Quite by chance I came across Mobile Admin, a plugin for wordpress that implements a streamlined admin interface for mobile devices.

It’s very iPhone orientated but has been done incredibly well. The interface is very slick and offers easy access to the most important areas of the admin panel. My only niggle is that the writing section is a little plain. It’d be great if there was an easy way to use some simple markup or insert links (although without copy&paste I’m not sure how useful it’d be anyway!)

One thing that’s very neat is that auto-save still works, which is always welcome when typing large amounts of text into a browser

I also came across wPhone which is another iPhone management plugin. It’s also well done but overall I prefer the look and feel of Mobile Admin.

Brenden Grant (no relation!) has written this is the coolest Add-in for Windows Home Server that I’ve seen so far.

WebFolders4WHS allows you to choose shares on your home server and have them accessible via WebDav. Once installed you can use any program that supports WebDav to directly access the files on your Home Server. WebDav is a less well known Internet technology, but it’s an established protocol and there are a lot of programs that support it.

Windows Explorer supports WebDav so once you install WebFolders4WHS you can use Explorer to access the files on your WHS from anywhere you have an Internet connection. If you’re running Vista you can even map a share on your WHS to a drive letter and it’ll act exactly the same as any other drive. (Windows XP will let you access the files through a special link, though you can install WebDrive or NetDrive to map to a drive letter under XP).

Tres Cool!

One of the things I’ve discovered about blogging is that on some days I have the time/thought-train/willpower to write a couple of posts, and at other times I’ll go for weeks without having a chance to write anything.

What I thought would be neat is if there was a way I could store some of the posts from my more productive days and have them published when a certain amount of time’s elapsed since my most recent entry.

Wordpress can already schedule posts for publication on a future date but this requires you to know when you want to post, and thus far more organization that I’m generally capable of.

So… I decided to write a Plugin that would do it all for me!

Post Queue allows you to write posts and have them queued for future use. Choose how long you want to wait since your most recent post and after that time has elapsed Post Queue will pick one of your queued posts and publish it.

If you want to create a few posts for those dry spells, or stockpile entries and have them posted on a regular schedule, Post Queue should be just what you’re looking for. Check it out here!

That’s the question asked by Google Blogoscoped, and it’s a damn good one. Me? I’d be screwed. I don’t want to think about all of the private data that’s sitting in my archive, likely forever.

Having (virtually) unlimited email space isn’t always a good thing

Jeff Atwood has a great post about ’Goating’, the office pastime of taking advantage of coworkers who forget to lock their workstation before leaving their desk for extended periods of time.

At Climax ‘goating’ usually involved sending an email from the goatee who’d suddenly decided to out themselves on the company or team mailing list, often while declaring undying love for a coworker.

I liked to be a bit more creating though, my favorites were the desktop-screenshot-as-wallpaper, and changing the current language into Russian. (It was surprising how many people thought the Russian characters represented some form of genuine OS corruption, and how hard it can be to reset the language when you can’t read the dialogs)

A few years ago I had a friend James who would use the language trick to ’goat’ peoples mobiles phones if they left them unattended at bars. This was especially effective since it was in Europe where the choices went far beyond just the English/Spanish. The alcohol factor also kicked things up a notch in the amusement factor.

This is very cool. Very cool indeed. Best of all they actually stream over Edge without any noticeable stuttering, so if you have an iPhone you can listen to them pretty much anywhere you have a phone signal.

It’s disappointing that the iPhone doesn’t have any support for saving these sort of media files to memory though. While playing a media file on a webpage you are unable to use Safari, although you can return to the home screen and do other things.

Of course, the best solution would be for the iPhone version of iTunes to support downloading of new podcasts to your phone, but I suspect that is some way off. Hopefully the new remote syncing capabilities of the Zune will kick Apple into gear though

I am one of those people for who the stock iPod earbuds NEVER stay in place. I’m sure Apple did extensive research before choosing that shape/size so I don’t know exactly how my ears are different than My Generic iPod owners, but there you go. I’m apparently a freak.

Before now I’ve usually bought a pair of Apple’s canal earbuds as these DO stay securely in my ears and have the added benefit of cutting out most background noise. (If I was a cynical person I’d suggest that it might actually be in Apple’s interests that their stock headphones are a little loose given that they sell a canal version for $30).

The problem with the iPhone however, is that the stock headphones come with a nifty combination mic/button that lets you answer calls with a single press and also doubles as a start/stop/skip control for music. This is a great little feature, though a little startling the first time your music fades out and is replaced by a ringing noise.

Fortunately for my non-average ears, V-Moda have released a new version of their Vibe Duo’s that come with the a builtin mic and control button. I was a little wary about forking out so much for a set of earbuds, but the sound quality is superb and the mic/button function works very well, though is a little stiff at first. Each pair comes with six sets of silicone fittings and you choose the ones that give the snuggest fit. The only downside is these fittings can come off fairly easily, but it’s nothing a dab of superglue doesn’t fix.

Highly recommended.

PS - if you’re going to pick up a pair make sure you are buying the ones with the control button. There was an earlier version that had only the mic and are now selling a lot cheaper as clearance items.

V-MODA Vibe Duo - Black

V-Moda Vibe Duo - Chrome

V-Moda Vibe Duo - Gunmetal Rouge

Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3 and migrating Keyword Tags over to the new built-in Wordpress sytem only took around 30 minutes, 20 of which were writing an import module to convert my existing tags to the new system.

For other users of Keyword Tags I’ve provided the import module on the Keyword Tags page. Sadly Keyword Tags is now consigned to history

The combination of Wordpress 2.3 and Windows Live Writer is slicker than ever, infact I’d have upgraded long ago if I’d known how well they work together now.

I’d been using my old design in various incarnations for about 18 months so I decided it was abut time for a change. I wanted a design that was a little more blog-like with more content on the front page, a wider main column, and a place that I could insert ads.

According to Google Analytics I’m currently getting around 11,000 visitors a month (yeah, I don’t know either!), the majority of which are spread over 10 posts. As my visitor count has grown so have my monthly hosting costs so I figured I’d try some non-intrusive ads on a few pages and see what happens.

As of this morning I’ve had one ad-click from about 136 visitors, I can almost visualize the cold hard pennies pouring in

At some point I also need to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3, after which it will be time for Keyword Tags to retire. 2.3 finally has fairly decent built-in support for tagging and with the improved integration of Windows Live Writer and Wordpress there isn’t much left for Keyword Tags to do. It should also be fairly easy to import my current tags into the new WP system, I’ll post a guide for other users after I figure out out!

So next week the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, is released. In a move sure to strike fear into the hearts of the record companies the album is available for download from radiohead.com for a price of… your choosing.

Once available you decide how much you think it’s worth, (minimum of 1p), pay your money, and download the album. I’m a big Radiohead fan so I’ll definitely be buying, but the question is how much is it worth to me?

Unfortunately there’s been no announcements regarding format and this is going to pay a big part in my decision. So, this is what I’m thinking, assuming a 12-track album.

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