Win an iPhone 5C

I'm pretty fortunate to be able to review a fair few bits of technology, thanks to my awesome writing skillz and some great contacts. OK, so mostly is the good contacts, but anyway, I digress.

This is a quick post, I'll be posting a humongous catch-up post soon, hopefully, but in the meantime I have some news to share with you. Following the announcement of the new iPhones, one of those aforementioned awesome contacts, the wonderful people at mobilefun.co.uk, have announced a competition to win an iPhone 5C.

I'm quite impressed with the concept of the 5C, to be honest, I like the fact that Apple are slowly widening their portfolio and introducing a cheaper (if not exactly cheap) iPhone with all the same attention to detail they are known for. I can't see them ever bringing out a truly budget phone, but this is a step in the right direction.

Back to the competition, it's incredibly easy to enter and it's one of those competitions where you get more entries the more you share etc. Of course the more you share, the more other people get a chance to win... make a wise choice! ;-)

If you win you will, of course, be needing some accessories for your iPhone 5C, and of course Mobile Fun just happen to cover everything you could possibly need.

If you win, please thank me in the form of £50 notes... Or chocolate will do...

In terms of getting back to general blogging, watch this space, the last month and a half have been jam-packed, so there's plenty to tell you!

As they say down these parts, cheers and gone!

Aggregating Vodcasts on KDE4

OK, so this is a really geeky post, so if you're not in the slightest interested stop reading now...

So I'm quite into the concept of vodcasting (Video-Podcast). Getting new episodes of a "programme" as and when they are released and automatically downloading them. For a while a year or more back I was using a program called Miro which was fantastic, but sucked the life out of my computer...

More recently I was using a combination of hpodder and reencode to download and encode the vodcasts for my GP2X and then watching them on the train to work. When I stopped taking the train, I stopped keeping up-to-date with the "channels" I was following.

I finally have my dream set-up in my office: 1 computer, 1 laptop, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse and 2 screens - all thanks to a KVM... woop!

Anyway, my computer has Kubuntu 9.04 (64bit) and KDE4 on it. Love it! Had a few teething problems with the network managers, but eventually found WICD (pronounced "wicked") which works perfectly! Also had some dodgy graphics and some issues with the dual screen, but that is all sorted now.

Anyway, thought I'd get a vodcast aggregator now that I have my own computer again (Lucy also has a computer in the back room, so at the moment there are 3 computers on... ooops). The question is, what should I go for?

I thought about Miro, but when I went to install it, saw a whole load of gnome packages, which I wasn't really into. So I had a look around and found a KDE compatible equivalent... Kitty. To be honest, Kitty looks like it hasn't been developed for a couple of years. With just a few tweaks it could be really nice, but it was just too naff for me. It doesn't automatically download new episiodes and it doesn't tell you what you've watched.

I did think about just using my hpodder/reencode combination, but this would have the same drawback (although I could cron it to run regularly, there would be no way of seeing what I had watched).

So it's Miro after all. I like the way it has a great guide full of other shows. I like the fact that it automatically downloads new episodes. I love the fact that once you've watched it it gives you 7 days and then deletes the old videos unless you select to keep them. It's brilliantly thought out and I love it! Such a shame it's Gnome, but nevermind.

So, in summary, Miro is much better than Kitty.

Let your little light shine...

So me and a friend of mine have thought about starting a company to install multimedia equipment in homes, churches, workplaces etc (Shameless plug time: CJ Technologies) and to get a feel for the work and to build reputation we approached my Church to do their upgrade.

The work was planned to go over two weekends, little did we realise the sheer scale of the project. The job entailed new speakers, a sound/multimedia desk at the back of the hall, a new projector, mounting the projectors from the (extremely high) ceiling, a front facing screen at the back for the leader.

We had some major issues with the wiring - this being mostly that I have a fear of heights and Chris can't use the ladders at the moment and I had to try and secure the cabling at a height beyond what the ladder could reach, so had to do lots of leaning and stretching... I was not comfortable and it severely slowed down the process!!

Anyway, there we were working through the night between Saturday and Sunday, to make sure it was all working for Sunday (which it did perfectly, with the exception of the projected images being tiny... doh!) and a couple of thoughts came to me.

Firstly was commitment. We were totally committed to the job and did what needed to be done, we kept going till it was finished. So there's your first lesson in the Christian life: make a commitment and stick to it until the task is complete, no matter what the cost is.

Second lesson comes from the fact that I was wearing a white t-shirt whilst doing very dusty dirty work. It was gross by the evening. I was walking up a ladder past a hanging globe light and a thought struck me - it wasn't the obvious about how the light showed up the dirt, I knew how drty I was, I could feel it in the material and could smell it... The thing that struck me was that despite how dirty the light was (and it was far dustier than I was) it was still bright enough to make my dirty white t-shirt look a bit whiter.

It made me realise that however useless I am (even when I predict that a 24 hour job will only take 6) my little light can still shine and can still make a difference - it still works better when it's clean, though!!

Robot to create Facebook profile

From the BBC:

Facebook could soon be helping bridge the divide between humans and robots.
Researchers are giving a robot its own Facebook profile page to help foster meaningful relationships with people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8034190.stm

Researchers are constantly trying to get normal humans to interact with robots, it's the best way for them to learn. This might be an interesting turning point in the interactivity of robots.

Cool stuff!

Microsoft Announces End of the Road for Encarta - ReadWriteWeb

It's the end of an era! Microsoft have made the inevitable decision to stop making and selling Encarta!

Those of us old enough to remember the oddity of owning a computer without access to the internet will remember how important and useful Encarta actually was.

Sadly, Wikipedia and Google together provide a free and relatively easy method of finding anything you want. Encarta was well put together and in many ways far superior to Wikipedia, you were far more assured of it's accuracy. Wikipedia is of course a growing and developing site, with many of the articles written by experts in the particular field, but it's also open to abuse... beware you students who submit Wikipedia articles as coursework...

If you have access to an Encarta CD, look after it - it's an important part of IT history!

Microsoft Announces End of the Road for Encarta - ReadWriteWeb

ASDA Razor

I'm not a fan of shaving. I'm lazy and I can't stand the faff. You shave; it takes ages, hurts, makes you bleed and you still end up with a face covered in hair. Joy!

I've heard some good things about the King of Shaves Azor, so was holding out to buy one of those. Unfortunately we shop as ASDA, one of the few places that don't sell it (yet, presumably). So I was forced to rethink, and quick, because I'd already thrown my last razor away...

As well as shaving, I'm also not a fan of spending money. There was just no way I was going to pay Gilette money and end up with the same result... Frankly the Sainsbury's own disposables had been doing almost as good a job! So I thought I'd try out the ASDA Triple Blade Razor. I was impressed!

Honestly! I know this sounds a little "out-there", but it's a surprisingly good razor. It's a good weight, it picks up the hairs well, it's smooth, it's close (but doesn't slash my skin to pieces). It even manages to cope with my patch of multi-directional hairs which even caught out my old Mach3! I'm still going to try the Azor when this runs out, but this one's pretty good.

AI to help you get to work

I'm catching up on some of my e-mails, I have something like 30 e-mails from Google News alerts relating to Artificial Intelligence. Even though I've sort of left that behind, I like to keep myself up-to-date. Anyway, more point is, I may make a few posts on my findings from those e-mails...

This one relates to the use of AI (fuzzy-logic) to aid a GPS navigation system. It's called CADRE and you can see more here (Science Daily).

Everything is now a computer...

I loved this article on Wired.Com

It's about a computer system that uses your phone, a camera and a small projector to make everything more interactive.

It's cool, but on the other hand it means there's even less chance of breaking free from your phone.

All those poor people who can't break free of their Blackberrys will never be able to escape!!

Yahoo Pipes

I've recently created myself a new "homepage". A single page combining my presence on the internet into one bitesize chunk. This means that anyone can come and see what I'm up to! This is, of course, a public site, so I don't want to give too much away (or say anything that my employer or future employer may find offensive, disturbing or generally off-putting).

I'm getting my current Facebook profile picture and status using a Facebook "badge", my 4 most recent blog posts using feed2js, my pictures using Yahoo Pipes (and Picasa Web albums) and finally a list of top links again using Yahoo Pipes (and Google Documents).

I can't believe Yahoo Pipes! It's so incredible! For instance, the list of links is actually a spreadsheet on Google Documents with 3 colums (Name, Link and Description). It's then published as a CSV which my Pipe then takes and reencodes as an XML compatible feed. What's even better is that you can then stick that on your page as a "badge" like the two I have on mine. Brilliant!

As an aside, I've also updated my profile on here so that it no longer says that I'm getting married, but that I am...

Oh my goodness

Wow! I just came across this on the internet. I've actually ordered something from this company through ebay, and was checking the status of my order (only problem ordering from Hong Kong is the delivery time!)

So, this company called Uxcell sell a watch which plays music, displays your photos and even plays videos! It has 2GB of memory, which is enough for a reasonable mix of the three (enough to keep you entertained on the train to work). And here's the best part, the whole thing costs under £36 (not including P&P of course).

I was so amazed that I just had to tell the world, OK, so the 6 people that read my blog ;)

Still, it doesn't compare to my GP2X. Games (old and new), movies, music...

GP2X

I recently purchased a GP2X, a handheld gaming/media device. And I am currently awaiting it to be delivered. It should be arriving sometime tomorrow or Saturday hopefully.

The GP2X is incredible, because it is LINUX based. This means that it has (built-in) a music player, a movie player (which plays virtually anything), a photo viewer and an e-book reader. In addition, because it is simply LINUX-based, you can have any of a load of emulators (giving you the ability to play games from all sorts of classic systems from the Spectrum up to the Playstation), palm-top software, homebrew games and virtually any software you might want. Oh, and because it includes a USB interface, this also provides opportunity to use a wifi dongle for wireless internet too...

The reason I've had to wait is because I pre-ordered the latest version, which also includes a touchscreen (thus hopefully making Palm-top stuff a lot easier, and opening the door for DS-style games).

I'm really excited, which is really annoying Lucy. She'll probably end up playing on it more than me anyway. I'm mostly getting it for it's media capabilities. Movies and music on the go for about the same as an equivalent, except the sound quality and toys will hopefully be better, the screen will be bigger, it has TV-Out and it plays games. Rock on.

More info here (plus, if you buy one I can earn some dosh): http://gp2x.co.uk/go.pl?A188