Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Ok I heard this for the first time ever today. The context was oh your so geekalicious… So with googling on my phone, I found out it means. Someone who is a geek but has strong social skills. A browse of Flickr would suggest the standard geek stereotype. I honestly don't want to hear the word again, thank you very much.
So I've been using Microsoft Money for quite a while to manage my money but since moving to gnu/Linux, I've not really converted the money file over to anything else. I was checking out the KDE application Money2 but started thinking there has got to be a better way to do this?
Well in steps Mint fresh faced from the Techcrunch conference. When I first heard rumours about it, I thought it was something to do with that terriable credit card company in the UK with the same name. However Mint.com promises to refresh money management by adding all the goodness of Web 2.0.
So I've been checking it out, and to be honest I like what I see but I'm not convinced they can be trusted with my finanical information. Now don't get me wrong I'm no hot shot with millions in the bank but I still wouldn't want what how much I pay for lunch (not a lot thanks to Tesco) in the public domain. I'm not saying Mint are leaking this information, I'm just not sure. I've been reading there Privicy policy and it all looks ok but I have this naggy feeling that this is dangerious and should be avoided for a while longer, at least let someone else be the test muppet. I had this feeling when I first heard about Paypal and to be honest I do use it but tend not to keep money in it for long and I use its most basic features. All those advanced features like hooking it into your bank i've avoided because it worries me. Although in a recent episode of Security now, Paypal's Director of Account protection was on talking about the levels of security and privicy they have for users of their service. SecureID was one of the solutions and to be honest, if my bank offered that, I would gladly use it.
I guess my fear of using Mint is a little overboard but like linking my facebook profile to some of the other sites I use, I think somethings are maybe left alone till I can trust them. Trust is a funny thing, I mean I trust my bank, paypal, amazon, Tesco, Plaxo, etc. But I don't trust Facebook, Mint, etc with my credit card details. They haven't been around long enough to prove their trustworthness. There rep is 0 in my book. I need Facebook to stop mining my information and start offering me real uses. Mint I guess will have to rely on good feedback from people on there own blogs before I start using it.
Its all useless anyway, mint is american centric, requiring a zip code before you can sign up. Have they never heard of Open ID? Simon Wilison was right, all startups should use Open ID if they want people to use their service. Now Mint you've lost a customer because although I could make up a zip code, why the hell should I?
Excellent now you can create powerpoint presentations online using Google Apps, just perfect for those last minute presentations but whats this? No export? Oh dear me… Just imagine presentating your killer new startup and the wifi goes down. Next slide fails to load, actually all slides fail to load, and you have to babber on about how great it was going to be. Maybe it will support Google Gears in the future?
Sometimes I like the high adrenaline fuelled action films that the film industry puts out. The last film like this I watched and loved was Crank, hence I'm also looking forward to seeing War at some point in the near future. I watched Smokin Aces recently and was let down by its highly ilogical plot and how it tried to take its self somewhat seriously. Shoot'em up like crank doesn't take its self seriously and delivers just 90mins of pure adrenaline rushing, mind numming, laugh out loud, entertainment. The only time it slows down is for sharp pieces of dialogue. Its just what I needed after a difficult weekend.
I'm not the only one who loved the film, check out this imdb review titled Perhaps the Most Shamelessly Ridiculous Film Ever Conceived.
Are you tired of all those heartless, senseless, generic and cliché, action-driven Hollywood films? That honor style and blood over character and plot? Well then I have news for you: don't go see “Shoot Em' Up”.
But it's a shame that you won't. The film whose trailer I pointed to and said 'that's what film-making has come to these days; all attitude and no heart', turns out to be the most fun and riotous satire I've seen in a long time. “Shoot Em' Up”–a relentless, simultaneously energizing and hilarious movie–is a surprisingly smart confection. As conceived by writer-director Mike Davis its an over-the-top send-up of every action film ever made; a wink and a nod (as well as a parody of) to the bloody overkill of “Die Hard” and “Rambo”, the gleeful excitement and charm of “Indiana Jones”, the cornball abandon of “James Bond”, the who cares of “North by Northwest”, the heroic terseness and ease of “Bourne”, the ultra-stylized and preposterous overdrive of “The Matrix” or anything ever made by John Woo (particularly a love for “Hard-Boiled”), and even in one scene the splendid lunacy of “Raising Arizona”.
The whole project, through controlled chaos and witty abandon, is made as a single, continuous in-joke. As in most films that take themselves too seriously, Clive Owen's hero (enigmatically titled Mr. Smith) quite literally never stops shooting. He shoots while having sex, he shoots while in the middle of free-fall, he shoots the umbilical cord off of a baby, he shoots with his fingers broken. Davis takes over-the-top to a whole new level; poking fun at action movies by taking their ridiculousness to its brinking point.
Yes the sex scene was perfectly delivered and unlike other films (except crank again) not pushed in for the sake of its self. I urge you to see this film in the highest defination you can get (cinema if possible) as there's no slow downs or clever camera tricks. Its just all the way out there action and before you know it the film will be over with a bang. Yes I won't be able to look at Carrots in the same way again.
Filmmaker Deborah Scranton talks about and shows clips from her documentary The War Tapes, which put cameras in the hands of Charlie Company, a unit of the National Guard, for one year in Iraq. The soldiers' raw footage and diary excerpts tell a powerful, unsettling story of modern war.
Wow, powerful talk and I did go check out the site later. Its self described as…
Straight from the front lines in Iraq, The War Tapes is the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves.
This is Operation Iraqi Freedom as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty. Steve is a wisecracking carpenter and a gifted writer. Zack is a Lebanese-American university student who loves to travel and is fluent in Arabic. Mike is a father who seeks honor and redemption.
I'm going to say something very positive about the Apple iPhone please don't be shocked. Since the iPhone launch, its been amazing to see the quality and attention to user experience windows mobile software has increased. I've been using this windows mobile locker for quite a while now but Nizam pointed me at 2 contact managers icontact and my prefered choice PocketCM. Who needs the HTC Touch when you got applications like PocketCM?
I found a site leading the charge in this area – http://whoneedsaniphone.com/. From the site.
We also want to let everyone know that the intent of this project IS NOT TO DUPLICATE THE IPHONE INTERFACE… we just want to take some of the principles of that interface and bring them to Windows Mobile users! One of the big keys here is operating the phone with just your finger… I have always hated having to pull out the stylus to do certain things… bigger buttons and more scrolling without scroll bars and stuff like that…
Under tons of pressure for my comments about the lack of a decent RSS reader on GNU/Linux systems. I've decided to list what makes the perfect RSS aggregator client in my head. A lot of the features I want will be specific and maybe out of scope for a lot of people, but its certainly something to consider as normal rss users turn into power or advanced users. I'm also going to try and avoid describing something as advanced as Particls which is really a desktop attention engine, but I'll add some key elements I do like.
I think that will do for now…
So its been about 2 months since I switched over to Ubuntu GNU/Linux on my Dell Laptop. Things have been a lot better over time and generally day to day I'm having no problems. Its only when I go to do something different is when I get the problems.
First problem, external display from the VGA port. During BarCampBrighton some of the projectors didn't like my laptop's native rez of 1280×800 and would fail to display anything at all. What made things frustrating was the fact I couldn't switch down to 1024×768 because my laptop driver seems to give me only one option.
I stilll have yet to find a decent RSS reader except the preview version of RSS OWL which actually works better that previous versions. I usually keep an eye on the heap memory and it tends to stay within the 40meg allocated memory. So for now its my choice for RSS reading
Blogging from a clinet under Ubuntu is working due to BloGTK but the general expeience is very basic and I closer to W.Blogger that Ecto. If there is a more rich feature blgging application/client do drop me a comment. I miss stuff like being able to update posts and read posts offline.
Battery life has imporved over the months. When I first switched over, it would run for about 4hours on batteries but now its up to 5hours (about the same as I would get out of Windows on the same machine). Hibernate support still fails but suspend now works correctly all the time. Networking still needs to be restarted when I switch on each time but it seems more consistent.
I've still not found something to totally replace outlook. Currently I'm using Plaxo online for most of my PIM type stuff. This is ok but sometimes when I'm offline its frustrating to look at Plaxo and hope I left the page on the calendar section.
I'm still looking to sync my phone with my laptop but I'm having very little sucess with this. I've seen mentions of Opensync but it doesn't work for myself. On the mobile phone front, I've tried to connect my nokia N80 to the laptop using this script but its not worked out so far. I've not even attempted this on my Windows Mobile phone.
Backup and Syncing is totally broken for me. I want to do simple things like backup my laptop to my storage server over samba but unison and rsync don't like samba! This is insane and I've tried many ways to trick it into thinking a samba share is actually a mounted drive but it doesn't work. There seems to be a solution here.I've yet to play with Baclua and Amanda (yes that guy from Amanda I will be contacting you very soon. I'm also looking for some way to generic.
Ok last few things, I've dumped Madma and Xmms in favour of Amarok which works so well now it supports Mpeg3! For ages I wondered why I got no sounds and only in later versions does it tell you your missing the codec in question, before that you were left to work it out alone. Lastly Bluetooth is working but I've not got the Wiimote talking correctly and I'm really missing GlovePIE. And finally to finish off for now. My logtech Camera still doesn't work and I can't find drivers for it anywhere.
So I heard about this and people have been asking if this makes any difference to my views on the iphone? Simple answer yes it kind of does but I still won't buy one. At 299 dollars its looks like it will be much closer to 200 pounds when it finally hits the UK in the next few months. Although it looks like it will get the compitition it deserves from Samsung, Google, HTC and Nokia.
I know a lot of iPhone users are pissed off with the price drop but I'm sorry they knew the risks with buying new tech on the first day. However something isn't working at Apple HQ. Its obvious, very few companies cancel a product (4gig iphone) and drop the price of by almost 40% within a few months.
Its coming up to the time for a new phone soon, but right now the iPhone isn't one of them on the list.
1st Rule after a party, don't sleep before everything is cleaned up. 2nd Rule after a party, check behind the sofa for left-overs. 3rd Rule after a party, check your fridge for weird ingredients. 4th Rule after a party, check your freezer for Beer cans because they tend to explode.
Forgot rule number 4 and a week later found yellow ice over most of the freezer. Worst thing is, I cleaned out the Freezer before the party.