Jeremy Rollinson

Nofilter. 7.30am on the a5 heading east. (Taken with instagram)

English Bridge, Shrewsbury (Taken with instagram)

@TomP83 @RadioPVC (Taken with Instagram at Ironworks, Oswestry)

8am on the way to Welshpool (Taken with instagram)

The first proper frost. -5 degrees this morning. Poor old landy. (Taken with Instagram at Berriew Village)

Taken with instagram

October? Clywedog Lake (Taken with Instagram at Llyn Clywedog)

Taken with Instagram at Llyn Clywedog

Taken with Instagram at Llyn Clywedog

Taken with Instagram at Welshpool

Beautiful mornings all this week (Taken with Instagram at Berriew Village)

Oh!  how awesome is this? Let me count the ways…..1.Zombies, 2.No stupid wedding guests, 3.Zombies, 4.Guns, 5.Zombies, 6.Melee weapons, 7.Zombies……you get my drift.

No Reuben. I don’t want your training program.

Firstly, I think the picture you used in the ad is nauseating. Second, I’m kind of insulted you targeted your ad at me.

Facebook allows you to target ads to an almost frightening degree. You were too lazy, or too stupid to bother creating a filter that left me out. Yes, I want to be in better shape. Maybe if you changed your ad to ‘Keep smoking, Drink like a fish and have a great body! The Hank Moody Diet.’

That’s an ad I’ll click on.

Like a fat kid loves cake….you just have to have email everywhere, on everything.

The best way to make email life easier on yourself is to make it someone else’s problem. 

The best solution; GMail, actually, to be more specific, Google Apps.

Google Apps, or Gapps, has everything you need to smooth out those little communication bumps and stop them becoming a real painus in the anus.

Essentially you get to use most Google webapps including GMail, Calendar, Docs, Talk etc on your own domain. I repeat, your own domain.

My domain is ‘rollinson.me’, it cost me $10 for a year….stop messing about with yourname@myshittyisp.com and just get one. You get geek points, redeemable for kudos and good karma because you’ll be a happier individual. Me too because you won’t have to ask me what SMTP server to use again ;)

Sign up for the free version of Gapps here.

There’s a paid version, US$50 per year, per user which is good if you need proper support on occasion.

Get your own domain here; GoDaddy.com

There’s a bunch of good information out there on how to get your migration to Gapps done because it’s a bloody good idea. Search for “Migrate your email to google apps” or similar. This Lifehacker article is a great place to start though.

Still a little befuddled & bewildered? Then drop me a line. I’ll get it all done and dusted in a few hours for you for a lucky lucky price. jeremy <at> rollinson <dot> me

All Gapps are accessible via normal browsers or the specific mobile apps available for iPhone & Android.

You can have up to 50 different email accounts even with the free version, meaning you can get the whole crew/family sorted out. Instructions on setting up your email client are covered in the Google help system here.

We’ll cover making sure all your important files & documents are available on all your devices next time….

sydneydailyphoto:

class piece of guerilla art/graf

Most excellent find.

I’ve been a Nokia user for about 89% of the time I’ve had a mobile (17 years or so) and during that time I didn’t see the need for a camera, mp3 player or handheld games console. I still don’t to be honest. I take pictures with either my 8mp compact casio or the D-SLR. I don’t commute a great deal and while I have a pretty sizeable MP3 collection I don’t need it everywhere I go. So shouldn’t the Finns have me covered still. No. Not by a very long shot.

Having access to location information and maps has been invaluable, I got hooked a few years ago when my BB Curve came with free nav maps and software courtesy of T-Mobile UK. That was a cracking device and when it came time for a refresh I seriously considered another BB. Shouldn’t the Finn’s still be fulfilling that desire though? Ovi Maps is free right? True but I had the use of an E71 for a couple of months this year and I just gave up on the GPS and Ovi, I could work out where I was faster with a sextant and compass.

Email next….I’ve used Gmail since it was invite only and now also have a premier gApps account. The Google app on Nokia’s S60 platform worked just fine but it’s limited, oh so limited functionality drove me crazy because the platform itself is limited. In fact, I’d go so far to say that S60 is not so much limited as crippled. I’m sure it has something of a life left for disposable prepaid handsets but even that well is running dry. For $150 Australian you can get a Huawei 8150 running froyo 2.2 as a prepaid handset from Crazy Johns (a cartoon version of Voda). I bought an unlocked version for $199 and the email experience is fantastic, I’m chuffed to bits with it.

The App question. Obviously Nokia didn’t even come close to having a shout here. Then the question becomes Apple, BB or Android. For an everyday user who wants a smartphone to just work, Apple, bar the “you’re holding the phone wrong” fiasco are streets ahead. I hate being told what I can and can’t do though so it was never going to happen. BB, once again, in with a serious shout, if I had plenty of colleagues or friends on BBM I might have gone that way. I work for myself however and am far from a social butterfly. Android for me means freedom, the ability to do whatever the hell I like with my phone and I also get the nice to haves like decent Twitter access, Evernote, simple contact syncing, decent web browsing, no need to go on really. 

I’ve been avidly watching the adventures of Karl Pilkington as he criss-crosses the globe visiting wonders such as the Great Wall of China, his opinion… The alright wall of China…and the remains of the great city of Petra in Jordan. He truly hates travelling, truly.

He’s been sent on this journey by Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais, both of whom delight in sending Karl into situations and places they know he’ll hate. It makes fantastic television and while the point is to see if a typical ‘little englander’ can have his horizons broadened while we all have a right old laugh, the episode on Jordan had some very serious moments.

Karl was sent to visit Bethlehem, crossing from Israel into Palestine, which means negotiating the wall. Now I count myself as someone who is generally interested in the world, what’s going on and why. Seeing someone who really isn’t interested at all struggle with the whole experience of this journey was powerful indeed.

In one sentence he summed up the chilling, depressing nature of the wall and what it really means. Seeing pilgrims who are visiting the supposed birthplace of Jesus getting emotional Karl looks at the camera and says “I don’t know why people are crying in ‘ere, that wall’s enough to make you cry, it’s depressing.”

It is indeed. Wall’s that divide countries, people and beliefs are a relic of the Cold War to my own generation. 

The best political brains in the world can’t unravel the tangled problems of the Middle East but where’s the outrage I remember from my youth that was directed against South Africa for it’s oppression of a majority population? Where’s the outpouring of angst that we saw whenever the Berlin Wall was mentioned 25 years ago?

That Israeli wall is an abomination. Everyone involved in “Idiot” should be very proud of the way they highlighted that fact.

A local cause, raising awareness of some ill thought out development of a redundant industrial site has asked me for some help in building the online tools of their campaign. Happy to help but it got me thinking.

You always read about why people don’t want whatever it may be in their backyard, focusing wholly on the negative impact. Of course, that message is important in order to fire up support from residents, councillors, media etc.

There’s a trick being missed though. Scream and shout about the idiocy and injustice of a planned development until you have a decent audience but don’t stop at creating the pitchfork waving mob. Suggest a better idea, something that benefits your community, get funding for it and make it happen. By all means stop a development with negative impact but wouldn’t the world be better if you put the same amount of energy into coming up with a better plan?

I’ve been reading a few articles about the problem of illegal posters in Sydney City and surrounding suburbs.

Sydney City Council quote a figure of $6m cost to tax payers over the last four years no doubt other surrounding councils face similar costs.

The answer so far has been to provide Poster towers….eight in Sydney City…wow, I’m sure that made all the difference. Epic. Fail.

Completely stopping illegal posters is impossible because it’s a cheap, quick and effective medium. It’s possible to reduce it without coming across as a goose-stepping fun killer with a different approach. Offer a truly better alternative….and make it FREE.

Councils own a ridiculous amount of street furniture and high profile frontage. FACT.

A great deal of it has power too (street lighting etc)

SO

• Install web connected display screens at strategic high profile locations (the same ones you’re always ripping posters down from).
• Offer access to advertise on these screens to LOCAL businesses, residents, charities, schools etc  and make it FREE. It has to be FREE. Really, I mean it. FREE. They already pay tax, if there’s commercial level charging, the screens will get covered in posters.
• FREE access gets you a set amount of advertising time per day, per month and so on.
• If an advertiser wants premium timing (peak hour) or additional ‘screentime’ then charge. It’s called FREEmium, it’s how the Internet works now. Local users always get first dibs. ALWAYS. Oh and a hefty discount on the rate charged to non-local commercial types.
• Empty slots can be auctioned, Google Adwords style, to other commercial advertisers. Reserve a sensible amount of time per day to pay for the infrastructure and overheads if necessary. Don’t forget though, the local tax payer can still use them for FREE.
• DO NOT let APN outdoor or JC Decaux anywhere near it. They won’t be in it to help you or the community, they’ll be in it to wring every last cent from it they can and make sure no one encroaches on their “territory”.
• Start a new non-profit social business to run it. Commit to using any profits within the community you serve. 

The technology and hardware to run it is available, off the shelf. A bit of background web application wizadry and you’re running. A pilot install could be running in a matter of weeks. If you’re spending $1.5m per year cleaning the posters up then there’s no way this doesn’t make sense.

Just think, a nice sign advertising a local garage sale, a local soccer match, a new band, quiz night at the local pub, a lost cat, a small festival………..and have Coca-Cola pay for it. WIN.