Schinckel.net

And, we now welcome back our ADSL service. Good to see you again, big fella.

Test run on 05/10/2006 @ 12:33 PM Mirror: **Wild Internet ** Test type: ADSL Your connection speed: kbps: 210.38 KB/s: 26.3 Mbps: 0.21

Courtesty of Oz Broadband Speed Test. The only anomalies are that my static IP address Wild gave me seems to be wrong, and apparently I connected at 12:18 this morning, which I can’t have, as the modem wasn’t connected then! And the connection might still be a bit flaky - it seems to be dropping out every now and then.

I use MacOS X Stickies as desktop reminders, and by an large they are very cool. Just recently, however, they got a whole lot less useful for me. Something has gone wrong, and I can no longer edit the text in any sticky note. I can select it, and I can paste into it, but I can’t type into it. And, before you ask, I’ve trashed the prefs, and deleted my ~/Library/StickiesDatabase file, all to no avail. And google can’t tell me anything about it either.

It’s been a while since I did this, but here are my favourite (or, in one case, least favourite) items from this week’s PostSecret: And, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks that the media coverage of someone’s passing was a bit too much (Smack Dab in the Middle). And now we have Brocky to mourn for, too.

I’ve always liked the integration of Gmail and Firefox, when you use something like WebMailCompose. However, it’s not clear how to set it up for Gmail Hosted. Just edit the Preferences, and in the Webmail Services tab, find the GMail entry. replace the /mail/ with /hosted/yourdomain.com/ and away you go… Found via Gadgetopia.

A Message • Coldplay • X&Y; ★★★

I’ve just started playing around with Google Calendars, and think there is a lot of potential here. I also use iCal, and sync my calendars with my Palm Pilot, which is better in a lot of cases for me accessing the data than having to go to a website. And it means I can update stuff when I am away from the computer. However, there is one problem, and Google Calendar may have a solution. Shared Calendars. In particular with my Touch Club, I’m one of several people who might need to update a calendar. It would be great to be able to have one calendar file, that I can update either on my Mac, Palm Pilot, or online, and have other people update this as well. However, you can subscribe to a Google Calendar in iCal, and subscribe to a published iCal calendar in Google Calendar, but not have one calendar that is editable in both programs. I might be happy with a solution that bypasses iCal - if I can edit a calendar on my Palm Pilot, and then sync it with Google Calendar, that might do. I’m already hardly using Mail.app anymore, and doing everything with Gmail. Especially since I got ADSL.

I’ve set up another domain’s email system using Google’s Hosting for Domains, and got really excited when there was a checkbox labelled: Share User’s Contacts, thinking that I could set up an address book for one user, and share it among all of them. This was just what I needed for the organisation, which I help administer. However, it only adds the users to each other’s address books, not every user they add to their contacts…

I’ve got hosted Gmail for both my domain, and my partner’s. It’s really good - much better than mydomain.com’s crappy email forwarding service, which seemed to fail every odd month. However, there is one caveat to take notice of. If you create a new account, and set it all up, including allowing POP access (which requires logging in, and agreeing to the ToS), everything works fine. If you upgrade this to an Administrator account, you need to log into this account again, and agree to the admin ToS, else you can no longer download mail via POP. Took me a while to figure this out…

I’ve had a loan laptop on more than one occasion recently, and I quite liked it. I recieved an email with an advert for salary sacrifice the other day, and did a bit of research. I’d prefer a MacBook, but the group I got the email from weren’t any cheaper than the Apple Education prices. Anyway, buying a $1700 laptop over 2 years would end up costing me only $15 per week, dropping down to $10 per week over 4 years. I’m due in a couple of months for a payrise of about this much, so I may do this.

I’ve never really liked Steve Irwin. His over-exuberance annoyed me. When he nearly fed his baby to a crocodile, I felt like the rest of Australia was starting to feel the same way as me. Steve Irwin died yesterday, killed by a stingray. The man who scoffed at the danger of crocodiles was (apparently) only the second person in Australian history to die after a stingray-related accident. The stingray’s tail barb flicked up into his chest, and he died shortly after. The news programs on Australian television had created tributes to the man by the evening news, and the late news was almost all about Irwin. Apparently the morning programs were even worse. Having died young, killed by a creature he was filming, Irwin has cemented his place in the Australian collective psyche for a very long time. Going out with a bang has made sure he will stay famous. Of course, had Steve Irwin taken the advice of the anti-skin cancer groups, he would still be alive today. If he’d worn sunscreen, he would have been protected from dangerous rays…

Test run on 29/08/2006 @ 9:55 PM Mirror: Optus Test type: ADSL Your connection speed: kbps: 209.77 KB/s: 26.22 Mbps: 0.21

Courtesty of Oz Broadband Speed Test.