Dave Bradford

Developer and picture taker.

Twitter Profile Bookmarklet for Tweetbot

Every so often I follow a link from a website for a twitter profile and have to copy the username into Tweetbot manually to then follow the user. I’m never logged onto the Twitter mobile site via my phone.

Moving to Digital Ocean

Two months ago I moved this website over to the fine folks at Digital Ocean, who offer SSD based VPS servers.

What is The Right Tool?

Has anyone ever looked down on you because you don’t have the right tools for the job?

Learning to Start

The biggest and most valuable piece of advice I’ve received in the last year is just to start.

Moving Away From Wordpress

Since as long as I have been on the internet I’ve been playing around with Wordpress, they have two versions a completely hosted version and an open source version which can be installed on a web server, PHP and a database of sorts.

Living Without My Computer

Picture this two weeks ago, it’s a cold Saturday morning. I get home after spending the night around my girlfriends, power up my MacBook Pro, went downstairs to make a cup of tea and noticed the screen was completely black? After a bit of troubleshooting it wasn’t just the screen, it seems to have completely failed posting at all I mean it turns on but other than that there is no chime no nothing! Wow this hit me pretty hard I mean my main machine was busted just shy of 4 years old.

Mac OSX Lion Using More Disk Space Than Normal?

Since I upgraded my MacBook to Lion (Apple's new version of OSX) I've noticed a few days ago I've been loosing hard drive space quite rapidly? After searching around the Apple community forums I noticed a few articles which pointed toward Time Machine backups, turns out Lion will backup using the local disk if it cannot find it's dedicated drive, a little bit of a pain. Since I'm a laptop user I find myself away from my external drives a fair bit.

Music Previewing Service

I've recently been trying to do something with music previews, displaying a page with a list of songs and include short music previews for each song.

10 Days In A Carry-On

Jesus.. look at that title for a post! "10 days in a carry-on" sounds like I had to endure 10 days in someone's hand luggage if that where the case then it would explain the lack of posts. 10 days in a carry on is a New York Times article I really wanted to share.

Saving Money When Surrounded With Great Technology

This morning I spent a little bit of time playing with my boss’s new iPad, a wonderful device. After looking at some photos and browsing a few websites I found myself finding ways to fit this device into my life. No doubt if I owned an iPad I would have place for it, however I don’t have the kind of money lying around where I could just purchase it without any finance implications.

Getting Rid Of An Old Hard Drive

Like most geeks, my house is full of old hard drives of various capacity, storage is very cheap these days. In a world where data privacy is an ever increasing issue and money is short you might decide that one day you want to either get rid of these old drives or sell them either over the internet or to your mate who's starting a freenas project.

System Serial Number In Windows

A few weeks ago I was on the phone to tech support about a problematic server, the first question they asked me was, "Can we have the make and serial number of your product please sir?", "ermm" I replied, I guess I could have taken a look on the box for the information, however this server was 70 miles away from where I was sitting. On a Mac OSX system you can find the serial number using "About My Mac", however on a Windows System this requires a little more effort, but it is possible.

Master Gmail Shortcuts Like A Pro

I rave on about Gmail to everyone I talk too, I can't explain how much Gmail has changed my life. If your just getting started and a just a little bit geeky, then you'll want to impress your friends with super speedy like shortcut powers. It's the printable Gmail shortcuts Google forgot to make. This will have you labeling and archiving mail in record breaking times!

Google Custom Builds Every Server

Over the past couple of weeks, I've completely moved techphooey from a Server in my bedroom to a full blown dedicated server in a data centre. After finishing a lot of research I discovered something which I completed missed early last year. Google announced that their secret server sause is a custom built server infrastructure. In the days when Google was first starting out, money was short and performance was key. The idea of building your own servers saves a lot of money, racks and racks of bare bone servers are easier to manage and easier to fix. These units are so exposed it looks like something you would find in a bedroom startup, which is exactly how Google started out.

Replace Yourself with a Small Shell Script

A very geek post to start this week.

Better troubleshooting for Mac OSX

After some issues this weekend, I've was forced to troubleshoot a Mac. However, with Apples proprietary hardware and without the POST information from a PC it can prove rather difficult.

Ubuntu 10.04 - What to do next..

Someone asked me today, I've installed Ubuntu 10.04, is there anything else I need to do? I somehow manage to end up building a new Ubuntu based machine almost every week, and managed to memorise my perfect setup. This is by no means a must do, but something to think about. A few of these will help your security but others might just enhance the experience. I'm going to be coming at these at more of a desktop angle, I shall prepare an Ubuntu Server list very soon.