Some people love them, some people hate them. Either way it seems PayPerPost are hear to stay.

They have just released a new feature to try and get more sign-ups that simultaneously gives publishers some exposure while giving out more money to them (they must be doing really well or have some confident venture capital behind them).

The new feature, “Review My Post”. You’ll notice the links at the bottom of my posts for the time being. Basically you click the link, join PayPerPost and get a special opportunity just for you in which you have to review my post. I get free exposure as you promote my blog, you get $7.50 and PayPerPost get another (hopefully) loyal postie. The odd bit is I also get $7.50… So it’s basically PayPerPost paying $15 for each new sign-up.

Considering the crazy people out there and what they are paying (there is currently a $1000 opportunity that wants PR 8 sites only) I expect they’re getting their money’s worth. This means you could get paid (as well as me) for reviewing my post (which I get paid for anyway) which is a review of a feature that lets people review other posts (and get paid) which may themselves be website reviews (that they’re paid for). That’s quite a chain of reviews…

Phil Jones has written a guide to getting TalkTalk broadband working.

Importantly the guide tells you how to do it without using the setup CD - quite a few of the problems people have had might not have happened had they not used the CD.

It’s in depth, complete and for the most part anyone should be able to follow it. I’m not sure the average user would be up to fitting a network card (something only a few people would have to do) but as he says, you may know someone who could help.

Yahoo! have launched a new service called Pipes.

It allows you take user input, grab web feeds, do clever stuff to the result and output it either as RSS or JSON - all with a nice graphical interface. I had a quick play with it and decided there was loads of potential for this. Although I couldn’t really think of any specific examples, but I’m sure people will start coming up with cool stuff eventually.

Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple has announced that the “best alternative” for consumers regarding digital music downloads is the removal of digital rights management. Implications from previous interviews have strongly suggested that he personally doesn’t like it and having the largest share of the personal music player market means it would be good for business too.

The music industry (and the movie/TV industry to a less extent) have to be worried by this. The sales from iTunes are now significant enough that if Apple threatens to remove DRM anyway then they would lose too much by not complying.

Ideally Bill Gates will announce similar feelings. Surely it’s good PR all round for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be united solely to protect the consumer? I’m being a little hopeful perhaps…

EVE have announced a second stress test on Singularity, their test server, to see how voice chat holds up in EVE. For a long time people have used external programs such as Ventrillo and Teamspeak to talk. Now (for a small fee if I remember correctly) users will be able to chat in game, hopefully in a way that is nicely integrated into the UI (and the new fleet system).

This morning Google went down in a big way, and in a disturbing way slowed down the most of the world wide web. Well it may not actually be most of it, but it was most of the stuff I was browsing.

The whois output for google.com this morning was:

GOOGLE.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM GOOGLE.COM.ZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.COM GOOGLE.COM.WORDT.DOOR.VEEL.WHTERS.GEBRUIKT.SERVERTJE.NET GOOGLE.COM.VN GOOGLE.COM.UA GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM GOOGLE.COM.SPROSIUYANDEKSA.RU GOOGLE.COM.SA GOOGLE.COM.PLZ.GIVE.A.PR8.TO.AUDIOTRACKER.NET GOOGLE.COM.MX GOOGLE.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET GOOGLE.COM.IS.APPROVED.BY.NUMEA.COM GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM GOOGLE.COM.DO GOOGLE.COM.BR GOOGLE.COM.AU GOOGLE.COM

It seems to be back up now although you may still have problems depending on who often your ISP updates its DNS records.

Although it seems only google.com was affected*, most of Google’s other domains reference google.com as a nameserver, so they were inaccessible too. This includes googlesyndication.com, the domain Adsense ads are served from. As such every single site that hosts Google ads well have seemed slower while the browser waits in vain for a response from Google’s servers.

* At least as far as Google are concerned. A whois on yahoo.com was almost the same but I didn’t actually notice whether Yahoo was down or not.

As many of you may be aware (most of you judging by the search engine keywords people use to get here with), I’m a TalkTalk customer. Now quite a few people are having problems with TalkTalk. Luckily I’ve had no problems with TalkTalk (although that might change when I’m unbundled. And for the most part that’s still true, although I did recently have a minor problem that led to me calling TalkTalk support.

Firstly, the problem I had was nothing to do with the Internet. It was a problem calling Julia in America. I would call and get nothing but silence. After a while it would ring but someone else would answer the phone who apparently couldn’t hear me. After talking to Julia over the Internet I discovered that she could hear me and she could also hear the third person. Very strange. Another point is that to call Julia and it be free (well at least included in the £10 a month we pay) I have to dial a prefix. Without the prefix everything was fine. So it was probably some obscure routing problem specific to TalkTalk.

So I called their support line. Specifically the one for landline faults. I got through straight away and told them I was having a problem calling America. They said it was a known issue and they were dealing with it. 24 hours later it was working fine.

I tell you this simply to point out that not quite everyone is having a problem with TalkTalk…

MythTV finally runs on a Playstation 3. Linux has been running on PS3s for a while doing all sorts of cool things. Well Takeshi Yaegashi has now got a USB TV tuner working for it making MythTV essentially complete.

So where does Mono come into this? Well Mono runs on a PS3 as well. Actually that’s not the link. In a cool coincidence, I first found out about MythTV on a PS3 after subscribing to a Mono RSS feed.

And the Nokia 770? Well the very next entry on said RSS feed was about Mono running on a Nokia 770 (and a Nokia N800 and Windows XP and Linux - all with one executable).

It’s a small world…

CCP have announced the patch details for Revelations 1.3. Nothing new as such is being added but it is a a pretty cool update nonetheless. Below are some of the points I feel especially important or cool.

Firstly, Jita should be a little less crowded afterwards. It will probably still be a trade hub but it’s asteroid fields are being removed and the school stations are “under new ownership” (and hence no longer selling skills). A bunch of other stations are suffering similar consequences.

Expeditions are more likely to be triggered by exploration sites and Data Interfaces (used for invention), BPCs, and materials will drop more. The new scanners will have their tech II mineral requirements removed also making exploration cheaper.

Best quote from the patch notes:

Moved all of the humans and animals located in the normal ‘commodity’ groups into the ’livestock’ group, to prevent the poor things from being squeezed into small cargo containers by unscrupulous players.

I recently managed to get video streaming (and transcoding in real time) to my Nokia 770 :D Here’s a guide for anyone wanting to do the same thing. This assumes you have a wireless network with a computer on it.

The first thing you need to do is install MPlayer on your 770. The media player that comes with it is too limited with regards to what it can play. The interface to Maemo MPlayer is a bit limited but I tend to start it from the command line anyway.

Then install VLC (VideoLAN client) on your PC. VLC is a cross platform media player with wonderful codec support and more important built in streaming and transcoding support. To stream (and transcode) using VLC, go to the Open File dialog box and select “Stream/Save” (and click the associated “Settings” button). From there select HTTP streaming (remember the port) and set up your transcoding options. The following are ideal for the 770:

• M4V video
• MP3 audio
• 256 kbps video
• 64bps audio
• Width: 400
• Height: 244

You need to fiddle a bit to specify the width and height. As you select the options you’ll notice the “target” field at the top change. Highlight the bit that says “scale=1” and replace it with “width=400,height=244”. You can also select play locally if you want to see what it’s playing on the screen at the same time.

After you’ve done all that click OK as many times as necessary to get back out of the windows and click Play. The video will now be streaming to anyone trying to listen. The first thing to do is to test it using VLC itself. Open another instance of VLC and go to File -> Open Network Stream. Select HTTP and enter your IP address or (localhost) and the port you selected earlier. When you hit play you should see the video clip playing (quite small). If not, then try again…

Assuming it’s all working, it’s time to see it on the 770. Run XTerm (you really need XTerm if you want to do cool stuff with a 770) and type in the following:

mplayer -cache 8192 -aspect 16:9 http://_your.ip.address_:_port_

Hopefully you’ll have your video clip playing wonderfully on your 770 :D

256kbps is good enough for most clips at that resolution. Actions scenes get a bit blocky but don’t complain too much. 256kbps is also low enough to fit through most if not all ADSL upstream connections and, even better, small enough to fit through newer cellphone connections (the 770 can use a phone as a bluetooth modem). In fact UK readers on T-Mobile can get Web ’n’ Walk Max for £22.50 a month get 10GB of bandwidth and are allowed to use the connection for video streaming and Voice Over IP.

My final goal would be getting it to work with MythTV (it can already use VLC for streaming) and have live TV anywhere I can get a signal on my phone…