Aprils Fools Day. Harumph. All across the world in tv newsrooms and newspaper offices, in radio studios and in front of PCs yesterday, people were desperately scrabbling to come up with something vaguely amusing…

As a result, with so much eratz news about the joke wears a little thin. Emperors new clothes thin. What annoyed me even more was my RSS reader. Of the 40 or so posts I got yesterday, 38 were bollocks, and the other two I can’t take seriously in case they’re nonsense as well….

This one looked the most plausible of the lot but I’m just not sure. Is it? Isn’t it? You decide

Rant over. jpf out.

Just got myself one of these. 2Gb, dinky little colour lcd, USB charging. 30 hours on a full charge and about the size of a pack of gum. I would use my mobile phone as an mp3 player but I don’t want the headphone cable acting as a waveguide for the radio signal and piping it straight in my lugholes…

The only downside is that it’s not a true drag and drop usb device. You’re forced to use Sonys bastard SonicStage software. If I’d realised that at the time I probably would have gone for the equivalent Phillips model. There is a way round it, but I’m not that brave…

I guess the lesson for the day is mea culpa. But that’s what you get when you’re a sucker for Sony style. Damnit they get me every time.

As I mentioned a few days ago I aggregated all my digital photos into one place recently. One part of the task involved connecting a bunch of hard drives one at a time and scanning them for the files I wanted. While this wasn’t a problem for the old Windows disks I had lying around, I was stumped for an answer to the Linux disks for a while.

A long time ago I used a tool called Explore2fs that let me get at linux disks from windows, but that was then, and it was fairly primitive, so I went in search of something more up to date…

Which was when I discovered Ext2 IFS (catchy name) which is an altogether slicker bit of software. It works in the background giving you access to linux partitions through any bit of windows software. They just look like standard windows disks (C: D: E: etc…) Clever stuff, and just what I needed.

On the odd occasion I do want to see carefully targeted messages from some of the companies that I deal with, yet at the same time don’t want to be bothered for evermore or run the risk of having my address passed around to other companies, I take advantage of disposable email…

Spamgourmet.com is my provider of choice for this service (There are plenty of others just a search away, but I can only vouch for the one I’ve been using for years.) The home page isn’t exactly web2.0 but it does the job…

Once you’ve created an account that points at your main mail address, you’re free to use any email address of the form:-

<unique-identifier.x.username>@spamgourmet.com

Where x is the maximum number of emails you want to receive from that unique address.

You can hand these out to anyone safe in the knowledge that once the sender hits the allotted number of allowed messages at the individual address, Spamgourmet will eat any further ones without troubling you. Handy, huh?

Just spent the past couple of hours rewriting one of the posts that seems to be getting a trickle of hits from Google. It’s now a mini how-to, rather than the one liner ‘ this is a test’ it was earlier. Hopefully this should be a bit more useful to people searching for how to get WordPress to do timed publishing…

Although, having tried the search terms that are bringing people to that particular post, you have to wade through a lot of results before you get to my article. Frankly, if people haven’t found what they’re looking for by then, I doubt I’ll be able to help them.

So it might have been an evening well spent, or it might not, all I can do now is keep an eye on the logs and let you know if it was worthwhile.