Great new fun stuff blog
Jun 28th
A friend of mine is on setting up a new site to gather together fun and interesting articles and videos, definitely one to add in to your RSS program, Google Reader or whatever your blog collection tool of choice is!
Get yourself over to http://iwantcoolstuff.co.uk/ now to have a look.
~Shepy
Know The Not Known – an interesting campaign
Jun 28th
Regular readers of this site will know that I have a great curiousity for the unknown, no longer seen spaces of the country, something I spend many hours wandering round and photographing in my hobby of urbex. One of the things that I have often remarked while wandering round these places is how it is such a shame to see these wonderful sites go to waste, left unloved and unused. For these reasons the new initiative by Tiger beer which is called Know The Not Known and one arm of this is the Vice partnership to create content.
As part of Tiger’s partnership with Vice, thety have created created 3 videos to reward consumers curiosity. The 3 videos are known as ‘The Found Series’ and hosted on Vice’s VBS.TV channel as well as Tiger’s YouTube channel.
This series of videos explores and charts the progress of a few groups of people who have worked to reclaim some of the forgotten treasures, and put them to more useful and modern utilisation, generating creative spaces as seen through the eyes of those who have helped to make them happen.
Take for example the 5000 tonne of what was once a rusting ship, now moored in East London and is quickly becoming one of the best recording studios in the area, helping new and established artists alike to record their music and get their songs out to a wider audience. Whilst some would have seen such a vessel as fit only for the scrap yard and the metal it was made of, the Lightship95 crew saw that it had much more potentitial and put in the hard work to turn it in to what it is today. With state of the art equipment, full time staff (that even live on the boat between recording) and a unique venue, they really are working hard to make it an excellent venture.
Have a look at Tigerbeer's Youtube channel to see more, or get over to their facebook page to see some of the other projects going on.
~Shepy
Is it just me, or is the new McDonald’s advert filth?
Jun 27th
It may just be my mind in the gutter, you decide!
~Shepy
Pow Burn absolutely dead.
Jun 27th
Having computer troubles so awaiting delivery, so unusual week night off. Headed to the local with my house mate and his pet gimp Danno, absolutely dead in here.
~Shepy
Good turn out for the #npwalk bbq.
Jun 26th
Much beer, much food. Worryingly though @alistair has cooked most of it, so it may be lots of dead people tomorrow. #npwalkingdead
~Shepy
North Shields still looking like a bomb site
Jun 26th
Metro still far from being finished, but the sun is shining and at least trains are running today so it’s all good!
~Shepy
When nature meets civilisation.
Jun 26th
Anyone who has known me for any decent lentgh of time will know that I grew up on the sticks, among nature, and moved to the big city later in life. For this reason I always enjoy the slight little reminders of what I grew up with when they sneak in to my new big city life.
For this reason I was really happy to see a sneaky fox wandering in to a church yard on the way home from a night out, while walking through a really built up area.
I appreciate every viewing of these animals, as if it was the first time. I can vividly remember each of the 4 times I have been lucky enough to gaze upon a deer in the wild for example, 2 and therefore half of which, where on islands of greenery that are man made sanctuaries captured between two rail lines. Homes that would have not have existed were it not for the trains but which i like to think thrive because of the lack of human disturbance day to day.
Please excuse the quality of this photo, which was snapped with my phone but I had no other camera on me.
~Shepy
Vintage style model shoot with Kiki La Rouge
Jun 25th
Kiki La Rouge contacted me looking to arrange a vintage styled shoot, so using a derelict old train station and an excellent old style barbers we set out and got some great shots, a few of which are below:
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~Shepy
Dropbox exposed files with security hole, and an alternative.
Jun 24th
First of all, this might look like a sponsored post in some places, but I assure you it’s not, but backup is something I take very seriously and extol the virtues of to anyone who will listen! Now, that out of the way as some of you may know, Dropbox is a service in use by some 25 million people to backup and sync files which they feel are important and should be looked after, many using the free 2gb account to backup just the absolute essentials. So what then if a flaw in security allowed anyone to log in to any dropbox account they liked, using any mish-mash of random characters typed as a password? Unfortunately this is’t a hypothetical situation I am describing here, this actually happened this week and all 25 million accounts were open for the world to login to due to a fault in a software patch. Though Dropbox state there was less than 1% of accounts accessed during this time, that still means up to 250,000 accounts were potentially compromised. If your account was one of them you should have received a mail by now telling you what happened, which folders were accessed, apologising for it an assuring you that it wont happen again.
For me though, an apology is simply not good enough, people use a backup service so that they can be sure their data is safe and secure, but if the people you entrust to make that backup cant keep it secure then it’s almost pointless to even use the service. This compounded with the change in TOS a few months back which state Dropbox will decrypt your files if requested by law enforcement agencies, and that a previous ‘Staff can’t access your files’ mantra suddenly being changed to ‘Staff are prohibited’ from accessing your files being widely reported on the net, I no longer feel that Dropbox is a service I want to trust important data to, in fact I’m not even sure I want to trust them with unimportant data.
When I was discussing this with a friend, he mentioned that he too had the same concerns, and had gone looking for an alternative, which turned up SpiderOak, a very similar but at the same time altogether different service.
An alternative
First and foremost, SpiderOak encrypts all your files at the client end, they never store your password and therefore are literally unable to provide access to your files to anyone, including their staff or law enforcement agencies. Files are stored on their servers in blocked segments encrypted at the byte level, so not even file names and folder structures are accessible. Even when you log in to the website your password is maintained only in RAM memory, in an encrypted form, only as long as you’re connected, and never put to disc. And that’s just the start of the improvements over Dropbox, some of the other big ones are:
- Faster data upload – compression and de-duplication upload your info much faster
- De-duplication means if you have the same file at home and work, it only takes the space of one copy
- Selective backup, you can opt to backup any folder on you machine (including network shares and external drives)
- Consolidation of backup between all of your devices and machines, you can browse them all through the GUI
- Complete revision history, no old copy is ever removed unless you choose to remove it.
- Sharing can be done on a folder level, like Dropbox’s public links you can share files with anyone, but share a full folder not just single files.
- Open Source transparency means they are actively trying to release their code to help the wider net community as well.
- Great referral system offering much more space for no charge (4x what Dropbox offers)
Though it is a shame the circumstances under which I felt obligated to move to a different backup / sync provider, I am wholly impressed with SpiderOak and glad that I did make the mov. I’ve got much more faith in it and find it to be much more featured than Dropbox.
Sign up & get 6gb free
If you’d like to sign up then I’d suggest you do so with my referall link, which you will find at the end of this post, and also use the promo code ‘worldbackupday’ which will give me 1gb of free space, and instantly start your account with 6gb of free space if you do both.
Let me know what you think of the service, and that referral link is: https://spideroak.com/download/referral/33d3bbe7b656b2c4cf47e479f4409406
~Shepy