I was told, in my weekly meeting with my line manager, about a new feature on the Specsavers website. Thought I’d share…

It allows you to try on frames virtually, from the comfort of your own home which is a great idea. A customer at work today even said, that it being her first pair of glasses, she felt embarrassed trying on frames in the store with other people around so she’d try them online and come back in.

You can actually order and pay for the glasses on the website too, then you come into the store to complete the order and arrange for collection. So this is Specsavers taking on the online-only retailers of glasses.

First: upload a photo of yourself (or use the stock images). Here’s a really bad one of me I just took on my phone. Still in my uniform look…

Second: select the centres of your pupils in the photo.

Finally: try frames on by clicking the “Try” button. You can adjust where the frame is on the picture till it looks right. You can also add the frames to a list to compare them.

Here’s one of me wearing the £125 Osiris 605 frame. You can switch between different colours, but this frame only comes in black. My actual frames are way cooler than these, but they’re not on the website and we don’t have any in stock at the moment either, so there…

And you even get a copy to print out with all the frame details on it to bring into store so we can make them up for you. Shove that D&A!

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Related articles…

• Know Your Frame Choices
  
  • ^ Some useful info if you’re looking at getting new glasses..
• Specsavers focuses on automation
  
  • ^ For the open source advocates reading this…
• Specsavers focuses on Australian expansion
  • ^ One of our managers is leaving to start his own store in Aus.. Lucky git!

Some fellow has made a pretty nifty Flickr plugin for Wordpress. Install it up & authenticate it. Simple stuff. Low and behold, you get a little Flickr icon when you’re writing a post, adding a photo from your Flickr collection is a few clicks away. Brilliant.

In other news & using the aforementioned plugin, check out my chilli plant - now featuring a couple of *red* chillies! Mmm, they look so tasty. Can’t wait for harvest time..

Before: what a mess…

It’s nowhere near as fun as you’d think. My back still aches from being under my desk for ages sorting out cables.. Still not amazingly tidy but it’s definitely an improvement. And the worst thing is, I’ve run out of power sockets. So I’ll have to start daisy chaining which isn’t a great idea. Hope the electrics in this house can cope… Probably better than my last house when I had all that and more running from just the one power socket there was in the room which must have been built when all people had to power was their bedside lamp.

After: oh look, some carpet!

Today I…

woke up,

went back to sleep,

woke up again,

got up,

had a shower,

made lunch,

walked to work,

worked,

walked home,

watched a bit of tv and…

…wasted a few minutes of your precious time by making you read this post. Come again!

Mwuaha…

Figured it was about time I sorted my Firefox bookmarks and that is a *huge* task. I’ve deleted loads that don’t work anymore and attempted to sort out the remaining horde of mostly what I’d call “things which might come in handy one day“… Whilst doing so I found some old gems which I think everyone should have in their bookmarks.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ - much easier than asking someone on IM if they can connect to a site that’s down for you. Useful for when the Internet decides to be annoying.

http://www.tempemail.biz/ - it’s a must-have if you need to register for a site you’ll never visit again.

http://www.bugmenot.com/ - or you could see if there’s already a shared login on bugmenot.

http://www.doineedajacket.com/ - better than a weather forecast, it’s all you need to know when you’re about to head into the outside world.

http://www.picturesofwalls.com/ - random thing I found ages ago, some photos of funny graffiti out and about.

…I got distracted from bookmark-tidying by doing this post, so my bookmarks are still a mess. *sigh*

I should have done this long ago. Every time I get McDonalds for lunch at work someone has a dig at me about it. Maybe they’re just jealous because I eat so much crap and don’t put much weight on, heh. But the other day I had a change of heart and decided to turn over a new leaf. I signed a piece of paper which said, words to the effect of “from this day forward I will not eat at McDonalds ever again. (Except on Sunday mornings before work)”. Sunday mornings are a tradition and if there’s been drinking the night before, it’s actually quite a nice start to the day.. In general though, I’ve been having way too much fast food lately, it’s not only expensive but it’s not that nice either.. I may not put on weight from eating McDonalds but it’s probably not doing me a whole lot of good; so I am never having McDonalds for lunch or dinner ever again. Burger King is still a maybe but I am going to cut down. It’s official. I’m off now to make my lunch for work tomorrow, a nice bagel with some ham and salad, oh and Reggae Reggae Sauce!!

FixMyStreet.com is one of the coolest websites I’ve found in a long time.. The other week I noticed that a street light on my road remained on during daylight hours and seeing as I had nothing better to do, I set about trying to get it fixed. Wayne told me about fixmystreet.com so I thought I’d try it out. You can register a fault on the site by selecting the location on the map and it does all the leg work involved with emailing the council about it. Interestingly, it doesn’t use Google Maps but a more detailed map which includes stuff like trees and pretty much any building so you can pinpoint the precise location of a problem with much greater accuracy than Google Maps would offer. You can upload a photo along with your report.. So that’s what I did, I got an email from the council confirming that they’d logged the problem. Low and behold about a week later a van came around and they fixed it.

I just registered a Twitter account, if only to make sure I got my username before someone else does, known as “land grabbing” - some say this Twitter lark is the new Facebook but I’m not so sure. Maybe I’ll use it, maybe I won’t. It’s pointless without anybody to follow or be followed by..

In other web 2.0 news, I’ve stopped uploading photos to Facebook because the 60 photos per album limit is just annoying. I’m moving over to Flickr for random photo uploads from my phone, using ShoZu of course.. So, check out my photo stream.

Blog integration of both Twitter and Flickr to come when I can bothered setting it all up!

MJ Ray wrote about a couple of things which puzzled him a while back…

Here are a couple of things that puzzle me.

1. Templates

Why is the ~/Templates/ directory empty on a default Ubuntu install? If there is a sensible reason, by all means comment and tell me. But if you right-click on the Desktop or somewhere in Nautilus you’re able to create a folder, or a document but since the Templates directory is empty, you can only create an empty file. What use is that?

sionide@zombie:~$ ls /home/sionide/Templates/
OpenOffice Calc.ods     OpenOffice Math.odf    Text Document.txt
OpenOffice Draw.odg     OpenOffice Writer.odt
OpenOffice Impress.odp  Shell Script.sh

As you can see, my Templates directory is full of files, they’re just filenames really - it’s the extension which counts and means that the “Create document” menu is filled with those file types as options of files I can create.. Seems silly to ship with a feature kind of half missing.

2. Bluetooth

I’ve already discussed this, so Bluetooth is supported out of the box but not properly. A pretty normal use case isn’t catered for meaning that from what I can tell, you have to install a few other things before it’ll let you send or receive files from another bluetooth device. It’s another half-a-feature..

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Perhaps these are ideas I should submit to the Ubuntu Brainstorm

My first phone…
A Sagem MV3020

Mike was wondering what the average age of other peoples mobile phones as been. And from memory I will try to put the mobile phones I’ve owned into chronological order..

The first phone I ever sort of owned was my Mum’s old Sagem. It was the most basic mobile phone you’ve ever seen. It was technically my Mum’s but I took it out with me whenever I went out so my parents could contact me.. It looked something like that picture but I can’t remember the exact model number. Eventually the screen became detached from the electronics inside and it couldn’t be used for anything unless I held it together, haha. RIP that one.. Took it apart to see what was inside when I got the next one..

I managed to acquire a Motorola v100 from a friend for a very good price. This was such an awesome mobile phone and is probably the reason why I still SMS more than make calls. If you made a call on the mini-laptop looking v100 you had to use the hands free kit but it’s Qwerty keyboard made it perfect for sending texts. I remember it had a really fun break-out game on it too.

We’re into 6th form territory now, I had my own income from my part time job. So I got my first contract mobile, a Nokia 3510i which I paid for myself. I got 100 txts and 100 minutes for £30/month, a true rip off in today’s terms but back then not a bad deal. I had this phone for ages, when the contract ran out I went Pay As You Go for a while as well, so far this is probably the phone which has lasted longest. As Nokia phones go, it was top of the range when I bought it, look at that colour screen and imagine the polyphonic ringtones! I had Toploader - Dancing in the Moonlight for a while.. Haha. It had GPRS as well, I used to make wallpapers for it on my PC and upload them to my website and download them to the phone - no Bluetooth you see and I wasn’t going to pay £2.50/week for those horrible wallpaper services on the premium text numbers. My brand loyalty for Nokia began here…!

When I started University, I started a new contract, got a good deal from the Intarwebz, a deal which even today no one can beat. Good ol’ Vodafone and the Nokia 6680! Another fantastic long living handset from Nokia. It still works perfectly today, just a few bumps and scratches. As for the reduced sized MMC card reader it has, I put a 1GB card in there so I never had to delete any photos from it. It came with a hands free kit as well, so I had a fair few mp3s on there too. The only real problem was, the Symbian 2nd Edition wasn’t built at the time to handle so much data so it did get quite slow.

November last year saw my upgrade to the Nokia N95 8GB. By far the best phone in the world And long may it live! So, that is five phones… four if you don’t count the first one cos it wasn’t “mine”. All have lived (and died in some cases) in the last, six years or so I’d say. And that is the history of my mobile phone ownership.