“If you could rewind your time, would you change your life?”
A flash drive in disguise? Everyone (well almost) remembers Transformers from the 1980’s. Those toys that would magically transform from vehicle/aircraft into a robot - well at the hands of a skilled child anyway. One of my favourite transformers back then was Soundwave, mainly because it could accept various ‘cassettes’ that were also transformers in their own right - and Ravage was my personal favourite!
Ok, admit it. How many of you lot have begun ignoring your blogs in favour of Twitter? Since returning to the fast growing service in February 2009 I am pretty much guilty of this as I have indeed ignored this blog, something I never thought I would do.
I suppose it is a multitude of things though. Yes Twitter is to blame, but aside from that I have been focusing on my working life pretty much 100% since the year began. I had enough distractions towards the end of 2008 and wanted to start the year fresh - and have done. So, work goes incredibly well. Too well infact and I am almost struggling to cope with some of the things now bestowed onto me.
I think Mr.Wud stated what I’ve had on my mind for a while now. I have noticed that a lot of bloggers since moving to Twitter have just let their blogs slowly gather dust, as it were. Blogging takes some thought, time and planning in some cases before one publishes a post. Twittering is limited to 140 characters a ‘tweet’ (message) so you can jibber-jabber about anything without a care in the world.
Does that mean my blog is pretty much stagnant i.e dead? Well no. I’ve put a lot of work into it, but time is precious, and after coming home from a long day at work I pretty much crash out on the bed/sofa. Twittering on the move is simple and quick, blogging isn’t so and that is my problem right there. I will continue to add reviews, and thoughts that cannot be twittered though but I predict things will be rather quiet for the most part.
Anyway, I’m pretty much looking forward to this summer. I had plans to visit Australia, NSW this April-May as I understand the weather isn’t hot at this time of the year. Heat=baad, Cold/Rain = Good. However as usual, those plans have gone tits up thanks to my parents who don’t want to go.
This summer see’s the arrival of the third iteration of Apple’s iPhone (the plodphone). I am excited as hell, even more-so with the new OS 3.0 that will be launched alongside it. My current Jailbroken iPhone is such a strong part of my everyday life that it’s hard as hell to live without it. I just can’t wait for the next version.
Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100) was leaked onto the interwebs just a week ago and my, it is good enough to ship retail in it’s current state. I’ve presently got it sitting on my Samsung NC10 netbook and it quite literally flies in comparison to XP SP3, that was on there. I await soundcard drivers for my Auzentech Meridian er soundcard so I can install the RC release on my main desktop rig though. Oh, and we can now uninstall that heap of gobshite known as Internets Explorer!! How cool is that?
I had written a ’short’ story over the past few months based on the Fallout universe and my adventures since discovering the game late during December 2008. However it has ballooned to such a size that I’ve no idea how to get it onto the blog! It was about my adventures in the game basically with a nice bit of fiction about my lone quest to get to Rivet City, and then to find ‘Dad’. Most people who know me know that I can pretty much sprout A4 paragraphs in minutes, so trust me - it is large!
Hmm, I gotta get out more!
Aside from Twitter virtually taking over any spare free time I have, I’ve also been buying a few toys. The most recent is a Blu-Ray player to replace my old HD-DVD player. The ‘Panny’ BD35 as it is known has received rave reviews online for it’s superb picture processing abilities and such a machine at a shade under £200 was too hard to ignore. You can find my review in the erm, reviews section!
Back in July 2008 I decided to try out a little known application for the iPhone by the name of Twinkle, developed by Tapulous. I was instantly hooked as it used the geo-location functionality of the phone to let you know when people are nearby. You could search for users within a specific kilometer radius around you and chat to them, in addition you could enlarge or shrink that search radius to suit. Seeing other twitter users who were within range of you and chatting away was horribly addictive.
Twinkle was basically a superb (and still is) location aware chat client that allows you to upload photos to your Twitter account as well as update your status. Addictiveness knows no boundaries and I was pretty much ‘Twinkling’ on the way to work whilst on the bus, as well as doing the same whilst in the office at work and then on the way home. I’d be constantly ‘chatting’ to complete strangers via 140 character long messages, similar to SMS texts if you will.
Behind all of this was Twitter. In its simplest form, it is a website where you can broadcast short messages up to 140 characters max - to anyone who has signed up to receive them (known as a follower). In turn you can also become a ‘follower’ to other twitters. Your followers for instance could be say ten of your best friends or if you’re a well known celebrity like Stephen Fry, 190,539 crazed fans. Twitter started off fast and is gaining momentum and a frightening pace. Balls to Myspace and the Facebook’s of today, they’re nothing by comparison.
Twitter went mainstream fairly recently on February 5th 2009 when a US Airbus Flight 1549 hit some birds and lost power in both engines. The plane slammed into New York’s Hudson River, with everyone on board surviving. The most incredible thing was that there was a person on-board the flight using Twitter as his prime means of reaching the outside world. How he managed to remain calm and type away amongst the turbulence is another thing altogether.
We all know what a clumsy oaf our iPhone 3G’s are when it comes to battery life. It is common and quite upsetting to see that battery meter on the top right of our screens rapidly deplete as we merely browse the web or just use GPS with google maps just for a few minutes. It is something we sadly have to live with for the most part.
After ending up lost in the middle of Gloucestershire with a couple of colleagues because my 3G ran out of juice, one thing was pretty much clear. Those battery packs that I have seen people rabbiting on about, that extend the runtime of the 3G could actually be rather useful. I’ve had mobile phones in the past that could go on for days until they expended all their juice but the iPhone 3G is slightly different - I pretty much depend on it for almost everything I do. No mobile gadget has ever had such an impact on me…
With all that babble out of the way, my first review of 2009 arrives. It’s very short, with hardly any detail - I give you the APC UPB10!
Overnight temperatures in London hit -3° to -7° celsius leaving every public transport service cancelled for the duration of the day as upto 8" (20cm) of snow hit the capital. Yours truly ended up having the day off from work due to the buses not running. So I spent most of the day observing the news, reading ebooks and generally chilling out.
Airports faced widespread disruption after a Cyprus Airways plane skidding whilst on the runway. Eventually Heathrow closed both it’s runways and half of outbound flights were cancelled leaving foreign commuters somewhat confused as to how little snow could cause so much chaos.
The iPhone Dev Team had done it yet again! Cracking through and unlocking the iPhone 3G with what they are hilariously dubbing yellowsn0w.
In short, you can unlock your iPhone 3G for use with almost any SIM providing you have the latest 2.2 Firmware and that your baseband is 2.28.00. Yellowsn0w is available on the Cydia app, meaning that your iPhone 3G has to already be jailbroken. I’ve gotta say thank you to these chaps. You’re incredibly talented developers and coders and the third party community is phenomenal. The sheer amount of quality applications and customisation tools really do make Apple’s useless Appstore look tame.
Let’s see now. 2008 for me will be the year that I preferred not to really look back on. I had a lot of plans for the year gone by but something unusual happened - I made a mistake, actually come to think of it I made quite a few. None that I’m proud of either.
At the start of the year I had planned to get me a CAR, except at present as I write this I still rely on public transport aka the wonderful BUS to take me to work. Except that despite the fact that my workplace is not that far from my house - journeys to work take just over 1hr 30mins. Now for those who have the luxury of having cars in this godforsaken already rammed to the brim country of ours, I really admire the fact that I haven’t heard any reports of drivers going POSTAL whilst stuck in a jam. By the time I reach my office in the mornings I practically want to kill the first person who I see - who happens to be our lovely security guard. I can’t win - if I get a car I’ll still be stuck in a jam, if I take the train I’ll end up squashed against someone with the biggest set of melons ever, if I use a bike then motorists will want to run me over.
Last week I watched Top Gear: Vietnam Special where the team travelled to Vietnam (where else?!) and had to do a set of challenges on SCOOTERS. It got me thinking…Motorbikes…they don’t get stuck in traffic!
Yours truly had a week off from work recently and spent that week tucked up in bed reading nothing but E-Books (electronic or digital books), which PR has recently got me addicted to.
The folks at Ereader.com have a superb bit of software available for all mobile platforms that could read/manage your purchased books as well as browse their website, containing thousands of books ready for download. I was immediately hooked! I downloaded the free software for my iPhone as well as my Windows Netbook and began purchasing books.
My first purchase was Karen Traviss’s Gears of War - Aspho Fields. Fans of the colossal selling Gears of War video game series will get a close up personal look at Delta Squad’s rag tag soldiers Marcus Fenix, Dominic and Carlos Santiago, as well as C-Company’s Cole Train, and Baird. Hoffman and Anya are also present.
In a word, I am hugely impressed! I loathed Wordpress 2.6.x and all it’s incarnations. It was a pain to navigate, clunky and just felt so delicate that I was afraid to even tweak my heavily modded K2 theme. Normally every Wordpress upgrade ends up breaking my theme and I spend weeks re-writing sections of it. After the RC1 installation, much to my surprise everything was perfect and I cannot see anything out of place anywhere.
The new Administration panels are a joy to use and uncluttered, yet compact. Discussions are much easier to see at a glance on the dashboard thanks to the new comment features - you can now directly reply to a users comments and your comment will be updated in realtime beneath it. The whole overhaul is a breath of fresh air compared to version 2.6, which I regard as the poorest release of Wordpress I have seen. I now await the full release on December 10th. Have that date on your calendar folks!
