Matt Cutts shows us how to deeplink to a bit of a YouTube video – nice one 🙂 And check out the comments for other ideas too.

alistairl is also available on twitter 🙂

Mmm, bit of a write off week. Didn’t feel well after the bike club committee meeting, then off work and noticed one of my ears had swollen up a bit. Then persuaded by Mrs AlistairL to phone the Doctor, got an emergency appointment, and a slightly worried looking Doctor gave me a pile of antibiotics (didn’t think they gave them out anymore) and also told to watch if the symptoms got worse.

Thankfully the symptoms responded to the antibiotics, I didn’t need to go hospital as a result, which was a good thing in my opinion. Now to finish the antibiotics which taste awful.

I’ve been thinking about blogging up some of my favourite things and gadgets that I’ve found useful. The first of these was a purchase for my bike video kit. I bought the cheapest best value for recording kit to help with the motorcycle observing I do and wanted to avoid connecting anything of that to my bike, so I looked around at battery technologies.

I got an email through from Maplin on their offers and one was a 2000 mah rechargeable mobile power pack that had been reduced by 50% to £9.99. It is charged by and charges from a mini-usb cable, and one of the connectors is a large usb connector – perfect for keeping my miniature digital video recorder going for as long as the sd card in it would record video.

So I bought 2! on a weekend when Maplin had free postage. The package came full with the battery pack itself, which is about the size of half of a pack of cards. The main part of the package came with 9 connectors and an adaptor cable. The connectors include a variety of mobile phone connectors, as well as a mini and full size usb. They also came with mains voltage adaptors, but I usually charge from a pc from a usb port.

So as well as powering my small mini dvr, I’ve also used the power pack to power my htc touch diamond with its woeful battery life, my old Orange SPV M600 which I use for TomTom, my bluetooth GPS bought on ebay and one or two other things I’m sure I’ve missed. The mini-usb connector is something I agree with as a common charging port, it is really handy.

I thoroughly recommend this which is excellent value at its power capacity, and really useful to have on hand – providing you have that essential cable of course!

I got a Qnap NAS a few months ago to store stuff on my network. Searching around I discovered a blog posting on how I could wire up time machine on my mac to back up to my NAS, without buying the very nice wireless time capsule that Apple make.

It took a wee bit of jiggery pokery, and a good bit of knowledge of the NAS and a bit of tweaking on the mac, but it all works seamlessly now. Sorted.

One great thing about upgrading to Subtext has been blogging client support. The first blog posting I made used Windows Live Writer, and the last few posts (including this one) have been from my Mac using ecto – brilliant 🙂

I know I mentioned it a while ago, and rummaging through my various disks has shown a trail going back about two years that I planned to upgrade from .text to subtext.

What gave me a kick was the recent 2.0 release of subtext, which must mean it has reached a level of stability – yeah ?

And I had a great visit to get some bike clothes measured up, so rather than blog that on the old platform, I promised myself to bit the bullet and do it. So here it is, it even carried over the old skin to look identical to the old one but I changed it so everyone would know.

Now to do some blogging on what I’ve been up to lately. And I can now use LiveWriter to post this stuff up – yay!

And picked up from another blog, someone has created a beta tool to analyse blogs. So I ran it, and from my writing style I am a doer. Active and playful and out a lot. I think that says a lot about when I blog most – when I feel my most extravert.

Have a play with it 🙂 – Typealyzer