Category Archives: SouthanUK General

Where most posts live. Contains general news that I cant otherwise categorise.

This is becoming a habit.

Hello all. Yes I seem to have, once again, neglected my site.

 

However, now its September, I once again feel the need to blog something.

 

Sitting here on my lunch break typing on my HTC Desire at this very moment, so I will keep this short. Plans for Sept? Doing a fair bit of cover at work. Ooh I’ve nearly been here 2 years now, pleased. What else? Got a party on Sat with my good friend Loz. Looking forward to that. And finally going back to university later this month.

 

Must get back to work. Ta ra.

Well that was weird – WordPress encoding

Seems the site decided it was time that it shouldn’t encode the site properly.

utf8-whatisthat

Since Southanuk is a relatively old WordPress installation [Around 2006] it was using an old character set, namely latin_1. Converted it to UTF8 and all is now good and properly displaying. Have a few celebratory ‘ , – s.

 

For others having the same problem with WordPress not encoding pages properly, I recommend the bbWP2UTF8 plugin. Its very simple to use and is a lot easier than this method, although saying that, it may work if the plugin doesn’t.

[edit]

Well something went wrong very shortly after I had posted this, post numbers weren’t auto-incrementing. Should be all fixed. Also discovered a very nice MySQL command to help convert those troublesome characters to UTF8:

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME = replace(ROWNAME,'’','\'');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'…','...');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'–','-');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'“','"');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'â€Â','"');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'‘','\'');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'•','-');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'‡','c');

[Source]

GEF follows shortly and possibly something on Monday if I can get it to work.

UK General Election 2010

election-2010-the-polls-7041602300So its that time already?

Who are you voting for this year? No age limits here, so feel free to vote even if you are under the legal voting age!

 

Its just a bit of fun and doesn’t represent the views of myself or any animals in my possession.

 

Also for a bit more election fun try out Slapometer, slap the main candidates to your hearts content.

 

Slap 

Poll:

Who are YOU voting for this 6th May?

View Results

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Southanuk Mobile – WPTouch and Android

So recently you may have noticed I bought myself a brand new HTC Desire. Since then I’ve been striving to get this site to display properly in the web browser.

 

SouthanukAndroid

To achieve this I used the fantastic WPTouch made by BraveNewCode. A very simple and easy to use plugin that requires hardly any configuration. Its very easy to add new user agents of websites I wanted to target and looks great too! You can also integrate your Twitter account into it using their other plugin WordTwit [Unfortunately I don’t use that on this blog, but I’m sure its up to the standard of WPTouch.]

 

To try it out on your mobile device, point your camera to this QR code and give it a scan, or just enter m.southanuk.co.uk to view it also.

[qrcodetag]https://m.southanuk.co.uk[/qrcodetag]

Sony end production of the Floppy Disk

 floppydisk

As the title says, Sony have finally ended production of the ever wonderful 3.5 inch Floppy disk.

 

I well remember the days of only being able to carry ~1.5MB of data around with me. Just look how far technology has come, I can carry 4GB in my pocket on a card many times smaller than the floppy disk. And for something that was developed in the 1970s to still have the popularity it does today is great.

 

Suddenly, a Wikipedia quote:

A floppy disk is a data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible ("floppy") magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell.

[Wikipedia]

From: Telegraph