Month: October 2006

Yamaha Majesty YP250 for sale

My Yamaha Majesty YP250

So its basiclly on its last legs now. Its time to give it up. Yep my lovely Yamaha Majesty is going to be replaced with something a lot larger and quicker. Its been great going here there and everywhere on it in the last few years. I remember driving down to Bristol in the summers. But I also remember the one crazy ride in the freezing cold and snow, when we drove back up to London on the M4 after a freak snow storm overnight.

Anyway back to the sale. Its actually in not too bad a condition. So here's the things which need fixing.

  • The coolent pipe has a leak, so the water cooling system lasts for 5mins.
  • The Battery is pretty much dead, so it needs replacing
  • The body work needs attention, its ok, but looks a little ugly
  • The Exhaust has a small hole, can be patched or best replaced as its old and gets very hot
  • The engine also needs to be looked at, but it does go well once running

I'm not expecting a lot for it but I'm still currently using it to drive to North Greenwich everyday. I'm going to stick the scooter on Ebay for about 400 pounds soon because it does have a good seat, box and it does still go with less that 30,000 miles on the clock. If you fix most of the issues outlined above, you could ride it for quite some time before another check up. With me and Sarah on it everyday, in and out of traffic for 36 miles a day, its a little too much for a older 250cc scooter. Someone riding less distance, with some training in motorcycle mechanics and not riding 2up everyday. Would love this scooter, and its a steal at 400 pounds. Tax and MOT doesn't run out till June 2007.

I was looking around Flickr for a decent picture of my model of Maxi-scooter but then I got hooked into modified Majestys. This one in Pink is simply nuts. While this one looks more like a TMax black edition which is certainly high on my list. This one is cetainly attractive and thankfully not as customised as the other ones. Anyway, do drop me a email if your interested, you could snatch it before it hits ebay, craigslist or the local loot.

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RSS in 2007 finally something for casual users?

RSS badge on a shoe

Richard MacManus over at the Read Write web, suggests that 2007 will be the the big year for RSS. Although I agree, I think 2006 was also a big year for machine use of RSS. 2007 looks to be a big one for casual users or consumers. The main reason seems to centre around every single browser supporting RSS in some way once IE7 is launched. Outlook 2007 also supports RSS so this pretty much covers all of Microsoft's bases. Pretty much now, if its not got RSS, its either a old site or the site can't be taken seriously. Pretty much everything has RSS including yahoo mail and google reader./p>

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Geek and Geekhag podcast 14 – Why a Second Life?

Me and Sarah did a podcast last night, number 14 (really 13 but lets not go there). This time we discuss Second Life, Myspace and Youtube, Feast of Fools and Sarah's new (non-hand me down) phone. The other good news is that Sarah has agreed to do the podcast every week now. So expect more geek and geekhag next week.

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Who says the Social scene in London is nothing compared to San Fran?

Socialising at the geekdinner with Dave Shea

What the heck is going on? Next week is insane! There are tons of events going on in London next week. I'll outline the crazyness…

Now imagine if Momo Monday, Girl geekdinner and Pub Standards were all added to the mix! Someone needs to sort this all out. Its too insane that all these events are happening the same week.

So getting serious for a while now. To be fair everything is ending up on Upcoming which is a good thing. I was using Eventful for quite sometime but since most of the events are ending up on upcoming, i'm not going to fight it. So things are getting a little more origanised here but the problem is that the actual event holders are not looking at upcoming first let alone posting them. Then add the extra pain in the butt that you need to sign in to register yourself with an event, not everyone likes that. So actually things are not that rosey. I thought the Jigsaw wiki might be a good idea but it seems few people use it for events. Then I thought Techcrunch UK might bring some calm to the crazyness but nope, its not happened.

I've filled you all in on the context but this conversation has gone on a little longer in the TechCrunch comments on the same subject. The suggestion of using a google calendar by D4rr3ll sounds good but I'm not sure it solves the problem of sign up but it will certainly help with clashes. As he said a XSL would mean anyone could see it on a normal webpage, and yes using the API event.add or event new, it would be possible to automaticlly add it to Upcoming and Eventful.

So I've setup a Google account for London Social events which I'll email around to people who run events in London. The Calendar is here – http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=londonsocialevents@googlemail.com. You can subscribe to the RSS here and Ical here.

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Vib Ribbon, one of the weirdest games you’ve never played

Vib Ribbon case cover

Trust me this game is nuts. On Monday I went to the games you should have played event at zero one in soho. I filmed most of it and it came up with very interesting games including Vib Ribbon which I've never ever heard of till that day. Remind me to look for a decent PSX emulator for my PC or Xbox one day soon. I'm glad these emulators exist and there mature enough to run these games. Otherwise such games would sink into the sands of time forever. What I find amazing about Vib Ribbon is the load into ram feature, hence the cut back on graphics I guess

Vib-Ribbon is a rhythm video game in the style of PaRappa the Rapper and Amplitude. The game was unique in that the software loaded into RAM, letting the player use any music CD to play against — the game could generate a unique level from any track. The graphics for Vib-Ribbon are simple, consisting of straight, white vector lines forming crude, angular drawings of the level and the character, a female rabbit named Vibri

Other games worth mentioning include my favorate IQ or as I prefer Kuruchi. Then Rez for having one of the best levels in gaming history. Oh and this moroccas game which needs no real introduction.

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The Digital well being store

Digital well being

I just got back from the Digital Well Being store in Fulham. I saw so many good things, I'm not even going to try and talk about them here. Instead you can see a load of pictures here on Flickr. But the most interesting thing about Digital well being is the whole concept of digital products being out and available to use and play with. Its not sterile like the apple store and certainly nothing like the dodgy pc world setups. The only stores which comes close is Ikea and Habitat. Anyway to only way to experience the store is to get your ass down there before they move somewhere else and change it around. You can also keep a track of whats going on with the blog they have setup, which needs to be updated.

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Hallam Foe bloggers film screener

Director David Mackenzie

On Thursday night I went along to the Hallam Foe screener which was opened to London bloggers. According to imdb.com the film is in post production and the summary goes something like this…

Hallam, a confused and sweetly old-fashioned teenager, has chosen an unusual way of following life on his father's estate – voyeurism. He convinced that his stepmother is responsible for his mother's suicide. His voyeurism becomes dangerous, but Hallam is eventually redeemed by love.

Anyway, I thought the film was excellent and really suprised me. When this hits the cinemas or picture houses I urge you all to see it. Good work Hugh.

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BBC Backstage Widget Competition

So those talented guys at Backstage.bbc.co.uk just launched a Widget competition. The prizes include a Origami PC and Nokia Internet Tablet but the other interesting thing is there will a meetup event where the winners will be announced.

I'm still new to widget creation so, I'm also going to try making a couple and link to any resources which I find useful. Like we talked about internally this is not simply a competition where we put it out there and expect submissions back. This is a conversation, and we will be listening and learning during the month. So good luck and subscribe to the mailing list for more information.

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Zune all about sharing of media?

Zune Walkthrough

I'm watching a video about the Microsoft Zune. Its quite interesting but there's not enough to make it much better than a ipod. The sharing has been talked about a lot but the thing which I think Microsoft missed is the loud speaker. Yes sure it would be very ignoying but its what the kids are doing with there phones now. And if the Zune is all about sharing, it would make sense to have a loud speaker too, imho.

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2 hour special Cracker tonight (october 1st 2006)

Cracker

Cracker is back for one more special episode. Hopefully to sort out that terriable mess of a special episode which they called White Ghost. The story line goes something like this.

Fitz returns to Manchester for his daughter's wedding, but is soon involved in another murder investigation when an American comedian is killed, apparently without motive.

Just incase you don't know what Cracker is, from Wikipedia

Fitz is a classic antihero, unfaithful to his wife, alcoholic, a chain smoker, overweight, addicted to gambling, manic, foulmouthed and sarcastic; and yet cerebral and excellent at his speciality: getting into the heads of violent criminals. As Fitz confesses in “Brotherly Love”: “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much. I am too much.”

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Xbox mediacenter hits 2.0

Almost excited about XBMC 2.0

I just upgraded my xboxes to the latest version. Xbmc keeps growing from strength to strength.

Team-XBMC and The XBMC Project is proud to announce the release of XboxMediaCenter 2.0.0. XBox Media Center (XBMC) is an award winning, free and open source media player for the Xbox™ game-console. The XboxMediaCenter 2.0.0 point-release source code has now been set in our CVS. We consider that the current code in the XBMC CVS is as stable as a point-release should be. All XBMC users are highly encouraged to upgrade to this stable Xbox Media Center 2.0.0 point-release. Remember, the XBMC source code needs to be compiled with the XDK, and requires a modded Xbox to run. Our thanks goes out to everyone who has tested, reported bugs, and helped fix them in order to make this release possible.

There are many new features and functions that have been introduced since the 1.1.0 point-release, that we cannot list them all here. A few that are especially worth mentioning are; the enhanced GUI/skin-engine, the Project Mayhem III skin, DVD-Video menu/navigation support (with ISO/IMG image parsing), RAR/ZIP archive parsing, a new audio/music-player (PAPlayer) with crossfade, gapless playback and ReplayGain support, Karaoke CDG-file display, Xored Trainer Engine (gaming-cheats), XLink Kai (online-gaming) front-end, iTunes 6.x DAAP and UPnP-clients, and two surprise features; read-only support for FAT12/16/32 formatted USB Mass Storage Devices up to 4GB in size, and a brand new “skinnable” 3D visualizer.

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