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..

–

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.

Wow, Zattoo is amazing…! Thanks popey for the heads up. Zattoo is a peer-to-peer television streaming program. It’s got a selection of UK Terrestrial channels, BBC One, Two, ITV, Channel4 and Five and some other random channels to choose from. It’s quite handy for watching Neighbours without having to go all the way downstairs…! It uses IP Geo-location stuff to deliver you the channels for your country supporting a bunch of other channels in other countries in the EU. It occasionally blips but this the problem with streaming stuff, I suppose the more users who are watching a channel at anyone the better, since it uses magical clever peer-to-peer technologies to distribute the content. It’s another good demonstration of p2p technologies being used for everyone’s benefit It’s got clients for Windows, Mac and Linux which means it’s better than other similar projects like Joost which doesn’t support the same channels either.

(p.s. I’m also demonstrating the NextGEN Gallery plugin for Wordpress in this post.. Hence the web2.0 style full-size image if you click it, nice!)

GTA IV - Can’t wait to play it!

Because I don’t have a PS3 or 360 (yet), I haven’t had the chance to play GTA IV but I’ve heard a lot about in the media recently and I have had the chance to listen to a promo CD of the music featured in the game.

The GTA series as a whole is renowned for having consistently good tailor-made soundtracks and by the sounds of this promo, the fourth in the collection is no exception. My favourite has still got to be the theme tune from the original GTA! I even played it on my radio show a while back.. (after bleeping the swear words out obviously)

Just listening back to it now makes me want to play the classic original. Good thing it’s available for free

The style in the fourth seems to be a lot more hip hop oriented featuring artists like Busta Rhymes and Mobb Depp which isn’t usually my thing but I’ll make an exception because they’ve picked some decent tunes. But it’s not all hip hop! Remember in the original when you hopped in a pick-up truck, the radio would be country music. There’s bound to be a wide selection, surely something to suit everyone. My favourite track on the promo is Qadir - Nickname

Of course, everyone who is playing it will be too busy playing it to care about what music is playing in the background as they speed away from the cops..

Another game series with a notable soundtrack is the Need for Speed collection. Definitely get a copy of the Most Wanted soundtrack, it’s brilliant - especially for driving music!!

Widsets is another application I have found on my travels. It’s a Java based thing which gives you a dashboard onto which you can put different widgets added either from the dashboard itself or via the website.

The strange thing is, I’d have thought this would have taken off a lot more than it has. There isn’t even a widget for Facebook which you’d perhaps expect. There’s a few mini-games like Sudoku, Minesweeper and that Helicopter game. There are a hand full of one-site RSS readers, like the BBC News one or the Techcrunch one. But apart from those few, nothing really jumps out as being amazingly useful or interesting..

It’s pretty slow to load up and slows down again in order to connect to the Internet to see if you’ve picked any more widgets since you last loaded it and to update the content of the RSS readers. It seems like a bit of a let down all in all. Oh well..

P.S. I finished writing this a couple of nights ago and scheduled the post to be published automatically. At the time of publishing, I’ll be at Alton Towers

Liero Screenshot (Wikipedia)

If you’ve ever played Liero, you’ll know that worms-style real time games are a lot of fun. Take that and mix it up with the graphics from Chase Ace 2 and you’ve pretty much got Teeworlds.

There are less weapons than Liero had back in the day, just the close-quarters hammer (which reminds me of when you pick up the hammer in Super Smash Brothers), a pistol, a shotgun, a laser gun (think rail gun from Quake but it ricochets) and a grenade launcher. You can’t make tunnels into the maps either..

There are clients for Windows, Linux and Mac which is always a massive plus for these type of games. The amount of online servers running is decent, you can easily jump into a game (trouble is, they’re all pros and if it’s your first time you get absolutely annihilated as you try and figure out the controls). I changed jump to up, rather than space but whatever floats your boat. I noticed a couple of graphics glitches when connecting to a couple of servers but most of them seem fine. Anyway, it’s really addictive and a lot of fun. Don’t waste too much time on it!!

I have found a killer app for my phone. This is one reason why I went for the N95 8GB in the first place, for software like this to crop up and make it well worth the investment! WalkingHotSpot turns a wifi-enabled smart phone (like mine) into a wifi router! They’ve just released a trial version. It’s pretty much install, fill in a couple of settings and run. It sets up an ad-hoc wifi network, which can be secured if need be. The trial version allows only 1 connection at a time. I had a small issue with it not working initially but I was using the wrong Internet connection settings on the phone, oops. (Everything else connects via the other lot of settings, so who knows what the difference is.) It works like a dream now, so I might be able to use a bit more of that monthly 120mb I get from Vodafone.

I noticed when I loaded sionide.net, that the header image was quite poor quality. Apparently most 3G/GPRS traffic is filtered through a lossy HTTP proxy in order to cut down on the amount of traffic you use. It was also fairly slow when I tested it just now but I don’t live in an area covered by 3G..

No more messing about with annoying sharing the phones Internet connection over Bluetooth or across a USB cable, something I never even bothered to get working because it looked so.. needlessly complex. This is the perfect solution for “proper” Internet, when out and about.