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.

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.

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.