Mark Roddis

Sep 9

Do you trust your hotel room safe? Think again

I came across this video the other day on YouTube whilst actually sitting in my hotel room.

I did check it out and found that my hotel had a very different make of safe to the one shown in the video. I have however seen the shown model in hotels I have stayed in, but in the UK at least they are quite rare.

So the safe in my hotel room could not be opened by an all zero code but that does not say their isn’t a master code known by all the staff.

In any case however it is clearly a potential problem and one any traveller should be aware of. I did post the video on Facebook and a friend did come back and suggest one of these.

So be careful out there people.

Aug 15

Stupidmarkets (via Not Now Nancy)

I just got sent this about the awful way Nancy got treated at her local Tesco supermarket.

Clearly this needs to be publicised and shouted about so here you are.

I spend a fortune on food shopping. There are eight hungry mouths to feed every week and eight bodies to clean up after. Okay so half of those bodies belong to animals, but they still need feeding and hovering up after. I would say that on average I spend £240 per week. It seems a lot yet I still manage to be out of things come the following Friday. My kids eat everything and are hungry at least once an hour and then there is Miles. To give y … Read More

via Not Now Nancy

Jul 31

It’s Official! Google Is Making Me Stupid

Well I guess we all knew this but recently published research by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner for Science Magazine entitled “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” (snappy title isn’t it) confirms what we all feared.

Google is making us stupid!

So the science bit goes a little like this.

Our brains process information in various ways however when presented with a new piece of information that the brain expects to be able to access from an external source at a later date, instead of remembering said information, it remembers where to find it and in 2011 that means one thing. The Internet!

So people are actually using Google as their own personal memory banks. An extension of their own brains without being conscious they are doing so!

Or in science speak:

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

So the full research can be found over at Science Magazine (sorry but you need to subscribe to download the very long and detailed research paper) but it really does appear that without us realising it, our own brains have been moving to the cloud as well.

So are our children destined to just be a collection of meta directories on legs? Do you think Google can find a way to monetise this phenomenon? Will Google take over the world (and our minds)? Do you want fries with that?

Jul 26

1 Comment

I Got Freshly Pressed

I have been using WordPress for quite some time now as the centre of my online world. I started out self hosting but after a couple of years of updating and tweaking every weekend, it made more sense for me to just take the platform as a service directly from WordPress themselves. I have not looked back since and these days I can concentrate on just creating content for my blog rather than spending time maintaining the blog server itself. It is truly liberating.

Now to be honest, my blog is not the most popular online destination for most people. On a typical day I can get 10 or 20 real visitors. Some may leave a comment but most wont and it hasn’t brought me internet fame and fortune just yet. But it is a place where I can share stuff. Where I can point people who know me to as a jump point to other destinations. So there are links through to my online photo albums as well as contact details and links to my profile on Twitter and Facebook.

But then it happened.

Each day, those nice people at WordPress pick a handful of new blog postings and feature them on the WordPress front page. This feature is called Freshly Pressed

So last week having just come back from Amsterdam I posted up a handful of photos from my trip that I thought stood out and would be nice to share. They must have been good because they caught the attention of the crew at WordPress who pick the Freshly Pressed sites and I got chosen. I got Freshly Pressed.

So apart from the honour of being picked out from a crowd of 350,000 new posts, I got to discover just how much hard work a busy blog can be.

First of all there is the increase in traffic

Yes that is over 1500 hits per day compared to the usual 10 to 20!

Next are the comments.

My single post got 90 comments in the space of 48 hours. You soon realise that trying to moderate that volume of comments is a full time job.

I also got a lot of spam. Sure the filters caught a lot of it but there was also a lot of shameless self promotion. To be honest, others trying to get their own blog noticed whilst adding a nice comment doesn’t bother me that much but some of it was obvious with comments such as:

Nice photos, now come and visit my blog at www.getrichquick.com to learn more

But there were lots and lots of genuinely nice comments as well. I have tried to visit the blogs of all the people who left nice comments and have in turn come across some really great blog posts on all sorts of subjects ranging from a great recipe for mango salsa to great travel blogs and loads of great photography.

So to the WordPress crew, thanks for choosing me. It really was an honour.

For all the 3000+ people who visited over the 48 hours especially those who left comments, thanks also. I am glad my pictures were of interest to you.

And finally, the second your Freshly Pressed link drops back onto the second page, the traffic stops. As you can see on the graph above, the traffic went away as quickly as it came but it really was fun whilst it lasted.

Jul 7

What if the future goes wrong? [Reblog]

A rather funny view into the future none of us want to live in.

Enjoy

In the future, our lives will be greatly enhanced by the ever-faster networks. Ultra-smart computers, sophisticated robotics and unlimited capacity communications will make every aspect of our everyday lives pleasant. Machines will do all the work while we enjoy the results on a beach. We will be always in touch, always in control. But sometimes, technology has a habit of turning out different than planned. Let’s remember that the telephone was o … Read More

via Your guide to the future