Ani MollerZero content, 100% of the time

Ever since I first became addicted to my Nintendo DS, I kept whinging about how it just wasn’t quite right – the buttons are poorly positioned and made out of really crappy plastic instead of being rubberised, and it was quite big for what it was. Finally, Nintendo has announced the released of the new Nintendo DS Lite.

According to my shoddy Babelfish translation, the press release says that the DS has been the fasted selling game machine of all time and has been really popular with women – moi inclus! Perhaps this is a reason for the design update – to try and woe more women with something small and fun, and of course something that doesn’t look clunky and plasticy. I don’t see that going inside any Gucci purses.

Aside from the obvious different colour, the buttons have been slightly moved with the select and start buttons now below the actual play buttons. This should make it feel a bit more natural to hold and play than the existing model.

The comparison shows that the new DS Lite is 57 grams lighter, which doesn’t seem that much – but in conjunction with the smaller size I think it will be a lot more portable. It is released in Japan on March 2nd, 2006.

Now, if only I could find a way to justify buying another DS…

If you haven’t noticed already, I added some extra RSS feeds to the side bar – one for my links and one for Flickr (although I really don’t use Flickr that much but that’s another post and an ongoing dilemma of mine).

I added a link to my del.icio.us RSS feed, something that I haven’t used until I saw my friend Ben Bashford was using it, and I usually copy whatever he’s doing. But after adding a few links, I realised that I think del.icio.us really sucks. It’s ugly, and for what I want to use it for, it’s unusable. See, I don’t care if 2,345,325 people are linking to the same page on the internet as me. That doesn’t mean I’m going to find something interesting. As I write this, the second most popular link on del.icio.us is on linux.com, and guess what, I don’t even use Linux.

So, my wonderful boyfriend coded me a little RSS feed to use with my current (somewhat large) links database. This is only an interim solution, however.

I’ve been using APB Bookmarks for sometime now, but aside from the fact that it’s dead software and isn’t being maintained any more, it’s fugly. I mean, just look at it. In light of this (and thinking about it for at least a year), I’ve decided to learn PHP and to attempt to code my own little app. Tonight, with the help of my PHP-ninja boyfriend, I created a login page that checks a table in a MySQL database for the right info. It’s a start, right?

Good luck to me!

Back in June last year, my boyfriend found that his 2-week-old PowerBook had a broken lower memory slot. He posted a few questions on the Apple forums and found that apparently quite a lot of other people had the same problem, and it was seemingly connected to upgrading to Tiger and/or 15″ PowerBooks exclusively.

What started out as an information search turned into a saga, with Apple deleting threads on the forums and loads of people experiencing the same problem, often outside of warranty – an expensive problem to fix out of your own pocket. So he started an online petition to get names together to register a problem with Apple.

A few months ago he contacted some lawyers in the States, who started a class action lawsuit against Apple. Today I see that Apple has started a repair extension program for broken computers out of warranty. Success!

I would like to thank Peter for all the time he’s spent working on this. Who said online petitions don’t work again?

I’ll be honest and say that I really don’t know much about MetaWeblogAPI. I hadn’t heard of it until I tried using Flickr’s “Blog This” functionality with a Textpattern blog and when I looked at using MarsEdit some time ago. When I first looked into using these things they couldn’t be used with Textpattern, but after some digging around in the Textpattern forums and Googling I’ve figured out how to do it (and it’s easy!).

The first thing you need to do is download the right PHP script. I believe it was created by the guy from Pixel Meadow but I couldn’t find the download link on the site, or his email address. Anyway. Put that file in your /textpattern/ directory. Now you need to download another PHP script that I can’t remember where I downloaded it from, but you can get it here. Put this in your /textpattern/lib/ directory.

Now, you need to go to Flickr and add the details for your site. You need to add a MetaWeblogAPI enabled blog – do that by clicking here. Your API endpoint will be http://yourwebsite.com/textpattern/xmlrpcs.php.

It’s as easy as that! Now you can post an image from Flickr to your website by simply clicking “Blog This”. You can also use MarsEdit, but I haven’t yet set this up so I can’t say how to do it.

Okay, to summarise in an easy-to-follow list!:

1. Download file and upload to your website into /textpattern/
2. Download another file and upload to your website into /textpattern/lib/
3. Add a Flickr MetaWeblogAPI blog.
   Your API endpoint will be http://yourwebsite.com/textpattern/xmlrpcs.php

I am pleased to announce that I am officially the hottest girl in Antwerp. Well, at least I’m the most popular person tagged with “Antwerp” (out of about 3, ssh) on Consumating – a Friendster-esque site that uses tags like Flickr.

I’ve had an account on Consumating since its inception, to start with only because the guy who coded it is my wonderfully internet-savvy ex-husband, Ben Brown and he likes to show me these things to either get my feedback/bug reports or to show me how totally awesome he is at the internet. However, after playing around with it for a bit I decided that I actually really like the site and how it works.

It’s super simple to set up a profile and the tags are fun. They make it really easy to find someone you think takes awesome self portraits or even to spy on people you went to primary school with.

So how about you sign up now and get your tag on!

Thanks to Google Images and this article I wrote a while back, I get hundreds and hundreds of hits to images linked on my server. This annoys me because when I find an image I want to link to I download it and host it on my own server – it’s common courtesy, come on!

So to redirect all requests to another image, put this in your .htaccess file:

Now all you need in an image of goatse or perhaps my bandwidth pirate. Yaaaaarrrr!

My partner and I left the UK last November and sent a package to Portugal with some Playstation 2 games on November 21st. It was sent guaranteed delivery and was supposed to be there in about 5 days. It never arrived.

The package, or rather what remains of the package, was returned to sender to a friend of ours in Manchester. The package is COMPLETELY destroyed, and it took 2 months to be returned. The package once contained 4 PS2 games – GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, GTA:3, and Soul Caliber 2. Now it contains nothing but a mangled Soul Caliber 2 box, with only fragments of the disc remaining. The other 3 games – MIA.

I’m wondering if Royal Mail has taken to keeping wolves and/or grizzly bears in the depots.

BMS is the synonym that I just made up of one of the things that makes me hate the internet – at least for today.

The Blogging Management System has been pissing me off since I started writing on the internet and after I realised that there was a way to make a web page other than creating a .html file with Microsoft Publisher and uploading it to Tripod using WS_FTP Le. I’ve tried quite a few different systems, the first being Blogger back when it was first released. At the time, my marginly-less internet savvy brain couldn’t deal with the “magic code” that was needed to put into the templates. So I tried Organizine by Adam Mathes that appears to have died, but at the time it was pretty simple to use and worked. But it didn’t support things like comments at the time, so after a while I used a hacked version of bbDiscuss by Ben Brown which I used for about 2 years. However, Ben stopped developing it so I looked around for a newer BMS (god, I love the synonym – it’s so crap).

I installed Movable Type, took one look at the confusing admin system and moved on. I tried b2 but couldn’t get it to install properly. I heard from a friend that Textpattern was easy to install so I tried it out. Good for my brain and my blood pressure.

I’ve been using Textpattern since May 2004 and it’s been pretty decent. Customising the design is kind of tricky for a vague newb like myself, with things named and located oddly (like “forms” which are actually code snippets but for whatever reason they are called forms, and the pieces of Textpattern code that you use in a template to do things like link to a previous article or creating a search field are spread out over various pages, somewhat arbitrarily) and because the version I run – 1.18 – has loads of the design code inside the actual PHP files. I’ve hacked a bunch of these files to get things looking right, like the comments and the search. The pain of this means that I can’t easily upgrade to a newer version of the BMS without painstakingly keeping a note of all changes I’ve made to the PHP and each time figuring out where that part of the code has been moved to. And thus, I am still running version 1.18 when the current version is 4.03.

As I posted yesterday, I am in the process of creating a more personal blog for my family and friends. I decided to try out the latest Textpattern, just to see. I’ve wasted an entire day trying to get it to work. Firstly I couldn’t get the PHP script to connect to the MySQL database, but this is a server issue I believe but it’s because the newer version of Textpattern is making it a server issue. After this little mishap I decided to try Wordpress.

Wordpress was fairly easy to install, although it wasn’t the “famous 5-minute install” even though I vaguely know what I’m doing. It works with software like Mars Edit (which I’ve always wanted to try) and the “Blog This” button in Flickr, which I’ve also wanted to try. However, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the navigation to not disappear in an article permalink without changing to some hideous theme. I’m sure it’s not really that hard, but I really couldn’t be arsed looking at it that closely and by the time I had attempted to figure it out I’d found out how to use the MetaWeblogAPI with my existing version of Textpattern, which enables me to use the Flickr “Blog This” and Mars Edit. So I decided to go back to Textpattern.

After I decided to do this, I got more database errors and kind of lost the plot. I fiddled with databases on other servers and then decided to use a port of my 1.18 version. Then I decided to try the latest version again, but now I can’t remember why I decided to do that. Then I spent about 4 hours importing an existing layout from 1.18, only to find that a bunch of Textpattern codes had changed which meant some of my existing things didn’t work. Also, I had to figure out how to import the stuff I’d hardcoded that had moved from the PHP files to the admin system. Then I couldn’t get the meta API stuff to work.

So now it is 2:02am and I’ve decided to go back to my hacked 1.18 install. I am so not doing anymore tonight otherwise I’m going to start screaming about gargoyles and astrology charts.

My server is tainted.

I’ve decided to try and get some structure around here so I’ve implemented some changes. The plan is to take all the semi-personal stuff off this site and move it to another location for friends and family. The main part of ANIMOLLER.com will now be dedicated to technology, games, movies, and travel, and if I ever get around to it I will start working on a photography portion which will probably be more like a portfolio and will be separate to the rest. This part of the site has been moved from /text to the root, which is redirecting so you don’t need to change your bookmark if you’re a lazy ass.

So, I think this is how I think it might work but I’m not sure. I haven’t quite thought it all through yet, but I do know that I want a separate part for my boring daily shit that I don’t want to mix in with my 1337 stuff.

Right so, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll probably change my mind in a few days and put it all back, but who knows.

Let me know if I’ve fucked something up. The new RSS link is sorted though, so you’ll need to change it. (Update: I changed it again! I knew I’d change my mind! Sorry!)

P.S. If you want to read about my boring life and haven’t received an email from me with the details, !

I just spoke to my sister in New Zealand – her boyfriend proposed on New Year’s Eve and she said yes! They haven’t set a date but plan on getting hitched in about two years. I am so bloody excited!

And happy new year! Wee!