Who needs violence to get a point across...

Surely a comical protest will have a greater effect on the general public that a group of "students" vandalising public property.

I've always been a big fan of the build up to Christmas, probably more so than Christmas Day itself. For me, Christmas always starts when the first Christmas adverts are aired on TV...

Read the rest of this post »

You may have seen that some companies use custom short URLs when advertising their products on social networking sites. Particularly, I've come across ind.pn, fry.am, 4sq.com, pep.si and a host of others, suggesting that companies (and Stephen Fry) are investing in their own URL shortening services. However, the fry.am short URL forwards to bit.ly, an URL shortener that's now almost ubiquitous on twitter. It turns out that bit.ly offer a free service, bitly.Pro, which allows users to add a custom short URL that will be displayed instead of the common bit.ly short URL.

So I bought twrd.eu from 123-reg.co.uk (who are offering .eu URLs for 99p if you live in the EU and want a bargain) and with a few changes to your DNS settings (that are detailed on their site) the short URL is up and running. You can also set up a Dashboard Tracking Domain which allows you to agrigate all your long URL traffic from bit.ly. If you're a (paid) enterprise user, whenever ANYONE shortens a page from your site, your short URL and not bit.ly will be displayed (all amazon.com pages become amzn.to, for example).

Thanks to @RexDixon for all his help setting up my DNS!

Amazon are running Black Friday Week Deals here in the UK in an attempt to replicate the hysteria the US sees for Black Friday (the first shopping day after Thanksgiving). The main event, it apeeared, was the chance to buy Take That's new album Progress and Susan Boyle's new offering The Gift for £1 down from £8.93. Both CDs were offered in one of Amazons Lightning Deals that offered a set number of each product at very low prices for, in some cases, a set length of time. So at 9 am, fans attempted to buy either or both album tyo be met with a Sold Out sign. It seems the deal lasted, reports are suggesting, a matter of seconds before all the units offered in the sale were snapped up leaving many consumers very unhappy, as is demonstrated in the screenshot below, showing a few of the open threads on the Amazon Forums:

The demand for the albums was incredible. Customers were online and ready for the start of 'Black Friday Deals Week', snapping up the thousands of albums that were available at just £1 in a matter of seconds.

In answer to some critics claiming that the deals were a con and only a few of each product were offed in each sale , a spokeswoman replied:

We had thousands of the Take That and Susan Boyle CDs to sell, they have just proved incredibly popular. It's not a case of just 10 or a 100 of each thing being available.

Either way, the reputation of Amazon, at least in the UK, will have taken a denting.

The owner of this site accepts no responsibility for any damage you cause to your device by following these instructions! Do so at you're own risk.

I love Android and I love my HTC Desire. The only niggle I have is that the phones flash memory is pretty small and if you manage to fill 90 % you start receiving "phone storage is low" notifications that can screw with the phones ability to sync to Gmail, the Marketplace and other services. The Froyo update helped a little by allowing developers to enable installation of their app on the SD card. Unfortunately, not all apps have had this feature turned on - some with good reason. Many places are reporting that widgets, apps that run in the background and those that use the notifications bar run poorly on the SD card. In fact, I've noticed that both Smooth Calendar and NewsRob fail to run from the SD card and the official Twitter app has a few bugs associated with running from SD (for some reason my phone kept forgetting that I was syncing with twitter and lost a number of contact links with their twitter details).Some apps still have Move to SD card greyed out, such as Adobe Flash Player 10.1.

Read the rest of this post »