A bit busy

I would love to be able to blog full time, I really enjoy writing and spouting my opinions on everything from the BBC to Web2.0 but alas the pains of reality strike at the pleasure of the daydream.

This week, as well as being shockingly busy at work I’m also moving house - yes we actually found somewhere to live within budget in the end - and the place is lovely.

We officially move on Thursday but we started on Saturday (just gone) - mainly doing odd bits of DIY in the new place to get it ready for us to move in.

Then next week the Island Games begin - a brilliantly fun and energy fuelled time and event to cover BUT a right pain to keep on top of - and I’ll be working around 10 - 12 hours a day for that week to keep things going.

Basically if you want to see what I’m doing from Friday 29 June until Saturday 7 July you’re best bet is to go to bbc.co.uk/jersey/sport/island_games - I’m not writing much but I do have to produce the whole thing - and write content for other sections of the site AND publish audio for things like Click of the Day and the Daily Phone-In.

To keep my sanity during this busy time I’ll have a few distractions for the quiet periods. I thought I’d share a selection of them with you so you know where I am and what I’m being influenced by.

Books

I’m currently reading three books (yes I do read three at a time - different moods need different books at different times).

The Evil Empire by Steven A Grasse
101 ways that the England ruined the World
IBN: 978-1594741739 | Amazon: £6.59 | 192 Pages

Notes from the Hard Shoulder by James May
IBN: 978-0753512029 | Amazon: £6.39 | 224 Pages

Beyond Words by John Humphrys
How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now
IBN: 978-0340923757 | Amazon: £5.99 | 256 Pages

Audiobooks

As with the books I listen to more than one Audiobook at a time - I’ve got several at the moment.

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr
Abridged| 7 hours and 14 min | Audible Price £10.19

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
Unabridged | 8 hours and 3 min | Audible Price £11.89

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Abridged | 7 hours and 29 min | Audible Price £10.19

Plus all the Torchwood Audiobooks and some old series of Old Harry’s Game, Just a Minute and In Our Time.

Music

With all of that there isn’t much time left for music but the three albums I’m enjoying most at the moment are:

The Twang - Love it when I feel like this
Play Price: £8.95

Art Brut - It’s a bit complicated
Play Price:  £9.99

The Clash - London Calling
Play Price: £4.99

Hope you enjoy that little insight into my tastes in music, literature and audiobooks. Oh and on top of all that - the week I’m not at home for most of the day I finally get SKY - at least it’s SKY+ and I can record what I’m going to miss

Sphere: Related Content

Opera v iPhone

As I’ve already mentioned I’m currently heavily into using Safari for Windows as my desktop browser of choice at home - before that it was Flock and I’m sure eventually I’ll switch back (or just use both).

At work my browser is IE 6 and Firefox 1.5 - I didn’t use the word ‘choice’ here because I don’t have a choice - it’s the browser I’m given and I had to FIGHT to get Firefox (so I can test pages).

But I’m also a big mobile web user - thats one of the reasons I’m so hyped about the new iPhone - at the moment though I use the only decent browser available for mobile phones - Opera Mini.

But even that has its limits - mainly because it pulls everything into a single line with no structural formatting which makes for a clunky and scroll heavy experience.

However (didn’t want to use But again - far too many Buts already), Opera to the rescue again with a brand new version of Opera Mini that is as easy to use as the old one but with the Zoom functionality of the iPhone.

It’s completely free to download from mini.opera.com/beta (point your mobile in that general direction) and works straight out (as long as your mobile internet settings are right).

Basically you type in the URL of the site using your mobile keyboard and it shows you (depending on the size of your mobile display) the whole web page from the site you’re visiting.

Then just move the little box to the part of the page you want to read, click the middle button (or whatever the action button on your phone is) and it will, in a very sexy way, zoom into that part of the page.

Then you can read and navigate that part of the site as if it was the whole site. It’s basically a MUCH better version of the browser Opera created for the Nintendo DS.

I’ve downloaded it and played a little but didn’t get a real chance to test it as I forget to charge my mobile last night.

Of course I’ll probably still get an iPhone when it’s released in the UK

Sphere: Related Content

Balancing Pebbles

I know this sounds a little bit sad but for a while now I’ve been trying to take up a new hobbie that isn’t tied to my computer. In the past my hobby has pretty much been either browsing the web, reading forums, commenting on blogs or watching TV online.

So I decided to take up Pebble Balancing - the art of balancing pebbles and then taking a photo of your creation to post to a site like Flickr or a blog.

I’m not going to bore you with photos of balanced pebbles as it WILL get dull after a while - it’s just this one blog post that will see me mention them and post a photo - because it’s my first success.

I’ve been trying on and off for a couple of months to balance pebbles but until this afternoon haven’t got anywhere with it - the photo at the top is my first success.

Hopefully now I can start creating some attractive balances, more so than a couple of pebbles on top of each other anyway.

It’s brilliantly relaxing - as long as you’re a patient person and don’t get easily wound up - I can sit there for hours (if I had hours) just trying to balance pebbles on top of each other.

I first learnt about rock balancing (or pebble balancing) from Dave Gorman’s flickr stream earlier this year.

Sphere: Related Content

More from ‘The Time Lords’?

“So are the people he sent to “utopia” chameleoned time-lords as well?”

This was part of a larger comment posted to the Outpost Gallifrey forums in reponse to the re-introduction of The Master to the new series of Doctor Who (bloody brilliant as it was).

It was a throw away line not picked up by anybody else but really struck a chord with me.

I really can see the Time Lords coming back - going to Utopia (which is probably some kind of shielded planet) and re-emerging as a civilization at the end of the Universe.

It could be that, at the start of the Time War, a number of the younger Time Lords were made human, had their identity put into some object and then sent to the end of the universe (where is the restaurant?) until they can get themselves to the planet that was sent their ahead of them.

Just a thought!

Sphere: Related Content

No more media blackout

A few weeks ago I went to visit my parents with my wife and children and stayed with them for a week or so. We like to go over a couple of times a year to visit them.

The biggest problem I usually run across when I visit is media blackout. Well not blackout so much as blurry muddle out - my Dad has internet access (WiFi around the house) and they do have Virgin Media but the TV is usually in ‘use’.

My parents have specific, set tastes in television - they know what they like and they like what they know. Which in this case usually means ITV dramas and soaps.

Fortunately, thanks to Zattoo and broadcasters realising the value of the web I now don’t have to worry about missing my favourite shows - or even having something to watch while the Bill is on my parents TV.

Getting Aunty

I can get all the BBC channels streamed live through Zattoo along with a selection of other news and entertainment channels from around Europe - and soon the Beeb will be launching the iPlayer which will give me both live BBC and on demand content (streamed or downloaded).

4OD

Channel 4 shows are fine as well because they stream the channel live and offer a very good on demand service with download or stream functionality.

ITV.com

ITV has been a pain in the past but has started to wake up with the launch of ITV.com - their on demand proposition. The problem with ITVs proposition is that it’s completely web based and even worse IE only.

But, when they finally take it out of the SOAPS only preview (soaps as in soap operas) they will have a mass of content from the last 30 days as well as the last 30 years.

They’re also live streaming their 4 main (ITV Brand) channels and putting up clips/previews of shows for you to watch as well. As you can see from the image on the right - it is a fairly simple Windows media/flash based player with the bulk of the content contained within web pages.

I started the itv.com section with a complaint about it being web based - to be honest I’m glad it’s ‘web based’ the problem I’ve got is with the streaming only option.

I’d rather the BBC and Channel 4 had links to their downloads/streams contained on a website instead of a seperate player that required system resources.

Just one player

Fine produce the player but give me the option of whether I want to use it or not.

Both players rely on the Kontiki Peer2Peer application so why not allow me to download content (regardless of whether I’m using 4od or BBC iPlayer or even SKY Anywhere) through a single downloader.

I don’t want to have to have three or four different applications running on my computer just so I can download TV shows that happen to be broadcast by different companies.

I’m happy to go to different websites (because then an RSS feed can be created that I can include to auto download my favourite shows) but I don’t like having to run different apps all the time.

Still at least they’re trying - I’m pretty much going to give up on Bit Torrent - I’m going to be able to download or at least watch TV shows from all the major broadcasters within minutes of it going out on TV for up to 30 days after in my own time without having to remember to set SKY+ before I leave.

That is service. It also means I don’t have to hunt through a dozen torrent sites to see who gets it up first if I missed it due to a programme clash, I don’t have to worry about viruses and I don’t have to wait for it to be encoded, uploaded and then seeded.

Sphere: Related Content

Final one from Hack Day

Taking photos of people taking photos of people taking photos at Hack Day London

This is going to be my final Hack Day post - I’ve said about as much as I’ve got to say about it and have posted a mass of media and links pointing to other places saying a lot more about it.

I was trying to think of one word or image that said the most about the weekend for me - other than lightning, dunkirk or hacking or even the brilliant chance to watch Doctor Who and (see source code) with several hundred other geeks.

No the one thing that summed up the weekend for me can be seen in the photo at the top of this post - TAKING PHOTOS - everybody had a camera and there are thousands of photos from the event on flickr.

Sphere: Related Content

Land of the Living

OK boys and girls I’m finally back in the land of the living (well almost). I’ve been at Hack Day London all weekend, finally getting back to Jersey around lunchtime on Monday - but after being awake for nearly 48 hour, I wasn’t capable of much on Monday - especially blogging.

But today I’m managing to catch up on things - like e-mail, uploading photos to flickr and posting my videos to You Tube - oh and not to forget blogging - adding a roundup post from my weekend away.

Lets start with the show and tell - here is a playlist of videos from You Tube taken over the weekend - I didn’t get my video camera out very much so most are from other people.

In the feed above you could see a selection of videos from the pre-party on the day before to one showing the vents in the ceiling opening up to let the rain fall on a massive amount of computer gear.

In the video below by Matt Mcallister (Yahoo) you can see a quick roundup of the whole day and if you look VERY carefully you can just about see me on stage behind Chad Dickerson during the presentation of Hacks.
Of course you can get a much clearer view of the day through photos - and given that this was a geek event with people from Flickr in the building - EVERYONE had a camera - within half a day there were over 2000 photos on Flickr tagged with hackdaylondon.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.
The selection above are just the photos I’ve taken of the day - you can see many more by searching flickr for hackdaylondon and a few by going to the Hack Day London group.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.
As well as what’s on Flickr and You Tube there are also videos posted to Vox (I can’t find the embed link and can’t be bothered to go through source code) including one of the roof opening.

You can also view some of the web based prototypes and see what people have to say on the event by going to del.icio.us and looking for the hackdaylondon tag or even doing the same thing on Technorati and Google Blogs.

You’ve read what I thought of the event in previous posts but I’ll just say that I hope it happens again - although I was very busy and had no sleep for two days - I loved the event, I had one of the best times of my life and it’s re-inspired my love of getting down and dirty with code.

I had a couple of ideas for hacks but due to being too tired, not eligible for prizes and too busy I didn’t get a chance to build them - but I did see some cool stuff other people where doing and hear a few VERY good talks on various future techs.

If you’re interested - my ideas involved flickr, twitter and bbc weather. The first was to take BBC Weather data for a specific place and then pull in a photo from Flickr taken at the same time and place to see how accurate the weather forecast was.

The other was to create a timeline of flickr photos taken at Hack Day London then pull in Tweets posted at exactly the same time as the photo was taken - this would need a scrape and processing of the Tweets to check for terms like Hack Day, raining indoors, no wifi and allypally.

I didn’t stay for the band as I was about to fall asleep on my feet - I left about 19:00 but I loved every second of what I saw.

Sphere: Related Content

Hack Day hit by lightning

As you know, given I’ve mentioned nothing but this for months, I’m currently at Hack Day London and, despite being on registration this morning, it’s been pretty good.

What made the event though was the indoor rain. Yup thats right - only at a British event could we have trouble with the rain - INDOORS!

The building was hit by lightning which caused the fire proceedure to kick in which opened the fire ven cats and let the rain in - then they couldn’t get them closed.

This was down to a computer fault apparently - the system threw a bit of a wobbler and it took a while to get it back.

You’d think, given that it was a room full of geeks, coders and general all around computer legends they’d be able to sort a little computer problem quickly - well it was done eventually.

What was ost impressive though, despite being evacuated from the main hall and having no power or WiFi they still got on with hacking - using pens, paper, card and anything else they could find to plan their mashup.

It was a real Dunkirk Spirit moment and it will be great fun to see what they come up with now they’re back in the main hall and with power.

I’ll try to post a video of the 90 second presentations tommorow at 2pm.

Oh and there’s still no sign of WiFi.

Sphere: Related Content

Hack Day Content

I’ll write something more detailed on Hack Day when I haven’t got to be up in four hours - I really should be going to bed but I want to get this out first.

While you’re waiting for the text - here are some photos from the Health and Safety plus Staff/Contributor pre Hack Day party evening (Friday).

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

I also have a quick video. There will be a lot more where they came from as well - I’ve equiped myself with a still camera, a video camera that records to SD card, an audio recording device and a laptop to put it all online as I go along.

If I get the chance I’m hoping to do a couple of quick interviews with people there (audio) and if I do I’ll make them available creative commons as MP3s so you can do what you want with them.

Sphere: Related Content

Next Page »