OzLady's Ramblings

Is it just me, or are the speeds on 3G totally not anywhere near close to what any provider promises? Even recently, Singtel has been highlighted as having poorer than average speeds in the world.

Despite being a major Asian business centre with a tech-savvy image, Singapore is among the countries with the slowest mobile Internet speeds, according to checks by Google (GOOG.O).

Using a mobile device, a typical page takes an average of 12 seconds to load in Singapore, Google data shows.

Source: Reuters

Even the Singapore wifi (Wireless@SG) seems overtaxed.

I pay a decent price for 3G, and am promised varying speeds as per their website:

StarHub’s 3.5G/HSPA network currently supports download speeds of up to 21Mbps(Typical download speed range – 0.6~6.6Mbps), and upload speeds of up to 5.76Mbps.

Lately I am getting ‘Safari cannot load the page you requested’ more often than not.

When I’m in Australia, Optus works ok in Sydney and Parramatta, but head down to Wollongong and its a similar situation – ‘Safari cannot load the page you requested’.

How come telcos can renege on service levels, but if I miss a payment by a few days I get hassled?

Update: I’ve given Optus the boot on one of my lines and switched to Telstra prepaid to see if it gets any better. Let’s see how it goes!

If you have a Macbook and you want to use it with another monitor, you’ll find that the menu bar stays on the main screen of your Macbook, and the other displays won’t have menu bars at the top of the display. Frankly, this is a pain in the butt.

I was given one option of trying Multimon, but US$10 seemed like a lot to shell out for this feature.

I have since discovered Secondbar, which works a treat!

Secondbar can be downloaded from here

MyBookWorld Network Storage

Backup drives fail – eventually. We’ve had our WD My Book World for 4 years and it’s been a great device for backing up files around the office.

When this one failed where it wouldn’t power up or mount over the network, I had to pull it apart.

Thank goodness I had a hard drive dock (see image below), my Mac and access to this web page: Mounting Linux (ext2/ext3) partitions under Mac OS X. The fourth petition has all the data, which is quietly backing up now.

**phew**

Important Note: I found out that one of the staff had been using the network drive as his primary storage area. He didn’t have a local copy of anything! This is not how a network drive should be used, in my opinion. For SMEs, I recommend that staff keep a copy of files on their desktop/laptop, and backup to the network drive, so that there are a minimum of 2 copies of files at any one time.

Hard drive docking station

How to activate the conditional call forwarding options on your iPhone

I love my iPhone, however the lack of call forwarding options is frustrating.

At the moment I’m working out of a location that has poor reception on the mobile network. Fortunately Skype is coming to the rescue and I’m able to divert my mobile number to my Skype number. I then answer calls on my iPhone (it has a Skype app), or my Mac.

Rather than having to divert and undivert, using this method I’ve set up Call forwarding if unanswered. That way I have enough time to go and put my headphones on before the call is diverted to my computer. Yay!

Recently a friend asked me how to create groups of friends (or lists, as Facebook calls them), and stop some lists from seeing what is posted on their wall.

My answer is here:

FIrst you want to create a friends list with the people you want to restrict. Maybe call it acquaintances or something similar. Instructions on how to do that are here:
http://slymarketing.com/how-create-friends-lists-facebook

Then you want to change who can view things on your wall. This can be done through changing 2 settings.

I’ve copied the following from Facebook’s page:

You can control the visibility of all content you and your friends post on your wall by following these instructions.

Your friends’ posts:
1. Choose the “Privacy Settings” option in the Account drop-down menu at the top of any Facebook page.
2. Select “Customize settings” in the “Sharing on Facebook” section.
3. Look for the “Things others share” section. A drop-down menu allows you to choose who can view the content that friends post to your Wall (you can start typing the name of the friend’s list you’ve just created and it should appear here). If you don’t want people to post on your Wall, uncheck the box next to the “Friends can post to my wall” option.

Your posts:
1. Choose the “Privacy Settings” option in the Account drop-down menu at the top of any Facebook page.
2. Select “Customize settings” in the “Sharing on Facebook” section.
3. Look for the “Things I share” section. A drop-down menu allows you to choose who can view the content that you post to your wall (you can start typing the name of the friend’s list you’ve just created and it should appear here).

This is more a personal bookmark than anything else, as I love spotlight but have been keeping my searches quite simple. I’ve read this before, however whenever I do, I think ‘ah… I should have used that last week when…” You get the idea.

So here is a great tip from MacTips for Spotlight search:

How to use the Spotlight Window for Complex Searches

Recently a friend sent me a link to the following video. It’s scary how ‘social’ information about where we are can be used against us. I guess now because of this and news stories like it, people really do know how to stalk each other electronically.

It can sound pretty creepy. Fortunately most people don’t have the skill to do this, however there are certainly a lot of people who do, and who will use it against you.

So we have a couple of options here – we can stick our heads in the sand and refuse to acknowledge the technology – its greatness and its dangers – or we can learn something about it. Here are a couple of definitions to get you started.

What is Geotagging?

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or other media. It is added to EXIF data in a large number of mobile phones, and lately, digital cameras. Some people call it GPS tagging.

What is EXIF Data?

EXIF data (EXchangeable Image File) is data that is stored in jpeg and other image and video media files, and includes data such as shutter speed, date and time, focal length, exposure compensation, metering pattern and if a flash was used a the time a photo was taken.

Fortunately, you don’t have to stop taking photos and videos completely. There are some ways to protect yourself.

Disable GeoTagging on Phones

The first way is if you use your phone to take videos or photos, you need to reset or turn off the Geotag setting.

iPhones – Visit eHow – How to Disable Geotag on an iPhone to see how this is done.

Other Phones – there is a comprehensive guide on turning this Geotagging feature off on a number of phones, including Palm WebOS, Android and Blackberry over at the I Can Stalk You website.

I would encourage you to do this, or never take photos on your regular routine or at home.

Does your child or teen have a phone that Geotags?

Also, check your child’s phone to see if they are recording location data. Talk to them about it so that they know the bad side of what can be done with that information – show them the above video if it helps.

Creating awareness about how information is used is not only important, it allows them to think about other ways that information can be used, and also makes them aware of the information that is collected about them and how it can fall into the wrong hands.

Do you know of any other ways to disable geotags on phones? Please post in the comments if you do, and share this valuable information so that we can create awareness and others will benefit.

And then when you are finished with this, go on to read about password security.

This is a bit for my own reference and because I couldn’t find a useful link on this, so I hope that this page provides information that some would find useful. Apologies to my regular readers who may think this is a bit too ‘deep’.

Recently I changed all the Permalinks in a WordPress blog, and shuffled some things around. This resulted in a lot of 404 messages and file not found results for regular readers, or some coming from other links and search engines. So for some really important stuff I decided to put some permanent redirects in. However when I tried to redirect to the new permalink that WordPress provided, I was getting some weird error messages, so I sought an alternative.

Redirecting folders to WordPress Posts

This was a little easier than the next one, as WordPress 3.0 and higher helps you out by providing you with a shortcut URL.

For example, after saving the draft of this post, you can see under the title bar there is a button called “Get Shortlink”:

If you click on that button, you get a link like this:

So now I copied that URL to my clipboard and then went to my host’s cPanel.

I then go to the ‘redirects’ item (which you can find easily by using the new search option for cPanel):

Then I just fill in the directory that I want to set up the permanent redirection for (eg. http://myblog.ozlady.com/some_directory redirects to http://myblog.ozlady.com/?p=1999) – see in the screen shot below.

Click the ‘Add’ button, and you’re done!

Redirecting folders to WordPress Pages

This one is almost identical to the redirect for WordPress posts, however for WordPress pages, I found it a little trickier to find the shortcut URL.

To do this you will need to find the Page number. To do this, go to the pages listing and ‘Edit’ the page that you want to redirect to.

In the URL at the top of the ‘Edit Page’ page you will see something link this:

Note down the number next to “post=” (in the instance above it is 166.

Now you will need to use that number and insert it in a pages URL which is slightly different from the one we used in the posts example.

http://myblog.ozlady.com/?page_id=7

Notice that we use ?page_id= instead of ?p=

This can then be entered in the cPanel Redirects page as follows:

Click on ‘Add’, and you now have a redirect to a WordPress page.

If you know of an easier way to do this, please let me know, however in my case I found that the permalinks provided by WordPress that would appear in the address bar were kicking me with error messages, and this was almost fool-proof.

Back to regular programming now!

Wolfram Alpha couldn’t tell me!

Sure – it could tell me how much they consume, but upon purchasing this app it couldn’t answer the first question I typed in.

Bummer.

It did, however, identify the dog that I was enquiring about! LoL