Eat Electric Death

iPhone 4

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:49:00 +0000

Whether you love or loathe Steve Jobs and Apple, there can be no denying that his WWDC keynote on Monday signalled a generational shift in smartphone technology. The iPhone 4 unveiling marked the end of two years of lacklustre updates that allowed competitors, such as Google's Android, to close the gap, then finally surpass the once mighty iPhone. Like all things Apple, the keynote was slick to the point of perfection, unashamedly self-congratulatory and, I suspect, very uncomfortable to watch for anyone who has recently poured a large amount of money, or entered into a lengthy contract, in return for an Android "superphone".

Of course, I count myself among that group - having recently bought a Google Nexus 1 - and while I did suffer from a mild fanboy twinge of jealousy, my overriding feeling at the end of it was a peculiar sense of admiration. I don't like many of Apple's business practices, but when it comes to iterating technology (in many cases, old technology) and presenting it in a way that is utterly desirable to geeks like me, you'd be hard pushed to claim they were anything other than masters of their field.

Take the much vaunted "... and one more thing": Facetime. This technology has been readily accessible on phones since 2005, back at the dawn of 3G networks. I remember it was just as vaunted back when 3 launched their first phones. It was futuristic, compelling, useful, and utterly, utterly ignored. I think I've owned three phones since 2005 with front facing cameras and not once have I made a video call. The fact that phones have generally omitted the front facing camera in recent years is testament to how entirely overlooked the technology has become. For some reason, people just didn't want to make video calls. I don't know why.

Then along comes Facetime. It isn't revolutionary. It isn't new. It isn't even something that people want. But somehow, with a veneer of Apple polish, it becomes desirable. Now, I'm a hard hearted old cynic, but even I found myself oddly compelled by the launch video for Facetime, apparently directed by Sam Mendes. The way they present it, the way they SELL it, it suddenly seems like something that might actually be worth having - road warrior dads can see their babies crawl for the first time; battle hardened Afghan squadies can watch as Mary-Sue back home gets her first ultrasound; teen sweethearts can finally give up "sexting" and flash their bits to each other in glorious VGA technicolor. It's manipulative, it's cynical, it is, I suppose, nauseating; but it is also compelling in a way that no other company has managed to achieve - it sells the feature as a human advance, rather than a technological advance. Suddenly it's a future that I want to be a part of.

Against my better judgement, I find myself suspecting that video calling may finally come of age... Of course, this comes with a proviso - in it's current incarnation, Facetime is virtually useless, since it is limited to iPhone 4s over wifi. If anything is going to kill an idea from the offset, limits like this will be it. A glimmer of hope comes from Apple claiming the technology will be "open", but whether this means "open" in the sense that I'll be able to video-call an iPhone user from an HTC Evo remains to be seen. I hope it does.

The second not-really-an-innovation to impress was the Retina display. On the face of it, this is nothing more than a natural progression in resolution. We saw it with the jump from G1-generation phones to Droid-generation phones, and indeed that leap was bigger than the leap from Droid-generation to iPhone 4-generation. But once again, Apple appears to have hit on a - dare I say - magical sweet spot. The genius of it is that their 960x640 display is squeezed into a 3.5 screen such that resulting number of dots per inch is so high that your eye is unable to see individual pixels. In essence, you may as well be looking at a printed magazine page than an electronic display. On top of this, they appear to have closed the gap between the glass screen and the display beneath so that the image itself appears to be rendered on the front of the phone, rather than floating a millimetre beneath.

Hyperbole aside, hands-on reports from WWDC report that the screen is just as gorgeous as Apple boast. While the Nexus 1 screen remains lovely to look at, I have a feeling that it will be something of a red-haired stepchild when held against an iPhone 4 - remind me not to do this. It might, I suspect, also make the once-revolutionary iPad display look somewhat wanting - how quickly obsolescence sets in eh?

Finally, battery life. Okay, this is the elephant in the room with modern smart phones, especially Android phones. There is no doubt in my mind that smart phone technology is a game changer - whether it's Apple, or Android, or Palm, or whoever, the possession of always-on, ubiquitous data is life changing. It's hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it yet, but being able to tap into the internet 95% of the time you're out and about is a quiet revolution that makes you wonder what on earth we did for 200,000 years without it. But there's a downside - while functionally our phones are almost complete, our battery technology simply cannot cope.

Whatever your flavour of real smartphone, if you use it how your instincts would like you to use it - ie heavily - you will be out of battery within half a day, if that. And worse, phone manufacturers appear to be ploughing more functionality into handsets at the further expense of battery life - the Android powered Evo is apparently the worst for this.

Luckily, Apple appears to have cottoned onto this - if you believe their spiel - promising a 40% increase in battery life across most tasks, a good step in the right direction. It's tempting to dismiss this as manufacturer spin, but I chose to buy into it for one reason - the iPad battery life official estimates were, if anything, underestimates, with real-world use achieving longer use-times than those quoted in the marketing material. Since the iPhone 4 uses the same processor, I hope that this new handset has similar luck.

All in all, it's all very rosey over at Apple. With this iPhone upgrade, I have no doubt that this is head and shoulders the most powerful smartphone out there. Combine it with OS improvements like folders (welcome to 1985), multitasking (welcome to 1995) and threaded mail (welcome to 2004), and there is simply no Android handset to touch it.

So I'll be flogging my Nexus 1 and signing up to a Starbucks Lifetime Pass right? Well, no. The iPhone may be a major and welcome step forward, but it is not a revolution. There is nothing in it that Android won't be doing in six months time and there are things that Android is currently unquestionably doing better (browsing, tethering, widgets) even compared to the iPhone 4. On top of this, what you get with the iPhone 4 is what you'll have for at least the next year - probably the next two years, since the next iteration will be incremental. In this time, HTC will have churned out about 500,000 handsets of varying capability.

I have no doubt, however, that the iPhone 4 will sell like titcakes. It will do wonders for recovering some of the ground that Apple has lost in the smartphone market. But most importantly, it will drive innovation. And innovation is a wonderful thing.

iVerdict (Initial)

noreply@blogger.com (Am) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:40:00 +0000

Of course I got suckered into wanting to try it. It’s practically in my job description. The lemming-like draw of new technology pulled me in as certainly as if I’d been a big dumb ox on the end of a rope. Which may be more or less accurate. It had me there in PC World on Sunday, standing next to all the other meat-bags pawing the display setup of eight iPads.

Canterbury being a reasonably posh sort of area, it was replete with those with the fiscal means to make a purchase but who are also liable to produce comments like “yah, it’s terribly clever.” This being a combo PC World & Currys, I had a momentary inspiration to shut the yahoo’s head in a tumble dryer door – far more stylistic variety than a simple netbook-to-the-back-of-the-head, surely? – but driven beyond endurance, there I was, exiting the door pdq with a plain brown box under my arm. Hey I don’t care what chemicals were used in making the shit kicking battery man but I can tell you this packaging saves planets.

Of course, an iPad costs a couple of quid at the moment, so I also had the sort of look on my face which, when I’ve used the credit card in a certain way, reminds me of how our family dog used to look when it had buried unspecified food matters under a cushion on the sofa. Frankly, it’s lucky I didn’t have a tail to wag or I would have been leaving myself with bruises all over my legs as the missus welcomed me back in the house with a cheery “Sunday lunch is ready.” Anyway, I digress. The three day impression from a user of yer actual iPad follows;

I went for the mid-range 32gb wi-fi with no 3g as I have a laptop and see it as pretty unlikely I’ll be travelling with this. If I do, the places I go usually have wi-fi and I have a BT Openzone account. I really don’t think the form factor is a good surf-on-the-train-while-on-3g contender – resting it on a seat back in front or on closed legs on a train, I ain’t seeing.

Well, you say, it’s a big iPhone or more particularly an iTouch (i.e. without the phone for those of you reading in from unfamiliar places) innit? Well, yes it is Watson, but in fact it’s less than that. It is a big iTouch without a few handy favourites missing and some “ugh” moments. For instance, there’s no clock / multi-alarm app because some of the world’s reputedly most brilliant designers were flummoxed at making a representation of a time piece. Onna screen. That girl with the clown that used to greet your eager correspondent on the BBC test card had her shit more sorted than this lot. There’s a couple of other regular apps missing too. No doubt, these will all come in due course but since this thing was planned from before the iPhone according to Steve Jobs yesterday, it’s not as if time was really the issue was it?

Then there’s some genuinely ‘ugh’ moments when you cheerfully port your existing iPod / iTouch apps across to it. Actually, quick aside here - now listen, I know it’s not actually called an iTouch but an ‘iPod Touch’ but I know what I’m talking about and you know what I’m talking about and therefore in these straitened times, I’ve gone for the economically efficient term. What’s that you say – you feel there’s some points of debate that could be profitably be worked through on this issue? Certainly and but of course. Let’s go and discuss it over here. Have you seen my new tumble dryer by the way? Do have a closer look…

When you use an application from your iPrevious (other than if it has been specifically reworked to work at the iPad’s native resolution), it appears on screen at the same resolution as on your original little handheld machine and occupies not a lot of the much bigger screen. There is therefore a ‘2x’ button on screen in the lower right that simply doubles up the size of the image. It’s as horrible as you would expect. That nice little neat app on your iPast with its crisp fonts and pics now blows up to twice the size and suffers from jaggies and blurring. Now, again, with early adoption of new devices, to be fair one has to anticipate a couple of issues like this. If you’re going to see the first dog out of the traps at the new greyhound stadium, don’t be particularly surprised if some of the stands aren’t quite finished, you can’t get a decent burger until September and the rabbit’s head flies off half way 'round the fourth. But aesthetically, these legacy apps are between meh and pretty damn horrible to look at. Bottom line – get on with it, application people.

Talking of aesthetics, it has to be that way I guess, to hide electronics, but the bezel is really quite large compared to the proportions on an iThing. This can’t have made the designers happy when they value beauteous design so highly. “Bad bezel, man!” you can imagine them moan over a chocafrappamochalatte in their wing-backed chairs. Indeed it is a big assed bezel, even if for us more geographically challenged types here in blighty, “Big Assed Bezel” is a phenomenon more likely to be encountered in a swingers’ club in Wrothram. But hey ho, why are you looking at the edge of the thing anyway?

Applications – other; Very very familiar because they are for iOther and suffer from the 2x horribleness aforementioned. A saving grace is the particularly lovely and fantastically designed Xe The Elements which is just beautiful and shows what good design and the intuitive use of touchscreen could really do for this machine. Using this, I had several ‘Star Trek’ type moments when I genuinely felt I was using something amazing. It felt generationally different but maybe that’s novelty. Also using maps is a qualitatively different experience. There is something very lovely about using Google World by, again, the use of a touch screen interface that rests on your lap casually.

Books – the screen is lovely but e-ink ain’t gonna be troubled any time soon. The Sony Reader has no challenges here if you have one. The book store looks pretty sparsely populated right now and existing experience of course is weak for UK eStores in general. Fortunately, you can at least access a number of rival formats. I’m going to the States soon – I must stock up.

Movies – I bought the very cheap Air Video application which will stream movies from your home pc or mac over wifi, doing on-the-fly conversion on your (reasonably fast) home machine. An excellent app. The screen is lovely for movies and streaming a movie to watch with headphones plugged for kids / me when people are watching crap tv is excellent.

So some good apps, as well as the bad. When you boil it all down, there are two things that the iPad really currently excels at. One, the using touch as a method of control on a high rez, relatively big screen. It is a different level of experience from using an iPhone or Touch when you can work with things at this size. Maybe this will lose its novelty but I don’t think so – it’s just a better way of doing things for *certain* applications and for surfing. There is something basically very satisfying about being on a web page with a lot of links and reaching out and touching the one that you want to go to or whipping over maps and zooming in and out. Yes, you can do this on the iPhone etc but here, size really does matter and makes for a qualitatively different experience.

But more than that, and really for me this is the best thing about it; It is a sofa-surfer par excellence. I absolutely have no doubt that I will never again come home and log onto my pc to read my email / facebook or pull out my laptop to do the same when the iPad is around. The iPad is, of course, an instant boot and coming home and cuddling up on the sofa with James who is watching telly or reading and doing that is very pleasant. It’s a brilliant pick-up-and-surf type machine if the rest of the family is watching tv too. I wouldn’t want to do hours of surfing or typing on it, although the onscreen keyboard at this size really does allow multi-finger typing with a pretty low error rate. Weight, I was somewhat concerned with picking it up in the store but at home it’s no issue. Battery life also appears very good. There’s no heat from it at all and even though the machine is new, hours of surfing was putting a very slow drain on the battery. Screen gets smudgey with fingerprints of course but seems not as bad as on my iTouch and you shouldn’t be eating all them chips anyway. Apparently.

So for a quick pick up and insta-surf with a very satisfying interaction method, it really is good. And in that respect it has delivered the biggest benefit of them all – that fact that the lady wife now uses the iPad exclusively and does not go on my pc ever. At all. And *that*, I put it to you, is an inarguable piece of world class greatness worth the entry price alone.

Re-containering And Transcoding video for android

noreply@blogger.com (Spiny) — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:39:00 +0000

If you’re a fan of downloading video from iPlayer unencumbered by nasty DRM this may be useful.

The high(ish) res files for iPhone can be downloaded by iPlayer Downloader or get_iplayer. But they are in a MOV container & unplayable on android devices. I’m yet to get my desire, but that didn’t stop me wanting a fix now :)

MP4Box will do the job, and here’s a batch file that will do the right stuff. It’ll work with multiple files passed on the command line too, so you should be good to add it to your SendTo menu.

@echo off
:start
if %1f==f goto end
echo %1
for /f "delims=." %%a in (%1) do (
echo %%a
echo Extracting video to "%%a.h264" ...
"C:\Program Files\mp4box\MP4Box.exe" -raw 1 "%%a.mp4" -out "%%a.h264"
echo.
echo.
echo.
echo Extracting audio to "%%a.aac" ...
"C:\Program Files\mp4box\MP4Box.exe" -raw 2 "%%a.mp4" -out "%%a.aac"
echo.
echo.
echo.
echo Muxing "%%a.android.mp4" ...
"C:\Program Files\mp4box\MP4Box.exe" -fps 25 -add "%%a.h264" -add "%%a.aac" -new "%%a.android.mp4"
del "%%a.h264"
del "%%a.aac"
)
shift
goto start
:end

Update:

And should you need to transcode rather than re-container, our old friend Handbrake to the rescue. I've used these settings & had really good quality

@echo off
:start
if %1f==f goto end
echo %1

for /f "delims=." %%a in (%1) do (
echo %%a

"C:\Program Files\HandBrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe" -i %1 -t 1 -o "%%a.mp4" -f mp4 -I -X 480 -e x264 -b 1000 -a 1 -E faac -6 dpl2 -R 48 -B 160 -D 0.0 -x level=30:bframes=0:cabac=0:ref=2:vbv-maxrate=768:vbv-bufsize=2000:me=umh:8x8dct=0:trellis=0:weightb=0:mixed-refs=0 -v 1

)

shift
goto start
:end

Grrrr

noreply@blogger.com (Spiny) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:43:00 +0000

I've been using Growl to get popup notifications from Pidgin for some time. (I use Pidgin as a replacement for the bloated Sametime at work.

Now, mIRC can do it's own toast popups, but the neat thing about Growl is that you can send notifications on to other computers running it. FWIW, Growl notifications also look a bit nicer than the mIRC ones.

If you bung this script* into your remote script editor in mIRC, it'll push any mIRC highlights to Growl.

on *:TEXT:$(* $+ $me $+ *):#: {
if ($highlight($1-)) {
run "E:\Program Files\Growl for Windows\growlnotify.exe" $qt(/t: $chan - $nick) /a:mIRC /n:"Notice" $qt($strip($1-))
}
}

Registering mIRC with growl is done by:

growlnotify /t:"title" /a:mIRC /r:"Highlight","Notice","Priv" "Some message"

Now, some kind bunny has written a Growl plugin for Windows Media Centre

So to get your mIRC highlights from the lair to the lounge, you just need to install that & push the Growl notifications there.

You metros can also forward notifications to your iPhones using Prowl

* Developed in #eed by me, spamming the bot :)

Amazon Kindle

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:11:00 +0000

It's not very often that you can evaluate a major purchase objectively. The very act of investing a couple of hundred quid in a single object tends to colour one's subsequent opinion of that object - almost as though your cash investment obligates you to love it. This is why we see the bizarre internet phenomenon of fanboism. Nothing stirs the blood worse than someone calling your hard-earned trinket a waste of money! I suffer from this myself to a certain extent, I suppose everyone does. So it was with some surprise that I found myself buying, and then subsequently hating, an Amazon Kindle.

I should give some background: last year I worked on a tough project. Really long hours, weekends, lots of pressure; but also lots of overtime pay. By about month five, I found myself resenting the time I lost, but also (amazingly) resenting the extra money I was getting in my wage slip. Almost as if the fiscal gain was an avatar for my stress. Of course, working resentfully on a Saturday morning and having a surplus of disposable income is a bad state of mind to browse Amazon in. Sure enough I found myself spending somewhat, shall we say, recklessly. A new TV. New speakers. A PS3 Slim. New phone. And, ultimately, an Amazon Kindle.

Now, I'd never expressed an interest in a Kindle before. Never even really knew much about them. But the announcement that Amazon were releasing an international version triggered some kind of lazy enthusiasm, and without giving it much thought at all, I ordered one. Didn't even really think about it till it arrived.

It was in this odd state of apathy that the Kindle and I began our strange relationship - a device I wasn't interested in, using a technology I had no previous opinion about, paid for with money that I wasn't really going to miss. A recipe for objectivity if ever there was one.

Okay, first thing - the Kindle is a lovely device. It might not seem like it from photos, and the QWERTY keyboard does like kind of clunky, but it is nonetheless attractive in a quirky kind of way. A bit like a sexy librarian - slim, trim and very pleasant to look at, but with a faint air of learning about it. The screen, e-ink as all good e-readers should be, is perfect to read on. It looks pretty much like paper (slightly greyer than outright white, but nice) and comes pre-printed with a quickstart instruction list - a list that some purchasers may find themselves looking for a loose corner to peel off so they can see the screen underneath, ahem.

It has built-in 3G and Amazon will thoughtfully pay for you to download books and (selected webpages) on a Sprint roaming tariff, no contract necessary. The wireless stuff is actually really cool and transparent. You can buy a book on the Amazon website on your computer and when you next pick up your Kindle it will be downloaded and ready to read. That said, as mentioned, Amazon will only let you view certain websites when not in the US - understandable given that they pay 35 cents per megabyte, but annoying given that they also won't let you download pictures for newspapers or magazines - text only in the UK unfortunately. A wifi option would have been nice.

Response is slow, as you'd expect with e-ink, but not massively so. You tend to notice the screen flash when you turn a page a lot at first, but soon get used to it. In fact, the flash of the screen seems to be exactly the same length of time it takes your eyes to go from bottom to top when starting a new page.

Apart from that, there's not a lot to say about it. It is a device that lets you buy and read books.

So why did I hate it? Well, learning to use an e-reader is a strange experience. It isn't like reading a physical book. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not a dead tree fetishist like many people seem to be. I have no great need to be surrounded by the smell of paper or experience the weight of a hefty 1000 page epic in my hands - books to me are great, but space filling and they need dusting, so I have no qualms about replacing them. My problem was that I couldn't see beyond the device to the story within.

When you first use it, it's like you're looking through a two hundred pound window, but you're only seeing the window frame and not the view outside. Your eyes are continually looking at the screen, you're constantly adjusting your fingers to sit better on the buttons, you check the battery life indicator, the wireless indicator and, if you're of a geek mentality, you have that new gadget lust that occupies your mind and blinds you to all else. This makes it very difficult to lose yourself in a book, which requires you to see beyond the medium and have the words take hold of your mind.

It also didn't help that my first book purchase was Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver - the first thousand page book in a trilogy of thousand page books - which I'm reliably informed by Gareth takes about 1500 pages to really get going.

If prospective Kindle owners take only one piece of advice from this blog, it should be this - for your first book, keep it short, keep it light, keep it something that you know you will enjoy.

I dragged out Quicksilver for the best part of two months, each page an effort to get to the bottom of and eventually found myself hating the device as much as I disliked the book. I was about ready to declare the e-reader revolution over, and go back to paper and then something strange happened. I gave up on Quicksilver and bought something completely different (Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan). This book was far more accessible, far easier to read and suddenly the Kindle disappeared from my line of sight and I could see only story!

With this revelation, I started to see the Kindle in a new light. I started to notice little things: like how easy it was to find my page when returning to a book, how useful it was to be able to search text or lookup words in the dictionary, how light the device was to hold, how much easier it made reading in a cold bed, how easy it was to throw in a bag and pull out on a train, how nice it was to be able to buy a book on a whim and save it to read later. The device suddenly opened up to me and I found myself reading more and more. I even take the thing in the bath now! And I have a queue of books I want to read for the first time in years and years.

So the story has a happy ending after all - three months I've had it, and I love it now. The Kindle, or something like the Kindle, is undoubtedly the future of reading, of that I'm convinced. But it's early days - I really hope they sort out the DRM nonsense before it gets to be like how MP3s were in 2005, and the technology is very primitive. I can't help but think I'll look back on my Kindle v2 in 5 years time and wonder what the hell I was thinking. But, for now, I'm happy to see beyond the device and enjoy that content.

The Climate Research Unit Hack

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:05:00 +0000

In the last couple of days, it has emerged that The University Of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit has had one its servers hacked, and a number of emails and documents stolen. Furthermore, a number of these emails have found their way onto the internet - and are causing quite a stir.

The emails date back more than a decade, allegedly sent by a number of high up figures in the recent IPCC reports for the UN. More interestingly, and alarming, they appear to show a number of instances of, what can only be described as, unscientific practices.

There are three main examples that are currently doing the rounds in the blogosphere.

Regarding data manipulation:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Regarding peer-review:

This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board… What do others think?

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !

Regarding concealment of data requested under the Freedom Of Information Act:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I have to admit, it all looks pretty damning on first inspection. I expect that a lot of people will have a lot of questions to answer. But I don't think it is the smoking gun that the climate change skeptic lobby hopes it is.

There is a danger with reading private correspondance out of context. Scientists go to great length to word peer-reviewed papers in a very specific way, so as to avoid uncertainty and ambiguity. It just makes good sense. However, they are not so circumspect in supposedly private email - and I think this is what this leak shows.

In the examples quoted above, the first (and potentially most serious) is the easiest to explain away. At first glance, the use of the word "trick" and the phrase "hide the decline" seem to scream data manipulation. But on closer inspection, by looking at the discussions around this area, it seems that he's using "trick" to refer to a method of combining the data - in this case, to present a smoothed dataset including proxy (tree ring, ice core) temperatures and modern, instrumental tempaeratures to show temperature behaviour beyond 1980. The decline referred to is probably a reference to the "divergence problem", a well discussed problem in dendrochronology relating to the unreliability of tree-ring data from the mid-20th century (DailyKos explains it better here)

The second example also seems quite disappointing. Why would a scientist organise a boycott of a peer-reviewed journal when the journal in question published a paper that didn't follow the party line? Especially since the most common complaint about anti-science factions is that they don't have any peer-reviewed work...

Again, a bit of background is needed. The email refers to the journal "Climate Research" which, in 2003, published a paper (Soon and Baliunas, 2003) that had broad anti-AGW conclusions (it was actually a literature review). Despite passing review, the paper was so widely seen as flawed that it caused three of the journal's editors to resign in protest at the breakdown in process. Similarly, 13 of the paper's references disputed the authors' interpretation of their results. Finally, a reconstruction of the paper's methods, but using valid proxy temperature measurements, found a completely opposite result.

In this situation, something has clearly gone wrong with the peer-review process. So what is a scientist supposed to do? A paper like this has the potential to knock research back by years, purely because society really, really wants it to be true. Perhaps a boycott is over-reacting, but it certainly isn't a conspiracy to silence dissenters.

Finally, the deletion of emails requested by the FOI. This one, sadly, as yet has no legitimate explanation. On the surface, it points to a conspiracy to hide data or methods. But perhaps this extract from another email points to the real story:

We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an “audit” by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues. In my opinion, Steven McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to this McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research. As you know, I have refused to send McIntyre the “derived” model data he requests, since all of the primary model data necessary to replicate our results are freely available to him. I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully. I will be consulting LLNL’s Legal Affairs Office in order to determine how the DOE and LLNL should respond to any FOI requests that we receive from McIntyre.

This excerpt seems to tell of a unit under constant scrutiny by a hostile critic. I can well imagine the scenario where this might prompt scientists to close ranks. Should they delete emails and withold information? No, of course not. What they've done here is clearly wrong and answers must be provided. But it doesn't point to the tax-greedy conspiracy conclusion that pretty much everyone is coming to.

What this leak really shows us is that scientists are humans, and fallible. They gloat over the death of an opponent, they fantasise violence to an annoying critic, they use sloppy language. But it shouldn't detract from the real and relevent results that they do produce.

Sadly, it already has. A cursory glance at pretty much any mainstream coverage of this story reveals an almost overwhelming tide of opinion against AGW. Furthermore, I see it cropping up in the blogs of other anti-science factions, the thinking being "if climate scientists can lie, why can't biologists/vaccination scientists/spherical earth proponents?".

CRU need to do something to extinguish this fire, because there is a very real chance that it will spiral out of control to the point that we take our eyes off the ball and miss our change to halt climate change. And in the worst case, this will have knock on effects to other "controversial" sciences.

What Google knows about me

noreply@blogger.com (Slim) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:25:00 +0000

I've had some disagreements on the interwebnet about the benefits of centralised data vs a more federal model. My view is that it's far easier to throw resources at securing important data if it's all held in one place rather than scattered around in small pockets. Many commercial organisations operate in this fashion, but when governments try to achieve it, it's met with hostility and suspicion.

Google have recently created an interesting tool which I think illustrates my point of view. The google dashboard:

https://www.google.com/dashboard

Shows you everwhere you're identified on the various google systems, and what information they hold about you. It also diferenciates between what's private and what's public. It's very effective, I hadn't remember granting a twitter app 'log in on my behalf' permissions, which showed up on the dashboard, and I was able to block it's access. Very effective, and I'd love a similar ability from government, log in, click my name, and have the application list everything the government knows about me. Only really possible with some sort of central identification of who I am, such as an ID card.

Of course, the danger is someone getting access to my single google account, and therefore having access to all this stuff. My view is that I'd happily pay to make this account more secure than worry about lots of little accounts all over the shop.

What do you think, is this kind of centralisation a bad thing?

360 Update preview

noreply@blogger.com (Slim) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:51:00 +0000

Got on the preview thing. Quite impressed! Everything installs like an app rather than integrated into the dash, kind of how the quiz thing worked.

Zune Video: Very impressive. 1080p instant video shouldn't work, but it does, and it looks bloody amazing.

last.fm: Pretty simple, loads up your last fm account and your stations are available. It shows pictures of the band and stuff as you listen. Doesn't work outside of the app though, so you can't listen to last.fm while playing a game. Scrobbles your stuff too. Nice, but the quality of last.fm seems really bad once you've got used to spotify.

Facebook: Pretty basic facebook, shows your status updates, picture feed and a newsfeed of status updates. Links your xbox account with your live account. Picture slideshow thing is nifty on the telly, but the status updates and stuff is a bit useless as it wont follow weblinks. No apps work of course. Not bad for pics, but crap for everything else.

Twitter: Pointless, as everything on twitter is links, and this doesn't do it.

There's a news feed thingy added too, only got dilbert and cnn at the mo, but could potentially be an rss news reader, which would be ace if you could add your own feeds. Perhaps you could fool it by changing dilbert.com in your dns?

Quite a good update, all free of course.

Google Wave Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Okay, Google Wave isn't exactly "great" in its current incarnation. It definitely doesn't live up to the initial expectations. But it is nevertheless an interesting piece of technology and, immature UI notwithstanding, still holds great promise. So here's an experiment. Embedding a Wave in a blog. Not sure how this will work out... (you'll probably only be able to see this if you have a Wave account)

Stuff which is hot and stuff wot is not

noreply@blogger.com (Am) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:03:00 +0000

In a decidedly intermittent series of posts, I thought I’d update some recent experiences of what’s rocking and what’s not rocking to the blog. You never know, some clannies might follow.... Anyway - is it hot or not? Lets find out...

Hot:

Podcasts for commuting. Currently about 45 episodes into Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast. Absolutely brilliant tales of empire, bloodshed, wenchin and plottin. All the better once you get past the early bits and he starts loosening up. Warren Buffett is currently one of the richest men in the world at around $40bn. Dollar for dollar in ancient Rome, Crassus was worth $150-180bn equivalent, all made in his lifetime. How did he do it? He had hundreds of informants around Rome and when a house fire started, he would turn up with hundreds of slaves with buckets of water. There wasn’t any fire brigade see. And no insurance neither. So Crassus would put out your fire but on the condition that he would then buy the remainder of your home from you. At a price decided by....you got it... Crassus. That’s a lot of sestertii, citizen.

Not:

Once a year clan meets. This must end. I am making it someone’s job to end it. It’ll probably be me appointing myself but life it too short. Watch this space.

Rocking the Socks:

Spotify. If you haven’t got it, get it. I suspect this one is ultimately doomed to failure because it’s just too fucking good and I have stopped buying music. Bands may ultimately gang up to kill it if they can. Anyway, in the meantime, if they’d actually write the API so it could stream to Squeezebox and Sonos, I might have to elevate them to godlike genius status. The mobile client is already extremely close to godlike genius. 3,333 songs offline for you here and now. Brilliant.

Old Knickers:

King of Shaves’ recent products. I want King of Shaves to succeed. Their inventor, founder and Managing Director is a genial cove who gives good interviews and frankly I’d love someone to scythe (see what I did there?) the legs from under Gillette. However, the much touted King of Shaves razor is fucking dire. It blunts faster than a cheese scalpel and is an ergonomic mess. Now lord knows I have many undistinguishing features, but a large or weirdly shaped schnozz is not one of them. Therefore when I say the lubra-strip on the top of the King of Shaves cartridges is retardedly huge, just go with me on this. It is retardedly *too big*. It means that you cannot get the cutting edges up to the top bit of your top lip under your nose. It therefore leaves you with a tiny tiny strip of uncut hair despite your best efforts. The end result is the Hollywood landing-strip of moustaches. Use the King of Shaves razor and you are left with what I can only term a porno-Hitler under your sniffer.

Second, their shaving oil. Two moderate sprays and you have something that sticks around your face and bathroom sink in perpetuity. Nations could rise and fall and this stuff would still be there caking up your bowl. Try and clean it off and you are in for a long hard battle. It’s not so much a lubricant as WD40 mixed with superglue in an aerosol. Fucking rubbish.

Bonzer!:

Laterooms.com. Recently as snagged by moi I got a £450 room in St James in London for £120 for the night. It ain’t gonna work always and you have to take your courage in your hands to wait until the last minute, but when it works it’s rocking. And as we all know, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to rock!

Bleh:

Google Wave. We’re gonna have to see if this is like the transistor – a good idea in need of an inspired use or whether it is simply pants. Currently it appears to be wearing its pants outside of its trousers in a remedial rather than a superhero kind of way. Demo now considered to be basically a con-job where pre-scripted collusion by the developers made it look like something that worked really well. When. It. Doesn’t.

Win!:

geoDefense for the iPod / Phone / Touch. Rarely enjoyed a game so much for sheer just...one...more...go quality. Classic tower type game but with stunning visuals given the platform. If you see someone on the train frantically wiping their finger over an iPhone like a teenager who has found his girlfriend’s nubbin for the first time, it’s probably this.

Fail!:

Recession. Taxes are at an all time high. Unemployment is on the rise and the winter is coming in. I shall now be voting Conservative for the first time in my adult life. Just simply too sick of the current lot. Is there no humility in them? Resign! Fall on your sword! Be a Roman! Have done with it! (Twats).

Until the next time...

Useful Android apps on my HTC Hero

noreply@blogger.com (Beej) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:00:00 +0000

THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! Thanks macspacks, we know you're into Steve Jobs for £50/month for 2 years! What we need is my overdue blog on what's running for free on my HTC Hero! Here are some apps I'm trying.

Here's my home screen. You know it has 4 virtual desktops to the left and right though? :)

This is beebPlayer.

WifiAnalyzer, useful for seeing what's around, or troubleshooting at home.

Google Scoreboard. Tell it any sport you want updates on, like an F1 driver or women's volleyball team. It will notify last/next game, and notify on goals as well.

Shop Savvy! Still testing this. It thought this can of Stella 4 was something totally different :(

3G Watchdog to check how much data I'm using. I found on holiday in Scotland, roaming all day every day, that I still didn't get near my 1GB limit (do youtube streaming over wifi, that's my tip!), but my next test will be trying it abroad where data roaming is charged 1MB @ £6 (ulp!).

gTraffic, much better than the similar UK Traffic. Lists roadworks and accidents or plots them to a map.

The terrifying Mileage app. Which I regret using. As I am learning what I'm REALLY spending on planet-killing through the medium of precise fuel statology!

Scorchio, an unofficial hotukdeals app. Heat and rep added!

Anyone else want to share Android app experiences...?

Winter lighting for tightwads

noreply@blogger.com (Slim) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:15:00 +0000

I need a night light for my mountain bike for the ole winter training. I've the following considerations:

- I'm a total tightwad
- I might want to use this on a few bikes
- I walk/run too so want something flexible
- I've a load of gadgets in my gaff that use rechargeables, so I've invested in some high quality batteries, I'd like to use those if poss.
- I really am a tightwad

Dedicated mtb setups look lovely, but they're blooming expensive, like £200 plus, but that could be for good reason. I've never done any winter mtb'ing in the dark, and I'm sure others have tried to shortcut this so I'd like to draw on any wisdom if there's any out there?

I think I'm being clever by coming up with the following. A torch like this or even two:

http://www.thetorchsite.co.uk/LED_Lenser_Professional_AA_Cell_Torches.html

Rigged via some recycled tubes and a bit of luck to the bars, like so:

..equipped with some high qual AA's should fit the bill and be loads cheaper and more flexible than a dedicated lighting rig.

But if it's that easy, everyone would do it, right? :)

Daftest anti-congestion ever?

noreply@blogger.com (Slim) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:18:00 +0000

Is this the worst thought out congestion reducing scheme ever?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/5942306/Motorists-to-pay-250-tax-for-parking-at-work.html

I'm a big supporter of the reduction in car trips, but any system has to be fair and work for everyone, not just businesses. This is daft, it's going to get passed right on to people in employment, while other car users will not be affected at all. What'll happen is firms will reduce parking spaces (the number of which are usually enforced by planning anyway), but still drive to work and park in public spaces. Silly.

Far better to just increase fuel duty if you want to stop people using the car. When the oil price went up, less people drove. It's been proven to work, why not just do that?

Streaming Spotify

noreply@blogger.com (Slim) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:33:00 +0000

As a clan, we're loving spotify. It's like having the worlds biggest itunes library without having to buy anything and sharing playlists is great fun. But one downer is that it doesn't stream to your upnp devices, it's PC only, bugger.

I found a nifty solution though: Jamcast . It's a little upnp server that will expose whatever your PC is playing as a playlist item, called 'virtual soundcard', now your 360 or Soundbridge or Sonos can hear whatever your PC is playing. You can't control it obviously, and it borks if you've a microphone plugged in, unplug or disable that recording device and you're flying along. It's also got the nice side effect that each of your streaming devices are kind of synced, but as they all buffer different amounts, it's a bit lagged, ok for rooms a long way from each other, but not very good for stuff close by.

Oh, it's a music only upnp server, but it seems to behave well enough alongside Twonky on my setup, so that's ok.

Google Wave

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:13:00 +0000

Back in May, Google announced that they were rethinking the whole dated concept of communications that we hold so dear. With Google Wave they claimed to have gone back to the start and invented electronic messaging from the ground up, with none of the baggage of SMTP or the various IM network protocols.

Indeed, their keynote presentation at I/O 2009 was almost universally praised. Wave looked to be just as revolutionary as they'd claimed - and, more enticingly, almost finished. It was genuinely exciting to see this working, and so polished and the concept seemed to just work as well. Meanwhile, for the developer, the prospect of a rich API and bot specification was almost too good to be true. The possibilities were endless - both for communication, for collaboration and for fun.

So, I put my name down for the developer programme, indicating that I'd happily put up with bleeding edge APIs and shakey service. And, finally, this week I got my access.

I've not yet tinkered with the bot APIs yet, I'll maybe tackle that in a different blog, but I've had a couple of days of intermittent usage. So what's it like? Is it as revolutionary as we hoped? Yes, kind of, maybe...

First off, it's worth mentioning that Wave is very early. It is slow, half of the features don't work, and half of the working ones don't work properly. It is memory hungry and you really don't want to leave a tab open with Wave running in it - not unless you like 500Mb Firefox processes that is. It pretty much kills my EEE901 stone dead, but runs okay on my desktop. This is very much a developer preview of a product that is probably six months from a proper launch, so being rough around the edges is to be expected.

How is it to use?

In this developer programme, every participant is subscribed to the Wave-Discuss list - like an old-school mailing list, but with Waves - so the first thing you notice about Wave is that it seems alive. Your inbox writhes like an organic thing as active Waves jostle to the top constantly. Individual Waves ripple with activity in the right hand pane as the much-talked-about realtime typing going on around you. The consequence of all this activity is that it can initially seem overwhelming - Waves slip out of your control if you neglect them and you never seem to be on top of your inbox.

I suppose this is an artefact of thinking like an emailer. We feel the need to absorb every bit of information, and information should persist for longer. Wave is different, it is sort of like a cross between email and twitter - conversations yes, but conversations that are time dependent. If you try to reconstruct the flow of information in such a thing, you'll soon get lost - even with the replay feature. Waves are both persistent and disposable - a strange contradiction.

It's this aspect that I'm not sure I like about Wave, and one of the reasons why I'm not as convinced as I was that it will supplant email.

More positively, this model works very well for collaboration. There's a number of Waves on the developer list that contain FAQ information, and are free for everyone to edit. These end up like a cross between a Wikipedia article and a forum thread. This kind of thing is one of Wave's strengths and it should find a corporate home if nothing else.

Wave is also home to a number of bot entities. Bots are currently hosted on Google App Engine and can be added to any Wave simply by adding the bot as a participant. From there, they can manipulate existing "blips" (snippets in the Wave), add new ones and pretty much do anything that a user can do. As such, they're open to massive amounts of abuse - especially since anyone on the Wave can add a participant.

It's quite weird to see Waves that have been abandoned because a runaway Elizabot has spammed it into uselessness. It's even weirder to see a counter-measure bot deployed to take care of unwanted rogue bots. What on earth will happen when the Chinese start coding for it??

And this is what I think is a major problem for Google - security. Both in terms of phishing/spam and informational integrity. At the moment, there is nothing to stop anyone from doing anything. If I start a Wave, then you can edit any part of it to your heart's content. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea of someone changing one of my posts from "I dislike Nazis" to "I love Nazis". Okay, so there is replay feature, but it is virtually useless for long running Waves, with no timeline to skip between periods. Wave desperately needs a "padlock" icon to lock blips.

My final gripe is with organisation of Waves. Google got Gmail's organisation dead right. But Wave, which arguably needs it far more, has it dead wrong. At least at this early stage. Waves currently land in your inbox. You can then send them to a folder (currently not working) or define a search, which you can save and which can also be applied as a filter. The search thing is horrible to be honest, it is arse backwards. Come on Google, let's have labels like Gmail please.

I sound quite negative don't I? I'm maybe being a little harsh on a product in the very early stages of development. All of the things I've mentioned are issues that can, and probably will be sorted.

In fact, using Wave is very cool, and very addictive. Actually being engaged in a conversation within a Wave is kind of like IRC, but with persistence and threading. And gadgets. And like IRC, you can find that the topic rambles on till it no more resembles the original point of the Wave than any conversation resembles its first sentence. For this alone, Wave is still worth watching. We just have to hope that Google attend to the really quite obvious gotchas before they release.

The Ultimate Burnout Playlist

noreply@blogger.com (Spiny) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:06:00 +0000

Paradise City / Guns N' Roses
Race / Yello
Always Crashing in the Same Car / David Bowie
Crash Dance / Yello
Cities in Dust / Siouxie & The Banshees
Smash / Offspring
Smash You / The Ramones
Bad Habit / Offspring
Cars / Gary Numan
Take Me Out / Franz Ferdinand
This Wheel's on Fire / Siouxie & The Banshees
Fine Young Cannibals / She Drives Me Crazy
Big Road Blues / Canned Heat
In The City / The Jam
This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us / Siouxie & The Banshees
Crushing Day / Joe Satriani
17.08 - Burn it Up / Offspring
Surfin' Bird / The Ramones
Paradise Place / Siouxie & The Banshees
Doctor Jeep / The Sisters of Mercy
The Lorry / Yello
Hit the road Jack/ Ray Charles
Road to Nowhere/Talking Heads
Further on up the Road/ Gary Moore
Highway Chile/ Jimi Hendrix
Highway Song/ Iggy Pop
Motorcycle Driver/ Joe Satriani
The Passenger/ Siouxie & The Banshees

This is what I came up with after a quick 5 minute dig in my library, help out for the AMLan Burnout soundtrack!

Google Integration

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:25:00 +0000

For a lot of years, it looked as though Google were just throwing any old tat out there with no real purpose or direction. Apps like "Notebook", "Bookmarks", "Base" and countless others seemed clever, but very indicative of Google's "start an idea, but never finish it" mentality.

Like most Google watchers, I quietly despaired and craved a little bit of integration. Well, it seems that they're getting the idea now. It's been fairly obvious for a while now that one sphere of integration is coalescing around their suite of Office apps - Google Mail, Calendar and Documents. As time goes on, and these applications mature, we're seeing more and more tie-ins between them. Mail integrates with Calendar to produce events, Calendar now allows you to attach a Document to an event, Tasks has finally come out of labs and things are generally a lot more polished (especially Documents collaboration, if you haven't used it, try editing a spreadsheet with multiple users!)

So the office suite is maturing nicely.

More interestingly, Google seems to be positioning a group of apps around a kind of "Social" sphere. I would include in this group: Reader, Talk, Latitude, Profile, Picasa, with perhaps iGoogle as a hub.

This move towards integration is in the early stages, but seems very obviously aimed at the Facebook/Twitter market. Look at how these apps currently integrate - as of today, Reader allows you to open up your following to pretty much any user with a public feed. You can "like" items, and these are carried across to every user who views that item. Basically, Reader has become a kind of social RSS application - a Facebook for news. Now this is all tied into your profile page, which links in your Talk status, and Latitude position if you have one, as well as your latest Picasa items and any personal information you wish to share (again, very Facebooky). On the Talk side of things, the previously innocuous "status" line has become a kind of Twitter-like information box, containing perhaps your Latitude information.

I have a feeling that we'll start to see more of this kind of thing - perhaps integrating Contacts further, maybe you'll get a timeline of your contacts activity, incorporating Reader shares, Talk update statuses and Picasa posts - like the Facebook news feed. All of this is an easy win for Google, especially if they sneak it in as an iGoogle function. The infrastructure is already there, the users are there, and integration will bring it all together.

Apache FAIL

noreply@blogger.com (Spiny) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:31:00 +0000

P45 sir?

Source: Muz :)

Gadget surprise

noreply@blogger.com (Shedir) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:15:00 +0000

Ever had a gadget which confused you, its too unexciting to want...but works that well you've got to! Borrowed a power washer this weekend and the results off it stunned me. But its such an old man gadget I don't want to buy one!

We've all these cobbles out the side of front door, blasted all the moss and crud off them. cleaned the path, then all the slabs out the back. Four hours of high pressure water blasting, the chinese police have emailed asking if i want work, place is transformed.

But its an old fogey toy, tell me I'm wrong here and it's ok to own one of these things!

Sci-Fi Must Read Shortlist: Part The Second

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:58:00 +0000

The bookclub didn't really work. Well, it was an EED project after all. Actually, that's not quite true... it didn't work in it's stated aim to get us all reading and discussing books (blame: Spiny) but it did succeed in getting your old pal Dave reading again. Since our foray into the world of the high brow, I've found my baths getting longer and longer, and even spent long afternoons ploughing through more books than I've read in the last two years.

Okay, I'm still in my comfort zone, 800 page Sci-Fi page turners, but I figure that at least it ain't no Bronte, dig?

I've just finished the last Hyperion book, Rise of Endymion, which I found to be utterly excellent, and the latest Peter F. Hamilton void trilogy novel, The Temporal Void, which I found to be hard work in places.

So now I'm looking for a recommend-me-do, in a similar vein to the well-trod but long dead blog "Scifi Must Read Shortlist". What's good scifi reading at the moment?

Glacial IE8 Tabs?

noreply@blogger.com (Spiny) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:09:00 +0000

I had a problem with new tabs & links in IE8 taking aaaages to open. 15 seconds or so.

Turns out the problem is the Java addins, even with the latest at the time of writing (6.0.140.8). Disable these and it’s back to being nearly as quick as firefox ;)

Ex Directory your mobile

noreply@blogger.com (Shedir) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:43:00 +0000

118800 is a site some may find useful, but I personally feel is taking things a bit far. A directory listing mobile phone numbers for the UK, it boasts. I'm not in favour however, so to the nitty gritty. Short and sweet.

Enter your mobile on this page , then the code is sent to your phone by text message.

Put that in the box and you're exempt from their effectively unathorised publication of your mobile number.

Safari So Goody

noreply@blogger.com (Spiny) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:06:00 +0000

Being the OCD sort for trying out new stuff, I downloaded & installed Safari 4 for Windows final, even though I found the beta, utter utter rubbish.

And you know what? It isn't half bad.

Things I like:

It’s quick. Noticeably so over Firefox & especially IE8. It makes Google Reader & mail a whiz.
It’s sleek. Typically Apple, the UI is very good, much more visually appealing than other browsers.
No more crappy Apple font rendering, it defaults to Windows rendering. Although you can still choose the Apple one if you’re weird.
Top Sites. This is a special page that comprises of your most visited sites, presented in a flashy pseudo 3d curve. It makes a nice compromise between having one home page and multiple home pages like FF & IE and means your frequent sites are just 2 clicks away.
Page Search. Works very well. On finding a match Safari dims the page and highlights where the matches are in white, the current position in the search is yellow. Caret hunting when searching is something that continually frustrates me in FF & IE.
RSS. Handling is pretty good & better than other in-browser viewers. If you have a small number of subscriptions it would be really good, but for RSS addicts it’s, still no match for Google Reader. I’d go so far as to say it would be worth using for some high priority feeds (that have full text) in addition for using Google reader for the others. No sharing mechanism though.
Search Results SnapBack. If you Google something (forgetting to open a new tab), follow a link browse around a bit, whacking SnapBack jumps you straight back to your search results page. Neat!
Installation recognised I was British & the dictionary spells “colour” !
Cover-Flow. I thought this was a bit of a gimmick, but… Cover-Flow. I thought this was a bit of a gimmick, but… it’s absolutely fantastic for browsing your history, especially when you can’t remember the URL you’re looking for.

“Not so much”:

No add-ins. On Windows anyway. There are some on Mac, but they’re mostly pay-for, yuck. So no add-block, X-Marks etc ;( Although poking about in the installation folder does reveal a Java plug-ins JAR.
Password saving, not a handy-dandy one like in FF anyway.
Search bar. You are limited to google.com, & yahoo.com in the search bar. I heard somewhere before that there were other countries besides the US, but I think it was just a rumour. You can’t change it to google.co.uk, www.google.se or whatever. You can’t add your own search providers. Steve Jobs uses google.com, so you should use google.com Doing things your own way is not the Apple way. You do things Steve’s way or you are not cool. </sarcasm> Retarded.

For me, it’s very nearly a Firefox-killer. Lack of extra search providers being the main deal-breakers. If you’re not fussed about this it’s well worth a look.

I did find a way of synchronising bookmarks, but it’s a bit of a faff. You have to create a sync folder using either Dropbox or Mesh and also locally sync your Safari bookmarks file with copies in these folders using something like PureSync.

You don’t really want to sync the whole Safari data folder (%appdata%\Apple Computer\Safari) as that will sync your cookies and history too, and I doubt your boss would appreciate your seeing adult sites list :) It would also trigger Mesh or Dropbox to sync every time a cookie landed or your history changed.

Public Safety

noreply@blogger.com (alfa) — Sat, 23 May 2009 08:16:00 +0000

Dave posted a link to a new V trailer on facebook. Sure, looks nice enough, but only about 19 seconds in i see something very important. Public Safety important.

A bookshelf falling.

Now i am as crazy as the next guy, but not anchoring bookshelves to the wall? Thats institution crazy right there. Its very common for all of us to think about our homes and offices as someplace safe, a slowmoving area. But reality can be cruel, reality can surprise us, and thats when we will find ourselfes quite unwillingly in the emergencyroom, bleeding and whining in shock and in pain.

Now i bet you start thinking about what a hassle anchoring a bookshelf would be. But i assure you, its not that bad. It doesnt involve heavy duty wallsurgery or even that much work. Since most everyone has atleast one bookshelf from ikea you will have what you need at home. Its a simple little strap. Yes, thats right, the little plastic bag with things you ignored when you put it together. If you have thrown it away use a L-bracket of your choice, it really doesnt need to be that big, just make sure you fasten it properly in the wall behind the shelf.

Its always better to be safe than sorry. The next rainy day, go over your home and/or your workplace, you could even involve the whole family and make a game out of it! Lets find those hidden dangers!

Good Luck, and Happy Hunting!

Gel

noreply@blogger.com (Slim) — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:13:00 +0000

Tetris crossed with Pengo! Why hasn't this been done before? Gel on Xbox Live Arcade has got Pengo's sliding and pushing blocks, now in 3d but instead of just matching the special blocks and busting the ice, you've got to get four like colours together to make them dissolve. That's nifty on it's own, but Gel ads combos. The gel blocks don't disappear when you group them, they slowly dissolve. If you can get another same coloured block alongside the gooey mass before it goes pop, it'll dissolve too giving you a combo where the points will climb as you keep adding blocks and the board will clear faster. It takes a mediocre puzzle game up to a fantastic puzzle game, worth trying out for yourself.