July, 2008

8-bit hippy shit

POSTED IN found stuff | TAGS : jeff minter, lamasoft, zx spectrum 21 July 2008

I’ve spent a good hour or so reading the brill History of Lamasoft by the Yak Jeff Minter himself, and then reliving some of his spectrum classics. The great Psychedelia especially.

Psychedelia Screenshot

“I called the program a “light synthesiser”, and advertised it as a new, non-competitive form of entertainment… no enemies, no killing, just light and colour.”

It’s available to run on your modern machines,emulated of course.

I wrote a quiz for WordCampUK, the picture round is 20 “famous people” to identifiy — I thought it was worthwhile to pop it up on the net. So here it is (PDF link) - answers are on page two, and link to somewhere on the net that should explain who they are if you’re not sure.

The voice of pikachu

POSTED IN video | TAGS : pikachu, pokemon 18 July 2008

Retro To Go: Dr Who Tardis wardrobe

POSTED IN misc | TAGS : hampstr 14 July 2008

, pretend you're the doctor by nipping in and out of this self-assembly canvas construction, with the added bonus of a single rail inside for your space age clobber. Make a K9 out of a waste bin and some old wire and you'll be ready to conquer the galaxy. link

WordCamp UK is coming 19th — 20th July

POSTED IN blogging, Conferences & Talks | TAGS : birminghamuk, wordcamp, wordpress 11 July 2008

If you’re interested in the super, open source, thingy WordPress — I hate to call it a blogging platform as you can do so much else too — you could do a lot worse than come to WordCamp UK next weekend. There are a host of talks, but it’ll be a great opportunity just to hang out with WP affictionardos and bloggers.

I’m planning on spending a lot of the weekend “broke out” around and about the venue, and I’ve organised a meet-up on the Friday and also a proper do (with a geeky quiz, prizes to be won) on the Saturday (I may even do some stand-up ).

You can book tickets here

And a word from the sponsors…

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We thank Namesco, and all our other sponsors for their kind support of WordCamp UK 2008.

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iPhone 2.0 — nightmare

POSTED IN technology | TAGS : error, error -9838, iPhone, iphone 2.0, mac, mobile, o2, rant, software, update problems 11 July 2008

I tried to upgrade to the new iPhone, I was up at 8am trying on the O2 store last week — it crashed, it was slow, and when I finally got to order there was absolutely no confirmation. Turns out I got a text yesterday saying that my order was received after stock ran out, and I’d get a new phone “soon”. Still, never mind I thought – the 2.0 software update will be something good.

All over the internet yesterday was talk of the Apps store, and the fact that you could download the 2.0 upgrade if you followed a link and did it manually. I held off until about noon today when the update was officially available to us in the UK — if anything went wrong I wanted to be able to follow the instructions exactly.

Plugging in, I selected “update” left the room, I knew I’d be nervous and it was best not to look.

The update failed with an “unknown error”. Then a restore failed. I know have a phone that says “emergency only” and shows to connect to iTunes.

I connect to iTunes and get a message that says :

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

“Could not complete your iTunes store request … error -9838″.

And that’s where I am.

I’ve had iPod or computer troubles before, you kind of get to live with them and look stuff up on the internet, or book an appointment at the “Genius Bar” and wait.

But this is not just my iPod, it’s my phone. And to a large part my business too.

Apple, O2, f-king EPIC FAIL.

Practising what I preach

POSTED IN blogging, del.icio.us, good practice, microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : crossposting, del.icio.us, noise, site news, social media, twitter, wordpress 10 July 2008

Prompted by Mark Steadman‘s comment on one of my many blog posts on the evils of crossposting, I’ve turned off the tweet digests that were (to be honest) overwhelming the nonsense blog of mine that is /ramblings.

Mark said:

“What’s your opinion then of WordPress plugins – like the ones on your own site – that post a digest of your Twitter and del.icio.us activity each day? Thankfully you’re not the kind of guy to tweet that stuff, but isn’t that just the same kind of cross-posting?”

With delicious digests or link dumps I can see added value; the posts give time based (and theme based when you’ve been surfing around a subject) context. This can mean that they mean more when posted to a blog rather than as separate links.

That said if a blog does nothing but republish delicious links then it’s worthless.

The delicious feeds and links that you see on this site are carefully (as much as one does) chosen to be in context — and aren’t by any means everything I save. You could subscribe to my entire delicious feed, but unless you’re my mother or my psychiatrist I think you’d be bored (and my mother would be bored anyway). I wouldn’t advise anyone to subscribe to my delicious feed en masse — I use it for a wide variety of destinations (as well as to store links for myself); things tagged “work” come here, those tagged “birminghamuk” go to BiNS, I occasionally do link collections on a subject, and others links go to other places too. It’s just a mash of my surfing mind, not useful to others.

As for the Twitter digests posts, I can see the point of a post (for your own records as much as anything) but it needs to be carefully positioned so as not to swap the point of your blog. Of course I first set it up “because I could”, I don’t think I would these days if I hadn’t already.

In fact, I’ve turned it off and switched to archiving to my email, thanks Mark for making me think about that.

Links for 9th July

POSTED IN del.icio.us 10 July 2008

/Message: Twitter Spam: What Can We Do? – "Could we somehow take advantage of our network to help Twitter find and eliminate spammers even quicker?" Idea about auto reporting, but twitter could do it without reporting ? if a user is blocked by a %age of people the follow shouldn't they just go

Tweets for Today

POSTED IN twitter 10 July 2008

12:11 thinking about writing up yesterdays’ Tim Berners Lee talk — do i write up the talk, or the ideas? they’re very different. #
12:44 #brumbloggers how does Thur 24th Aug grab you for a meet-up? #
15:07 rambling blog post on Tim Berners-Lee talk yesterday is.gd/P80 I now _think_ i understand the Semantic Web, but we’ll see #
16:36 seems one of my iPhone orders got through. i’ve just had a confirmation email <dances round the room/> #
17:24 Have found a way to keep the BiNS blogroll updated from Google Reader, need to sift my actual reading list for rubblish now is.gd/Pgi #
17:59 a photo of the internet flickr.com/photos/bounder/2652540665/ #
18:39 anyone know what’s happened to the Birmingham Polytechnic blog? I liked Ronald’s musings #

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