It snowed quite a bit here in Ireland over the last two weeks – not much compared to the levels of snow in the UK and the rest of Europe, but a lot compared to recent years in Ireland. We took the opportunity to have some fun – involving sliding (slowly at first, then faster) down a hill on a piece of softboard. Just wish the slide was longer, but it was fun nonetheless and the kids had a great time (the kids, including me that is!) Check out the videos below.

Apple are renowned for their product innovation and design prowess with their Mac computers and iPods, but when it comes to marketing they are also a very innovative company. Their brand is one of the strongest in the consumer electronics world, their print advertising is young, fresh and consistent with their products, and their website is one of the best I can think of in the consumer world. I recently came across one of their banner advertisements on the wired.com website promoting their iPod Touch line of portable music players. It’s probably the most eye catching and innovative banner ad I’ve ever seen – so good that it was worth me taking a minute to capture it and share it. See below. I think you’ll agree that Apple simply have it nailed when it comes to their marketing both online and offline. Top notch stuff.

One thing that really started to annoy me in the new Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard was how quickly my computer would lock after the screensaver kicked in. There appeared to be no delay as there had been in Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. The experience was consistent across my two work computers – a Macbook Pro and a Mac Pro, and my Mac Pro at home. In my previous world running 10.5 I had been able to move my mouse really quickly once I noticed the screensaver kicking in and the process of the OS locking would stop. Under the new OS 10.6 this didn’t seem to be the case – the very second the screensaver was enabled, the OS would lock and I would have to enter my password to unlock it.

Thankfully it turns out that this is configurable. Under System Preferences -> Security, there is a setting which allows you to cause a delay before the password lock happens. Watch this very short video below to see how you can configure this delay and hopefully improve your Snow Leopard experience even more. This video was recorded using the new Quicktime Player screen recording function, and cut, cropped and uploaded to YouTube using iMove ‘09.

I recently picked up my tickets to see Massive Attack in Dublins Olympia Theatre, and to catch up on some tunes I dialed in to the very cool Grooveshark. I normally shy away from buying compilation or ‘best of’ albums so hadn’t ever got Collected. So given the opportunity to do some catching up on [...]

I’ve recently been doing some development work with the Twitter REST API, and I ran into an interesting dilemma – what to do when I want to test a post – and especially a batch-post? In my case I don’t really want to use my live account, as I have an established account with followers [...]

If you need to check the Irish National Lottery Results for previous draws you can do that right here on my lotto results page. This page shows the lotto results from August 2003 to present. The main purpose of this site is to show the results for my private lotto syndicate but it also provides [...]