5tracks.eu

It’s only been a day of my ‘rest period’ and I’m already posting again - don’t worry though it’s a one off quicky to point you in the direction of a new blog I’ve launched.

It’s called 5tracks and is at http://www.5tracks.eu/

Basically every day I’ll post the five tracks my iPod played to me while walking to work in the morning. That and a mix of pics and info on the bands that I have listened to. Feel free to add your own tracks in the comments.

I’m still working on it so it isn’t finished and some things probably won’t work but love to hear your feedback on the idea.

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Be Back Soon

Sorry about the lack of posts for a couple of days and sorry in advance for what will be a lack of posts for the next few days.

Cold + Burnout + Heavy Workload = Blog on Hold

Sometimes you have to take a few days away from blogging to be able to keep going at a reasonable level so, with everything happening at once at work I’m going to take a couple of days off from the blog.

Be back soon.

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Google Mail Good

You may remember that a while ago I set up four new e-mail addresses with the goal of seeing which service got the most spam, which then caught the most into a junk folder and what type of spam each one got.

I only published the e-mail addresses once on my blog and then never told anyone the address or put them on a webpage, used them to sign up or generally did anything with them again.

So any spam I get would have come from crawls of the blog for e-mail addresses or by sending to random addresses at the major providers and hoping for the best.

The worst service for getting spam and for putting it into a junk folder is Yahoo by a long way.

I’ve had nearly 200 spam messages - 180 of them have been caught by the Junk filters (which is pretty good) but 20 are still sitting in my main inbox.

Hotmail is the next worst with around 80 spam messages getting through - their junk filters are rubbish though - only 15 of the 80 made it into the Junk folder.

Lycos is next with 20 messages in junk and about 11 in my inbox.

By a VERY long way though - Google Mail is by far the best service for handling Junk Mail - I haven’t checked any of the services in about a month and Google Mail had NONE.

No junk e-mail at all - not in my inbox or the junk folder.

I don’t personally use any of the web based e-mail services as I have my own hosting service and get pop3/web e-mail through that.

The spam filters through Fasthosts are actually pretty good - combine that with Thunderbird and you’re well away.

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My dead desktop

I’ve blogged a couple of times about the new laptop I’m saving for - I’d pretty much decided to get a MacBook.

Unfortunately that’s all been thrown out of the window.

The laptop was going to be my machine, something I could take out, away and use when and where I like - then I could leave the desktop machine at home for the kids and general family stuff.

The desktop machine died a horrible, smoke filled, smelly death last night and so my plans for a laptop have gone as the money has to be spent on a desktop machine.

The problem is - as well as running all the usual bits and pieces for general family use - it still needs to be up to the job of heavy photoshop use, a hammering from flash, dreamweaver and Audition with the odd bit of DVD burning thrown in.

My now dead desktop, allthough a few years old could still happily handle most of that (although it did complain a fair bit).

My wife is still happy for me to get a mac but after hunting around apple.com there seems to be a gap in their product line.

A Mac Mini isn’t up to the job I need it for, a MacPro is too expensive and over the top in terms of power for what I’ll use and I don’t want a machine all in one box so that’s the iMac out.

What I want is a sort of Middle Mac - the power of the iMac (or a little bit more) but without it all being in a single unit.

I could go for the 20″ iMac as it comes in at just under £1000 but would soon increase in price after increasing the ram to 2gb and then having to buy all new versions of Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver et al.

So in the absense of a decent, base only unit from Apple for £1000 or less I’m going to have to go for a PC.

But which one?

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As Pluto gently drifted away….

It’s a sad sad day - I like Pluto, it was a funky little planet that sometimes pushed Neptune out of the celestial hiarachy - it had … spunk!

Now a bunch of astronomers in Prague have decided that Pluto can’t be called a planet anymore - it’s a Dwarf Planet instead.

For a while there I thought they were going to let Pluto hang on in there and add a couple of extra planets into the family at the same time - alas not.

There are now officially only eight planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Personally I think it’s all the fault of the bully Neptune - the great granddads of the solar system (Jupiter and Saturn) would have happily let Pluto hang on there but Neptune, the plaground snitch just kept poking his nose in and demanding the removal of Pluto from the fold.

So I now can’t teach my daughter the word ‘MVEMJSUNP’ but must instead just stick to ‘MVEMJSUN’ - I’ll miss that little P!

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Dictionary Sites

Just hunting around Digg and found a second or third page digg on the re-design of Dictionary.com - a semi-useful online dictionary site that seems to be a lote more popular than it deserves to be.

Apparently the site has been re-designed with a css only layout - not really worked that well as it still looks bloody awful and now it doesn’t even auto focus on the search box.

There are a number of other dictionary sites out there with much better definitions - ok so the designs might even be worse than Dictionary.com but the actual content makes up for that.

You could just head over to askoxford.com and get a basic definition of a word you’re looking for from the Oxford English Dictionary (consise version) or if you’re British and have a library card you can use the full version of the OED for nothing.

Just go to dictionary.oed.com and sign up with your library card number and away you go.

What’s your favourite online dictionary and how important are they in a world of spell checkers everywhere and in everything?

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Planet Earth

One of the things I like most about bbc.co.uk is that, every time I visit the site I discover something new and quite incredible. Either that or a tweak to something already brilliant to make it even better.

The latest addition thats grabbed my attention (and forced me to waste about an hour) is the Planet Earth Explorer.

It’s basically a flash app with a rotating globe that lets you zoom in and view a variety of BBC produced video clips from that part of the world - you can also save your clips in a folder.

Apparently it will be regularly updated with new video from the BBC Natural History Unit and they’ve made all the clips available in Real for anyone without Flash (although I’d guess flash would be more widely available than real to be honest).

Again (as with other BBC projects) I would have liked to have seen more organic features in this - for instance - the abillity for users to add their own video clips, photos and audio to different areas but I’m sure that will happen eventually.

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‘Learn to love magenta!’

Apparently BBC Director General Mark Thompson believes the iPlayer will either “make or break” the corporation. The DG told staff working on the iPlayer “In many ways, this is the most important thing we’re doing at the BBC” but also commented that the current BBC structe could cause problems for a service that demands interplay between different media.

What interested me the most though was the fact that iPlayer project director Tony Ageh told people to “learn to love magenta”, apparently refering to the colour associated with the iPlayer brand.

He also suggested that the iPlayer will be ready for launch by Spring 2007 after going through public value tests.

The BBC iPlayer is the public evolution of the iMP trial that took place over the last couple of years and I personally can’t wait until it launches.

Basically the iMP gave you the opportunity to download a selection of programmes broadcast across the BBC television and radio network as well as other one off features like movies and HD content.

The iPlayer is likely to feature a LOT more than the content available on the iMP, including almost everything broadcast on the BBC Vision & Sound network, HD content, movies and archive shows.

I have a feeling that eventually it will also include user created content, probably through the Creative Archive licence and may even have Channel 4 shows as well.

Although at the moment I’m not sure it will work on the Mac or Linux and is likely to be DRMd to the high heavens (Windows Media DRM technology).

I don’t mind the DRM (as I know it’s the only way we can get it - because of indie studios & other rights holders), but I’d like the DRM to allow me to transfer the content to my iPod at the very least.

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Guess Where Jersey & BBC News

Inspired by the simple but brilliant flickr group ‘Guess Where London‘ that I found through the ever increasingly, brilliantly, surreal photos of Mr Dave Gorman, I’ve decided to start the Flickr group ‘Guess Where Jersey‘.

Rules are simple - post an obscure photo from Jersey and other users have to guess where in the island the photo was taken and what it’s of.

Oh and I’m loving the new look (well slightly tweaked) BBC News Online - although I haven’t quite worked out the rules for when and where a generic Audio/Video link goes up and when a direct link to a specific show goes up.

The internation/uk version buttons don’t looked as slapped on anymore either - and they have a space for promoting their ‘other’ bits - like podcasts, desktop alerts, rss feeds et al.

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