WebOS is dead. Long live WebOS.

So HP are pulling the plug on WebOS hardware development.

It's sad news, but apparently the OS might hang around a bit longer.

I love WebOS, I think it's fantastic. There's some things about the Palm Pre2 that I love, but it's sometime not quite powerful enough and the camera just sucks.

The TouchPad should've been brilliant, but they went all cheap on the hardware again. You'd think HP would know what they doing with hardware, but they let themselves down. They needed to build market share, so they should've built something incredible to match the software and practically given it away! Looks like they might be doing that now, so I'll keep my eyes open for a bargain.

Google Wave

Sorry to those who follow my blog and are relatively normal... this is another geek post!

So I've discovered Google Wave and managed to get myself an invite (just like when Gmail started, this is still invite only). To sum it up really simply, this is a combination of E-mail, IM, Wiki and social networking. Basically you start a conversation (a wave) with other people and the content of that conversation changes - every member of the conversation can edit every part of that conversation!

It's pretty exciting, useful for communication and collaboration (provided, of course, that it takes off).

The thing is, I have 18 invites remaining and it's a bit boring (and pointless) if I have no one to talk to, so I'm looking to get some of my friends on board - especially people who are likely to use it to communicate a lot. If you want an invite, just let me know!

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.

Sword drills and SAYsoaps

So a couple of days ago I said how I was going to engage in training and spiritual exercise, in an attempt to build myself up and prepare myself for what's ahead.

To be honest the knee drills have been easier. Although I've only actually been on my knees once, I have been making an effort to spend some time praying every morning to varying levels of success - in the words of most of my teachers: "Could do better!"

However I've really struggled with the Sword Drills. I know it's vitally important that I don't just dip into the bible but actually bite huge chunks out of it - that's why I picked the SAYsoaps stuff. It's online and I can look at it whenever, plus it has other peoples observations, applications and prayers attached. However I've been struggling a little because the passages are so long!

So today my brain actually kicked into gear and I had a think. It became quite obvious eventually - SAYsoaps includes a link to BibleGateway, BibleGateway includes a "listen to this passage" feature et voila, listen to the passage whilst I do other stuff! Yay! I tried it today and got through Proverbs 4-7 quite painlessly (I'll be blogging about this shortly). So pretty good really!

Tech meets holiness!

I love it when I can combine my two loves, technology and Christianity! As I've said lots of times before, I'm trying to get myself trained up as a warrior. Recently, however, I've been a bit lax. I've let myself go!!

So here was my plan over a year ago now: morning and evening knee and sword drills - a good combination of exercise and discipline. The situation now? Unfortunately I haven't continued any one of those four exercises... oh dear!

It strikes me that perhaps God has postponed our engagement in the battlefront in Looe until we are properly focused on Him (especially me). I'm now working from "home" for the same company, and the joy of this situation is that they told me that as long as I was available 10-4, I could pretty much work whenever I wanted. The last few days I've been waking up at 9:30 and still having to rush to work... what's that about?

So, anyway, it's time to recommit myself and get a little bit more disciplined!! As part of that, I've been really impressed with SAYsoaps - it's an interactive daily reading guide provided by the Youth Department of The Salvation Army USA Western Territory (SOAP stands for Scripture, Observation, Application & Prayer). I wanted a way to view it on my phone and use it in the morning, so I played around with the site a little bit and I've managed to develop an RSS feed of yesterdays, todays and tomorrows readings.

The feed (built using Yahoo! Pipes) can be seen at http://pipes.yahoo.com/dave_lumm/saysoap and the RSS feed is there (or here).

In order to build the feed, I had to start with the yearly outline and build from there. It takes the list of daily readings and uses those for the item titles, the link points to the specific record on the SAYsoaps site and the "description" (or body) of each item is captured from the BibleGateway.com mobile website.

This means I can read on my phone and then comment on the site if I so wish. Good eh? I really love playing around with Yahoo! Pipes, they're brilliant!

OK, finally, what's the plan for my spiritual exercise and training?
Morning Sword Drill - SAYsoaps - Something big to wrestle with to get me going for the day (hopefully you can expect to see some output from these morning sessions on here)
Morning Knee Drill - Literally get down on my knees and thank God for another day, pray for people, situations and places, pray through issues of the day

Spiritual food/snacks (important to match exercise with a healthy diet ;-) ) - A few daily readings to provide extra bits of spiritual nourishment

Evening Sword Drill - Specific study of passages as led
Evening Knee Drill - Praise God for the day, pray through issues of the day

At least once a week Lucy and I will also spend some time studying, praying and worshipping together, something that we haven't done regularly for a little too long!

Cheerio for now!

Dave

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