Recently, I have been leaving just one single album pretty much on repeat no matter what I’m doing. It’s For the Masses by Hadouken! and although it took me a fair while to warm to it, I now utterly love it. Ten tracks, each of them with their own little piece of joy. While I love pretty much every song on this album, my current favorite is “House is Falling“, although I am also a big fan of Turn The Lights Out. It’s a very different album to their self titled Hadouken!, although every now and again you can hear a lyric they recycled, maybe a guitar riff. But it fits in perfectly, and almost ties the songs together. This is an album that you should check out.

Of course, the wonderful Celldweller is never too far away from my ears, and I’m still loving The Best It’s Gonna Get, a song that I played on VFTQ a while back. And while I’m talking about Celldweller, how could I ignore Blue Stahli, who’s Ultra Numb is still on my playlist. (You are going to want to turn on HD for that song to sound OK.)

For stuff that is slightly less… hard… I simply LOVE Gorillaz’s new song on their Plastic Beach album, White Flag. It’s just such a happy sounding song, and manages to merge orchestral instruments with indian with hip-hop. Love it. I don’t, however, like the headliner song on the album, Stylo.

And of course, I found the 4th season soundtrack to Battlestar Galactica, and have to recommend Gaeta’s Lament, even if you are not a fan of the show. Kara Remembers is a wonderful song that will also bring you right back to that last episode of Season 4, and is a wonderful cover of All Along the Watchtower, even if you hated the ending of the show.

So now you know what I’m listening to at the moment. A rather eclectic mix, I’m sure you will agree. Got any recommendations for me?

Tags: Blue Stahli, Celldweller, Gorillaz, Hadouken!, Music

Privacy on the internet is a very important issue, one that becomes more and more important as services like Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook come more and more into the public eye. As a blogger and podcaster, I give up a certain amount of this privacy, but I completely control the amount of information that gets out about me through these avenues. The second I get within 2KM of my house, all geotracking services are completely shut off. Every single one of my domains is registered through Dreamhost, giving me utter privacy. I think very hard about personal details I give out on View From The Quad and this blog, I separate my “personal” email address and my “work” one, and most importantly, I ensure that if anybody has a problem with how I run VFTQ or Scodio, they have easy ways of contacting me to talk about it and share their concerns. This allows for two things. One, if somebody has a way I can do something better, they can let me knowm and Two, people don’t have the need to track me down in meatspace and start talking to me there.

This has happened only once before, and it was involving the CTYIwiki project, the wiki that I founded for CTYI attendees, which has since been handed on to a friend after it was hacked and had its database wiped. One or two people who didn’t quite understand how a wiki worked decided to track down phone numbers and private email addresses for people involved deep in the CTYIwiki project, and started making phonecalls. They didn’t like some quotes that were attributed to them. I clearly explained how they could remove the quotes if they so wished, and everything was back to normal.

So I’m good at handling stuff that I have control over. If you run a blog, podcast or any type of website, I bet you are too.

But what about the stuff that you have no control over?

I was recently made aware (read: was given a blind link that I “should really check out”) of a photograph of me and a good friend, that was on a certain website I have had dealings with in the past (read: I got them kicked off two webhosts due to their unauthorized use of my intellectual property. The only time the DMCA works for the little guy) and on this photo, there was a tirade of people speculating as to if I was the boyfriend of this good friend of mine. The general theory was that while there was a little chance we were a couple, she would never go for somebody as ugly as the guy in the photo. OK, so I may have been a little sunburnt at the time. (Needless to say, the guy/girl who sent me the email was chastised, then blocked from contacting me again.)

One thing I have developed over time is a fairly thick skin. If you are a longtime VFTQ listener, you know how I like to treat hatemail. I read it on the show and make fun of it, sometimes sparking another piece of hatemail. Which gets read on the show. If you were a friend of mine on Facebook, before I removed myself from that time-cancer for the Leaving Cert, you probably saw me dealing with people who strongly disliked my habit of posting links about religious people doing mindbogglingly stupid things due to their faith. I have a public post on my wall telling me that I am going to get sodomized with a trident while my flesh is  bubbling off my bones and I’m being fried alive for the rest of eternity? Just another day in my life as a skeptic (I think I still have screenshots of that conversation lying around here somewhere, actually). I dealt with hatemail regarding the CTYIwiki project by posting it on a public page, along with details of who sent it to me, if I had them. Ridicule, for me, is the best way of stopping these things from getting to me. I have friends who develop both websites and applications who have dealt with people who have harassed them, claiming that they will never be good at what they do, they will never have a career and they will never finish an application. Most of these people are now wondrously successful, working with companies, making thousands off iPhone (and iPad, now, I suppose) apps and freelancing. This hate never stopped them. Why should it stop me?

Now, I am quite careful about what I consider hatemail. If somebody is simply criticizing what I’m doing, I don’t treat this as hatemail. Sadly, in the past, one of my favorite podcasters has taken emails that he has received about how he conducts himself on his show VS how people he complains about conduct themselves, and he has read them out on the show, in a whingey voice, and then torn into the writers, listing off their email addresses. This strikes me as misguided. Nowhere did any of these emails say that they were going to kill him, they just pointed out a possible hypocrisy in how he was conducting himself. But sure, if that is how he deals with it, that’s how he deals with it. But never be scared to criticize something I do, as unless you are an utter asswipe, you won’t hear me slagging you off by name in VFTQ.

However, this message board sort of did get to me, and not for the usual reasons. Not because they made derogatory remarks. I can deal with those. I leave myself pretty much open to them, with the content on VFTQ, posting of my own fiction and the likes. I never EVER get it from people I know or people who have chosen to follow what I do. What got me is that these people, people who I don’t know and people who none of my friends knew were making horrible remarks based on not one, but three pictures they had dug up of me with various other friends, but had started making judgments on my reasons for being friends with the aforementioned friend. I have no inbuilt defense against this. These are not people I can call out “on air”, and I’m sure as hell not making an account on this disgusting privacy invasion website to give them a piece of my mind. However, they had found my name, had found that I do View From The Quad and had most likely found out about this blog. So maybe one or two of them will read about this here.

Cyber-bullying, to use a shitty term conjured up by some HR department somewhere, is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s world of anonymity and connectivity. Phonecalls, emails, texts, you are only a button click away from somebody who wants to make your life pretty miserable. But these people weren’t cyber-bullying anybody. There were just discoursing, chatting between themselves. Is that why it got to me?

Maybe it is. And why did I decide to open myself even more to attack, by writing a blog post about it? Who knows. But if somebody gives me grief here, I have a working email address for them. And an IP. Which can lead to an address. And let me tell you, a prime cut of cod starts to smell after it has been in the postal system for a day or two.

But I’ll tell you something. I bet they are just jealous of what their imagination provides.

Ignorance isn’t ALWAYS bliss, after all.

Tags: bullying, facebook, foursquare, privacy, twitter

It seems that in these recessionary times, the best way to get hits to your blog is to not only use buzzwords such as “Recessionary Times”, but to get angry about something. Really really angry. However, it seems that a lot of people get angry about the same things at the same times, so this “anger factor” sort of looses it’s effect when 6 of the blogs in your feader (like reader and feed mixed up, you see. This is why I get paid the big bucks) are all complaining about some shite like NAMA, Peaches Geldof getting dirty and naked, or some corporate paid-to-post makeup blog winning Best Blog in the 2010 Irish Blog Awards. “Oh!”, they wail; “The banks are taking our monies, Peaches didn’t do it with me AND some more organized blog then me won the Best Blog! It’s all one huge big conspiracy!”

So, dear readers. I have decided to get angry about something in this blog post. Really angry. Fuming, one might say. But what to get angry about?

Well, there is always the matter of how, according to Greenpeace (let’s ignore that it’s them for now. Easier to get angry about it that way),  “US oil company donated millions to climate sceptic groups“! Shock! Horror! Clicking on the rather uninformative headline, it gets WORSE! “Report identifies Koch Industries giving $73m to climate sceptic groups ‘spreading inaccurate and misleading information’”! Did you fucking read that? DID YOU? BIG OIL COMPANIES ARE PAYING PEOPLE TO CLAIM GLOBAL WARMING IS A SCAM! Oh! The humanity! How could they do this to us? You know what it is? It is all this socialism coming into the world!

Which brings me to my NEXT thing to be MOTHERFUCKING RAGING about, and that is

OBAMA!

How dare he get to spend time looking at awesome things like Captain America’s shield, the Tardis and THE MOTHERFUCKING FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE when he has an entire nation to turn into a socialist state? And make abortions a national sport? And for god’s sake, why the hell is he creating more bike lanes? Madness!

Which brings me to another thing;

Crazy fucked up religious shite masquerading as actual science!

So there is this program where a bunch of people take the Shroud of Turin (this piece of cloth which SOME people claim is the one that Jesus used when he was being crucified. Because the FIRST thing I would use to send a message to the human race, upon my crucifixion, is a piece of cloth that I bled all over) which is at this point widely accepted to be a fraud and have submitted it to “painstaking and technical” technology to create some sort of 3D image of our Jaysus Lhord nd Savier. “Well, ok, Cian”, you might say; “You don’t have to watch the bullshit Christin channels on the telly. Just watch a secular program about eating babies and providing healthcare!” WELL, FUCK YOU, MISTER! This show is going to be on… Wait for it… THE HISTORY CHANNEL! History comes from the greek word ἱστορία – historia, meaning “inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation. You know what ISN’T history? Some superstition about some man who made the entire population of the world sinners so he could come down to earth (being his own father, of course) and kill himself so that the sins would be forgiven. Come ON, History Channel!

Right. So that’s me done. Now I just wait for the hits to come flying in, right?

Tags: climate change, global warming, Obama, religion

Some of you may have noticed that I enjoy writing fiction quite a lot. I often then go on to either podcast these stories, or post them right here on this very blog. Some I do both. However, I have always had a problem with writing, something that I have not yet solved.

How to start?

When it comes to assigned fiction, give me a title, and off I go. Most of the pieces of fiction that I read out on VFTQ or post here likely were written for school, in a very short period of time. Give me a general topic or title, and after a bit of brainstorming, I’m off. However, when it comes to actually coming up with my own ideas, I either decide that they suck, or I just can’t flesh them out enough.

Take, for example, a short story I’m working on at the moment (as a means for testing Scrivener). Basic premise (as it stands) is thus: (And I’m being vague for a reason)

• At some point in the future, the US gets pissed off at Europe, which is now a Super State, declares war. There may have been oil or conservative Christians involved somewhere.
• Dangerous negotiations, due to it being the future, are carried out by digital consciousnesses, and Europe sends one because they don’t want to have to kick the US’s ass in a war. Lit, the negotiator sent, gets stolen by a group while in transit, who want to reverse engineer him to find out what makes his AI tick.
• ???
• Profit!

So, I have the general idea set out for this story (but I’m keeping a fair bit of it from you) but I just don’t know what to do now. For whatever reason, I have total writer’s block, something that just doesn’t happen when I am given a topic, and just told to “write it, Cian”.

Tags: block, fiction, Writing

So, this September, Liz and myself are shipping off to DragonCon, the geekiest convention ever created. If a comedy is slagging off geeks, this is the convention they use as a backdrop. That is how awesome this thing is going to be.

So, this whole mad story started back in my 4th year, when I attended the last New Media Expo to be held in California. This was a pretty much 100% business conference, with multiple talks going on all the time about how to make money out of your show, how to sell your show to listeners and how to “monetize the user experience”. While it was great fun, and VERY informative, I found that I got little chance to hang out with people I only knew online, such as Scott Sigler, Tee Morris and the likes. (In fact, I 100% blame my short time and inability to buy Siggy a drink on Tee, but that’s another story, for another time.) Dragon*Con, however, will be 100% about the fandom side of sci-fi and such, and thus I hope to get more hangout time, and less getting glared at for being a teenager in a “Big Boy Conference”. Which happened.

Originally, there were meant to be three of us going on the trip. Liz, Girl X and myself. So we got in touch with John Merlin, who was also attending the conference (with me… We are planning something, and YOU can’t know what it is! Yet!) and booked us a nice roomy 4 person bedroom, two kingsize beds, breakfast and all. Then, all of a sudden, Liz and Girl X seemingly dropped out on me, leaving me pretty screwed over, in terms of that hotel that Zard had booked. It didn’t take long, however, for Zard and I to work something out, and I soon rebooked a two person room in the Swanky (and much closer to the event) Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel (second-tallest all-hotel skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere)

One thing that people may remember me for from the last conference I was at was my signed microphone, which I handed around the New Media Expo and got people to sign, resulting in people remembering me to this day. I may be pulling a similar gag this year, just with my new MXL V67 microphone, but I shall have to consider it. It has slightly less body space, as far as I can see, so I may have to let people sign the grill.

So, I have a few questions for you.

If you have ever been to Dragon*Con, or a similar huge conference, what sort of gear should I bring with me? I am aware of the 3-2-1 rules (three hours slate, two square meals and one shower per day) but what else should I know?

Should I book restaurants long in advance?

Last, but not least, who else will be going? I wanna meet you all at some point!

Tags: con, convention, Dragoncon, geek

Continuing my habit of posting various things that I have written for school, here is an essay I wrote based on “What we wear”. It was marked quite harshly, because apparently what teens want to read can’t be written the way that I wrote this. Please prove The Man wrong! Please note that ALL STATISTICS were made up on the spot, as is traditional in English Essays.

What we wear is a topic on the minds of teenagers, parents and other members of society. On one hand, anybody looking at newspapers or the internet news sites in the last week will have seen the almost farcical images of teenagers stumbling along in the snow, wearing nothing but skirts smaller then most belts and tops that reveal more flesh then they cover. One almost felt sorry for these people, but they seem to be getting the glances that they so crave. Fashion dictates all, after all, when it comes to outward appearance.

Put on some cloths, crazy floating snow girl!

In contrast to this display in public, 97% of Irish Schools enforce the wearing of a uniform, a much higher precentage then almost any other country in Europe. I have always thought that the pros of a uniform greatly outnumber the cons. In removing the aforementioned perils of living fashionably, schools greatly reduce the risk of students suffering from hypothermia, and broken ankles as a result of very high heels. This also, of course, means that us students don’t have to consider what we wear every single morning.

However, many students are finding ways to mate the ideas and fashion and school uniform. (The more cynical minded might consider that this is easy, considering both result in everybody wearing the same cloths.) Even in such highly regarded institutions as my very own highly regarded college, we find boys wondering the hallowed halls of education with such travesties as untucked shirts, skintight T-shirts warn as vests and trouser waists in a position many of the elderly teachers may consider below ankle level. The same, of course, can be said of girl’s schools. Have you not noticed the progressive shortening of the kilt? This is not, my dear readers, the result of reduction in supply of fabric, but rather, the students are rolling up the hems of the skirts, both to make the elusive “fashion statement” and to remove the impracticality of their unforms, in many cases designed to sweep along the floors.

So where does this bring us? More stringent rules regarding uniform would only serve to annoy the student body, while removal of uniform will result in hypothermia. I propose that, dammit, we keep everything exactly as it is. I like it this way, after all. And the less I have to see of “cool kid” cloths in school, the better.

Do you go to a school which doesn’t enforce a uniform policy? Or has a very lenient one? What do you think about this? You now know why I like my uniform, tell me why you like not having one, or why you hate your current one!

Picture is “Jumping on Christmas” by lanuiop, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Tags: clothes, fashion, humor, sarcasim, wear

This year is a rather important year, for people like me. This year, we all have to face an exam known in certain circles as “The Leaving Cert”, most people call it by it’s official government given name, “That Pain in the Ass” certification, or the T-PAC.

This is a time for us 18 year olds that we find especially hard. Society tells us that we should be outside at 4AM, getting drunk, and enjoying the night with some young’un. However, the government have rudely placed this big looming megalith above our heads, promising rewards, an evolution of a sort, if we can work out it’s secrets. This results in us having to “knuckle down”, as the parents and adults around us keep pointing out self-satisfactorily. We nod our heads, and pretend that this is good advice that we had not thought of ourselves, and shuffle off, as if to make use of this tasty nugget it knowledge that this glorious creature has blessed us with.

But that’s not what I’m here to discuss about, today. I’m not going to mention how the T-PAC does not cater to the intellegent, how it can allow even a headcold to screw up the rest of your life, and I won’t even consider mentioning the stress that this system puts students under. Because today I am writing about how I gave up facebook, all in the name of this evil examination. CURSE YOU, T-PAC!

The decision to give up on facebook for a while was made when I realised that I would have to do a fair bit of work in order to bring my T-PAC grades high enough to get whatever course I wanted in whatever college I wanted. They would have to come up a lot. Facebook was probably the biggest timesink every day, and Twitter is too important for my communication with the outside world to drop. So facebook had to go. And go it did!

However, facebook did not go without a fight. Take a look at some of the emotional terrorism that it wrought upon me! (you can click to view the image slightly larger, if you so wish.)

That’s right! The buggers actually went and fished out images of me with people I know, and dragged them up in order to make me reconsider my account, because I will never talk to these people again!

Anyway. On with the post.

Day 1: After one full day without facebook, I notice how much I use it. When first opening a browser, my fingers use muscle memory to head to reddit.com, tab, facebook.com. I hope this stops soon, as closing facebook again and again makes me miss it more. Also, I keep heading over to my iPhone to check out the latest on that, but am always dissapointed when I notice that it’s not there. I also feel the need to poke everybody I see and write on all walls, but this might not be connected. I have also discovered a problem with deactivating an account. It’s basically just logging off. Nothing else. Hmm….

Day 3: I have still not gotten over facebook. You see, every time that I whip out my iPhone when I’m bored, be it on the bus, train, in a car, or just waiting around in school, I have a little ritual that I follow: Email, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Check for app updates. This systematic checking of my digital life is disrupted half way through now, as where there once was a facebook app, there is now naught bt black space. I stare at the screen for a moment, then realise what’s wrong, and move on to checking RSS feeds (there’s another blog post in the works on that topic. Long story.).
However, am I happy I gave up facebook? Yes and no. I miss the instant communication it gave me with many of my good friends, but I do not miss having to wade through loads of wallspam every day. Gives me more time to write these posts!

Day 5: I still get pangs for Facebook, every now and again. After all, it’s a really great way to organise nights outs, and such. However, I’m fairly sure that I am totally over it. Hurrah! Now, should I start up my usage of it again once the T-PAC is up? Only time shall tell!

So, the question is thus: Will giving up facebook for the next six or so months give me much more free time? I’m fairly sure that it will, if only from the time no longer spend deleting stupid wall spam. I know that some of you have given up facebook. Why have you done so? For those who haven’t, why not? Is the threat of loosing contact with your friends too strong? It seems that facebook have managed to build one of the ultimate systems for keeping people locked into their accounts.

Tags: emotional terrorism, facebook, Social Media, social networking

This is a piece that I wrote for school, but I thought that it was relevant too this blog as well. You will understand, therefor, it’s slightly different register then normal. No snark here!

Today’s technology is moving along at a blisteringly fast pace, speedier then anything even Science Fiction writers of yesteryear could predict. Except for the flying cars. I still hold out for the day I have to swat for my flying car driving license.

I remember receiving my first ever computer. I was 11, and it was a brute of a device, built by a company called Gateway who used to reside here in Ireland. It had a huge 4.6 GB harddrive (enough to hold an amazing 1,150 songs) two hundred and fifty six times the amount of RAM that the space shuttle uses every time it goes into space, and more importantly, a stuttering connection to the internet! The internet (or “The Web”, as we called it back then, in our late 90s and early millennium coolness) was an elusive place, to be both respected and feared. It could be used to send pages and pages of text in minutes around the entire globe, it could be used to listen to strange music, and we could even create our very own websites! I still look back at that dusty relic of my own first website, and realise that it was actually quite ahead of it’s time, using technologies that were just being developed. And who could forget the dialtone? I remember my first ever iPod, a chunky yet attractive 20GB machine, capable of holding 20GB of music, only a third of what our second computer could hold. Those were the good days! I still have it lounging around in one of my desk drawers, and some day, I hope to take it apart and restore it to it’s former glory. For some reason, I have always liked it’s clunkyness when compared to the new anorexic models that Apple release every year. And who could ever forget their first spontaneous, breathtaking encounter with an online message board or chatroom? It’s like we were thrown through a window of information, trailing colourful glass as we went.

Nowdays, however, things are totally different. My thin, light laptop has more speed, memory and storage capability that could have ever been built into that hulking Gateway. My phone is immeasurably more powerful then that machine, with the ability to access a wealth of information in a blink of an eye, and no longer am I confined to only checking the latest blogs and sites once a day, but these blogs and news sites come to me, every single minute of the day! The phone measures my sleeping habits, and wakes me up every morning within a 30 minute alarm period, based on when I am in my lightest phase of sleep. It can even listen to local radio stations from the other side of the world, and all this in a device smaller then a paperback book! I can shout at it, and it will play exactly the song that I ask it too, I can shake it to interact with it’s menus and, if I feel the need, I can play games on it that rival their console counterparts. This is the biggest change that I have seen happening around me, the change in communication. Sure, I missed the progression from pony to telegraph, from telegraph to phonecall, but I have witnessed the rise of the ability to send high quality videos around the world in seconds. I am watching the landscape of the social norm be torn asunder, the very meaning of “communication” changing day by day and most importantly, the ability for free information to propagate throughout the world within seconds. Less then five minutes after the Hudson plane crash, I was looking at pictures of the event, even watching short videos generated by people who were near the river that day. Somebody even leaked the audio conversation that the plane was having with the Air Traffic controllers, a shocking listen, if only for how calm everybody remained. Earthquakes in far off regions of the world were reported second by second by an army of anonymous fingers, dancing over phone keypads and laptop keyboards, and I didn’t even have to go looking for this goldmine of intelligence. It came to me. Newspapers, magazines and radio stations are going bust every single day. The biggest uprooting of information sharing ever is happening before our very eyes, and it is not happening quietly.

So what do you think? Am I right in suggesting that this is the biggest change to happen over the last 18 years? What is the biggest change that you have noticed in your lifetime?

Tags: growth, hudson, internet, personal writing, school

As an atheist, I often get asked what I think of Christmas. What do I think of this shamefully consumeristic celebration for the birth of a non existent ‘son of god’? How can I possibly celebrate Christmas without being a damn dirty hypocrite? And I answer thus.

How reader, much of Christmas is Christian?

Well Cian, it is a time of love, the giving of gifts and the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, our savior sent to clean up the mess his daddy started by throwing us out of that garden.

WRONG, deluded reader! Christmas has next to nothing to do with Christianity. Let’s outline why.

Firstly, the date. 25th of December. Why do you think it is that date?

Because Jesus was born on that date?

Bullshit, kind reader! Think over the story presented to us in the Bible. Shepherds watching their flock at night, traveling for a census and such. Shepherds don’t watch over their flock at night in the dead of winter. They would not live through the night. Or at least catch a nasty cold. And anyways, traditionally, shepherds watched over their flock during Spring and Autumn. And no self respecting ruler would call a census for which thousands of people would have to travel for days during the coldest time of year. That’s just silly. As for the birth itself? Totally didn’t happen then, if it happened at all (but don’t take it from me! Read this article by a group of religious people who have looked far too deeply into this.) And the Stable and animals are not even mentioned in the biblical accounts. Only the manger is.

Ok… So maybe the birth didn’t happen on Christmas. But how about all this giving gifts to celebrate him? How about the tree to symbolize his birth, and the ever-present love of god?

Well, kind reader, let me continue.

It is fairly well known at this point that many of the Christian holidays are actually just Pagan holidays in disguise (Seriously. Rabbits? Chocolate eggs? Encouraging sex between unmarried couples?). When early Christians first tried to convert other people and remove their celebration of other gods, they pretty much failed. Hard. So they decided to keep the Pagan festivities, just change the story slightly. After all, December 25th was the data Pagans believed the sun (son?) was reborn, due to it’s being the Winter Solstice, the day with the least hours of sunshine. So that’s why the day was chosen.

As for the tree, decorated trees were around LONG before Christianity decided to claim them for their own. The Pagans again, you see. They believed that ever-green trees (like your average Chrimbo Tree) had a little faerie in them, which is why they stayed green, even in the deepest darkest winter, when other trees would loose their leaves. So while they didn’t take them inside, they decorated them with little shiny pieces of metal, and brought any fallen branches inside and decorated their houses with them.

So Christmas isn’t Christian. It has simply been hijacked by the Christian Church. It wasn’t even celebrated as a Christian holiday until Pope Julius I decided to announce it as Christ’s birthday in the year 350.

In the end, I do take the two weeks off for Christmas, I stuff my mouth and I love giving presents. I think of it like this. If only Christians can have Christmas, then only Vikings can have Thursday. And that’s just silly, right?

Tags: christmas, religion, Science

A while back, you may remember me showing you how too, with use of ASpell, get an Irish Spellcheck system up and running on your Mac for free. Well, while this was a free way of getting it, it did take a little bit of work. Snasta, a (as far as I can tell) new Irish software development company has come up with a solution for those not wanting to get your hands wet in something that could be a little bit scary for a novice user. It’s called MacLitriú, and costs a mere €9.99.

On installing MacLitriú, I uninstalled ASpell and set to work writing an Irish essay that was due for the day after. I noticed exactly NO difference. The ASpell way of doing things and the MacLitriú way of doing things, to the end user, are exactly the same. MacLitriú integrates directly into the OS, which results in it working in pretty much every single Mac program that allows you change the spellcheck option.

The one caveat I noticed is that when I installed MacLitriú, it seemed to change the system default spellcheck from English to Irish, a problem that was easily fixed by changing it back again in the settings tab. This might just have been a freak accident due to my use of various different profiles depending on what I am doing on the Mac, or it might have been a bug. I don’t know.

All in all, MacLitriú does exactly what it should, and does it well. If you don’t want to bother messing around with cocoASpell and such, I recommend giving this a go!

Please note that while I was given a copy of this software to check out, it was not under the condition that I review it. I decided to review it myself.