This is more of an idea than something I have needed yet but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

• Open a twitter account if you haven’t already got one.
• Open another twitter account and call it something_notifier or something fun like that.
• Setup your mobile on the first account and set it up to follow the notifier account and receive SMS notifications when it updates.
• Test this.
• Now whenever the notifier twitter account it updated you will receive a text with the contents of the update.

For example, the next step could be to install a twitter API implementation on your servers then update twitter if something catastrophic happens. Remember to alter the privacy settings and set it so that only your followers can see your updates.

But I’m sure there are loads of uses for this; any ideas? Although SMS messaging from the internet is easy in the USA, its a lot more complicated in the UK and Europe.

Found a great article on life simplification.

10 Things you can do today to simply your life

Im in Berlin at the moment for Railsconf Europe. After a long day today I went for a nice run round the city to make more sense of the city and how it all fits together. I love running in random place where you dont really know the layout.

You can cover so much ground in a short time and this allows you to take in much much more. Its the same with Hill running. You can be up the mountain, down the mountain and in the pub before the hill walkers have got half way up.

I did a good thing and a bad thing. I hope its ok. I was running and I found the holocaust memorial (pictured above) but didnt know this at the time. I decided to run along the tops of all the concrete. This made for a good time as they end up being about 3-4m high and I was jumping between them in the dark. This brought on the fear and was a great adrenaline hit. The thing is I feel direspectul after I knew what it was.

I suppose as I was ignorant it was OK. :0)

I found this very useful for fine tuning my vps memory usage.

In the same vein as my last minimalist post I have been thinking about buying stuff. The wonderful website that is ebuyer allows me to purchase computer stuff super cheap.

The thing is these products don’t last that long and often has shortcomings. The result is that you end up with something which is OK for the short time but doesn’t last. Its the same with shoes.

I think it is a far better investment and so do lots of other people that its better to buy less. Instead of impulse buying wait for 14 days and see if you still really want it. If the answer is yes, then go for it. Dont buy stuff which is stupidly expensive but try to get a quality product which is going to last.

For example, a few months ago I bought a flat panel monitor to replace my ageing CRT. It turned out that there was a monitor available for like £50 which was a 14.1” in size. I though wow! Thats properly cheap and bought it. Now that im using only laptops and these have better screens that this, it is useless. I should have spent 3x more for a 24” and instead have a tasty docking station.

Even underwear should be good. One area which you can scrimp on though is t-shirts. Just by cheap ones and replace them every few months.

Im moving out of my flat in a couple of weeks and what with RailsConfEurope coming up next week im having to packup sooner rather than later.

The goal is to get a flat full of stuff into one Subaru Impreza. This is going to be a tough but achievable goal and something which we need to do when Helen and I move to Trondheim, Norway in January. We are following rules like:

• If it hasnt been used in 6 months and is of questionable use get rid of it.
• If stuff is too good to throw away it goes to charity shops or glasgow freecycle. Got rid of my monster desk the other day through this. It was named ‘the cockpit’ in Staples.

• Personally, the most stuff I have is technology related. I am using online web services wherever possible to try and move as much as possible to ‘the cloud’. (Google apps for your domain, Amazon S3, Flickr, VPS Servers)
• Get rid of desktop machines and use only laptops for space saving reasons.
• Take photos of stuff that is sentimental to you. Normally this is enough, why keep the hard copy!

Next step is to get one of those Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners and convert all documents to electronic format and backup to S3 in an attempt to go properly paperless.

Anyone got any other suggestions for living a truly minimalist lifestyle?

I copied some podcasts onto my ipod shuffle the other day and they didnt play at all. I was perplexed by this and as it turns out all you need to do it put the shuffle into non shuffle mode. This is weird. Why cant I listen to my podcasts at random?

Also, you can autofill podcasts into the shuffle. Why is this? Do they really just want you to purchase music from the ITUNES instead?

In other news there is a new ipod out which seems to be just like an iphone without phone capabilities. Maybe someone can put a microphone on it and install skype?

List of free wifi spots in Edinburgh and Glasgow:

Free wifi in scotland

Update: The free wifi in Firebird is great. The cost of food a little high though.

Just back from a wee holiday at the Scottish 6 Days of Orienteering! I also completed 30 days of orienteering in a row culminating yesterday at the legendary Anagach wood.

Tomorrow I leave with a crew of 5 people for a 4 day bike trip. Im looking forward to it and should be able to come up with some good stories I hope. Legends like Ewan Mcarthy and Oleg Chepelin are going.

In other news I now have a macbook for rails development so should hopefully be able to start posting stuff related to this.

Time to go back underground for a while. Bye bye internet.

Update: Edit testing using xmlrpc via textmate.

I have been doing a lot of systems administration and dns work recently.

To make my life easier I have created a simple DNS Report Tool

If you are constantly checking dns setup this might help you.