Ebay confuse me. Throughout my recent creation of a listing for an as-new RME Fireface UC I was told my ebay costs would come to 37 euro. When I received payment, said amount was deducted from me by PayPal. All appeared to be well.

This morning, about two weeks after that sale, I was surprised to find a ‘monthly invoice’ from Ebay for 67 euro in my inbox. Pardon me?

If this was some fee that’s standard on making a sale, Ebay managed very well, through their listing UI, to ensure I was not aware that I would be liable for this amount.

As far as I can tell that means my cost of selling the item on E.bay has been approx 15%. Which feel like a lot to me.

Date Added: February 21st, 2010 | Leave a comment!

When I saw that Skype had business accounts available it made sense to me to sign up for one so that myself and my business partner could manage our Skype credit through a single business interface. Logical right?

Ever since that day I’ve found nothing but mass confusion on trying to manage our accounts through the system. We originally had two personal accounts, which we added to the business account. We had online numbers, but thanks to the confusion of the system if they were registered through the personal account then you can’t manage them through the business control panel. My Skype Pro subscription was through the business panel and therefore the SkypeIn number was not discounted. I had to transfer stuff all over the place, cancel things, etc etc. There was much discussion with Skype at the time, none of it made sense, I think eventually we were given credit for our trouble.

I will say that when I ranted a bit, Skype support were very helpful.

Now I’ve a new problem.

Just now I went to set up a new online number in an attempt to sort out managing my voicemail through Google Voice, for which I’ll require a US based number. I went to the business control panel, signed up for the new number and paid my $25 for the year.

I went to assign the number to my Skype account and I get told

Sorry, but you cannot allocate an online number to a personal account. You can only allocate online numbers purchased to business accounts created in your Business Control Panel.

Um, what!? But how did my first SkypeIn number get assigned to me?? None of this makes any sense. Skype have changed something somewhere and now I’m left with having to either:

1. Create a new Skype account through the business control panel – I don’t even want to imagine the hassle this could cause seeing as I have an important Irish SkypeIn number which I absolutely can’t afford to lose.
2. Sign into my “personal” account and just forget about the $25 I just threw in the bin and sign up for another SkypeIn number from there.

Option one makes my brain hurt with the how I would need to manage it. Option two means that I need to start adding credit to my personal account, get massively confused with SkypePro discount confusion, actually this option makes my brain hurt as well.

Why the hell do companies make buying things from them such an incredible pain in the ass.

Date Added: February 18th, 2010 | 8 Comments

I recently wrote a review of the elegant WordPress plugin called “After the Deadline”, which is a fantastic tool designed to help you write better articles on your WordPress-based website.

The great news is that this fantastic functionality is now available for writing anywhere on the web through a simple Firefox Extension.

…we’re pleased to announce the release of the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox.

After the Deadline works in text areas on most webpages. Simply push a button F7 or click to check your spelling, style, and grammar no matter where you are.

This add-on has all the After the Deadline features. You can enable the style checker options you use in the preferences and you can ignore errors to prevent them from coming up.

via After the Deadline for Firefox – Released « After the Deadline.

Download After the Deadline for Firefox

Date Added: February 3rd, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Another death-knoll for IE6. Hopefully the lingering user base will continue to rapidly decrease for this ancient browser. The more high-profile sites that continue to drop support for this browser the better.

I will feel more and more confident in placing a warning at the top of sites that is shown to IE6 users only which recommends that they upgrade their browser (there really is no excuse for using IE6 anymore).

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.

via Official Google Enterprise Blog: ​Modern browsers for modern applications.

Date Added: January 31st, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Recently enough Google has changed their default search behaviour to include a “Show Options” button which brings up a sidebar to narrow your search results by a variety of parameters such as type, time, previously visited pages and so on.

However they haven’t extended this functionality to their Google Custom Search results.

I created  my own Custom Search for searching WordPress plugins to make up for what used to be a very poor search functionality on WordPress.org’s plugin directory. This search function has massively improved but I still find myself using the Custom Search I created.

In order to add an option to view by date modified I found this handy tip on Lifehacker which I thought I’d share here:

Google can reorder search and news results from the last day, week, a few months, or entire year by adding a small string to the end of the search URL. Just add this string—&as_qdr=d—to the address bar and hit enter.

via Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick.

Date Added: January 15th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Ever wanted to know what the first web page ever created looked like?

The World Wide Web project

Thanks to SixRevisions for sharing this and a huge amount more information in their article, The History of the Internet in a Nutshell, a really fascinating look back over the way this remarkable technology has developed.

Date Added: November 16th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Thanks to Jonas Nockert for sharing this one. The instant I saw it, the image struck a chord, both introspectively and as a commentary on broader society today.

Below I have reproduced the most recent cover of the New Yorker, posted by Design Milk, which says a lot about today’s society. Something of which I know I’m guilty -  my face constantly being lit up by a screen of some sort. It is also something which I’ve seen in action at the last stadium concert I attended – the view from the stand seats being one of a sea of camera phones held up to capture the moment, either calling friends during famous songs, or camera-phoning the event.

November Cover of New Yorker

This humorous new cover for the November 2, 2009 issue of The New Yorker says a lot more than it appears to at first glance. For a closer look in case it’s difficult to see, read more.

via Design Milk – The New Yorker Cover by Chris Ware.

This cover also made me think of one of the best articles I’ve read on TechCrunch in a long time – NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web – which I recommend reading, and captures a lot of my own thoughts and concerns about the all-encompassing, always-on, realistically unsocial (at least in the traditional sense) internet world into which we’re drifting.

Am I guilty of a lot of these things – hell yes. My world is now driven by internet-based communication and social networking tools, I’m as bad as anyone. Still, I want to keep it in check and make some changes that result in me having a bit more physical world interaction over the coming years. I think travelling to India and Cambodia will help with this. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s just a natural evolution, but I still think I need to keep it in mind.

Anyway, great cover – wanted to share it out there (I recognise the somewhat ironic nature of using the medium I am slightly knocking to deliver this message).

Visit the New Yorker

Date Added: November 1st, 2009 | Leave a comment!

This is a quite an amusing search quirk on Google. If you search for Google Ireland it doesn’t report the obvious result of www.google.ie as you might expect, but instead returns www.google.co.nz.

Google Error

Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing this one out – this error was first spotted on the 15th October and it’s still returning the same result

Amusingly the second result is for Google Thailand.. um, how far removed can you get really?

Date Added: October 17th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Many users, myself included, visit YouTube on an almost daily basis. Ever since Firefox version 2.0 implemented the session restore function, when you are watching a video on YouTube (perhaps on other video sites as well, I haven’t really tested that), you may notice a tiny freeze-up of the video every 10 seconds or so. This happens because the session restore is by default set to save all open tabs every 10 seconds. This is especially noticeable if you happen to have a lot of tabs open at once.

The quick fix for this problem, at least for my own sake, is to increase the time between each of the saves performed by session restore. By opening about:config in your Firefox address bar, then typing browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box, you’ll see a value of 10000, which is in milliseconds. (Meaning your session is saved every 10 seconds.) I changed this to 300000, or every 5 minutes, as I don’t have the urgent need for tab restoration. If you feel like being more on the safe side, try increasing it to something a bit lower, say 120000, or every 2 minutes.

via How to Fix Annoying YouTube Jumpiness in Firefox – Firefox – Lifehacker.

Date Added: August 27th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Whilst people are harping on regularly about real-time news streams in the form of twitter and so on, there’s still an awful lot of value to be had from RSS feeds which are incredibly widespread on the web. I’ve been using Google Reader to stay on top of my favourite news sources for a long while, and though it’s not without its failings, I still find it to be the best RSS reader available.

Yesterday the Google Reader team added a few features which make it even more useful.

Send To

There’s a new section in your Reader settings which allows you to set up sites to which you’d like to share an item with. This makes it easier to choose a particular network to send an item to instead of just using the generic share button.

Feeds from people you follow

A small but nice touch. By following people you see their shared items in your feeds. Now you can also check out what feeds they have posted to their profile, meaning that you can catch a friend’s blog feed which you might have missed.

“Mark all as read” tweaked

This is the best update by a long shot. You now have the ability to mark as read any subscription, folder, or all items with certain time conditions. As I’ve recently returned from a week on an island I was confronted with 3000+ new items in my feeds. Now with one click I can mark anything over two weeks old as read, which knocks that number down under 2000 new items.

What next?

Calling out to the Google Reader team – please allow us to set up filters, or some way of training our feeds so that we can start pruning out the noise that doesn’t interest us. I have little to no interest in Apple news, of which there is much discussion on many feeds. I care not about Steve Jobs’ health. I’m not interested in Daily Tech’s reporting of latest news from NASA, but I like their other reports. TechCrunch’s excessive reporting of every single movement of the Twitter team bores me.

Make it possible for me to filter this stuff out so I can save time in my morning catch up.

Date Added: August 13th, 2009 | 8 Comments