web 2.0 services… which I let scroll through… took about 10 seconds, the group watched wide-eyed and my point was made. ie that there are (as Merlin Mann would say) a metric buttload of services out there… all vying for a slice of your time.

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Google Calendar – The Sauce to Our Fritz

Posted May 21, 2008 by Stuart Jones
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One of the tools we use at work, and which I showed off briefly at the Connecting Up 08 conference is the Google Calendar. I use it to plan/keep track of what I’m up to, as do some of the other staff at MOSHCC. We share those calendars to keep track of where we all are, and so our reception desk also knows where we all are!

We also have some calendars that we all contribute to, such as room bookings, transport bookings, and one main “MOSHCC Programs” calendar which is publicly viewable. We then embed this public calendar on moshcc.com.au and byte-on.org.au

The great thing about the Google Calendar is that is can sync to Outlook, or to iCal on the Mac. For iCal I do this with a third party program called Spanning Sync, it then ends up on my iPod which makes for great portability. For Outlook; Google has their own tool which provides the same two-way syncing.

You can also access the mobile version of your calendars either by mobile phone/PDA/iPod etc when connected out and about.

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Flock – the web browser

Posted May 20, 2008 by Stuart Jones
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I spoke today at Connecting Up 08, in Brisbane, my presentation: “Virtually Breathing: MOSHCC’s Fritz and Sauce method for dealing with the flood of information”

I’ll post a few things out of the presentation here, since it is the inspiration for this new blog!

I gave a short demo of Flock, the social web browser, which is one of the ways I connect with people and information online. I only showed a few features, but there is so much more: web clipboard, blog posting, rss reader, del.icio.us integration… watch this episode of Mahalo Daily for a great look at Flock by the developers behind it.

Flock – the web browser:

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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