archive for 2005

Rise of the “MilBlogger”

Links Friday 30th December 2005

Blogs offer taste of war in Iraq

 

DivX Browser Plug-In

Links Thursday 29th December 2005

DivX labs: DivX Browser Plug-In

 

New Camera

Me,Technology Thursday 29th December 2005

With my hard earned xmas bonus I’ve splashed out on a new digital camera, a Pentax Optio 60.

pentax optio 60
 

It’s a 6 mega-pixel thing with oodles more features than my old skool Fuji 2800. I will miss the mighty 6x optical zoom but I absolutely will not miss the size of the flippin’ thing. It was huge. Get ready for an influx of pictures when my new one arrives.

 

Xmas Gifts

Me Wednesday 28th December 2005

I got some awesome gifts this year, including:

  • Roy Lichtenstein Whaam! prints (both of them)
  • Jarhead by Anthony Swofford
  • Banksy’s “Crude Oils” postcards (getting framed)
  • Shiny new parker pen
  • Sin City DVD
  • Batman Begins DVD
  • Block of kitchen knives
  • Smoother Maker
    •  

Merry Christmas

Me Saturday 24th December 2005
the tree
the presents under the tree
star wars chocolate decorations! yeah baby
masses of reduced turkeys in sainsburys
 

So the tree is dressed, the presents wrapped and the beer is chilling. Kerry and I decided to take the diplomatic route this year and have christmas all to our selves. Neither parents would have to receive us on the big day. This is actually my first christmas away from home, which will be strange, in a good way. Kerry and I have oodles of food planned (just for us!) tomorrow, I’m on beef roasting duty and trifles making. Mmmm, trifle.

Sorry about the ass-ness of the photos, they’re from my phone. I’m going to pick up a new digi-cam in the January sales.

 

Unified Feed Icon

Meta Saturday 24th December 2005

Now that IE 7 is going to use the orange feed icon developed for Firefox Matt Brett decided it was about time to vaguely standardise the thing. Seems like a good idea to me. Accordingly I’ve stuck a grey-scale version in my menu.

 

Pattern Recognition

Book Blog Friday 23rd December 2005

Re-reading this again 🙂

 

Public Domain Movie Torrents with PDA versions

Links Friday 23rd December 2005

Public Domain Movie Torrents

 

Stephenson Invented Google Earth

Links Friday 23rd December 2005

Stephenson Invented Google Earth

 

Trend Alert

Me,Technology Monday 19th December 2005
omg so small
it really is sooooo small
 

Uh-oh, I think I might own an ipod. Not sure how that one happened… It might have something to do with mentioning to my parents that I would like one for Christmas. It is unbelieveably shiny and so small!

I opted for a (ninja) black 4 Gb Nano, mainly for the ease of carrying and for a decent amount of space. I don’t really want to carry around my whole music collection, but then I don’t want to have to rotate albums every day or something (like with a shuffle). As a Windows user I’m allergic to iTunes so I ditched that at the earliest convenience and I’m using mlipod for winamp which is aces-cool.

The screen is great and the scroll wheel is easy to use once you get the hang of it. The UI is the usual Apple slickness and makes navigating around really easy. I haven’t tried any video on it, but the photo album is vaguely useful and has pretty slideshows. It’s usability is limited on a screen so small though. The whole Nano is incredibly easy to scratch, I have a few minor ones after only a week so I’ve ordered a case for it which should help a bit.

More on my adventures in Apple-land in time.

 

Did You Mean?

Work Monday 19th December 2005

At work Sandy recently implemented Google-esque “did you mean?” results on our site search. It’s pretty neat.

 

Child’s Play

Gaming,News Saturday 17th December 2005

childs play

Buy some toys for sick children at xmas.

 

Safe Landings

Photography Friday 16th December 2005
 

What is RSS?

Links Friday 16th December 2005

XML.com: What is RSS?

 

del.icio.us & Yahoo! Sitting In A Tree

News,Technology Friday 16th December 2005

So, the big Y! makes yet another social-software purchase and buys del.icio.us. I started using delicious last year and while I didn’t find the whole book marking thing that useful I do try to trawl delicious popular once a day to catch up on all the latest trends. It seem that Yahoo! is taking taking a different approach to the big G. Google tend to hire the super-academics and take the “look how smart we are” approach. Whilst Yahoo! are hiring (and buying) the entrepreneurs to broaden their portfolio of online services to provide to Yahoo! users, “look how friendly we are”.

It’s quite a turn around as Google used to be the friendly new kid on the block, with Yahoo the bumbling, messy old guy trying to keep up. Now everyone is realising that Google is not infallible, is making billions of dollars a year, has endless beta cycles and generally wants to index every bit of data, ever. Yahoo are trying to get close to the people who use their products, they’ve finally got into blogging, launched a nicer API than Google and started buying up the social apps that people actually use (upcoming, flickr, delicious etc). I still like Google’s products, Maps is just awesome, but somehow I feel they’ve become more corporatey than Yahoo!

 

iPhoto-like image resizing in jscript

Links Friday 16th December 2005

Neat use of javascript to do real-time image resizing

 

Extratasty: Get Your Booze On!

Links Friday 16th December 2005

Skinnycorp (the dudes behind threadless) launch Extra Tasty

 

Mostly Been Playing

Gaming Wednesday 30th November 2005

F.E.A.R.

FEAR stands for something daft like First Encounter Assault Recon. FEAR has some truly awesome fire fights, the “gun play” is very, very good. In firefights the developers have gone for a full on experience. Particles and chunks fly off every surface as your bullets inpact on it. Paper sprays off bundles of paper, splinters fly off piles of timber, glass shanters into lots of pieces and sparks and smoke come off all the weapons. Whilst you’re getting all of this eye candy thrown at you, the AI is cunningly flanking you, flushing you out with grenades and generally being clever (or giving a very good illusion of being clever). This was the first game since half-life 1 (when the grunts first flushed me out with a grenade) where the AI actually surprised me. The bad guys will vault over surfaces and pull over desks and filing cabinets to provide cover. Get too close to them and they lunge at your and knock you flying. It’s all very impressive.

So, the guns, the fire fights and the AI is all good. Unfortunately the level design is mind-numbingly repetitive. Abandoned warehouse, abandoned office, sewer, repeat. The story seems pretty good initally but the briefings at the start of each mission get more and more pointless as you realise its just another warehouse of bad guys to shoot your way through. It does have some genuinely creepy moments, just as you turn a corner a ghostly figure will walk past into a wall. Or, just as you reach the top of a ladder a figure will be there and then scatter into lots of fly-like black particles. It does bits of horror stuff very well in places, but then you round the next corner and it’s back to mowing down bad guys again.

I’ve been playing it in small bursts, it seems to be best that way.

Call Of Duty 2

Call Of Duty 2 is very much a sequel. It doesn’t look vastly different from the first one. There has been a bit of polish to the engine, it has very good smoke for one thing and still has its intense edge. The one thing that stands out after playing FEAR is how static the scenery is. Everything is completely glued to the floor, unless it’s scripted to get blown up by a tank or something. I mean, a small wooden crate can provide cover from a tank shell, which is just silly.

The various scenarios are still huge fun though, and you get into those intense situation we’re you’ve got enemy fire zipping past you and you’re throwing grenades and jumping over walls and stuff. Crouching…reloading…popping up…sighting down the weapon…capping a bad guy. Great stuff.

 

Charly’s Boat

Music Tuesday 29th November 2005

I’ve totally forgotten to give some props to my work-mate Blair’s band Charlie’s Boat. You can hear some of their tunes on their myspace page. Looks like they’re playing in Edinburgh on Thursday night, so y’all should go and stuff.

 

Blingin’ Hardware

Me,Technology Saturday 26th November 2005

So I bought Ian’s old PC case of him as a replacement for my monstrous tower. “old” in Ian terms is, like, more than 6 months so it’s still pretty spiffy. It’s made from super light aluminium and has a very shiny black automative paint finish. Rather hilariously, as I was trying to take a picture of it to post here my camera fell off my desk with the lense extended…ouch. It’s now at a rather wonky angle and won’t zoom in and out, officialy “shonky”. Oh well, it is more than three years old and probably only worth about £50 (its got quite a bit of previous battle damage). Looks like I’ll be picking up a new one in the January sales.

Update: Just remembered. When I had got everything moved into the new case I fired it up and got a continuous high-pitched beep. Strange….because this case doesn’t even have a speaker! I finally realised that I hadn’t plugged the molex power connector into my uber geforce 6800 graphics card. That did the trick, the card itself must have a speaker to warn you of low power or something.

 

Quick Fire

Me Thursday 24th November 2005

Rome: just watched last episode of season one. Wow. Can’t wait for the next season.

Days Off Work: Aces, I’m off today and tomorrow.

XUL, XML, BBQ, XPI: Firefox plugins and XUL is cool. I’m thinking about making some kind of firefox plugin and learning XUL.

Blog Tweaks: All you feed-readers might not have noticed some tweaks I’ve made lately. Come and have a look at the site!

 

The Locks O’ Truth

Links Thursday 24th November 2005

Can you actually shoot a padlock off?

 

Revolver

Movies & TV,Reviews Tuesday 22nd November 2005

Wow, Revolver is a total head-f**k (to put it mildly). It’s a surprisingly cerebral movie for Guy Ritchie and I’ll be honest and say that I Googled for an explanation of the plot as soon as I finished watching. Revolver is absolutely nothing like Lock Stock or Snatch other than it has Jason Statham in it and it’s vaguely about gangsters. Ritchie has definitely matured with this movie and I had to shift my brain out of comedy gangster movie mode and up a notch to take this in. I can’t really describe much of the plot without giving it away but there is lots of voice-over and innner monologue from Jason Statham. André Benjamin (from Outcast) is also very well cast in it and Vegas, as always, makes a gorgeous backdrop. I’d recommend giving it a watch, its central theme about the “ultimate con” is intriguing.

My Rating: gold stargold stargold stargrey stargrey star
 

A History Of Violence

Movies & TV,Reviews Tuesday 22nd November 2005

Viggo Mortensen is excellent in this David Cronenberg directed movie. I watched this knowing nothing about the plot and so was pleasantly surprised at the twists and turns it throws at you. The plot is simple but nicely presented and keeps you guessing right until the end. In typical Cronenberg style the move is very raw, and the violence is sudden and explicit, much like The Sopranos. The ending is Hollywood but not too much of a cop-out and leaves you upbeat but still reeling.

My Rating: gold stargold stargold stargold stargrey star
 

Where IKEA get those wacky names from

Links Tuesday 22nd November 2005

Where IKEA get the names

 

Mario Unleashed

Links Tuesday 22nd November 2005

High school talent show version of various Mario themes, brilliant!

 

CryptoKids

Links Saturday 19th November 2005

The NSA has a website for kids which includes fun characters such as Crypto Cat & Decipher Dog! Learn to eaves-drop on Mummy & Daddy at an early age!

 

W3C Web APIs Working Group

Links Thursday 17th November 2005

W3C Web APIs Working Group

 

Wall & Piece

Books Sunday 13th November 2005

banksy

Kerry bought me the shiny new Banksy book “Wall & Piece”. It is supremely awesome, practically every page makes me smile at the ingenious stencils. This book is a very arty coffee table type thing which is quite a departure from his others, which were almost like pamflets. I’ll never forget the jacket blurb on “Cut It Out”:

If you only ever read one book in your life
I highly recommend…
you keep your f***ing mouth shut.

I heartily agree.

 

Complete Trashing Of Blair’s Reasons For 90 Day Detention

Links Friday 11th November 2005

Independent Online Edition > UK Politics

 

State of Fear

Book Blog Friday 11th November 2005

Yeah, yet another Crichton. I just need something easy to read at the moment. I really can’t face getting back into QuickSilver. Typical stuff so far, very entertaining and easy to read.

Update: Finished it. It has adjusted my view of some environmental issues a lot.

 

Remembrance Day

News Friday 11th November 2005


In Pictures : Field Of Remembrance


Britain remembers it’s war dead

 

History’s Worst Software Bugs

Links Thursday 10th November 2005

Wired News: History’s Worst Software Bugs

 

Drug Runners High Tech Boats

Links Monday 7th November 2005

Wired News: High Seas Drug Runners Ditch Cops

 

Shiny Jacket!

Me Sunday 6th November 2005

I went kinda nuts yesterday and bought myself a new, extremely shiny, jacket in Cult. Behold:

carhartt fellow jacket
 
 

Napoleon Dynamite “Learn To Dance” Kit

Movies & TV Saturday 5th November 2005
 

I saw this in Forbidden Planet yesterday, it even comes with a copy of Canned Heat on CD. Awesome 😀

 

WWI Eastern Front Photos

Links Thursday 3rd November 2005

WWI Eastern Front photos on Flickr

 

The BBC’s Programme Catalogue

Technology Thursday 3rd November 2005

The BBC has been keeping a vast catalogue of information about all the programmes it has put out for more that fifty years. It has been maintained all this time by a “crack team of librarians” and has so far been for internal BBC use only. Now, with the help of the BBC Backstage project (use our stuff to build your stuff) it could soon be useable for anyone on the ‘net and hopefully hackable for all of us geeks. Matt Biddulph is working on this for the BBC and gives us a sneak peek. Take a look at some of his screenshots, the breadth and detail of the information is vast.

 

For sale: Underground City

Links Thursday 3rd November 2005

This is awesome. I’d love to get a poke around that place.

 

The Winter Queen

Book Blog Tuesday 1st November 2005

This is great so far. I got this as a proof about two years ago when I was still working at Waterstones. It’s a translation of the original russian and is set in 19th Century Moscow. “Erast Fandorin” a criminal investigator for the Moscow police is the hero and when he sets out to investigate a simple suicide all is not what it first seems…

Update: Finished it already, that was quite fast for me. The ending is quite a shock and leave me wanting to read more of Erast’s investigations.

 

Halloween

Me,Movies & TV Sunday 30th October 2005

Kerry and I were invited to a combined Halloween and Flat Warming last night at Anna & Jen’s new place. Kerry was unforuntely working and so I went alone, without a costume. I did bring snacks, liquer and wine so they still let me in. Lots of people had cancelled and Anna wasn’t very well so the back-up plan of heading to the Auld Hoose swung into action. We somehow got stuck watching Bound (the Wachowski bros. film before The Matrix) and ended up at the Hoose just after midnight. It was packed out with lots of kerazy dressed-up folk, so I had a quick drink and then escaped to annoy Kerry at work.

 

Blueyonder, I Love You

Me,Technology Sunday 30th October 2005

I’ve just realised that I haven’t blogged about the free blueyonder speed increases. I was originally on a pretty standard 1Mb cable line, but now have a mighty 4Mb! This is mainly the cable companies playing catch-up with ADSL and completely out-doing them so they don’t get left too far behind. This new connection means I can download at 500kb/s (that’s kilo-bytes!) and upload at 48kb/s. Awesome 🙂

 

Local Area Network

Me,Technology Sunday 30th October 2005

So now that I have my shiny new wireless access point I’ve managed to get my media player thing working over wirelss. Which is just beyond cool and keeps Kerry happy, as there aren’t huge lengths of CAT-5 trailed eveywhere. Its a nice little box and fits in with the rest of the D-Link range. I’ve had no problems so far with reception but then it’s only going about five metres. The firmware is pretty neat and has stuff like syslogd support so that the access point log gets piped across to my linux box’s logs aswell. Now I just need a laptop or something to waft around the flat, marvelling at the magical wireless technology.

 

Clocks go Back

Me Sunday 30th October 2005

Woo-hoo, an extra hour in bed!

 

The Heated Mouse

Me,Technology,Work Monday 24th October 2005

We’re often joking at work about how cold it is. Maybe this is the answer: The Heated Mouse.

 

New Toy

Me,Technology Monday 24th October 2005

Now that we’ve got a TV and everything in an actual living room the problem arose of how to watch all of our downloaded media on it. Kerry would have probably killed me if I’d set-up a noisy media PC in there, plus it would be a bit too expensive. A chipped xbox was another option, or some kind of dedicated divx player. I was browsing ebuyer and came across the Lite-On LVD-2010 which is a DVD player than can also play mpg4, divx etc and can stream stuff via ethernet. Seems pretty sweet! I faffed around too long though and ebuyer sold out, I eventually got one from dvdplayers.co.uk, who have now sold out aswell.

It’s a neat bit of kit. It looks just like a normal DVD player but can play content from a ‘Media Server’ on the local network. This clever ‘Media Server’ is actually just a web server that offers a file browsing interface and streams the files to the box. The server software that comes in the box is pants, and uses Java (eww). SwissCenter is a much nicer, open source project that just uses a mini version of apache and PHP. The only problems so far have been that it can’t play q-pixel encoded divx files (whatever the heck they are) and it doesn’t support movie subtitles in external files.

In the retail box you also get a wireless bridge adaptor so that you don’t need to run CAT-5 to the box. I haven’t yet got this working, mainly because I don’t have a wireless access point for it to work with. This presented an excellent opporunity to get one though, and I shelled out for a D-Link DWL-2000AP+ which should arrive tomorrow. More toys! 🙂

 

International Urban Glow

Photography Monday 24th October 2005

Awesome pictures of underground Britain

Update: Uh-oh, they’ve exceeded their bandwidth 🙁

 

Kingdom Of Heaven

Movies & TV Friday 21st October 2005
koh

Kerry and I watched this last night and it was pretty good! If you’re expecting a Gladiator-esque Crusades movie, this is not it. There is actually quite a bit of plot and acting around all the usual Ridley Scott high speed photography battle scenes.

It’s a wee bit slow at the start but picks up towards the end with the siege of Jerusalem being a high point. Very nice CG, as pretty as Lord Of The Rings but not quite as ‘magnificent’. Neil is right about Orlando Bloom’s character. One minute he is a lowly blacksmith, the next he is a master swordsman and siege tactician.

My Rating: gold stargold stargold stargold stargrey star
 

Broken Angels

Book Blog Friday 21st October 2005

I got this from the library a couple of weeks ago and have been engrossed by it since. Now that we have an actual bedroom without tv and computer I have much more time to read before bed, which is nice.

 

dabs.com does CSS

Design Thursday 13th October 2005

Blimey! Dabs have gone all CSS, and have valid XHTML! They’re even displaying the W3C buttons in their footer. I can’t think of another sizeable e-commerce operation that does that. Good on ’em!

 
via: joshuaink.com