Bomb the bass - new single

Absolutely love this video - Butterfingers by the the old classic, bomb the bass

How to prolong lithium-based batteries

How to prolong lithium-based batteries

I was interested in this as I wanted to know the best way of prolonging the battery life of my Mum's new macbook.

Here is the advice from Apple and some people recommend to calibrate the battery every month or so.

Coconut-Battery is an application which tracks the health and cycles of your battery.

And if your battery is below 80% and has more than 300 cycles (some say 250 cycles) Apple will replace the battery for free of charge, as long as it is still under warranty.

1&1 mislead over subdomains

I have got two domain names registered with 1&1 and they generally seem to have a good service, but in the last few days I have come across a blatant bit of mis-selling. They claim that you can create five subdomains when you purchase a domain from them. Well it turns out that you can only create five subdomains no matter how many domains you have purchased from them. So instead of the sensible approach of have five subdomains per domain name it is five subdomains total. The stupid thing is that I could have just created another account and had one domain per account each with the five subdomains. Arrrgggghhhh.

So I complained about this and here is their useless reply:

Dear Daniel Brewer, (Customer ID: *******)

Thank you for contacting us.

This is regarding to your issue about subdomain. As we have checked,
your account is an Instant Domain Package. With this package, you can
only create maximum of 5 subdomain. You can check this on this link
below.
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/MailInstantMail

If you want to create more subdomain, you may upgrade your package to
any of our Hosting Packages. You can have 5 to 3, 000 Subdomain
depending on the Package for our Linux Hosting Packages. You can check
the number of Subdomain for Linux Hosting on this link below.
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/Hosting

For our MS Hosting, you can have 50 to 3, 000 Subdomain also depending
on the package. You may also check this informationon the link below.
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/MsHosting

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

--
Sincerely,
Nina Troena Tabudlong
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

Thankfully they sent out a customer satisfaction survey just after, so I could let rip.

The reason I wanted more subdomains in the first place is because I am playing around with Google Apps and that requires lots of subdomains and CNAME entries. Haven't got far with it yet, but it looks promising. I might even ditch the email package I have with 1and1 and take it to google which provides pretty much the same service for free.

Anyway, there is a solution to my problem and that is to use free DNS providers, in my case editDNS and everyDNS. Following the excellent instructions here I have set up redundant DNS with EditDNS as my primary DNS server and EveryDNS as my secondary. This means that if either of the services has an outage my domain will stay visible on the net. This is important as even though both services have geographically separated servers, they both have been target of DDOS attacks previously. I expect that I now have much more secure and reliable DNS than with 1&1, with the added bonus that I have almost complete freedom with the number of subdomains and virtually everything else.

Arthur C Clarke, writer and futurist, dies at 90

Arthur C Clarke, writer and futurist, dies at 90: "Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90."

BBC iPlayer on Linux

BBC iPlayer on GNU/Linux without Flash using only free software - Exploring Freedom with Matt Lee

Another link

As iPlayer has been released for the iPhone and the iPhone does not support flash, you can now get content in MP4 format (DRM free).

==Edit==
This loophole has been swiftly closed (link).