21 September, 2006
I was aware of Google’s new featre (Search History) but I had only briefly looked at it once. This morning I decided to have another look and, to be honest I think it is fantastic.
Not only does it give you all the sites you have visited, and the option to search these sites, but also your usage statistics. It also alows you go to back to a specific day, and also tracks the music you listened to that day (possibly through the gtalk feature). How cool is that?
There is also a trends section which gives interesting info on your usage of the internet and search engines. On average, since February, Sunday is my quietest day with an average of 155 searches and wednesday is my busiest day with 1704 searchs in total. My busiest hour of the day is 1400 with 1066 searches since February and my quietest is 0800 (because this is when I get up). Amazingly all other hours in the day have searches: 0500 has 60 searches for example.
If you haven’t already tried it, give it a go. It really gives you an idea of your internet usage habits and is a real eye opener. I would never of guessed that I have used google during every hour of the day except 0800 since February.
13 September, 2006
I came accross Shakespeare Searched today… what a great idea. It should really help everybody doing English exams. Pity it wasn’t around in 1997 for my final exams.
Basically you can select a character (e.g. Hamlet) for any Shakespeare production, type in a word (e.g. Father) and press search and it will list every time that word is mentioned by Hamlet:
Hamlet – Act 1, Scene 2
I came accross Shakespeare Searched today… what a great idea. It should really help everybody doing English exams. Pity it wasn’t around in 1997 for my final exams.
Basically you can select a character (e.g. Hamlet) for any Shakespeare production, type in a word (e.g. Father) and press search and it will list every time that word is mentioned by Hamlet:
- Your loves, as mine to you: farewell.
- My father’s spirit in arms! all is not well;
- I doubt some foul play: would the night were come!
- Till then sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise,
- Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.
12 September, 2006
I don’t usually pay much attention to what webiste do to try and make a sale, but I came across this today on a Irish Wedding site:
‘Google’s No1 Choice for Irish Weddings in Ireland.‘
First of all, I think it is funny, because what does Google know about ‘Irish Weddings in Ireland’? But then again, Google is a cool company, run by cool people who did something smart and has a good image, so maybe by aligning this wedding service with Google they can imply they are same minded people. I don’t really know.
Maybe the site ranks first for Irish Weddings in Ireland, but that doesn’t mean that Google Uses this site for all their weddings in Ireland does it? Nope, it just means it ranks better than the other sites because you are stuffing your keywords. Maybe I should say fair enough for trying to sell your product and doing what you can to do that, but I just think it is too miss leading, So I decided to point it out to all you people out there thinking about getting married in Ireland, and maybe try and rank my blog for: Irish Weddings in Ireland… so there you go…
By the way, I don’t want to impact negatively on your website… so if this blog post is not helping you, tell me and I’ll remove it or tone it down or something… To be honest it might not even be still here next week.
27 July, 2006
I decided to have a look at Internet Explorer 7 after I heard good things about it. I am never going to deviate from Firefox as my default browser, but there are some things you just have to use Internet Explorer for. So I started the ‘process’… It verified that I have a propper copy of Windows, but then I got an error message:
Internet Explorer 7 could not be installed. You must restart your system to confirm that any changes to your system are undone.
I was asked to restart my machine and upon restart follow the troubleshooting guide that is now on my desktop. Seems fair enough… but it turns out this is one big mess… it was always going to be the case that the easy trouble shooting wasn’t going to work in my case and I ended up having to look at making changes to the registery which I am very slow todo. This not helped by the warning given by Microsft:
Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.
So now, do I have unresolved issues in my system because this program failed, and secondly am I going to have to make changes to my registry? Right now I am a bit confused because I don’t know if I have to make the changes to my registry to make sure my computer keeps working right or the changes may only result in IE7 working properly? Are the changes to my system undone?
Do you know what Microsoft, I think I’ll pass on this one. It is too much like hard work… Fingers crossed my system isn’t fucked.
20 July, 2006
Hi all… I am up and running on Skype (at last). Just seach for Ronan Menton and give me a call… 
29 June, 2006
A list of the current podcasts that I am listening to…
- - Baddiel & Skinnner’s World Cup Podcasts
- - Documentary on One (Radio One documentaries)
- - Hidden Dublin on City Edition (Newstalk 106)
- - Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show
- - Newstalk 106 Greatest Hits
- - PRI’s The World: Technology
- - Scrubs
- - Spin103.8
- - Breakfast Exprss Comedy
- - Strawberry Alarm Clock
- - The Football Phone In - 606
- - The Ricky Gervais Podcast
- - World News Bulletin (BBC)
- - World Cup on Guardian Unlimited
23 May, 2006
So what is a IP address I hear you ask… An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP). Any participating network device — including routers, computers, time-servers, printers, internet fax machines, and some telephones — must have its own unique address. You are visiting us from Ireland (IE) 
You are in or close to Dublin
Until you hide your ip address, anyone on the net can see the personal information shown below
Your IP Address : ***.***.***.***
Your Country : Ireland (IE)
Your City : Dublin
Your ISP Name : Eircom IP Networks Group
Your Latitude : 53.3331
Your Longitude : -6.2489
You were referred here by : http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=Proxy+Firewall&sourceid=Mozilla-search.
Your Browser Version : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
12 April, 2006
I am an iPod user in a rather unusual situation, I have two computers, one I use for work in my office, and a second one which I use for home use / playing games etc.
My music is on my home computer which meant I couldn’t listen to tunes at work without copying all my music onto a second hard disk, installing it on my work computer and then copying it across to the desired location on the main hard disk.
It would also be great to know in the case of a hard disk crash or a complete windows reinstall when you forgot to backup your tracks (guilty) that you have a copy easily accessible on your iPod.
But wait, isn’t your music on your Ipod I hear you ask. The answer is yes, but it is complicated. For some reason Apple have put measures in place to prevent you from accessing the music on your iPod, which include an updated version of iTunes which prevents a drag and drop facility similar to how you put your music on your iPod.
Luckily there are a couple of free tools on the web which allow you to accomplish this task. I used ephPod which I found to be very simple and and to almost accomplish the task. This is probably down to my own stupidity, but my music wasn’t sorted correctly into arist/album/tracks.
I did some more reading on the topic and found SharePod which was very easy to use and within a couple of tries i had my music copied onto my hard disk in the format I like.
21 March, 2006
This is something I wanted to figure out for a while, and once I sat down to actually do it, it took about 2 minutes. Not only can you remove the shortcuts to the search engines, you can add search engines too. For me, the fact that Amazon search was there while MSN search was not was a pain. If you are a user of the search facility in Firefox and you want to be able to customize the search engines that appear there follow these simple instructions.
To Remove Search Engines
Go to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\ and delete the search engines you don’t need. There are two files which need to be removed for each unwanted search engine, the shortcut file and a .scr file.
To Add Search Engines
Visit here and click on the search engines you would like to have. Shortcuts for everything from BBC to Technorati are easily installed by just clicking on the relevant link.
2 March, 2006
If you are like me, then you don’t want to be looking a network logo everytime you turn on your phone. I wanted to get rid of the big Vodafone logo sitting in the middle of my screen. I am using a 6101 and this worked perfectly for me.
Using wap go to this site and follow the obvious options that follow which basically is to save the image. Basically what it does is replaces the network logo with a blank image. I found lots of info here on the subject.