1. Registration

Make it hard for spambots to register on your SMF forum. The three main ways of doing this are captcha codes, questions and email activation. Captcha is easy to fool and the strong setting seems a little too hard for even real humans to read, so I’d set to medium. Forcing the user to answer a simple question can really reduce spam. Make it easy like “What is the second word in this sentence?” Also, having more than one question option can be useful, but only ask one question. Finally email activation will reduce spammers that are using fake emails.

2. Bad Behavior Mod

This is mod that allows monitoring of spam like behaviour and automatically initiates bans. You can download the mod here: Bad Behaviour Mod.

When setting up the mod, you need to be careful to have the correct settings to make it run correctly. First visit http://www.projecthoneypot.org and sign up for a free BL API key. You will also need a Project Honeypot QuickLink. Enter the details into the Bad Behaviour settings page. If you are using a reverse proxy, make sure it is set up correctly or else everyone will have the proxy IP and that IP will quickly get banned, banning everyone in the process. I recommend using CloudFlare. It is free. See below.

3. CloudFlare

CloudFlare could be described as the ultimate solution. It is also the most complicated but well worth it if you have the time and ability to change the DNS settings on you domain (their setup guides are very helpful for people who don’t know much about DNS too). Basically CloudFlare is a secure content delivery network with antihacking facilities. It routes your traffic through their hardened servers and automatically filters out known malware. You might think this will slow your site down, but in actual fact, their advanced compression and simplification algorithms actually speed the site up most of the time! In the last 30 days, CloudFlare blocked 2,684 threats from this Blog alone.

It’s free to sign up and you need to follow the instructions on redirecting your domain through CloudFlare. Once it’s installed (and it can take 24 hours or so for the DNS settings to filter through), you need to install the CloudFlare mod into your SMF forum and also configure Bad Behaviour mod to play nice with CloudFlare.

Download the CloudFlare SMF Mod here.

In Bad Behaviour settings, tick the ‘Enable Reverse Proxy’ box and in ‘IP call to Reverse Proxy’ put “Cf-Connecting-Ip”.

You should now notice a significant reduction in spam on your SMF forum.

A particularly good and very in depth study echoes my findings - http://www.behardware.com/articles/828-27/h-264-encoding-cpu-vs-gpu-nvidia-cuda-amd-stream-intel-mediasdk-and-x264.html

“It’s difficult to provide a succinct conclusion to so many tests, but one point does stand out: GPU acceleration of H.264 transcoding isn’t on a par with encoding carried out by CPUs.”

“At the end of the day, the marketing promises in terms of GPGPU transcoding haven’t been kept. The manufacturers highlight the rapidity of their solutions as a solution to the very real problem of the excessive amount of time required for CPUs to encode video alone. By offering rapid encoding solutions, but with quality that leaves too much to be desired, H.264 encoding via GPGPU solutions remains, as yet, a poor solution to what is a real problem.”

So I’m going back to the good old CPU only encoding with an x264 implementation.

Vodafone
Free phone, £36 a month on a 24 month contract. 600 mins, 1GB, unlimited texts.
Total cost over 24m = £864

Orange
Free phone, £36 a month on a 24 month contract. 600 mins, 1GB, 3000 texts.
Total cost over 24m = £864

O2
£99 phone, £37 a month on a 24 month contract. 600 mins, 1GB, unlimited texts.
Total cost over 24m = £987

Three

Free phone, £34 a month on a 24 month contract. 2000 mins (+5000 to 3 phones), unlimited GB, 5000 texts.
Total cost over 24m = £816

OR

You could buy the phone for £499 from Amazon, then get a SIM only deal from Three for
Free phone, £12 a month on a 12 month contract. 600 mins, 1GB, 3000 texts.
Total cost over 24m = £787

OR

You could buy the phone for £499 from Amazon, then get a SIM only deal from Three for
Free phone, £10 a month on a 12 month contract. 300 mins, 1GB, 3000 texts.
Total cost over 24m = £739

OR

You could buy the phone for £499 from Amazon, then get a SIM only deal from Three for
Free phone, £15 a month on a 1 month rolling contract. 300 mins, unlimited GB, 3000 texts.
Total cost over 24m = £859

Conclusion

Now if you know you will keep the phone for 2 years, you might be happy to go with the lock in contracts and save money up front. It will cost you more in the end. Assuming you can shell out now, there’s a real advantage in the SIM only offers from Three. First, you will get an unlocked phone and not be locked into a long contract. The final option is only 1 month at a time. Also, the Three deals are much cheaper. The final deal also gives you unlimited data.

Some people worry about the Three network. I can assure you, it’s much better than it was 10 years ago when it got the bad reputation. Don’t just trust me though, trust the independent government affiliated reviews (YouGov). They consistently rate Three as the best network, though maybe not for customer service…. but how often do you really have to call them?

From Galaxy S3 Forums

There are some caveats though. First, it has not been tested by BMW. That’s doesn’t mean it is not safe but it does means that it is not on the official list. BMW don’t see it as a family car and would rather sell you their seat.

Second, you will not be able to take your child out while in the seat. One benefit of this seat is that you can take the child from the buggy and straight into the car. Not in a mini. There’s not enough room around the door.

Finally you will need to put a towel under the seat to stop the leather getting damaged.

I had mine checked by a Mothercare trained fitter and it went in fine. It’s not quick but it does work. I hope other people find this post if you are thinking about getting the Silver Cross Surf child seat for your car and have a new style Mini. The buggy also fits in the boot with the wheels off. Very useful.

This has been highly embarrassing. I added an album in Google Plus yesterday and ticked the box to email notify family members. Today I uploaded some more photos in Picasa only to find everyone has been spammed. This is very uncool. Google need to fix this ASAP!

www.galaxy-s3-forums.com

As with the previous forum, this site is very much a work in progress, but hopefully I can attract a lively debate.

www.hdr-forums.com

At the moment the site is very much a work in progress but I hope to make it grow over time.

For those of you who haven’t heard of OnLive Desktop, it’s basically a service that allows you to stream a Windows desktop or games (separate gaming service) over the internet to any device such as an Android tablet, dedicated set top box, or Mac/Windows PC. It’s like having a VirtualBox/VMWare session streaming live over the net. But how good is this in practice?

OnLive Desktop on an Android Tablet

First impressions are extremely positive. First, I’m currently living in a country (Japan) that is not supported, so I expect latency to be poor… it isn’t. I’m also running WiFi and I realise with a cable the system can be even smoother. But let’s be honest, we want to use Wifi right? What is the point of a tablet without WiFi.

The applications included in the free package are mainly just Microsoft Office and a few basic windows programs like calculator etc. Office, while not designed for touch, actually works quite well. The onscreen keyboard is surprisingly easy to use if you’re used to onscreen keyboards that is.

Internet explorer is also included with flash support, but on the OnLive Desktop free package you can only access the OnLive website. What impresses me is the general speed though. The fact that it is running over the internet doesn’t seem to be an issue at all. Dragging and scrolling are all smooth enough. I’m starting to think this could well be the future.

Realistically you probably need a decent internet connection, but with latency dropping all the time and superfast broadband increasingly available, this may no longer be a problem. I’m interested in how other companies might adapt this technology. With real competition in the market we could see prices falling and eventually no need for powerful and expensive hardware as all the computing is done in the cloud. OnLive Desktop is certainly one to watch!

I used to this Akismet was gimmicky. I’m pretty glad I have it running now. What I can’t understand is where all this spam is coming from. Do people really make money out of spam posts these days?

How does it achieve this? Well CloudFlare have data centres all over the world and they cache your static content so when users visit, the content that is closest to the user geographically is delivered. There’s also advanced stuff like deep packet inspection that compresses and optimised HTML. Advanced routing techniques and improved security are another feature. They also offer statistics and logging services.

CloudFlare were even the company that defended LulzSec’s website from continued attack during the few weeks it was up. Check out this article in NewScientist describing how it worked.

The best thing about CloudFlare is that the basic account is free. I’ve read many users are reporting significantly better results than from costly content delivery network services. Check them out: www.cloudflare.com