Planet SUCS

rollercow: Snap, Crackle and Pop!

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:36:07 +0000

One evening last year I arrived home to find the master fuse producing a fizzing sound with smoke gently rising from it...
the emergency response team from western power distribution arrived two and a bit hours later (in flip flops) and found this, dripping wet...

The chared black bit should cover all but the cm or so at the end and be red.

We reckon water was getting in outside, running down the length of the cable and forming droplets of water large enough to bridge the gap between the +ve and -ve wires causing a short, slowly eating away at the plastic insulator as it went. The smoke starting when there wasnt enough insulator to keep -ve and +ve apart.

Minor disaster averted

foshjedi2004: Guess Who's back.. back again..

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:21:15 +0000

Thats right... SONIC's BACK.. Tell a friend!

Gamespot have released an announcement that SONIC is back in 2010 with Sonic 4 - Episode 1. Similar to how Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles were linked this new title will be episodic content of a larger storyline.

Its going to be available via Wiiware, PSN and XBLA.

And the best thing about it...

Its 2D with 3D Visuals.. http://bit.ly/dgeinD

All I can say is.. THANK YOU SEGA!

One of the Iconic Figures of my Childhood restored. Forgotten are the Horrors of Sonic 3D and the various other Sonic universe games which fundementally sucked.

Annoying thing is that its not out til the summer but eh well.. I've waited 15 years.. 6 months isn't going to be much harder :)

foshjedi2004: Looking to the Future

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:34:22 +0000

Its got to that point, 11 weeks into Uni Term of Final year that our lecturers start talking about what we are going to do \"AFTER\" we graduate.

I\\\'ve been planning on this for several years. Ever since I first came to Swansea in 2006. The EngD, a Research Based Doctorate Program.

In particular I am now looking at the Steel Technology EngD. Initially when I was looking when I came in 2006 I saw posters for a Power/Aerospace EngD, but now I actually get into learning more about Steels and Aero Alloys I find that Steels interest me more.

Steel theory we\'ve been taught in Physical Metallurgy can be transposed to different Alloy systems therefore while my doctorate could well be in \"Steel Technology\". I could use the transferable skills found and take them to loads of different jobs.

The fact that we get paid for doing the EngD is just a bit of a bonus really. £16.5-18.5k Stipend, tax free.. Equivalent of a £24k starting Salary. As borat would say.. \"That\'s Niice\".

They also have a number of other benefits as well - from the Swansea Uni EngD page ->

General Information for 2009 Entry *not yet updated for 2010*

The four-year EngD programme includes:

*A taught-course component, covering technical subjects as well as development of personal, professional, business and managerial skills, and an industry-based research project, guided by academic and industrial supervisors.

*Ten funded places are available each year. In addition to having all fees paid, graduates selected for the EngD programme receive:

*A tax-free stipend, currently rising from £13,000 in Year 1 to £14,200 in Year 4.
*A stipend supplement from the industry partners, currently rising from £3,600 in Year 1 to £4,100 in Year 4
*A travel/subsistence expenses allowance, currently totalling £600 over the four-year period, plus a contribution of up to £600 for approved attendance at an international conference.

The benefit package (including fees) is equivalent to taxable earned income from employment of over £24,000 per annum. Moreover, other all-expenses-paid activities enjoyed by research engineers appointed to the EngD include:

*A five day tour of Corus plants in Wales and a five day tour of other manufacturing plants across the UK in Year 1
*A five day tour of metal intensive manufacturing plants in Europe (e.g. Holland, France and Germany) in Years 2 and 3
*An Annual Seminar and Dinner attended by senior industrialists and academics at which research engineers present research highlights of their work

I\'m just gonna need to ensure I get that 2.i or higher now :)

tobeon: Geocaching Day

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:20:39 +0000

Since getting back from Cyprus (a whole month ago) I have been quite obsessed with GeoCaching, even more so than usual (as you should have guessed from my last post). Plus with more and more of my friends taking part I think it is one of those rare hobbies that isn’t going to slowly fade into the background. As a big bonus this hobby also gives me some much needed exercises (specially since I recently quit the gym). Anyways I had a great geocaching day yesterday with Nick & Rob, we walked down to Black Pill and found four caches (one was a multicache). In total we trekked over 12 miles (nearly half of that was done on a twisted ankle ouch!).

It was a really good day and even though I managed to twist my ankle I did find a good walking stick (thank you Nature) and as well as general geocaching we had a nice pint and some tasty food at the Woodsman pub (does that counteract all the good the walking did?).

You can see our path here if your at all interested (google maps FTW).

Other than Geocaching I have been doing lots of Halo playing (Halo 3, Halo ODST, Halo Wars) which is uber good fun. I have also just started to use blipfoto which was pointed out by frosty. I am not sure how long I will keep it up, but I have managed to post a photo entry the last three days. If you want to keep up with what I’m posting then you can follow my blipfoto RSS feed.

So there ends another blog post, what to do now?
Option 1: Tidy up before Jay gets home.
Option 2: Go get snacks from the corner shop namnam.
Option 3: Play Halo
Option 4: Read Halo

I will leave my choice a mystery

frosty: Singletasking

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, I’ve become increasingly concerned about my scatterbrained-ness. I find it hard to focus on a single task for a prolonged period of time: for example, I find it takes me far longer to get through a book, or even read a short passage of text, than it ever used to. I don’t listen to the other person when I’m having a conversation – or rather, I try to listen, but the information somehow always seems to pass through my brain without being stored anywhere. I’m not really present in the moment. My brain gets distracted very easily, and I’ll swear I hadn’t had that conversation with you. My comprehension of texts is perhaps worse than it’s ever been, too. Not all the time, but often, I have to concentrate quite hard in order to actually take in the details of what I’m reading if I want anything more than a cursory understanding. When using the computer at home, I never seem to do anything productive – just follow an endless cycle of checking my feed reader, my e-mail, Twitter, and flicking through my open tabs. Sure, I get things done, but slowly, and piecemeal. My concentration usually feels scattered, my focus divided, my brain like it’s trying to juggle too many balls/clubs/knives/porcupines at once.

The first time I noticed this really happening was after starting university. My arrival at uni coincided (I think) with my first really portable, useful laptop (an iBook G4) with real internet-wherever-I-was; with the rise of update services like Twitter; with the rise of tabbed browsing. More and more things calling for my attention at any given time, and an increasing number of easy distractions. I think taking a laptop into lectures was a big mistake. What with web browsing, instant messaging, and the computer society chat room, I’d often leave lectures not having a clue what we’d just been told about. Closer to exams, I’d be going over course notes and sample exam papers and come across topics that I was sure I’d never been taught. Of course, I had – I just hadn’t been paying much attention.

It’s a problem that feeds itself. Checking your e-mail or Twitter account and finding a new message or some new updates from your friends is very… moreish. Each new ‘thing’ you discover is like a reward for your brain – well done!, it says, you checked for a thing, and you found one!. And so you check again. And again, and again.

Modern technology makes it easier than ever to be distracted; for your focus to be divided. Everything is at your fingertips. The problem is that if you’re trying to write a report on the computer and your brain keeps diving off to skim through some websites, or check your e-mail, or see what your friends are up to, it leaves very little time to actually devote to what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. And every time you check on one of these things, and your brain gets that little reward, it spends more and more time looking at more and more things. Ergo, you don’t finish that report – never mind, I’ll finish it tomorrow. But tomorrow, you’re just as distracted. You feel bad for not finishing, but your brain can’t help seeking its little rewards. It becomes a habit. An addiction. So the downward spiral goes.

I think multitasking’s partly to blame for this detrimental effect. As much as we like to think we can work on lots of things at once, the fact is we’re simply not that good at it - and I don’t think it’s particularly good for us, either. It’s stressful, and it trains our brain that it’s okay to only focus on tasks for a short period of time before switching to something else - but that’s no way to get things done. Even when relaxing, my brain still thinks it should be doing other things. For years, I’ve been overloading myself with information and trying to do too many things at once. Without even noticing it, I’ve been training my brain to always look for opportunities to perform this kind of rapid context-switching, which has left me less and less able to focus on any one thing for any length of time.

And lately, it’s been getting to me. I want to read more (I used to love reading books and would devour them ever-so quickly); I want to write more; I want to create more. Every time I attempt to settle down to do one of these things, that crack-seeking part of my brain gets excited by the slightest thing, pulling my attention away from what I want to do. What was that noise? Have I done this? I should remember to do that. I wonder if I have any e-mails? Are there any updates to my iPhone apps? Has anyone posted on Twitter recently?

I’m genuinely concerned about the effect it’s going to have on my long-term ability to focus on tasks and on my memory. The change I’ve described thus-far has arisen over a fairly short 4 year period. Current research seems to be backing up this idea that multitasking may well be problematic. A recent CNN article covers a study in which multitaskers did worse on attention tests than non-multitaskers. The multitaskers were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and retained useless information in their short-term memory. Researchers aren’t sure whether these effects are reversible or not – I’m inclined to think they are, given enough time spent trying to correct them. So, I’m planning to do something about it and start trying to reverse the effects. It’s like realizing that for years I’ve been eating junk food on an alarmingly regular basis, and training my body to crave the taste of it. It’s time to throw away the Big Zinger Whopper, go on a diet, and start an exercise regime.

For starters, I’m going to be attempting to take up meditation on a daily basis. After all, applying single focus for a prolonged period of time is part of what mindfulness mediation is all about. Training my brain regularly in this way should help increase my mindfulness and focus when going about my day-to-day activities.

The goal of this kind of meditation is to bring an inner peace and a lasting happiness. Along the path to that goal, you get a lot of other benefits such as being more connected to your body, more aware of your feelings and emotions, and less caught by your thoughts and what’s called the “monkey mind” – a mind that won’t rest and that, over time, contributes to the kinds of anxiety and stress many of us feel each day. An Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation - Hivelogic

I’m also going to be trying to cut down on multitasking. If I’m doing something creative, or talking to somebody, or reading something, I want to give that my full attention. No aimless web browsing, or e-mail/Twitter/feed checking, whilst I’m trying to half-participate in a conversation with you. That doesn’t mean I can’t browse the web or read my feeds - but there’s a time and a place, and keeping these things distinct means that I should be more effective at whatever it is I’m doing. As with meditation, singletasking should help my ability to focus on a given task. It won’t be easy and it won’t be fast, but I guess it’s a bit like learning to run a marathon - take small, incremental steps, practice as often as you can, and you’ll get there.

After I began drafting this post I bought a book I’d read about online: The Power of Less. It may sound like a load more self-help nonsense, but it puts forward some useful ideas about applying meditation techniques to singletasking in your daily life. Simply focus on the task at hand – if you find your attention drawn away, be aware of what’s happening, breathe, and return your focus to the task. I’ve written the first draft of this blog post with no distractions whatsoever - just me and a text editor. I’ve written nearly 1000 words in about half an hour, because my attention has been on writing, and only on writing. Singletasking might just be the way forward.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

tri: 360 Achievements

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:22:59 +0000

So I’ve been planning a series of posts revolving around the games I like and have enjoyed playing the most in recent months. Games like CoD4, Assassins Creed, Prince of Persia and recently Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Unfortunately I waited a fair while before drafting posts of the first two mentioned and have rather lost the point of what I wanted to say about them. One thing that runs key through all of the above mentioned games though, are the Achievements that come with them. And that is another topic I quite fancied discussing.

I’ll start by saying that generally, I really quite like the achievement system. I wasn’t too sure if I would, being from a PC gaming background where achievements weren’t present, and owning consoles that never offered them (N64, Gamecube, etc.). I also remember how much I disliked them when I saw them suddenly pop up when I was playing Half Life 2: Episode 2 on the PC. As I said, PC games i had played before had never had them, and I was quite taken aback to find that when I squished a grub, I was only 499 away from squashing all of them in the game (may be more than 500, but you get the jist).

When I got my 360, my opinion did begin to change, and I think I can say with some certainty that I like them! However, there are some issues I have with them, and suggestions for making them better:

Why I like achievements.

Lately, I have become pretty addicted to achievement hunting, and currently have 3 games 100% completed. Now, I don’t do it to improve my gamerscore, since I don’t see my gamerscore as very important, it can be easy to obtain a high gamerscore by simply playing a lot of games (bought, rented, traded or borrowed). Achievements to me, represent a bit more, and I think are far more important than the gamerscore associated with them. For instance, I can show people that I have essentially, mastered a game. I have found every possible item there is to find, and performed every possible combo/fight style, completed every mission and completed every difficulty. And that to me is far more rewarding. I enjoy sometimes browsing through the achievement boards and seeing a game fully complete, or that I’m on my way.

A good example of this is from when I completed CoD4 and Assassins Creed. I enjoyed both games so much on my first play through, that I wanted to play again. CoD4 was brilliant to complete. I not only had to do the standard “Find the item” hunts, but also had to learn how to play the game again in order to complete the levels on Veteran. An activity that left me drained but satisfied - and not many games can do that! The last achievement I had to really work at was “Mile High Club”, where you had to complete the Epilogue plane mission on Veteran difficulty, meaning that not only was the AI better, the health lower and the bullets more dangerous, but I only had 60 seconds (as supposed to the 2:30 minutes on normal) to complete the mission in. The achievement frustrated the hell out of me, and I tried time and time again to do it, and the moment I did I was so happy. I really felt like I earned it, and with that achievement I essentially fully completed the game (I had some items left to find, but all the missions were complete).

Assassins Creed on the other hand, required two commitments: first I had to spend hours and hours searching for flags and Templars, hidden around the various cities, using check lists to make sure I found them all. This, was not very fun. The second commitment, for my final achievement, required playing the entire game again, in order to get “Conversationalist”. Due to the way the game saves, if you miss a single line of optional dialogue from the character, Lucy, then you will not get this achievement. Fortunately I did want to play the game again, but needless to say I was very disappointed when I first found this achievement.

The above are two very different examples of my experiences of completing two brilliant games. CoD really tried to make the achievements fun, or feel monumental in achievement. Shepherdnick even commented on how his veteran achievements really felt earned. Assassins Creed however, as good-a-game as I thought it was, really made the 100% completion journey boring as hell. I could only face searching for so many flags, completing an area before giving up for the night and doing something far more fun. Upon completing the flag hunts I didn’t feel joy, I didn’t feel satisfaction, I felt drained.

Prince of Persia is a very unique game, and one that I highly recommend. Achievement wise though, it really isn’t very difficult to get them all, you get your first by simply starting a new game. They were generally fun to get, but the main problem, every single icon in the achievement list is exactly the same!

Online v. Offline

You may have noticed that all the games I have completed have one thing in common, they have zero online achievements. This was my main reason for choosing to complete these three; after looking through the games I had, I decided that Creed would be the best to go for - I had done the majority and how hard could it be to get some flags?

I like that the achievements are offline though, and dislike seeing games in my list uncompleted simply because there are loads of them that need to be done online - especially when I don’t really want to play those games online. I was thinking about this, and thought that rather than keep all of them offline, since some people are bound to want to get online ones, wouldn’t it be good if the games achievements were split in the achievement lists? Two distinctly different sections on each achievement page to show offline and online. At least that way when browsing through,any offline gamers can feel content that they have completed the offline portion, at least, that’s what I think! Feel free to leave your own opinions on this matter.

When to achievement hunt/look for achievements?

The one downside to my achievement hunting was that it made me want to do it more. I fell into the trap of wanting to look at available achievements, sometimes before even starting a game. More often than not I would play the first few levels, quit for a break, and end up checking what achievements I already have, and what ones I could maybe get. I finally realised that this was affecting the enjoyment of my game however, somewhere in the back of my mind I would always be thinking of the achievement I read about, and when I can get it, is this the bad guy I can knock out this way? and so on.

As such I have tried to make more of an effort to avoid looking at the achievement lists until I have completed the game. I did this most recently in Batman, and I found myself enjoying the game far more. The achievements even made me smile when I got them, because I had no idea that doing a particular thing, would result in getting one.

This is a conversation I’ve had with James a few times recently. He finds it doesn’t affect his game experience very much and says he has often read up on the achievements before even getting games. I used to do this, but think after how fun Batman was, I’m gonna stick to only looking after I’ve finished the game.

(As a quick note, I don’t want to turn the notifications off, because I like it when they pop up, and generally, if they pop up, you know why. There’s something satisfying about seeing them. )

Keep it secret, keep it safe!

Finally I wanted to mention something that I’ve seen happening more and more - Secret Achievements. Generally, as in Ghostbusters, these are the story progression achievements. I quite like these sorts of secret ones since you don’t always have to wonder how you get them, because you will as you play the game. It means that even when tempted to look at the lists, you will come away none the wiser. I like this, and think it could be a cool feature to be able to hide the achievements until you have finished the game once through.

So, quite a long blog post, and hopefully something that you will have found interesting. How do you view the achievements? Do you like hunting for items, completing online ones, reading and getting them purposefully during your first play through?

As I’ve said, I really like them, they help me feel I’ve accomplished something and shows how much I have really enjoyed the game, often allowing me to prolong my time with it. However, I do think in some instances they can spoil the experience of a game -the amount of flags in Creed really was ridiculous! In addition I can feel, as with my first encounter during Half Life 2: Episode 2, that it can break me out of the game experience, another reminder that I am *just* playing a game. I quite enjoyed the experience I god from playing Batman, and think that is how, at least for the mean time, I will go about playing any new games that I get!

tobeon: Random Thought: Is it OK to be competitive?

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:51:00 +0000

I am as I am sure all of you know, very competitive which occasionally gets me frowns from some folk. This competitive streak runs through a lot of what I do, throughout my academic career I was very competitive with shepherdnick (every % counted!) and I am very competitive in my games (although sadly my game-playing skills do not match my competitive nature as no matter how much I “play to win” I inevitably lose). This mentality has followed me even in to the world of Geocaching as although I know that “the numbers don’t count” the fact that Trazer.W (someone I recently introduced to Geocaching) was rapidly gaining on my modest 26 finds filled me with dread! No way can I let him overtake me! The same goes for RicheJByrne, beechyboy, jwfrosty & Shepherdnick. RicheJByrne/Triard has had to remind me several times that Geocaching is not a competition (I can feel his distaste of my competitive nature even in his gtalk messages!).

You know what though? Being competitive is good! The friendly rivalry between me and Shepherdnick was the reason I got a First in Computer Science, I would not have worked nearly as hard if I didn’t have to keep up with him. It helped me get (and keep) each of my previous Jobs, it’s the reason I enjoy gaming, the reason I love ~~arguing~~ discussions and it is the reason I am going to keep on discovering as many new and exciting caches as quickly I can.

As I mentioned at the top, I have gotten more than a few frowns and scoldings about being “too competitive”. However I would argue that being competitive is not bad, but being unsporting. You must not cheat (obviously) and you must be HAPPY when you lose. You must remember that it is the competing itself that is fun. This does not mean that you don’t try as hard as you can to win as unless you “play to win” it’s not a real competition (and if it isn’t a real competition wheres the fun?). I should try to tone it down a bit when around those who get annoyed about it. However it is a big part of who I am so I don’t think I could ever get rid of that urge to compete and you know what? I wouldn’t want to.

Now I think with all this talk of competitions it is about time to start a new one, or at least restart an old one. I throw down the Blog-A-Week gauntlet to all you bloggers out there! Let it begin!

rollercow: She said yes!

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:00:00 +0000

I asked, she said yes!

Here: 50.6896,-4.7046

dez: Protecting my phone: Review of Zagg invisibleSHIELD

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:13:11 +0000

Before I even took delivery of my iPhone, I had bought a Sena Eléga leather case and an Xtand. This limited my choices for protecting the device from scratches when it is out of the case as neither accessory allows for much increase in the dimensions of the iPhone.

However, having clumsily put my iPod nano in the same pocket as my keys once and scratched the screen, I was keen to avoid a repeat of this with my iPhone. Admittedly, this is less likely given that I have a leather case for my phone and so would be unlikely to put it in my pocket. Nevertheless, there's always the risk of dropping the device.

Having seen Chris Pirillo's video about protecting your iPhone, and having looked around online, I decided to get myself an invisibleSHIELD. The manufacturers, Zagg, claim, as the name suggests, that the product is virtually invisible when applied to the device, it causes no extra bulk and that it comes with a lifetime guarantee with free replacement should the invisibleSHIELD get damaged. I regard all of these claims to be false - more on that later.

Applying the invisibleSHIELD

I placed my order with Fire Lounge on Amazon and was impressed that despite choosing standard delivery, the product arrived the following day. Following the instructions printed on the inside of the box, I applied the product to my iPhone.

My first problem was that despite carefully cleaning both the device and my hands, some dirt got stuck to the underside of the invisibleSHIELD being applied to the screen and I could do nothing to remove it. However, it did prove quite easy to apply evenly and the supplied Shield Spray made it easy to adjust and avoid fingerprints.

I was quite disappointed with the accuracy (or lack of it) with which the invisibleSHIELD had been cut. While it didn't foul any of the buttons or the camera, overall, the back piece was significantly smaller than I felt it should have been - I had lined the right-hand edge flush (looking from the front) with the corner of the metal band on the right-hand side and the other side was well over a millimetre short.

Once applied, the instructions recommend leaving the device switched off for 24 hours to ensure that any excess installation solution evaporates and that the shield has "set up" properly. I can't imagine that many users will heed this advice as they will want to get on with using their device! Indeed, Chris Pirillo didn't even bother switching his device off to install his screen protector. That wasn't an invisibleSHIELD though and didn't involve a solution being applied. My impatience got the better of me after a couple of hours so I turned it on.

Initially, I was fairly pleased with the results (although very annoyed about the dirt, which seems to be a fairly common problem with screen protectors) and felt less concerned about my phone being damaged. The curved corners of the back of the device presented a problem for Zagg in terms of how to make a flat piece of sticky-backed plastic fit a three-dimensional curve. Their solution was not that satisfactory to my mind as it left a fair amount of the corners unprotected and of course, the corners of any device are likely to take the most punishment.

The problems start

After the invisibleSHIELD had had a chance to dry properly, I started using my xtand and Sena case again. The first problem was that the extra fraction of a millimetre thickness that had been added to the front and back made the phone much harder to remove from the leather case. This was something that Sena had warned about and advised that over time, the leather would adjust to the size of the phone.

After about a week of use, the flaps that so inadequately protected the corners of the device started peeling back as a result of inserting and removing the iPhone from the xtand. I used the Shield Spray once again and carefully restuck them, but after another couple of weeks, it was quite clear that this wasn't going to work so I cut them off.

Gradually, I became more dissatisfied with the invisibleSHIELD. That dirt speck irritated me more, particularly as the lifetime free replacements don't cover dirt, which was also now beginning to collect at the edges and corners.

Likewise, the slightly tacky texture (which is advertised as a feature - "Improves grip") was getting on my nerves as there was more friction on the touchscreen and the Home button was now slightly soggy to press - the nice positive click it makes when naked is absorbed by the plastic covering the button.

As the invisibleSHIELD is made of a flexible sticky-backed plastic, it doesn't have the sheer glossy finish of the iPhone screen, which detracts from the visual appeal of the device. This is probably a personal taste thing, as it certainly does mask fingerprints better for longer than even the oleophobic coating of the device's screen.

I decided to investigate the option of the promised free replacement as I would be prepared to give it another try without the annoying dirt. It turns out that you have to give Zagg your credit card details in order to receive a replacement. Not only do you pay the postage for delivery, you initially pay the full price of a new invisibleSHIELD, which is then only refunded if you send back your existing shield at your own expense within 25 days. Zagg recommend you use recorded delivery to avoid the loss of the shield in the post. As I am in the UK and they are in the US, it would cost me more in postage than to simply buy a new invisibleSHIELD on Amazon.

I finally give up

I spoke to a number of other iPhone users, none of whom bother with screen protection. Indeed frosty, who has had an iPhone for over a year, doesn't even bother with a case for his phone. His phone has fallen down a staircase and come out of it unscratched and he reports that it is still in good condition. He also quoted another SUCS member whose task it was, when working at Nokia, to find out what it took to scratch an iPhone. Apparently, the only thing he managed to make a mark with was another iPhone's screen.

On that basis, I have decided to remove the invisibleSHIELD from my phone and will not be seeking a replacement. It seems screen protectors are just not necessary unless you intend to take a dremel to the thing.

welshbyte: Dear Laptop Vendors...

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:43:33 +0000

... my parents have set me the task of selecting a laptop for them to buy, to replace their ageing desktop machine. The time frame is fairly generous: early 2010. (At this point it may be useful to note that we live in the UK). Now, listen closely because here comes the tricky part. The desktop machine has been running Ubuntu for a few years, which means they want the new laptop to run Ubuntu. No ifs, no buts. That’s what they want. They’re happy with Ubuntu.

Reading about David Woodhouse’s painful adventures in laptop purchasing (and others’) left a sour taste in my mouth. I don’t want to subject my parents to a similar experience. That is, I have no interest in advising them to buy a laptop with Windows installed on it, only to tell them they’ll have to contact one or more companies to request a refund, forensically and photographically document the removal of Windows from the hard disk, threaten legal action when said refund doesn’t materialise and jump through the other flaming hoops involved in buying a laptop without paying for an unused copy of Windows.

The fact that my parents want Ubuntu does not necessarily mean that they want it preinstalled; it simply means that they do not want to have to pay for Windows in the first instance. Focus on that small-but-important detail.

So, laptop vendors of the UK, you have until next year to offer my parents a good customer experience.

[Link]

dez: First impressions of the iPhone 3G S

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:13:55 +0000

I’ve now had an iPhone 3G S for a little over a day and thought I’d share my first impressions.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the battery was pretty much fully charged out of the box and also how easy the keyboard is to type on even in portrait mode. Of course, practically, you are limited to single finger typing as you’re generally going to be holding the phone in your other hand. More on this later.

Once I went through the registration process and set up my 60 day MobileMe trial, I headed over to the App Store and started downloading. There were a few things I already knew I wanted - to complement applications already installed on my Mac Boo Pro - notably 1Password and Things. I also got the iTunes and Keynote remotes, iSSH and a free VNC client. As a Tetris addict, I also shelled out for the official version of that at £2.99.

At that point, having spent £16.05 on software, I decided to stop spending money and started looking for free apps that I would find useful.

I now have 63 icons on my home screens - so I’ve added 46 items, four of which are websites. There are a few that duplicate functionality - for example, I’m going to try out a few GPS tracking apps to find out which I prefer. There are still a few holes in my tool set though.

Medication tracking

I currently use On Time Rx on my Palm Zire 72 to keep track of all my medication and there’s a lot of it to keep track of. It’s a well-thought-out programme, which does nearly everything I need from it. Obviously, I won’t want to carry both my Palm and my iPhone around with me all the time, so I need to find a suitable replacement app on the iPhone.

One of the main reasons I didn’t want to get the previous incarnations of the iPhone was because of their inability to schedule notifications when the app concerned wasn’t running.

With Push Notifications, that problem has been solved, but it’s too early to expect a niche app to take advantage of them. Even so, there are already a few medication tracking apps out there, albeit without Push Notifications. I’m currently using a free app called iPills, which seems to be the best of a bad bunch. It tries to be clever with a graphical pillbox, with trays to show which tablets you’ve taken and which you’re yet to take. Unfortunately, it falls short in a number of respects. I take tablets at five different times during the day - 9am, 11am, 3pm, 8pm and 11pm. However, iPills only provides four trays - “Any Time”, Morning, Afternoon and Evening so it’s less than ideal. With seven different tablet types in the Morning and Evening trays, it’s quite fiddly to select the right tablet to mark as having been taken. iPills provides no system to provide alarms to remind you to take medication. They suggest you create iCal events to do that instead.

As well as reminding me when to take my tablets, On Time Rx also provides detailed logging and stock control. iPills does logging of a sort, but doesn’t record the time at which you took the tablets, which makes it worthless. There is no stock control system, so you have no idea how many days’ worth of tablets you have left. I get my tablets prescribed at approximately three-monthly intervals so frequently have several hundred tablets of a given type in stock.

I may well end up writing my own iPhone app to do medication tracking properly.

iPhone shortcomings

While iPhone OS 3.0 clearly brings a great number of improvements and some new features and the 3G S is certainly very nice hardware, there are still a number of areas where Apple could do better.

The biggest of the shortcomings from my point of view is the lack of support for Bluetooth keyboards. Both my Palm Zire 72 and Nokia 770 support Bluetooth keyboards (although admittedly the Palm has been rather temperamental at times) and this makes them vastly more useful. On a number of occasions, I have used my 770 to take notes at meetings. Fundamentally, however clever you get with onscreen or pull-out keyboards on mobile devices - and the keyboard on the iPhone is nice - they’re always going to be too small to type on properly. My folding Bluetooth keyboard (a Dell badged Think Outside Keyboard) provides almost full-sized keys and is easy to type on. I’m probably slightly slower typing on it than I would be on a normal keyboard, but there’s not a lot in it. Being able to use it with my iPhone would effectively turn it into the smallest NetBook going!

As @mezzoblue pointed out on Twitter this evening, the current iPhone is roughly the same spec as a laptop was in 2000 - 256MB RAM, 30GB hard drive and a 600MHz processor. Add a keyboard to it and it becomes as useful as that laptop. It’s hard to see why Apple would want to deny people this.

frosty: OS X on a Dell Mini 9

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

These days, my primary computer is a 15” MacBook Pro. It’s an amazing machine, but sometimes those 15” can be a little unwieldy (yes, that’s what she said).

Apple used to make a small, very portable laptop: the 12” PowerBook, which was unfortunately retired during Apple’s switch to the Intel platform. However, the transition did introduce the potential ability to run Mac OS X natively on non-Apple hardware. Whilst Apple don’t (currently) make their own netbook¹, a big community has sprung up around running OS X on non-Apple netbooks. I should note from the outset that installing OS X on non-Apple hardware potentially violates the OS X EULA. If you’re going to do this, in the very least ensure you own a legal copy of Mac OS X Leopard.

The current netbook au jour is the Dell Mini 9. BoingBoing’s compatibility list shows it as the only device that currently supports every piece of hardware² under OS X. And it does.

I bit the bullet and bought a Mini 9, which finally turned up a couple of weeks ago. It has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM (user upgradable to 2GB), and a 16GB SSD drive. I ordered it with Ubuntu pre-installed - and let me tell you, this thing is fast. Ubuntu boot time was a respectable 30 seconds, and the user interface felt extremely responsive. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen OpenOffice load so quickly. I’ll go as far as to say that out-of-the-box, this was the best experience I’ve ever had with Ubuntu - things just worked, which has rarely been the case for me with desktop Linux before. I put an SD card in the Mini 9’s SD reader, and it instantly mounted on the desktop; I plugged an external monitor into the Mini 9’s VGA port, opened the display settings, and was able to rearrange the monitors / change resolutions / etc; Flash in the browser worked without needing to install or fiddle with anything; heck, even wifi just worked. If you’re not comfortable with sticking OS X on there, the Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu is a lovely machine.

So, back to OS X. Aside from a few minor niggles due to my hardware setup³, installation was a breeze. This is one of the things that makes the Mini 9 such an attractive proposition as a Mac netbook - all of the wrinkles have been ironed out of the process by the clever group of people over at http://mydellmini.com. I won’t re-iterate the process in full here (I followed this guide), but in short it’s a case of:

Create a DellMiniBoot boot disc (either CD or USB) and boot from it.
Swap the disc with the Leopard installation DVD and tell DellMiniBoot to boot it.
Install Leopard.
When prompted to reboot, do so using the DellMiniBoot disc, and tell it to boot from your hard drive.
Once you’re in OS X, run the DellEFI application to install the fixes that’ll make sure everything works ok.
If you want two-finger trackpad scrolling, you’ll want to install these trackpad drivers.

It’s fairly straightforward, as long as you follow the guide. I had the odd problem crop up now and again, but a quick Googling saw me through - in particular, when rebooting after the installation, I had to boot into safe mode (using the -f flag) so I could get all the way through the post-install setup process. Other than that, it was pretty smooth.

The Mini 9 runs OS X beautifully. I’ve been using the Mini 9 a lot over the last 2 weeks and haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked.

Things I like

Tiny and light.
This is überportable. I’ve been chucking it into my work bag and taking it to the office with me every day. By comparison, I’ve taken my MBP in twice in the last 6 months because it’s just a hassle.
Silent.
Fast. Very fast.
Fullscreen HD flash video gets a bit stuttery, but hey, this is a netbook. Streaming 480p H.264 movie trailers works brilliantly, however.
Convenient.
For small tasks around the house, taking to work, to a friend’s house, going home for the weekend, surfing in bed, and assorted other scenarios, this is a brilliant solution.
A built-in SD card reader.
Works flawlessly, and is extremely useful.
Cute.
C’mon, look at it! It’s tiny!

Issues

Somewhat cramped keyboard on the right side.
For some reason, our UK keyboard seems to have had an extra key squeezed into each row, meaning that the keyboard is a little more cramped than the US one. It took a little adjusting to - the tiny right-hand shift key, which is the one I usually use, was quite easy to miss at first.
Screen size is a limitation in some situations, although for what I’m using it for it’s generally fine.
I’ve had one occasion where the mouse didn’t work properly after waking, and one or two other assorted issues where it hasn’t-quite-woken-up-properly.
Very very occasionally, it doesn’t boot (the spinner doesn’t appear on the boot screen). If that’s the case, just turn it off and on again.

One final point it may be worth making is that this is not a replacement for a full-size Mac. This is a netbook, and a compliment to an existing machine - don’t go thinking you’ll get the same experience you will from a full-sized MacBook, because you won’t. Rumours are that Apple may be creating their own netbook-like device to be introduced later this year. Time will tell whether this is true or not - I’d be very much interested to see Apple’s take on the whole netbook thing.

I was going to finish off by filming a walkthrough showing how well things run on the Mini 9, but Mr Andy Ihnatko does a sterling job of it himself:

Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh Test Drive from Andy Ihnatko on Vimeo

There’s the MacBook Air, of course, but that’s thin - whereas the most important factor for portability in my opinion is width and depth. A Macbook Air, whilst lighter, takes up essentially the same amount of space as a normal MacBook - you’d still need a > 13” bag.
↩
Note that their caveat beneath the compatibility table is incorrect - you don’t need a replacement SSD for sleep to work. Just make sure you get a 16GB or bigger SSD in it. 8GB just doesn’t cut the mustard.
↩
You need an external DVD drive to load the Leopard installation DVD, and I was using an internal IDE DVD drive with an IDE -> USB convertor. The Mini 9 didn’t want to boot from this, though - so I had to copy the Leopard DVD image to an external hard drive, and boot from that.
↩

tri: So they all said

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:38:38 +0000

On Friday, one of my favourite shows ended, Battlestar Galactica. I wanted to write something about it, as there has never before been a show that has made me feel such a strong connection to the characters, the morals or the story that was told. So before reading, I warn you that there are spoilers throughout, and that this will only interest those of you who have seen the show, and the finale. EDIT: To alleviate confusion: May I also add that this isn’t indepth analysis of the finale, just about the show and how it made me feel, and how I felt throughout watching it, there were things I liked, and thats mainly what I talk about here, in another post I will analyse it more in depth, and talk about the things I didn’t like, or the points I mention bellow in more depth. However, there is a nice discussion going on in the comments section!

There’s only one word I can use to describe the finale, Incredible. I can’t think of anything better to say, or that sums it up more succinctly. Everything I could have hoped for to be answered was, and in my opinion, in the best way it possibly could have been. It seems silly to be talking about a television show in such a deep and affectionate way, but thats how it made me feel. Every episode, even the worst of them, had characters I loved, and cared about. I can recall many occasions where I was sat on the edge of my seat, completely taken aback or on edge about who was killed, or who may be killed off at any moment. No other show has come close to making me feel that rush of anxiety and fear that I felt whilst watching the season 4 two parter, The Oath and Blood on the Scales (both about a mutiny carried out by a key character, who has always been on the “right” side). I watched the second episode with James and Hannah, and the three of us couldn’t stop “whooping” and cheering, and hiding behind things, wondering if anything may go wrong, and if Adama would be killed. Roslyn’s speech in that episode, where she refuses to break down and give in still gives me chills, and was one of the most amazing moments I have ever seen, on stage or screen:

“NO! Not now… not ever. Do you hear me! I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you. I swear it! I’m coming for all of you!“

The delivery was amazing, and heart felt. It was just…great. And that’s the other side to the show, where as I said, I would always worry about who may be killed next, I also longed for the moments of happiness, and cherished the moments where the characters got together, and when the happy times flourished. The show was rife with dry wit and humour, deep characters, heart felt sentiments, morals, real life situations, real life connections and so on… Everything about the characters was, for want of a better word, real. There’s so much to discuss, the music, the favourite scenes, the action, the special effects, etc, and that’s for another entry.

In this entry I just wanted to acknowledge how fraking awesome the show was and to emphasise how much I am going to miss it.

So onto the finale, again, one of the best finale’s I have ever seen, another “on the edge of your seat” moments, and just incredible. All the clues paid off, all the hinted at iota’s of information expanded and explained, or left so open to interpretation that it didn’t feel like a cheat, or that the writers had no idea what to do, instead it felt that that was precisely the only way it could have happened. For example, Kara’s disappearance, and the Head Baltar/Six revelations, I wasn’t asking for any more detail than was given, and am happy to apply my own interpretation to it, the show didn’t force you to accept they were angels, or demons, related to God as we know it, but to assume that they were working for some higher power, brilliant.

The action scenes were immense, the humour brilliant, the story incredible and the characters, fantastic, and of course, heartbreaking. I, along with some others I watched with, couldn’t hold back the tears when Roslyn finally passed away. ”For crying out loud, it’s a television show!” I was shouting in my head, but it made no difference, so strongly I felt about those characters that I found those moments of her and Adama together until the end amazing, and so totally heartbreaking that I almost didn’t want to watch.

I can’t get over how it ended, and it stayed with me for the last few days. I finally saw it on Monday night, and found it so difficult to take everything in, my brain just couldn’t process it all. It all tied in so well, the opera house payoff, the Kara Thrace payoff, and the final tie in with mitochondrial eve, brilliant.

I can’t help but feel a bit sad though, and wish there was another future glance, even 10 years, or 20 in the future, showing everyone gathered at Adama’s cabin, which he will have named Laura, eating food, catching up, just to know that at least they all saw each other again once. I really hope the separate ways they went weren’t for good, and hold onto that hope that they saw each other again, Lee, Saul and Adama at least. Again, it’s only a TV show, but I can’t express how much I feel for these characters, or convey how awesome the show was.

I think that’s enough for now, I will probably post a more constructive, and specific blog about the finale after I rewatch it.

For now, good bye Old Girl!

pwb: Excess packaging

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:43:16 +0000

I got a package from Dabs today:

You'd think I must have ordered something pretty big, right? Think again:

That's a desktop microphone and a USB sound card. If they'd packaged them correctly they could have just posted them through the letterbox!

Thankfully this isn't as bad as Dez's package from Scan which filled a box about that size with mostly bubble wrap, the payload being a 2GB SD card. But it still defies common sense.

welshbyte: The Soldier

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:25:13 +0000

There was nothing for her here. Past the template-punched houses she trudged, the old soldier staring through the same grey pavement. She had taken the bullet, and somehow the world was more silent now. A gust of wind blew and corrected her posture like a loyal friend. She stopped and leaned into the air, eyes softly shut. The air caressed and cradled her body as it passed her by. She smiled. It had whispered its secret to her. Arms straight at her sides, she caught the air and rose into it: the baby on Mother’s shoulder, high above it all.

This is in reply to Scott’s drabble meme blog entry. I’m not sure I completely understand the rules but the ones I’ve read so far have been good reads so I thought I’d have a go, too.

[Link]

pwb: What’s Twitter for?

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:33:35 +0000

Discounting the last week, my last blog post was on 24 October, then 3 July, then 18 April. Prior to that I was posting a couple of times a month. So what happened to my blog in 2008?

I started using Twitter.

Twitter has been getting some mainstream press lately, mostly though celebrities using it — especially Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. As with any new communication medium people are asking: what exactly is it good for? On the Twitter website the synopsis is: "What are you doing?" Well, that doesn't quite describe how I use it. Here's what I use it for.

I use Twitter for semi-realtime conversations.

It may have started out as "What are you doing?" but really, that's just the starting point. Sometimes you really do say what you're doing and if your friends find it interesting, they can comment on it. And not only what you're doing — what you're reading and thinking too. I made only two "QOTD" blog posts last year because I was using Twitter to point these out instead.

Using TwitterFox, which makes my followings instantly available, it's more immediate than a blog and its comments which you have to dive into a feed reader to follow. It's also more uniform than blogs-with-comments, in the sense that the original message and its replies have the same status — they are both just tweets, whereas a blog post is somehow more important than the comments attached to it.

But at the same time it's less immediate than, say, Milliways, or IM. There was a gaping hole between realtime chat and blogging in terms of immediacy and Twitter fills that gap, which I think is why it's so popular. Nobody really wants to know what you are doing every minute of the day and of course letting them know can be dangerous. But it's for sparking discussion and carrying it on, in a way that's in the present yet not demanding that you pay constant attention.

stringfellow: Shtaggle 1.2.1

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:49:22 +0000

With the encouragement of a large German following, and news of the inclusion of Shtaggle on the next MACup magazine cover CD, I present version 1.2.1…

WITH POWER PC SUPPORT!

It isn’t as functional as the Intel version (the transport progress bar doesn’t work properly.) but it does the task it is required to do - tag sh..music.

For those that don’t know, Shtaggle is a music tagging app for OS X, with help from the last.fm community. It also gets lyrics (from lyricwiki.org).

In this version there is also support for Spotify, though limited, and better integration with Last.FM’s web services - including syncronising your tags from last.fm back to your library, so they match up in both places (no tags are deleted, only appended).

Download it here (or Direct link)

Oh, and, if you can, please do blog this or mention it in a post sometime - I’d appreciate the exposure!

-Steve

stringfellow: Pinax prettiness

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:27:20 +0000

Update on gardening: there is a *lot* of mint root in that little patch… all went well though, and Chris and I fashioned a compost heap out of rubble from the building of our wall. Its very homebrew.

Got some seeds and pots yesterday, so growage should soon commence.

Pinax Prettiness you ask? Well yes, yes indeed. Pinax is a sort of package I guess that is built on the Django project. Its a collection of Django apps which together make an ‘out of the box’ social site. Its what I built http://badlist.co.uk on (but was sorta bodged a little bit because I was finding my way around it) and it is now what I have built the new-look http://synfinity.net on.

It was far too easy.

My thought process went “Hm I could do with a repo for coursework PDFs (for comparative analysis with coursemates) and a place to sort of ’show off’ some bits (CV etc)…”

Django went “How would you like to do that really fast? Here’s a framework for you to store things and manipulate them. Files? Yeah we can do that. Files in different subjects? Yeah, no worries.”

Pinax went “Wanna be able to manage all that really quickly and not worry about the user-login-maintainence cruft? Oh I got some nice apps here if you wanna feed in all your media feeds too..? Oh your coursemates want to upload their work too? Yeah thats cool, I got some funky user profile things built in. Don’t worry about templating too much, I’ve got a nice standard styled template that looks pretty awesome. Change the logo if you like.”

jQuery went “Doc viewers? Don’t do it statically! Here, bosh a bit of AJAX in this page… yeah, then a little nav bar (oi Django, give us a hand!). Sweet, there we go. Oh, I got some rounded edges if you’d like that?”

Steve went “HOLY FUNK! It is done.”

2 to 3 days… could have been done quicker but for interruptions and hosting woes. Pinax is perfect.
Not to mention the creator and co-conspirator (’jtauber’ (James Tauber) and ‘brosner’ (Brian Rosner) respectively) are awesome, dedicated, bright, friendly, helpful… thats 5 characteristics you dont usually find together in the geek world… This project will go far and fast.

-S

PS - if anyone would like a demo/explore of Pinax I would be happy to acquaint you with it.
PPS - if anyone wants a project doing FOR them, and has a little cash to throw at me, I’ll do it for them!

This blog post was brought to you by Welti Productions.

talyn256: Stream of Consciousness

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:08:25 +0000

Looking through old files and found this. Damn I was smart back then - I wonder what happened..

----------------------------------

Earth. The blue planet. Third rock from the sun. Our home. A speck of dust in an unfathomable universe. And yet, to us, the Earth is an area far too vast and intricate to ever fully comprehend. And beyond that still, the borders of our lands and towns and villages. People live out their entire lives, rarely straying from their familiar territory. Many seem afraid of what may lie out there. Out beyond the Starbucks and McDonald's, the pubs and clubs, the corner off licenses and greasy fish and chip shops, past the parks and playing fields, the hedges and the streams, beyond the hills, valleys, and lakes, mountains, deserts, forests, oceans. Past the limits of our small and humble homeworld and into the infinity of the unknown.

The sheer size, scale and grandeur of the universe is awe-inspiring, the rugged and untamed beauty of our planet is breathtaking, the ingenuity and splendour of nature itself incomprehensibly spectacular. And yet, how many people stop and look and listen? And realise the beauty of existence? The preferibility of presence as opposed to absence? The magic of light, dark, empty, full, good and bad?

Life, examined closely, is a fine-tuned ballet of super complex mathematical precision and programming. It can be explained quite simply. You would, probably, associate biology with life. Right? A living being can be described as a biological entity of some kind, be it animal, plant or microbe. But what is biology? Merely a fine balance of chemicals, reacting in a manner which metabolises and generates electrical energy in such an intricate fashion that it forms self-aware, self-replicating units of life. And if we examine that chemistry under the microscope, we see that each atom is comprised of energy, manifested in condensed form. Chemistry is, to all intents, a means of describing the physical behaviour of matter. Chemistry is a level above physics. And physics, of course, is maths. Quantities changing, shifting and altering according to algorithms. Life is bound by mathematical precision. Matter behaves according to fundamental universal principles in the real world, much as it does in that of a computer game. But what is outside our box? How did the laws that we take for granted come to pass?

As human beings, we are all wrapped up in our own tailor-made universes. Too busy to sit and contemplate the obsurdity of the cosmos, to indulge in unadulterated thought and speculation. I wonder why we're here. All cogs spinning in a universal machine. But to any higher purpose? Surely this race of bizarre creatures serves no useful function? Are we here just for the hell of it?

I wonder if I'll ever get the answers I seek to my questions. But I say this now. I am very much afraid of death. And am dreading the day that I draw my last breath. Consciousness is the single most fascinating thing I know and I cannot comprehend the lack of comprehension that the lack of life and consciousness would bring.

But my end looms, many many horizons away. I try not to think about the end but it often returns to plague my thoughts. Death is inevitable. My memories and awareness seemed to fade in as I aged from birth to my present age of 18. Will my thoughts fade out similarly until I'm completely mentally deconstructed? Or is there a robust fundamental element comprising my being which exists in an untangible format long after the death and decomposition of my body?

I will probably never know... And so I believe I should live out each day of my life, doing my best to absorb all I can from this world before the timer runs out. To experience as much of life as possible before it's too late. To take more risks and have more fun, to live life in happiness, laughing and smiling, singing and dancing, running and jumping. A brilliant bouncing ball of appreciation, love, compassion and happiness.

Election 2009: Nominations Open!

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:19:49 +0000

Hi everybody, its that time of year again!

The nominations are for:

President: Figurehead of the Society, and general administration.

Treasurer: Deals with the Society's accounts, and general financial administration.

Secretary: Deals with paperwork, and takes minutes during meetings.

Publicity Officer: Deals with posters and other publicity materials, and generally publicises the Society

Nominees must have at least two nominations (one of which can be yourself).

Full election rules are section 6.4 of the constitution.

Nominations close at 12 noon on Friday 27th November.

talyn256: America #4

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:01:46 +0000

I landed in Florida in the dead of night amidst a wild spring storm. The plane sailed onto the runway in a cloud of spray and mist and I found myself in Tampa awaiting a taxi.

The journey in via Houston had been fun. West Texas is absolutely _absolutely_ vast. Heading East from Santa Ana over the mountains, the landscape swiftly transformed into a pale, yellow smear of featureless and barren plains, interrupted occasionally by a lonely road cutting straight through the empty space. These vast horizons persisted for hours as we hopped across Arizona and New Mexico to the Texas border.

A dusty city materialised below. I asked the friendly flight attendant whereabouts we were. El Paso. I smiled and enjoyed the view of this desert city beneath, glad to see the welcoming signs of life amidst the emptiness. The attendant and I shared a moment as a granddaughter tenderly helped her centenarian grandfather through the plane.

"Man, what a sweet kid."
"Yeah..."

I smiled and sipped my complimentary Coke. US soft drinks have the dubious pleasure of being flavoured by the controversial high-fructose corn syrup. This sticky goop is a main ingredient in many American sweets and is well known for causing and contributing to health problems such as diabetes and obesity. Combined with bucket sized portions and the health issues that plague the world's wealthiest nation are suddenly less puzzling. And the free refills policy across the nation can't help much either.

Houston airport was a stampede of multi-chinned entities, bumbling about between gates and terminals. A charismatic crew of surly people carrier drivers whisked about the corridors, yelling at anyone in their paths.

"Beep beep!" barked a portentous gentleman as he encouraged me out of the way.

Many hours later, I awoke in my hotel in Channelside, Tampa. The rough weather of the previous night had swept away and the air was a warm caress of sunlight and humidity.

I explored the surrounding area in the inquisitive fashion that befits me. The weekend's highlight was definitely the Florida Aquarium. An awesome array of fish, birds, mammals and reptiles devoured my morning, follow by an afternoon whizzing around Tampa Bay watching dolphins.

Streamlined shapes slipped and sluiced and raced, splashed and spluttered into foamy depths. With over 400 Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins in Tampa Bay alone, spotting these beautiful creatures held no difficulty.

I smiled and realised I had no idea what I'd done the previous weekend. Whatever it was, it certainly didn't involve dolphins. Refreshed, invigorated and happy, I returned to my hotel and investigated the possibility of refreshments.

davea: Background Apps on the iPhone

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:03:56 +0000

The iPhone 2.0 software was recently released, and with it came the ability for users to download native apps (i.e., not web sites) directly to their phones from within the iPhone UI or via iTunes. Developers (anyone who pays Apple 59GBP for the privilege) can then write their own apps and have them available for purchase in the App Store.

One limitation of the Apple-sanctioned SDK is that only one application is allowed to be running at a time. This presents a problem for apps such as IM clients, music players and other programs whose functionality relies on being able to run in the background. Another example (courtesy of James) would be an app that takes advantage of the iPhone 3G's GPS chip to create a log of all the places you visit.

However, there is a neat trick that I discovered: your app will only get terminated if you switch away from it, and hitting the iPhone's power button while your app is in the foreground doesn't count as switching away. The upshot of this is you can create apps which continue to run while the iPhone is in your pocket - perfect for the GPS example.

Achieving this is as simple as implementing two methods in your UIApplication delegate - applicationWillResignActive: and applicationDidBecomeActive:. Here's a simple example to demonstrate the effect.

In your UIApplication delegate header file, add a new ivar: BOOL activeApp. Then, in your implementation, add the following three methods:

- (void)applicationWillResignActive:(UIApplication *)application {
	NSLog(@"resigning active status...");
	activeApp = NO;
	[self performSelector:@selector(sayHello) withObject:nil afterDelay:1.0];
}


- (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(UIApplication *)application {
	NSLog(@"becoming the active app...");
	activeApp = YES;
}

- (void)sayHello
{
	NSLog(@"Hello!");
	if (!activeApp)
		[self performSelector:@selector(sayHello) withObject:nil afterDelay:1.0];
}

Then run the app on your iPhone, hit the power button, and watch the log fill with pointless but oh-so-cool messages.

Of course, when the phone is put into standby mode by the user the expectation is that barely any juice will be drained from the battery, so it's a good idea for your app to reflect this. Indeed, you can make a big difference by halting your updating of the UI; the user isn't going to see it when the screen is turned off.

This isn't a perfect method, and won't be helpful in situations where the user wants to do other things with their phone while your app continues to run. However it might come in handy for certain scenarios.

wedge: The Five Best Comedy _____ Ever

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:52:16 +0000

In the unique style of the top five list, I proudly present The Five Best Comedy Instruments Ever:

1. The bagpipes

2. The tuba (even the name is funny!)

3. Er, drums? ("what do you call a guy who hangs around with a band? The drummer." Actually, all those jokes are about the man, not the instrument...)

4. The flute (I always hated American Pie. I think it was because they forgot to hire a writer.)

5. Sousaphone (like a tuba, but sillier. Actually, shouldn't this be higher up than the tuba if that were the case? Curse you, relentless one track mind!)

Next up, the The Five Best Comedy Fruit Ever:

1. The banana (phallic. Also slippery)

2. The melon (especially in pairs)

3. The raspberry (Monty Python know their stuff)

5. The grapefruit (as do Morecambe and Wise. Also, I guess you could have a pair like melons)

5. The lemon, I guess? (Sometimes people make funny faces when they eat lemons... Ok, so it's a stretch. Man, this top five list thing is hard...)

And now, the Five Best Comedy Cars Ever:

1. The Skoda

2. Um, pink limousine? (Actually, I think that one has migrated from the Five Best Gay Comedy Cars Ever list)

3. Er, the Skoda again. (it's still funny, though, right?)

4. F1 cars (not actually very funny. Also, people have died driving them, which if you think about it is more tragic than comedic... yet, still funnier than...)

5. Clown cars (also tragic)

Er. The Five Best Comedy Dinosaurs Ever: (honestly, who is coming up with these ludicrous categories?)

1. Tyrannosaurus Rex (hehe, little stubby arms are funny)

2. Diplodocus (king of dinosaur stand-up. Inexplicably.)

3. Stegosaurus (funny plates are all funny)

4. Archaeopteryx (funny name. Funny looking. Negative points for possibly not really being a dinosaur.)

5. Those dinosaurs from Dinosaur Comics (is the comedy inherent to the beasts themselves or is it just the writing? Who knows?)

The Five Best Comedy Rainbows Ever: (what the fuck? Er, ok then. Here goes:)

1. Single Rainbow (Hilarious)

2. Double Rainbow (Doubly hilarious. Also inexplicably further down the list)

3. Bifrost Bridge (not hilarious. On the plus side, actually a rainbow, unlike...)

4. Dylan Moran (Hilarious)

5. My Sandman collection, which has colours on which are kinda rainbowy when they're all together. (Tragi-comic. No pun intended.)

grant: Vroooommm!!!!

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:08:35 +0000

For all those people with those magical things called iPhones and iPod touches, you HAVE to check out Raging Thunder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrO65-jperQ

It's available to download from the installer app. It's bloody hard to get used to because you have to steer by tilting the iPod, and you can't slow down so if you get a boost you're almost certain to crash. I'm very impressed with the graphics though.

I stumbled upon it because I was researching openGL and the graphics in the game are generated with it.

davea: Five of my Favourite Video Games

Tue, 27 May 2008 16:17:24 +0000

In response to James's meme, I thought I'd join in the fun and share a few of my favourite games. So, in no particular order, here are five games everybody should experience at least once in their lives.

Lander

Lander is, I believe, the first game I ever played. Calling it a game is a bit of a misnomer, perhaps, as it was really just a tech demo that was put together to show off the graphical prowess of the Acorn Archimedes. However, trying to explain that to my 8-year old self would have been a hard task, given the sheer amount of joy I got out of flying this little space ship around a rough-and-ready 3D terrain and blowing up trees and buildings. The game was notoriously difficult to control - you tilted the craft with the mouse and engaged the underbelly thruster with the middle mouse button, but the slightest twitch in the wrong direction or misjudged boost would send you crashing to the ground - but once mastery was achieved, you would be the envy of your friends who looked on in awe (silently hoping that you'd crash soon so they could have a turn).

Grand Theft Auto IV

Moving forward a decade and a bit, this is perhaps an obvious choice but the GTA series are all fantastically well-executed, IV especially so. I've always been a PC gamer, but I couldn't help but join the console crowd when this was released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 without a release date for the PC version anywhere on the horizon. The tipping point came when I realised I'd have to spend about the same to upgrade my PC to be able to play this game as it cost in a 360 bundle deal from Play, so I took the plunge.

There's not a lot I can say about this game that hasn't already been put far more eloquently by others, and a Metacritic score of 98 (at the time of writing) speaks for itself.

Crystal Caves/Commander Keen

Putting two games together is perhaps cheating a little, but they're so tightly intertwined in my memory that separating them wouldn't be right. Both old platformers, both brilliant fun and both a great way to introduce my 8-year old self to 'proper' gaming. Many an hour was spent staring at the screen whilst my characters ran around collecting crystals, power-ups, jumping on bad guys and completely failing to understand the more intricate plot twists and subtle humour intended for the game's more grown-up audience.

In some ways, these games were more than mere entertainment, they were my introduction to computers and how they worked. cd, diring my way around the floppy disks' directory structure and tweaking settings in the games' configuration files piqued my interest in how it all worked behind the scenes, and it was only a couple of years later that I was writing my own programs in GW-BASIC.

Half-Life 2

No 'best games evar!' list would be complete without a nod to the epic created by Valve Software and its subsequent episodes. The original Half-Life was a phenomenal game so of course all eyes were on Valve to come up with something that surpassed that game's greatness. Of course, those geniuses pulled it off with aplomb. Never a dull moment in the game, and 3.5 years later the game looks fantastic as ever.

The deathmatch component, while taking a little longer to appear than people had hoped, is an absolute blast, and cutting people down by launching office furniture or broken toilet bowls at them never fails to bring a huge grin to my face.

Starcraft

Warcraft II was a fantastic game, the multiplayer especially, but Starcraft improved upon it in just about every way possible. I'll admit that I never really got into the single player mode, but that was purely because I spent so many hours playing multiplayer with friends. It came along at just the right time - all my friends had PCs capable of playing the game, and we were at the age when there was nothing more exciting than congregating at one house and spending all weekend playing the game across a hastily-cobbled together LAN. Here's hoping Starcraft II is able to live up to the reputation of its predecessor (all signs point to 'yes', it seems).

Next, I tag Steve to share his list with us all.

wedge: The Five Best Video Games Ever

Mon, 26 May 2008 17:59:20 +0000

Sometimes I see a bandwagon and some people jumping on it. Oftentimes, I jump on it too and we roll on to our destination, like an enormous, beautiful katamari. This is one of those times.

I'm rating the following games based on a few things: obviously graphical quality will only be worse the further into the past you go, so I'll try and rate them as they appeared at the time. Equally, they'll be rated partially on the influence they had on the games that followed them. I'm trying to avoid personal preference, so my list of my Five Favourite Video Games Ever would be different to this one. I'm obviously not going to include anything I've not played, that would be silly. I'm not keeping spoilers out of these, the most recent one came out around eight years ago and you've no excuse for never having played any of them. I'm only reviewing the games as they appeared on their primary system (i.e. for the first time), no GBA ports dated a couple of years later nor things appearing on the Wii virtual console.

With all that said, my own opinions do move back and forth a bit, it all depends on my mood. A bit like asking which my five favourite bands are. If I ever get around to playing GTA: IV then that might make this list. Spore too, depending a bit on what it's like. Anyway, enough equivocating, here's game number five.

5. Planescape: Torment (1999) Metacritic score: 91

You begin the game as a heavily scarred man, who knows nothing of his identity, waking up in a mortuary; your only companion, a sarcastic floating skull. Things get stranger from there. You discover you're immortal and are haunted by a question: "what can change the nature of a man?" Never before or since have I felt like every action I took had a consequence, for good or evil; law or chaos. The NPCs you can have in your party are a strange but massively compelling group. Some of the other people you meet are even more so. Highlights include challenging a rather arrogant preacher to a suicide-off (which, unsurprisingly and hilariously, you win.) and debating with a man until you convince him he does not exist. At which point he stops. The setting is a far cry from your standard D&D with Sigil, city of doors, an incredible place filled with different factions vying for control. Your group even finds itself in the middle of the Blood War on Baator and later in the Abyss at one point. The script is unparalleled, probably more dialogue than in any other game I've ever played and every single line worth reading. The very greatest thing about it? The name. Planescape is only the setting, as it were, the actual game's name is 'Torment', the one thing that drives every single character in it. Vital for heavily influencing Baldur's Gate and its sequel, which would take the importance of NPCs in your party to an even greater level, although few of them would be as cool and individual as Fall-From-Grace, Morte, Nordom, Ignus, Anna et al.

4. Super Mario 64 (1996 Japan/US, 1997 Europe) Metacritic score: 94

The level design is unbelievable. The graphics, for the time, were unbelievable. The sheer level of exploration required to get all 120 stars is unbelievable. The camera was innovative and having complete control over it was unbelievable. The entire damned game is pretty freaking unbelievable. Ok, so it lacks a bit in terms of the storyline, which is why the last few games beat it to the top, but this game did so much for the 3d platformer as a genre, I can't even begin to describe it. Oh, and the last ingredient? A healthy dose of fun. Few other games are more fun to simply jump into and go and grab a random star. This game showed the true power of the N64 and made it the must-have system (unless you preferred the Playstation, which I heard was good too). This game's existence was directly responsible for dozens of others, including the recent Super Mario Galaxy and the next one on the list.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) Metacritic score: 99

If Super Mario 64 gave some indications of what the N64 could do, then this game was the one to really let loose with everything it had. Again, the graphics for the time were absurdly good, especially things like the draw distance. This game, to my mind, took the series back to the quality of A Link to the Past, a game I have very fond memories of playing on my cousin's SNES, after the disappointing Link's Awakening. The time travelling and ability to move from being an adult to a child made was an idea that had not been implemented as well before. The dungeons were exactly the right length to dip in and out of and the use of music, not just the orchestral score (which naturally was brilliant) but also the use of the titular ocarina to teleport around. Without this, there would not have been any Majora's Mask nor Wind Waker nor Twilight Princess nor countless other similar games.

2. Deus Ex (2000) Metacritic score: 90

Terrorism. It's a complicated word these days. Deus Ex was fortunate in exactly when it was released, I doubt that a character who starts the game attacking terrorists (who have in the past blown up the Statue of Liberty) in said statue's ruins would have been approved of in late 2001. I'm reminded of the exploding buildings at the end of 1999's Fight Club film. Very much a product of its time, it owes the style mostly to The Matrix and cyberpunk more generally and its plot to numerous conspiracy theories and leftover fear about the Millennium Bug mixed with some incredibly interesting philosophical questions about the nature of humanity as found in Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell. In short, then, these are a few of my favourite things. The gameplay is sort of FPS-y with added stealthy bits taken from Thief: The Dark Project and RPG inventory management and an experience system. Quite apart from all of that, however, Deus Ex has something that is all its own. It combines these things fluidly. In any one mission, you have multiple different ways to go about things. That was, essentially, totally new for the time. The choice to be extremely stealthy one mission and then blow up everything in sight the next still staggers my mind. I've not seen any game, not even the sequel, that attempted to keep up the multiplicity of choice throughout. Not only that, but the decisions you make have huge and lasting impacts on the game as a whole. For example, when I first played it, JC's brother Paul was killed. I assumed that was scripted and 'just what happened', but no. Paul can live. Right through the whole damn game. There are almost no characters you're forced to kill at all, in fact. You can go through the entire game and just tranquilize your enemies. This was beyond mindblowing. Combined with superb set pieces and a plot that dragged you in until you practically forgot that a world existed outside this futuristic globetrot, I was stunned. Shame the sequel sucked a bit. But the one thing that the game owes the very most to? The last game on my list, of course.

1. Half-Life (1998) Metacritic score: 96

This game brought me into gaming. Sure, I'd played other things before, but this was the catalyst that made me into who I am today. This totally rewrote the book on the first-person shooter. As revolutionary as Wolfenstein 3d or Doom or anything else, but perhaps more so. It took the rest of the industry years to catch up to Valve. Even simple things at the time, like the water effects, were very cool. The AI was the best at the time bar nothing. The fights and oh dear God the beautiful, beautiful set pieces. Each one like a short movie that defied you not to drop your jaw. An example: you're in a nuclear silo of some sort, where a rocket engine is being tested. But wait, what's that banging sound? No idea. Keeps getting louder the closer you get to the centre of things. You go through a door and see a scientist grabbed by an enormous tentacle thing. And then you realise that the only way out is past a whole bunch of tentacles. Oh, by the way, they were making the banging with their enormous, razor sharp nose things. Razor sharp nose things that kill you extremely dead if they ever make contact. Scary, immersive and wonderful. This was the first FPS I played where you didn't start with a weapon. No, instead you are a scientist. So you walk around, interacting with other characters and then the entire world goes to hell. It was also the first FPS I played where they actually took away all the nifty weapons you'd found up until that point and had to get them back again. This trick was used later in nearly everything ever. Even now, I still play the game occasionally and, even if it looks pretty dated, I am still immersed and sucked right into the gameplay. The sequel undoubtedly has its fans and I'm tempted to give that the equal first position. It brought a much-needed level of humanity and plot into a game that had previously been mostly "Kill aliens. Kill soldiers. Do a jumping puzzle. Kill a helicopter. Do a teleporter puzzle." although Valve did become quite keen on the physics puzzles. Still, the vehicle sections are great, the physics engine is great, especially the gravity gun and the set pieces. Oh my yes. Yesyesyes. If you throw in Episodes 1 and 2, you only get more of the character interaction I like so much and a bit more of a feeling of the world. I'll admit that the game has its flaws, but I'm not sure there are many games out there that really are totally flawless. Anyway, time for the Honourable Mentions.

Starcraft (1998) Metacritic score: 88

Any game that is still regularly played for its perfect multiplayer balance a full 10 years after its release is worthy of this sort of list. The single player campaign is brilliant too, especially the events of Brood War. And the cinematics conjure up the sense of an epic space war at least on a par with Star Wars. Seriously, look on YouTube for the Starcraft: Brood War opening and I dare you not to get a tingle in your spine when that music starts. I'll admit that it owes a lot to Warhammer 40K for the world, but it's still a damned awesome game.

Goldeneye 007 (1997) Metacritic score: 96

The game with a sniper rifle in it that meant that essentially every single game after it also had a sniper rifle in it. Also fantastic multiplayer, even if four of you were squinting at a tiny screen and jostling for position with controllers and whatnot.

Day of the Tentacle (1993) Metacritic score: 93

I like the Monkey Island series. I like it a lot. But I played this first. Sometimes that's enough in a game to change your mind about which is best. All the classic SCUMM games fit in here, though.

Baldur's Gate (1998) Metacritic score: 91 and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) Metacritic score: 95

A much more accessible and traditional look at the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Following the life of your protagonist from random level 1 guy to the epic hero they become is a fantastic experience. If the isometric thing gets to you, play Neverwinter Nights, it's not as good, but I know how some people can't actually play games that don't have 3d graphics.

This has gone on for a long time. Rather longer than I'd intended. I guess I'll just have to revisit this list and see if there are many other games that I would load onto someone who had never experienced a game before. Probably a few. Thanks for reading.

grant: Hi! I'm a Mac...

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:14:32 +0000

PC: And I'm a PC...

Mac: I look all white and sexy...*click*....

PC: I'm boring aparantly...

Mac: *click*...I have cool software like GarageBand and...*click*...iLife...*click*...

----------------------------------------------------------

I recently bought a MacBook and was very pleased with it. It took a while getting used to...twas awkward not having a task bar but I've got the hang of it. I'm mainly going to keep the MacBook for "fun", e.g. music, vidoes, photos etc. and then keep my Windows laptop for "work", e.g. programming, essay writing etc.

BUT...the reason for this blog is that I am having to take the MacBook back today! Every so often (ranging from every 10 secs to every minute" the MacBook was making an annoying clicking sound. I did some research and found out that it was due to the hard drive parking it's needle too often, something which should only happen in older hard drives. So seeing as the laptop was less than a week old, I was not happy.

I rang technical support first and they took me through a few things to try n fix it, but to no avail. The most annoying thing is that there isn't an Apple shop in the whole of Wales! So I'm taking the train home to Birmingham to return it there. Ah well, at least I get to see my girlfriend :D

So yeah...Gwant am cwy :'(

Oh...and, is it just me...or does anyone else feel reeeeaally guilty when they get a new computer? Every time I was using the Mac I could hear my laptop shouting at me going: "What about me Grant? Don't you love me any more?"

Election 2009: Questions For Candiates

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:36:11 +0000

Anybody running for a SUCS Exec position should consider telling people why they are worth a vote. In past years, candidates have written short manifestos, explaining why they are suited to the role and what plans they might have for the year ahead. If you write one, e-mail it to exec at sucs.org and we'll add it to this blog for everyone to read. Some questions you might like to think about:

Why Should I Vote for you as X?
What do you think you can bring to this role? / What are your strengths?
Where do you think the society is at the moment?
Where do you want to the society to be in a year? / What do you want to achieve?
How do you think you can make your goals for the society happen?

For more information on the structure of the executive, and rules of the nominations/election, check out the SUCS Constitution: http://sucs.org/About/Constitution

seymansey: Dirty friends

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 20:01:08 +0000

The dirty bugger.

Steve only went out and made a porn site.

*I might be lying here, the term 'porn' tends to attract a lot of traffic.

worldinsideme: The Universe

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:57:48 +0000

Is weird.

I haven't been terribly bloggy have I?

elsmorian: Lejo

Fri, 25 May 2007 23:49:32 +0000

On a random trawl through teh stuff and things that is the internet, I found this - check it out, it's rather cute, in a morph / pingu etc sort of way!

www.lejo.nu also available here

elsmorian: elsmorian @ 2007-05-09T17:07:00

Wed, 09 May 2007 16:13:05 +0000

I despise group projects. Ive had ones in the past, but this is awful. I have no idea how im going to pass it, and everything has to be in in 2 days. I dont see why i should have to do it and have pretty much no sleep but otherwise I cant see how its going to get done.

Fun times- suckstobeme™.

seymansey: Dancing like a proper mong

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 18:11:58 +0000

I was browsing youtube for a Drum and Bass video, namely 'Download' by Clipz. I found it, but in the right hand side 'related' pane I saw a mentioning of Swansea Uni - cool! When I saw it, it turns out it was the set i was front row at, so you can see me dancing like a twat by the MC's chest at 1:04. yay!

worldinsideme: Yay! I'm a blogger!

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:04:45 +0000

I have started a blog, lets see how long this lasts, the odds of it lasting terribly long are not good, as I really don't seem to say anything anybody wants to hear, but we will see how it goes.