Nick Long's Blog

New Year New Blog

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 19:53:28 GMT

I finally found some time to update my janky looking Word Press to a shiny new Gatsby powered site. I’ll write about why I wanted to change and what made me select Gatsby at some point in the future, but in this post I want to reflect on the history of my blog.

Looking Back

This blog has existed in one form or another since 2006 and looking back provided me with some interesting insights. In 2018 the idea of even having a blog (and especially self hosted) seems somewhat retrograde, but back in 2006 when social media still meant MySpace blogging was what you did if you wanted a simple way to share things with people over the internet. I’m impressed how dedicated I was that I managed to sustain posting several times a month for so long.

I’ve been a blogger since there only were a few thousand bloggers in the world first on Open Diary and then on Live Journal (alas the teenage insight on those pages is lost to the mists of time). This page started life on Blogger before I was tempted away to Posterous. That site was promptly shut down after being bought out (I wrote about my disappointment with free services that shut down here ). After that experience I decided to be the master of my own destiny and self host however since the move to Word Press I’ve managed the grand total of five posts in five years. Partially this is due to the increasing demands on my time from having a family and because in the era of Facebook people are seldom interested in your blog, but also because I have found other outlets for my writing with a bit more reach.

What have I been up to?

From 2011 I began writing for Easy Ear Training which has since morphed into the excellent Musical U. This gave me a great opportunity to take writing more seriously and the quality of my written output massively improved over this period. You can find all of my collected writing for Musical U here.

In addition to Musical U in 2013 I helped to set up The Fretboard which is now the UKs most popular guitar site. since then I’ve spent most of my writing energy on contributing to the community.

Looking to the future

Modernising my site doesn’t mean I’ve recommitted to blogging and the original focus of game and music reviews feels a bit like “Dancing about architecture” in a world where streaming services exist. That said I don’t intent to leave it entirely unloved. I would like to use it as a platform to share projects that I’ve been working on, but this will be intentionally infrequent.

Console Wars - Book Review

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 19:53:28 GMT

I bought this book because I was very much an 80’s Nintendo kid and there has been quite a bit of buzz about it.

The first thing that must be said about it is that this is a book with a very narrow scope. It’s not a history of the console wars, it’s not even a history of Sega (check out Service Games for a better book on this subject). Instead it is a history of how Tom Kalinske successfully marketed the Mega Drive to become the dominant console in early 90’s America before Sega spectacularly shot themselves in the foot with the Sega CD /32X / Saturn debacle.

Non Americans should be aware that markets outside of the US are largely ignored.

Despite it’s limitations it’s a very detailed and clearly well researched book and even people who’ve read quite a bit on the subject will probably learn something. It’s written in an engaging novel like style and is an enjoyable read (though the imagined dialogue is horrific) For people considering a purchase it’s important to realise that it is at it’s heart a book about marketing not video games, or tech.

Though there is little doubt that Tom Kalinske was a marketing genius and pulled off one of the all time underdog upsets when Sega USA pushed Nintendo in the second place spot, the book is guilty of being a bit of a rose tinted love letter (The author even name checks him as a “Great guy” in the acknowledgements).

Most of the achievements of Sega are attributed to him and his team while seemingly blaming anything bad that happened on Japan. This is especially jarring with the 32X which is portrayed as something that was foisted on him when most sources agree that it was largely Sega USA’s baby and developed by a team under his control.

Perhaps worst of all the book asks the question why Sega Japan was so hard on Sega USA and comes to the conclusion “No one knows, probably jealousy” without acknowledging that Sega USAs overspending and price slashing saddled Sega with large debts that restricted their ability to compete with the Playstation.

Despite all these complaints it’s an entertaining book as long as you take it with a substantial pinch of salt and I’m sure most gamers of the early 90’s will enjoy the warm glow of nostalgia.

TheFretboard.co.uk

Sat, 03 Aug 2013 09:59:55 GMT

For a number of years I’ve been an avid poster to the Music Radar Forum.

It simply had a better community than any of the other guitar sites out there, but despite that I found myself getting frustrated with it.

It was based on the somewhat dodgy VBulletin and would often be riddled with bugs which the owners Future didn’t seem to have the time or inclination to fix and it’s gone offline for extended periods several times in the past. As I write this it’s been offline for over two weeks and it took them a week to even acknowledge there was a problem with no date for a proposed fix.

With this in mind me and some geeky ex forumites took it upon ourselves to see if we couldn’t knock up a better forum in a week, one that was run by the members, for the members, and do you know what, I think we’ve done a pretty good job.

So it is my great pleasure to introduce to you: www.thefretboard.co.uk

Get Lamp and Interactive Fiction

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 22:23:55 GMT

I finally got around to watching Get Lamp which I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

It’s an interesting documentary though it clearly shows it’s low budget nature (it could seriously use a narrator) and I can’t imagine it would have the appeal outside of the gaming community that something like King of Kong had.

I think the most interesting element of it for me was just being reminded of how much I enjoyed those games in my childhood. I’m probably amongst the first generation where video games really were ubiquitous. The first game I really played extensively was Super Mario Bros so unlike the guys who got into gaming in the late 70’s graphics was always an option even at home.

My real introduction to text adventures (apparently you call them IF now) was Hitchhikers Guide. Long after such things had fallen by the wayside I was a huge Adams fan and sunk hours into playing this impenetrable monster of a game into which the great man had clearly invested a significant amount of time.

Straight after watching the film I went to the competition site mentioned in the film and played a few of the high ranking games. Despite all the intervening years I fell right back into the joy of the genre.

As inevitably happens in such situations it has awakened in me a long held desire to write a text adventure. I have always felt that there was a novel in me somewhere, but all of my past literary projects have come to nothing and so I have largely restricted myself to non fiction writing in the past few years. A text adventure would I think tickle that part of my brain which enjoys coding as well as the more creative part.

Part of the appeal is discovering that Inform 7 one of the principle development tools used for writing these games uses a declarative domain specific language based on a natural language like syntax. I learned Prolog at university and found it quite an interesting approach to programming (if painful at times). The first thing you learn on a Comp Sci degree is that we have programming languages because attempting to write programs in natural language would be a non starter. The large number of Inform 7 games would seem to suggest that for specific application and a narrow definition of “natural language” this may not be the case. Software engineers tend to be so focussed on the default OO/procedural approach to software design that it’s easy to forget that any other paradigm can exist and I’m sure the experience would sharpen my saw.

As anyone who knows me about 1 in 10 of my projects comes to fruition so don’t hold your breath waiting for a dazzling piece of interactive fiction to appear on here unless you are interested in free diving, or experimenting with the properties of your vagus nerve.

When Cheap is Better Than Free

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 00:11:27 GMT

This week Google announced Keep a free online note taking product to rival Evernote which I will not be using.

I’m an avid premium Evernote user, but I haven’t always been. Back in 2006 I was introduced to the world of online note taking by a free online note taking app called Notebook made by a company called Google. I used to fill these notebooks with interesting things I’d found using my favorite feed reader also provided by Google and sometimes if really liked a news feed I’d pin it to the front of my iGoogle homepage.

Nothing but a G Thang

You might go so far as to call me a Google fan boy. I have used GMail and Docs since it was invite only, I have an Android phone and tablet. I’m even writing this article via Chrome.

The reason I use so many Google services is that they are so frequently an unassailable combination of the best product at the best price which is as we all know is free, or is it?

At What Price Free?

I used to write this blog on a site called Posterous which was a really great platform with the nice twist of allowing you to blog by e-mailing them whereupon lots of clever code would format your ramblings into a nice looking blog post. Like many web start ups Posterous apparently had no business model whatsoever. In the face of this they did what all startups want to do and got bought by one of the big boys. In this instance Twitter who promptly shut them down.

Last week we discover that Reader (and iGoogle) are also to be shutdown and I find my self looking for a replacement in a marketplace that has stagnated due to a free product completely wiping out the competition and then disappearing in a waft of corporate bullshit about “focus”. Google are nothing like Posterous in that they are clearly very good at making money, but the situation is identical. I don’t pay Google for Reader or Posterous for my blog so they can take it away if they so choose because I’m not the customer.

I shouldn’t be surprised after all as I mentioned in the first paragraph I was an avid fan of Notebook which died in 2011. Indeed this excellent Guardian article suggests Google services have an average life expectancy of about four years.

Feedly Falls Flat

Hunting around for a new provider for my Reader I saw a great number of recommendations for Feedly. Pretty as this site undoubtedly is (I do have some technical misgivings I shall share in a future post) I can’t bring myself to use it because it offers no obvious business model and currently lacks a premium offering. This means that at some point in the future they are going to start charging an as yet unknown amount, or will shut down through acquisition, or just burning though their VP money.

As a consequence I’ve decided to selfhost my blog using WordPress and my RSS needs using Tiny Tiny RSS. These services can’t be taken away from me because I own the source and the data and even if my web host and the developer went under my services would continue to work.

Why Evernote Premium is Better Than Keep for Free

Some of my friends have questioned why I continue to pay for services like Dropbox and Evernote when Keep and Google Drive are free. The simple answer is that both services are inexpensive and I have come to realise that some things on the internet are better when they are cheap than when they are free. I have no doubt in my mind as to the business model of Evernote. It is simply to sell as many premium accounts to their note taking service as possible. Their revenue stream and thus there loyalty is with me not an advertiser, or a potential acquirer. Put another way Evernote’s purpose is to delight me with their product, not to delight an advertiser with my personal data.

I did briefly consider that I might be being too cynical until I read the other big tech news this week. Sumly have been acquired by Yahoo for a large sum of money.

The app is already being shut down.

New Blog Home - Site Update

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:02:39 GMT

I’ve been neglecting my blog for some time now and my homepage at nick-long.com was a shambles that hadn’t been updated since 2008.

I recently discovered that my chosen blogging platform Posterous is due to be shut down in April which has spurred me into action. I’ve migrated my blog across to a new self hosted WordPress and over the next couple of weeks the plan is to update my site with some new content and to adapt the content of the old site for WordPress.

Deus Ex Human Revolution

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:12:00 GMT

I’ve just finished a run through of Deus Ex so I thought it would be a good time for another in my increasingly infrequent series of game reviews.

Human Revolution is the sequel to Deus Ex the game commonly considered the greatest in PC history (which I must confess I’ve never played). I’m not going to recount the whole plot as Wikipedia can fill you in should you desire, but in brief you play Adam Jensen the head of security for a biotech mega corporation who is maimed and subsequently rebuilt as a bionic badass when his company is attacked by mercenaries. I’m a sucker for a cyberpunk setting so I’d been looking forward to playing Deus Ex for some time and it hasn’t disapointed.

The reviews I read before getting the game were positive, but tended to dwell on a few things that Deus Ex gets wrong (of which more later), but what really struck me when playing it is how many fundamental things it gets right.

The Good Bits

I found it incredibly refreshing to play a game where even handguns feel dangerous (especially compared to Uncharted where some human opponents can survive a direct hit from an RPG). If an opponent sneaks up on you, or if you get careless in a firefight you will be dead in seconds, couple that with the relatively slow health regeneration and you have a recipe for some very tense action sequences. It is a credit to the game that though you will die a lot, it rarely feels cheap.

At its core Deus Ex is a story about the transhumanism and the ethics of unregulated biotechnology. You are frequently called upon to make moral choices, but it avoids the horrible goody-o-meter which recent games (I’m looking at you Infamous) seem to be much enamoured with and it mercifully doesn’t equate ethics to unlocking abilities.

Human Revolution gives you complete freedom to choose your play style. In nearly any situation you can get through it with stealth, hacking, charm or a bit of the old ultra violence. Indeed it’s possible to complete the game without actually killing anyone (for which a trophy is available). In most games I’ve played of this nature you always suffer if you play a non combat focused role due to missing out on loot and experience from slain grunts, but Deus Ex very cleverly awards extra XP for stealth takedowns, locating secret routes etc, meaning a Rambo style play through will probably net you fewer points than a more cerebral approach.

I know the sales figures of the COD franchise suggest I’m in the minority, but I don’t do FPS games as a rule. I just can’t work out how you are supposed to avoid getting flanked when you can’t see around you and I tend to spend at least some of every FPS game aimlessly spinning around trying to work out who the hell is shooting at me.

Human Revolution cleverly gets around this by switching to third person when you are in cover.

The game develops a great sense of place and mood. The city levels are small and densely packed meaning you don’t end up trudging for miles between missions and the newspapers and ambient conversations update to reflect what’s going on in the game. When hacking it’s great to stumble on petty email squabbles between NPCs. It helps that the side quests are generally consequential and tied to the main plot (rather than the typical meaningless fetch quests). By completing them you learn more about the protagonists back story and expand the world.

The Bad Bits

It alas this review can’t be a total love fest so I do have a couple of things to bitch about:

Your abilities are powered by a multi segment energy meter of which only the last segment automatically recharges. Other segments must be recharged by eating. This would be fine, but performing mundane tasks like carrying heavy objects drains your energy so you end up leaving your energy meter at one and only topping it up for combat. The idea that Adam is locked in a deadly firefight while cramming down Mars bars, seems a bit silly. (You can also chug a litre of vodka to regain health in a move which seems more like it belongs in Duke Nukem)

The lack of any melee weapon is also frankly barking mad. You can use energy to perform instant takedowns, but if you are facing more than one foe it’s either punch one and then fumble for an assault rifle while the other immolates you, or thump one, eat a chocolate bar then strangle the other one using what I’d like to dub the “punch up at Weight Watchers” technique. Gordon Freeman’s crowbar where art thou.

Without resorting to spoilers the end is very unsatisfactory. Your moral choices throughout the game basically result in a video montage plus voiceover end sequence which varies very little regardless of what you do. The ultimate fate and future of most of the characters and society as a whole is left hanging. The game is well written enough that you really care what happens to some of the characters so to just say “The End” is a bit of a pisser.

Any other complaints about the game pale into insignificance when the boss fight sequences are considered. These come dangerously close to ruining the whole game. At various points through the game you are dumped in a rectangular room with a near indestructible walking tank who proceeds to sling armfuls of grenades at you. Apparently these sequences were provided by an outside developer and you can really tell as they seem to be from a different game (specifically a mediocre 90’s PC shooter). The deadly combat means this is not a fun experience if you are playing as a combat focussed character, but the nature of the game is such that many players attempting a pacifist play through will get dropped into this level with only a taser and a tranquilliser gun and have to go back to an earlier save, or simply give up. The disjointed nature is underlined by the fact that there is no way to get past a boss without killing them which the game awkwardly gets around by not counting them as kills for pacifist players.

The only thing that prevented me from giving up during these sequences was the discovery that bosses are not immune to the instakill Typhoon smart bomb weapon. I’m not sure if this is a glitch or just the developers covertly acknowledging they had made a balls up and providing a means to opt out.

Conclusion

Though I have had a big moan about certain aspects it’s only because they stick out like a more thumb in an otherwise excellent game. Deus Ex is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time and if you are a fan of cyber punk, or action RPGs I recommend tracking it down.

My New Hobby - Finding E-Petition Nutters

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:51:00 GMT

It's a simple game browse through the petitions with only one vote and enjoy some unfiltered ALL CAPS insanity.

Tax free armour:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1520

Ban Cash:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1601

Huge taxes on paint:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/2039

Revert decimalisation of currency:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/3445

Tax Fridges to combat obesity:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/3515

Drop flowers on countries we are at war with:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/5460

Age of consent and marriage raised to 25

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/5698

Paint criminals green

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/7264

Awareness of one punch ninja death strikes:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/5092

Finally this one is so insane I don't even understand it:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/4441

Fret King Vs Tonerider (Vs Iron Gear) - Part 2

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:23:00 GMT

The new Tonerider alnico IV classic pickup arrived at the end of last week. They were described as “Black White Zebra” so I was hoping the light coil would be white, but it ended up being the usual cream colour which was a bit annoying. I could have sent it back, but I was far too excited.

The plan was to try just the bridge PU and see how it goes before buying the neck. In some ways it seems crazy to replace the Wilkinsons with Toneriders as they RRP at £50 to the Toneriders £35.
I stuck them in over the weekend:
All the tools in place:

The control cavity turned out to be a bit busier than I was expecting.

I was initially a bit puzzled how it worked but then worked out that the pickup cables were spliced onto a grey cable that headed off to the pickup switch on the scratchplate. The volume pot was another solder Malteser so I decided as I was doing one wire as a splice I would do them both that way.

Pickup installed!

I put the old strings back on as I figured I would be taking them off soon to change the neck one. First impressions are very good. The Tonerider sounds very different to the Wilkinson. Loads brighter which was one of the things I was really looking for as the current one is a little too dark for strumming. The broad tonal difference means they don’t blend all that well so another pickup was required in short order. I decided on an Iron Gear Alchemist humbucker sized P90. The only reason for using this over the Tonerider Rebel 90 was that the Rebel was out of stock at the time.
It shipped today so I’ll post some comparison clips when everything is installed. Including the Axetec strings which cost a staggering £2.60 a set!

Fret King Vs Tonerider - Part 1

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:56:00 GMT

The Iron Gear pickups I added to my Strat were a great success. I was very impressed that Chinese made budget pickups could make a big improvement to a vintage US Strat but indeed they did. There was quite a bit of debate on the sound clips on Music Radar. I preferred the new pickups from the get go but a tweak to the heights and they now sound amazing. I’m never going to go back to spending twice or three times the price on Seymour Duncans.

Since installing the Iron Gears my beloved Fret King has started to sound somewhat ordinary in comparison so I started planning my next pickup upgrade project. Lots of great advice was forthcoming on the thread I started on Music Radar.

I was torn between getting another set of Iron Gears which I already knew were excellent and trying out the pickups made by Tonerider which had glowing recommendations from a number of people. I already have a Tonerider British Distortion pedal which was great value for money and puts a big grin on my face when ever I use it (seriously check out the clips) so I had no worries about using them or their distributors Dangeberry Music.

To help me decide I sent an e-mail to both companies asking what they would recommend. Both companies replied within a day which is seriously good customer service in my book. Iron Gear recommended the Rolling Mill and Tonerider suggested either the Alnico IV or the Rock Song.

I’m sure I can’t go wrong whoever I choose, but as I’d already put some business Iron Gear’s way I thought I would take a punt on the Toneriders and ordered an Alnico IV from Dangleberry as I liked the clips on the site bit more.

As they sell them individually I went for just a bridge to see if I like it. Rather than sticking to the nickel covers it came with I’ve gone for the rather more gauche zebra coils.

As with last time I’ll record some before and after sound clips for your delectation and comment.

Book Review - A Drink Before The War by Dennis Lehane

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:46:00 GMT

I bought this book having just seen the amazing film Shutter Island (based on a Lehane novel).
I must say I was extremely disappointed. I am not a regular reader of detective fiction, but even so I found the plot to be nothing more than a sequence of Sam Spade clichés strung together, from the hard drinking Irish American detective stereotype to the over reliance on standard genre tropes (characters being shot moments before revealing a secret etc).
The dialogue is glib and comes across as if the characters know they are in a detective novel and have already read the plot outline. The book clearly wants to make a statement about important issues like race relations, domestic abuse and corruption, but has no idea what it actually wants to say on the subject.
Perhaps worst of all the book breaks the literary golden rule and is pretty much all tell and no show. Vast tracts of exposition take the place of any kind of characterisation or development.
My understanding is that his later books are somewhat better. On this evidence I'm not going to take the time to find out.

Frankenstrat vs Iron Gear - The Installation

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:31:00 GMT

Last weekend the deed was done and I installed my new Iron Gear pickups in my Strat (if you don’t know what I’m talking about look here)

I thought I would share some of the photos with you as modifying a vintage guitar already hacked about by previous owners is a slightly different prospect than the brand new guitars that are usually worked on in youtube videos. I decided to go for white pickups as the aged cream coloured pickups most people offer on “aged” guitars look really fake to me and I like to age my own gear.
Here are all my tools laid out ready for the job (There’s nothing worse than getting half way through a task and not having what you need)

The first task was removing the strings. My top tip if you have a guitar with a floating bridge is to put a shim under it before you remove the strings so it doesn’t fall off the posts.Paying cards work best, but I used a nearby notepad.

My first issue was getting the scratchplate off, one of the screws had rusted solid on the top and required some tweaking with pliers to remove. Once that was sorted off came the scratch plate (Notice the unfaded lake placid blue under the scratchplate).

Only then was the full horror of the hacked about wiring revealed. The new soldering iron was powered on but immediately started emitting loads of white smoke (That’s what you get for £6 from Amazon). I figured it was probably burning off some ill advised anti corrosion coating on the metal and left in running in the garden for half an hour after which it was behaving its self. Desoldering is usually a fairly simple task but as you can see in the next photo dodgy repairs left the volume pot with a lump of solder on it the size of a Malteser which my plucky 30W smoke belching soldering iron declined to melt. Eventually after trying until some of the insulation on the wiring started to fry I resorted to hacking it off with a soldering iron.

With the old pickups removed fitting the Iron Gears was fairly painless. They are really well made (better than the Fender USA originals) with single conductor waxed cloth cable and all the vintage goodies. The only issue was that the supplied springs were a little big so rather than cut them down I used the old ones.

With all the pickups in I put the guitar back together and added the two rather jazzy roller string trees as the old ones were getting corroded leading to some tuning problems.

Pleasingly it worked first time once I got the strings back on. I recorded some tone samples before I changed the pickups so for my next post I’m going to give some sound clips so you can judge for yourself if you think it sounds better but I’m very impressed so far.

Frankenstrat Meet Iron Gear

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:37:00 GMT

Let me introduce you to my Frankenstrat.

It was the first decent guitar I owned, bought for the princely sum of £200 back in 1996. I got it cheap because it had been bashed around and modified so much (Now people spend a fortune on fake looking “Relic” guitars). It’s been my constant musical companion for 15 years and is probably the only object I would consider running back into burning building for.

It started life as a 1980 USA made Fender “The Strat” (It’s a pretty rare model and I once saw a mint one in London for nearly two grand). When I bought it had been fitted with a horrible 80’s wang bar and shrill heavy metal pickups.

Over the years it’s had:

replacement Wilkinson bridge
replacement Seymour Duncan bridge pickup
Refret
Locking nut removed and new nut fitted
All knobs, switches, jack sockets, and pots replaced

It’s getting to the point where the only original bits are made of wood. It’s a fantastic guitar and it records beautifully, but I’ve never managed to get the kind of live tone I want out of it as the two original pickups don’t tend to cut through in the mix and they blend pretty badly with the replacement bridge pickup.

I’m a big believer in replacement pickups as tone boosters after hearing guitars transformed from muddy junk into tone monsters with the addition of Seymours. I’ve been thinking about treating myself to some Bare Knuckle pickups for ages as they are supposedly god gift to tone, but never getting around to it as they are so bleeding expensive. Yesterday I came across the Iron Gear website quickly followed by reading huge quantities of rave reviews about them. They are spectacularly well priced and I could buy two whole sets for the price of a single Bare Knuckle.

I’ve taken the plunge and bought a set of Texas Locos off the back of a 5* review in Guitar Buyer. Sticking to the budget theme in these recession hit times I’m going to be fitting them myself so I’ve also invested in a soldering iron.

I’m planning to record some tone samples before and after and post them here so you can hear for yourself what the Iron Gears can do for my beloved mutant guitar.

Android Project - Train Game Design

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:03:00 GMT

I've had a slight pause in my game project due to coming up against my first major design decision namely what is my game actually going to be about.

I've ruled out porting Brick of Destiny and on closer inspection I'm not convinced either of the ideas I mentioned in my initial post are going to work out.

I still stick by my initial assessment that there is absolutely no point in rewriting a classic unless I'm convinced I can do it better than Zynga, Glu or any of the hundreds of well funded casual game devs out there.

I've played and downloaded a lot of Android games and I've come to the conclusion that I don't really like tilt controls. or on screen joysticks for controlling action games which pretty much rules our classic shmups, platformers, or racing games.

I want something that's a natural fit for touch controls, but I still want something that has a proper game loop and gets the heart beating a bit faster.

There's an awful lot of games out there and it's easy to think that all the good games have been done. I've literally kept my self up at night trying to think of an original game idea.

I very nearly considered a remake of a PC game I was a huge fan of called Sheep, but a quick look at the Android market showed that several people have had the same idea.

I had my eureka moment this morning. I've always loved the scene in Wallace & Gromit where Gromit has to lay the tracks out in front of the model train. I briefly thought about making a game where you have to lay tracks in front of a train but I realised this would be nothing more than a remake of Pipe Mania and there are dozens of those out there. I also briefly considered a remake of an old Amstrad game called Locomotion which is a similar concept with a sliding block puzzle twist.

My moment of revelation was thinking about the on rails sections of Mario games where you have to ride along on a moving platform hitting switches to change course and avoid obstacles. This reminded me of the mine cart mini game in the Indiana Jones arcade game (skip to 1:30).

I've had a bit of a rummage around on the Android store and I can't find any decent mine cart, or train based games. I also spent a bit of time searching for flash games (including a site dedicated to train based flash games!?!) and though there are a few games that have a train points mechanic they are usually focussed on managing a station rather than guiding a single train.

So the concept I'm going for is keeping a train running on the tracks.

The screen will contain four parallel tracks the train can be switched from one track to the next by touching junctions on the track thus avoiding various obstacles. I'm a big fan of trying to keep something in a playable build at all times (especially due to my short attention span) so I'll probably knock something out as quickly as possible using horizontally blocks and lines and then add additional game play elements one by one getting rid of them if they don't work. Ideas so far are:

A cutesy cartoon type look possibly with isometric pixel art (I might also try some fixed perspective 3D if I'm feeling brave)
Trains containing bad guys that you have to dispatch by forcing them to run into traps
Obstacles that can't be avoided but have to be fixed for the train to pass by using touch gestures.
Depending on how I end up doing the graphics I may try my hand at a chip tune type sound track with some 8 bit synth action
Rather than have instadeath and multiple lives I'm planning on having train passengers acting as lives who fall out when the train gets hit and can be picked up by driving past stations
It would be really fun to be able to define rules for track layouts that provide a challenge, but are guaranteed completable so I could have the levels procedurally generated rather than defining them by hand
The game should progressively speed up throughout the level possibly with some power ups which allow you to speed up or slow down the train.

I'm glad I've finally got an idea I can start implementing. The next step is throwing some code together and seeing what works.

Review - Blur PS3

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:13:00 GMT

I received Blur today from Love Film. I had high hopes, but unfortunately it was one of those games that was in the console for about half an hour before it was back in the envelope ready to be posted back.

The concept of the game can be summed up very simply, it’s Burnout crossed with Mario Kart (or if you prefer Wipeout with cars). You race around stylised tracks in real cars with arcadey physics whilst picking up various power ups that fling balls of glowing energy into your opponents. The graphics and presentation are very impressive, but ultimately the game just isn’t fun.

Combining the two genres of cartoony Kart game and arcade adrenaline racer must have seemed like a winner on paper, but they are fundamentally incompatible genres. In Mario Kart the unrealistic physics of the tiny nimble cars allows you to dodge your opponents shells and makes targeting tricky, but a game like Burnout is all about the feeling of weight. A great arcade racer gives you the impression you are hauling tonnes of protesting steel teetering on the limits of traction moments from disaster. The upshot of this dysfunctional marriage of genres is that in Pure with it’s large unwieldy muscle cars it is trivial to hit and virtually impossible to avoid being hit. When 20 cars are participating in a race armed with a near limitless supply of homing missiles and leader zapping lightning you might as well call it blue shell the game.

As is par for the course in such games you start at the back of the pack and have the benefit of being slightly faster than your opponents. Making your way to the front requires little more than not crashing for a couple of laps and once you are there it’s simply a matter of luck if you will get zapped on the last corner and end up finishing in 10th place. It’s not just that when you fail it feels like a cheap loss you also start to feel that victory is equally random and thus hollow.

Checking Metacritic it looks like Blur got some pretty solid reviews, but I wonder how much that was a result of Activision leaning on the press as by all accounts the game tanked at retail leading to the Bizarre Creations eventual demise last month. My heart goes out to all the guys facing redundancy as you can tell a lot of love went into the making of a game which ultimately doesn’t really work. Bizarre will always have a special place in my heart as quite apart from their stand out hits Project Gotham and Geometry Wars the studio’s first ever game was The Killing Game Show an Amiga classic which I loved as a kid.

Playstation Plus - A Good Deal?

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:38:00 GMT

I've not been doing my usual amount of gaming recently. First I got Metroid Other M from Love Film which didn't work because apparently older Wii's stop playing double layer disks.

Then Bioshock 2 arrived, but though I think it's a decent game it didn't really work for me so I took a trip to the Playstation store to see if there was anything worth buying. I've been wondering about the Playstation Plus service for a while, but I've been resisting. There were about half a dozen games I liked the look of and for £11.99 for a 90 day subscription it seemed like a pretty reasonable deal.

The small print is that you don't get to keep the games if you cancel the service, but then there are virtually no games that I'm still playing 90 days down the line so I'm not going to worry about it and I don't let it stop me subscribing to Spotify. I used to sign up for the view that you can resell physical products but having looked into selling my old games on Amazon, most of them seem to only be worth about £5 which isn't much return if you bought a new release for £50.

I'm planning on making a few notes about it over the next few weeks so I can decide if it's worth it when the subscription renewal is due.

One of the things I was most looking forward to playing from the first batch of games was Magician Lord. When I was a kid there was nothing I coveted more than a Neo Geo with Magician Lord, but at £600 for the console and £200 a go for the games it was never going to happen. Having played it I'm glad I didn't part with my hard earned cash back in the day because it turns out it's unreasonably hard and not all that much fun. Lets hope they put King of Monsters, Bust a Move, or King of Fighters on there soon as they are the pick of SNK bunch.

Of the games I've played so far Shattered is the game that I most enjoyed. It's a superb HD remake of Breakout (you know I have a soft spot for these types of games as I wrote one ).

As well as really well balanced game play it has a great electronic soundtrack and some nifty features like the ability to move things with force waves. If you like bat and ball games you really have to play it.

It really does validate my requirement that I try to make something with a twist for my Android project as you really can't compete with big studios if you are making a straight retro remake.

Android Project - LibGDX

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:55:00 GMT

After a bit of research on Android frameworks I've decided to go with LibGDX. It looks like an excellent framework and has the advantage that Android is just one back end to the framework. It can also build for JOGL to produce a desktop app. As well as the obvious advantage of having two platforms for the price of one it also means you can play with the desktop version while you are tweaking gameplay without having to continually go through the rigmarole of building for the emulator.

LibGDX is an OpenGL library and unlike some of the more beginner focussed libraries it doesn't sugar coat anything, it expects you to deal with it's eccentricities.

I noticed that many of the other Android libraries seem to be using the libraries from LibGDX so I thought I might as well go straight to the source.

For those who are not au fait with such things OpenGL is a library that provides a standard way to talk to graphics accelerators. Before it existed people writing PC games had to write their own drivers for every single graphics card they wanted to support. OpenGL compliant hardware supports a standard set of features if you write code using an OpenGL library it will work any compliant hardware.

You might wonder why graphics hardware is important if you have a device with a speedy processor. CPUs are what's called a Turing machine which means they can do pretty much anything you can dream of while graphics accelerators can only perform a very limited set of instructions tuned for moving shapes around, but because they are so specialised and perform actions in parallel they can increase graphics performance, by a factor of tens or hundreds.

Previous Java games I have written have used the Java2D library which allows you to draw graphical primitives on a canvas without graphics acceleration and while this might be fine for a simple game running on a desktop PC if I have any aspiration for writing more advanced game on heavily resource constrained devices I'm going to need to learn how to use hardware accelerated graphics (That said I developed my desktop game on an 800MHz PIII and will be developing my mobile game on a 1GHz Galaxy S)

I'm definitely going to use the Box2D library in the future, but I think in order to get on with writing a game without having to spend to much time learning stuff I'll make OpenGL the new thing for my first project and introduce Box2D on the follow up.

I've been toying with the idea of updating Brick of Destiny to use OpenGL, but having reviewed the source I used the collision detection from Java2D quite extensively and the game also has a fixed frame rate which would mean tinkering with the rendering and simulation quite a bit so much so that it wouldn't speed things up that much. Last but not least I made a few school boy errors in the code as a gaming noob and so I would either have to waste time fixing them, be forever annoyed by bad decisions.

Next time hopefully I'll write up some concrete game design for my project.

SQL Hell

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:06:00 GMT

Today I needed to install MS SQL Server on a PC. My usual experience with installing a database engine is MySQL on Ubuntu where you open a terminal and type:
“sudo apt-get install mysql-server”

That’s it job done. 10 minutes later and you have a working DB on your server. If there are dependencies or things it needs to change it works it out for you and sorts it.

Here is the process for MS SQL Server 2008 on my XP PC

9:20AM Decide to install MS SQL Server
Search google, go to the SQL Express 2008 site
Run somekind of Java downloader which crashes firefox
Installer application reuiqres a hot fix and will not run
Manually download and run hotfix
Reboots computer without asking work lost
Run graphical installer agree to EULA
Will not install because power shell is not installed (No information provided as to what this is or how to get it)
Back to google
Can't install powershell because it can't validate Windows is genuine
Download validator tool
Run tool manually copy validation code into website
Download and install powershell agree to EULA
Installer won't run because the machine has Visual studio 2008 but this is not patched to SP1
Visual studio will not update because I am not using Internet explorer
Back to google
Download visual studio 2008 SP1
Run graphical installer
Agree to licence terms
Visual studio 2008 Installer takes half an hour to run
Go through pages of incomprehensible set up dialogues
SQL Server 2008 installer takes half an hour to run
12:07 Installer completed

And people say administering Linux is hard……

Nokia and I (A cautionary tale)

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 01:48:00 GMT

So today the long heralded rumour was confirmed and Nokia announced that over the next year or so it would be euthanising its ailing Symbian mobile platform.

I’ve been following the ongoing saga of Nokia’s slow fall from grace for some time, partially because I work for a company that develops mobile phone software (amongst other things) and partially because of my own experiences with Nokia over the years.

When I think back it seems like an impossibly long time ago that people marvelled at Nokia as kings of the user interface. I realised that looking through the history of my experiences with Nokia shows problems that started before the iPhone hit the market and are rooted in taking your consumers for granted.

Love At First Ring

My first Nokia was also my first ever mobile phone. I had just arrived at university and the phones in the halls of residence were painfully expensive as was the norm in the pre-ubiquitous mobile ownership days of the late 90’s.

I could barely afford the contract as it was, but when I saw the sleek and sexy lines of the 3210 I knew I had to have it. It stood out like a beacon amongst the lumpy grey boxes with external aerials that filled the shop. I never regretted the extra I had to pay for it. It served me for years running through several batteries and cases. The user interface was perfect; snappy and everything where you expected it to be.

When it finally died I replaced it with a 3310 which was the same only better. I kept it until it died shunning such decadence as colour screens and polyphonic ringtones as the frivolous distractions they so clearly were.

The Finnish Rebellion

Some years down the line the company I worked for were bought by German engineering behemoth Siemens. As a result everyone had to hand in their corporate issue Nokia mobile phones and get a shiny new Siemens mobile phone. The backlash was huge. People flat out refused to to return their Nokias others went out and bought replacement Nokias with their own money. The clunky Teutonic user interface of the Siemens phones seemed stone age by comparison and besides every desk in the building featured the ubiquitous Nokia charger.

Smartphone Hell

Tempted by the prospect of a 2 (count ‘em) megapixel camera I defected to a Sony Ericsson K750i for my personal phone. It had plenty of snazzy features, and it was a good phone, but it didn’t have the battery life and snappy streamlined interface of my old 3310, or my corporate low end Nok.

When I went with the good lady wife two replace her ailing phone I happened upon such a thing as a Nokia N73. This the man in the shop explained was a “smartphone”. It could play video, retrieve my e-mails and even browse the internet and more than that it was made by Nokia the Finnish masters of user experience. I bought the phone and upgraded my subscription to take into account all the data I would soon be using.

The first thing I did when I got it home was try to listen to an MP3 except it didn’t have a headphone jack. I had to buy an adapter which I promptly lost then gave up. The e-mail client flat out refused to pick up my GMail, It was too much bother to get video into a format it would play and the browser was a bad joke that I never managed to do anything useful with (I remind you I’m an engineer not an average punter).

As a professional geek I decided I would write some apps for it, but a quick look at the development environment told me it would be a nightmare.

To cap it all the phone would randomly crash, or switch its self off. I couldn’t believe how one of my favourite tech companies Nokia could produce something so defective.

To give you an impression of how much I hated this phone, my wife banned the subject in our house so frequent were my tirades on its deficiencies.

Maybe it was just a duff model. I asked around. A friend who shelled out for the even more expensive flagship N95 told me that when his contract expired he was planning to hit it with a hammer and then burn it in the garden.

Running to Standstill

When the iPhone was released in 2007 the world changed. I was surprised to discover that the iPhone 2G specs weren’t a patch on my year old N73 (no 3G, worse camera, no flash, no SD card, no front facing camera), but the difference was that suddenly everything worked, e-mail and web browsing were a pleasure.

A year down the line in 2008 and the press were full of tales of the forthcoming Nokia 5800 the new touchscreen device that would level the playing field.

A perk of my current job is that I generally get to play with every high end phone on the market. When the 5800 arrived I decided to use it as my work phone. I lasted half an hour. The clunky resistive touch screen interface was so broken that I couldn’t even make phone calls or write text messages effectively.

Though each successive generation was heralded as the iPhone killer, four years after the release of the iPhone the current £430 N8 flagship is still years behind even the first gen Apple product in the UI stakes.

How were these things even selling? I asked myself.

Backlash Begins

I started to understand what the answer might be when I went into town to look at the brand new Android phone the G1. I asked if I could try it and the guy in the shop said no. I asked how he expected to sell any. He said “Most people either know what they want from TV advertising, or else they buy what the sales assistant tells them to buy”. When you couple this with the fact that most newspaper phone reviewers don’t bother to test phones (they essentially republish bits of the press release and rate it according to the specs) and you can see how these pieces of junk get into the hands of a lot of people.

The thing that seems to have passed Nokia by is that these phones are being sold to people not statistics. A two year contract is a very long time to be stuck with a device that you hate and by the end of that period you are going to be pretty pissed. When I traded my n73 for an Android phone I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t buy another Nokia mobile phone without very good reason and I don’t doubt that there are millions of people who feel the same way. Perhaps this is what Strephen Elop means when he talks about Nokia loosing mindshare in the mobile market.

When I have some time I’ll give my thoughts on the Nokia / MS tie up, but now I need to go to bed.

Android Project - Game Engines

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:27:00 GMT

In the comments to my previous post iPhone developer extraordinaire Chris suggested using a third party physics engine for my game. I don't know why I hadn't thought of this in the first place. For web development I wouldn't dream of starting a project without using a framework. After all the longer you spend writing loads of boilerplate code the less time you have to spend on the good stuff.

Chris suggested using the Box2D library which looks very good. As Android is a Java platform a Java library would be ideal and luckily some helpful chaps have ported the library and called it JBox2D. There are some very nice looking demos on the website and a helpful tutorial about getting it up and running on Android. I was slightly concerted when playing with the applets that there were a few freezes and stutters (My laptop is only a year old) and a quick search on the internets revealed that most people were having problems with the Java garbage collector causing problems.

Luckily all is not lost. Android is not a Java only environment thanks to something called the NDK (Which as far as I can gather is just Android's version of JNI) which allows you do drop meaty chunks of speedy C++ into your Java stew. This requires you to do a bit of work to wrap any C++ classes you want to use with a bit of Java.

Luckily a bit more Googling revealed the AndEngine and libgdx a pair of free Android game frameworks. Both use OpenGL for graphics and rather conveniently integrate the Box2D library saving me the job of getting my hands dirty with NDK. Opinion seems to be that libgdx is faster and better documented while AndEngine is higher level and easier to get to grips with. I quite like the fact that libgdx offers the ability to compile into JOGL for desktop apps rather than having to continually build apks and test on the emulator.

I'm still undecided between the number puzzle and the jumping frog game but either way I'm going to give a framework a go and see what it offers.

Planning an Android Game Project

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:06:00 GMT

Back in 2008 when I wasn't feeling particularly engaged with my day job I wrote a Java game called Brick of Destiny. It was one of the most rewarding projects I've worked on and it inspired me to get a job where I could spend more time coding. Two and a bit years down the line and it occurred to me that since I've been a software developer for a living I haven't really done much in the way of coding outside of work, something which I intend to remedy by writing a game.

I have a few objectives for the project:

Simple and self contained as I have a short attention span
This isn't an intellectual exercise I wan't to write something people will play
I don't want to write something there are a thousand versions of as someone with greater resources will probably have done it better so Pac Man or Space Invaders is out of the question unless I can give it a twist
I'm going to document the development process on my blog

I have an Android phone and my Java is getting a little rusty so I'm going to write the game for Android as it's interesting to work within the constraints of a limited device. The Android Market also gives me the opportunity to get the game out to lots of people rather than the handful who played my last game.

I have the platform and the language so now all I need is an idea. I think a simple puzzle type game would be the easiest thing to implement as it can take place within a single screen and shouldn't require too much effort.

I've tried to think back to games I enjoyed from the 8 bit and 16 bit eras for inspiration and so far I've had a few Ideas, but I don't have my heart set on any one thing yet.

So far my ideas include:

Stress

An implementation of the card game Stress. It's an interesting card game because it's real time so you don't play in turns which makes it more of an action title compared to your average card game. I was all set to get started with this until I realised that there is already a version of it on the Android market (This surprised me because it's an obscure enough game that Wikipedia doesn't know about it ). Having installed the existing game on my phone it's not the most impressive implementation so I'm pretty sure I could create something better.

Jumping Based Platform Puzzle

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464 which came with a game called Roland In The Caves.

It was a really original if somewhat frustrating game in which you played as a flea trying to escape from a cave with the twist being that you could only move by jumping. I love physics based games and I think there is something very satisfying about games that involve objects moving with parabolic motion (For example Worms)

The game I have in mind would be a series of puzzle rooms filled with obstacles that can only be overcome with precision jumping. I would also probably include some elements from Bill's Tomato Game which was an Amiga game I really enjoyed in which you had to place objects (springs, fans, etc) to ensure the safe passage of a particularly squashy tomato through a level filled with hazards.

I am quite taken with this idea, but it is definitely the most challenging game idea I have thought of and the Android Market is awash with high quality physics based puzzle games.

Number Game

Number based puzzles are always popular and it should be fairly easy to implement a single screen game.

So far the best idea I have had is for a bejewelled style clear the balls from a grid type game using numbers rather than colours.

The objective would be to find lines of numbers within the grid which fulfilled certain criterion for example where the first two add up to the third, or where they are in ascending order. When these were found the numbers would explode and more numbers would fall into the grid.

This is the front runner so far, but I need to think about the game mechanics a little more to make sure that it won't be trivial or impossible to play!

If anyone out there has a genius idea for a game but lacks the coding skills to bring it to life give me a shout also anyone who fancies doing some graphics for a game get in touch if you want to collaborate.

Hopefully I will have chosen an idea for my next post so there should be some more detailed design for the selected idea.

The (not particularly) dark secret of phone hacking

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:59:00 GMT

Between the News of the World's rather shady dealings with voice mail hacking and the amorphous web vigilante Anonymous leaping to the defence of Wikileaks there has been an enormous amount of talk of hacking in the press. From the tone of the press you would imagine these acts are being performed by a cabal of amoral genius hackers (If you were feeling saucy you might imagine them as Lisbeth Salander, but I've chosen the rather more wholesome Matthew Broderick) . After all much of the case has centred around Glenn Mulcaire a private detective hired for the task surely he must be some kind of master of these dark arts.

Unfortunately the truth of the matter is really quite mundane. Most mobile networks allow you to access your voicemails from numbers other than your own phone provided you have a PIN. The mobile phone networks in their wisdom enable this feature automatically even though most people don't use it, or even know it exists. Not only that, but unless you have explicitly changed it to something more secure it will be set to a default. (If you are on Orange it's 1111, for O2 it's 8705, etc). If this has come as news to you then it's highly likely that anyone who knows your mobile phone number and can be bothered to Google the default PIN for your network could listen to your messages right now.

It's so laughably simple to do that it astounds me that Clive Goodman needed to employ a PI to do it for him creating a paper trail that put him in jail. The real scandal is that no one in the media seems to be criticising the phone networks for giving everyone the same default password, or the government for failing to advise MPs on basic telephone security.

So we've established that cell phone hacking is pretty simple, but bringing down Pay Pal that must take some kind of \Matrix style genius right?

Not so much. The attacks on companies refusing to deal with Wikileaks was a type of attack known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack or DDoS for short. The name sounds awfully complicated, but it's actually a basic as you can get and isn't really hacking at all.

You might remember a little while back some hippy types got rather annoyed with Top Shop engaging in alleged tax avoidance and so decided to go and stand outside and cause a nuisance.

A DDoS attack is simply the electronic equivalent.

Lots of angry people connect to the Paypal site at the same moment until the servers that power the site are overwhelmed and can no longer do their job. Nothing is hacked and nothing is broken, but rather like Top Shop during the protest so many grumpy people are standing in the way that regular punters get turned away. You may have heard talk of sophisticated software called things like “Ion Cannon“, but in reality a drinking bird pressing the refresh button on your web browser would have the same effect. It's no different to when you hear that a ticket website has crashed as a result of demand for the new Take That tour.

DDoS attacks are sometime carried out using hacked PCs by organised crime to do nefarious things like blackmail online casinos, but in this case it was simply a group of like minded individuals expressing their frustration with the online equivalent of a peaceful protest.

The fear of the new means the Top Shop story gets reported as people expressing their democratic right to protest while the tone of the Wikileaks story ends up as evil hackers trying to bring about the end of society.

Kindle - First Impressions

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:25:00 GMT

You may have seen my previous post on my compulsion to buy a Kindle. Well quelle surprise I caved after getting to have a play with a family members Kindle over the holidays.

It arrived today and so I thought I would quickly post some first impressions before writing a full review when I've spent more time with it

Q: Are you ready for some unboxing porn?

A: Of course you are!

Apologies for the rubbish picture quality, but unfortunately though the Galaxy S is a great phone it has a rubbish camera (more of that in another post)

It's brilliant that companies are focussing on creating a positive experience when you first come in to contact with a new shiny thing and I was really impressed with the excellent packaging. Minimal and understated, but really classy and well made at the same time.

I was also impressed that the charger is a really nice looking unit and that power and data is supplied by a single Micro USB (Devices without standard connectors are my biggest gadget pet hate)

I can see why people have tried to rip the screen off believing it to be a dust cover because it looks so much like matt plastic. It took me a moment to realise that it was displaying a welcome message.

The Kindle feels light and easy to manage. I can imagine happily reading with it for hours (And after writing this I intend to). The screen is fantastic I haven't stopped being impressed with the magic effect of seemingly printed words changing before my eyes. It definitely fulfils Arthur C Clarke's third rule: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The fact that when you buy a Kindle it comes pre-linked to your Amazon account is also brilliant because it allows you to dive straight in with nothing to get in your way.

The overriding impression that you get when holding the Kindle is that it feels special in the way that Apple has been able to nail with it's recent products and the Galaxy Tab I was playing with earlier today really didn't.

My Kindle's first big outing is going to be on my four day business trip to Milan next week so I'll write up my experiences when I get back.

Ciao for now.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

BBC Sound of 2011 Long List

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 12:17:00 GMT

The BBC have just published their sound of 2011 long list some thoughts as I listen.

I'm impressed by Esben and the Witch as their name implies they sound like a dark fairytale. If their album keeps up this level of quality I can see it being on heavy rotation.

I'm a sucker for anything with a Dub Step flavour so I enjoyed Jamie Woon though his voice is a little commercial for my tastes, in the D&B/Dubstep category Nero excites me the most. It would be great to see an artist other than Pendulum getting some viscous breaks in the charts.

Daley is clearly a big talent, not the kind of thing I spend a lot of time listening to, but the world needs an alternative to Jamie T who can sing in tune.

The Naked and Famous are perhaps a little too indebted to MGMT on the evidence of what I've heard, but there's always a place in my heart for sunny pop music.

No clips on the BBC site but The Vaccines sound like a strange hybrid of Mumford and Sons and Interpol topped off with the fantastic baritone of Justin Young. I found a clip of them playing on Jools Holland you can check out. I'll eat my hat if these guys don't make it (Which naturally means they are doomed)

Warpaint are capable of dreamy loveliness, but Undertow sounds a little too much like a rewrite of Polly by Nirvana to my ears.

While Clare Maguire and Jessie J may well end up being huge they do nothing for me.

I think Anna Calvi has the potential to produce a world class album. Jezebel is a curiosity, but Moulinette is a wonderful track.

I'm not going to make any predictions of who will be the true breakthrough, but even the beeb picked Little Boots over Lady Gaga.

Humble Bundle 2 Reviews - Machinarium

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 22:50:00 GMT

The Humble Bundle 2 is available for another couple of days (Total at time of writing over $1.5!) They have recently added Steam access to the games and thrown in the games from the original bundle free of charge so there is even more reason to grab a copy if you haven't already.

The second review in the series is Machinarium which is an old skool point and click adventure in the style of Monkey Island and the like.

The game tells the tale of a little robot called Josef who has been dumped in the wilderness by gangsters who have kidnapped his girlfriend. You have to traverse across several screens full of puzzles and quests to get her back and thwart the evil robots.

Like Braid what sets this apart from the crowd is the spectacular artistic direction and story telling. Everything from the little touches in the animation (Like the way Josef slides down banisters, or dreams about his girlfriend when you leave him to his own devices ) to the wonderful scribbley line drawings that take the place of dialogue screams attention to detail.

The puzzles are tricky, but satisfying when you complete them and in a genius move a full guide is always available but each page can only be accessed by playing a time consuming mini game meaning you only ever look when you really need to,

I straight up loved this game. It's fairly short (I finished it in a couple of evenings of casual play) and has zero replay value, but both as a narrative and as a lateral thinking puzzle it has been one of my favourite games of the year.

Humble Bundle 2 Reviews - Braid

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:41:00 GMT

For those of you who aren't familiar The Humble Bundle is a collection of games by top indie devs which are collected together and sold for a limited time as a pay what you like bundle with a proportion of the money going to charity. I bought the first bundle and was really pleased with it. All of the games were released for Mac. Windows and Linux, were totally DRM free and could be downloaded as many times as you like. After release several of the games were made open source and also made available to download via Steam.

The Humble Bundle 2 has just been released (http://www.humblebundle.com/) and I excitedly bought it on the first day (At time of writing it is available for another 5 days) .

I thought I would give a few thoughts on each game as I played it and the first up is Braid.

Braid is probably the most famous game in the bundle as it has already been a critically acclaimed hit on the Xbox arcade and PS3 where it has a 93% Metacritic score so you know you are in for something pretty special. The game is a simple platformer in the style of Mario, but what make it stand out are the fantastic graphics which look like a water colour painting and a superb orchestral soundtrack.

The core mechanic of the game is based around the protagonist Tim's ability to rewind time. This is used to great effect as there is no need to have any kind of menu or HUD. All bad things (monsters, spikes, fire) are instant kills and you simply rewind time and try again if you fail so the screen is kept completely free of score, lives, etc. The time rewinding mechanic is used for some mind bending puzzles and is tightly tied into the plot which explores the idea that someone with power over time could erase all their mistakes and annoyances and if you could would be the right thing to do.

Braid is an excellent game and at £7.99 on PSN you could easily purchase the bundle for that price and enjoy the rest of the games as a bonus.

Daft Punk's Tron Legacy Soundtrack is Awesome

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:36:00 GMT

Spotify have had a preview sampler of the Daft Punk soundtrack for the Tron Legacy movie for the last couple of weeks and since the full version has come out I have listened to very little else. It is a glorious, electro orchestral tour de force. I can’t think of many more perfect pairings for a film soundtrack and I’m impressed that Disney have had the stones and the vision to hand a triple A blockbuster to a couple of French guys who think they are robots. It bodes very well for the movie which I still fully expect to be impressive nonsense, but at least now it might be stylish impressive nonsense.

Check out this trailer featuring stand out track Derezzed

listen to it on Spotify

Rotoscoped Insanity

I’m a huge fan of the Rotoscoped insanity that is the origional Tron. It’s a little bit all over the place, but I think alongside War Games it really stands up as one of the greatest geek films of all time. I can watch the primitive CGI scenes over and over again, but I love the neon glow most of all (which few people even to this day realise was painstakingly rotoscoped by hand).

A weak point of the film was probably the Wendy Carlos soundtrack. It was quite reasonable to assume that the menacing synth work of Clockwork Orange might be carried across, but to me the soundtrack sits awkwardly and is quite conventional and in places cheesy.

Even if Tron Legacy is a stinker the soundtrack will still take it’s rightful place in my heart alongside the greatest sci-fi sound track of all time the Vangelis soundtrack for Blade Runner.

The Saboteur is a terrible game - So why did I play it to the end?

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:19:00 GMT

I’m not too picky with games. I have a Lovefilm subscription and due to the four point scale it’s pretty much impossible to trust game reviews (with the possible exception of Ars and Edge) so I just tend to rent anything that looks interesting and send it back when I get bored. Sometimes I can’t stand a game that everyone raves about (Modern Warfare 2) and occasionally I rather enjoy something that’s generally considered to be junk (Excite Truck).

Space Invaders with Swastikas

Despite having read dozens of books on WWII there have been no games on the subject that I have enjoyed as they all seem to side step the reality of war and degenerate into Space Invaders with swastikas.

The last game I rented was The Saboteur; Pandemic’s swan song before going belly up. It’s a fantastic concept for a game. Set in occupied Paris during WWII and loosely based on the real life story of William Grover-Williams winner of the first Monaco Grand Prix turned French resistance war hero. Perhaps this would be the first true war game. Unfortunately the game is so spectacularly mishandled it’s reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer rewrites Mr Smith Goes to Washington as a bloodbath shootout.

For no apparent reason the protagonist has been changed into a horrific Irish stereotype (genuine sample dialogue: “OIM BLOODY OIRISH!) who’s only interests are drinking, smoking and shagging. Worst of all he openly doesn’t give a toss about the plight of the French under the Nazis and is only fighting to get revenge on a German solider who killed his friend after they tried to steal his car in a tit for for tat dispute over a fixed race (I’m not kidding).

Not only is the main character a misogynistic. homophobic moral vacuum who lives in a brothel (complete with premium DLC to add computer boobies) the voice acting, plot and script are risible with accents that would make the cast of Allo Allo blush. The plot is so muddled that in 1940 the war doesn’t seem to have started but three months later, the Nazis seem to have invented Nuclear Weapons, have highly advanced radar systems, conquered France (and rebuilt half of it) and the French resistance is in full swing.

All this and more is summed up nicely in Keza MacDonald’s opinion piece for Eurogamer “Why I Hate… The Saboteur” (so I’m not going to talk any more about how offensive the plot is) which really got me thinking if it’s so terrible, why was I half way through it and why did I complete it last night?

Game Mechanic Bingo

It certainly isn’t because of the focussed game play. At various points The Saboteur continually switches between third person shooter, stealth, racing game, parkour platformer, demolition sim and Nazi themed GTA. You can imagine someone at Insomniac pitching it as Metal Gear Solid meets Gran Turismo, meets Assassins Creed, meets Gears of War, meets Red Faction.

This unfortunately results in nothing being done very well. Despite playing a racing driver you only get to take part in five races in the whole game which aren’t all that much fun (Imagine a racing game based on the GTA engine). Worse still stealth games rely on the guards being much stronger than you, but the shooter parts result in our hero having huge amounts of regenerating health and vast amounts of fire power so upon discovery you can often just run down the machine gun fire for a one hit neck break for a free Gestapo uniform shaped ticket back to stealth mode.

The stealth model its self is somewhat broken relying on what is called a zone of suspicion which shows up on your map around Nazi property and locations of explosions or gunfire. This means the following are all possible: Driving a car down a busy road into a fuel dump but jumping out before the zone of suspicion will not register as a suspicious event, when walking up to a guard tower the lookout will loose interest when you are underneath because he can’t see you meaning you can always blow them up in complete safety, and after driving a tank into a base and blowing most of it sky high you can jump out and switch off the alarm and everyone will assume it was a false alarm and go about their business despite half of the base being on fire.

The map is so vast and so filled with German hardware and troops it seems like an impossible task to defeat them, but as on death anything you destroy stays that way and you always start at the nearest gun shop you quickly realise the war of attrition is in the other direction. A fool proof technique is to stock up on rockets, drive a car straight through the front gates of fortress blow up everything in sight, die wake up at the gun shop rinse and repeat.

There are almost too many silly things list like the fact that there are no consequences of driving a car into civilians, or a wall at 100mph, or that in Germany everyone is still French and on your side, or the controls which share the same button for detonate and shoot making it easy to execute the perfect stealth sabotage then randomly fire into the air in a room full of Nazis if you hold the button a microsecond too long, and worst crime of all the grenade button mapped to the (hair) trigger meaning you blow yourself up if you ever put the controller down without pausing.

So what’s good about it?

The Joy Of Blowing Things Up

The first and most obvious thing is that blowing stuff up is fun. Covertly planting dynamite on tanks and anti-aircraft guns then watching your handy work as bits of burning metal ascend into the sky never really gets old and there’s an awful lot of stuff to blow up. Gunplay is also solid and enjoyable with a good range of weapons on hand.

Paris J’Taime

The real star of the show in this game is Paris. The city and surrounding countryside are lovingly rendered and you are often met by breathtaking cityscapes complete with iconic Parisian landmarks (Although it does have the amusing Team America tendency to put the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triumph right next to each other). Much has been made of the novel mechanic where the sense of hope in the populace is reflected with colour. Areas under German control are rendered in black and white with the only splashes of colour the red of blood, fire and Nazi symbols while areas in which the resistance have a foothold are in vivid colour. The game engine is solid and has some clever anti-aliasing on the PS3 which keep everything looking smooth not to mention it is one of the only action games I’ve played recently that hasn’t crashed at the drop of a hat.

The sound track is also inspired with some excellent jazz tracks including Caravan and Feeling Good featuring extensively.

I can’t help imagining the turtle neck wearing art department despairing as the high fiving frat boys in the gameplay department filled their loving crafted city with strippers, cartoon Nazis. “Sweet Jumps” and a main character who will commit murder for a case of booze (I’m not kidding)

So Close and yet So Crass

All in all this game feels like a wasted opportunity. If the management at Pandemic had picked one or two gameplay mechanics and stuck to them the action could be much tighter and more fun.

The second and more significant improvement would have been to send the entire script and voice teams on a day out and then move offices while they were away. It’s a rare example of a game that could be remade without changing the engine, or graphics and easily be double the game with with the kind of charm and charisma displayed by the story teams at studios like Naughty Dog or Rockstar.

As it stands the best way to enjoy this game is to rent it and skip the cut scenes.

Kindle - Evil or Awesome?

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:28:00 GMT

The Brave Future

I’ve been telling people excitedly about electronic paper and e-books since it was a sci-fi dream of the future, but I haven’t made the jump yet. Chris of Sonictruths excellent article about how he became the poster boy for the Kindle sparked my enthusiasm that perhaps I should buy one of these graphite marvels, but a few doubts remain in my mind.

E-Books and the minimalist life

I’m the first to admit I spend way too much time staring at backlit screens (Note: My wife has since informed me that she is in fact the first to admit this) and as I have keratoconus the idea of reading from a surface that doesn’t sear my eyes and induce migraines is one that appeals. It isn’t just the reading surface I like the idea of. I moved house a few months back and experienced a damascene moment on the subject of stuff. Having moved from a single room to a one bed flat, then a two bed, then a three bedroom house I found myself downsizing for the first time ever. The cycle of filling my place with crap then getting a bigger place had to be broken. Divesting myself of my hard won junk was daunting at first, but driving back from the charity shop, or the tip felt liberating. I felt lighter without being tied down to possessions I didn’t need and didn’t use. I used to take huge pride in the hundreds of CDs and DVDs I own, or my shelves full of books. Now I just think how much more space I would have if I didn’t have book shelves, or CD racks in the living room. Music and video are already taken care of I now have a subscription to spotify and lovefilm so buying CDs and DVDs is a thing of the past. Books are the last piece of the puzzle.

The Reader

When I lived in London an spent an hour and a half on the tube every day my consumption of books way legendary. I read very quickly and with seven and a half hours of tube reading plus any free time I would consume a couple of novels a week. Since moving to the country I don’t miss the tube, but I do miss the reading. I had become reliant on my enforced sessions and without it I simply stopped reading.

Bandwagon Jumped

I think of my self as an almost but not quite early adopter. My tendency towards thrift makes it too painful for me to buy a thousand pound gizmo only to find a better one in the shops. ( I made an exception with the EEE which I bought on the day of release ) I usually set my self a set of conditions for when I want to get on board a technology bandwagon. With e-book readers it was small and light with minimal screen bezel (My only dislike with the first generation EEE PC) and have a decent contrast ratio, good page turn speed and not cost a stupid price. The third gen Kindle seems to have all these things with a vengeance, but something stays my hand

Never owned an iPod

I’m far from a Linux obsessed electronic freedom bore (Others may debate this point), but I have no desire to live in a walled garden where I’m not free to control the media I have bought. When I buy a device I have always chosen one which mounts like a USB stick and allows free transfer of files without requiring pointless DRM and software acting as a gatekeeper and as a result I have never owned an iPod, or installed iTunes and I went Android rather than Linux. The Kindle store seems like such a wonderfully integrated service that it’s starting to turn my head. The idea of giving up my freedom to escape to a different device if the Amazons tech gets left behind in the future does worry me although frankly I don’t think this is any more likely than Apple loosing their grip on the MP3 player market. The razors and blades model of selling the readers and the books allows Amazon to soundly undercut the likes of Sony who have to make a profit on the hardware without the promise of book sales in the future to look forward to. Without another credible platform like the Nook in the UK Kindle dominance is a practical certainty. The fact that the Kindle seems designed from the outset to be a standalone platform without the tedious need to tether it to iTunes that to my mind ruins the iPad is another huge plus.

Do E-Book Readers Dream of Electric Libraries?

Succumbing to the temptation of the Kindle seems inevitable, but perhaps this is no bad thing. The way publishing is run at the moment is frankly ludicrous. Publishers produce thousands of copies of big name authors only to pulp them to make roads The holy grail of the e-book world now is the full colour FMV wonder that is Mirasol, but I figure this is still at least five years away from on the market and affordable.

Damn it I think I’ve just talked my self into buying one…

Red 5 Mic

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:10:00 GMT

The Red 5 RV8 microphone I ordered just arrived

So far I'm very impressed. The mic seems well made and it came with a decent flight case and shock mount thrown in.

I've been wanting to get my hands on a large diaphragm condenser mic for ages, but I haven't had the excuse until now.

I'm planning to podcast some of my up and coming articles for http://www.easyeartraining.com/ so you will be able to hear the fruits of my labours very soon.

I'll share some thoughts once I try it out.

The Playstation Phone

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:52:00 GMT

After much rumour and innuendo it looks like Engadget has scooped a photograph of the upcoming Playstation phone.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/27/the-playstation-phone-is-still-real/

I’m hoping that it’s rather less of an unmitigated disaster than the PSP Go. Sony are still more than capable of making devices that press all the correct fan boy buttons (I love my PS3), but the Xperia X10 made me want to stamp on it after a few minutes. Comparing it to the Galaxy S and the Desire (HD or otherwise) it’s actually impressive how they have managed to make such an entirely dreadful phone out of almost exactly the same components.

I don’t know why I am clinging on to the vain hope that the combination of a failed variant of a long in the tooth portable and a phone that I actively dislike, will be the answer to all my portable woes. My HTC Hero has been an excellent companion for the past year and it seems very likely that the Desire HD will be its replacement when my contract expires, but a device as shiney and pleasing as a PS3 could sway my decision.

Infamous - PS3 Review

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 21:17:00 GMT

I haven’t written a review (or indeed anything) on the blog for a while as I have been concentrating my written output on Easy Ear Training, but I recently completed Infamous on the PS3 and got to thinking that it was an awesome game with a few flaws which is the most interesting kind of game to review. Couple that with the fact that it is featured in Sony’s new Playstation Plus promotion and Infamous 2 is on the way and I figured it was ripe for some comments.

The Plot

I guess if you are reading this you probably have an idea of the plot, but for those of you that don’t you play the part of Cole a courier who has suffered the inconvenience of having the package he was delivering explode destroying half the city and equipping him with super powers. He awakens some time later in a city which has been quarantined by the government and taken over by violent super powered gangs. The city is roughly based on Manhattan and is split into three islands which become available as the game progresses. Playing as our hero you must kick vast amounts of ass in a third person, open world, shooter, come parkour influenced platformer where you complete story missions and optional side missions indicated by flags on the map. “Wait a darned minute” you quite rightly say. Isn’t that like just about every other game I’ve played for the last five years?
Well pretty much, but there’s a twist. Cole has power over electricity but he doesn’t generate it himself he is instead reliant on the power grid of the city for his powers. Initially armed with a peashooter lightning bolt charging yourself up from overhead power lines, generators and streetlights heals you and grants you access to all manner of additional powers such as lightning grenades and force fields. The only thing that stands in your way of a baddy zapping party time is the unfortunate fact that most of the cities grid has been knocked out in the explosion. Arriving on an island for the first time you are presented with violent gangs on every street corner and no power to juice yourself up with. Many of the main quests revolve around restoring the cities infrastructure by locating fixing substations. This is a very cool element of play as the increasing power in the grid provides a very natural way to grant the player new and awesome powers like surfing on power lines or gliding on static which are usually required from that point on to complete missions.

Side Quests

The side quests tackle the gang side of the equation. Each mission is given to you by a needy member of the public and completing it marks that area of the map as your territory meaning enemies are less likely to appear there. This is a cool game mechanic, but has one obvious downside. When you get to a new location you are well and truly under the cosh with bullets coming from rooftops all around and few opportunities to recharge, but as you complete missions you become stronger, face less opposition and are never more than a few meters away from life giving power meaning on medium difficulty you can pretty much just stand in the open wailing on your enemies and slurping up street lights as soon as you get shot. This means that the difficulty level is somewhat uneven and even worse once you have completed the game there are so few enemies around it becomes difficult to even find enough targets to practice trophy winning “stunt” kills on. This is made up for by the fact that it is undoubtedly fun to be Cole. You feel pretty bad ass at the start, but by the end once you have unlocked all the powers and upgraded them with the XP you earn for most actions you are a one man army. Tossing people around like rag dolls and blowing up cars and petrol stations with gay abandon. Moving through the city also feels great. You need to get up high to get around without being sniped and the parkour come power line surfing mechanic makes you feel like a cross between Spiderman and Silver Surfer. Unusually for a third person game the camera is nearly always where you want it and jumping into an abyss by mistake is a rarity. The control scheme feels natural and the only real downer is that the combination of a Gears Of War-esque cover mechanic and acrobatic platforming means that often when you are racing away from a hand grenade you will inexplicably stick to a wall and meet a messy death.
The side missions should be singled out for special praise they feel like a part of the core experience rather than a tack on and encompass: Taking prisoners to jail, treasure hunts, rooftop races, protecting citizens, solving murders, deactivating surveillance devices and fixing trains. So much better than the go to place x, shoot 5 guys and collect Maguffin y, repeat until coma that many games think is acceptable.

Morality Bites

So far I haven’t touched on the morality mechanic that gives Infamous it’s title and that’s with good reason as I feel it adds pretty much nothing to the game. Blowing up half the city has made Cole public enemy number one and you can choose to use your powers either to change the mind of the populace and become a hero or punish those who rejected you and become Infamous. This mostly manifests it’s self as nothing more than morality based quick time events where you press “X” for good or “O” for bad action, you don’t even have to work it out for your self as a handy red blue chart appears on screen. In addition to this various actions like killing or healing members of the public has a cumulative effect. It would be cool if the decisions were worth a moment of your time, but once you have taken your first good or bad step you would have to be an idiot not to take the same course with every successive action. Extremes of status grant new powers so trying to act in a “realistic” fashion and alternating means you miss out on all the optional powers. This means that far from being a complex game of morality it is simply a linear game that you can play through twice should you wish to. The net result of your morality choice is a handful of mutually exclusive good or bad side missions on each island and two optional powers one of which I didn’t ever use and the other of which is fairly similar regardless of which side you get it from. At several points the game gives the illusion that your actions are having a significant impact on the plot, but on a second play through you will discover that regardless of the decision the game contrives to provide virtually the same outcome.
The final moan is that the game crashed a couple of times and you may find your self sinking through more complex terrain due to some dodgy collision detection.

Fun despite the flaws

When it comes down to it Infamous is a lot of fun and I enjoyed playing it all the way to the end though it didn’t offer enough for me to want to start again with an evil play through.
If they can fix the few annoyances that stopped this from being a true world class game then Infamous 2 is going to be an absolute riot.

Windows 7 Review and Tweaking Guide

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:03:00 GMT

This is the third and final part in my blog series on my experiences of moving to Windows 7 from my previous set up of XP and Ubuntu Linux.

In my old set up I used my Ubuntu as my everyday machine and kept XP around to use when inconsiderate manufacturers don’t provide drivers for Linux (I’m looking at you HTC and Tom Tom) when both of my machines died in quick succession I bought my laptop with an expectation that I would probably dual boot Win 7 and Linux, and once again avoid Windows except when necessary.

Once I saw the very positive reviews of Win7 I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if an Ubuntu devote such as my self could use Win7 without being driven insane. In my previous post I explained some of the long list of tweaks I have to apply to XP to make it usable so I’ll be covering some of those issues here along with a few other things that came up along the way.

I guess I should start with the headline news that after a month I’m still using Win 7 and I have to hand it to Microsoft it’s pretty good. That’s not to say it’s all been sunshine and roses. I’ll try and use the same headings as my XP article but first the setup process:

Set Up & Crapware

I’ve always believed that at least 25% of the reason people love Macs and tolerate PCs is the dreadful state that Windows machines are in when they get to a punter. PC manufacturers make on average an extra £50 on every PC they sell due to shipping a machine full of hard to remove trials, toolbars and useless expensive services. On my PC I had: An app launcher, a game download service, online storage, a dell support program, a music download service, MS works and the expected overpriced antivirus. Unsurprisingly crapware vendors don’t like to make their applications easy to remove and the standard Add Remove Programmes dialogue isn’t really up to it. I quickly found a couple of tools which made life a lot easier. Revo Uninstaller Pro is a superb tool which makes removing unwanted crap a breeze and also cleans up any leftover files and registry entries as well as featuring a number of other useful tools beyond the scope of this article. For this less technically inclined PC Decrapifier is a simple one click solution that finds crapware and removes it.

Set up was in all other respects a breeze. There are any number of nice little touches down to the comprehensive selection of well thought out system sounds and wallpapers which can be selected using a simple personalisation menu.

Browser

I’m going to have to start with a bad one I’m afraid; Internet Explorer is still a joke. Microsoft are going to have to find some way to keep all those crappy IE 6 apps while embracing open standards or Firefox and Chrome are going to eat them for breakfast. I lasted about 10 minutes with IE 8 before downloading Firefox, but to be fair I would probably do the same on a Mac as I’m no fan of Safari.

Media Playback

I use Spotify for my music needs so I can’t really comment on Windows Media Player or Media Center for managing your media library, but as a minimalist media player it’s very usable and has a very much improved set of codecs compared to XP. In fact I didn’t really feel the need to download any other media player software for a month and then only because I needed to work on AMR format audio which is fairly obscure.

Under this heading I will also mention that the photo viewer application is also really rather good even when viewing photos on a remote server.

Taskbar

This is one of the obvious big changes from XP/Vista. The taskbar is a huge improvement. Quicklaunch and the main application area are merged and applications with multiple windows are neatly handled with Aero Peak which shows a thumbnail of all that apps open windows when you hover over the icon. The system tray also looks a lot cleaner and has a really nice interface for hiding icons or restricting popups. Hopefully the days of the irritating popup frenzy system tray are over.

Overall I still think the OSX doc is tidier but I didn’t really feel any urge to install Rocket Dock

The Start Menu

The start menu is also a big improvement over XP (Though perhaps not Vista). The main plus is that its fully searchable so when you hit the Windows key you simply start typing the name of the app and it instantly takes a guess at the app or folder you are after as you type. It doesn’t offer all the functionality of a dedicated tool such as Launchy, but again it’s good enough that I don’t feel I need anything else.

File Management

Explorer has a few nice tweaks like breadcrumbs and better support for zip files.

A couple of gripes would be that Explorer lacks tabs and support for ISO disk images is very limited.

Window and Desktop Management

Ok here is my first serious beef. No virtual desktops. I my opinion this is totally unacceptable. Even XP had a powertoy which gave you 4 desktops. It also makes very little sense because I have been very impressed with Win 7s ability to handle multiple screens and surely it can’t be a big jump from one to the other. The only reason I can think of is that the feature was vetoed by the Office team as Office 2007 works both appallingly and inconsistently with virtual desktops.

The worst thing was I couldn’t find a tool which worked well with the Win7 toolbar. This was the first issue that nearly caused me to reach for the Ubuntu disc but luckily someone pointed me in the direction of the new beta version of Virtuawin which works seamlessly. It’s still a big black mark though.

In general window management is very good. The new Aero Snap features which let you maximise and split screen windows with a gesture are excellent and I find myself trying to use them on other operating systems. The window switcher is also improved with life snapshots and an optional groovy 3D window fly though feature.

Software Updating

As I mentioned in my XP article the ability to seamlessly update all of the software on my machine with one simple automatic interface is something that is only available in Ubuntu. the same is true of the Ubuntu software store which provides a great source of trustworthy free software.

Windows updates seem less obtrusive but no great improvement from XP.

Security

My biggest tip to anyone using Windows is DON’T PAY FOR VIRUS PROTECTION!!!!

Microsoft have a free antivirus product called Security Essentials which integrates seamlessly and outperforms all of the commercial applications. It’s a terrible shame that people are being screwed by charlatans like Symantec when MS would probably include it in the OS if they didn’t fear a lawsuit from the EU.

I get the impression that Win 7 seems pretty secure and as a Linux user I don’t mind having to give permission to allow an administrative action. My wife has been freaked out by malicious popups on websites claiming virus infection. Of course the computer was in no danger, but it’s easier to laugh it off if you are using a Mac or Linux.

Media Sharing

OK here is my other big bitch. Out of the box my laptop could not access the shared folders on the Linux server on my home network. The problem is due to Windows requiring authentication which most versions of Linux don’t support. Fixing this required a lot of messing about with registry settings and lots of rebooting. This would be galling enough, but moves to the realms of infuriating when you realise that if I had Win7 business I could use a built in app called Secpol to fix the issue with a single click. Mac and Linux users don’t have to make do with crippled operating system versions and I don’t see why I should have to either.

Now you might say I’m a geek and this is a geeks issue which I knew how to fix, but lots of people buy network drives to backup photos and these nearly all run on Linux. For these users their photo back up drive becomes a brick.

On a positive tack my Laptop automatically appears in the menu on my Playstation 3 and seamlessly streams HD video to it without a glitch. Very impressive.

Other Thoughts

Overall Win7 seems very customisable and user friendly. I’ve been impressed by the audio stack which allows you to change between the internal soundcard and a USB soundcard while Windows Media Player is playing and have it seamlessly switch playout without a glitch (XP would require an app restart). Lots of people think the Aero Glass window theme looks tacky but I think it looks very clean and adds some candy without getting in the way.

One omission is that seemed a little bizarre is that Win7 supports customisable log in screens but requires a reg hack to make it work.

The start up and shutdown speeds are acceptable but not amazing and of course with Windows you are limited to a DOS Window rather than the power and elegance of a Bash shell.

Conclusion

Overall I think Windows 7 is a huge improvement over XP and Vista. I think I still appreciate the power and flexibility of Ubuntu and if I didn’t need Windows 7 for drivers and such it would be a hard decision which I would use as my main OS. With today’s announcement of Windows 7 phone it seems like after a few years of getting an whipping in the technical stakes from Apple, Google and the open source community. Microsoft might finally be getting their act together.

How To Buy A Laptop

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:21:00 GMT

This is the second post in my planned three part epic inspired by my recent purchase of a new laptop.

Buying a laptop is a daunting thing to do. They represent a fairly hefty investment and they aren’t very upgradable. If you aren’t especially tech savvy then the problem is even worse. Now I’m a geek, before purchasing anything I like to spend a vast amount of time doing research, but I know that most people don’t have the time for that kind of rainman like focus. Luckily I’m also a maven, someone who must share the results of their geeky endeavours. With that in mind I thought I would share my advice from my recent
laptop purchase. I’m planning to keep it free from specific recommendations so I don’t need to keep updating it all the time, but instead focus on more general advice which was true five years ago and will most likely be true in another five years. First up don’t listen to people in high street shops. Without wanting to be excessively harsh if you know very much about computers you can get a much better job than working in PC World and most of the people I have spoken to have ranged from pleasant but clueless to pushy salesman and clueless with the common theme being clueless. Now I don’t doubt there is the odd star but on the whole unless you can find a privately owned shop with someone who seems trustworthy then take any advice proffered with a pinch of salt. Adverts on the TV are all about confusing sounding big numbers without concern for what I consider to be more fundamental considerations.

Reliability

The first category I would suggest you think about is reliability. A system failure will reduce your prize notebook into a paperweight with a hinge in the middle. The sorry fact is that on average one third of laptops don’t make it to their third birthdays. Now you might wonder why you seem to to get so much more for your money if you buy a laptop from one of the giants of the industry such as HP or Acer and the simple answer is build quality Check out this survey from Squaretrade. The reason you pay a chunk more for an Asus or Sony laptop is because there is a significantly bigger chance that it will still be running a few years down the line.

Build Quality

My second consideration was build quality. My old laptop was a 7 year old Toshiba, though it was creaky and on its last legs I was loathe to get rid of it because it had the best keyboard I’ve ever used. Though you may know nothing about computers this is something you can easily check out in a shop. Does the keyboard have a positive clicky feel? When you rest your hands on it to type does it flex and buckle? Do the plastics seem high quality? Try applying a gentle twisting force to the top of the screen, if it bends too easily it’s not going to last. The same applies for the hinges if they aren’t smooth and solid now laptop and screen may not stay attached all that long. Build quality was so fundamental to my choice that with my limited budget I chose the lowest specced model of a better built line rather than going for maximum specs in a cheap chassis.

Now on to the more usual stuff people thing about when they compare laptops.

Processor

Once upon a time the clock speed was a pretty good indicator of the performance of a processor, but with the advent of multicore processors keeping the processor fed with data is just as important as the speed it can deal with the data meaning cache size and front side bus speed is just as important. If it sounds like hard work to figure out what constitutes a decent processor then you would be right but luckily you can look at this list from notebook check to figure it out. The higher up the chart it comes the better it is. My laptop has the lowest spec that Dell will sell you in the current lineup, but it does a perfectly good job so I wouldn’t worry about it too much though it is one of the components that you can’t easily upgrade.

RAM

Put simply the more RAM you have the better. Modern operating systems love to eat up RAM especially office type apps. The good news is that RAM is one of the easiest bits of a laptop to upgrade so it’s not the end of the world if you need more down the line.

Hard Disk

The headline number for hard disks is always the amount of storage. Frankly unless you want to store a ton of HD video you don’t really need a terabyte hard drive in a laptop, but what will make a big difference is the speed of access. Hard disks are by far the slowest components in a PC and most high street laptops come with a slow disk (5200 RPM in 2010 numbers) upping this will chop a lump off the time your lappy takes to boot up. If your budget will stretch to it a solid state disk net you a huge performance boost and give you a machine that’s much less likely to die if you drop it though as with RAM it’s a pretty easy home upgrade so you can wait and pick one up when they inevitably plummet in price over the next year or two.

Graphics

There are two types of graphics set ups, those that share memory with the processor (called Integrated or Shared) and those which have their own memory (Called Dedicated). If you aren’t interested in 3D games then don’t give this a second thought, but if gaming is your bag then you are going to need something with dedicated graphics. As a rule of thumb a machine with integrated graphics will not be able to run games at all, the average machine with dedicated graphics will probably play games from a couple of years ago on decent settings and modern games on low settings. If you want top flight games performance you will need a gaming laptop. Personally I consider these a waste of time. By my calculations for the price of a gaming laptop your could pick up a desktop PC that would blow it away and still have change for a decent laptop. Worst of all they are pretty rubbish at being a laptop generally being large and heavy with terrible battery life and a tendency to overheat. As with processors, graphics cards are a mass of confusing numbers, but you can head to notebook check for a performance league table.

If you are interested in what my wranglings led me to, I ended up picking up a basic Dell Studio 15 though I was also impressed with the Sony FW series. In the end the awesome offer prices on the direct from Dell website swayed me and I’m very happy with the machine though as I suspected customer service leaves a little to be desired.

In my final article I’m going to talk about my impressions of Windows 7, what I like about it, what I think is lacking and what you can do to fix it.

How To Make Windows XP Feel Like A New OS With Some Killer Productivity Apps

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:40:00 GMT

With my new laptop due to finally arrive tomorrow I’m planning to blog my experiences with Dell and more importantly with Windows 7, but before I do i thought it might be worthwhile to explain why stock Windows XP doesn’t really do it for me and suggest what you can do to make it a little bit more bearable if you have to use it at work, or squeeze a bit more performance out of it if you can’t afford to upgrade your machine. If you are tech savvy enough I would suggest installing Ubuntu Linux, but I’m assuming if you are reading this guide that’s not really an option for you.

First up a couple of fairly obvious ones:

Web Browser

The problem: There are no two ways about it Internet Explorer is an absolute dog. The German government is even recommending that people stop using it due to the pathetic level of security offered.

The Solution: Installing Firefox is pretty much the first thing I do when I get my hands on an XP box.

Media Player

The Problem: Windows Media Player 10 is also well past it. The interface is ugly and unintuitive, It can’t play common formats like AAC and MPEG4, Music library management functions are virtually non existent and worst of all it once destroyed (and I mean literally destroyed) my wife’s MP3 player by crashing during a sync even though it was the model featured in the Microsoft “Plays For Sure” advert.

The Solution: VLC is like the Swiss army knife of media players. It’s almost impossible to find a file it won’t play and it has a mass of other useful features. Media Monkey is a superb app for managing your music library and has loads of great features for ripping CDs and syncing MP3 players.

Now on to some stuff which if you have only ever used XP you might not even realize is much nicer on other platforms:

The Task Bar

The Problem: Once you have a lot of Windows open the task bar gets cluttered, The system tray quickly gets swamped with junk and the whole thing looks very tired.

The Solution: Rocket Dock is a very nifty piece of software which apes the behavior of the Mac Dock and makes managing Windows a lot easier. With this installed you can set the bar to auto-hide and forget about it

The Start Menu

The Problem: You don’t have to install very many applications before the whole thing get completely clagged up and you can’t find anything.

The Solution: You can put your favorite apps on Rocket Dock, but for a solution which works for the hundreds of apps you doubtless have installed you want to get Launchy. Launchy pops up when you hit a certain key combination and works out what application or file you want as you start to type its name in. I was skeptical when it was recommended to me, but now I can’t imagine living without it. Mac and Linux owners have had access to these features for ages thanks to Spotlight and Do so it’s time you got in on the party.

Virtual Desktops

The Problems: If you’ve never used a machine with virtual desktops you probably don’t know why you would want them but once you get used to having three or four different desktops multitasking at home or work becomes so much easier. For example my work machine has 4 desktops split by function between e-mail, internet, software development, and documents which lets me instantly jump to a screen set up for my needs.

The Solution:Dexpot is a superb virtual desktop manager with stacks of great features like allowing different wallpaper on each desktop.

Software Updating

The Problem: I only used my old XP desktop once in a blue moon and so when I logged in it was not uncommon to discover that in addition to Windows update I could have: Virus Scanners, Adobe Acrobat, Java, Quicktime, Flash, etc pop up and demand to be updated each with a separate dialogue to click through. On Ubuntu all the applications update themselves through the same mechanism that updates the operating system.

The Solution: I’ve never found one, but if anyone out there can tell me they will go straight to the top of my Christmas list.

HTC Hero Review

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:41:00 GMT

I’ve had my Hero since the week they came out in the UK, but I’ve been waiting until the new firmware (v2.7) was available to do a review and I’m glad I did. Initially I was somewhat disappointed with the lag on flipping through the home screens and the feeling that the hardware was struggling to cope with all the fairydust HTC have sprinkled on the UI, but the new firmware is like night and day. After the update everything is slick and speedy. Believe me, if you have a Hero or are planning on getting one make the next thing you do to upgrade the firmware. Similarly if you were thinking about picking one up but were put off by the pasting some reviewers gave it for being slow then give it a second look.

Hardware

Internally the Hero has the same memory and processor as the HTC G1 and G2, but externally it’s a far tidier more professional package and makes the earlier phones look like the development prototypes that they essentially are. Unlike the version due to be released in the US it still has the chin which a lot of people don’t seem to like however it does have the effect of holding the touch screen out of contact with the contents of your pocket which is a plus.

The phone also boasts a 3.5mm jack and an impressive 5MP camera.

The battery life is pretty reasonable although you will probably want
to charge it overnight. I generally leave the Wi-Fi on all the time and
even when spending the day listening to music and synchronising
hundreds of megs of music over Wi-Fi with Spotify it didn’t give out on me.

One black mark is the non standard USB jack, What’s that all about? The Mini B exists, why reinvent the wheel?

Software

This is a review of the Hero rather than the Android phone OS so I’m going to concentrate on the changes HTC have made. The most significant updates are the addition of multi-touch for photos and web browsing which I couldn’t imagine doing without and the excellent social network integration which links your contacts to their Facebook profiles and provides you with a rather nifty Twitter widget. In addition to that you get some useful buttons which let you turn Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off with one click and lots of UI sugar sprinkled all over the place.

One thing which I love is the ability to have your contacts pulled in from google meaning no painful exporting from SIM or syncing with some rubbish bit of software (I’m looking at you PC suite)

I guess if you are reading this the question you want to know the answer to is should I buy this phone rather than any of the other mobiles on the market?

In the course of my job I’ve played with a stack of mobile phones so I’ll offer a couple of thoughts on the subject.

Hero vs Other Android Phones

The most obvious competitors for the Hero are the existing Android handsets on the market having played with the two previous HTC devices I would say there is no competition. The Hero is much slicker device and you would be missing out on the 3.5mm, camera and sense UI improvements. If you must have a hardware keyboard then you may want to hold out for the Samsung Galaxy or the Moto Cliq neither of which I have tried.

Hero vs The Old Guard

First up the Hero is a pretty pricey phone and if all you really want to do is make a few calls and write some text messages then my vote would be for an inexpensive Samsung slider especially as an iPod touch is only £150 and makes up for most of what you would be missing out on, but if a smart phone is where it’s at there is nothing on the market that can compete with Android outside of the iPhone.

Having tried a variety of Symbian phones they range from the mediocre to appalling but all seem like they belong to a previous generation. The same goes for the dreadful WinMo. e-mail junkies love their Blackberries, but they really are more oriented to business and the consumer focused ones don’t do much for me. Maemo phones and the Pre both look good, but they aren’t available in this country yet which just leaves the iPhone.

Hero vs iPhone

Before going any further I want to make the point that there isn’t nor is there going to be an “iPhone killer”. Apple are far too good at being Apple for anyone to beat them at their own game. That said the Hero offers some advantages and disadvantages compared to the iPhone which will push you in one direction or the other depending on your requirements:

Hero Wins

Better Integration with Google services: If you are a heavy user of Google services then you won’t find a better device for using Gmail, Greader, Contacts, etc

Synch with multiple machines: Unlike the iPhone Android devices will let you copy music back and forth with as many machines as you want without Apples artificial restrictions

Apps Run In The Background: This is a huge advantage when it comes to apps like Spotify which allow you to web browse and write texts while listening to tunes something that you can’t do on the iPhone version.

App store apps tend to be free and less apps get rejected: I have always found apps I’m looking for on the store without having to resort to paying and you can get your hands on naughty apps Apple don’t want you to have like Google voice.

You Don’t Have To Use iTunes: Not an issue for Mac users but it’s not available to Linux users such as my self and I find all Apples software for Windows utterly hateful.

Notification Bar and Widgets: I love the dockable widgets and the nifty notification bar on Android its far more tweakable than the regimented look of the iPhone

Develop Software Without an intel Mac: Only of interest to software developers, but important to me

Flash support in the browser: Not 100% compatible with all sites but a rarity in the mobile world

iPhone Wins

Much Better Mac Integration: If you are a Mac user there is really only one choice

It’s an iPhone: And is therefore much cooler and more desirable if you are that way inclined.

More responsive and slicker UI: The Hero is great but the iPhone still pips it for slickness and feedback

Far more apps available on the app store: The app store has far more games including lots of big name commercial games.

Better iPlayer integration: No listen again radio on the Hero

Slicker music player: The iPhone is also an iPod and so has all the whizzy cover flow and genius stuff.

My New Band

Wed, 06 May 2009 12:19:00 GMT

I’m in a new band playing bass.
We are gigging all arround Suffolk so come and see us if you are in the area.
Band Site Here

The Nuclear Rifle

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:47:00 GMT

I was happily perusing a gallery of cold war dooms day weapons as one does when I noticed something called the M65 Atomic Cannon. Having done a bit of googling I have discovered that not only is this a mobile cannon which fires NUCLEAR FREAKING WARHEADS, but there is also a shoulder mounted variant.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking of nuclear weapons as the stealth bomber carried final move the in the game of Mutually Assured Destruction which is scary enough, but this is something else again.

The idea of soldiers wandering about the battlefield with atomic rifles shows just how insane the cold war would have been had it become hot.

This rather terrifying video shows it in action.

Free Pocket Ubuntu Book

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:23:00 GMT

The excellent book Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference by Keir Thomas is available for free download from this link: http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/aboutthebook.html

It’s probably a little basic for a hardcore Nix head but if you are considering breathing new life into an old laptop or ditching Vista then I’m sure it will be a lot of help.

Kid playing the "Why?" game outdone by science dad

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:27:00 GMT

Linky

_
DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt?

SARAH: Yes.

DAD: Because soap is a surfactant.

SARAH: Why?

DAD: Why is soap a surfactant?

SARAH: Yes.

DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles.

SARAH: Why?

DAD: Why does soap form micelles?

SARAH: Yes.

DAD: Soap molecules are long chains with a polar, hydrophilic head and a non-polar, hydrophobic tail. Can you say ‘hydrophilic’?

and so it goes on…

The world is a Hologram

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:28:00 GMT

What was thought to be interference in a German gravitational wave detector could turn out to be proof that reality is in some sense a hologram.
While this is a fascinating discovery in its self it is a perfect example of one the things that makes me love science (Yes, I love science).

Every so often in the world of physics there is a theorist wondering how to find proof of their new idea while someone performing an experiment designed to measure something completely different sits scratching their heads at a set of results that seem to make no sense. It happened with Einstein predicting the Brownian Motion that baffled Robert Brown and with the discovery of cosmic background radiation which researchers initially thought was due to their antenna having a fault until they found out about some scientists at Princeton theorising that just such a signal should be found.

So to sum up:

Take A Logic Test

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:11:00 GMT

A quiz to test your powers of logical reasoning.

I got 100% but then I did take a course on logic at university.

Don’t forget that just because a premise isn’t true doesn’t mean the conclusion doesn’t logically follow.

Super Ubuntu

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:04:00 GMT

For those of you who fancy a go with Ubuntu, but don’t want all the bother of having to install all the extra codecs and bits of useful software that can’t be distributed with the main build then Super Ubuntu might be the thing for you wrapping it all up into one handy distro.

The BMA Debunk Medical Myths

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:40:00 GMT

The BMA have published a handy one stop shop to point people to when they insist on drivelling on about how you only use 10% of your brain, that you have to drink 8 glasses of water a day, that eating in the evening makes you fat, or that reading in low light makes you blind.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec17_2/a2769
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1288

See also the nonsense of Detox: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7808348.stm

Well done Science kids!

Windows 7 Looks Rather Good

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:44:00 GMT

After the numerous Vista bashing and pro Linux posts you will have seen me make you would be forgiven for thinking I was a raging MS hater, not so.

I’ve been reading up on Windows 7 and so far I’m quite impressed.
OS news have posted an interesting review here and the Microsoft Engineering Windows 7 blog has a really great article about the sensible sounding changes they have made to the taskbar.

Couple that with some rather promising looking benchmark results and I could even be persuaded to give it a try (Once SP1 comes out that is).

Playstation 3

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:08:00 GMT

So I’m taking the plunge on my next geek venture and grabbing myself a PS3 this afternoon.
For those of you who know what a hardcore Nintendophile I am you maybe a little bit confused about this so allow me to enlighten you.
I’ve had a rather nifty HD LCD for about a year and a sad lack of HD content to watch on it and it occurred to me that if someone had been offering a Linux media centre that output 1080p played Blu Ray movies and had 6 (count em) 3Ghz processors for £300 quid I would have bitten their hand off.
Such a beast is a PS3. Having done a bit of digging it turns out that not only can you run Linux on PS3 it is officially supported by Sony and you can boot in and out of Linux from a menu option in the PS3 native OS. The other rather nifty fact is that the PS3 uses a standard SATA laptop hard drive which can be fairly easily replaced by the user to give it some serious media centre drive space.
Under normal circumstances I would baulk at the high price of the films and games, but luckily I have a Love Film subscription which means I can hire them out at will for no more than the cost of a regular DVD.
Anyone else out there in blog land got a PS3?
The deal I’m getting comes with Burnout, GT5 and Army of Two so if anyone fancys some multiplayer goodness let me know.

Finally apologies for those that read my blog as I’ve been really busy lately and haven’t had the chance to update. Hopefully I’ll get back to some semblance of regularity over the coming weeks.

Man Dies From Cake Poisoning

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:42:00 GMT

Sometimes I wonder if this is how I’ll meet my end: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7261888.stm

This probably ranks right up there with the guy who got kicked to death while trying molest a horse for embarrassing ways to die.

Linky Love - Fun Stuff Round Up - 24 02

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:26:00 GMT

Well yesterday was a total geek fest so today I’m going to focus on fun stuff:

I’ve been meaning to share this for ages so it’s likely that you may have already seen it, but I love planethiltron who photoshop celebs back to normality. if all magazines did this we would be rid of eating disorders at a stroke.

This collection of famous poems reworked as limericks is inspired as I proved when I had a crack at doing some myself and failed miserably.

I’ve heard plenty of great music mashups in my time, but this flash game mash up of Metroid and Megaman is awesome. You get to control Megaman taking on the space pirates on the original Metroid maps. Great stuff!

For those of you interested to know what desktop wallpaper I use on my machine at home you will be excited to know that I have this picture of Haggar piledriving a shark and yes it does come from a site called gay gamer!

This collection of HRD photography from Japan is hyper real. I Love the way that at first glance it appears to be a painting.

Got some time on your hands?
Why not fold yourself a towel monkey.

I haven’t got around to downloading this crazy 2D physics simulation game
yet, but the demo video looks just great.

Staying on gaming. Nintendo have announced that they will be putting C64 games on the Wii virtual console. 500 points seems a bit steep though.

Finally this tiny Korean kid playing Hey Jude cracks me up.

Useful Digital SLR Links

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:43:00 GMT

A trip to London Zoo a few weeks back made me understand that a lot of people are investing in digital SLRs these days. I got one for Emily for her birthday last year, Although they take great shots in point and shoot mode you need to get to grips with manual mode if you want to get the best out of them.

I have collected together a few photography links from lifehacker that I found helpful:

The rules of photography composition

Master Your DSLR Part one

Master Your DSLR Part Two

Happy clicking!

Linky Love 22 02 08

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:35:00 GMT

So many links so little time.
I’ve been trying to reduce my backlog of links to post, but it keeps growing faster than I can prune it, not to mention that I promised to review my Sennheiser HD600 cans ages ago, but still haven’t got around to it.
I’m going to give this entry a geeky flavor and post some funny stuff next time.

Cory Doctorow recently finished podcasting the whole of Bruce Sterlings “The Hacker Crackdown” which is a very geeky, but brilliant book about the history of hacking which couldn’t be further than the nonsense peddled in your average Hollywood movie.

I’ve had this in depth Ars Technica review of KDE 4.0 in my to read list for absolutely ages, but haven’t got around to reading it until now.
I’ve favored Gnome over KDE since I used Linux at uni, but this release looks good enough for me to consider switching. It doesn’t seem like it will be worth installing until 4.1 appears in June though.
With Nokia buying the Troll Tech technology that underpins its development and becoming an official patron things are looking great for KDE at the moment. The port to Windows and Mac OSX might also win some converts.

Voz me is a nifty little web site that converts text to Mp3s which means you can make pretty much any document into an audio book. When I was revising 12 hours a day for my uni finals (I’m not a swat I just I hadn’t been to any lectures that semester and it was a month till exam time) I had to sit in a dark room fending off migraines every so often and used a speach synthesizer
in conjunction with some Bit Torrented PDF files of the Harry Potter books to stop me going crazy. Whether I would have found them any less crap if Id listened to the Stephen Fry versions rather than having it read to me by a disembodied robot voice is another story.

Continuing the uuuber geek theme Neetorama had a rather groovy overview of early computing devices. Good stuff if you like letching over retro techno porn.

If you don’t visit Lifehacker you really should. They recently published an overview of all their free productivity software. I use Better Gmail, Better GReader, Better Youtube, but they have a whole bunch of great stuff.

The security of encrypted hard drives received an almighty kick in the nuts this week as some researchers got around it with the aid of a spray can and a thumb drive. It’s real James bond stuff.

Finally for todays over long and super geeky installment. If you have been wondering about dabbling with Linux, but can’t be bothered with partitioning drives and all that technical stuff then try this easy method to run Linux inside your Windows desktop.

Film Review - Sweeny Todd

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:20:00 GMT

Never one to tread an obvious path the latest film by Tim Burton is a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s critically acclaimed 1970’s musical about the demon barber of fleet street.

No one who who is a fan of Burton will be surprised to hear that Jonny Depp (switching from Keith Richards to Bowie for his performance cue) and Helene Bonham Carter play the main characters. The plot for those of you not familiar with the story is kind of The Count of Montechristo with the addition of some razor slashed throats. Evil judge Alan Rickman frames Benjamin Barker so he can have his wicked way with his wife and daughter. Fifteen years later he
returns in the guise of Sweeny Todd and begins a campaign of murder aided by the lovesick Mrs Lovett erstwhile pie vendor and sometime human butcher.

The film is up to Burtons usual superb standards and it is safe to say if you are a fan you aren’t going to be disappointed, but it’s not going to change the mind of critics.

To say the film is gory would be an understatement. It contains more gruesome scenes of closeup throat slashing and blood jetting than any film I’ve seen except perhaps Kill Bill and that might be a box office problem. I’m not convinced that the musical and extreme gore demographic has that much crossover, (as the difficulty I had finding somewhere that was showing it confirms) but Burton has to be admired for his decision not to go for the soft option and tone it down for a 15 certificate. I just hope that it doesn’t tank and deprive the world of more of his surreal masterpieces because for those that do love a jaunty tune juxtaposed with a spurting carotid you will find few finer films.

Linky Love 17 Feb

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 12:37:00 GMT

I know I haven’t written any serious content for a while, but I have a stack of links to get out of my GReader Starred list and so without further ado here is todays linky love.

Lets start with a bit of levity. The cast of Spongebob Redub Classic Movies This one has been doing the rounds now for quite some time, but if you haven’t seen it you are missing a treat.

Amplive have remixed In Rainbows and after hairy moment where it looked like Radiohead’s label would sue it’s all kosher and you can get it gratis and at no charge.

With HDDVD dead and EA saying this year will be the PS3’s year it’s looking like this could be a good year to be Sony (now if only they would bring back Aibo). This Freview PVR add on which hooks up with the BT vision system isn’t going to be the killer app, but it’s one more
reason why PS3 is looking like the console to have in 2008.

I was shocked to hear that school kids are getting fed unscientific dross about Brain Gyms. The Guardians Ben Goldacre provides a typically excellent expose.

Finally if you want rock power look no further than this 250,000 volt tesla coil based guitar amp. Personally I would love to see what Matt Bellamy could do with one of these things!

HD DVD is Dead Long Live Blu Ray!

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:34:00 GMT

It’s official Toshiba have conceded defeat to Sony and have announced the closure of their HD DVD factories. An official statement is expected soon, but for now there is this NHK article for conformation.

http://www.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/dailynews1.html

After getting dumped on by, Best Buy, Netflix, Blockbuster, Woolworths etc it looked like it was inevitable that HD DVD was doomed, but I must say I’m astonished how fast Tosh have moved on this one.

Linky Love 15th February

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:32:00 GMT

First up Happy St Skeletors day alll you love haters out there.

EEE User have a link to a guy at laptop magazine who is trying to use an EEE as his only PC.
If you get external storage and a monitor I think it could make a great budget PC for people who just want to browse and work especially with Xubuntu installed.

Neetorama have a cool article with facts about Edison admittedly I am what my sister calls a “fact head”, but I thought it was worth reading.

Some jerk has hassled You Tube into dropping the awesome guitar parody videos that showed up a while back, but Wired have rather excellently hosted them all and you can see them here I think Santana is my fav.

This colour tile illusion from Boing Boing really freaks me out. I love optical illusions and all that jazz.

Valentines Day

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:27:00 GMT

I’m making a bit of a bold step this year and not celebrating it at all (and yes the missus supports that stance).

I have never been one for making a big fuss but I usually get some flowers or something.
I think Valentines day is cool, but I think it should be about telling someone you have worshipped from afar how you feel not about couples at all.

Hallmark and the like know that couples are better cash cows and as a result most singletons I know hate it when the day should be for them.

Though if you do want an excellent card without paying Hallmark these are fantastic:
http://shirt.woot.com/Blog/BlogEntry.aspx?BlogEntryId=3899

Stephen Fry Reviews The EEE PC and Claims Linux Is the Future

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:32:00 GMT

In the most recent instalment of Stephen Fry’s rather excellent blog he not only gives a very positive review of the EEE PC. He also claims that Linux is the future.

“The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.”

While I’m not as optimistic as Fry I find this very interesting because:

Stephen Fry is a very clever man

Stephen Fry is well known for being an obsessive Mac fanboy.

His blog gets published in the Guardian which is the kind of mainstream exposure that Linux doesn’t usually get.

Review - Derren Brown - Tricks of the Mind

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:17:00 GMT

I should probably start the review by saying that I haven’t been a long term fan of Derren Brown. At the time of his Russian Roulette stunt I had him tarred broadly with the same brush as David Blaine. However I have had his book recommended to me a number of times and was interested to hear that his outlook on life is much like James Randi whom I greatly admire.
Tricks of the Mind is the first book by Derren to be aimed at a mainstream audience (He has previously written a couple of textbooks on close up card magic). It’s quite a hard book to nail down into any particular genre other than being a book about the things Derren is interested in, but covers three main themes. Firstly as you would expect it delves into the techniques that Brown uses to perform his tricks on stage. There are sections dedicated to Card Tricks, Improving Memory, Hypnosis and Suggestion, Mind Reading and determining when people are lying to you. To his credit he doesn’t fob you off and claim that by reading the section in question you will develop any significant level of skill in the techniques described, but he provides an introduction and background to each technique along with a few examples for you to try that should be sufficient to pique your interest for further study should you be so inclined. One of the most valuable aspects of the book is the extensive bibliography which provides an excellent resource for further study. Intertwined with the first section are semi autobiographical passages that cover the development of his own interest in hypnosis and magic which also chart his transformation from a very devout evangelical Christian to a committed rationalist sceptic. The third theme which makes up the majority of the final section of the book is a scathing attack on alternative medicine, the psychic industry and all other forms of superstition and dogma. He illustrates this section with some excellent examples of how fake psychics and healers can trick you with Barnum statements, Cold Reading and the Placebo effect. People expecting nothing more than a book about mind reading may be surprised by some of the content where he espouses Dawkins and Bertrand Russell. However don’t be fooled into thinking this book is a rationalist polemic in the style of Dawkins. Brown writes in a very light and witty style with a sense of whimsy that at its best is reminiscent of Stephen Fry. I laughed out loud at several occasions while reading. The best thing that I can say about this book is that it has started more conversations and requests to borrow than any book that I’ve reads since Freakonomics and for that reason I whole heartedly recommend it.

The Internet At War With Scientology

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:58:00 GMT

There is a very interesting post on thedaddy about the guerilla war being fought against the international scam masquerading as a religion Scientology. Personally I can’t believe that it hasn’t been banned in the UK.
It is truly an evil organisation.

Check out the thread here

Linky Love 28th Jan

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:24:00 GMT

I still haven’t got around to writing my review of my Sennheiser HD600 headphones, but rest assured that I will when I get the time.

I’m really excited that Amazon will be selling DRM free music worldwide. I know a few people who have got it to work from the US store, but I can’t be bothered with all that. Now if only a store would start selling FLAC files I could stop cluttering my house up with CDs.

Nokia have purchased Troll Tech. You probably haven’t heard of Troll Tech unless you are a total Linux freak (It makes a tool kit that is used to make KDE ), but the interesting part of the story is that Nokia will now be a patron of Linux which is a huge boost to the mission for Linux desktops to attain feature and usability parity with XP and OSX. This is even more interesting with the news that KDE is due to be ported to Windows and Mac. I wonder if the two stories are related.

Lifehacker reported on a free web tool that can convert text into Mp3. I think this is a great idea and I might try converting some of the stories that get recomended on Boing Boing into audio to listen to on the tube.

It looks like the HD format war might not be the protracted battle that we all expected. Ars claim that Blu Ray is surging ahead, while Engadget claims that the death of HD DVD is now inevitable. Sony have also just announced that they have invented a new and improved Blu Ray module and rumours abound that a new and improved 120GB PS3 is on the way.

Finally as a bit of light relief after all that techy stuff check out this Italian guy rocking out to the Mario 2 music

PS3

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:42:00 GMT

If you said to me that you could buy a home media centre PC that ran Ubuntu had 7 (count’em) 3.2 Ghz prcessors output 1080P HDMI and also played Blu Ray movies for £270 I would bite you frikkin hand off. If you then told me that it could also play Playstation 3 games I would consider it a useful though not essential addition to that feature set.
Such a thought went through my head the other day and has led me to the question: Should I buy a PS3?

When Sonys underperforming console was released it cost a franky bonkers amount of money and boasted the same amount of noise as a jet plane graphics that were inferior to the rather cheaper Xbox 360 (The PS3 has more theoretical power, but it is harder to utilise) and an ability to play a disc format that shared worrying similarities with Betamax (no offense Mr Betamax).

So what’s changed?

In a word, plenty

Firstly it’s no secret that Sonys gaming division is in a bad situation (The long time divisional leader got the boot a little while back). It has gone from comfortable industry leader to third place in a single generation and it is loosing money hand over fist. In this kind of situation developers start abandoning a platform and offering big name exclusives to Microsoft or Nintendo. When you consider the number of people who will buy a console just to get their hands on Halo or Mario Galaxy it becomes obvious why this is a pretty serious situation for Sony to be in and the decision they have taken is to discount the PS3 to death. Now it is a fact that console manufacturers (Nintendo excluded) sell consoles at a loss for the first year or so of production on the grounds that as technology moves on components will drop in price and they will make a profit later in the game.

Review - Umbrella Chronicles Wii

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:03:00 GMT

Umbrella Chronicles is the latest game in the successful Resident Evil franchise and a Wii exclusive. Rather than taking the story in a new direction Umbrella lets you play through various key scenes from the previous 4 games.
The gameplay is somewhat of a departure from the norm as rather than the traditional 3rd person survival game umbrella is a rails shooter in the vein of Virtua Cop, or House Of The Dead.
At first the rails shooter format seems incongruous with the franchise. The unique aspect of the Resi has always been the need to horde ammo and use it sparingly which would make for a pretty rubbish shoot em up.
Umbrella gets around this in a clever way. Ammunition for your pistol is unlimited, but is pretty much useless against tougher enemies and ammo for heavy weapons is in limited supply and has to be used with care.
At the start of each level you can choose a weapon to take in addition to your pistol and plenty more can be collected along the way. All the Resi favs are here including the sub machine gun, shotgun and grenade launcher all of which have unique advantages and weaknesses.
The game boasts three difficulty levels and even easy is a challenging in places so rest assured there is plenty here for the core gamer to get their teeth into.
The game is also one of a small handful of games currently available that work with the Wii Zapper and this is the control method that I most enjoyed. As with all the best rails shooters it also supports 2 player simultaneous play which is great fun.
Recommended.

Links Crossbow Training - Wii Zapper - Review

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:23:00 GMT

Links Crossbow Training is the pack in game with the Wii Zapper peripheral for the Wii.
The Zapper is a plastic shell resembling a submachine gun into which the Wiimote and the Nunchuck clip which costs a pretty darn reasonable £19 for the shell and the game.
Links crossbow training is a game based on the successful Zelda franchise and uses the game engine and graphics from Twilight Princess meaning the graphics are very impressive for a budget title.
Each level contains three stages falling into three categories static target shooting, defending your position for advancing enemies where you can rotate your view by moving the Wiimote to the extents of the screen and an FPS like mode where you can move Link arround with the Nunchuck stick.
Gaining points across the three stages of a level wins you medals which are required to move onto the next level.
The game mechanics are pretty simple levels are timed and you can never die (hits just reduce your score) Ammo is always unlimited, but there is a multiplier that increases on each consecutive shot so accuracy is the key to getting a good score.
Some people have complained that the game is slightly easier without using the Zapper shell, but for me this is missing the point after all a driving game might be easier with a joypad, but using a wheel is more imersive.
There are several games to be released that are compatible with the Zapper including the excellent Umbrella Chronicles and House of the Dead and for the budget price you can’t really go wrong.

Headphones, Audiophiles and BS

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:36:00 GMT

I have just ordered some rather extravagant Sennheiser HD600 open backed headphones from play.com (Expect a review soon).
Before you condemn me too much for spending £140 on headphones, I was intending to get some 595 or 555, but play have been sold out of them for the past month and as they sell Sennheiser for half the price of everywhere else I decided go up a model rather than pay an inflated price for 595s elsewhere (Of course I could have waited another month, but where is the fun in that).
Naturally being the obsessive maven that I am I had to do vast amounts of reasearch before committing to the pair that I was going to buy and this put me into the whacky world of the “Audiophile”.
High end headphones are something that I haven’t really delved into before, but it came as no surprise to see quite how much nonsense that people will talk.
On AVforums and headphone.com it’s quite common for people to recommend that you buy a pair of £60 headphones and couple it with a £500 headphone amplifier. In fact it is quite common to see people recommending £2.5K valve headphone amps or portable headphone amps for iPods.
None of this is a surprise after all some audiophiles claims are so ludicrous that James Randi has started calling people out via his million dollar challenge . Where it is a real pain in the arse is when you actually try and get some useful advice on Hi-Fi which despite the ludicrous numbers of magazines and forums on the subject proves virtually impossible. Much of the available information seems to be written with the intrinsic belief that if you can’t hear a difference then you must be some kind of philistine.
The only thing I have been able to glean with any authority (Other than that fact that as I suspected Sennheiser are the defacto standard for high end cans) is that many integrated amp manufacturers stick crappy components into the headphone sections of their amps to keep costs down on the basis that people don’t audition them when they go to buy an amp. This may well be true, but luckily I have a good quality firewire audio interface attached to my PC which I can use to compare and contrast to my NAD amp in the lounge before I consider a separate headphone amp.
A review written by a sound engineer from Sound on Sound convinced me that the HD600s were a good choice for me, but I would love to find a place where I can be sure of finding decent information about Hi-Fi without all the nonsense.

Linky Love 4th Jan

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:50:00 GMT

A great article from Ars about the prospects for Linux uptake in 2008.

A talk from Dr Ben Goldacre discussing the medicalisation of social problems which is worth listening to hear just how little evidence there is for the health benefits of Antioxcidents, Fish Oil, Pomegranate juice etc.

One of the most imaginative games I’ve played in ages. Your objective is to get to the top of the tower. Your cursor travels back in time after a few minutes and then you can go back through and help yourself out.

More On The Guitar Hero Debate

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:35:00 GMT

Review - BBC iPlayer Streaming Beta With Ubuntu and Firefox

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:14:00 GMT

As a Linux user the decision by the BBC to use proprietary Microsoft DRM for their iPlayer video downloading service came as very disappointing news. Seemingly many of the several million UK Mac and Linux users agreed with me and kicked up a fair stink over the issue. This lead to the BBC trust mandating that the iPlayer should provide support for all licence payers, not just those who run Windows.
The streaming iPlayer is the BBC’s answer to the protesting OSX and Ubuntu devotees who want the freedom to catch up on last weeks Eastenders.
I will be testing it with Firefox 2 running on a fairly decrepit Ubuntu laptop to see if it offers anything for us beardy Linux users left out in the cold.
My first impression is how Mac like it all looks. I find it quite bizzare that BBC Future Media managed to come up with a platform that has the look and feel of an iPhone with an Apple referencing name which was incompatible with the Mac but I digress.
The page opens with suggested highlights you may wish to catch up on and a “Last 7 Days” button which causes a snazzy looking days of the week toolbar to fade into view. From there you can filter the content by network and time of day. The available programmes appear in a grid but unfortunately the interface truncates the title of the programme and doesn’t offer the full title in a tooltip when the mouse hovers over the item. The only way to get to the full title of the content or a synopsis of the show is to click on it and open the video. There is no back button so if the content is incorrect you must start the search process again. Strangely if you click the “Last 7 Days” button once you’ve opened a video it opens behind the video and is effectively no use.
Once you have found your desired episode the interface is essentially a You Tube alike. On the plus side the video is 16×9 and looks relatively free from artefacts and the audio is 128Kbps which is perfectly acceptable for most purposes.
Unfortunately it has a lot to learn from the oft imitated but never bettered You Tube player. The time indication is grey on black and I find it virtually impossible to read. I could put up with the unreadable time code if it wasn’t for two painful errors. Firstly the transport controls don’t appear to work at all. If you attempt to move the play head it switches to a buffering icon seemingly indefinitely and secondly if you click the full screen icon it claims the feature is unavailable because my Flash player is not up to date when this is not the case. On the two programmes I attempted to watch both played to approximately half way through then faded to black and displayed the not at all helpful message “Something Went Wrong”before refusing to play further.

iPlayer is still listed as being beta software, but with a full launch planned on Christmas Eve it really should be in a better state than this by now.
As it stands the service would appear to be virtually unusable to the Firefox/Ubuntu user though I would be interested to hear what the experience of Windows users has been.

Despite all the problems I can’t help thinking that more than just a conciliatory gesture to the Linux/Mac community the streaming player will prove to be the better way of accessing iPlayer content.
Throughout the history of TV the user experience has been that you get your show when you turn on the TV not the next day. If you Bit Torrent a show you have to wait, but at least then you have the option to keep it as long as you want and transfer it to your portable device/burn it to DVD as you require.
The BBC p2p service is rendered obsolete when you can easily download platform agnostic content unburdened with DRM from Pirate Bay. This method has the disadvantage of it dubious legal status, but could you imagine any court in the land punishing a licence payer for getting hold of content they were unable to watch through official channels because the content is crippled with proprietary Digital Restrictions Management.

I look forward to seeing how the service develops and matures over time but for now it simply doesn’t function as it should.

Linky Love - 17th Dec

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:07:00 GMT

Rather than over posting with too many links I’m going to try bundling them up in a round up post. Let me know what you think.

I would love this story about an 11th grader at a US school getting detention for using Firefox, but I have the feeling it might be fake.
That said I do know a guy who’s kid got computer literacy homework of finding out how to use features in MS Word and failed because they were using Fedora with Open Office!

I also love this story about the porn industry loosing money because of the popularity of adult You Tube variants if only for the fact that I’m imagining the poster for Home Taping is Killing Porn!

Boing Boing is linking to a superb paper analysing the insanity that lead to Sony BMG installing spyware on users PCs.

Over on TDDO Spanners has been suffering after the dentist saw fit to sew his mouth shut!

Petition for Data Loss Notification = 25 Million Letters in the Post?

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:32:00 GMT

A petition has sprung up on the 10 Downing street site asking for mandatory notification if a company looses your personal data.
I think this is an excellent idea. There is nothing better than the threat of bad publicity to keep people honest.
As it stands if a company accidentally spill your data to a bunch of credit scammers their best course of action is just to hush it up.

Link via Boing Boing
Link to Petition

Xubuntu for EEE PC

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:07:00 GMT

I run Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop and though the KDE based distro that came with my EEE PC does have some plus points I do miss that buntu goodness.
I haven’t had a bash at installing it myself yet as most attempts I have read about seem to have fallen foul of the non standard WiFi and Screen.
Rather conveniently eeeuser have just released eeeXubuntu which includes some custom tweaks to the Xfce based Ubuntu variant to help it run on the EEE.
Xubuntu is a good choice for the EEE as it is considerably less intensive on system resources than GNOME or KDE based distros.
I’m not going to bite the bullet and install it quite yet, but I’ll certainly be keeping tabs on progress with it.
I’m hoping Hardy Heron comes with EEE support built in but until then this looks like the best bet for buntu fanboys with an EEE.

EDIT: It would appear that eeeXubuntu is the work of one oasisbob rather than an eeeuser comunity project.

Homeopathy Cures AIDs (or not)

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:33:00 GMT

http://www.badscience.net/?p=578

I've just been reading this article by Ben Goldacre.

I've always considered Homeopathy to be utter nonsense (Homeopathic medicines are just sugar pills and contain no active ingredient) but relatively harmless nonsense that gives the recreationaly unwell something to squander their money on in exchange for a dose of the placebo effect.

Recently however I have discovered that practitioners are recommending that people give their children sugar pills to prevent malaria, or as a substitute to the MMR vaccine (Measles has claimed its first child fatality as a result of the declining immunization rate BTW) and cure AIDs. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it should be entirely outlawed, or at the very least that practitioners should not be able to refer to what they give as medicine, or a therapy and furthermore that people setting themselves up in a position of authority giving people dangerous health advise should be held criminally responsible for the damage they might cause.

Richard Dawkins Documentary

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:55:00 GMT

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2293483151556804649

Link to a fascinating pair of documentaries by Richard Dawkins dealing with spiritualism and faith healing / alternative medicine.

One thing I didn't realize is that Homeopathy is being paid for with tax payers money which I find sickening.

The Daddy Advent Calender

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 02:35:00 GMT

I’m running an online advent calender over on thedaddy.org

I was thinking about cross posting it onto my blog but I’m going to find it hard enough to keep the thread updated let alone keep this place in step as well.

The Bible Gets Bad Ass

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:06:00 GMT

This Article had me laughing so much the missus just came in to ask me what I was up to.

The bible has some really bizarre stuff in it for example:

“And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them” (2 Kgs. 2:23-24).”

but it’s the commentary that makes it ultra funny.

Voice of The Underground Sacked

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:15:00 GMT

Boo to TFL for not having a sense of humor!

They have done away with the voice of the underground Emma Clarke because she posted some spoof announcements on her website. I think it's a bit of a poor show especially as the clips are really rather funny.

http://www.metafilter.com/66883/The-Voice-of-the-Underground-is-silenced.

Clips can be found if you follow the link.

Review - ASUS EEE PC

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:05:00 GMT

If you keep up with the tech news websites then you will have probably heard about the EEE PC which was initially called the $199 laptop although rising prices for LCD screens has put paid to that dream it is now out and if you’ve read my earlier post about trying to buy one on Tottenham Court Road you will know that they are flying off the shelves by all account.

What is an EEE PC?

When you review something it is usually taken as a given that you know what it is. In this case however the answer is not quite so cut and dried. It looks like a laptop, but it’s much smaller than even a subnotebook. It almost fits into the category of Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) which is a type of device that Microsoft and Sony have been investing heavily in but a Sony UMPC runs Windows Vista and costs around £2,000 compared to the £170-£260 that a EEE PC will set you back. Perhaps then it’s better thought of as a PDA. It boots into a simple tabbed menu system that allows you to select between web browsing, e-mails, etc, but under the hood it is a real Linux PC and it is quite capable of running XP should you choose to install it.

The fact that it doesn’t fit into a niche held by any other device could be a real boon for ASUS. It’s what Nintendo called blue water thinking when they came up with the Wii. You leave the sharks to fight in the bloody red water and sneak off to position your product where there aren’t any competitors.
I guess I should start by explaining what you get for your money;

Specification

900Mhz Intel Celeron M processor
512MB of RAM
3xUSB
VGA Monitor out
LAN Port
Line In
Headphone Out
7” LCD screen
Full QWERTY keyboard
WiFi
Webcam
4GB Flash Drive
SD Slot

What you don’t get is a hard drive. The operating system and your data are stored on the internal 4GB flash drive. This keeps the power and size down, but you arent going to be keeping your photo albums or MP3 collection on here unless you invest in an SD card (it supports cards up to 32GB) or a USB hard drive.
The software is a customized version of Linux made by ASUS and Xandros, but don’t let that scare you away. Asus have talked of the EEE PC being an appliance rather than a PC and as such it has been designed with a rather nifty user friendly tabbed interface.
At the top of the screen are a number of tabs labeled: internet, work, learn, play, settings and favorites and clicking on these opens a menu with big chunky buttons for each of the functions in that tab.

In the internet tab you have a web browser (Firefox), instant messenger, e-mail, skype
The work tab has the Open office suite of Word, Excel and Power Point alikes (what I am currently writing this article on in fact) along with PDF reader and Mozilla Thunderbird the e-mail app from the Firefox people.
Learn has a few educational apps to help kids with maths and the like.
Play has games (including Linux favs Frozen Bubble and Penguin Racer) and photo, video and music managers.
Favorites and Setting are pretty self explanatory.

Build Quality and Construction

The EEE PC really reminds me of a bigger version of my old Psion 3 from the big oversized hinges with the removable battery slung between them to the style of the icons.
The whole thing has a nice robust feel about it and compares favorably with the frankly rather flimsy Toshiba Portege sub notebook I tried a while back.
The keyboard is very small but it has a positive feel and a decent layout.
The matt finish on the case doesn’t pick up finger prints or scratches.
Its about the same size and weight as a large paperback book and though it isn’t going to fit in the pocket of your jeans it will go in a large coat pocket or a handbag with ease.
One nice touch is the neoprene slip case that came as a pack in and protects from knocks and dust.

Performance

From switch on to up and running takes a lightning quick 15 seconds. For word processing and web browsing everything opens pretty quickly and there is no appreciable slow down when you are running a few apps at the same time.
Nothing I threw at it seemed to phase it at all and even the 3D penguin racer ran ok although the frame rare was nothing to write home about.

Screen and Graphics

The screen is a 7” back lit LCD with a slightly bizarre resolution of 800 x 480.
The screen is crisp and has a very good viewing angle and the colour representation is very good. There is however no getting away from the fact that the screen really could be rather bigger. The 7” screen leaves quite an expanse of unused space on the top surface and though this is used for a web cam and speakers I would gladly sacrifice them for a bigger screen. ASUS have stated the intent to produce one with a 10” screen and I expect they will be able to package this within the same form factor.
The picture from the built in VGA connector performed admirably and supports a variety of output resolutions though I have to date only tried it with my TV which only supports 1024x768.
One minor gripe is that there are no threads provided for the locking screws of the VGA connector this was only really a problem when I was using the EEE on my lap with the monitor output going to the telly. In a desktop situation with monitor mouse and keys I doubt it would be a problem.

Random Things I Love

There are keyboard function keys for switching back to the tabs and for opening the task manager.
The caps and num lock are shown on nifty little on screen buttons.
The touch pad has a scroll slider on the right hand side which allows you to scroll a web page or doc with a slide of your finger.
The fact that they have thought to put 2 USB ports on one side for keyboard and mouse and one on the other for a USB stick.
The chunky feeling of robustness that the unit has.
The very impresive battery life (ive done Birmingham and back on the train today and it’s still on half power on the batteries.)
You can turn it into a full KDE Debian install with a couple of Bash commands.

Gripes

All in all I have been very impressed with the EEE PC in the short time that I have had it, but there are a couple of issues I will bring to the attention of the pedants.
Volume and WiFi are on soft keys which is a concession to space. The keyboard is in the main very well laid out if cramped due to its small size, but the location of the insert key just above the delete key is a total pain and you can easily put yourself into the dreaded insert mode.
The machine can go into standby which takes only a couple of seconds, but lacks a hibernate mode, though when you consider that the machine has half a GB of RAM and only 4 GB of disk it is obvious why it doesn’t.
The touch pad is small which makes it a bit jittery and a mouse is a must if you are doing a lot of pointer work. I am however an ardent supporter of what I like to call the pointer nipple (becaue I don’t know what its propper name is) so you are unlikely to find me singing the praises of any touch pad.
Though it saves the details of your home network you have to explicitly tell it to connect when you boot it up.
Open Office is quite a slow loading app and it would be handy to have a simple text editor like gedit for when you just want to write some notes.
The PC has the all singing all dancing Konqueror file manager but doesn’t use it by default.

Techy Stuff

The Linux environment is based on Debian distro with KDE and has all the tools and apps you would expect. The installer for the OS is stored on a hidden partition so you can reinstall if you break it (though I resent the additional disk space that this uses up)
On the more expensive models like the 701 the RAM is socketed and upgradeable however it is soldered in on the cheaper surf models. The guts are accessible though a flap on the bottom of the unit, but rather uncharitably there is a warranty voiding seal which you must break to open it. I am also lead to believe that there is a slot in which an additional 4GB flash card can be inserted to enhance the internal disk and the disk manager application backs this up by displaying a disk 2 not present message (I assume the 8GB model uses this extra slot as standard.)
The machine supports XP and ASUS provide a drivers disk and an app which makes a USB stick into a bootable Windows installer for the device. Pressure from MS has lead to the promise that they will release a version with Windows pre installed for an additional £40 some time next year, though I hope they don’t use muscle to make this a replacement for the Linux version.
The machine its self is a pretty standard Intel system on a board set up with integrated graphics acceleration and the ubiquitous Realtek integrated sound also found on my desktop and work laptop PCs. As a result you should have no problem installing another flavor of Linux if you so desire with Xubuntu, Puppy or Damn Small all being good options.
You can also set it to boot up in a normal KDE environment by installing kicker and ksmserver from the command line and from then on you can switch between them freely.

Options

For those of you pondering if you should buy now or hold out you should keep in mind that there will shortly be a number of options added to the list including a 1GB RAM 8 GB disk version, There has been talk of a 2GB, 256MB version but I would steer clear of this as it also has a lower spec battery and the RAM is soldered rather than socketed and therefore non upgradeable.
In the future there is an suggestion from ASUS that they plan to produce versions with a 10”LCD , a 3G wireless data card and perhaps most interestingly upgrade the processor to an Intel Merom based unit which will reduce power consumption by a significant factor.
On a purely aesthetic front the box shows a variety of colours with the green one looking especially fetching..
There is also talk of a desktop model being made available at some point.

Conclusion

This is quite a specialized device and it certainly isn’t for everyone although what I will say is that if you want a very portable cheap machine or something that just works out of the box then you really can’t go wrong. I also think it could be an option for a very simple desktop machine if you coupled it with a screen and a keyboard and mouse.
While writing this review I have used the machine on the tube and on a London to Birmingham train and compared to the bulky slow booting laptops everyone else was using it has been a breath of fresh air and has had quite a few admiring glances.

Wii Review - Scarface The World Is Yours

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:01:00 GMT

As the name suggests “The Word is Yours” is a game based on the classic gangster movie Scarface, but offers an intelligent alternative to the normal movie tie in.

[FILM SPOILERS]
The game starts with you controlling Tony Montana through the final scene of the movie complete with his “Leetal friend” but with his fate in your hands you can prevent his climactic demise. What you can't prevent is the destruction of his empire at the hands of the law and rival gangs.
[/FILM SPOILERS]

Back on the street without a penny to his name Tony immediately sets to getting his empire back the only way he knows how. Selling cocaine and killing people. As you progress you can buy all the trappings of a crime lord and tart up your mansion.
The gameplay is what you might uncharitably refer to as a Grand Theft Auto clone with a couple of twists.

Control is as you would expect for a GTA alike with the advantage of the ability to free aim with the Wiimote. An extra mechanic added to the game is Tony's rage which is added to by good aiming, daring stunts, and taunting your enemies. When it maxes out you can enter rage mode moving the camera into first person, making you invincible and giving you a health boost for every person you kill.
Every time you negotiate you have to do a test based around holding down a button and releasing it at the right moment like an old skool golf game. It's a shame the Wii motion controls couldn't have been introduced here.

Playing as Tony you roam around the four districts of Miami getting your turf back in one of three ways: Selling drugs to make money, Wiping out rival gangs to reduce the competition and Buying legitimate businesses to use as fronts.

Clearing out gangs is as simple as driving around till you spot some toughs then gunning them down. Once their leader is dead they will scatter and you have to make sure you kill all of them or they will come back a bit later. Why they have to be exterminated and won't join your gang is not explained..

To do drug deals you phone your contact at any time who sets you up. You always have to do some kind of random mission which involves collecting something, dropping something off or doing someone in to set up the deal. Depending on how big your operation is you progress through making deals with street dealers for a few grams, to distributing through your warehouses to front businesses, finally running your own shipping from Cuba bringing it in by the Kg. This part of the game works really well.

Buying front businesses is the way you progress through the story arc. This involves running some kind of mission for the owner and then handing over the readies. Every so often this results in some kind of set up or story trigger that sees you wiping out a rival gang leader.
This is where the game falls down for me. Only one mission is available at a time and though some of them are great fun some of them are marred with poor mechanics making them virtually impossible to complete. This would be fine if you could pick and choose but the linearity forces you play dreadful missions again and again.

It's a shame some of the missions are so flawed as the actor playing Tony (Hand picked by Al Pacino no less) is excellent and has something to say for every occasion and the graphics are good considering it is a PS2 port, but as it is I can't recommend it.

I got me an EEE PC

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:37:00 GMT

Woo I’ve got one!

I am writing this post from my brand new ASUS EEE PC 701 (512MB, 4GB, £219) and dang was it some kind of freaky time getting one.

I saw posters up in one of the shops on Tottenham Court Road (For those of you not familiar with London this is the electrical goods district) while I was in town which reminded me that today was UK release day.
The first shop I visited (at about 1pm) had said they had just got them in but had already sold out of all of the White ones and only had three Black ones left. I really wanted to see a white one before i made a choice so I set off down the road.

I did a quick whistle stop tour of the 15 or so PC shops. 10 had got shipments that morning and of those only three had any left in stock and none of them had any white ones. In just about every shop someone was ordering one, or playing with a demo model. Having played with a White demo unit I decided that the black one was just dandy. I quickly went back to the first shop (keep in mind only about 15 minutes had elapsed). When I got there I found they had now sold the remaining three units in stock, but he told me that he also owned the other shop that had them in stock over the road. He phoned and confirmed that they had one left so I paid while he nipped over and got it. While I was paying he rang the shop assistant and told her that in the time it took him to cross the road they had sold it and the didn’t have any more, by this time I had already paid so he gave me one that was being held for another customer as I was quite understandably miffed.
While he was bringing it in a woman came in and said she wanted to buy it but he told her he had just sold it to me and it was the last one.
The shop assistant seemed completely confused and said it was only normally like this the week before Christmas.

First impressions are that the build quality and interface are good and it boots very fast. I also can’t get over just how small it is (not much bigger than my old Psion 3) but I will do a detailed review ASAP.

Also just because Engadget do it here is some unboxing pr0n:

Nice Box! Behold Babylon No I'm not a giant, it really is that small.

The Web 2.0 Non Debate

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:47:00 GMT

I was inspired to write this post after reading Jo’s excellent blog

Recently I have seen any number of blog posts and newspaper articles discussing this seasons exciting buzz phrase “Web 2.0” in relation to the future of the professional journalist.

Much of the debate seems to center around Web 2.0 being a “good thing” to be embraced or a “bad thing” that should be done away with .
Quite apart from the fact the genie is well and truly out of the bottle the question in its self is almost nonsensical. Web 2.0 is neither good nor bad it simply is.

Breaking Down Barriers

The blog and the wiki are the technologies that underly Web 2.0, but they no more define it than a printing press defines a newspaper, or an FM transmitter defines radio. The crux of Web 2.0 is that an individual can now publish to a potentially limitless audience without the barrier of cost and technical expertise. Framed in this way it is clear that web 2.0 is the the most recent in a long line of ways in which it has become easier to communicate the written word.

Holding Back The Tide

Fourteenth century monks transcribing the bible by hand gave way to the printing press which in time led to Offset Printing, Word Processing and DTP. The common factor between all these advances is that at every step publishing becomes faster and cheaper and skilled labor is replaced with an automated process. It’s pointless to ask if these advances should be permitted. They were inevitable and irrepressible. Put simply if you oppose Web 2.0 you are on the wrong side of history and noble as that might be history is written by the victor and does not look back fondly on the Ludite however many cotton jennies they might smash.
It should be blindingly apparent to anyone reading this article that I am not a trained journalist and therefore I don’t intend to weigh in on the debate over the position of the NUJ on citizen journalists and the like. However the flood is coming and it would seem somewhat foolish to focus on holding back the tide in preference to booking some boat building lessons.

Ubuntu Vs XP Pt1

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:04:00 GMT

I was planning to do this part of the story of my switch over to Ubuntu eventually, but hearing that fellow TDDOer Malcolm has had a less than fun time trying to use Ubuntu and had to give up on it I thought I would crack on with it and let you know how it stacks up with Windows. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of Leopard or Vista to hand, but I’ve spent some time with a decently speced Vista laptop and a fair bit of time on a Final Cut Pro machine which I believe was Panther on a Power PC based G5 Mac Pro so though I don’t feel well informed enough to do a comprehensive comparison I will chip in with points where I can. I will focus the first part of the article on core OS features and will talk about applications in the next part.

Installation

Ubuntu
At the time of installing both of my machines the current version of Ubuntu was 7.04 Edgy and so I haven’t had any experience of the new versions installer, but I must say it was an absolute breeze. The PC booted into the Live CD and then during the installation all I had to do was set the time zone and type in my name and that was it.
I must note that two people I know have had problems installing Ubuntu one with a very old machine and the other with a non standard screen in this case there is a text mode installer which is just as easy to use but doesn’t look as pretty it’s annoying that you have to download this separately and it doesn’t detect the problem and switch into text mode.
For more advanced users Ubuntu comes with superb features for making a PC duel boot and repartitioning the disk. While installing my desktop PC I repartitioned my fragmented XP system partition and it worked like a charm without any scares.

XP
XP is the easiest Microsoft OS I have installed, but I have had a few problems with it. The first one is the classic have a cup of tea and leave it going problem. You set it up and leave it to do its thing for half an hour and then come back to find a dialogue box popped up seconds after you left and its done naff all in the time you were away.
I’ve had XP hang on installation more than once and had to reformat and go back to the beginning and I’ve also had Windows become confused on a rebuild and recreate all the user folders a second time prefixed by the computer name and a dot.
XP is also blighted by the fact that many vendors don’t provide a proper Windows disk and some don’t even provide a recovery disk.
Verdict
Had two of my friends not had a bad installation experience I would have given it to Ubuntu as it is I’m calling it evens.

Registration

Ubuntu
No registration is required unless you take out a support contract woo hoo! Windows
Initial registration is not hugely arduous and easily circumvented if you are so inclined however I must mention the blight that is Windows Genuine Advantage. This is a special application the job of which is to check you aren’t doing anything you shouldn’t be with Windows. Having bought my desktop PC and reveling in my first paid for legal Microsoft product since the Postman Pat game I had for my Amstrad in 1985 I allowed the Genuine Advantage app to install its self as an automatic update. My PC then promptly spent the next month flashing up messages that it was pirated and refused to update. I later discovered that Norton Firewall was blocking the connection to the authentication servers online so it had decided to call me a thief rather than give me the benefit of the doubt. What depressed me about this episode is that if I had cracked Windows none of this would have happened so I was effectively being punished for being honest.
Verdict
Genuine Advantage is one of the things that made me loose faith in XP so it’s an Ubuntu win hands down.

Crapware

Windows XP and Vista
Some of you may not know what I am talking about when I say Crapware, but believe me when I say that this is one of the most significant problems facing the Windows platform today. Crapware is catch all term for the software that you didn’t ask for which came preinstalled on your machine usually with some kind of limited trial or some kind of advertising revenue attached. The most common forms of this are Norton Antivirus, pre installed ISP services and the Yahoo toolbar. With my current PC Windows was so broken by this software it would not uninstall correctly that I had to rebuild it.
My mums PC has the same problem, but because it doesn’t have a proper rebuild disk and has some proprietary media centre hardware built into the mobo I can’t even do a restore!
The fault of this does not lie with Mictrosoft who I understand are very unhappy with the situation, but with the manufacturers. Dell have speculated about having a no Crapware option in there options list, but estimate the PC could cost as much as £50 more as a result.
Ubuntu and Most forms of Linux
Thankfully free from this abomination.
Mac
Apple have sensibly avoided this problem and well done to them for not taking the quick dollar at the expense of the user.
Verdict
Windows in last place all the others are tied.

Hardware Compatibility

XP
XP is the current market leader and it’s been around for a while so it’s fair to say that if you want to make hardware that people will buy then you make it XP compatible. XP will also run on a few processor types though the Intel x86 is the most common.
**Vista
**

A disappointingly large number of companies haven’t written any Vista drivers so it is still very likely that an upgrade will stop some hardware working. Companies like Creative make it a deliberate ploy not to write soundcard drivers for subsequent OS because they think you will shell out for new stuff. This will of course change

Ubuntu and Linux in General

Though a lot better than in days gone by you are still likely to find problems with esoteric or very new hardware in Linux however this is getting better all the time and the only bits of kit I have that don’t work are the memory card slot in my laptop (the one in my desktop is fine) and some of the 3D acceleration features aren’t supported on the esoteric graphics card on my desktop.

The hardware situation gets better all the time. Only a year or two ago Printers, Bluetooth, Multi Monitor set ups and USB WiFi adapters were all known to be problematic, but are now working out of the box.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Skype headsets and Touchscreen support is still pretty poor.

Ununtu gets support for the longest list of platforms supported with: x86, Power PC, SPARC, PS3 and Itanium all being supported.

Mac OSX

As Mac increases it’s market share more people consider it a must to write Mac drivers. The real bummer is that Apple won’t let you put their lovely operating systems on your own PC which is a shame as there boxes are super expensive and the reasoning is purely to maximise profits and keep them exclusive rather than any technical reason. I understand the commercial sense of this decision, but I don’t have to like it.

OSX can run on x86 and Power PC, but only on Apple provided hardware without contravening the licencing agreement.

Verdict

XP is on top here with Vista and Linux in second place and OSX in last place.

Installing Software

Ubuntu
This is one area where Ubuntu absolutely shines. You add and remove software from the Package Manager much like Windows, but where it comes into its own is that you can search or browse any of the software that is available for Ubuntu from the package manager, click install and you are all done.

XP
Compared to installing directly from within the package manager having to download zip files, unpack, and then go though an install shield seems positively archaic in comparison.
Verdict
Ubuntu wins hands down

Security

Ubuntu
Ubuntu is in the UNIX family so it has an excellent security pedigree. Ubuntu comes with a capable Firewall, Antivirus is available, but not really needed. Another excellent security feature is Sudo. In Ubuntu you are never really logged in as administrator (or Root in Linux terminology) instead when you need to do something that only admins should do you do a “super do” or sudo which asks you to put in your password to check that you really mean it. This is brilliant because it means that even if malicious code gets onto your machine it can’t do anything naughty without your express permission and even then only for that session.
XP
XP gets a bad rap but most of the security problems it has are due to the fact that it’s the biggest target, but with a bit of tweaking it is fine. It comes with an adequate firewall which is switched on by default, but doesn’t come with antivirus which is a must.
On the downside logging in as an administrator leaves you vulnerable and switching between user and admin accounts, or using run as is a pain in the arse.

Vista
Vista has much improved security over previous Windows products, but the obsessive paranoia gets in the way of the user and it seems that their need to prove themselves as super secure has been at the expense of usability.

OSX

Mac users are famous for their arrogance about security and that worries me a lot. OSX is also built on UNIX so theoretically it is very secure but there have been a couple of things recently that have worried me. One is that Panther comes with the Firewall switched off by default and is of a poor quality, but the main thing is that Apple’s ascendancy is making them a much bigger target and the first commercial hacks are starting to appear.

Verdict
Ubuntu in first place, despite my worries OSX goes in second place followed by Vista and XP

Boot Time

XP
This one is a bit of a tricksy one. XP gets to the log in screen slightly quicker than Ubuntu, but it’s still working furiously behind the scenes. Once you log in it takes quite a while before the PC becomes responsive.
Ubuntu
It takes a little longer to get to the log in prompt, but one thing that’s really nice is that once you log in and the Window manager starts up you can start working really very quickly.
Verdict

From switch on to log in XP is a little faster. From switch on to starting to do things Ubuntu wins.

Updates

Ubuntu
As standard Ubuntu will check for updates once per day. Like XP it checks for updates to the operating system, but the superb thing is that it will also update all of the applications that you install with the package manager. So your automatic updates also make sure you have all the latest versions of, Firefox, Java, etc. Updates are notified with a balloon which pops up to tell you that you have updates and you simply click on it to install them. Reboots are seldom required after updates.

XP also features automatic updates, but unfortunately they are one of the most broken features of XP. A problem I had recently illustrates the point
I logged into my Windows PC a couple of days back for the first time in a while and as well as a balloon popping up to tell me that I needed to update Windows I had balloons from my Java notifier telling me Java was out of date and also one from HP telling me that my printer drivers needed to be updated and another that Avast was out of date. In comparison to the slickness of Ubuntu this looked positively backward.
I was in a hurry and needed to set my PC ripping a DVD then transcoding it into a format for my portable. This is a time consuming process so having set everything up as a batch of rips and codes I left my PC for a couple of hours and came back to find that shortly after I had left to room Windows had decided that it needed to apply a critical security patch and so without consulting me it had installed the patch then rebooted the machine all without any user intervention. Though applying updates as the rule rather than the exception is a good thing this kind of big brother behavior is what has increasingly put me off spending any time using Windows.
Verdict

Ubuntu by a country mile.

Networking

XP
Networking in XP is pretty good. Though settings and preferences are set out in a slightly esoteric manner I have found wireless configuration to be very easy and something that works most of the time.
Ubuntu
Apparently wireless networking in Ubuntu used to be a nightmare but since the previous version it is really quite easy. The menus are laid out rather more logically than XP, but the experience is not quite as seamless as Windows. I have had a few minor problems with Wireless my desktop with a USB wireless antenna works like a charm, but my 5 year old laptop would not auto detect the name of my wireless LAN though it connected fine when I typed the name in by hand. I have also had a couple of problems one where Firefox would not recognise that the network had come back for a few minutes if it had been disconnected and another time when after coming out of Hibernate the machine would not connect wirelessly until I did a reboot. One advantage Ubuntu does have is a nice network tools GUI that lets you do ping, netstat, whois, finger lookup. trace root and lots of other handy tools from one interface without having to negotiate the terminal.
Verdict

I have had fewer problems with XP networking than with Ubuntu so XP is the winner here

Upgrading

XP
I haven’t upgraded a PC from XP to Vista but I have done so from 2000 to XP and though there are some useful tools for maintaining some settings and backing up data it has never worked very well for me and I’ve always found it easier to just format the disk and start again.
Ubuntu
This is another of the areas where Ubuntu works far better than anything else I’ve ever used. When Gutsy Gibbon the most recent version of Ubuntu came out last month a little icon appeared on my update manager saying upgrade to Gutsy and when I clicked it the machine downloaded all the packages taking about an hour and then installed the updated operating system taking about another hour. Once it had completed everything continued to work seamlessly and all the settings and data was preserved. A new version of Ubuntu is released about every 6 months so you are able to benefit from a continuous stream of updates rather than having to worry about the more substantial shift involved in the 5 years or so it takes MS to get a new version of Windows out.
Verdict
Ubuntu is far more impressive.

Performance and System Requirements

XP
XP will run on most PCs that aren’t ancient. It used to run ok on my 900mhz laptop, but the 256MB of ram made it painfully slow to load applications. On my 3.8Ghz 1GB P4 desktop it ran nice and fast.

Ubuntu
Makes my laptop runs significantly quicker though there is still the issue that Firefox is a memory hog (no more than on any other platform mind you). If you have an even more ancient machine than me then you can use Xubuntu which uses a different Windowing manager and runs even faster.
Vista
This is one of the area where Vista has been a rod for Microsoft’s back. In it’s full glory with the Aero Glass interface Vista really needs a modern multicore processor and high spec graphics card to get the best out of it. If you aren’t buying a new PC then it probably won’t run Vista all that well and even new laptops can struggle if you buy a cheaper one.
Verdict
Ubuntu is noticeably faster than XP. Vista is so resource hungry it is a serious problem.

That concludes my discussion of the core parts of the operating system.
Next time I want to cover software and who I would recommend to try Ubuntu.

Ars Review Ubuntu

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:40:00 GMT

The first part of my comprehensive round up of Ubuntu Vs XP will be posted up shortly, but in the meantime here is the Ars Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon review.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/ubuntu-gutsy-gibbon-review.ars/1

All in all it seems fairly positive and I would agree with everything that was said.

The North South Divide

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:28:00 GMT

I have recently started reading Pies and Prejudice by Stuart Marconi which is a book which talks about the North South divide from the perspective of a Northerner. Not so much on the socio-economic differences or geography, but on the defining characteristics of the people.

The book is well written and funny as you might expect, but I can't help, but think that the comparison is being made with a straw man. The first chapter talks about his experiences of the South and I was struck by a definition of the South that encompasses: London, East Anglia, The Midlands, The Home Counties and The West Country (He defines the North as starting at Crewe station).

I feel fairly well qualified to talk about this as I am an East Anglian with a Lancastrian mother who has lived in Suffolk, Birmingham and London and has spent quite a bit of time in Wigan, Liverpool and Manchester where I have family and friends.

I want to avoid making too many generalisations, but in my experience people from the North will tend to self identify with the concept of being a Northerner whilst I don't know many people who would describe themselves as a Southerner in any meaningful sense not only because it tends to be used as a term of mild abuse, but because its impossible to give it any meaning other than "Not a Northerner". I would always consider myself an East Anglian over any other geographical description not least because though Ipswich is fairly far South the North Norfolk cost is as far north as Stoke on Trent.

When I first moved to Birmingham I found it a very alien place to be. The accent could be hard to understand and the cultural reference points and sense of humour were different. It's much the same if I go to Cornwall for a holiday. I certainly don't sound the same as these people or have any more in common with them any more than if I spend a day in Wigan or Sheffield.

In terms of the traits that I could identify the differences between the people from Wigan and the people from Bristol that I've met aren't really that pronounced. Accent is the obvious one which amongst the middle classes doesn't tend to be all that different anyway (the tell tale Baaarth/Bath excepted).
The one that has been pointed out to me on several occasions is that people randomly talk to you at bus stops, but I have been just as aware of that in Birmingham or the East end as I have been in Sheffield or Manchester though I do conform true to type as if I don't have a specific question to ask I hate being engaged in conversation by strangers (Though I think that reflects badly on me not my place of birth)

I must say it has never been something that has any bearing on my life, but I'm interested to know how others feel on the subject.

I shall leave you with this anecdote from freshers week at Birmingham University upon being introduced to a new person who was from Macclesfield (I should add this is one of the only times something like this has ever happened to me).
Me: Hello I'm Nick
Them: That's a funny accent, where are you from?
Me: Suffolk
Them: Ah a Southerner, eh I expect you don't want to speak to a Northern Monkey like me then?
Me: Erm
Them: cos that's the problem with Southerners isn't it... not very friendly you don't give people like me a chance, you just form opinions about us from the off, I don't know how you get by really. Now with a Northerner they would give you a chance you would be chatting away like old mates by now, everyone is just so friendly, but Southerners are just such miserable bastards you don't have a chance
Me: You're not really giving me a chance now.
Them: Typical (Storms off)

Today's Best Quote

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:12:00 GMT

“If things that schoolchildren do in the course of being schoolchildren violate copyright, the problem is with copyright—not with the schoolchildren.”
Cory Doctorow

http://www.kottke.org/07/11/cory-doctorow

In The Audience For Later With Jools

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:18:00 GMT

I had a pretty excellent day yesterday…

I’ve been wanting to see Later With Jools being filmed since I started watching it about 10 years ago and yesterday I managed to blag some tickets from a friend who knows someone on the production team, but couldn’t go. I only found out the tickets were on offer at five pm on the day of the show so it was a rush and very pleasant surprise.
I had a bit of a worry when I got there because the tickets said no light clothes, or coats and I was straight from work and wearing a Daz white shirt. The audience manager said that people in light clothes might have to stand out of the way rather than be with the main audience, but I managed to get away with it with judicious use of keeping my jacket on and standing behind the missus who sensibly dressed in black.

Standing behind Robert Plant

Once we were in having walked straight past the midget like Kelly Jones Emily noted a sign on the table right in front of us saying “This Table Reserved for Robert Plant” which as a fairly obsessive Zep fan you can imagine was pretty damned exciting and lo and behold he sat down right in front of us with Alison Kraus (If you watch the show you should be able to see us standing behind when Jools is interviewing them).

The show was awesome and was filmed totally as live in one take. If you have been despairing about all the fakery in TV these days you can be assured that Jools is totally genuine as you see it on TV.
The line up was: Stereophonics, PJ Harvey, Estelle, King Creosote, The Foals and the traditional world music group who’s name escapes me, but were introduced by Damon Albarn. If you want to see it I think it will be shown on Friday in three weeks.

On the way out back through Television Centre I couldn’t help but think what a shame it is that soon all of this will be demolished or turned into luxury apartments and the people in the audience who stopped to take a photo of the famous sign reminded me that it is a privilege that I get to work in such an iconic building.

The Big Ubuntu Switchover

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:46:00 GMT

There seems to be some kind of law that if you stop using Windows and you have a blog you must at some point write a post about your experiences and who am I to buck that trend.

I recently moved over from using Windows XP to Ubuntu on my home machines and I thought it might be helpful for those considering the switch to read about my experiences. Since the most recent version of Ubuntu called Gutsy Gibbon (no seriously) came out there has been a lot of buzz about how it is great for every day PC users rather than just beardy computer science types so I have decided to write it with a non technical audience in mind.

What’s an Ubuntu?

I suppose that the first question to answer is what on earth is Ubuntu, and why should I use it instead of Windows?
Ubuntu is a type of Linux which is an operating system like Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X. Where Linux differs from the Apple and Microsoft products however is that it is free in two important ways:

Free like free beer
Free like free speech

Linux is free like beer because there is no charge for using it on your computer and it is free like speech because anyone can look at the program and change or improve it (something Microsoft or Apple would never let you do however much money you had). As a result lots of people both volunteers and people in industry continuously improve Linux allowing it to keep up with the huge investment made by its commercial rivals. Though you may not have Linux at home you will almost certainly use it every day as it is the most popular way of hosting web pages and powers such Internet legends as Google, Amazon and Ebay and quite a lot of phones and TV set top boxes also run it. Lots of people bundle up Linux with a collection of useful bits and bobs in what is called a distribution or a distro. Ubuntu is a Linux distro put together by a company called Canonical who make their money by selling help and support for Linux users. The motto of Ubuntu is “Linux for Humans” and their philosophy is often compared with the Apple Mac mantra “It just works”.
Ubuntu is designed to be as easy and friendly to install and use as possible and as a result it is fast becoming the most popular type of Linux with home users.
Now we know what Ubuntu is the next question is:

Why did I switch from Windows to Ubuntu?

To explain that I suppose I should tell you a little bit about myself.
I am what you might call a techy or a geek. I have a degree in a computing discipline and I work as a technologist for a living however I would like you to trust me when I tell you that I am in no way a fan of technology for technology’s sake. My mobile phone is second hand and exists only to make phone calls and I see gizmos as being only worth bothering with when they make our lives simpler and easier.
Whilst at university I was encouraged to install Redhat Linux on my PC by the department, but having sampled it in the lab I decided that though it had a lot of good things going for it, it was still too arcane at that point and didn’t really offer me anything that I couldn’t do in Windows 2000.
So what changed my mind?
As a younger person I like many people was not adverse to using software without playing for it, but as I got older I started to feel that if I got use from some software I should pay for it. At the moment I own two computers. One of them is a fairly modern desktop PC which came with a legitimate copy of Windows XP and the other is a rather decrepit by modern standards laptop for which I did not own a legitimate Windows licence. Unfortunately the hard disk in the laptop had to be replaced and this presented me with a problem. The laptop had never run XP very well in the first place as it was rather too old and buying an XP licence when it had already been superseded by the underwhelming Vista was a rather unappealing prospect. As an avid reader of the excellent Lifehacker (A website dedicated to making life easier and more productive) I kept hearing a lot about a newish and popular flavour of Linux by the name of Ubuntu. This surprised me somewhat as Lifehacker being productivity themed is typically more likely to sing the praises of Macs with their elegant interfaces and well thought out design.

So I had in my possession an old laptop, a virgin hard disk and a free operating system. What did I have to loose except a Sunday afternoon.

Installation

Having gone through an old fashioned Linux install as part of an engineering course some years back (Apparently during which if you set the scan rate wrongly it could make smoke come out of your monitor!) I was surprised at how easy it was to install (more detail of how it stacks up against XP in a later post). All you have to do is stick the CD in the drive and turn the machine on and it boots straight into Ubuntu from the CD and lets you poke around and check that you like it. Everything seemed to work and so I clicked the big install button and then other that asking me my name, time zone and the password for my wireless network everything just happened.

Not only did the machine work like a charm without me configuring anything (I’ve lever had to use a terminal for anything unless I wanted to) but I actually found my laptop now ran pretty fast and was very easy to use. soon I pretty much stopped using my well speced XP desktop except when I absolutely had to.

Going all in

The two things that turned me from a dabbler to an advocate came when my other half who is as non techy as can be and had previously only really used XP asked if she could borrow the Ubuntu laptop I was using rather than use the XP machine because she found it easier to use and another occasion when I was showing a Youtube video to a friend and he asked if my machine was Vista because it looked much nicer than his XP machine at home.

After this I soon changed the XP machine into a dual boot Windows/Ubuntu machine (I had paid for the XP licence so it seemed silly to delete it) and I have never looked back.

Next time I hope to do a feature comparison between the two so you can make your own mind up if you are considering making the switch.

Monkeys Kill Mayor

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:23:00 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7055625.stm

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.

Who thinks we should club together and smuggle some Monkeys into David Camerons office?

Arsenals of Folly

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:21:00 GMT

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375414138&view=excerpt

An excerpt of this excellent book has been made available on the Random House website.
It is the third part of a non fiction trilogy about the development of nuclear weapons / power and the ensuing cold war arms race the first part of which won the Pulitzer prize.

After reading the chapter I immediately bought the first book (The Making Of The Atomic Bomb) from Amazon though I had to import it from Canada as it is no longer in print!

Tiny Laptop for £169!

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:57:00 GMT

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39030092,49293507,00.htm

Asus have released the EEE PC, a super mini laptop that only costs £169!

It's 7″ so half way between a laptop and a PDA and it runs on flash memory rather than having a hard disk so it has a really good battery life as well as being super light and it starts up in 30 seconds.

It's fairly low powered so it runs Linux rather than Windows, but the good thing for non techies is that it has been designed to work as an appliance (Like some Nokia phones which also run Linux) rather than a PC so it is set up to “just work” like a Mac with all the things you need like web browsers and word processing on big simple buttons. They do plan to release an XP version. (Which will probably be £50 more and run quite a bit slower!)

The great thing is that Asus have done what Nintendo did with the Wii and ducked out of the arms race of power and graphics and produced a device that does the things that really matter like being small and light and cheap and having good battery life and it will almost certainly be more responsive than a much faster PC running Vista.

I'm quite tempted to get one especially as it would probably be a trivial task to install Xubuntu which would be pretty awesome!

Simian Mobile Disco - Attack Decay Sustain Release

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:21:00 GMT

At last a new rave album that actually is ravey (rather than just indie with keyboards and glowsticks).
Some good scratchy bleepy noises perfect for us venerable pop music pensioners who enjoyed acid house the first time around.
Like all good dance music the album is named after some knobs that can be found on a synthesizer.
I was a bit sceptical when I downloaded this that it was going to be all hype and no content as the group are flavour of the month due to their association with The Arctic Monkeys (remember Dustins Bar Mitzvah… ergh) , but I was very pleasantly surprised.
It’s available on e-music so if you have an account get and download it, and if you don’t then get an e-music account then download it!

Rick Rubin Gets It

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:41:00 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html

Link to an excellent NYT interview with Rick Rubin. Rather awesomely he is now one of the heads of Columbia records.

It makes for some very interesting reading. It is refreshing to hear someone who now represents a major label acknowledging that much of the problem of the record industry is that they use their clout to strong arm crap onto people. It sounds so obvious to say it, but it takes someone like Rick to make them understand that quality = sales.
He also supports the all you can eat for a flat fee model of music which is prevalent in the tech industry, but anathema for the majors.

Rick is one of my heroes anyone who could have kick started the careers of: LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Slayer, RHCP and renewed Johnny Cash is alright by me.

I’m now expecting the Gossip to go far if Rick is taking an interest. You heard it here first.

Gottlieb Pinball Classics - Wii Review

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 13:21:00 GMT

Billed as the most accurate pinball simulator of all time this PS2 port was one of the launch titles for the Wii.

The RRP of the game is a quite staggering £40 which to put it in context is £10 more than the magnificent Resident Evil 4 and the same price as Zelda Twilight Princess. Much as I love pinball there was no way I was going to shell out that kind of cash for it. Luckily play.com came to the rescue selling the game for a much more reasonable £17.99 which is the point at which I decided to make my investment.

The game features exact emulations of 11 tables from the history of the famous pinball manufacturer focusing on tables that are either historically significant, or favored by pinball enthusiasts. Unfortunately licensing restrictions prevent many of the classic games making an appearance so there is no Streetfighter II or Mario pinball to be found which is a shame.
The play of the tables is to some degree a touch hit and miss. Some of the tables notably Black Hole and Victory are great tables with lots to do and keep you entertained. Unfortunately some of the tables have been chosen because of their appeal to competitive pinball players which equates to them being exceptionally hard rather than fun, though fortunately this is only the case for a couple of the tables.

As a pinball simulator the game doesn't make huge use of the Wiimote, but the buttons for the left and right flippers are on the Wiimote and Nunchuck which makes it feel more like a real table than holding a gamepad and you can nudge left and right by shaking either hand.

As a PS2 port the graphics are pretty much as you would expect and though clear and smooth the textures aren't that sharp and don't do anything to dispel the 2 Gamecubes taped together myth put about by Wii haters.

The game is a very full package featuring voice over histories of each game with promotional material and strategy guides and offers a nice 4 player tournament mode, but does have a slightly weird system whereby you have to play tournament games until you earn credits to play games in the arcade which you can then unlock for freeplay by attaining challenge goals. This kind of thing seems to be all the rage in games these days, but personally I would rather just be able to freeplay all the tables from the off without jumping through any hoops.

All in all if you want a realistic pinball simulation then this is the game for you, but make sure you don't pay the frankly insane full price for it.

Live Earth - Music Review

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:47:00 GMT

I was lucky enough to attend the Live Earth event at Wembley. I’m not going to try to describe the event here just the music. I might cover the event at a later date. I watched the event back on TV on Sunday was interesting how different some of the bands sounded on TV which I will mention when relevant.

Genesis

Sound is quite muddy, Musicianship is polished, but not all that exciting. Phil Collins inexplicably provides the first “Fuck” of the day at 11am. Sounded a lot better on TV.

Razorlight

Jonny Borrel flounces around, plays two hit singles and has the crowd on his side until he complains about the sound and plays an obscure album track loosing the crowd entirely.

Snow Patrol

The first two tracks are pretty decent then they play Chasing Cars and for the first time hands fly into the air and people start singing along. Gary Lightbody looks stunned and overwhelmed by the volume of Wembley singing back at him. Didn’t come across as well on TV.

Damian Rice & David Grey

Not my cup of tea, but David Grey come across as pretty charismatic.

Kasabian

Best band so far, absolutely blow the roof off. Tom stomps about like the stadium belongs to him and the audience seem to agree. Set finishes in style with a wicked drum solo and lots of feedback

Paulo Nutini

I have some time for his records, but as when I saw the Glasto coverage of him he hunches his back like he has spinal problems and mumbles into his shoes in a weird Golum type voice. Played far too many songs considering much better artists played less. The biggest low point so far.

Black Eyes Peas

Not my cup of tea but get a great response getting everyone moving and sound powerful

John Legend

Generic soul ballad. I find my attention waning and then discovering the song has finished.

Duran Duran

Gamely soldier on despite technical hitches but sound indistinct and all over the place. A band I was looking forward to but proved to be a bit disappointing.

RHCP

After a really long break band come on sans Kleidis and jam for a bit. The he comes on and they play a song talk in jokey nonsense and have long off mike conversations on stage. Rhythm section are predictably awesome, but not as good as I was expecting.

Bloc Party

Very good sound tight and funky, get a good response

Corrinne Bailey Rae

Missed most of it cos I was having a wee, but sounded pleasant enough.

Keane

I’ll freely admit that I don’t like Keane’s music, but Tom has got some pretty awesome pipes on him and is looking loads healthier since he stopped being a big drug dustbin. They play like a real stadium rock band and it is one of the pleasant surprises of the day.

Metallica

Everything steps up a gear. Metallica play like bastards, crowd go apeshit, moshing breaks out everyone knows all of the words. You can really tell that this is a band who play a stadium this size every day of the week. Much better than the last time I saw them when they were really off form.

Spinal Tap

So awesome to get the chance to see The Tap. Stone Henge is hilarious, middle song a bit rubbish, but then “Big Bottom” featuring bass players from every single band so far is an awesome experience not to mention a kick ass song.

James Blunt

Inexplicable scheduling strikes as James Blunt breaks up the rock section of the evening with his piss poor whining. He gets lots of boos and is generally dull, by the end several members of the audience have blood spurting out of their eyes and resort to eating their own children (I’m exaggerating, but not by much).

Beastie Boys

Awesome from start to finish. They start off MCing over Mix Master Mike’s turntable awesomeness then bring the house down playing as a band with Sabotage which can only be understood by imagining tens of thousands of people all shouting “LISTEN ALLA YALL IT’S SABOTAGE!!!” as loud as they can.

Pussy Cat Dolls

Once again inexplicably scheduled really late in the day for a band that ain’t all that famous and are playing in the middle of a load of rock bands. Warble along to a tape while prancing around. The set seems to be much longer than anyone else’s. Most of the crowd seem to go from the Beasties jump fest to standing about with arms folded looking pissed off.

Foo Fighters

SOOOOOOO GOOOOOOOODDDD!! Played it like they were headlining their own show rather than being a turn at a bigger show. People go predictably nuts. Manage to out do Metalica at the stadium rock thing which is no mean feat. Best act of the night by far. Many exhausted people don’t even stick around for Madonna.

Madonna

The first song is a rubbish new Live Earth tribute thing which features a school choir and sucks in a horrible way. With that done we get Ray Of Light with Madonna rocking out on a Les Paul and having a good swear. Isla Bonita with an inspired cameo, by Gypsy Punks Gogol Bordello and finally a body popping version of Hung Up. I would never play £150 for a ticket to one of her shows, but seeing this I now know why people do.

I am Sparticus Online

Sat, 05 May 2007 12:46:00 GMT

After spending billions of pounds and two years developing the stupidly restrictive copy protection system for HDDVD the encryption was broken in a few days by a consumer angry that he couldn’t play back the DVD that he had legitimately paid for in the way that he wanted to.

The key to decrypting every single HD DVD is a short string of hexadecimal numbers namely: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

The AACS promptly sent 7000 takedown notices to people who had even mentioned or linked to the story threatening their favorite action of making ordinary content consumers into criminals.

Digg was a primary target of their ire and their clearly worried management started deleting any posts which included the code. The Digg community reacted by ensuring that every single post on the front page included the code and bloggers worldwide posted the number on their sites a google search shows 1.2 million hits and counting!

To me this is a wonderful thing and shows the web community is willing to stand up and be counted. If we all stand together and say “I am Sparticus” those who want to drain our pockets at the expense of our freedom can’t touch us. The spin doctoring suggests that people who break DRM are criminal fanatics with links to terrorism who want to undermine the foundations of the music and film industries, but this reveals the truth that we are a small but ever growing minority of people who are sick of being told how to use the content that we have legally paid to buy.

See here for the BBCs take on the story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6623331.stm

Or here for the story from Boing Boings Fantastic Cory Doctorow
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/04/aacs_vows_to_fight_p.html

What is the point of organic food?

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 12:24:00 GMT

Normaly I don’t bother paying the premium to buy organic food, but the supermarket only had organic apples (and no English ones available either), so I think “It’s ok because it’s a bit of a treat and they probably taste nicer like the ones from the apple tree in the garden when I was a kid”.

I get home and decide to have an apple and it’s woody and tasteless (Imagine eating a raw potato) so I think to myself “well at least I’m doing my bit for the environment” and then I notice that the apple has come from America so any benefit that could have been gained from not spraying pesticides has been ruined by burning stacks of hydrocarbons shipping it over from the US.

Then I see this sugesting there is no proof that it is any better for you:

BBC News

And finally I hear an interview on the radio where a scientist was pointing out that if all farming was organic we wouldn’t be able to feed the world’s population due to the lower yeild, so organic food is not an attainable goal it’s just a two tier system where the rich eat better and push food prices up while the poor have to eat pesticide covered crap.

So I’m starting to think what’s the point of buying organic?

Crazy Esher Style Pictures

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:08:00 GMT

Check it out here

The Prestige - Review

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:22:00 GMT

I went to see this last week and was duly impressed.

The film focuses on a pair of aspiring magicians (Played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) who develop an intense rivalry. The pair become obsessed with stealing each others secrets which results in tricks aplenty and an escalating series of double crosses which spirals dangerously out of control and ends up consuming and ruining their lives.

The film is directed by Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, Memento) who is fast becoming one of my favourite directors and displays his typical style and love of twists and turns as previously shown in Memento. You definitely need to keep your wits about you so the plot doesn’t get away from you.

I thought the film was excellent and not really like anything I’d ever seen before. It also has a rather excellent cameo from David Bowie playing a partially fictionalised Nikola Tesla and if that doesn’t recommend it to you surely nothing will!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/

The Magic Numbers - London Hammersmith Apollo 18/11/06

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 23:41:00 GMT

The Hammersmith Apollo is the biggest gig the Magic Numbers have ever played and tonight they look like a bunch of excited puppies bounding around the stage clearly loving the jubilant reaction of the capacity crowd.

To celebrate this milestone they have invited along Robert Kirby (The genius arranger responsible for the strings on Nick Drakes first two albums) and a string octet, both of whom play on their recently released second album.

I’ve been lucky enough to see The Numbers three times with the first being a Camden pub gig in early 2005 while they were still just another band playing Camden toilet circuit gigs. Even then it was obvious that they were something special, by the quality of their songs and their infectious sunny harmonies, so what has changed in 18 months? (other than the size of the venue and the Mercury nomination)

As you might expect the songs are tighter and the band have gained confidence and stage presence, but the biggest revelation is Michelle. She has clearly grown into the role of rock bass player strutting around the stage like Gene Simmons and stomping to the music whilst throwing a series of rock shapes. It’s surprising and heartening stuff coming from a 20 year old girl who is probably most famous to the general public for being part of the band that walked off Top Of The Pops after insensitive remarks were made about the bands weight by Richard Bacon.

The reason for the tour is the new album (I haven’t heard it yet, but as soon as I have a review will be forthcoming) and the gig is a mixture of old and new with the old favorites unsurprisingly sounding tighter and ushering the strongest response from the audience. The highpoint of the gig is undoubtedly Angela and Romeo’s duet on “I See You, You See Me” with every line from Angela provoking yells and whoops from the audience. One of the great strengths of the band is the quality of the three voices and wisely both girls get a turn on lead vocals with songs from the new album. Surprisingly it is Michelle rather than Angela whos vocal turn is most convincing taking centre stage and swapping bass for guitar with Romeo. Whilst Angela has arguably the finest voice in the group her turn is less engaging as she stands off to the side and seems too nervous to cope with being the main focus of the audience.

It remains to be seen if the new album will be as big a hit as its predecessor, but if the reactions of this crowd are anything to go by then they can count on a devoted live following for some time to come.

London Lites Lame Listings

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:59:00 GMT

I was reading the listings in the London Lite on the tube on the way home last night (A London Free Paper mostly concerned with celeb gossip) and noticed some truely lazy music journalism. Ray Lamontagne whose single Trouble echoes Nick Drakes softly spoken style

Say what?

Last time I listened to Trouble the guy sounded like a love weary Grizzly Adams bellowing an Otis Reading song, with a gob full of gravel. Drake on the other hand sounds like a painfully shy posh boy singing rather eloquently in a very English accent.
I think what they actually meant was:
__
I don’t really know anything about Ray Lamontagne other than the fact that he doesn’t do interviews and he is very shy and the most famous singer/songwriter I can think of who was also quite shy is Nick Drake”_

Tomorrow I’m expecting something along the lines of:
“If you enjoyed the Streets latest record why not listen to UB40 who are also from Birmingham”

Still what did I expect for free….

Fax Machines

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:34:00 GMT

Every so often Michael Buerk wanders into my office and asks if he can borrow my Fax machine (I’ve no idea why he does this).
The only problem is that despite the fact that I sit next to the huge beige monstrosity and I am employed as a technologist I have no idea how it actually works.

The ubiquity of e-mail means that I’ve only had to use a fax machine about 3 times in my life (and always at the behest of an estate agent) and though most are fairly self explanatory ours is a monster (It even has a Mercury button). It has a help button that when you press it displays a message in its tiny screen “Press any button for help on that feature” and then when you press the button for example “Confirm” it prints out a sheet of paper with “Help Index #88934 CONFIRM BUTTON -: PRESS TO CONFIRM ACTIONS” written in tiny letters at one corner.

The net result is that I fiddle arround trying to help him with an array of buttons that all go bleep and do nothing whilst the 999 music plays in my head and I think “Little did they know that playing with the fax machine would prove deadly!”

I can’t work photocopiers either…