Whilst I’ve been getting more and more attached to my T-Mobile G1, it looks as though the Android development team are going through the opposite emotions. According to this story on Engadget, G1 users really need to make the most of their recent Cupcake software update, because it will probably be their last!
Supposedly, HTC put a limited amount of internal flash space into the G1, and the Android operating system will soon outgrow it. There is plenty of information emerging about the next ‘Donut’ update, but there’s not much point in going through it here, as I still have months and months to go on my G1 contract and won’t be able to enjoy any of the new stuff until I can get my hands on an updated handset.
Part two of a media-related post on our sister site Sidepodcast.
Do some keywords fare better than others? Which headlines provided the most interest? Everything is completely transparent, it’s quick and easy to tailor things on the fly and straightforward to vary advertisements according to budget. We have, in the past, run an advertising campaign purely for the live commenting of races. At most that means running ads for a maximum of four hours before closing them again. Try doing that in print.
Part one of a media-related post on our sister site Sidepodcast.
Linking makes the social, well, more sociable and without it conversation takes considerably more effort. Which is why we know print is dead. It’s been a long time coming, but social networking has finally rendered the printed page obsolete.
Remaining marginally rational for a moment, it’s probably worth adding that the length of the printed material and the type of content held within appears to have a bearing on just how dead it might be. Short passages of content would seem to be first on the chopping block. Quick snippets of content are easily replicated online. Longer pieces may earn a reprieve, and a novel’s worth of content might hang on for a long time to come. Equally print’s lifespan could be categorised by type, with news being the first to suffer, while fictional content may survive in print format for many years.
If you work in an office it can be quite a grind, but there are loads of toys and gadgets out there to help the day go a little bit faster. Here are some of my favourite ones at the moment.
The Desktop Henry Hoover is an ideal gadget because not only is it cute and a talking point, but it also cleans your desk! It takes a couple of batteries, and apparently the suction has been greatly improved from when it was first released. If you’re worried about getting biscuit crumbs on your desk, then the Henry Hoover might help. There is also a Hetty Hoover in pink, for anyone who wants a woman’s touch. Part of me really wants one of these, but then I wonder how noisy they are?
This is singularly the best moment from Never Mind the Buzzcocks ever.
In my opinion, Buzzcocks got better when Simon Amstell took over, although some of his humour was, it’s fair to say, evil. Bill Bailey also made a great addition, and his weird moments could be very amusing.
LibriVox is an organisation with a simple goal - to make all public domain works accessible in audiobook form. I’ve been involved for a long while now, part of an enormous group of volunteers who record chapters, poems and entire books to attempt to reach this goal.
My latest solo book has been catalogued: Grace Harlowe’s Plebe Year at High School. It’s one of those books that is probably aimed at young adults, but is secretly interesting to all. It reminds me of the Famous Five books, although perhaps the adventures are a little less mysterious and more humble. The story follows Grace and her friends as they navigate their first year through High School.
What unbelievably good weather we had in the UK this past weekend! Mr C and I were so impressed we actually headed outside.
We found our way to the river, and ended up on a boat. I didn’t want to take the wheel to start with, but after a while I was desperate to take over, so I drove us up and down, whilst Mr C took some pictures and video.
There has been some speculation recently that Franck would be signed up by AGR to race for them in a forthcoming IRL event, and now it has been confirmed.
FKM will take to the wheel of the No. 25 on the 22-23rd of August, in his IRL debut. He says:
I am certainly looking forward to my IndyCar debut in Sonoma with AFS and Andretti Green Racing. I was able to test one of the team’s IndyCars last year and very much enjoyed driving it. Being able to test the track later this week will be very helpful for me to learn the circuit and prepare for the race. We have a lot of work to do to get ready, but I believe we are up to the challenge.
I actually didn’t discover this song until quite recently, one of those ones that I’ve heard plenty of times but never really knew what it was. As ever, Mr C was more than happy to educate me, and now I really, really like it.
It’s not so much the song that I like, but the fact that this song, and more importantly the video, creates amazing conversations. For the record, I think he did it, and Mr C thinks he was framed. We will continue to have this debate every single time we hear the song, and it never gets old.
I mentioned the Best Job in the World previously, worrying that the successful candidate - Ben Southall - will find it difficult to top his six months in Australia.
What has occured to me now is that I can’t bring myself to read the blog. I subscribed to it as soon as the blog went live, because I was one of those who followed the selection process with interest. The tourism department who dreamed up this idea did an amazing job because finding the right candidate for the dream job created a media frenzy and plenty of the desired marketing.
Sony has announced two new ebook Readers - the Pocket and the Touch. Specs, more pictures, and a brief review available on CNET. At least this one is available in the UK. Are you listening Amazon?
Rupert Murdoch and his many, many media enterprises announced huge losses recently, and that has prompted the newspaper giant to announce that their online news presence will not be free for much longer.
Murdoch says he is aware that this will cause copyright problems, and they’ll tighten up on that considerably. However, he is looking forward to cashing in on the celebrity gossip hunters who visit such sites as The Sun and The News of the World.
Recently, we were enjoying a relaxing weekend and decided cooking wasn’t part of the plan. On Saturday, we wanted an Indian restaurant. We didn’t know where the nearest one was, so I pulled out my G1 and googled the area we were in, plus the type of restaurant we were looking for.
As it turns out, we were just round the corner from one, that we had walked past several times. It was on the top floor, with a simple sign on the window that you would only have seen by looking up. The door was round another corner, we went up the stairs, and lo and behold, Google doesn’t lie. The restaurant was lovely and the food was delicious.
Here we are, then, eleven weeks on, and my gardening adventure has come to its conclusion.
Most of the stuff died. The lettuce seemed to expire. I cleared out the strawberry pot, and I was left with a weird Jekyll & Hyde tomato plant.
The tomatoes are at least trying to turn red now. I am not sure whether I should pull them off and ripen them, or if I am supposed to leave them on there until they are red and beautiful.
This is my last blog entry about the safari park trip, I promise. The thing is, as we were going around the park, we realised that there was one fundamental problem with the whole premise.
Why are we driving? Our experience of the safari park was: turning off the main road to get to the ticket booths, queuing to buy the tickets, then driving excruciatingly slowly round the park. Thankfully, there were two lanes to allow some cars to stop and take pictures of the animals, whilst others could pass if they wanted to move on. This idea failed as soon as we got to the popular exhibits, though.
Okay, so yes, it’s a great film. But it’s a rollercoaster of emotions - infuriating, painful, funny, awkward, sad, ridiculous. It makes me uncomfortable not knowing whether I should be laughing or crying! But I did enjoy it and the two characters are really well played.
It’s no secret that Radiohead aren’t afraid to try something new with their distribution models, particularly in the scope of online delivery. Their free release of In Rainbows, where consumers were encouraged to pay what they felt it was worth, garnered them a lot of media (if not money).
Now, Thom Yorke has spoken out in Believer magazine, admitting that CDs were never his favourite:
There’s a process of natural selection going on right now. The music business was waiting to die in its current form about 20 years ago. But then, hallelujah, the CD turned up and kept it going for a bit. But basically, it was dead.
A report out this week suggests that TV viewers in the UK are now consuming more ads than ever before. This is purely taking into account actual television viewing, and not online TV, and the stats line up something like this:
16.7 hours of commercial TV per week on average in the first half of 2009 that’s up 9.9 minutes on 2008, which isn’t a lot, but who was expecting it to go up? commercial TV is now 63.7% of all broadcast TV viewing that’s up 3.2% on the last five years (still only counting the first half of the year) the Beeb accounts for the rest, naturally That’s good news for ITV, who had to sell their Friends Reunited site at a loss of almost £100 million, and I forget where I read it, but were also advised that going pay TV would be the best way to protect their future.
This film is pretty much perfect. It has aged a little bit, but the idea of smart little kids and grumpy teenagers will never get old. It’s a great mix of comedy and angst, and totally family friendly. The clown is the one bad thing, but not enough to dock it a point.
I have just found out about a new park opened in New York called the High Line. I don’t ever intend on travelling to New York, but if I did I would want to go and see this.
The High Line railway opened back in the 1930s, as a way to stop pedestrians getting knocked over by freight trains. The tracks ran alongside the big warehouses, allowing buildings to have openings straight onto the trains. Loading and unloading was supremely easy.
Of course, after saying I had not experimented with the share feature on Google Reader, I went and clicked on the button and now I’m hooked.
It’s like bookmarking things on Delicious but so much easier!
I’ve only been using it for about 12 hours, but already it’s the best thing since the last best thing and before the next best thing. There’s even a selection of my latest shared items in the column to your right - displayed in all their Wordpress Widgety wonder.
I was converted to Google Reader a while ago, after I decided I needed to be able to check my RSS feeds while I was out and about. Until then, I had happily used FeedDemon, which then became Net News Wire when I switched to a Mac. It didn’t take long for me to be convinced that Google reading is the way to go, because:
If you’re on a site, you can click the subscribe to feed button, add to Google and you’re done. Easy. You can rename feed subscriptions. I don’t think this is an unusual trait for a feed reader, but I have come across many issues with trying to rename feeds, particularly with them being overwritten every time you hit refresh. Google doesn’t seem to have this problem. My favourite thing about the Google reader is that you can have it only show you the items that are unread, thus eliminating the need to scroll through feeds that aren’t updating very often. It’s also very handy that you can look back through unread items if you so desire, going back even before you subscribed to the feed in the first place. To my knowledge, it also manages to go back in time further than what is on the feed itself, which blows my mind a little bit. I am not sure about the whole new sharing thing, but it seems kinda cool. I haven’t used it to any degree, but it looks like a new way of sharing somewhat equivalent to Delicious. Perhaps I’ll take a look soon. Given these reasons, I am very unlikely to go back to a desktop only version of feed reading. However, I did look for a way to sync my feeds back to a desktop app, because I do feel more comfortable using apps when at home, rather than a browser.
As heard on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud, EMI are apparently backing out of deals with smaller retailers in the US, preferring to only sell to the big stores, such as Walmart and Best Buy.
I don’t know why they’d stop, surely it is the same price to deliver to one store as it is to another, however, this is bad news for physical music sales.
Independent CD shops tend to have a much wider selection, buy and sell used music, and can track down relatively unknown artists. I don’t remember the last time I bought a CD, and I won’t notice when these shops disappear. I think a lot of people will though.
I have been waiting for a decent way to sync my feeds to the desktop from Google Reader, whilst still being able to keep up with them out and about.
My only problem with this so far is that I forgot I already had NNW installed, and my two sets of feeds have merged somewhat. It’ll take a while to sort, but I have a feeling it will be worth it.
Here are some more of my favourite photos from our visit to the West Midlands Safari Park:
As I alluded to in the previous post, the lions were quite popular, and the traffic backed up as we got towards the corner of the park where they were all resting. Considering how long it took to get near them, it’s only fair to come away with a great picture like that.
Apparently the successor to the somewhat aging USB 2.0 interface will be known as Super Speed USB.
The current interface answers to the name High Speed, leaving little wiggle room for 3.0 to go bigger, but bless it for trying anyhow.
I cannot wait to learn what comes next. Should we take suggestions now? I’m pitching Supercalifragilistic USB. You?
Written by Mr C.
Leo has added to his ever-expanding network with a new show: This Week in Google.
The first show is live, featuring Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis, with topics including Apple blocking the Google Voice app, drunk emailing, and Google Wave.
Always recommend checking out a new TWiT show, even if it’s not your thing.
This past weekend, we visited the West Midland Safari Park. It hadn’t actually been part of the plan, but sometimes visiting animals you wouldn’t normally see is the only way to brighten up your day.
There were the usual deer type animals, some buffalo, and plenty of zebras and things. It was the rhinos and elephants that we enjoyed seeing though.
It was interesting that as we were going round, the cars piled up when we got to the lions. It was impossible to get anywhere, and we spent at least twenty minutes making our way past the big cats. Now, lions are exciting, I will grant you that, but when there are elephants just around the corner? No competition.
This is one of the best blog entries I’ve read in a while, despite the fact that it is in the form of an image, which I would normally frown upon.
The topic in hand is the progression from terabytes to the next level petabytes. It took me a while to get my head around this at first. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, a petabyte is a thousand terabytes. So, in other words, quite large.
There are studies emerging all over the place regarding who actually uses Twitter and what they get out of it, and it seems as though the powers that be are starting to take notice.
The social networking site has long since ceased to be a place where you answer the original question “What are you doing?” In fact, I just had to go and check the website itself to see if it actually still featured the question above the text box. It does, which seems odd.
Our hero FKM has finally opened up about Le Mans, and it makes good reading (even when murdered by Google Translate). There’s a lot of detail about the broken leg, and the race itself, but the best bit comes at the end, when he talks about why he looked grumpy on the podium:
Sorry … I am not proud of this moment for my guys, for all the work we have done, I should have a smile of pride to belong to this family … but tired, hurt and disappointed, I struggled on. But do not worry after a few hours, I was the first to open the fridge door truck to offer drink to the winners and 2009 … with a smile!
I recently uncovered a site called 11 Points which compiles top ten lists, but with eleven items. Some of the lists are rubbish, and the site is very garish to behold, but there are some gems to be found.
I have always liked top ten lists and similar. The first podcast I subscribed to was Top of the Pods, which is sadly no longer broadcasting. The idea was a simple weekly chat between two guys, counting down random lists, some submitted by listeners. There’s something about the list format that appeals to me, and I miss that show.
I have definitely seen this one before, perhaps at the request of Mr C, but I think it might have been late at night and I probably wasn’t paying attention. I recall it as the one where they pretended to be dead which is factually incorrect. I like the idea of this film, and the story is good, but my god it is hard work. All that smoke, and blue/red lighting, it gets a bit trying. Still, some of the lines are funny, and the characters are good. I’m not sure I would recommend this onwards, but I don’t want my two hours back.
With all the current news and info emerging about the Apollo 11 mission - celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landings - it’s hard not to think about space travel and what the future of it is.
During a reunion of the Apollo 11 crew, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong seemed to think that Mars should be the next destination. They also didn’t stop at dreaming up _visits _to the red planet but thought we should aim higher. Aldrin’s take on things:
Today, the first LibriVox book that I co-ordinated has been completed and catalogued for the wider world to enjoy. If you’re at all interested in a book that follows the life of a prehistoric caveman, then I recommend The Story of Ab by Stanley Waterloo.
It was quite exciting when I saw this book turn up in the new releases RSS feed, as it is with any book I’m involved in. Knowing that I helped to make it happen, that I was a part of a wider effort to make the audio available to everyone, is really satisfying.
I have seen it before but like most films, although I remember the ending, I don’t quite know how it gets there. This is, as always, a great film, something of a classic, even though the flying effects are rather awful looking back. Some of the lines made me laugh out loud, which is always a good sign, and the characters are really strong (even that smarmy Superman fella).
I don’t really enjoy hot drinks much, the occasional cup of tea or hot chocolate, and certainly not coffee. That being the case, I feel like I am missing out on the joy of the vast variety of mugs there are available to purchase. I was doing a little searching, for no particular reason, and came across a couple I would want, if I could justify buying them only to sit in my cupboard and collect dust.
I appear to have grown a cucumber.
I don’t quite know how this happened. One minute it was all leaves, then the yellow flower, and suddenly there’s a big, green cucumber growing. I did take some pictures last week but forgot to do anything with them, and I can tell you this vegetable has more than doubled in size over the course of a week.
I remember writing a piece for The BBC Blog when Being Human got recommissioned for BBC Three. At the time, I said:
Personally, I couldn’t get through the first episode, but it was even successful on the iPlayer. The first two episodes were the most watched at the time, and the website has seen a soar in hits.
Well, as it turns out, they have been repeating the first season, presumably in preparation for the second to begin soon. I gave it another go on the iPlayer and absolutely loved it. Perhaps I wasn’t in the mood previously.
Firstly, you must, must, must check out these very cuddly panda bears, and whilst you are there, you must buy me one. (Thanks to Andy for the tip.)
Now, onto the good stuff:
Credit: Karen/Flickr
It’s been a bit quiet in Franck-land recently, but he hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs, doing nothing. He was in France for a Peugeot event, and then travelled to Canada to spend some time with the Andretti Green Racing team.
According to the official website:
Franck was pretty excited to go to Canada to see his Dudes… His former mechanics and engineers kept in touch and the AGR team actually followed the Number 8 performance pretty closely at Le Mans.
I was recently perusing the Podcasting News site and found an article with some new media tips from Trent Reznor. Now, I am only vaguely aware of Mr Reznor, not being a Nine Inch Nails fan, myself.
However, it was the tips themselves that fascinated me. And by fascinated, I mean baffled. It starts off well.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace - it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic.
I just heard about the £12.5 million revamp of the London Eye.
Do you know what they’re doing?
They’re taking each pod off, one at a time, and replacing them with a temporary one that doesn’t carry passengers. Each pod is then floated down the Thames to Essex, before being transported to Worcester. The refit takes place, the pod is returned to its rightful place and the next one gets the same treatment.
Shock, horror, last Thursday was actually an acceptable day, as days go. I have a feeling today will revert to the usual Thursday fare, though, so Baby Panda Thursday it is!
Firstly, make sure you check out the latest Zoo Borns panda post because there’s all kinds of cuteness on there that shouldn’t be allowed.
Also, there is a superb set of panda photos on Flickr that are unfortunately not available for sharing. They are definitely worth looking at, though, and there are loads of them.
It turns out everyone was right. You all said it was a great film and it is. I laughed a lot at the end. I don’t know how much of that was the wine, but I would have enjoyed it sober as well. I am bitterly disappointed at the lack of Slimer, I thought he was in it more. (Also secretly glad because shudder more goo.)
Today we have a new and unexpected bloom:
I think this must be part of the bell pepper plant, but I can’t be 100% sure. It’s very pretty though, and so far I have spotted two of these cute little flowers.
The tomatoes are coming on very well, growing nice and strong, bigger than I expected. They are still green, so I am waiting for them to turn a lighter shade of red before snapping some more photos. I can’t wait to try one.
