Internet

Julian was kind enough to pass on a beta invite for chi.mp this morning. Basically, it’s a website that will aggregate your entire online presence into one site, so all of my Blog postings, photos, tweets etc can now be found at mattwhite.mp and, if you really have no life at all, then you can subscribe to an RSS feed of them all together at this link.

A great service I think, that is easy to set up, looks nice. As with a lot of these internet startups, I have no idea how they plan to make money so it may not be around for long. But for the moment, it’s the best place to follow my online activity in one place.

I haven’t yet got any invites to pass along, but if you want one, just comment on here with your email address and I’ll pass them along as I receive them.

There is literally no excuse to use iTunes for buying music any more. The Amazon MP3 Store has opened in the UK. It offers basically the same music selection for less money and without DRM so you can play it on any player, not just your iPod.

There goes the credit card for December 🙂

Because I run a small business I have multiple bank accounts with Barclays, one of the “big four” banks here in the UK. As banks go they aren’t too bad (although that is like saying that as diseases go Malaria isn’t too bad, don’t think I actually like these guys). So at the weekend a package arrived containing my new Pinsentry card reader that I have to use to get into online banking. In the past I needed to know two user IDs, some personal information and a password to log into each of my accounts. Now, in addition to that I have to put my bank card into this card reader, enter the PIN for the card and then type another 8 digit number to log in. It’s classic dual factor authentication, and it’s absolutely crazy.

Frankly the old system was more than secure enough. All that the new system will achieve is to make me log in to the site less frequently as it is such a palaver. I genuinely can’t think of a reason why they have gone this far with the security, if someone is foolish enough to give out their personal details, two secret (and hard to guess) user IDs and their password then frankly they deserve what they get.

Setting aside the absurdness of the over-security, when I tried to log in yesterday (taxes to pay, thanks Gordon) I couldn’t actually get in at all any more. The reason which was discovered after nearly an hour on the phone was that my personal bank card has now been tied to my business account. So to log in to my business bank account I have to partially use business details and partially personal details. Their response when I asked how it was going to be fixed… “Well you have both sets of details so you can just live with it”! This from a company which last year made over seven billion punds profit. That’s more than fourteen billion dollars. And the worst thing is that moving banks is not really an option, they are all as bad as each other.

The always useful 43Folders offers some sage advice for those of us who spend far, far too much time on our laptops.

Well it appears that the iTunes Music Store has finally started selling TV shows here in the UK. In and of itself not big news, especially when you see the very small selection of programmes you can download and the fact that they cost £1.89 (or $3.78 for those over the pond). But what it does open the way to is movies being available at some point in the near future and then the Apple TV actually becomes an appealling product.

Here’s something to screw with your mind on a Wednesday afternoon.

Yahoo have released a Firebug addon called YSlow, it’s well worth a look if you’re a web developer just to get an idea of the very high level reasons why a page might be slow to load.

As the reasons why Grosse Point Blank is my favourite film are explained.

I’m constantly looking for the ideal Task List manager. I don’t know about you but if I don’t write things down they simply never get done, it’s silly really that I can remember all sorts of obscure trivia but can’t keep track of the things I have to do for work. Anyway I must have tried seven or eight different products and although they are all good they don’t do exactly what I want, so I don’t use them all the time, so I still wind up forgetting something. Anyway I am currently trialling a very simple web app from 37 Signals called Ta Da list. Simple is good, but as usual there are a couple of things I’d like to happen differently. I’ll probably end up writing my own app at this rate but I’m interested, what, if anything do you use?