Archive for September 6th, 2006
I miss Dublin, particularly the rats
Posted on September 6, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour, Ireland.
Craig sent me this picture taken by a tourist in a Dublin playground. To save you having to zoom the picture, the warning sign says “These lands are bring treated for rat infestation and have been laid with poison”.
Happy days.
tags: Rats, Playground, Dublin, Poison
2 Comments
Shockingly - Yayyy Vodafone
Posted on September 6, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Gadgets, Technology.
So I bitched about Voda (twice) and the fact that I couldn’t upgrade the software on my N70 mobile. Then Ciarán, an old workmate, pointed out that I could get the phone unlocked by just calling customer service.
It turns out that they have to ask Nokia for the unlock codes for the N-series, five days later they texted me the code and now the phone can work with any SIM card (like Roam4Free for example). I never knew they would do this so good on them. I’m still on a long contract with them so I guess they don’t really care.
I then re-tried the software upgrade of the phone (as previously described) and the beauty worked! I have no idea if it is related to the unlocking or it is just a coincidence but I now have the latest (bar one) version of the N70 software and I’m a happy bunny.
The main obvious change is that it just seems faster, particularly the SMS menus. Hopefully they have also fixed the idiotic bug where if you paused an MP3 that you were listening to and then someone called you, it would play the paused tune at full volume for the world to hear rather than the ringtone.
If you have an N70, go get the upgrade. If it doesn’t want to upgrade you, call Voda and get the phone unlocked.
tags: Vodafone, Vodafone+Ireland, N70, Nokia, Roam4Free
2 Comments
Interested in what the papers were saying up to 200 years ago?
Posted on September 6, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Entertainment.
Well Google have just released their most impressive service in a long long time. Over at News Archive Search you can search on a bunch of newspapers worldwide going way back. In many cases you have to pay to see the scan of the paper itself but you can read the actual text for free.
As a test I put in the phrase “famine Ireland” and then selected “before 1880″ and found a newspaper article from The Republican Compiler of Gettysburg on March 1st 1847 which mentions the suffering caused by the Irish famine.
This is an incredibly powerful tool for anyone interested in what was really going on at a particular time rather than the interpretation put on things by historians.
As a tool for schoolkids, it really does boggle the mind compared to what I grew up with. I remember our Irish history book in the Inter Cert doing 1922 to 1969 in a couple of pages and then stopping at 1969.
Imagine if the Irish Times, The Indo and whoever owns the rights to The Irish Press were to hand over their archives to Google Ireland? Hell, I’d be happy to see my tax euros spent on paying them to do it.
Next query, “bombing of Dresden”. Dunno why but it was the first thing that popped into my head after the famine. Oh I’m a barrel of laughs today.
tags: Google, News+Archive+Search, The+Irish+Press, The+Irish+Times, The+Irish+Independent
2 Comments
