Year: 2005

End of year quiz 2005

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In what is now an annual event, it’s about time I did the ‘End Of Year Quiz’. Read my answers from 2004 and 2003, or read on for this year’s answers.

1.What did you do in 2005 that you’d never done before?

Get a serious girlfriend 🙂 . I also went to a few new places.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

My resolutions have been the same for a few years now, and they were:

  1. Drink less alcohol. Not entirely sure whether to say I managed this or not. I certainly didn’t binge drink so much (bar a few notable exceptions) but I’m still drinking quite a bit – it just tends to be spread out more evenly. Which health-wise is probably a good thing.
  2. Eat more healthily. Good progress here. I’m eating much more fruit and veg and less chips and pizza.
  3. Do more work. Well, I graduated, didn’t I? Could still do more though.
  4. Do more exercise. At last, some progress here too. I’m now hiking on most Sundays and I live further away from the university so I do more walking during the day too. Not a lot, but an improvement.

For 2006, I’ll continue with 2,3 and 4. Instead of 1, I’ll do “Don’t binge drink”.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes, they did. And he’s sooo cute.

Next year I should have another second cousin, which will be nice. He’s due in April.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?

Again, didn’t really get to go abroad this year despite a planned trip to Ireland in November. I did spend a day in Scotland though. Hopefully I’ll be able to get away in 2006.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?

Hmmm. Can’t use the same answer from previous years now. To be honest, I really don’t know – all I can think of are little material things that I probably don’t need anyway, like a new iPod, new laptop…

7. What date(s) from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Meeting Hari in October (because she’s wonderful), the Make Poverty History demo in July (because it was such a big and positive event), my election campaign in March (because I learned a lot and didn’t come out as badly as I’d feared).

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Graduating.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not getting a 2:1 or first class honours in my degree.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Just lots of colds. :-/

11. What was the best thing you bought?

My Mac Mini 🙂 . Probably followed by my digital camera.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

I’m tempted to say all my friends again. They’ve been excellent this year.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

George W Bush. Need I say more?

Oh, and the new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Like last year, the pub and Apple Computer. But also the University of Bradford now that I’m paying part of my fees myself, eBay, and on stuff with Hari.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Christmas, the beach party, my Mac Mini and Hari. Essentially the same as last year, except last year it was an iPod and I didn’t know Hari.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

“Mr Brightside” by The Killers.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

happier or sadder?Quite a bit happier.thinner or fatter?I think I’m a bit thinner.richer or poorer?Probably a bit richer (in terms of money in the bank) but I’m still in debt since I owe the student loans company £9000 now.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Time with Hari. And free time in general.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Playing Solitaire and Freecell. Again…

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

I make this mistake every year don’t I? Oh well, I spent it with my family again. It was nice to see them all again, especially my grandparents.

21. Who deleted question 21?

Davros.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004?

Erm, yeah, just a bit…

23. How many one-night stands?

None at all.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

I was really impressed at the revival of Doctor Who this year. I’ve also been enjoying the new series of Family Guy, Top Gear, Have I Got News For You and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (now that’s available here).

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No, not really.

26. What was the best book you read?

Books?!?!? That’s so ‘old media’!

Erm, well, I enjoyed Hacking Movable Type. Haven’t really read any fiction this year… again…

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Probably We Are Scientists and the Kaiser Chiefs.

28. What did you want and get?

A new mobile phone (again), a Mac Mini and some other stuff.

29. What did you want and not get?

Once again, world peace has failed to materialise, and I didn’t get a pony either. Hmph.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?

Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But the new Harry Potter film was good too.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Not a lot, since it was the exam period and there was a big football game on. I was 21.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Meeting Hari earlier in the year.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?

Same as usual.

34. What kept you sane?

My friends and hobbies.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Kirsten Dunst still. Though Charlotte Church is nice.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Probably equality and anti-racism, but Fairtrade was up there too.

37. Who did you miss?

My former housemate Jamie who’s now in France.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Again, Hari, but there were plenty of others.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005.

I learned that I can’t drink lager quickly and still expect to be able to stand up.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

“I’m coming out of my cage, and I’m doing just fine” – Mr Brightside, by The Killers.

Merry Christmas!

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Cute Christmas Card

Probably about time I posted my annual Christmas Message, so:

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Since it’s about 9am here we’ve opened our presents here already – I’ve got:

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (film) DVD (sponsored link)
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (BBC TV series) DVD (sponsored link)
  • Cocktail shaker and two cocktail glasses
  • Hiking boots
  • 5 small bottles of Absolut vodka
  • A bottle of Cockspur rum and a bottle of Diaquiri cocktail mix
  • Limoncello nougart
  • Green & Blacks organic dark chocolate
  • 2 tubs of Cadbury’s Heroes
  • A fawn-coloured Next long-sleeved t-shirt
  • A black zip-up top
  • A Van Heusen silk tie (in a posh box)
  • A black Mulberry shirt
  • Some Lindt chocolate Reindeer and a chocolate Santa
  • A box of Hazer Baba Turkish Delight
  • Some House of Commons dark chocolate
  • …and a bottle of Fentimans Curiosity Cola

In other words, I’ll be sat watching DVDs wearing some new clothes and hiking boots, eating chocolate and getting drunk on cocktails 🙂 .

Anyway, for those of you who celebrate Christmas (in whatever way you choose), I hope you have an enjoyable and happy day. 🙂

1000 reasons why IE is better than Firefox

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It’s in French, but here’s 1000 reasons why IE is better than Firefox. Except that there’s only actually 14 reasons, so it’s 986 short. And some aren’t really reasons. In fact, it’s a pretty pointless piece of flame-bait designed to stir up the Firefox community.

In any case, here are those reasons translated into English, with the help of the Google Translator and my French A-level (feel free to correct me if I get any of these wrong):

  1. Internet Explorer is integrated with Windows XP so you can surf the internet without having to decide which browser to use.
  2. Internet Explorer is accessible for everyone.
  3. IE can display all web pages – not all of them work in Firefox.
  4. IE requires hardly any extensions, whereas Firefox has a plethora.
  5. IE does not ship with tabs, but they can be added if you wish.
  6. IE does not have an RSS reader, which is a fad. You can just visit the site every day if you need to.
  7. IE is less secure than Firefox, but patches are released regularly.
  8. IE is closely linked to Windows.
  9. IE does not pass the Acid2 test like Safari does.
  10. You need to use IE to access Windows Update – even though Microsoft released a Firefox plugin for Windows Genuine Advantage, they will never open Windows Update to Firefox.
  11. IE doesn’t crash when visiting online banking sites, Firefox does.
  12. IE7 will adopt the standards of 2006 and include innovations of Microsoft and others, such as RSS, SSL3 and better security.
  13. IE does not respect W3C standards in their entirety.
  14. IE is the ‘de-facto’ standard that developers work to.

There you go. Pretty lame reasons, in my opinion, and some of them are reasons not to use IE as far as I’m concerned.

[Via Glazblog]

Screenshots on a PocketPC

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Since it took me a while to find out how to do this myself, I’m going to use this opportunity to tell you how to take screenshots on a PocketPC or Windows Mobile device – in my case, Windows Mobile 2003.

First of all, you need to know that, as far as I can tell, your device does not have a screenshot capability built in. It’s not like a Windows machine where you can hit Print Screen or a Mac where you can hit Cmd+Shift+3 – you will have to install some software first. I’m sure there’s some fancy-pants shareware jobby that will do the job painlessly but in this instance we’re going to use Pocket SnapIt (link no longer available), which is available for both normal Windows Mobile/PocketPC devices and Windows Smartphone handsets. There’s also a Windows version for your PC. It’s free and open source.

Choose the relevant package – for my Dell Axim x50v, I chose the PocketPC package – and download it to your device. This may mean downloading it to the Mobile Device folder in My Computer and then using ActiveSync to send it across. Then, click on the cabinet file on your device to have it install. If you’re using Windows Mobile 2003 (and probably 5.0 also) you’ll probably get a warning saying that the application was designed for an older operating system – you can ignore this. Now, go to Programs and run the newly-added Pocket SnapIt icon.

You’ll now need to define a hotkey to trigger the taking of screenshots. I chose the ‘/’ character – to set this, click on Menu and select Options. Then click Menu again, expand Options and choose Capture Options. Now click Menu a third time and click Select Capture Button. Click OK and then select a key on the keyboard. Click OK to go back to the main screen, and then click Start.

Now, open up the program you want to take a screenshot of and press the trigger key – you should hear a noise when you do. You should then find a bitmap file in your My Documents folder call Snap001.bmp – this is your screenshot.

You can see my effort further up the page – this was a shot from Skype for PocketPC. As you can see, the capturing mostly works but it chokes on the font smoothing, so you may want to consider turning this off first. You’ll also need to change the image format to something other than bitmap if you want to post your screenshot on the internet (since bitmaps are not compressed) – PNG is probably the best format to go for. The image I posted is less than 13KB.

New Camera

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Kirkgate Centre Lift

This is (one of) the first photos I took with my new camera. I settled on the Samsung Digimax A6 – £150 from Argos – 6 megapixels, 3x optical zoom, 32MB onboard memory with an SD slot, movie recording mode and lots of other stuff. Seems to be an alright camera – the 4 photos I’ve taken so far have only needed a little bit of touching up in Picasa. It’s also smaller than my last one and has a microphone – in fact, so far about the only thing it doesn’t do that my old one did was output to a TV or external screen. But then I used that feature exactly once on my old camera so that’s not a major issue.

I looked at the Nikon Coolpix 5900 – the camera that I previously said I wanted – but to buy it locally would be nearly £300 – well beyond my budget. Buying online simply is not an option right now as I’m not going to be home much and really I wanted to have something to use tonight. Tim Westwood is playing – not into that kind of music but I’ll go anyway, because it’s rare that we get big names here.

I’ve also uploaded some photos from my old camera taken last night on the pub crawl – here they are. I may upload more later.

By the way, does anyone know of any tool – preferably free – that works like Picasa on Mac OS X? iPhoto just doesn’t seem to cut it for me – not enough options and its ‘enhance’ button often makes my photos look worse.

Mac Stuff, again

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I think this will be the last post of this series for at least a few days now, since I’ve pretty much explored the OS now.

  • Managed to get 10.4.2 to install. It turns out I needed the ‘Combo’ update and not the standard one, which is presumably only for US English users or something. It would have been nice for the non-Combo installer to tell me this though.
  • I also managed to finally sort out the keyboard mapping problems using this UK keyboard map. It’s a shame I had to resort to third-party software to fix the problem – Apple should really have addressed this in the operating system, especially as one of the selling points of the Mac Mini is that you can bring your own keyboard and mouse.
  • Now my next keyboard problem: getting the Home and End keys to do as they do in Windows. In OS X, they do nothing. Any ideas?
  • One of the flaws I heard about the Mac Mini was its headphone socket and poor quality output. This is something I’ve noticed as well; there’s not nearly the same depth of sound as on my laptop. It sounds very muffled when hooked up to my stereo, for example. Sure, it’s only supposed to be a headphone socket but it is the only built-in audio output, and when you consider it comes with software like GarageBand and iMovie you would expect something a bit better. I may have to consider the Griffin iMic (£30 or $40), especially as the Mini has no way of inputting sound (no microphone or line in).
  • The network tools applet in Utilities is awesome! Whois, DNS lookups and allsorts, all in a nice interface. Nice one, Apple.
  • I gave in and downloaded StuffIt Expander for the Mac. Even though the StuffIt web site uses browser sniffing and will only let Windows users download the Windows version. Thankfully I have Chris Pederick’s User Agent Switcher installed so I pretended I was actually a Mac user and it was okay.
  • The main reason for this is so that I could install Windows Media Player 9 for OS X since I imagine I’ll need it to view some movies. Alas VLC doesn’t yet support many of Microsoft’s proprietary media formats (or at least not on its non-Windows builds) so I’d better get it just in case. And you need StuffIt to be able to open WMP since it doesn’t use a disk image like, um, just about every other piece of Mac software I’ve downloaded recently.
  • I also have a feeling that I’ll need to get a copy of RealPlayer for OS X. Unless, of course, anyone can suggest another program that plays RealMedia files?

Even more Mac stuff

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I’m sure these posts will stop eventually, but anyway…

The Good Bits

  • Despite what Joe said, Adium X looks really good. The lack of internet at home has meant I haven’t had much chance to play with it, but the interface is very nice and I like the cute duck icon, whose eyes open when Adium is launched. It’s everything that Gaim should be on Windows.
  • Like I was expecting, software installation, and indeed uninstallation is a breeze – arguably easier than Windows and much, much easier than Linux.
  • NeoOffice seems to work well, and being based on OpenOffice.org means that I’m immediately familiar with the interface. Alas, it still uses the same interface as the Windows/Linux versions so it looks a bit ugly, though it is an improvement on the standard OpenOffice.org builds for the Mac which also require X11. My other complaints would be that it is based on OOo 1.1.4 which means it doesn’t yet support the OpenDocument formats (which some of my work is saved in) and the splash screen is ugly – too much text. The icon is nice though, however quite what a galleon has to do with an office suite I don’t know.
  • Deer Park also works mostly okay bar some minor display issues; Thunderbird seems to be fine.
  • After upgrading the firmware on my router, Airport is working fine. We’re using WPA-PSK in the house to encrypt the Wi-Fi transmissions. It still doesn’t work with my Wintel laptop but I’ll put that down to the rather old 802.11b PCMCIA card and not Windows XP itself which supports WPA as of SP2, and in SP1 with an optional download. I’ve got a new 802.11g card with WPA support on order.
  • Unlike in Linux, I’ve barely had to use the terminal for anything – the only thing it was useful for was for finding out where a CD was mounted so that I could use it with DOSBox which is a pretty niche use. Mac OS X gets it just right – the Terminal is there if you feel the need to use it, but there’s usually no reason to unless you need to engage in some real geekery.

The Bad Bits

  • Still not got the keyboard thing sorted, however I’ll check these threads out:Ucontrol may also be worth a look.
  • Can’t seem to be able to install the 10.4.2 update. As far as I can tell I just have plain vanilla 10.4, but when I try to install the 10.4.2 package it tells me my disk is “not suitable”. It doesn’t tell me why it’s not suitable, nor how I can make it suitable though. This thread seems to cover my problem so I’ll look into it.
  • On the subject of updates, in addition to the OS, I’ve had to update iTunes, iPhoto, iSync and QuickTime. This is a brand new machine; why weren’t these already on there? iTunes was at version 4.7.1, yet 4.8 came out in early May – surely the best part of 3 months is ample time to include an update. 4.9 has been out for over a month too.
  • I don’t really appreciate OS X creating .DS_store files on my laptop when transferring files over, however there is a way of disabling it. It does require dropping to the Terminal and a reboot, though.
  • More StuffIt ranting: StuffIt is not included in Tiger, so any new Macs, like mine, don’t support .sit archives. Ironically I’ve had to expand them on my PC using ExtractNow before copying them over. Mac people: please, please use .zip files from now on 🙂

More Mac Stuff

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If you’re not in the least bit interested in my experiences with my new Mac then you can safely skip this post. Otherwise, read on…

The good bits

  • Bootup and shutdown are very fast in comparison with my Wintel laptop, but this may be because my laptop has quite a bit of software loaded on it and a number of things which run on bootup: virus scanner, memory manager, ActiveSync, phone manager utilities, Microsoft Antispyware and a series of hotkey/background utilities for managing my sound and video. The majority of those won’t be needed on the Mac.
  • Despite mice with more than one button being a rarity in the Mac world, my two-button wireless mouse with scroll wheel works just as it did in Windows. If you’re only used to one button then trust me, you don’t know what you’re missing.
  • Not really tried it yet but installing and uninstalling applications looks like a sinch.
  • iPhoto is an awesome tool to have out of the box. Not quite as powerful as Picasa for Windows but a nice tool to have.
  • Seems to work fine with all of the hardware that I’ve plugged into it thus far.
  • Preview works well as a PDF viewer. And I appreciate native support for creating PDFs when printing, rather than installing an add-on like PDFCreator (or the full Acrobat package, obviously).
  • The Terminal, and all its Unix command line goodness.
  • Nice to see iChat making the first steps into cross-network support by allowing connections to Jabber and Bonjour as well. That said, I’ll be downloading Adium X to enable the other networks.

The bad bits

  • OS X is still not properly respecting my keyboard layout. Sure, I’ve found the options that let you change it, but what it thinks is a UK layout, um, isn’t. When I press Shift+2 I should be getting “, not an @ – that’s what it’s labelled as.
  • Closing applications takes some getting used to. Clicking the red X doesn’t actually close it – it just sends it to the dock. You have to press Alt+Q or right-click its dock icon and choose Close. Minimising sends it to the right-hand side of the dock, incidentally.
  • Though it’s not as bad as many PC manufacturers (see Ed Bott’s weblog entry) there’s still a bit of bundled crap that I don’t really want, namely trials of Keynote and Microsoft Office:Mac 2004. I’ve downloaded NeoOffice to replace the latter.
  • iSync doesn’t support my phone (Nokia 7250i) or PDA (Dell Axim X50v). Though I will be getting a better phone soon (next 6-9 months, I reckon) and The Missing Sync fixes the latter problem, albeit at a cost of $40.

Software I have lined up to install

  • Deer Park Alpha 2
  • Thunderbird 1.0.6
  • Adium X 0.82
  • NeoOffice/J 1.1
  • VLC 0.82
  • Flickr Uploadr for Mac OS X
  • Flickr plugin for iPhoto

Any other suggestions? I’m considering buying Transmit but would appreciate some free alternatives. I might give FireFTP another spin once DPA2 is running.

It’s here!

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All booted up

So, it’s here. Actually, it would have been here yesterday but no-one was in when the delivery guy called.

First impressions

Setting up was pretty easy – not much more than a case of plugging everything in and pressing the On button. Which, confusingly, is on the back.

It picked up my mouse and keyboard fine, although it did ask me to press the key next to my left Shift key just to verify the layout. Even then, it’s on the US layout and not the UK one, despite saying I was in the UK the whole way through the setup. Will have to adjust that later on.

Network settings were picked up no problem and it detected the wireless network in the house too. It couldn’t actually connect to it but then neither can my laptop so I’m guessing it’s an issue with the base station. It probably needs a firmware update but we’ve not been able to get on the internet to do it.

The first-run installation looks very nice, with the revolving dialog animation. All in all it took under 5 minutes, after which I was looking at the OS X desktop in all its white and silver glory. Work commitments have meant I haven’t been able to explore much though.

Since my monitor has DVI inputs as well as VGA I’m using a DVI cable to connect the two together and this seems to work fine. OS X even defaulted to the 1280×1024 resolution, which is the highest the screen can take. Using DVI has the added bonus of not needing a KVM switch when switching back to my laptop; I’m hoping to use Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse between the two machines.

So yeah, I’m pretty happy right now 🙂 . Unfortunately we still have no broadband, and now the phone line itself doesn’t seem to want us to make calls, so I’ll have to keep using my laptop in the library for now. Small though the Mac Mini may be, when you include the keyboard, mouse and screen the package gets somewhat bigger, and not exactly portable.

Here’s a Flickr photoset of the unpacking.

Woohoo!

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Just got this email from Apple:

Today Apple announced a new Mac Mini. Accordingly, we are pleased to revise your recent order by substituting the original product you ordered with the new Mac Mini at no extra cost to you. The new configuration either matches or exceeds that of the original product. In fact, depending on the configuration you ordered, you may be entitled to a partial refund. If you are paying by Credit Card, Loan, or Leasing, the price will be adjusted automatically.

The new Mac Mini is basically the same as the old one but includes 512MB of RAM as standard instead of 256MB, and the 1.42GHz model includes Aiport Extreme and Bluetooth as standard. I’d gone for all these options which means that Apple should hopefully be refunding me £46 very soon.

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