Year: 2005

Mac on Friday

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The latest update to my Mac Mini’s order status suggests it will be ready by Friday, so hopefully delivery will be either then or the beginning of next week. I don’t yet know if it’ll be one of the “new” models or a standard one, but seeing as it has taken some time for it to be ready I’m hoping it’s the latter (I ordered it 9 days ago). We’ll see, anyway.

This week is somewhat less interesting than last week was, though I am going home to York this weekend for a friend’s 21st birthday.

Update: As you may have guessed, it didn’t come on Friday. Apple’s current estimate is on or before next Tuesday (9th August). I’m guessing the launch of the new model is the cause of the delay, but considering that it’s going to be considerably cheaper and that I still have no proper internet at home I’m not too bothered about the wait.

Open Tech 2005

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I’m sat on the train back to Bradford (another direct one with wifi, woohoo!), ready to leave King’s Cross. The verdict on Open Tech 2005? Possibly the best £5 I’ve spent in a very long time.

There was wifi at the event (and indeed lots of geeks with Powerbooks reading their Bloglines subscriptions) however for some reason I couldn’t get it to work with this PDA. Damn Windows Mobile…

Anyway, what follows is my take on the days events.

Despite it being only two days after some wannabe terrorists tried to blow up the tube, the underground seemed surprisingly normal and I had no problems getting to where I needed to be. The event was being held in the Reynolds Building, part of the Imperial College London’s medical school in Charing Cross Hospital, and the talks were in a couple of the teaching rooms there. The first talk I went to was by Danny O’Brien on the issues surrounding privacy amongst those in the public eye, especially bloggers. It was very interesting (even if it did take a while to start due to internet access problems, eventually sorted with an impromptu SSH tunnel); Danny is a good speaker and kept the audience interested.

At 12:30 I moved over to the seminar room where I saw a Linux-powered iPod for the first time (and even watched a video on it), learned about scripting in iTunes and about MythTV, along with the BBC’s open source project Kamaelia. I also bumped into Sven from Blogwise and Gia who vaguely remembered me from the London Geek Dinner last month.

During a much needed lunch break Phil Wilson came to chat to me (it’s great to be recognised :) ), and we then headed back to the lecture room for the official launch of BBC Backstage – effectively the Beeb’s developer network, with APIs and syndication feeds galore (see BBC News Online article). There’s already some people doing cool stuff with it, like taking the BBC’s travel news feed and plotting the problems on a Google map, or a ‘changelog’ of the BBC News Online home page – Ben Metcalfe, who was presenting, used the archives from July 7th as a good example of why this was so cool. Ben Hammersley was the ‘master of ceremonies’ – he’s even more mad than his blog depicts him as. He was wearing a skirt…

Ben H also MC’d the next session which was with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo!. Jeremy’s talk focused on openness in technology – RSS, APIs etc. and how it benefits companies (and the problems it can create). Obviously being from Yahoo! the focus was on Yahoo! and Flickr but it did show how Yahoo! is ‘getting it’. While it didn’t make me as excited as the BBC talk it’s still good to see big companies opening themselves up, as it were.

It was at this point that I found out I’d won the third prize in the prize draw, so I picked up an O’Reilly USB flash drive (256MB!), along with a 1-year subscription to Make magazine. I also bought a copy of Ben’s ‘Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom‘ (sponsored link), which he signed.

The next session I went to was called Blogs and Social Software, and was chaired by Gia. Tom Reynolds, who works for the London Ambulance Service, did a talk about how to blog and not lose your job, which included lots of cat pictures, as any blogging talk should. He was followed by Paul Mutton, creator of the PieSpy IRC bot, about creating diagrams showing how individuals interact. He used data from Digital Spy’s Big Brother site to create an interaction map of the Big Brother housemates, which was pretty cool. Finally Paul Lenz talked about his Who Should You Vote For? site and his new project What Should I Read Next?, which lets you type in a book you have read and recieve suggestions for other titles to try. You can also add books that you like and help to extend the data set.

There was one final set of sessions after that but in tne interests of getting home at a reasonable time I left early so as to catch the 18:30 train from King’s Cross. All in all I had a great day and it was well worth the journey – I just wish I could have gone to all the sessions. That would have required some kind of cloning device though.

As well as those that I met (I also met Lloyd Davis in the last session), I saw but didn’t really have chance to meet Cory Doctorow, Tom Coates, Simon Willison and Matt Webb, amongst others.

Yikes, it’s taken me over an hour to write this. If I ever buy a PDA (this one is borrowed) I’ll be buying a keyboard for it. I’m in the Lincolnshire wilderness between Grantham and Newark now, by the way.

Update: Back home, so I’ve added links to some of the stuff I was talking about.

Good things come to those who wait

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PICT1418

It’s taken me almost two weeks but my photos from Edinburgh are finally up. Not all of them are very well annotated or tagged though since I’ve not really had an awful lot of time lately nor been near enough to an internet connection.

I also have photos taken at Diggerland from last Saturday as well as some from central Durham which we popped into on the way back since we had some time and it was a nice day.

A few weekends ago I also went out and took some photos around Little Horton Green, a road in Bradford that seems to have got stuck in an 18th century time-warp. It’s really nice down there, actually.

I’m now only 155 images away from my 1000th photo on Flickr – not bad for less than a year.

iPod Recycling Programme

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At the risk of annoying Dave, who’s just bought a iPod Mini to replace his 2G iPod, Apple have announced an iPod recycling programme, whereby if you take your old iPod to an Apple Store in the US, Apple will recycle it free of charge and give you 10% off a new model (if you buy one on the same day). The old iPod will then be dismantled and recycled within the US, so that no hazardous chemicals, such as lead, are shipped overseas.

It’s a good move by Apple. On the one hand, they’re ensuring that unwanted iPods are disposed of and recycled properly, instead of being dumped on landfill sites. And at the same time, they’re encouraging users of old iPods to upgrade to newer models, thus bringing the company more revenue.

Let’s just hope that Apple extends this to other countries and that other manufacturers take a hint and adopt similar policies.

It’s here!

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Side by Side

Okay, after this I’ll hopefully shut up about the screen, because it arrived this morning (yay for ParcelForce delivering before 10am). It works fine, although I found that you really do have to follow the instructions by turning the computer off first, then turning the monitor on and then the computer on to get it to work – you can’t just plug it in and expect it to work. RTFM, as they say.

Having a 1280×1024 resolution is so much better than 1024×768 – the machines at the university use it, as does my parents machine at home – but I’ve had to put up with the latter as my laptop screen doesn’t support it (but then it is only 14”). The screen arrived with no dead pixels, which is good.

Oh, and it works with my PDA, as well 🙂 .

Update: Since I got a rather large birthday money cheque this morning, I’ve also treated myself to a Belkin wireless keyboard and optical mouse, thus meaning I finally have the luxury of a full-size keyboard. It’s USB and both PC and Mac compatible, which will be handy when I order the Mac Mini in a few weeks time.

My one problem now is a lack of desk space…

Post-birthday notes

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  • It’s the morning afternoon after the night before, and I’m actually feeling okay. I did drink a lot (by my standards) last night – mostly Southern Comfort, which, had I drank neat, would have seen me consume half a bottle of the stuff. I am somewhat hungover but I’ve been much, much worse than this before having consumed less, so, yay.
  • I went into town today to put a birthday money cheque into my account at the bank. This is the first time I’ve had to put any cheque in for about 2 months now; normally I have my Google AdSense cheque and rent from my parents to pay in, however thanks to Google introducing EFT and my parents embracing the joys of online banking the money now comes through electronically.
  • On the subject of money, now that I’m 21, I get access to a savings account that my grandmother has been keeping for me. I’m not quite sure how much is in there but it’s not an insignificant amount of money. I don’t need it desperately so I’m probably going to bung it into an ISA for a year or so to amass some interest.
  • There’s a surprisingly high number of Liverpool supporters in Bradford, as I found out last night. Trust me to have a birthday that coincides with one of the most gripping cup finals ever. Well done to Liverpool by the way.
  • I haven’t yet got all of my presents yet, but so far I’ve had a box of Celebrations from work, a blue drinking t-shirt from my parents and some birthday money. And money to buy the TFT screen which I’ll be ordering next week.
  • And now I’m off to the pub for a much-needed cool, caffeinated, non-alcoholic beverage.

To be 21

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I’ve just got back from my 21st birthday celebrations, which, as you can probably tell by me being able to post here, means that I haven’t managed to totally inebriate myself. I am pretty well-plastered, but on the other hand I have been much worse before. I’ll blame it on the fact that we got kicked out of a club due to one of my friends reproducing the contents of her stomach, after which we decided to go home.

Thanks for all the ‘happy birthday’ comments and the TFT screen recommendations; I think I’ve decided on one now so I’ll be ordering it in a few days time. But right now, I really, really need to go to bed.

Oh, on a totally unrelated note, congratulations to Lucio Buffone on getting a Sony Award and a contract with XFM. Lucio is a former University of Bradford student and was Communications Officer of the student union for a year as well as being a DJ on our radio station, Ramair.

Quickly compress PNG images

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Before posting any PNG images on here, I use the open source Pngcrush tool to compress the images as much as possible first. Even when I set the compression to its highest value in programs like IrfanView, Pngcrush is still able to make most images even smaller.

Unfortunately, Pngcrush is a command-line tool, so it’s not the easiest tool to use in Windows. So here’s how to add a ‘Crush’ option to the context (right-click) menu in Windows Explorer for quicker crushing.

Firstly, you’ll need to download Pngcrush, which is availble at Sourceforge. You’ll want the win32 version. Download it and unpack it somewhere.

The instructions that follow are for Windows XP; for older versions they’ll be a little different.
Open Control Panel and choose Folder Options. Select the File Types tab, and scroll down to the ‘PNG’ entry. Click on ‘Advanced’, then click on ‘New…’.

In ‘Action’, type Crush, and in ‘Application used to perform action’, type the following:

C:\Downloads\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe -e 2.png "%1"

The first portion should be the location of the pngcrush.exe file that you extracted from the archive. The ‘-e 2.png’ bit specifies what the outputted PNG image will be called, which in the case it’ll be the filename with ’2′ appended to it (so the crushed version of ‘catpicture.png’ would be called ‘catpicture2.png’). You could also use the following:

C:\Downloads\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe -brute -e 2.png "%1"

This does the same as the above but does a ‘brute force’ crush – rather than use one of a few common methods to crush the file, it will use all of them. It’ll take longer, especially on older hardware, but may result in a smaller PNG file.

And you’re done. Now, when you right-click on a PNG file, you can select ‘Crush’ and have Pngcrush your image for you. Remember that the compression is lossless – you won’t lose any quality by using the tool.

Picasa 2 Rocks!

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A screenshot showing a before and after image that has been enhanced by Picasa's 'I'm Feeling Lucky' tool

Thanks to Chris G for letting me know that Google has just released Picasa 2, a new version of their photo editing tool that they acquired last year. It’s really worth the download – it has a superb auto-adjust mode called ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ which can instantly fix bad photos, like the one above which was taken using the flash in a very smoky environment. It’s also good for managing photos, such as categorising and tagging them. My father would really like this.

(It’s Windows-only, I’m afraid)

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