I found the watch on Bluedial, a website where you can find Brand name watches like Seiko, Citizen, Bulova Casio. There are a number of great watches, but the geek factor is pretty important for me.

What do you think about it, isn’t it just the best?

So, if you’re interested and want to learn more, head down to Facebook and Become a fan a get your digital twin

photo credit: KayVee.INC

I’m planning on going to Twestival here in the Isle of Man. Here’s the blurb about it:

Twestival (or Twitter Festival) uses social media to bring people together offline to rally around the important cause of education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness. All of the local events are organised 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to Concern Worldwide’s education projects.

IoM Twestival will take place at Jaks Bar & Steak House, a popular music venue in Douglas. The main event is going to be a performance and karaoke singalong with band Red. The evening will include a silent auction, raffle and other fun, fundraising activities. Further details will be released as plans are finalised.

We have a bunch of things going on, people have been kind enough to donate a number of things for auctions and raffles, including an electric car for a weekend and a digital video camera amongst others. We’re also looking at having live video streaming services at the event, so we can keep in touch with other Twestivals around the world.

Read all about Isle of Man Twestival and come join us.

photo credit: Brymo

It must have been over six months ago that Hyder and I started working on Drazbi, a new concept that combines social networking, blogging and a platform that lets you auction stuff without paying a hefty chunk of what you make to a 3rd party. We’ve both been extremely busy, but over the months we have put together system that’s almost there, but now needs beta testers to come, sample and give us feedback on what they like and what they don’t. We’re open to ideas, suggestions, criticisms and anything you think will help the site. If you don’t like the design, let us know. If you don’t like the auction process, let us know. It’s all very fluid at the moment and we believe that the only way it can be a success is by listening to our potential customers.

So, if you’re interested in contributing, we’re giving any testers a free year when we finally launch our final auctioning service. (Yes, we’re also looking for feedback on our marketing and customer acquisition plans). So, head down to the site and sign up for drazbi.

photo credit: macieklew

Had an interesting debate over lunch yesterday while in a Twestival planning session, about the different between shopping online, or buying things over the web. You see, you can always find a good deal online, but if you’re really after service, nothing really beats walking into a shop and getting an expert opinion. The key thing, of course, is that the shop needs be staffed by an expert, someone who really knows what they’re doing and knows their way around the products they are selling.

Shopping online always has the advantage of price. The costs of running an online operation will always be lower than running a bricks and mortar operation. And you can knock q few quid off the price of your purchase using a service like PromotionalCodes.co.uk, a website that gives you discount codes to a number of popular websites. You can easily knock 10% to 20% off the online price of an item in this way. And when you consider online prices can be 20% cheaper than going to a store, you can see the attraction.

The knock on effect is that retailers need to start factoring this in, stop trying to compete on price alone and up the ante; providing critical services that cannot be replicated online. The question is, how many retailers really get it?

photo credit: Thomas Shahan

Looking for some interesting websites to visit? here are some cool sites to visit.

• Isle of Man Twestival – Celebrating social media and raising money for charity. Come join us!
• Tools 4 Noobs – Some great hacker tools and utilities
• 5 tips to improve your home cooking – For the aspiring chefs out there
• How your brain tells time – Interesting insight into how the brain works
• Convert your laptop into a digital projector – Here’s a great DIY project
• Connection Strings – A site dedicated to being the ultimate resource when it comes to connection strings
• All there is to know about chickens – Yes chickens
• Open Source Restaurant – How’s that for a concept?

Enjoy the honey!

Are you paid to post videos on your blog? If not, this post is for you.

While many bloggers discover, watch and post branded videos on a daily basis, relatively few know how to earn on it. This post will shed light on how and what you can earn by posting branded videos.

What you need to know.

There are companies who will pay you to embed video ads on your site. Video revenue is considerably higher than Google AdSense. You will earn above $1 CPM and if you are smart about your placement you get up to $9 CPM. If you like, read more about it here. View your potential CPM earnings here.

Where to start.

One of the most notable platforms paying bloggers to post branded videos is goviral network. It’s free and easy to use – 1) register; 2) pick and post videos you like; 3) get paid monthly via Paypal or bank wire. Your revenue report is updated hourly and you get new campaigns alerts by email.

Sounds easy? Here is the link to sign up.

Don’t have a blog?

No worries. You don’t need any technical skills to create one. As long as you can click on your mouse buttons, you’ll pull it off. Try blogger. It’s fast and free.

Can’t be simpler, can it? Happy posting.

photo credit: onkel_wart

I had a bit of a problem today trying to get an 8Mb backup uploaded into MySQL. The problem was caused by the fact that phpMyAdmin was timing out when I tried to import the database. I tried breaking it down into smaller sections but a couple of the tables just had too many rows in them. Just as I was about to bang my head against the wall, I came across BigDump, a MySQL upload tool that staggers the uploads allowing you to upload dump files up to 50Mb in size.

One to add to the toolbox!

Do you have any MySQL tools you’d like to share?

Did you know that there are about more than 400 different types of barcode symbologies  in use today? I never realised it was that much, but as you can image, only a few are in widespread use. A symbology is a way of converting the symbols (whether they are lines or patterns) that make up a code into particular letters or numbers. You may have noticed that a simple barcode on a product (usually UPC or Universal Product Code) consists of a fixed number of stripes and translate to 13 digits, while a 2D barcode (shown on the right) can actually represent a complete URL and can serve as a shortcut to a web site or page.

I was reading up about this on the Barcode Education page on the Wasp Barcode Technologies. They’re a company that specialise in the entire product set needed to create and scan barcodes, as well as the software technologies that make barcodes useful, including Inventory Control Software and Time and Attendance Software. They were looking for a sponsored post about their products and website, and I was pleasantly surprise on two counts. First of all, their website is actually quite readable and very informative. I also like the fact that they are entirely focused on one subject-matter. Sure, you can buy a barcode reader from any shop, but these guys seem to focus predominantly on this field. And if you have a tough nut to crack, it’s always better to get experts who have a body of experience they can call on to help you solve your problems.

So, if you’re looking for somewhere to buy barcode scanners or looking for the complete package and someone to help you implement it, you might want to check them out; they certainly seem to have all the bases covered. In the meantime, I’m heading back to that Education page, because I just realised how little I know about barcodes

Here’s an interesting read if you work in or with a team that’s responsible for building public facing systems. It’s a collection of the top 25 programming errors that have been responsible for most of the major security breeches and system outages over the last few years. Some of them are pretty well known, some a bit more exotic, but it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re aware of the risks you’re facing and familiarise yourself with them.

Here are the top 3, which I’m sure most people are familiar with:

• Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure (‘Cross-site Scripting’)
• Improper Sanitization of Special Elements used in an SQL Command (‘SQL Injection’)
• Buffer Copy without Checking Size of Input (‘Classic Buffer Overflow’)

Get the whole list here: Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

What I like about the list is that there’s a plain English description after each vulnerability (further down in the document), which you can use when explaining to non-programmers what the risk is all about. So next time your website gets hacked, you can use this to explain to your CEO exactly how it happened.

On a side note: My mate Noah maintains that the single Most Dangerous Programming Error was demonstrated to us by James Cameron in the Terminator series: Giving complete control to machines results in disastrous consequences which includes them ruling the world and going back in time to kill your mother. I have a plan for that though; if we take down the satellites they won’t have access to internet satellite services and therefore will get lost as soon as they’re out of Bluetooth range of each other. Reckon that will work?