Rob the Geek

Technology, Open Thinking, Community & Education…

Browsing Posts in Misc

To celebrate the introduction of the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS*) in New Zealand today (1 July 2010), I thought I’d publish the following article on what I’m doing in terms of residential Power Monitoring. Read on for: The Back Story The Unboxing Installing the Device Configuring the Software Results The Back Story A few years [...]

Hat tip to @VodaphoneNZ for re-igniting my interest in having another crack at the following post which I originally wrote for an internal publication for my employer. I’ve changed some of the phraseology,but the basic content – apart from the opening paragraph – remains pretty similar. Once again, these are my personal opinions and are [...]

Wow – I’ve just finished reading a recent blog post by Aza Raskin (creative lead for Firefox) and he presents an interesting new phishing attack vector for us to be(a)ware of, that of ‘Tabnabbing’. For many of us, phishing attempts, (that is – attempts by ‘evil’ sites or emails to pretend they are from legitimate [...]

With my wife adopting a new notebook we’ve found ourselves with an additional, usable machine which we’ve earmarked for our boys use. The unit in question is a rather dated IBM Thinkpad R51 which ran fine with Windows XP, but given that our boys are now of an age where they are being more inquisitive, [...]

The first week of April 2010 saw the announcement of Telecoms first Android handset, with the exclusive launch for the XT network of the LG GW620. Telecom is not alone in the New Zealand market with Android handsets. Vodafone have been selling the HTC Magic since the end of June 2009 and independent device importers [...]

Okay – after a bit of fnarkling, we’re back with Temperature, Humidity as well as that ever useful Wind and Rain data. Not only are we transmitting in elegant Flash interactivity, we’re also on Twitter – should that be your thing (note, this is currently set to tweet every 15 minutes). So – there we [...]

..well, mostly. Over the last week I’ve managed to run some power to a nearby cupboard where the La Crosse WS2300 LCD has been sitting and I’ve now got a PC in there gathering the data, and spitting it out to the Weather Page via a very slow WiFi link. The biggest stinker about this [...]

…it probably is.” It’s an old, well-worn saying for sure, but it holds as true today as it did way back whenever the anonymous, cynical, amateur philosopher came up with it. Recently in New Zealand, there have been an increase in phishing attempts trying to get people to open email attachments which then deploy malware [...]

Honestly, this is brilliant – while the clip itself has been mashed up to cover everything from Hitlers replacement motorbike to his choice in gaming consoles, this subtitling by Laurel Papworth (original article) has a bunch of agencies across the ditch resorting to ad-hominems – a classic sign of “oh-bollocks-what-do-we-do-now”. Disclosure: I have met and [...]

Oh very very cool… and if you are lucky enough to be able to source an Android 2.0 based phone (like the Motorola Droid) it’s also very very free. Couple this with the just announced Google Music service and Google Voice and you have a take everywhere, contact, entertain and communicate solution – Not much [...]