Jane's New Music

Jane bought a car three years ago, and it didn't have the key code for the radio/cassette player, so no sounds. On Friday she finally got around to asking the garage to sort it out, and then spent an hour sorting out old tapes.

She just went to return some DVDs to Blockbuster, and what was she listening to, and hopefully indoctrinating the children with? The Clash and London Calling. Impressed, I am.

Sgt Pepper: 'It Was 40 Years Ago Today...'

Great documentary on BBC2 last night. Seeing Kaiser Chiefs struggling with 4 track recording to 1" tape was interesting. They needed 20 takes. It's not scheduled for repeat though.

DOCUMENTARY: Sgt Pepper: 'It Was 40 Years Ago Today...'
On: BBC 2 London (102)
Date: Saturday 2nd June 2007 (Already shown)
Time: 22:45 to 23:45 (1 hour long)

To mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, the album's engineer, Geoff Emerick, heads back to the studio with some of today's top artists to create new versions of the album's classic tracks. Will today's musicians succeed in recording their versions of the songs using the original studio equipment from 1967, and with only a day to record each song? The Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight and Bryan Adams are among those taking up the challenge.
(Stereo, Widescreen, Subtitles)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpt taken from DigiGuide - the world's best TV guide available from http://www.getdigiguide.com/?p=1&r=11301

Copyright (c) GipsyMedia Limited.

New Gadget

Motorola F3

Thin, big screen, huge characters, big buttons, cheap. £15 from Phones4U. No MP3 player, no camera. Extremely basic, just what I wanted. And only £3 more than a replacement battery for the old phone.

 

Dell Axim RIP

Official Dell Blog Post - The Dell Axim is Discontinued

End of another era

Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

So it goes

Link to article in The Register

Microsoft Friendly Fire

What the ??!!??



I know Windows Me is old and unsupported, but ???

Fewer Wires

Owing to an errr, 'beverage/mouse/interface incident' I needed a new mouse. Since my kybard was shot too, I decided to replace both. Now much more space and neater too.

Just Testing Widgets

Get your own Box.net widget and share anywhere!

Best IT Expert in the World

Thanks for the new Keyring Melissa :-)

Pass along this small tribute, copy this code.

 

The Top 10 Albums from Insomnia Radio

Interesting that I have bought two of these:

The Top 10 Albums from Insomnia Radio

I really think Jason is on to something here, with his plans for world domination by Insomnia Radio. This is an area of music which as he says is often overlooked.

BIO BOTTLE - The UK's first biodegradable bottle

The storage instructions say:

"Store in a clean, dry, rabbit free place"

Why just rabbit free? What about other rodents? Mice, Rats, even Marmots might be interested.

And anyway, who would store bottles of water where rabbits could get at them?

http://www.belu.org/

 

Wireless Society

This is the display on my PDA looking for wireless devices at a bus stop in Kensington, London, UK. I make it ten within range.

flickr Profile Widget

http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/profile.php


 

Leeds swelters in 188°C heatwave

And I thought that we had it hot. It was nothing:

www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/21/leeds_heatwave/

HOT!

More Netvibes Goodness

I just realised that if a discussion forum is set up right, when you display a post to it, from its XML feed, in Netvibes, you can comment to it straight from the Netvibes page.

Where's the Catch?

There is always a Catch, but I can't see it yet. Sky are offering free Broadband to all TV subscribers. It only has 2 GB bandwidth, but if you pay £5 per month you get 40 GB.


Link: www.sky.com/broadband


 

Hottest day of the year

It got to around 32 C today, and guess what? The A/C in our office overheated and shut down :-(

 

Top 100!

Scout

 

17!

 

Google Browser Sync

I missed this one, sounds useful: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/get-in-sync.html

I wouldn't go there if I were you

Actually, the link goes to a story on the Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/07/pharmacy_posing_as_google/

Google Spreadsheets

I can immediately see uses for this


http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/tour1.html

Bitbucket Podcast #2 Jazz Mix

I realise now I shouldn't have posted all the details of #1 to both Blogs.

The Podcast Blog is
bitbucketpodcast.blogspot.com

The Atom Feed for Netvibes etc. is
bitbucketpodcast.blogspot.com/atom.xml

The actual Feed for iPodder, Doppler, iTunes etc. is
feeds.feedburner.com/bitbucketpodcast

Still confused? So am I.

----------------------------------------------------------

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

Article in PC World (the US one). Number one? AOL.

----------------------------------------------------------

The Bitbucket Podcast

I know you have all been waiting for this. Well here it is.

Download   Subscribe

Music

Title And Registration by Death Cab For Cutie
Reflex Blue by without malice
Sum of One by Blame Amy
Electric Love by Reactor
Exodus Damage by John Vanderslice
Spitting Out Benchmarks by amplifico

----------------------------------------------------------

Not saving the Planet

Not sure which is worse, the energy used leaving our Linux server running for seven months, or the heat produced in that time. A good indication that Linux runs unattended for a long time though.

Countries I have visited

create your own visited countries map

Hmmm. I wonder?

You should see what it says about my graphics card :-(

Google Analysis

Apparently I signed up for this, but I can't remember. Anyway, I got an email from them last week sying I was in, so I set up the St Andrews home page for monitoring (you just need a few lines of JavaScript at the bottom of the pages you want monitored) and left it for a week. Its pretty interesting looking at the stats.

Panic! Don't Panic?

One of those things I tell people will eventually happen to them happened to me tonight. I was editing a Word document, saved it, tried to quit Word, and it would not. The whole PC hung up with the HDD drive flashing frantically. I pressed reset. The PC tried to restart, the BIOS reported no HDD, then a Black Screen Of Death:

BOOT DISK ERROR - INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Gulp.

Found Bart PE Boot Disk, inserted, pressed enter. It booted into Knoppix. Started Command Shell, did C: - DISK NOT READY

Now wondering how long to rebuild this, and what I had on its C: drive. Shouldn't be too much apart from Music. Database I was working on backed up last night, phew.

Turned it off to think. Half an hour later, turned it on again and it started normally.

What do I do now? Turn it off again, never turn it off again, back everything up - how?

Still thinking, PC still running, 4 hours later.

ADSL

Bit of a rant coming up.

In the mid 90s I went to an IATA conference in Montreal, about the use of the Internet by Airlines. One of the keynote speakers was an Internet pioneer (whose name I am embarrassed to say I can't remember). This was about the time that ADSL was taking off in North America, and he rubbished the technology because he said that the speed must be the same in both directions. I didn't think much about it at the time, but now, ten years later, of course I realise what he was getting at.

Up until a few years ago the fastest residential connection we could get was 56 Kbits. Then we got ADSL at 512 Kbits down (ten times faster) and 128K up (only twice as fast). This made browsing much faster, but uploading not much faster. Last year we got 2 Mbits down and 256 Kbits up. Later this year we will probably get 8 Mbits down and 512 Kbits up. This is the first time it will have been possible to run a web site on an ADSL link, and will make uploading pictures and music less of a drag, and may even make video practical.

I recently had a shock when we ordered a 2 MBits SDSL line for work, which costs GBP 4,500 per year, compared to GBP 240 for ADSL, but we needed a line to send emails from so ADSL wasn't an option.

End of rant.

BBC Programme Catalogue

BBC Programme Catalogue
Originally uploaded by Stuart43.

http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue


Thanks to mbiddulph for the pointer

IE7

IE7
Originally uploaded by Stuart43.

I thought I would give IE7 Beta 2 a try, since I beta test software as part of my job.

Beta 1 wouldn't install for me, so I didn't get started there.

This is a very different IE, I'm not sure I like it though, but I will give it a try.

And and it doesn't like my anti Spyware program Spy Sweeper, they lock each other.

Spring is Sprung?

Spring is Sprung
Originally uploaded by Stuart43.

18 on Friday, 19 on Saturday?

We will see ...

Sky Down

IMG_1279
Originally uploaded by Stuart43.

Andrew was complaining that Sky was down. I have just finished reading the Asterix book 'The Sky is Falling', and wondered if that was related.

Seems not, the Sky box just needed its 6 month reset.

Windows XP

untitled
Originally uploaded by Stuart43.

At work I'm being a guinea pig for Windows XP (currrently everyone is still on Windows 2000). A very colourful and loud experience until I turned all the sounds off, and made it look as like Win2K as possible.

Quite a lot of things not working, mostly caused by the fact that we have lots of things which assume that C:\WINNT exists and has lots of useful things in it.

The biggest surprise though is Office 2003. I can't cope with the new version of Outlook, it is sooo different.

Hmmm

Image1
Originally uploaded by Stuart43.

:-(

Netvibes Woes

I really like Netvibes, but have been without it for a whole day :-( The problem started when I was adding lots of RSS feeds, and suddenly all my RSS feeds just showed

Updating ...

and/or

Loading ...

I eventually got around it by deleting all the feeds and re-adding them, but I have no idea what went wrong. I also started getting '403/Forbidden' errors at the same time.

I have reported these to Netvibes, but in case its not fixed and you have the same problem, the above might work for you.