Monthly Archive for July, 2007

My Poker Challenge - €0 to €1k!

Published
by
Adam
on July 31, 2007
in Poker
. 0 Comments

For those that know me, you will know that ever since February of this year I have taken a keen interest in Poker and have been playing online quite a bit since then in an attempt to grind out some extra income. I have been quite successful too, accruing no less than $800 on two poker sites, Ladbrokes.com and Green Joker Poker but I recently became quite worried when I started playing Blackjack, sometimes at up to $120 a hand! Thanks to some exceptionally good fortune, I managed to turn what was a $700 loss within 20 minutes into a $150 profit before the hour was up. I got lucky, very lucky and have decided to withdraw all my money from my account and into my savings account where I can’t touch it!

I still wanted to play poker though and was intrigued to learn of poker pro Chris Ferguson’s Zero-Hero challenge where he is attempting to turn zero into $10,000 within a year. Such a challenge appealed to me because it would allow me to really hone my poker skills and any money earned would be an added bonus as I can’t really complain if I lose a portion of my bankroll when my only investment has been time and I like any hobby, I don’t mind investing time if my return is entertainment and enjoyment and I enjoy playing poker and feel this challenge would help me continue to carry on enjoying poker!

Chris Ferguson had no choice but to start by playing freerolls to start his bankroll, but I decided to search for a poker site which would be favourable to my challenge and found VC Poker who have a $10 no deposit required bonus, they also run many cheap MTT’s starting from as little as 60c and run their own freerolls in addition to the ones that the iPoker network offers. I figured that this site would be ideal to start off on as it would allow me to play many exclusive lucrative MTTs against soft opposition.

I intend on updating my site weekly with reports on my progress. I have no timelimit on my challenge and don’t mind grinding a small profit in the micro-stakes cash tables if I think it is the best way given my bankroll! So wish me luck in my endeavour and I’ll report back this day week!

Bebo Introduce Visitor Tracking Map.

Published
by
Adam
on July 12, 2007
in Bebo and Ramblings
. 15 Comments

bebo

I noticed this a few days a go and was surprised that the guys over at Mashable didn’t pick up on it. The map, which is accessible here, allows users to check who has been visiting their profile within the last 24 hours and where they hail from.

This has been a feature that many web-security experts have been recommending be implemented on Bebo and other social networks for a long time. I would be inclined to agree with them as a feature such a this allows more transparency and can potentially cut down on the phenomenon which has become known as “Bebo Stalking”. Think about it, would you hypothetically stalk someone if they knew you were doing it? Most likely not.

It may seem like an innocent addition but such a feature gives users increased information about their profile which can be used to keep them safe but what I really like about it is that it also adds to the Bebo experience as a whole. It’s nice to be able to see who’s been visiting your profile and by using the Google Maps interface they can potentially add more features to it in the future such as a social connections map which could map out how many of your visitors are connected to each other.

The only complaint I have about the addition is that users have the option to set themselves as private and are actually set to private by default. I would have preferred if all users under the age of 18 were set to private (and were warned about the dangers of setting their profiles to public) while over 18 year olds should automatically have their profiles set to public. This, I believe, would further add to the Bebo experience and enhance the effectiveness of Bebos security.

visitormap.JPG

How To Download Bebo Bands Music

Published
by
Adam
on July 12, 2007
in Bebo, Geekiness and Music
. 19 Comments

Many moons a go, I quickly slapped together a quick guide describing how to download music from the Bebo bands music service. The article was criticised for being rather vague, and rightly so. So I have decided to update the guide and even include some step by step pictures to help you.

STEP 1
First you must navigate to a bands profile page. Tonnes of major label bands and unsigned artists are available to choose via the Music Tab on the Bebo header. For this example I’m using the Transformers Movie Soundtrack page.

STEP 2
Once you are on the Bands profile page, scroll down and you will see a box labelled “Songs”. Here you can look at what songs are available to listen to. If you wish, you can click the “play” button to preview the songs before you download them.

STEP 3
Now you must right click in any blank space on the page and click “View Page Source” (in Internet Explorer it’s labelled “View Source”)

This will open up a window full of text which is probably alien to you. In actual fact it’s a programming language called HTML which is the language in which all websites are created but we don’t really care about its lifestory, instead we simply want to find out where the songs are located within this code.

STEP 4

Press CTRL+F (i.e press CTRL and while it’s pushed down press “F”) and a search box should appear at the bottom of the screen as shown (in Internet Explorer it will appear in the middle of the screen). In this box we type in “.mp3″ (without the quotes) and we are then taken to the section of the code which contains the information about the location of the music.

STEP 5
Now that we know where the .mp3’s are, we simply copy the address of the music file by selecting the area of text shown below and copying and pasting it into the address bar at the top of our browser window.

After pasting it into the address bar, hit ENTER and a dialog box should come up asking you where you wish to save the song.

STEP 6
Now that you have the song that you want downloaded, you can quickly download the rest of the available songs by searching for .mp3 and clicking “Find Next” which will automatically find the next song.

I wish you all the best of luck and I hope this revised tutorial will help those who found my first attempt difficult to follow!