One of the things they were shown was the vault full of every LEGO set from the 1950’s to now. Wow! Some of this stuff is amazing. The video is viewable on site and well worth a look.

See how many sets you recognize and remember. I saw a few that my brother had and I remember being launched across the bedroom But they are a real treasure and brought back lots of those memories.

The other thing is check out all the videos and stories from Gizmodo’s LEGO trip, very cool. Great write up as well.

Share your happy memories in the comments!

The call went out to geeks across the globe, download Firefox 3 to help set a world record. Great job guys!

It’s not over yet and there’s over five and a half million downloads according to the Map stats. Before Firefox 3 was even available, Mozilla’s servers were feeling the burn. There’s a bit of time left, so it’s not too late to download, with Download Day 2008 starting at 10:00 a.m. 17 June 2008 (PDT or San Francisco time in the United States), and finishing at 11:16 a.m. 18 June, 2008 (PDT or San Francisco time in the United States). The current PDT time can be found here if you want to check it.

For those who have yet to see it, I’m a huge fan of the about:robots easter egg in Firefox 3 and the awesome robot art that goes with it. Lifehacker has also released the Power Users Guide to Firefox 3 already, with lots of great tweaks and tricks.

Laparoscopic surgery takes a lot of skill. Not having the sense of touch and working from what you see on a monitor is totally different from “open” surgery through an incision in the skin. In fact some surgeons don’t do any laparoscopic surgery at all because it involves a whole new skill set which they have not developed.

So I was impressed at this video as a demonstration of skill with the da Vinci robot in the making of an origami crane. It may not look impressive at first until you see the size of the result. But I would argue that it is probably easier with the robot than free hand without the robot. The robot means that every move is smooth and steady, by hand there is far less precision. But still this is awesome and I could really appreciate the difficulty and skill involved.

No doubt the conference will take twitter out of action. But it is OK apparently the folks at twitter have been gearing up for the rush. Another strategy that they are falling back on is the progressive “oh-shit” measures. That is as demand grows they start switching off features. This from the twitter blog:

We have isolated and created on/off switches for many Twitter features.

They are also claiming that they have made some server tweaks that should make things a little more robust. Sorry but I am not holding my breath. I am not going to even say what I think about the idea that you can support a service by killing off features.

That said one of the best summaries that I have seen of where to get your Apple fix can be found at Read Write Web. They did a good job of letting people know where to go. There are a range of goto places including FriendFeed rooms, twitter, blogs and sites. So you can pick and choose or really test twitter and have them all open plus use the ReloadEvery extension for Firefox. That extension will automatically refresh a page at an interval that you specify.

I was a bit disappointed not to see more utilization of live blogging services such as CoverItLive. There have been a bunch of these services released in the last few months, shame they are not being used more. Maybe they are, if you find one then throw it in the comments. I would guess that if you had a poke around you’ll be able to get something on services like uStream, Qik and seesmic.

Personally I am going to let the bloggers and commentators sort the wheat from the chaff and review the feeds tomorrow. My life is noisy enough already and this will also make the juicy bits float to the top. No doubt the Lab Rat will have something on it in the next show as well. But then if it is all hype and no content we will give it a miss entirely. Anyway as you guys know I am a feed junky anyway.

Have fun people and remember no eye gouging, name calling optional and feel free to pay out on Knightwise… he is Belgian after all and the fact that I ruffled his feathers on the last show.

Our feed is valid and working on all other services that we know of. The feed was working fine before the TPN servers started playing up. Enter non responsive servers last month. This coupled by the fact that the servers went down totally and NewsGator was getting no response from our servers.

Turns out that if a feed is not updated or has a fatal error and does not respond multiple times then NewsGator temporarily blacklists the server and or feed. I can understand that, it saves resources. But on the other hand it stays this way until a manual ping is done. Better would be that NewsGator set up some kind of scheduled periodical ping to see if the server is active again and if so reestablish regular indexing of the feed.

So the process for “forcing” NewsGator to recheck a previously “blacklisted” feed. Especially useful if you have feeds that don’t appear to be updating as they should (Matt):

1. Log into NewsGator Online you have an account automatically if you use FeedDemon
2. Go to settings on the top right
3. Select the “My Feeds” tab
4. Find the feed that is the problem
5. Manually ping the feed to force NewsGator servers to check the feed

The ping button is a little obscure in that it looks like a “refresh” symbol, it is on the far right. But it is the manual ping button. Hit that and if the feed is valid and updating it should fix the problem. It only took about 30 minutes and I was receiving the latest posts from the GGP blog, including the latest podcast.

Just note though that this only works with feeds that are valid and working. There is no point pinging a server for a feed that is borked. I think that is obvious but worth mentioning.

I am very pleased that our recommended feedreader is now updating our own site. Please let me know if you are using FeedDemon and it is working again for you as well.

Recommended reading is an article about what NewsGator does by the CTO of NewsGator Greg Reinacker. The article is well worth the read. For publishers check out NewsGators ping endpoint details.

Many thanks to Nick Bradbury for his assistance in sorting this problem and letting us know about the new ping functionality. Nice work on FeedDemon Nick, it is still our recommended feedreader and one tool I could not live without. Thanks.

• Sunday: recorded the show and finished about 1am
• Monday: Worked the late shift; 1430hrs till 2300hrs, in the morning I finished a job application and helped the wife clean the house.
• Home Monday night and did an hour of editing, but had to sleep as I was a 0730 in the morning.
• Tuesday; Late shift again; 1230hrs until 2100hrs. Edited in the morning for about 1/2 hour but had to go an d fix the driveway on our property as it is gravel and we had over 100mm of rain over night and some of the driveway was on the road.
• Got home Tuesday night and had dinner. Had some domestic paperwork to do for the extension. Edited the show for an hour after that but fell asleep at the keyboard… Thought I needed to go to bed.
• Wednesday (today) , 10 hour shift - 0700hrs till 1800hrs. I actually worked until 2100hrs due to an emergency at work.
• Got home, had dinner and then I had to return a phone call.
• Tomorrow I have another 10 hour shift…

I had every intention of getting the show out tonight. But as you guys know I work in the medical profession and sometimes you just can not walk out of the place.

My kids have not seen me for 4 days. I am absolutely buggered beyond reason. But I am going to work on the show tonight. I need to get the show out and I am trying.

But thought to share that with your guys so that you knew what the go was and that I am doing my best.

Stay tuned it is coming!

Image courtesy helmer.sfe.se

It’s an amazing piece of engineering, yet so simple in concept.  Janne has provided a bunch of other pictures on his website.  They’re worth a look.  A perfect example of function over form, and simply doing what’s necessary to “make it work”.

While the video focuses on startup marketing and getting noticed, I think that there are some really good ideas and information for everyone. There is also talk about users, community and social networks. There is also a 10 minute question time at the end. One of the questions is “How do you recover from bad press?”. Quite funny, but some really great strategies for doing so none the less. Also including some details and interesting insights from Arrington about what social media to use in order to market yourself. This stuff applies to the aspiring blogger not just the multi-million dollar start-up and A-list blogger.

One thing that really struck home for me is the value that media producers and bloggers need to have in their community. That is your audience and for us that means you guys. I can honestly say that one thing I value more than anything here in our community is the Eric’s, Herne’s, Knightwise’s, Ape’s, George’s, Doug’s, Brie’s, BlogSlut’s and all the rest that I have failed to mention. Thank you for all your support and being active contributors - without you the comments would be boring and we would feel like we were talking to ourselves.

OK now you can have your opinion’s back and love him or hate him.

via: Orli Yakuel

Me I want to know how he toasted 1,500 hard drives just modding XBoxes!!

Case 1: The up and coming new Indiana Jones Movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull“. The movie is due for release here in Australia on the 22nd of May (IMDB). But just how he snagged Harrison Ford to interview for seesmic I don’t know! There is nothing on seesmic accept the videos, nothing on Loic’s Blog so I guees we will find out in due course.

So Harrison Ford has his own username on seesmic and there are a couple of videos up there of an interview with him. Looks like the interview has been broken up into questions with each one making a new video post. Harrison seems relaxed and quite candid, which you might expect - he is a bit of a veteran at this stuff.

So far there is one video on his Fave Indiana Movie:

Plus one on the stunts, which I think is a great response:

I am guessing that these are going to be filtered out over the next week in the lead up to release. What a fantastic idea. I love the fact that Harrison has appeared for seesmic and it “feels” a lot more personal and laid back. As opposed to some stuffy mainstream media interview. Bloody fantastic, I think Loic really does understand this space and the users that are a part of it.

But as jjprojects states; to really pull this one off it would br great if we could ask the questions! So how about it Loic? Seesmic is about the conversation right? So how about letting the users in on that conversation. How cool would it be to have Harrison Ford responding to users of seesmic? Damn, now that would be cool.

Who would you like to ask questions of on seesmic?

Update: Maybe Cate Blanchett? That means this is the run of the mill mass interview by the media of stars. Still I don’t retract my statement that I think it is a great idea, but lets take it to the next level.

Got a surprise when I saw in my feeds that FeedDemon just updated, which I am downloading now. It has not filtered down to auto updates within FeedDemon as yet and when I tried the “Check for new Version” nothing happened. So we must be in early. There is nothing up on Nick Bradbury’s blog either. Mind you he has been in Denver. So I am figuring a minor release with bug fixes and minor changes you would be hard pressed finding.

Kick over to the homepage and check out FeedDemon 2.7. I will no doubt let you know on this weeks show what the go is.

Something that is worth checking out at Nicks blog is how to tweak FeedDemon to search FeedFriend and tweetscan right in FeedDemon. Most excellent. Check out Nicks Tutorial on extending FeedDemon detailing how to do this and where to put the code that the post links to. Great stuff Nick! Hope to hear about the new release notes on FeedDemon 2.7 soon.

See you all this week when we will be podcasting from inside your head.

That better Lurch?

• have files in which there may be spyware, viruses (no difference in my mind) or potentially harmful applications
• send unsolicited email or share your email address with 3rd parties without your consent

This image was altered to protect people from themselves

According to Yahoo this is in direct response to users stating that security and privacy are the top concern for users when online. Thoughtful of Yahoo to also include the two extremes in your preferences you can select to turn the feature completely off and have zero filtering. Secondly you can select the search results to totally remove any link with a warning. Nice one Yahoo.

I would add to that that if people are that concerned about their privacy and security they should do something about it. While this is a good move by Yahoo and wise, it only serves to protect the stupid and for them there is probably no hope anyway. I have been taking advantage of Site Advisor for about 2 years now. It is available as an extension for Firefox and *cough* IE. Users need to be proactive about their security and privacy and yeah it takes a bit of effort to do so; but so does locking your car. I am glad if only it adds some protection for the rest of us that do put the effort into keeping ourselves clean and private.

I am not about to knock these features, it is a great thing and helps to protect users from themselves. If you are a “bit” serious about your security and privacy then these are my quick tips:

1. Don’t use Internet Explorer: sorry but it remains one of the primary vectors for malicious software on the web
2. Install a decent anti-virus: I use Avast! and set it to update automatically.
3. Have a decent Firewall: I use ZoneAlarm Pro, but also highly recommend Comodo Firewall
4. Install Site Advisor: Gives you the same features that are at Yahoo! across all the major search engines. One of my “can’t live without” extensions. It becomes automatic to check it.
5. Don’t click links in IM and email: If you don’t know where it goes and you don’t know the sender then don’t click it, simple
6. Don’t open unknown email attachments: The promise of a Paris tit-fest is a lure you idiot, so wipe the surprised look off your face when your newly installed decent Anti-virus is screaming at you that it has found a nasty thing on your computer
7. Click Ctrl + Alt + Del Once in a while at start-up: learn what all those weird apps are that start when your computer does, a search on Google will be helpful and there are some great search engines dedicated to the cause, like ProcessLibrary. Then you’ll start to recognize when something might be there that should not be.
8. Check the SSL Cert: When your shopping online take the time to take advantage of that “View Certificate” in Firefox and make sure that the domain matches the site and that the certificate is valid and not expired. Piece of mind is a good thing.
9. Common sense: Yes plain and simple THINK! Use your head and think, think think - Whinnie the Pooh does it now you have a go. If it does not add up then it probably doesn’t! Looks dodgy? Probably is! Simple eh? So why don’t users do it?
10. Keep your system and software patched: this includes all your apps/OS and your online stuff like that install of WordPress with your precious blog on it. If you are using old software versions and platforms, don’t be surprised when you wake up to check your blog stats and you see a giant ad for penis enlargements or the Russian hackers association!

These are just a few things off the top of my head that I do daily, there are more but I thought 10 was a good number to stop at. I am constantly thinking about security you can not be any other way and be a part of the web and have a clean PC and intact privacy. Not to mention the fact that the whole penis enlargement thing woudl be hard to explain to your boss.

I got burned once with a zero day virus. A particularly nasty drive-by one that wrote to my boot sector. I lost everything. But I learned a great deal and swore that it would never happen again. I got serious about my security and taught myself to get with the program.

Oh and back-up, back-up, back-up… cause sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do something borks.

Let us know in the comments your tips on what you do to protect your security and privacy.

Don’t use IE, please… Doug! talk’in to you buddy!!

via: Yahoo! Search Blog

The blog is working as you can see, we were even going to have a show out this week. But late last week we found a major problem. It would appear that our RSS feed is dead. That means that anything we post here is not getting to our loyal listeners. You won’t get this post unless you visit the blog.

This also means that the show won’t make it to iTunes or peoples RSS readers. So there is not much point producing a heap of material that few people will get to hear. We want everything to be right and working.

The tech team is working on the problem and that is as much as I know right now. As Cam says in the latest from the TPN blog, there are going to be bugs with the new servers and it will take a bit longer to sort them out fully. Please be patient and rest assured that we have not abandoned you.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all listeners that have dropped us a comment or email, tweet to say hello and where the heck are ya? Thanks, we appreciate the support and we are looking forward to be back podcasting and blogging more regularly soon.

If you have not already make sure you add us to your follow list on twitter I regularly tweet updates there as to what is going on.

Obviously the Internet is a minefield and the governments of this world are interested in what goes on in it, additionally computer and network security is a concern and one they have a priority in maintaining as just that: secure. The military interest in computer security is obvious. That said it appears they feel that their “regular members” of the military could be complimented by a different crowd.

Earlier this month Col. Jeff Kendall of the Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER) stated that there are distinctive challenges recruiting  in the area of “cyber warfare”.

“Perhaps we need a different kind of warrior in this domain…”

(Not sure if that is a bad pun or not)

Col. Jeff goes onto to suggest that perhaps the physical requirements the military has doesn’t quite fit for the type of recruits that they want. Read: people that spend all day in front of a computers(s) on a staple diet of coke and pizza, bad sleeping habits and have forgotten what sunshine looks like.

Other considerations are the fact that the personnel they want might not have maintained the law in quite the way it was intended and that the life of a hacker by nature means that they have probably haven’t. If you think this might block you from entering the military into the cyber warfare division then think again… they are probably willing to over look the fact that you more than likely operated outside the law to obtain your talents.

Basically I think that the military is seeing that the hacker represents someone of great skill and abilities that the military can’t replicate in it’s training. They realize that who they want probably doesn’t “fit the mold” and so they are rethinking how they can change the mold. Smart thinking in my opinion.

I guess if you think you have what it takes then go and check out the Air Force Cyber Command Homepage. I would really appreciate it if you left our blog as it is, we have had enough trouble lately. But please go and do something about the AFCYBER Homepage it is damn awful.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Col. Jeff Kendal, classic:

“…they’re not the same kind of folks that perhaps you want to march to breakfast in the morning.”

Get transcript on the Military Fellows Roundtable, where these comments were made.

We are not totally out of the woods right now but things are better than they were a week ago. Check out what Cam had to say and again we thank you for your patience and continuing support.

It ain’t easy being green, but we are learning to cope with it. Please continue to let us know of any kookyness that you might have with the network and we are doing our best to resolve issues as they occur.

It looks like the Eee PC XP version is joining the market at the same price point as the Linux version. So that took me totally by surprise. Not sure what kind of deal Asus has struck with Microsoft or if they are willing to take a hit on their margins initially to get market penetration.

What has been confirmed is that gadgets like the Eee are prolonging the life of XP in that the ultra low PC market will be able to sell OEM XP for the next two years. While the desktop cousins and laptops will be cut off as of the 30th of June this year. Truth is that Vista would cripple the Eee and Microsoft see these platforms as a money spinner. Long live XP!

It will be interesting to see if the dominance of the Microsoft and XP brand make this the preferred format for the Eee PC. I know, I know the geeks will still go for the Linux version, but I am talking about the poor uni student that needs something to whack out assignments on and stuff like that. There is a market for a budget mobile computing solution and now with XP the Eee PC might just fill a void. For a lot of consumers the traditional laptop just doesn’t make economic sense.

Second I am waiting to hear how the XP version performs. XP clearly has more overheads than Linux and it will be interesting to see if this comes into play witht he Eee PC version. Keith maintains that you can tweak XP to be light and efficient, which I am sure is true. The big question is have they got the mix right?

So what do you get for your hard earned $399? (Best Buy)

• 900MHz Celeron
• 512 RAM
• 4 GB soild state memory
• 800 x 480 screen
• Wireless 802.11 b/g and ethernet
• 3 USB ports
• Camera and Mic built in
• Windows XP Home

So anyone going to be taking up the Eee PC under XP? Maybe you already have. Let us know what you think or do what Doug did and send us an audio comment ton play in the next show.

Check out Episode 80 of The Global Geek Podcast

The major impact it has had on the site is that we have not been able to post anything over the last week. We might have been able to chance it and have a try at posting but I was over losing posts.

In addition to that we were experiencing errors right up until late last night (AEST), I was faced with a decision. I could prep a show with the possibility that the server was stabilized and be able to get it out. Or I could abandon this weeks podcast. As you know a lot of time and effort goes into a show. Our shows are also time sensitive, so I could not release this weeks show next week. Because I did not want to lose the hours that it takes to prepare for a show I decided to abandon plans for this weeks show. I hope that you guys appreciate that.

We are gearing up for a show next week and we hope that you join us then. We are also hoping that we have seen the end of the server problems.

Thanks again for your patience and support.

- Dave and the GGP Crew

For those that don’t know what EverNote is, it is a 3 part application - you can choose which parts you want or need and not worry about the rest as well, so lots of different ways of using it. It is a web application, a standalone and a mobile app as well. What it does is enables you to make notes, clip stuff from the web, save images and just about everything else you can think of and save them to EverNote. From here all three of those components can be sync’ed up.

The power of the software is in the search, it can be via tags, text, attributes, dates or right through to the text in image recognition (that works a charm). That is, very powerful. You can have everything you ever put in a notebook in an instant where ever you are.

I have not done a great job at saying exactly what this software can do, brushed the surface more like it. If you are interested then check out the about page. There is also a screencast of the software in action.

If that is enough for you to want to give the alpha version a try then I have some invites to give away to listeners and readers of the blog. No preferential treatment, first in = first served. Email me at the show address with a legit email and I will shoot you through an invite. I’ll update the blog when they are all gone.

Mac, Windows and Mobile versions available.

Seesmic is an awesome service and it has me very excited about the possibilities and the future of internet conversation. However the service is currently in closed alpha. That means invite only.

The development is thick and fast and the user numbers are starting to climb rapidly, if you want to get access at this early alpha stage then I have a hot tip that is better than the one that I gave in the podcast. This comes directly from the founder of seesmic. They have set up a twitter-bot that dispenses invite codes!

“…anybody can get immediately a seesmic invite DMing our bot @getseesmic with “get” that is to avoid me doing it”

loiclemeur

So if you want in this is your chance. I have no idea what kind of limits they are placing on this so be quick. Just in case there is a flood and they stop the service via twitter.

Readers can leave a video through a number of methods, record one right there via their webcam, upload a video from their computer or they can insert a link to a video that they select from any URL. This is where it gets interesting because as you will see this opens up some very real opportunities for spammers, a different breed of bottom feeders (the video is from the post above - for context):

Pete has been very cleaver and quite humorous in his video but the message is quite a serious one. There is no doubt that video is exploding and one of the biggest problems for this medium is the fact that you can’t pass the video through any software that will detect spam. There is no Akismet for video, in the words of Pete.Then is there any benefit for spammers to submit video spam? They are not indexed by Google, they don’t contain links or references to another site in text. So the benefits of regular comment spamming are not there. In addition, the effort of recording video, hosting it and serving it to the mass spamming operation that would ensue is probably not worth it either. So we are looking at a more sophisticated and subtle spammer, subliminal maybe? So the advent of video commenting may be a good thing for bloggers and commenting. The Mashable test will be as good a place as any to watch the results.

What about you? Would you use video to comment about a post?

Well now there is an easier way: Down For Everyone or Just Me? answers this question very quickly and easily. Just put in the link that is giving you grief and you’ll get your answer.

Although what it won’t tell you is if the 404 is a regional problem or global. So it may be down for you and the rest of the Australian eastern seaboard as well. So don’t take it to heart if it is “Just You”.
Cool tools and useful, sure as heck saves you the time otherwise.

It is all geek, Tony Goodson and I talk about the trappings of technology for geeks and what we do to try and stay productive. We talk about almost everything. Tony has great show notes and you can have a listen while you check them out. There is lots of stuff there that I have never said on the GGP. This is pretty different to the average GGP episode but I think you would get a kick out of Tony’s perspectives and ideology. It was great to just chat and be a guest as well.

I would thank Tony for the invite to join him on the show and I trust that you might get something out of the show. Please drop Tony a comment and let him know what you thought as well. He is a geek at heart.

The Productivity Show #37 - David Gray (Global Geek)

Knightwise, just be nice…

These sites with wacky URL’s are mainly collectors items, just to say that you have it. I would not say that they are useful as a URL. So people end up doing novel things with them, like this one:

http://o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o.com

Yes it is real, check it out. It might be the answer as to where all your zeros went…

So, have you found something similar? I know I have seen a few over the years. Share your weird and wacky URL’s in the comments!

So for those of you having trouble explaining what twitter is. Or maybe your a listener of the show (Herne) and are still asking yourself why you need twitter, a blog or anything else online; this is a good intro. It is simple enough that Dr Evil could understand it.

The video only covers the basics of twitter. I have seen just in this last week more and more integrated uses of twitter as a way of communicating and meeting people and not just on twitter, this is just the tip of the iceberg!

So here is twitter in Plain English:

Don’t forget to follow the GGP twitter if you sign up!