A few days of misc
Thursday, October 18, 2007 ~ 9 comments so far
OK, a conscious decision to not think about this blog has meant a fair amount of stuff is getting ‘done’. But I won’t bore you with the minutiae of the past few days as it mainly consisted of shuffling stuff about (mainly into loft), a fair amount of tidying up, a large amount of throwing crap out, and a growing pile of stuff to be “put in car to take to charity shop”. You know how it is.
Aside from that a few things have floated to the top of the pool of things “to be considered”, whilst others have merely skimmed the surface leaving only minor ripples in … yeah, enough of that..
Some thoughts from the past few days:
- I am really REALLY beginning to miss running, starting physio on knee next week, and dieting has started (ish). Hoping to lose weight, tone up, and whatnot before I start pounding the pavement again. Considering not running until next year to give me a chance to improve other areas first. Thoughts?
- Hard drive enclosures – I have two large hard drives sitting dormant in my old PC. Whilst looking for enclosures I spotted some ‘media capable’ ones with various outputs and gubbins. Anyone got something like this? Is it worth it? I’m thinking: download TV episode in HD, copy to media enclosure, watch on HD TV. Yay or nay?
- Bluetooth mouse – I am still loving the MacBook (alas I can’t make it my main machine) but have never enjoyed using a trackpad. So I’m in the market for a bluetooth mouse. A quick Google found me the Logitech V270 which looks OK but, of course, I’d love to hear your suggestions. No cables please (duh), and I need two buttons!
- Leopard – new version of the Apple operating system out on 26th of this month. £80 from Amazon.
- Speaking of paying, after downloading In Rainbows for £0.00, I’ve since been back to offer the princely sum of £7.43. I think that’s fair.
- Ohh yeah, I’m now, as of Wednesday, 34. Birthdays are becoming increasingly pointless, I think my 35th may be the last I acknowledge (more on this later).
- Cape Apple and Mango juice is delicious. Alas the packaging is cack and it’s impossible to pour it without “glugging” and splashing juice all over the place. Me does not like wiping up in the morning (wait, that sounds worse than it is…).
- Linux – old PC lying dormant (see point 1), so maybe a chance to play with.. Ubuntu? No idea where to start though, pointers welcomed.
- This weekend will continue the decluttering and should see me finally finished with ripping all my CDs to MP3 and most of them will be stashed in the loft. That means I’ll have 6 Benno CD towers (from IKEA) which I would like to find a use for… creative suggestions welcomed.
Normal service will be resumed at some point, although I do have another blog you know, and I am still twittering away like an idiot.
Planning ahead
Sunday, October 14, 2007 ~ Comments Off
In my hangover fug I’ve been thinking about stuff wot needs to get done.
One of those things is to sort out my WordPress install as the recent upgrade has left it littered with errors. It seems to be working OK but… well.. it’s annoying.
Other than that, with the bulk of last week concentrated on Louise and her new job, there’s loads to do in the house. Nothing major, but a small pile of “stuff” has slowly grown and needs dealt with.
I’ve also got my presentation for the TICAD conference to hand in this week.
So, I’m going to dial back on my ‘online’ activities this week. Not disappearing but less conspicuous. Maybe. You know how it is…
Dreaming of dreams
Saturday, October 13, 2007 ~ 2 comments so far
I had a lucid dream the other morning. Louise had gotten up early and I dozed off again to grab a final 15 mins in bed. When I say dozed off, I really mean that I was vaguely aware of her alarm going off before nodding back off some seconds later. Nanoseconds that is…
When I woke I was aware that I’d just had a very lucid dream. I can remember thinking, whilst dreaming, that the dream I was having was a familiar one and that it would an excellent source for a story.
Let me backtrack a little here.
Some of you may have noted the occasional comment from my Mum, asking me when I was going to start writing a book. I’ll happily admit that the idea intrigues me but, honestly, it’s one thing writing an eloquent blog post, quite another to write a book. Those things have plots, character development, and all sorts going on.
So there I was, just awake and no more, realising that I’d just been dreaming about my realisation that one of my frequent dreams would be ideal fodder for my masterpiece.
I just wish I could also have remember what THAT dream was about… I’ve tried but can’t get any idea of what it involves yet I know I’ve had that dream before, and I know that I realised, WHILST DREAMING IT, that I should use it as the basis for a novel …. honestly, it’s a wonder I managed to get out of bed at all.
Life with the Cocoon
Friday, October 12, 2007 ~ 8 comments so far
DISCLAIMER: I was given an O2 Cocoon by a PR firm. I am under no obligation to blog about it at all, nor was I to only mention it if the ‘review’ was favourable. If this post offends you, then feel free to leave. But if you were thinking of buying one… read on.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been playing with the new O2 Cocoon. I’ve been using it as often as I can and ‘living’ with it since then, bar a week away in Spain, and overall I’m reasonably impressed. What a wonderful word “reasonably” is…
It’s not a stunning ‘must have’ gadget, but it does have some nice touches, alongside a few annoying quirks.
The OLED embedded on the ‘outside’ of the phone is a nice idea. Subtle and effective and probably my favourite feature. However it suffers through implementation. There are two possible scenarios, both centred around the use of the display when receiving text messages. One is when an unprompted text message is received, the display lights up and scrolls the name or number, and then the message itself, across the outside of the screen.
Now if I have it in my pocket this is kinda useless. If it is on my desk it is in full view of anyone who looks, again not so good.
However if I’m in ‘text conversation’ mode, sending messages back and forth, then the scrolling is too slow to be useful, and I don’t need the name/number anyway. So, a smart idea that just feels a little like ‘an idea for ideas sake’. But that’s only on the text message front. The other uses – time, alarm, MP3 track details – make more sense.
Hardware-wise it feels nice in your hand, until you open it and answer a call. I’m happy to concede that it might just be that I’ve got a funny shaped face but the phone never felt comfortable when I was on a call. However the call quality was good and clear, as was the signal strength, of course it may just be that I was in particularly good coverage zones for the O2 signal.
As a It has most of the usual features of a mobile phone and, by and large, the software and features are nothing out of the ordinary but, as it’s being sold as a music player/phone/lifestyle gadget I’ve spent more time trying to use it with that in mind and, on that count it’s not too bad.
Having loaded up some MP3s I found the music player software is a little quirky to operate but didn’t take me too long to master. The sound quality through the supplied headphones is good and in a nice touch you also get a headphone splitter in the box, allowing two pairs of headphones to be connected to the phone.
Alas the main navigation button/joystick, used to navigate the onscreen menus and options is hugely frustrating and I still can’t decide if it’s over or under sensitive. Sometimes it reacts on the slightest of touches, other times a furious session of bashing is required to make a selection and too often that would result in the WRONG selection and another session of guessing where or how to push, flick or tickle the control.
One of the advertised uses of the phone is to set an alarm, place it on the charging dock, and use it as an alarm clock. With the soft blue hue of the external OLED perfectly suited to this, the idea falls flat on its face because the only accessible buttons are far too small to find easily in a state of Again, close but no cigar. It is a neat idea though, with a lot of people using their mobile phones as their alarm clocks anyway. The MP3 of your choice is usually a better choice than whatever dross the radio is spewing out of a morning.
little
I didn’t use the camera much and, in the current climate of 5 and 7 MB models it doesn’t seem a little stingy to only offer 2MB. But for quick snaps and silly video clips it’s fine if not earth shattering.
Overall I whilst there are some faults but then every phone has those and some of the quirks I found won’t affect everyone. In particular the joystick may be fine for others, it is probably just me. However there isn’t that much that stands out other than the OLED display and the provided dock. For me, those don’t make the phone a must-have gadget but if you are in the market for a phone/music player then it’s worth a look. The big question is whether the OLED display and the dock are enough to give it a competitive announcement.
I must admit that initial impressions were good when I got this phone, but over the course of a couple of weeks it fast become just another mobile phone. Given that O2 are the UK network for the Apple iPhone, something that DOES have the ‘wow’ factor that the Cocoon aims for, I think it will take some clever selling strategies to shift many units of this handset.
Finally a word on O2, excellent coverage, and their customer support handled my one and only query efficiently and friendly and it’s more than likely that I’ll switch my main phone contract to them as soon as I can. Orange should take a leaf from their book if you ask me.
WordPress 2.3
Thursday, October 11, 2007 ~ 5 comments so far
Upgrade complete – sidebar borked.
Apparently the introduction of the new tagging doo dah means a table is now no longer valid, the table that quite a few plugins were using, one of which was powering my miniblog posts.
Hence why they’ve all, suddenly, appeared here.
So, until I get some free time to get the code sorted out myself, this is how it’s gonna be… mind you, maybe a switch to single column…
apple insider
Thursday, October 11, 2007 ~ 2 comments so far
Apple Insider is doing a set of posts, in the lead up to the new version of OSX (Leopard), entitled “Road to Mac OS X Leopard”. So far they’ve covered the history of the Dock and the Finder. Despite the titles, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour do not appear.
A pound of guilt
Thursday, October 11, 2007 ~ 9 comments so far
Needless to say, portions of the internet are abuzz, discussing the ins, outs and possible impact of the way Radiohead have handled their recent album sales (they are allowing the buyer to set the price when downloading the MP3s, and yes, you can set the price to zero – more on that here).
Having heard on the radio that the band won’t be releasing (at least not in the short term) the sales figures, I am starting to wonder why they did it. Aside from the obvious “all the money goes to us and not a record label” reason of course. Protecting their artistic investment is fairly valid, rather than having earlier versions and whatnot floating around the internet, and it is pretty obvious that the band don’t place value on chart positions and so on.
However they must have known that releasing their album, without a record label, through their own website, would be looked on as a test case for a way forward in the industry. There seems to be the view that all record labels are evil, and the people that work for them are idiots. That is patently not true, yet they do seem to be slow to react, and let’s face it, there is hardly a lack of opinion in this area…
So, if Radiohead aren’t going to release figures then the record labels won’t find out if it was a success or, and you never know, if it failed. More importantly the same holds true for other bands.
But, on the flip side of this, the way people are dealing with this neatly focusses attention back on the consumer. By allowing you to set the price of purchase, the price of your integrity, then perhaps this is a (rather bizarre) yardstick of how humanity is fairing.
When it comes to digital content, it’s not that hard to find out where to go to be able to steal it. It’s a little like entering a new neighbourhood and learning which bars to hang out in to get the best score… umm… allegedly. However many people, myself included, argue that what we are really doing is previewing the content first, before purchasing it later on.
As an aside: TV shows are an odd one. I downloaded the entire first series of Heroes from the internet, but as I pay my license fee (and it’s shown on BBC2, yes?) then surely I’ve already paid for it?? Ditto for 24 and Smallville which I pay for with my Sky package and by being blasted with adverts. No?
Music wise, this kind of ‘preview downloading’ is akin to the days when you could stand in your local record store and ask to listen to the latest Adam Ant album. However as no-one shops in stores these days, and typically most online music stores only offer a 30sec snippet from which you can preview a track (completely useless for a lot of Pink Floyd tracks, many of which seem to just be starting around the 25sec mark), then currently this is the only way to replicate such a service.
Except it’s not, is it. Services like Pandora, and Last.fm allow you to search for, and listen to, entire tracks and albums. So why do people still download them?
Because it’s free.
It doesn’t cost anything (internet access prices aside), and you have no emotional buy in when you download music tracks from the internet. You only have your guilt to deal with and the price that you pay for that varies from person to person.
The question then becomes, how many people will suffer the guilt, and how many will “do the right thing”?