RyuKent on Life

Despite the fact that there is an official Delicious extension for Google Chrome in the pipeline and available in Alpha here, I am still looking for a decent plugin that actually works.

Recently I’ve tried a number and it seems they are all missing the ability to search through your existing bookmarks easily, like you can do in Firefox with the official plug in there. Some of the worse ones don’t even allow you to use keyboard shortcuts to bookmark. This is a real turn off for me as I hate having to use time consuming mouse movements which slow me down and are fiddly on a track pad.

At the moment, Chromium Delicious Plugin seems to be the best option. It allows quick bookmarking with CTRL+M and is very lightweight. For searching through your bookmarks, it’s possible to use Chrome itself.

Right click on the address bar, then select “Edit search engines”. Click on add and use this following string as the URL

http://delicious.com/search?p=%s&chk=&fr=del_icio_us&lc=1&atags=&rtags=&context=userposts|@@@@|

Note that the @@@@ will need to be replaced by your username. Call the entry Delicious and use the keyword “d”. This way if you want to search through your bookmarks, just hit CTRL+L then type “D ?????” where ????? is your search string. This is quite a nice integrated approach.

Lets hope there’s a decent official one coming out soon.

I’m currently loving the new Google Chrome extensions. Today I’d particularly like to plug Furigana Injector. This great little plugin adds furigana to kanji on websites.

It can be downloaded within Chrome at this address. With an increasing number of top quality extensions now available, the battle between Firefox is going to get interesting. With Chrome’s superior speed and seemingly faster development we will see people switching left right and centre.

Rarely do I write my opinions on such subjects, but today I want to vent my anger at the Alan Johnson. Apparently, Islam4UK have been banned under terrorism laws and membership in the UK now carries up to a 10 year jail sentence.

Now I do not support their activities and I strongly believe what they do is highly insulting to the bereaved families of servicemen is wrong, but should you make membership of a group who has an unpopular opinion illegal? Is this not an affront to our civil liberties. Could you criminalise amnesty international for criticising the government? I understand that actions could be deemed illegal and even seeking to cause distress to the families by verbally abusing them criminal, however membership of a political group alone? Shocking.

What is needed is common sense. Separation should be made over the nature of the illegal act and the group of which some members have performed. What about people who chose to join but would not commit acts of terrorism? They are not criminals simply by membership. Many people consider the  policies of the Labour party offensive. This is a slippery slope to the erosion of our freedom of democracy.

The iPhone on O2 in and around central London at busy times like 5 in the afternoon simply doesn’t work. On 3G at least, you have to wait half an hour for a connection and even then, receiving any kind of data is like pulling your hair out. It seems now, O2 have actually apologised but all this is hot air if they’re not going to do anything about it. What is the point of spending £45 a month for a service you cannot use at the one time you really need it.

What gets me the most though is the fact that while using 3G I have to wait 20 minutes to even receive texts and frequently people who call me are greeted with the answerphone despite my phone being on and in signal.

New York have taken a novel approach. Apparently Apply have actually stopped selling iPhones to people with NY zip codes. Is it really the case that our 3G networks cannot handle this much data? I never seemed to have a problem using the Three network. Loads of people are using Three USB dongles without this kind of issue. It seems strange to hear AT&T would prevent people from buying iPhones rather than investing in their network.

Disabling 3G and falling back to EDGE only seems to help, but does mean you are stuck with a much slower transfer rate. To me this is preferable to no transfer at all. I had thought of taking out the tethering plan. I will think again. go on O2, sort your network out, or at least stop selling more iPhones that don’t work in London like AT&T!!

This post is a great list of Linux reference sheets. There are over 25  quick reference guides to use. Worth bookmarking!

This is a quick note to tell the world how much I appreciate good customer service and especially that offered by O2 broadband. Having previously suffered at the hands of Tiscali who have fittingly joined the evil that is Carphone Warehouse, I was presently surprised to be treated like a human by the O2 team.

Little things like receiving texts when you order is going through and being able to check the status online made all the difference. They checked that I was on the right package and genuinely seemed to care. This is a commodity that is becoming all too scarce in this country. People just simply don’t take pride in their jobs any more and don’t care about customer service.

Sure, everybody wants cheap, but at what cost? Having being conned into a terrible deal with Tiscali where by my 10 days cancellation period expired before my service was even connected (it took 2 weeks) I can safely say that I will never get involved in another year long contract with a company that doesn’t take customers seriously.

Which brings me ironically back to O2. Has anyone else noticed that at around 9am and 5pm, despite having great signal strength in the London Bridge area, it is simply impossible to use the 3G network? I mean yesterday it took me over half an hour to send a text. Checking train timetables on my iPhone just didn’t work. I’m not alone here and it is definitely not a handset issue as everywhere else is no problem.

Clearly O2 have overstretched their network. I’m n0t sure if they can do anything about it because of the limit in spectrum available, but I would seriously consider changing networks (when Orange and Vodafone become available) based on this. There’s no point in having a phone that you can’t use. Have emailed them and will await the reply. I look forward to posting it here.

Since iTunes 9 was released many programs such as iTunnel have stopped working. Despite various posts claiming they have been updated, I simply couldn’t get them working. However, there is a new program that is fully iTunes 9 compatible and allows you to transfer files to and from your iPhone over USB. It comes with a lovely looking GUI and does not require SSH to be set up or any complicated configuring.

i-FunBox can be downloaded here. It is very easy to use. One word of warning – I couldn’t connect just after I installed iTunes 9, but then restarted windows and it worked fine. This is definitely the best USB iPhone connection software I have used!

It seems the reasons that the PS3 slim won’t have the OtherOS option are not as we expected. Seeing as Sony make a loss on these machines and can only recoup the costs by selling games and peripherals, it does make sense that they don’t want people buying hundreds to use in PS3 cells. Those people don’t buy games or peripherals. Sony just lose out.

But apparently this is not the reason that the new PS3 has had its linux capability removed. According to this post on the official Sony linux site, by a Sony employee, the reason is that the hypervisor drivers were too expensive to maintain.

“I’m sorry that you are frustrated by the lack of comment specifically regarding the withdrawal of support for OtherOS on the new PS3 slim.

The reasons are simple: The PS3 Slim is a major cost reduction involving many changes to hardware components in the PS3 design. In order to offer the OtherOS install, SCE would need to continue to maintain the OtherOS hypervisor drivers for any significant hardware changes – this costs SCE. One of our key objectives with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3.”

So there we go. Maybe in the future we will see this option return. Lets all keep our fingers crossed. In the mean time, lets all go out and buy XBOX 360s as they seem to offer better value for money with a larger range of games should we get no linux love from Sony.

Note to Sony: Linux would have made me buy a PS3 slim. Now I’m buying from your competitor.

OK, I know this has nothing to do with anything, but I found a really cool guide showing you how to make a Super Mario mushroom from an ordinary radish. I feel I need to share it with everyone! Guide here at annathered.