barnskiblog

I remembered; I'd seen a copy of Q Magazine over the festive break and they had the top 50 albums of 2007 listed (they only have their top 10 on the site), and I was horrified to see that Mr Hudson and the Library's "A Tale of Two Cities" was not in there. For my money, the album of 2007, no question.
(Oh, and that link didn't used to be a MySpace page - maybe they're working on the main site).

I nearly cursed just now. It seems no matter how good my intentions, it's always about a month between posts these days. Dammit. So I just got home from a good night with a good mate. Some shit was shot and a few beers were had, so apologies if this gets a bit random. Anyways.......
First, I can't remember what is first. I had something poignant and interesting to write floating about in my head and now it's slipped away. If I remember it, I'll come back and fill in this gap.
Next, Bill Gates' video of his last day at Microsoft from CES this year. Genius, respect where it's due etc.
Now, Kina Grannis, the girl that did the digg song, I have no idea why it's so appealing - it should be a slightly embarrassing geek item, but somehow is not. Actually, I do know why it's appealing - she is amazingly cute and sounds great, and also seems to be both talented and prolific. I hope she makes it. In fact, I just caught Try whilst writing this. F?*k; that's really, really good. I hope it's not some marketing trick (the production/engineering sounds dubiously well-done to me), but she is breathtaking in any case, so look after her, please.

Sheez, life is busy. Another month-long interlude on the blog. I keep seeing stuff that is interesting, and thinking "Oh, I'll blog that", but then good old life gets in the way and it all goes out the window.
Anyway, check out the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Interesting. Funny. Controversial. Probably about a month behind the rest of the blogosphere, but worth a looksee.
Next, the Amazon Kindle is apparently a genuinely good stab at an eBook device (at least, according to Steve Gibson), and I'm kind of interested to see how this pans out as I am a geek what reads on occasion.
Finally, and to complete today's random trio of links, I have found frixo to be a hugely useful tool when needing to know how the traffic is on the motorways near where I live. The simple map view is really, really handy when you're 5 minutes late out the door and need the info quickly.
Oh, and the quick iPhone update is that it's missing search and cut/copy/paste, which drives me nuts on occasion, but is still the most awesome device to have in your pocket. I just came home cross-country on the train, and was e-mailing, texting, calling, surfing and watching video all the way. It genuinely wasn't until using it like this that I really got it; although I loved it before, I am now well and truly hooked.

Well, it's finally here in the UK, and I have an iPhone.
I waited in line at the Apple store (pics, video), like a good (sad?) geek and had my mitts on one pretty much as soon as was possible.
So, first things first, it is absolutely awesome. I love it almost irrationally, and I wanted to get that out of the way before proceeding :)

I don't think anyone has summed up the experience and the hype quite as well as Stephen Fry did in the Guardian this weekend, in his piece entitled "Not sensible, but oh, the joy of it".
Also interesting was the fact that there were, by my reckoning, somewhere upwards of 150 people queuing at the Bullring Apple Store at 6:02pm, and yet the O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores were deathly quiet. Funny, isn't it?
Actually, there was one man who stoically queued on his own outside the Bullring O2 shop all day, with nobody but three O2 dolly birds to keep him company. Hang on, he may have been onto something there......... ;)

Anyway, my experiences so far have been almost entirely positive. Everyone has different requirements from a phone, and I know some people that are unhappy about things that definitely don't bother me (MMS messaging, for example - if I get an MMS, I have to use Safari to go to the O2 website and collect it that way). However, there are a few things that bother me, especially coming from a Treo:
1 - No search. I loved being able to search my Treo. If I forget someone's name but remember their company, or maybe don't recall someone's surname, search is really useful. Apple are also kings of search with spotlight, so I dunno what's up with this at all.
2 - There's only one calendar on the iPhone. I have two calendars on my desktop iCal, each in a different colour. It's nice. Why can't I do this on the iPhone? - everything is merged into one.
3 - No to do list. I like a to do list. I have one in iCal/Mail on my desktop; why is it not on my iPhone?
4 - No notes sync. Come on Apple! - what were you thinking? I have notes in Mail on my desktop. I have notes on my iPhone. Neither is synced to the other platform?!!
5 - No week view in the calendar. The list, day and month views are cool, but I do like a week view.
6 - Missing apps. I had a few that I really liked on the Treo (ssh client and encrypted text storage being the main ones) that are not possible on the iPhone. (Yet).
7 - Mail app on the iPhone doesn't support "Send As". I use this in GMail a lot, and it would be nice to be able to use it on the iPhone.
8 - No Flash support. Kinda annoying with some websites using it so extensively.

That's it so far though - not bad, really. There are loads and loads of positives, but I am currently really enjoying the easy, native synchronisation with my Mac. Palm conduits and all that bollocks were always a huge pain and caused endless problems if there was a twitch (which there was from time to time). The iPhone just works, as you'd expect.

I'd basically sum up by saying that it's not as flexible or well-featured as some alternatives, but what it does, it does supremely well. I can't see myself wanting any other phone for quite a while.......

Oh, and Apple have released 3 new TV adverts, all poking fun at Vista - "Podium", "Boxer" and "PR Lady". Enjoy :)

We last saw them together by London Zoo’s wolf enclosure, parting mournfully in the rain at the end of the most memorable drink and drugs bender in British cinema. Now they’re back for one more bender: Withnail and I get together again as Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann have been reunited at The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival after a young director plucked up the courage to ask them to appear in his short film.

digg story

Radiohead have just released their latest album, In Rainbows, as a download-only record.
What is really cool, though, is that there is no fixed price - you pay what you think it's worth. Which can be nothing.
Now, this is an interesting experiment, and I hope it works.
The way I see it is that the old-fashioned recording industry model is no longer sustainable. The internet means that the strangle-holds that the big record companies held over artists (mainly marketing and distribution) no longer work so well. If you can afford to record it, you can now distribute it for next to nothing. If you have a fan base or a good viral marketing idea, then marketing is a small cost too.
The other thing is that (and this is a guess) Radiohead are probably not in hock to a record company for this album. They are hopefully distributing it fairly directly, dealing only with an internet specialist like cachefly or akamai, which means that the only real cost is that distribution bandwidth. If they're pocketing the remainder, then me paying the five or six quid that I think is reasonable for an album means that they're probably making more money than if they did the traditional CD.
Of course, this all hangs on whether the average punter actually ponies up the cash, and I'd like to think that enough will do so to make this work.
So go on, download the album, give it a whirl, and if you like it, go back and buy it again to give them some money. Show the record companies that overpriced CD's and DRM-encumbered downloads are no longer necessary, or acceptable.
Oh, and if you do try the album and don't like it, just delete it. As an artist, I reckon it's better that someone who otherwise wouldn't have bothered listening to your work actually downloads your music for free and listens to it than never hears it at all, so that's cool too :)

Went to Diggnation in London last night, and it was awesome.
First: biggest audience ever for a live Diggnation show. The auditorium was supposed to hold a thousand, but people were carrying chairs in and sitting in the aisles well before Kevin and Alex came on stage.
Second: awesome show. Check it out when the podcast is released, but I thought that the guys were really on form. Also, I never really watched Diggnation as a social exercise before, but sharing with other people (and drinking beer) really did add to the experience.
Finally, a mention for Wil Harris, a really likeable and unaffected British chap who had a few beers with us. Also (more importantly?) a mention for his latest project, ChannelFlip - check it out.
All in all, a tip-top night of geeky entertainment. If you're really interested there are photos of some of us at the event here and here.

I've just looked back, and I seem to be managing a post about every three weeks at the moment, which is pretty poor, it must be said. I'll let myself off this time, as I have been away, but on the whole life is hectic and facebook is still sneakily stealing too much of my online time.
So, another quick compendium of links, top of which is this iPhone post on the blog of the truly mighty Stephen Fry (link passed to me by the increasingly scarce sofabum). I've always loved Stephen Fry; a funny, frighteningly intelligent and very English man. He's done some great stuff (I'm really liking QI), and he's also a long-time Apple user and advocate, but I had no idea he actually enjoyed technology on the level that his blog post reveals. A top gent; definitely on my dream dinner party guest list.
Also wanted to mention the new movie being made of The Dark is Rising. I read this Susan Cooper book when I was young; well before I had read any Tolkien and it really captured my imagination at the time. Kind of a Harry Potter for my generation, only less franchised (so far). It (and the rest of the series) are books that I keep meaning to re-read as an adult. Perhaps I will, as the movie apparently "introduces significant plot and character changes from the book". Actually, I doubt I'll have time before the movie comes out though, as I've recently discovered Peter F. Hamilton who is in my opinion (and Steve Gibson's) a spectacularly good Science Fiction novelist. Very highly recommended if sci-fi novels are your kind of thing.
Anyway, somehow that's another half an hour gone, so I'm off. Having just read that post back, it's all about the English today. Brilliant :)
Hopefully I'll post again before mid-October.......

Can't get to facebook at work? Looking for something else to smash the crap out of your productivity? Try faceball. Awesome.

So, I needed to test some software that needed IIS. I had Vista up and running, so I installed IIS 7 on that. First time I connect to the web server, I see this image.
Anyone who has ever booted a Mac for the first time may find this a little familiar. That Redmond crew have no creativity at all, do they?

Stuck In Customs - "unique photography for unique people". I like it.

I'll follow up on that last post soon, but in the mean time.......
I was chuffed to see that Apple have finally improved .Mac for no fee, as it was pretty expensive for a pretty crappy service before. Thew new iLife '08 integration features are cool, but the features I use most are iDisk and Mail, both of which consume online storage.
The fact that my limit has been upped to 10GB for free is awesome, but there's a gotcha. I looked at the storage and thought "Hmm, I'll probably only need a few GB for Mail, so I'll use 7GB for iDisk". Which sounds reasonable.
However, since I use iDisk syncing, this immediately created a 7GB dmg file on all the Macs that I sync. If you've only got, say, 8GB free on an old Mac, this is a problem (I have had calls from relatives whose Macs have mysteriously run out of disk space all of a sudden too).
The real PITA though is that if you subsequently shrink your iDisk capacity online, it appears that your computers do not shrink the corresponding dmg file. I got round this by turning off iDisk syncing, deleting the archived iDisk and then re-enabling it, which created a new dmg file of the right size. This involves a fair bit of patience though, even on a fast broadband connection.
Just thought I'd share.......

I'm gonna post some more updates soon, I promise. There's loads of stuff that I want to link to / comment on, including the new Apple stuff, facebook and orkut, pownce, tumblr, mountain biking and map my ride, drunken ramblings about music, fame and Badly Drawn Boy and some random links to some cool stuff. Trouble is, life is busy, you know?
Anyhooo, after whetting your appetites with those lovely links, I just wanted to say that I have just installed iLife '08 and have launched iPhoto. I've spent, like, 2 minutes playing with it and it rocks. I have some theories on what the Apple master plan might be too, but I'll save that for another post.......
...to be continued.......

Sod the iPhone, I want an rPhone ;)