The future of Dyson? February 11, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Internets, Scraps , add a comment
This was made by my friend and made me chuckle, I thought it should be out there for the world to see so he let me put it up here. For those who don’t know that’s James Dyson, inventor of a fine handful of neat things, probably the most awesomest being the Dyson Airblade. If you’ve never had the good fortune to use one you’re missing out, they are bad ass.
Googling Fun December 22, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Blogs, Gaming, Internets, Scraps , add a commentSo while I should be going to bed (and will once I’ve finished this, I promise) I was procrastinating (yeah, procrastinating going to bed, it happens a lot) with Google Webmaster Tools. They’re quite helpful for all things google related and I noticed a few things about my blog’s top search results.
Thanks to my review of EA’s internships I’m actually on the first page of results for educating adventures. I think this is pretty cool, and goes down as the first time my blog might actually be useful to someone. I’ve noticed a few hits from similar google searches, it does appear that there’s very little in terms of actual experiences from people on EA internships out there on the web so my account is a rare thing. It’s nice to think that my post might help someone make a better decision about their future.
On a sillier note, I also come up quite a bit around Toy Commander related stuff which is quite sad in a way. It’s such a good game but so under appreciated. Shame I’m not famous enough to have the impact required to get a sequel, that would be so awesome. 8 player online multiplayer? Hells yeah.
A guy can dream…
Windows Implosion December 8, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Internets, Scraps, Technology , add a commentI’ve just about managed to mop my computer up from a nice little bit of random operating system failure. The computer crashes and then windows doesn’t load any further than the loading screen with no real clue as to what went wrong or where. So after a while spent using a Knoppix CD to back up all my documents (my computer has 2 hard drives, makes backing up that bit easier or looking at it alternatively that bit harder as I still felt inclined to do an external back up too) I reinstalled windows.
I was actually able to install without formatting but my files have all become completely inaccessible in windows (but not Knoppix, weirdly). So those backups were worth it. I figure this would be a good time to convert to windows 7, so I grabbed my student edition. Not sure if I wanted 64 or 32 bit version I consulated wikipedia (perhaps not the wisest choice) and found my processor (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600) was 64 bit only so I got the 64 bit version. Now that I have XP back up and running all the system tests seem to indicate that it’s 32.
So I’m generally quite confused and fear that I may have wasted £40 on a new version that might not work. I have no idea whether I should risk it or not, although I imagine if it isn’t going to work it will tell me before formatting and getting rid of XP (which did take quite a while to set up again). Windows: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Well, actually I would if linux had a perfect equivilant to itunes but I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.
I really do hate being without 5.1 speaker tunage to the max…
So much for rebranding December 2, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Fun, Gaming, Internets, School, Scraps , add a commentSo after realising that my relaunched durka is practically impossible to actually find due to both it’s rebranding and it being parked on this domain. Also, Godaddy are having a sale on .info and it was hella cheap for me to grab my old domain back. So I did.
Now the un-rebranded durka can be found over at tehdurka.info. This does have the possible bonus of past visitors coming through random searching or something. I can’t imagine anyone will still be hoping that it re-appears and regularly look for it but maybe there’s one guy. And one guy is all it takes! So long as he has friends…
All Ad’d up and ready to go November 28, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Blogs, Entertainment, Fun, Gaming, Internets, Scraps , add a commentSo I’ve now got the google ads back up on the blog and also on Malarky. Before they were under another account rather than my own because I was under 18 but now that I’m legally an adult I’m allowed to earn money on my website. Woop.
My main concern with this little venture is the time it’ll take for traffic to really pick up, it was a long time after starting Durka that others outside of people I knew actually used the site. Word of mouth is a great propogator for something like this but it what it really takes is people searching deep into search engines for a site that they can actually play on. It’s this that really got visitors to it before and eventually caused it to somewhat explode in terms of popularity. Explode relatively that is.
I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to poke this along or whether it simply is a case of watching, waiting and hoping. Of course, please do tell your friends, it’s the caring sharing thing to do. With that I’m going to be over and out.
Bringing Durka Back November 27, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Fun, Gaming, Internets, School, Work , add a commentIt’s been my plan for a while to relaunch my old filter avoiding website tehdurka.info. As my most sucessful website ever, it’s demise was quite unfortunate. At the point of taking it down it had received over 400,000 hits during it’s lifespan, not massive on internet scale but certainly something for me. Of course, if it ever did get especially popular I would probably run into trouble anyway due to it appearing on the radar of school and workplace filtering technology. A few thousand hits a day was quite enough for me.
I can’t entirely remember why I shut it down, probably to do with the hassle of juggling free providers to keep my costs down to a minimum. In order not to run up massive bandwidth costs (my host, nearlyfreespeech.net, operates on a pay-what-you-use system with a high level of transparacy in their operation, I would reccomend them for anyone needing a cheap place to host a low bandwidth/storage site) I will be using free web hosting providers wherever I can, a slightly dubious practice but if they’ll let me hotlink then hotlink I shall. Most are very limited in terms of both space and bandwidth so it’s quite a bother juggling it all. But I’ll do it again, to keep myself occupied.
My new incarnation of Durka is named Malarky and is currently hosted as part of this website. Depending on what happens, I may give it it’s own subdomain or possibly get some unlimited bandwidth hosting for it. Of course, that’s a point where it gets worryingly popular and could possibly fail because of it. There’s also issues of copyright on the games I’m hosting, I have a very open takedown policy and I think most game makers are mostly interested in people playing their game rather than making money but I’m sure there are some out there who only want their game on a specific site and I’ll respect that provided that I’m aware. There are of course lots of ways for flash games to make money irrespective of what website is hosting them, mochi ads for one.
Hopefully my good faith will keep me clear of any trouble, and it should improve my programming skills as a by product which is always positive. So, if you’re in need of entertainment at school or work (obviously not during a lesson, wouldn’t want to ruin your education) then head on over to Malarky and get playing. I will be adding lots more games over the coming weeks to get it back up to the level that Durka had when I shut her down.
