Submitted by johnh on February 21, 2008 - 13:26.
Item: Adult return ticket from Cork Kent to Dublin Heuston. €60.
Item: Adult return ticket from Cork Kent to Kilkenny MacDonagh, via Dublin Heuston. €49.
Try it for yourself.
Submitted by johnh on January 19, 2008 - 22:52.
I'm not picking on Damien in particular (well, other than purely for sport), but:
You know who else comes to your site with a referer field containing "google.com"? Yup, Google Reader users.
Everyone using this plugin is basically slapping people who've already subscribed with a rather insulting message implying we're freeloading.
Cut that out, would ye?
Submitted by johnh on January 19, 2008 - 17:58.
RTÉ Radio 1 will go dark on 567kHz in eight weeks.
Yup, the so-called national flagship station will at that point become unavailable to:
a) Anyone in the sticks who can't pick it up on FM
b) Anyone listening on a receiver which doesn't have FM (they didn't need it, they listened to Radio 1).
c) Anyone at sea, who probably isn't using it to pick up the Shipping Forecast at the moment. (Though, to be fair, anyone thick enough to listen to Met Eireann instead of the UK Met Office shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 LW more or less deserves to drown.)
d) Touchy subject, this one: Anyone in Northern Ireland outside the FM coverage area. Officially, that's all of them. In practice, it's Goodnight Coleraine because it's almost impossible to buy a long wave receiver for less than a hundred pounds anymore.
e) Liverpool, Manchester, Stranraer and the M6/M74 corridor through Cumbria and up to Glasgow. No Irish people there, though, so not to worry, eh?
And finally, since it's Saturday and this is my gaff:
f) Anyone listening on a weekend who would rather not, on balance, listen to a bunch of people who know fuck-all about football talking about football, nor any extended coverage of the bloody GAA.
I live in Cork, so my radio options are extremely limited anyway, but right now there's exactly one station available on the band which is neither playing inept sport coverage nor trying to spoonfeed aural prions directly into my brain (And now on County Sound, and on Red FM, and on 96FM, it's the daily Simply-cocking-Red/ Damien-"RhymingSlang"-Blunt/Lighthouse-Family 20-hour marathon!).
It's Radio 1 on medium wave, with its "Second Helpings" slot all afternoon. If they shut down the service, I will no longer be able to set a clock radio alarm for lunchtime on a weekend for fear of having reheated pretend-live reports shouted in my ear from Stamford Bridge over the IRN satellite by some wanker who ended up on the sports desk at the Eckythump Telegraph because he was too thick to pass his court reporting exam.
Never fear, though - this alternative programming strand "is also available on RTÉ's trial digital service, RTÉ Choice". Whoop-fucking-ee.
Allow me to demonstrate:
On the left, a crude map of the Pale (shaded red) about 550 years ago. On the right, RTÉ's entire universe of editorial interest, and the total extent of RTÉ's digital radio transmissions. That's the footprint of the Three Rock and Clermont Carn transmitters, shaded dark green.
If you're not in that space, you can't receive RTÉ Choice. It's not on Sky, it's not on FM, it's not on AM. It's not even on the intertubes. Chances of DAB being extended to the rest of the country during a period where the state-funded broadcaster and the regulator haven't even decided what format to broadcast in when it comes off trial? Zero.
So enjoy what's left of Raidio Éireann while it lasts. You have two months.
Meanwhile, let's see if any of us can figure out why RTÉ is so institutionally wedded to a six-hundred-year old boundary, shall we?
Submitted by johnh on September 8, 2007 - 17:00.
...but if you want to poke about inside the newly-spectacular Google Maps, I've once again been doing my job as "that foreign guy with the map stuff".
In ascending order of interest:
This would be big news, so I'm going to hold off on the "about bloody time" comments for today. Well done, Google - now let's follow through and release it, eh?
Submitted by johnh on June 24, 2007 - 09:55.
Ring the bells. Hang out the bunting.
Yahoo Maps has already given all and sundry full permission to use its satellite imagery as something we can trace into Openstreetmap.
I've just noticed this morning that the satellite imagery for Ireland has jumped up in resolution to the extent that we can now trace streets here. Yay.
At this point in the narrative I usually don't bother to mention that I tried a street-level lookup just in case, and it didn't work.
Not today!
How about "387 Blarney Street, Cork, County Cork, Ireland"?
It gets better. That pin was really put in the right house. Really: look up the road at number 64 instead to see what I mean.
Oh, my. Could it possibly get any better than this? Well, yes. If we were wishing beyond our wildest hopes and dreams, they'd have added all this new sexiness to the Yahoo Maps Geocoding API. But that would just be a silly thing to ask for. Wouldn't it?
Submitted by johnh on June 17, 2007 - 18:33.
Posts like the one below get traffic like crazy, I've found. This last year over ten thousand people have come looking for instructions on how to undelete a message from Thunderbird.
Submitted by johnh on June 17, 2007 - 18:31.
For people in the future who come looking...
The Sky installer will try to do the normal thing and set the box up with a dialing prefix of '142'. This is the 'anti-141'. Its purpose is to make sure your Sky box carries caller ID when it phones home.
Your Digiweb Metro phone line can carry this call, even though it's VoIP (they're using cable telephony protocols rather than regular SIP VoIP).
However, 142 doesn't work on Digiweb Metro. In fact you don't want a dialling prefix at all.
To set your box correctly, choose 'Services' on your remote and then key in '401 SELECT' to expose the technicians' menu. Dialling Preferences is option 3. Press the red button to reset all these options to the factory default of tone dialling with no prefix. Press Select to save this and make a call. If nothing happens, press Select a few more times until it starts dialling.
If the call is unsuccessful you'll get a full-screen error. If it works, you'll get dropped back to the main Installation menu. At this point you're done and can push 'Back Up' a few times. Et voila. You will now not be disconnected for not phoning home.
Submitted by johnh on June 13, 2007 - 14:46.
In which your author restricts himself only to things which are not obvious. Stuff we've covered before is not included, and stuff which doesn't contradict known expectations of me is also not included.
Now, let's be fair -- I've got some game / cred / {insert 'street' term here} when it comes to being opposed to what the US government has been pulling off in Shannon in the last six years. I spent seven entire years of my life on this sort of thing.
But I think that if any Green Party members in the Mansion House in Dublin today use it as a reason to vote against the coalition deal, they're crazy batshit insane. Seriously, there's an improvement on the table -- not just in regard to Shannon, but on a huge tract of other issues. Frankly, voting against that improvement is nearly as bad as strapping the electrodes onto someone yourself, in my opinion.
I'm not pro-choice despite being adopted. I'm pro-choice because I was adopted.
I'm a lousy radio DJ.
I'm a pretty good presenter when there are people to interview. I can run a desk. I can schedule a radio station. I'm a journalist by trade and I definitely know one end of a news bulletin from the other.
But talking about nothing and playing records? Hopeless. I've got nothing to say, mostly because of a deeply-held conviction that nobody listening to the radio gives a stuff what I think. (You don't count. You came here on purpose.)
I have never, ever, ever bought anything on eBay. Not once.
Anyone else want to confound expectations? Damien? James? Bernie?
Three things minimum. Pass it on.
And remember: This isn't "things you didn't know". This is "Really? I would never have guessed."
Submitted by johnh on May 27, 2007 - 19:04.
Nobody seems to be talking about it, but Webjay will close next month, according to a well-concealed announcement on Wednesday.
Yahoo bought it only sixteen months ago.
Presumably it'll join Blo.gs, which Yahoo bought some time back from Jim Winstead, assuring him throughout that they'd be taking good care of his baby. Last December 11th, someone at Yahoo broke it, and it remains buggered to this day. Nobody's built anything to replicate what it did yet, either.
Two examples, off the top of my head, of Yahoo rushing in, buying something which worked for thousands of people every day, and promptly smashing them to pieces.
So, if you need to make a couple of years' salary as quickly as possible and you don't mind having someone erect a permanent monument to your wasted effort and the kicking of your users in the face... why not give Yahoo a ring?
Submitted by johnh on May 25, 2007 - 12:17.
Because you don't need to travel to Dublin to sit in a room and watch television </only joking, guys>.
Chat with others as the results start coming in, and/or post/watch the progress at Kildarestreet.com.
See you in there. Some well-configured users can click this link and join in right now. Everyone else - server is irc.freenode.net, channel #kildarestreet.