July 2010 Archives

July 30, 2010

Amazon Revamp Kindle

kindle Amazon’s Kindle is one of those devices that I’ve been looking at for a long time, but I couldn’t quite convince myself that I needed one.

Well I still don’t need one, but I suspect I might end up with one ..

Why?

Very simply put – they’ve cut the price on them down to something more palatable and introduced some new options.

So what’s it got that makes the difference?

It’s slimmer and the screen contrast is meant to have been improved. Anyone I know who uses the Kindle has always been impressed with the screen, while iPad users have complained about not being able to read text in bright light..

The introduction of a cheaper, Wifi only, model is also a good move. Sure, you can opt for the 3G model, but putting a wifi only one at the close to £100 mark is a good move.

Shameless Hosting Offer Plug

Threw this up on the company blog earlier today, so I’m shamelessly cross-posting it here..

We (Blacknight) have slashed the price on Windows VPS by 50%

More info here

Waiting for an iPad

I go to a number of industry events every year.

At each and every single one of them there are exhibitors with bowls for business cards. The idea is simple. You give them your business card and are entered in a draw for some kind of prize.

I never win

Or more correctly.

I usually don’t win!

I did win recently, which is why I’m writing this

The guys in Ascio are sending me a nice new shiny iPad and all because I put my business card in a bowl during the Brussels ICANN meeting ..

Random Bits and Bobs

The .co launch started a few hours ago and seems to be doing very well

We finally setup our own custom URL shortener, though I’m still trying to find a TwitterFeed alternative that will allow us to use our own shortener sanely.

We’re working on a bunch of different things over in Blacknight at the moment, so I’m looking forward to being able to talk about some of the final products.

On the negative side .. I seem to be spending a dis-ordinate amount of time dealing with legal threats. Between us being easy to find and lawyers not really understanding the internet, we seem to be an “easy” target.

Axel Shipping Sale

Axel are offering stupidly low shipping rates (practically free!) for the rest of today.

Worth checking out if you are as badly addicted to BluRay and DVD as I am

Big Bang Theory iPhone Case

If you’re a Big Bang Theory fan you’ll remember their version of “rock, paper, scissors”….

So now we’ve got the iPhone case to go with it:

More info here

Tweaking Spam Filters

I’ve been running my own mail server for this domain and several others for a few years. I could have used our main mail servers, but I like messing around with the server settings and trying out new things.

One thing that I hadn’t been checking too stringently on my inbound email was SPF.
Sure, I had it set up on several of my domains so that anyone else getting mail from me would be “happy”.
Switching it to more stringent settings and checking SPF inbound, however, has proven to be worth the few minutes it took to set it up – over 100 mails blocked in less than 24 hours!

I opted to install postfix-policyd-spf-perl as I’m using Postfix. Configuration was pretty easy – just adding a couple of lines to the main.cf and master.cf (the man page gives you the most up to date configuration settings)