Here’s a way to turn those wretched Nigerian scam emails into a bit of entertainment – scam them back!
www.419eater.com has some great success stories whereby 419eaters have entered into dialogues with Princes from Ghana, Finance Ministers from Nigeria and whole assortment of motley emailing crew.
Take up this hobby at your own peril! But if you fancy a go, read their tips page first. Happy 419eating.
Personal blogs are the perfect place to try out new plugins and technologies before implementing them on a business site. One such example is the WPTouch plugin from Brave New Code. This allows you to show your viewers a Ajax based version of your site from either a iPhone, iPod or Android. With many customisable settings, you can give a faster and more native feel to your site on a mobile device.
I have activated this plugin for this blog and can confrim that it does not interfere with the regualr theme that viewers see from non-mobile devices.
Feel free to check out this post from your mobile and let me know what you think.
iLife09 has a few new features, one of which is the new facial recognition feature built-in to iPhoto. So it was with great interest that I let iPhoto scan my library to identify the usual suspects’ that comprise my photo collection. However I believe the Apple geniuses at Cupertino were just simply unprepared for my friends and family…
I first noticed the username @davidbowie being snapped up on Twitter at the beginning of the year, shortly followed by the one and only update so far. (I have the hashtag #bowie as one of my searches using Eventbox).
I automatically assumed it was another amusing fake celeb account, which is amusing for about 3 microseconds. I thought nothing more of it.
Between then and now a batch of commentators, blogs, magazines and even newspapers have informed us that Bowie is working on a new album in Berlin, written with a degree of certainty that appeared convincing. A classic example being “David Bowie is currently recording in Berlin, the place where he recorded three of his finest albums, The Quietus is excited to report.” The NME and Classic Rock magazines were all joining in with the claims.
However, as far as I can see, without exception all these stories and reports all stem from this single tweet on Jan 5th. Nothing else except the perpetuating rumour mill appears responsible. In fact, in a strange self-fulfilling prophecy, I am now half expecting Bowie to book a studio in Berlin.
If I had to guess at this stage who created the @davidbowie account, I would probably guess a slightly bewildered teenager, not knowing what to tweet next. Although I can’t deny a part of me wants to be made to look foolish when David himself tweets “albums nearly done. here’s a twitpic of me and Tony V”
One of these guys is the ‘genius’ Karl Pilkington, one is children’s’ TV favourite Bod and the other is technology writer and founder of gdgt.com Ryan Block. Prizes for telling me which is which.