NRL and gambling

What a joke!

“The National Rugby League has told a Senate inquiry on gambling that the code is already doing a lot to minimise the impact of sports gambling on children.”

The reality is that NRL TV broadcasts have wall to wall gambling promotion, by the presenters, by betting agency personnel appearing as part of the broadcast, by paid commercials, and via ground signage. Every second team seems to be sponsored by a betting agency, and the NRL iPhone app has ads for gambling, as well as gambling odds displayed right in the middle of the live match display.

The NRL’s response is like saying I’ve minimised the risk of theft from my house because I put a padlock on the skylight, while leaving every door and window wide open.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

HP EliteBook 8570p memory card reader

After having this model of laptop for 4 months and lamenting that it didn’t have an SD memory card reader like my previous HP laptop, I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to discover that it does have an SD/MMC memory card reader – it’s just positioned in an incredibly hidden location, in the beveled section underneath the USB slots on the rear left hand side. Unless you were flat on your back underneath a glass top desk, you’d be unlikely to spot this slot.

This post is for the benefit of other 8570p owners who get confused by the specifications saying there is a memory card reader, being unable to find it, then hitting the googlewebs in frustration.

hp8570pSDcard

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Cheap, and nasty

Buying cheap computer accessories from eBay – I’ve had mixed success. Some things I’ve bought in the past have been perfectly fine, others, just a little bit short on quality. My most recent purchase is definitely the low point in quality. It was a USB memory card reader and the very first time I tried to plug a memory card in, it just burst apart at the seams.

cheap

I’m currently contacting the seller to get a refund.

Update 23 Mar 2013: The eBay seller quickly refunded the purchase price with no dramas, so a good ending

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Google, google, going

So Google Reader is google, google going. Pity. I use it almost every day. It wasn’t flashy or fancy, but it did pretty much everything I wanted in a web based RSS news reader. I’ve started looking for alternatives, but so far I’m unimpressed.

I found Netvibes to be a ghastly and overwhelming UI overload of options.

Pulse looked good, but for a product that is supposed to be an RSS reader it was almost impossible to discover how to actually add an RSS feed to it that wasn’t in their standard catalog of feeds. When I did finally manage to add another feed, one that I tried to add just wouldn’t work at all, and another one worked but just looked odd, because the feed items had no pictures displayed.

Any suggestions on what to try next?

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Security

From an excellent article by Troy Hunt, where I think he nails the unacknowledged problem contributing to many security breaches on the internet these days …

” We have a security problem on the web, of that there is no doubt. What compounds this is that we also have a bullshit problem. You can see this problem in action every time an organisation talks about being “robust” or “never being hacked” or any other number of subjective, unquantifiable statements that tell you nothing about the measures that are actually in place and amount to little more than marketing speak.”

[This content was originally posted to Google+]