A fortnight ago, it was the first of September. At the start of every month, it has become routine to change my desktop wallpaper and take a nice screenshot which I then uploaded to Flickr. I only have a few icons permanently on my desktop, such as My Computer, TV Shows, Podcasts, Notes and the Recycling Bin. I do however use my desktop as a temporary place to put files, which either have to be used, or sorted and put somewhere else. I use the desktop because I see them there everyday and remember the task yet to be done.

So anyway, I had some extra stuff on my desktop. Some TV shows and podcasts that had to be watched and some files that needed to be attended to soon. Now I didn’t want these files on my screenshot to be uploaded to Flickr so for some reason I moved them into the recycling bin. Well the total size of all the files exceeded the recycling bin space, so most of the files I moved there got deleted. Normally I would put them in a folder and put that folder in one of the other folders that is on my desktop, but for some reason I didn’t do that this time.

As an person online would, I tweeted my stupidity for the Twitter world to see (or the friends that follow me.) I wasn’t expecting to get any of these files back and I would have to re-download the files that could be downloaded again, and the others (either unrecoverable to I forgot what I had) would just be my loss. To my surprise, my good friend Rowan replied to my tweet with a link to a piece of Windows recovery software called Recuva.

After you download and install Recuva, when you execute it, you are greeted with an easy wizard to guide you through the recovery process. You can get it to find only certain types of files, such as Pictures, Videos, Music, Documents or all files. This is good for say if you delete all the pictures off your camera memory stick. Next you can specify where the files were. If you are unsure, you can do a full scan of everything. There are two types of scans, a normal scan and a deep scan. The regular scan is faster, but it finds far less than the slower deep scan. I required a deep scan to recover my files. Then after the scan is done, you select the files you want to recover from the ones its found and you are all sweet.

Recuva managed to save most of the files I had lost, with the exception of a folder with a season of a television series, but that is easy enough to download again when I actually have time to watch it. I also lost my Notes text document. The document the software recovered was somehow corrupted and had text from an html/css document. I don’t think there was anything of great importance in it anyway. Thanks to Rowan for helping me recover, or at least identify what I had lost. The most annoying part about losing files isn’t the fact that they are gone (although it is annoying,) it’s the fact that you don’t know what you have lost. Well that applies for me anyway.

Over the past month, I have been using a Twitter like services called Plurk. The major difference between this and Twitter is the way they display the messages, or as they call them, Plurks. Where Twitter shows Tweets in a list form, Plurks are shown in a timeline format. At first, I found the site to be a little slow and not as good, but as soon as more of my friends jumped on the bandwagon, the ball started rolling.

One of the things that makes Plurk different from Twitter is the conversations. Replies are threaded with a Plurk, as shown by clicking on the Plurk to drop down the replies people have said. This is better than the way Twitter does it because it don’t show it as a new message, which is a little annoying at times seeing replies to other people in your tweet stream. It just doesn’t make sense.I really like the replies because it makes the site seem a lot more active and fast paced, more like IM or IRC.

Plurk is very smooth, all thanks to AJAX. There is no refreshing of pages, which is a godsend, especially when there is a new Plurk or reply every second. You would be refreshing all the time otherwise. It is also good about notifying you when there are new messages and replies, and marking them as read. I like being able to know what I have and have not read. It makes it so much easier to catch up when I have been away sleeping or at school or away from keyboard.

One of the perks with Plurk is a Karma system. This gives users a way to how they compare with other users on the site. This is much better than judging by who has the most friends or followers, as sometimes its impossible to beat web celebs with that. The karma system is more fair and is based more on messages that friends, although it still is a factor. Although having a ratings system as such does have its downsides, such as people overplurking, aka spamming. This isn’t a huge issue but it could be in the future. I hope they have ways to manage this when it does happen.

I have not had any issues with Plurk and I think it is a great service, better than Twitter in my books. Although this wouldn’t be the case if it wasn’t for my friends and the internet people that friend me and make the Plurking experience more enjoyable and real. If you don’t already have a Plurk account, make one by using my link here. By doing so will note me for your referral and we will automatically be added on each others friends lists. Plurk on my friends!

 Veronica Belmont recently wrote an article on her blog about how she doesn’t like Tumblr. The reason behind it was because of people aggregating their feeds into it. I don’t think that it is enough for you to not like a service because there is a lot more too it than that. I personally think that its the worst feature that Tumblr has but I get over it because very few of the people I follow do import their feeds into it.

But she does have very good points about people aggregating their feeds into sites like Tumblr. I think people shouldn’t do it, especially on Tumblr. Why you may ask, well it is because I don’t want to see your links and such on your tumblelog. If I want to see what you are twittering about, I will follow you on that and/or subscribe to your feed there. Same applies to your pictures, if I wanted to see your pictures, I would be following you on Flickr and seeing you pictures along with everyone elses pictures. This is also the case for all the other services that you are part of.

If I want to see various content, I want to see them together as a group. All my friends tweets, photos, blog post ect. on their own. I don’t want to see the content mixed up. I am fine with having everyone pictures together in a single feed for me to go through. The problem also is that if you do that, I am going to end u seeing your content twice. I don’t want to see it twice because it wastes time. In saying that, if you have something that everyone must see, for example, a very nice shot you took and uploaded to Flickr, that would be acceptable, I just don’t want your whole feed with all your pictures on your tumblelog, or any other service.

If you do that, people are going to get annoyed and frustrated and stop following you and unsubscribe from the feed, so in the long run, you lose. This is a greater loss if you actually use the service for what it was intended, the imported content clutters your actual content and you end up with a mess that few people are following because of it. In saying that, I am sure it is acceptable for you to have a place to import your feeds in one place to give to a contact, or contacts, that don’t follow you everywhere and would still like to see what you do online.

It would be good if there was a service that could deliver that and that only, aggregating content, not creating it. I am sure there are services that do that an I don’t think Tumblr is one of them, even though it is possible. I think it was a mistake to ever put that feature in to be honest. Anyway, I think it is unfair also for someone to dislike a service for something a feature on the site, one that the minority would use. Tumblr is a wonderful service and is definitely my favorite one of 2007. Please keep your feeds of my Tumblr

As you may have realized, my blog has been down for about a fortnight, on and off. Well I promise (well Peppery promises) that it won’t happen again anytime soon. Now I shall return to posting on a regular  schedule knowing that the blog will be up for me to do so. I am going to try for a daily post because I have the time to do that now that I am on holiday.

Well now exams are over and from Monday at 10:30am, I am officially on holiday, although my body and mind have been on holiday for a good two and a half weeks already. I managed to struggle though my exams without studying and we can see the results (or lack of) from this exercise. Lets hope I managed to fluke everything again like last year.

At the end of March this year, I left a service called Twitter. Today marks the day I return to the service because a lot of my online contacts use it and I have been following them for some time now. I feel it is time for me to participate with them on the website so tweeting commences on my original Twitter profile. I hope that this time I can stay a little longer, just long enough for the service to capture me in its net and not let me leave. We will see how this turns out.

Yesterday I managed to make the frontpage of Digg. This is a difficult thing to do in my opinion, although there are people that are naturals and get heaps of stories on the frontpage daily. Anyway, I strategically got a story that was bound to make it to the frontpage to get there before someone else submitted it.

First off, I needed to work out what the reader wanted to see and/or know and find a place that would be able to provide that information. I decided to go with the big topic of Apple’s new iPods, one that is seen on Digg at least 5 times a day. I was going to submit one of those stories!

One thing that hadn’t been done is the dissection of the new iPod Touch. Okay, it may seem like nothing but one question that is on a lot of people’s minds is Bluetooth, is it or is it not in the iPod Touch? The only way this could possibly be answered if in one of two ways, either Apple confirms it, or someone rips apart a unit and discovers a chip for Bluetooth.

I knew where I had to go to find the story. iFixit had recently taken apart the iPod Nano and iPod Classic and I was positive that they were going to do the same to the iPod Touch when they got their dirty hands on it. I frantically waited for signs of them having their way with her, refreshing the page every minute. The iPod was out and they had to have one by now.

After about an hour of refreshing, in fine print down the side of the page was the first sign on life “Check out our first look at the iPod Touch.” I click and saw a bunch of unboxing pictures. When are they going to rip into her? Are they going to? There was no mention on the site about taking it apart, but they had to! I refreshed a couple of times. I went to submit it to Digg, entering in all of the field waiting to submit it. I went back to iFixit. After more minutes of refreshing, finally there as a sign, they were going to take a look inside.

This was when I finally submitted it. I was hoping no one else had submitted it during my period of hesitation. To my luck, I was the only one. My story is bound to be on the frontpage by the time they finished stripping her naked. I get Peppery to digg it, he did as well as twittered it. I submitted it to Pownce, thats where a lot of the Kevin Rose Fanboys… errmm… I mean Diggers hang out.

Every 10 minutes, a picture of the iPod Touch went up, each one more less article of clothing from the last. After two hours, she was completely stripped of her glory and out there for the world to see her bits, every single component, every single chip. Every hour, I got one or two diggs. 6 hours later, my story only has 20 diggs. The problem was the timezone conflicts. I was going to have to wait till the morning to see the progress of my story. I went to sleep. In the morning, I wake up to discover my story hit the frontpage an hour ago. 400 diggs by the time I wake up. Yay! I got there! I win!!!

If you don’t already know, I have a Tumblelog hosted by Tumblr. I follow other peoples good tumblelogs, and people who have similar interests to me. I have recently been so annoyed and frustrated by two people I follow that it has resulted in me unfollowing them.

The first person I unfollowed annoyed me by spamming his twitter posts in his tumblelog. This results in about 20 post a day that consist of short messages taken from his twitter RSS feed. It is annoying because now my Tumblr dashboard is full of spam. Why would someone put spam in their tumblelog. If someone wanted to see your twitter posts, they would follow you there. There is no reason to move that into your tumblelog.

The second person annoyed me because I would see posts that they have reblogged off my tumblelog but they never sourced me. Everyone who has any kind of blog, whether its a full weblog, a tumblelog or even a microblog, they all source where they get things from. Its etiquette as well as common sense, well so I though. Unfollowing them isn’t going to stop them from not sourcing the people he gets content from but it mean I don’t have to see it, therefore can’t be that bothered by it.

So if anyone does these things, I am going to stop following them, whether it is on Tumblr, Twitter, a Blog or any other place online for that matter. Its annoying and frustrating! Don’t Spam and Source your posts! These things are so obvious but yet there are people that do it. I wonder how they would react if they were the one reading spam or the one that was having something they found or wrote and have that content used without sourcing!

About two hours ago, Apple’s Presentation would have ended. I have just woken up and don’t know where to go. There is going to be Apple information from the presentation everywhere on the internet. But where sold I go first to get all the information and pictures in a single, easy location so I don’t have to muck around sifting through information to get everything I want to know.

Digg will definitely have this in the top 10 dugg stories. Digg is one of the many bases online for Apple Fanboys and any big technology news is on there. Apple + New Product + Hype = Top Story! My guess would be that the story either links to Engadget, Gizmodo or Mac Rumors or all. If this is the case why not go to the original source first because I’m sure the information is spread across multiple posts.

I could go possibly go to Twitter, Pownce or Tumblr. Someone on there would have definitely linked to a website with a lot of information on it. My guess would be that it would link to the same article(s) as seen on Digg. The only problem is that there will be quite a few people with different links and I wouldn’t want to go to all the sites to find the exact same information on it so this method of getting all the information quickly might not be the best solution.

I could try the my RSS feeds because I know for a fact that there will be at least 5 different sources with information on the new iPods. The only problem is that this information will be mixed with other stuff so I would have to siff through my feeds. Also if I wanted to see any extra content, for example photo galleries, I would end up going to the site anyway to see these so why not just go to one at the start.

I guess I will just go straight to a website and have a look at the news. Now I have the problem of deciding which one would have the best content, whether its Gizmodo or maybe Mac Rumors of possibly Engadget, now thats a big decision. Well off I go. *crosses fingers for new iPods* :p