Founder, Inventor, Creator
Crayon Physics is a download/install game, I received it as part of the humble indie bundle which cost me ~$5 for 4 games. There is a windows, mac and linux version.
There is no right or wrong answer to any of the puzzles and each buzzle is really bite size making it ideal for learning about shapes and space &forces. The design is perfect for kids and even at 20$ I think it’s a bit of a bargain.
Orange have a problem where you can’t connect from one Orange ISP customer to another. It appears to spur from when Orange “upgrade” your line.
This is a problem if:
a) Your friend is hosting a game you want to join [Terraria in this case]
b) You want to remote desktop to your home from your friends house.
c) You need to do any form of connectivity between yourself and your friend/family/other orange customer.
Is it really an upgrade if it causes problems?
Many people have said the Orange upgrade is actually a downgrade, I haven’t noticed any difference in speed or latency, check out the orange problems forum if you have this issue.
What are Orange doing about it?
It looks like nothing. I don’t think they have the ability/knowledge to fix this, I think they have to depend on subcontactors/BT so they are probably waiting on a response from the Cisco guys there.
What can you do about it?
Orange aren’t actually providing a service that falls inside their own T’s and C’s[needs citation] so you are within your rights to ask for a refund but you will need to be able to show evidence of inter-connectivity failing.
Should you leave Orange?
That’s up to you. I’m not going to. I’m going to email orange customer support, show them evidence of the failure (in the forms of route failures) and inform them I will be requesting a refund for the months where my internet connectivity has failed.
How can you test if this is the problem?
Contact me and I will give you some tests that you can run.
I purchased a subscription to 23 and me several months ago and the service has been great but one thing has become a real issue. I can’t pay for the monthly subscription using my bank account. It turns out that 23 and me don’t accept international payments with a CVS code :/
I have tried a number of different ways to sort this out, offering to pay via bank transfer or paypal but 23 and me just can’t accommodate me paying with a standard debit card.
It’s a real shame, I hope 23 and me get it sorted ASAP 😐
If you are considering purchasing 23 and me I would recommend you take the annual subscription option and ensure you can pay online without using a direct debit or so. Basically as long as when you pay you can use a CVS code (the security code thingy on the back of your card) then you will be fine!
After Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype things have gone from bad to “omg are you kidding me?”. Skype now installs bloatware on your computer and the frequency of adverts being displayed on your screen increasing dramatically I felt it was time to leave the sinking ship.
Don’t get me wrong, I used Skype daily and it’s still got some great projects running but Microsoft have a history of really messing up services like Skype but forcing us to all use them. Sure we loved Skype before it got bloated, I remember when I used to install Skype and only use it for calls, now I’m constantly finding myself in a state of frustration when I have 20 ads to close, 50 payment reminders or the service fails to perform.
Primary Technology out-grew Skype. I didn’t want video conferencing, I wanted more people in an audio call and PrimaryT now has 20+ members of staff so I needed something distraction free, light weight, reliable, free and barrier free.
Skype’s recent partnering with Facebook and MySpace sends even more shudders down my spine. I don’t trust Microsoft much and I don’t trust Facebook at all, I’m not alone on this and there are plenty of reasons why such as Microsoft’s patent on eavesdropping calls and the idea of integrating Facebook with my audio calls leaves me in a dark, worried place. We should also remember that voice / language detection technology is so advanced that if you think a transcript can’t be made of your phone conversations you are horrible naive (a bit like the Facebook facial recognition stuff everyone said wasn’t computationally possible).
I also worry about the idea of bringing “credits” into social networks, at what point will I have to pay to ask someone to be my friend?
I was first introduced to Mumble by a member of the Piraten Partiet, they use it with hundereds of people to hold their voice conferences. Imagine 400 people on one phone call? It should be chaos right? Wrong. If you are a gamer: Mumble is like Vent/Teamspeak but completely open source and much better audio quality. If you’re not a gamer.. What you need to know about Mumble is that it’s a client/server service. You can’t make calls to land lines. A few major downers for teachers are that you need someone to host a mumble server for your school and there is no video calls. Who even finds video calls productive anyway? I never did…
Mumble’s client is great, it’s so unbelievably easy to use and lightweight, the whole project has a really good feel to it and I expect to see some really great things coming soon!
Every 2 years Primary Technology re-engineers all of it’s services and this year I have been tasked with re-engineering our School offsite / remote backup service. Our current service works well but there are a few things we would change and we feel our current provider isn’t really giving us the support we need to make these changes.
The first part of any successful re-engineering job is to gather a comparison of all the available products on the market.
I reviewed these products/pieces of software:
And I reviewed them based on this following requirements of functionality:
And my notes which probably contain the most important informative information:
