Posts Tagged ‘internet’

I don’t know if this is a new bug at Facebook or if it’s spam, but lately I’ve had a lot of email notifications that my photo’s been tagged. And the members in all these notifications are total strangers to me. In the beginning I did a search on the name that was in the notification, but after a couple of times I realized that it was a dead end. When you get more than 200,000 hits on a person you don’t know, it can be any of them…IF the notifications actually were real.

There’s a lack of information in these emails that Facebook is sending out when someone is tagging a photo. And the security on my Facebook account is set as high as it can be, so you can’t really tag any of my photo’s unless you are in one of the lists of friends I’ve got who can SEE my photo’s.
But anyway…this is what these email looks like:

Melissa requested to tag one of your photos. As the owner of the photo, you need to approve this request.

To approve this request, follow the link below: “link to approve”

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

And below those lines there’s a couple of lines from Facebook who the notification was meant for and their own address in Palo Alto. And that’s it. No link to the photo in question, no link to Melissa (Kirk) or anything. And it would be nice to know who she is, how she got access to my photo’s to begin with and what photo she wants to tag. But then again, as I said earlier, it might just be a scam…but a darn good one if it is. There’s nothing in the details of the email that suggests that it was sent from any other place than Facebooks own servers.

If that is the case, Facebook really need to look into their security – again. Or at least give a bit more information in the notes they send out. I never put up anything on Facebook that I feel uncomfortable sharing, but I still like a certain privacy when it comes to people I don’t know.

As promised the other day, here’s the rest of the photo’s of my grandson visiting his granddad :) Not sure what he’s doing in the second photo, but he’s cute anyway…heh In that age they make a lot of faces and still manage to look sweet for some reason :) And it seems that he’s trying to get out of the buggy…or his legs just got mixed up, not sure which :D There are larger versions if you click the thumbnails as usual :)

We have a sunny and warm day for a change. During the past couple of weeks we’ve been reading about heat records, people dying from heat strokes and terribly high temperatures pretty much everywhere…while we had rain, high winds and rather chilly. Today it’s just perfect :D

Since yesterday I’ve tried to upload a new profile photo on Twitter without any success. I went to their help section on the site and found a post where you could in the comments give them the location of the picture you want to use, the size of the file and the file format and they would fix it for ya. Obviously this doesn’t affect all Twitter users. So I uploaded my photo to TwitPic as I was told, signed into support and put the information down in a comment and pressed submit.

And guess what.
I had an error back saying that something went technically wrong! There’s no darn glue left on their site any more. Twitter itself works when it wants to and now their support is falling apart too. Isn’t that charming?
I’m tempted to set up my own stream and get off Twitter.

Anyway…I got my hands on their support over Twitter itself this morning, so hopefully they can help me with my profile.
It seems that when one thing after the other keep breaking down you should set aside a team to work on a new model of the site. Something to replace the entire system with instead of trying to patch it together. That way they could make it more secure, rewrite the bits that are full of bugs and keep breaking down today and in the end move everything onto something that is more stable. To run something like Twitter on a platform that isn’t even stable is crazy.

But, it’s easy for me to say :p
Anyway…I hope you have a bit of sunshine as well today, and even though it’s Monday, have a great one :D

When I found this Linksys WCF12 CompactFlash Card for £10 on eBay I really was a happy bunny :) The old card seems to have turned invisible and I just can’t find it. For those of you who don’t know what you use this card for, I can tell you that it is a wifi card that makes it possible to connect pretty much any PDA to the Internet.
Now, this card was newer than the card I had before, but there was plenty of drivers online so I didn’t think it would be a problem. And was I wrong :p

I spent most part of yesterday afternoon and evening trying to get this to work. And so did Robin. By now I doubt there is a driver available that we didn’t download and installed.
Finally I had to give up. The green light at the top right corner on the card seemed dead (they usually flash when you put the card into the slot and start searching for a network) since it never came on at any point. Instead it kept asking for the name of the card since the iPaq couldn’t identify it no matter what drivers I installed.

What should have happened is this: You install the drivers, do a soft reset and then put the wifi card in the slot. It will ask for the name of the card and depending on what drivers you’ve got you name it after that. In most cases it’s the name of a dll file to begin with.
When that is done you set up your connection and at one point in that process you are told that after this point your wifi card will have a different name that it will remember the next time you use it.
And that’s where things went wrong. Every time. As soon as I disconnected the card and put it back in again, the iPaq acted as if it never seen the card before.

So when I wrote to the guy who sold it to me late last night I didn’t have any big hopes to solve this in any way. Since it said in the listening at eBay that the seller would not accept any returns on this card or give a refund, I decided to ask him if he had any drivers that worked, or if he had any similar problems when he tried it out.

This morning I had a reply from him. It was a while since he tested it and at the time it “just worked”. Which is a phrase I saw in a lot of forums yesterday while I was searching for a solution to this. And that is an experience I’ve had with the older version of this card as well…the one I can ‘t find :p
But since I’ve spent so much time trying to get this to function he said that the card might be faulty. He wasn’t sure how it happened, but he took the blame for any problems that might have occurred in between his testing and sending it out to me.

So he offered the money back :) And I don’t even have to send the card back to him. However, I’m not really comfortable keeping it, so I think I will drop it in the mail anyway. Since he’s been a real good sport about this and trusted me, it’s the least I can do. He can have a faulty CompactFlash card back. There’s enough junk around here as it is ;)

It’s a bummer, but it’s not much I can do. Except from the fact that the green light on the card never came on, the hardware I’m connecting are like light years apart. My PC is running Windows 7, which complicates installations that are dated back to 2003 and 2006. Win7 is very good when it comes to solving compatibility issues in software, but these installations simply won’t work once you’ve gone through the hassle to run the installations as a different OS.
Then it’s the iPaq. Mine is a HP iPaq h2200 running WinCE 4.20. Steampunked, as u can see in the picture here :p HP made only one version of this iPaq and there are no updates for the OS and it’s not very forgiving when it comes to compatibility either. There is no way I can run anything that wasn’t made for it since the next version that HP made of this PDA was completely different.

So it’s a mess just putting those two together and try to sync them. ActiveSync, which is a software that came with the iPaq, won’t work on Win7, but built-in to Win7 there’s Windows Mobile Device Center and that works just as well. However, yesterday I think that it did make a difference for some installations I tried to do.

It doesn’t matter much. I will have to turn this place upside down and find the old wifi card. Doesn’t seem to have a choice.

Today I’m alone and unsupervised most part of the day. Got some stuff to do, but since it’s Friday and everything it won’t be in a fast pace :p The sun is shining and the rain we had last night is gone. Was really nasty out there for a few hours last night.

I bet that I’ve already posted this photo, and if that’s the case you have to forgive an old and senile fool :p They are both pretty anyway and to me they are both in the same age too…heh And for those of you who doesn’t know, it’s my son and grandson :) So there.

Anyway… first of all the domain name for this blog and steampunkbox.co.uk are currently being transferred from one domain registrar to another. They were both registered at Weycrest Limited, but for one reason or another they lost the possibility to “tag” .co.uk domains. So yesterday I had an email from Nominet where they told me what happened and that I had to transfer both domains to a new domain registrar as soon as possible before they got “detagged”. If that happened, the info that connects the domain names to the server where this blog is living and where Steampunk Box can be found, would vanish. To make a long story short, the URL here would not exist any more.

So right now at this moment these domain names are being transferred to another domain registrar where a couple of other domain names of mine are living since yesterday, and that are suppose to be more reliable.
Domain names that ends with .co.uk is really nothing but a hassle to deal with and the only domain names that needs a “tag” to function.

Unless they lose the IP address for the server on the way while doing this transfer, it shouldn’t be noticeable at all. But you never know.

Other than that I’ve set up my old HP iPaq again. Since sleep is something that happens on rare occasions after the sunset with me, I might as well have something to read and play with while in bed. To listen to Robin snoring gets old after a while. And I really don’t want to get in and out of bed several times a night either unless I have to. During the past years I’ve left the PC alone even if insomnia struck. Days need to end somewhere.

The iPaq is a Pocket PC for those who doesn’t know. I’ve also bought a wifi card for it so I can use the broadband to connect to internet that way. A Twitter client is trickier to find for this version of handheld computers however. The operating system is Windows CE 4.2 and it’s buggy as any other Microsoft OS tend to be. Needs upgrading, but HP doesn’t provide anyone with that sort of upgrades any more. In this throw away society we’re living no one wants you to use a handheld device for almost 6 years :p You’re suppose to buy the new stuff.

I might be a geek, but if I don’t need a new version, I rather spend my money on something else.
In the end I might just install Linux anyway :p

But, it means that I’ve got ebooks to read, games to play and in a few days also an internet connection. Besides, its a lot easier to use than my cell phone when it comes to the mobile web. Easy as that.

And that’s about it for now :D
Have a great day/evening :))

First of all, all graphics in this post belongs to Zynga.com. The screen dumps are mine, but the game isn’t :p

Anyway…this is the newest game from Zynga. In Frontierville you start out with a small piece of land that is overgrown, and then it’s up to you to clean it up. There’s lots of weed and wild flowers to remove. Trees growing everywhere and along the way you encounter angry bears and rattlesnakes that you need to chase away.
What you see above is my homestead the way it looks right now. All the images in this post have a bigger version if you click on them. And if you’re not interested in this rant and the ins and outs of this game, you can always skip the entire post ;)
I won’t go into too much detail here since some surprises can be fun if you want to play this, but you start out as a single person, preparing the lot for your spouse to arrive.

While you build a cottage and clean up your lot, the game provides you with tasks to do to achieve this or that. Like most games today you can customize a lot of things, and your game characters are among those things. Currently I’ve got a couple who’s got a son, all of which I’ve had to finish different tasks to get. Building houses, buy trees, harvest and buy animals belong to those.

In “My Stuff” you will find what you see in the images above. “Gifts” will show what you received from your friends. “Family Album” is where you can change the look of your character/characters. “Inventory” is a drawer where gifts since earlier will appear, such as animals, trees, building material and energy. While you harvest and feed your and your neighbours animals, you will find things. They are rewards that belong in the “Collection” box. They are automatically placed where they should be and you’ll get a note on the screen when it’s time to trade them for coins and XP.

Just like most games, Frontierville has it’s own store. And this is where you can find anything you might need. The payment is both coins and “horse shoes”, and the later you can either collect while you play and level up (currently you’ll get 1 horse shoe for each time you level up), or you can buy them using FB credits. In most cases there are alternative decorations or whatever you might want to buy, and that you can pay with coins. In some cases, such as for fences, buildings etc. you will also need enough wood. And wood you’ll get when you clean up all the trees. In time more trees grow as well, so you will always have something to chop down :p

To buy energy you’ll use the pie slices that you earn while harvesting. The more of those you’ve got, the more energy you can buy. The game will generate more energy for you when you’re not playing it as well, so if you leave it for a couple of hour or so, the energy bar is full again :)

The tab Specials is where you’ll find limited items and things you might need to level up and finish the tasks. It’s easy to get carried away when you clean up in the beginning of the game and I’ve made the mistake to clean up a bit too much. So now I don’t have enough thorns to clean so I can finish a task that is currently under way. However, just like everything else that grows, thorns will turn up sooner or later, but it means that I have to leave some of the big trees alone. And I could buy the thorns I need, but I rarely spend any money on these games, so I rather wait.

To build a cottage or any of the other buildings you are sending and receiving building material. That’s partly what your neighbours are needed.
You can customize the buildings and each of them has it’s own purpose. You can collect Bonus from them and the pictures above show what you’ll see when you enter a building. Most of the things you can make inside any building has a purpose later on.
I just finished the school house today and so far there are no classes, but Zynga has announced that there will be lessons of some kind.

At your neighbours Homestead you can harvest, water and revive their crop. You can also harvest their fruit trees, clean up weed, wild flowers and trees. Or feed their animals. In return you get coins, XP and a heart for each thing you do. And you gather the hearts to build your reputation. The higher reputation, the bigger bonus will the neighbours get and in return you’ll get more coins. So it’s a win win situation ;)
And for 50 coins you can hire a neighbour to do work for you. In return your neighbour get the coins of course and if you’re lucky your neighbours will return the favour.

Overall this is a lot more fun than Farmville, maybe because the interactions are different. There are more things to do than just harvest and feed animals over and over again. Your lot will be overgrown unless you keep it tidy. The tasks generated by the game makes for different goals along the way and it’s just a very neat game :)
Simple as that.