This month I am saying goodbye to a couple of services that I have been using for a while.

First Posterous. At the end of last week it was announced that the micro blogging platform Posterous will be closing down at the end of April 2013. This has been anticipated for a while since Twitter bought it in March last year and assured users that they will not close down without notice and will create an official data backup path.

I started using Posterous when I moved my “Vox Blog” to it (actually migrating to TypePad and then Posterous as it was easer) after Vox was closed at the end of September 2010.

As this is a second blog of “silly stuff” that I do not upload much to it nowadays I have decided to just kill it off. I did consider moving it to another service such at Tumblr but it is not simple to get the archive in there and I have other things to do that are more important. I will however place a full copy of my Posterious blog on my web site and redirect from the original URL so the content will not vanish from the Internet.

There is a small bug in the export where the original Import from Vox is listed backwards, and the Image URLs are mashed, but I fixed the URLs with a little .htaccess hacking. If you need help to do the same please do ask.

Next is Dopplr. Dopplr is a service where you log where you will be travelling to and it allows you to see if your friends are going to the same location. When you attend a lot of events like I do it can actually be useful. The service has been running unchanged since it was bought by Nokia in September 2009. I give it a lot of credit for running apparently untouched for almost 3½ years. Sadly it has just started to play up by not allowing trips to be created, edited, or deleted. It is clearly not being maintained and about to die.

Rather than move to another system (I only know of Tripit and it is not quite the same) I have imported my last Dopplr backup in to my Google Calender. Clearly this is not going to duplicate Dopplr’s social element, but will help with my planning and this is what I have mostly used it for in recent times.

So that is two services gone and I suspect there will be more going before the end of the month. The Internet is always exciting because of the constant flow of new and exciting things on it, but most will eventually vanish or be swallowed up by other services regardless if they are successful or not. It is sad but the way it is.

In 2010 I won an iPhone 4 at Over the Air for my Hole Mapper mobile app. I was having some problems getting the phone going because I had not purchased the phone at an Orange shop, and in the end I was forced to pay £25 for a PAYG SIM to do anything (and I am still grumpy about that). I could then enable the phone for T-Mobile’s network as part of there network sharing, and this meant I could use my Virgin SIM again (after a little trimming).

Anyway, back to today… My phone on Virgin has worked well for well over a year but recently Virgin have also started sharing the Orange network in the same way that T-Mobile customers have been, and my data does not work on Orange by default. This is because the settings are being picked up from the network and for reasons I won’t go in to they are wrong for me and I can’t change them on my iPhone because the settings are locked down.

The solution was to go to http://www.unlockit.co.nz/ that created a profile containing the APN setting. Just go to the side ON YOU PHONE and follow the instructions to set the APN. The UK and Virgin are preconfigured so when you click to create the profile, and allow it to be instilled your phone will magically start working when you fall on to the Orange network.

The official solution is for you to call Virgin Mobile and they will disable the roaming. This obviously means you can’t use Orange’s coverage, but as Orange coverage is poor where I live I often end up with a blue circle on Orange where there is a good 3G signal form T-Mobile/Virgin so I might have that done anyway, but lets see how thing go.

This is a blog post I started almost 2 years ago but got side tracked and never finished it. Having just needed some information from it I dicided I would finish it off and post it just in case it is helpful. Please remember that there may mow be a more appropriate solution available though.

A couple of years ago I bought a reconditioned Acer Aspire One A0751h. It is a lovely little machine. It is rather slow and the graphics chipset has huge compatibility problems, but it is still a nice machine. It came with Vista installed but now has Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installed.

One problem I had with the graphics chipset driver is that the machine would not hibernate properly. The quick fix to this was to replace the latest hibernation applications with the old ones that still work with these drivers.

First of all you will need to install the Debian Userspace Software Suspend package with the command…

sudo apt-get install uswsusp

…and then we need to remap the commands to the new (or should that be old) binaries…

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate
sudo echo -e "#bash\ns2disk" > pm-hibernate
sudo mv pm-hibernate /usr/sbin
sudo chmod a+x /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
sudo echo -e "#bash\ns2ram --force" > pm-suspend
sudo mv pm-suspend /usr/sbin
sudo chmod a+x /usr/sbin/pm-suspend

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid
sudo echo -e "#bash\ns2both --force" > pm-suspend-hybrid
sudo mv pm-suspend-hybrid /usr/sbin
sudo chmod a+x /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid

Canonical make the point that the fact that Ubuntu’s suspend not working is a fault with the power management routines and should be these should be fixed instead of just replaced. Using the Debian USS works but is not supported under Unbuntu and may have other issues.

Remember that this is not an officially recommended solution and to return thing to normal you can run the following…

sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate
sudo ln -s ../lib/pm-utils/bin/pm-action /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate
sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
sudo ln -s ../lib/pm-utils/bin/pm-action /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
sudo rm /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid
sudo ln -s ../lib/pm-utils/bin/pm-action /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid

You may or may not have heard about the new(ish) cookie law that has come in requiring web sites to get the users permission before sending out a cookie that can be used to track a user across web sites. Although aimed at increasing online privacy it is causing a problem for most people who have a web site including me.

I have done an audit of my sites that use cookies and I actually use them very irregularly. In fact I am only serving them from my server for two forums running PHPBB and several WordPress installations. As both of these are an opt in with a privacy policy mentioning cookies I am quite happy that I am already complying with the legislation. I used the Buisness Link templates for these policies (that have vanished from their site but I can send a copy) if you want to do the same.

The problem I have is with third party services serving cookies, most specifically AdSense and Google Analytics. The new legislation gives both Google (as the service who sends out the cookies) and me (as the user of there service) equal responsibility to get the users agreement before service the cookies. The problem is I have no control over what Google serve and they don’t appear to have a solution in the pipeline. As the Information Commissioner’s Office, the organisation charged with enforcing the legislation, have said they are taking a light touch approach to enforcement “where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals” I will, like many, continue to take the wait and see approach and hope that Google comes up with a more defined solution in the near future.

So, in summery I am already compliant with the exception of some Google services, and I am now hoping Google will supply a recommended solution for me and many millions more across Europe.

Update: Things are changing already with new advice from the ICO saying that we can presume implied consent. As a result I can now just bring up a one time message (perhaps just for European visitors but I will need to check in to that) letting the user know I am using Google Analytics cookies and taking there continued use of the site as implied consent. Clearly I am missing the deadline on implementing this but will have it coded and active soon.

Back in 2007 I created a centralised status updater that allwed me to post a short message to Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook at the same time. Later on I extended this to use Ping.fm so I could additionally post to Plaxo Pulse, Plurk and YouAre.

Now Jaiku have been swallowed by Google, Plaxo has closed Pulse, Plurk is still there but no one I know uses it any more, and YouAre closed down, there is little point in using this any more. Additionally Ping.fm is about to be closed down, so I would need to do some more coding if I wanted to keep it going.

As a result of all this I have decided to closing down my status updater and use Twitter and Facebook directly. I also am experimenting with the Twitter Facebook app that cross-posts tweets to Facebook that seems to be working well for my tweeting style.

This Saturday gone we held our first notable event at Maker Space, that being the MakerSpace Arduino Day. We had a good turnout to the point of reaching capacity. People were working on a few projects from laser games to wireless railway signaling, and a lot learning about the Arduino.

I spent most of the time not in fact working on Arduino code, but working on optimising and improving the development environment. My plan is to blog about this in the near future when I have finished my experimentation. The best tip I have is to turn off your virus scanner when compiling Arduino code.

We will no doubt be holding other maker gatherings and workshops in the future, and I suspect we will have another Arduino day soon so keep an eye on the email list. We are also continuing with our drop in sessions on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of every month. If you have something to show, need some help or advice with something, or just want to join in the chat then come along.