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UK ISPs forced to block The Pirate Bay – thoughts

30 Apr

The High Court in the UK has ruled that all of its Internet Service Providers must block The Pirate Bay from being accessed within its borders. Initially, I was going to tweet about this, mocking it and generally highlighting the ludicrousness of the entire thing. As per usual, it is of the arrogant, ignorant and absolutely idiotic opinion of so-called “copyright holders” that by plugging a hole in an unfathomably large boat that it will somehow curtail the spread of piracy among Internet users.

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3 Comments

Posted in Current Affairs, Technology

 

Letter to Galway West TDs regarding “Irish SOPA”

15 Feb

The following is an email which I have sent to every TD in the Galway West constituency. I did so using the tool made available by Boards.ie at boards.ie/petition. It outlines my opinions on the madness that is junior Minister Sean Sherlock’s proposed new copyright legislation and the detrimental effects it will have on Ireland. I would encourage everyone to write to your local TDs using the above tool and to make a note of who replies, when they replied and what their stance was on the issue.

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Posted in Angry Letters, Technology

 

For Aidan…

10 Aug

I was recently asked to write a blog post on my reaction to sunglasses indoors, London riots, hair products and coffee. As well as this I’ve been asked to include at least 6 links on random nouns linking to relevant information sources. And like all good bloggers, I’ve agreed to it without argument. Read the rest of this entry »

 
7 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

 

Pet Peeves 1

23 May

I just finished a pretty hectic year at college so I’m looking forward to some more free time, at least a part of which I can donate to blogging more regularly. So I thought I’d open with something fun.

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6 Comments

Posted in Me, Pet Peeves

 

Verifying the reliability of medical information on the Internet

23 Jan

As part of my degree, I am taking a module in Professional Skills. Professional Skills focuses on developing one’s writing and presentation skills. As often happens in University, the course began by throwing us into the deep end, with each of us a receiving a random topic on which we were to focus on for the entire semester. Every topic was Information Technology-related and no two people had the same topic. My assigned topic was, “How can consumers verify the reliability of health and medical information on the Internet?”. Admittedly I wasn’t very happy when I first received it, especially as a friend of mine was assigned a topic on the advantages of open-source software. But the topic grew on me and in the end I was happy with the knowledge I obtained from the research and with the overall report. This blog post is a summary of the final report.

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3 Comments

Posted in College, Literature, Science, Technology

 

Setting up Android Notifier in Ubuntu

03 Jan

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4 Comments

Posted in Android, Java, Linux, Software, Technology, Ubuntu

 

Xmas – a time of giving, receiving, and paying subscription fees

29 Dec

So even though it’s only been four days, I feel this is a bit of a belated post. Anyway.

Xmas [purposely sic] in my house is always an irreligious affair based on materialism and sherry trifle. This year’s haul of presents consisted of three video games (Super Mario Galaxy 2, Gran Turismo 5 and Star Trek Online), two t-shirts from Jack and Jones (or three if you count the free Star Trek Online t-shirt), an aftershave gift set, an RC helicopter which doesn’t work – sad face – and the most quintessential Irish stocking filler of all time, a Cadbury’s Selection Box.

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2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

 

Linux users pay more for software

18 Dec

This probably isn’t much of a surprise to anyone, but I saw an interesting chart on the Humble Bundle website regarding donations to their “Pay What You Want” scheme for their Humble Indie Bundle #2. The Humble Indie Bundle #2 is a bundle of 5 awesome indie games, available for Linux, Windows and Mac. The developers have adopted a payment scheme whereby customers can pay whatever they wish for the bundle, from $0.01 up to whatever’s in your bank account, although paying anything under $1.00 brings up a tear-jerking comic about how the developers need money :’(

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6 Comments

Posted in Linux, Software

 

Reply from The Document Foundation

16 Dec

I recently wrote a letter to The Document Foundation, asking them to fix a spellchecker bug that’s been irking me and my friends since we first started using OpenOffice.org. I don’t know why this seemingly small bug was never patched by the OpenOffice.org team.

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8 Comments

Posted in Java, Literature, Not-so-angry Letters, Software, Technology

 

Letter to The Document Foundation

13 Dec

Anyone who uses OpenOffice.org in Ireland will now how annoying it is not having a spellchecker by default. This is because the default language is “English (Eire)”. While our “Irish English” has the exact same syntax and grammar as “English (UK)”, we still don’t get the privilege of a spellchecker without changing the default language to English (UK). I’m hoping that the recent fork of the OpenOffice.org source code, LibreOffice, will be able to fix this: Read the rest of this entry »

 
5 Comments

Posted in Angry Letters, Linux, Literature, Software, Technology, Ubuntu

 
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