Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

RSS-powered desktop solutions

RSS-powered Windows 7 desktop slideshows

Part of the new theme file specifications in Windows 7 is the ability to specify a RSS feed as the source of slideshow images. To put this to the test, I created three themes that source images from the RSS feeds of various Flickr users’ who make available the original high-resolution photos to the public. If you have a copy of Windows 7 handy, feel free to download these and play along.

I've been informed this isn't unique to Windows 7 but I got to say its pretty cool. I'd like to see a lot more RSS powered things on the desktop. For example I still don't understand why there's very few RSS screensavers specially on Linux. Long Zheng does mention this but quotes a quite boring example of the background changing depending on the weather outside. I'd like to more of the social networking rss/attention pushed into the desktop. On Linux when the screen is locked, people can leave a message but imagine being able to leave a message for those around your computer using your own lifestream feed. Tie it your Brightkite or Fire eagle and you could give a estimate of how long your'll be till your back. Combining your personal informatics (credit to Tom Coates and Matt Jones, but I still don't like the phrase much) and maybe your computer could suggest which project you should work on based on how much work you've done previously from a data sensor service like Rescuetime. It could even suggest you take a break.

Although OSX and Windows seem to have gotten a head on this march so far, I expect the FOSS operating systems to really steal the day because of the diversity of developers and different versions.

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Hearing the Bristolian accent in Skins

Pandora

Yes I know Skins is made for 30 somethings who want to believe a teenagers life in 2009 is just like this. But you know what I kind of like it. Part of my enjoyment is it being set in Bristol and boy oh boy those 'cut your throat down after a bottle of cider at chasers' accents. Yes there really rough and some very ropey but they do remind me of home, specially now living in Manchester.

What I love about the Bristolian dialect is the interesting usage of words such as.

  • A'write me Lover.
  • Right you are my love.
  • Gurt lush
  • Smittin

There's a shop in Bristol where you can buy T-shirts with the interesting phrases on it. Actually looking at Wikipedia.

A dialect of English is spoken by some Bristol inhabitants, known colloquially as Bristolian, or even more colloquially as “Bristle” or “Brizzle”. Bristol is the only large English city with a rhotic accent, in which the r in words like car is pronounced. The unusual feature of this dialect, unique to Bristol, is the Bristol L (or terminal L), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in an 'a' or 'o'.Thus “area” becomes “areal”, etc. This is believed to be how the city's name evolved from Brycgstow to have a final 'L' sound: Bristol. Further Bristolian linguistic features are the addition of a superfluous “to” in questions relating to direction or orientation (a feature also common to the coastal towns of South Wales), or using “to” instead of “at”; and using male pronouns “he”, “him” instead of “it”. For example, “Where's that?” would be phrased as “Where's he to?”, a structure exported to Newfoundland English.

Stanley Ellis, a dialect researcher, found that many of the dialect words in the Filton area were linked to work in the aerospace industry. He described this as “a cranky, crazy, crab-apple tree of language and with the sharpest, juiciest flavour that I've heard for a long time”

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3gig of mobile data, thanks Orange

HTC Touch HD

My bill came through from Orange just recently, I expected it to be very high because I had used it over Christmas and New Years pretty much non-stop while in Bristol. Most of the usage was using the phone as a modem for my laptop and of course microblogging from the phone its self. Anyway, bill came in at about 50 pounds which is quite a bit but not the amount I was expecting. What I found interesting was the Summary's for December.

Talk Summary: 80:08 (I get 100mins free)
Text Summary: 148 (I get 500 per month for free)
Data Summary: 2741.6411 (yes almost 3gig of mobile data)

Next month my 18 month contract comes to a end, and although I'd love to have the Android phone, I don't want to switch network to do so. Tmobile do have a simular data plan as Orange (I currently pay 6 pounds a month for unlimited evening and weekend data) but I think I have my head set on the rather big but futuristic HTC Touch HD. The only thing it doesn't support is a flash for the 5mpx camera and a large internal storage drive. But seriously thats being very picky.

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Xbox 360 AV woes

xbox 360 back

I bought a Xbox 360 on Friday night, it was my treat for being good and saving up over Christmas and New Years. Anyway, when I was in the shop in Leeds, they had one 2nd hand for 129 pounds with a 20gig hard drive and wireless controller. Now to be fair that was a hell of a lot cheaper that CEX's 130 pounds for the same without a harddrive of any kind. The only thing about the option was the lack of a HDMI port, it was strictly Component only. So I had to move up to the next option which was a brand new Xbox 360 with 60gig harddrive, wireless controller and HDMI. Looking back for the extra 30 pounds it was more a better deal that the 129 pound one. I didn't get any games because I knew the games I really wanted to play were online, namely RezHD and Geomentry Wars.

So why the need for HDMI, well on my current setup I have a Samsung LCD with lots of HDMI ports free and only one component input which is used by the old Xbox (which I still use for a backup when the Linux PC box does odd things – if you like XBMC avoid upgrading up to ubuntu 8.10). So using the HDMI is good but the dolby digital audio which is passed over the HDMI cable isn't then passed through the TV's optical output. So now I got digital stereo sound instead of the full dolby digital surround. The AV cable that comes with the Xbox 360 does have a optical out but of course, Microsoft decided to put the HDMI cable slot directly under the AV slot which means you can plug both in at the same time! No I just learned I will need to buy another AV cable for the ability to listen to dolby digital surround and watch using the HDMI cable.

I hope this might be the last thing I'll need to buy for the Xbox 360 for a while, as I'm saving for a replacement home cinema amp. A new amp would also solve all my component and HDMI audio problems. Currently my Sherwood Newcastle R725 receiver only supports analogue composite for all video switching. Yep not even S-video input is supported because its pretty much 12 plus years old. The only reason I still use it is because it a great power amp (100watts per channel) when plugged into the Technics SH-AC500D DD/DTS Decoder. Unfortually even the pre-amp/decoder's digital inputs were all used up before the Xbox 360 was bought. Time to buy a new cinema amp me thinks.

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Werewolf night: The Manchester chapter starts up

Playing Werewolf

So I'm officially starting up the Manchester Chapter of the Werewolf gamers fans. Not much more to say except all the details are on Upcoming.org.

If you don't know what Werewolf the game is… Think of it as a Social Game of Deception, Paranoia, and Mob Rule.

Its a social mind game for 8-25 players, in which a vengeful group of villagers must figure out who among them is secretly a werewolf (before it’s too late…) Each “night” the werewolves eat a villager, and each “day” the surviving villagers attempt to rid the town of werewolves by lynching one of their own.

Werewolf is a game that takes place in a small village which is haunted by werewolves. Each player is secretly assigned a role – Werewolf, Villager, or Seer (a special Villager). There is also a Moderator player who controls the flow of the game. The game alternates between night and day phases. At night, the Werewolves secretly choose a Villager to kill. Also, the Seer (if still alive) asks whether another player is a Werewolf or not. During the day, the Villager who was killed is revealed and is out of the game. The remaining Villagers then vote on the player they suspect is a Werewolf. That player reveals his/her role and is out of the game. Werewolves win when there are an equal number of Villagers and Werewolves. Villagers win when they have killed all Werewolves.

If you want to know more check out these rules here.

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Lessig vs Colbert the remixes

Thanks to Glyn for notifying me about Lawerence Lessig on the Colbert Report. As usual Steven Colbert takes the comical opposite view to pick some fun at his guest. What's so interesting about this time is, Colbert tells the audience not to remix (also the name of Lessig's new book) any of his works including the show there on now.

“Never. ever. ever. take anything of mine and remix it! For instance, I will be very angry if anyone takes this interview right here and remixes it with some great dance beat, and it starts showing up in clubs across America.”

Obviously the opposite has happened (and Steven knew this was going to happen of course) and now there's all types of audio and video remixes of that segment. I wouldn't be surprised if it started showing up all over the west world Steven. (which would be great advertising for not only lessig's new book but also the colbert report of course)

Remix COLBERT/lessig project, has really blown up and now there's a contest here and video remixes appear on youtube. I was even tempted to do my own remix, but its late now and I got a lot on tomorrow. So maybe over the next few days I'll drop a remix track.

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The panic attack at midnight mix

So my first recorded mix of 2009 and its a festival of hard beats and bleepy sounds. I would normally call it progressive trance but I'm fed up with the confusion between that and progressive, Which seems to be some kind of rock genre. So now I'm calling it Tech Trance. Anyway, whats important is the mix is pretty fast pace due to the introduction of a Rave classic (Put the bassdrum on by the ascendant masters) at the start which I also had to slow down by 10%. There's a bunch of new tunes which I've never played before in this mix including the show stopper Panic attack by Simon Patterson.

The Panic attack at midnight mix is available for download as a Mpeg3 too and is licensed under a creative commons nc-nd licence, obviously the tunes themselves are all rights reserved copyright. Enjoy!

  1. Put the bassdrum on – the ascendant masters
  2. a new dawn (virtual vault mix) – Steve Forte Rio
  3. smack – simon patterson
  4. shnorkel – Miki Litvak & Ido Ophir
  5. Rheninkraf – Oliver Klien
  6. Panic attack – simon patterson
  7. Pegasus (megaminds mix) – Mauro Picotto
  8. Body of conflict (cosmic gate mix) – Cosmic Gate
  9. Kink – Trentemøller
  10. Grasshopper (dance version) – Sander Van Doorn
  11. Coincidance (Trentemøller Remix) – Mathias Schaffhäuser
  12. first strike (signum signal 2004 remake) – Signum
  13. Interstate Emperors – Jeffed
  14. Kalopsia (Monogato's Filth Remix) – The Blizzard
  15. Lyra (leon boiler mix) – Leon Bolier Pres. Precursor
  16. The last pluck – Marcos Schossow
  17. strip search – simon patterson
  18. massive motion – M.I.K.E

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Playstation 3 or Xbox 360?

Current generation of consoles

I can't decide. They both have there advantages and disadvantages but I'm hoping the people out there will be able to help me.

So quickly a couple of things. Blu-Ray is a non-starter for me, I'm not interested and so being able to play back a HD disc source is not going to score the PS3 any points. The high price of the PS3 is off putting due in part to that Blu-Ray drive which I'm not going to use. I also don't need a media player replacement, I already have a Ubuntu box running XBMC and Boxee for Standard and High Def content across my network. Plus I have a Xbox which runs a older XBMC (need to upgrade it really) for backup even. I know I can stream stuff to the PS3 using Universial plug n play which is nicely built into my NAS box. The xbox 360 seems to require other less standard software to do anything with media.

Home on the PS3 also looks silly but so does the new dashboard on the Xbox 360. The PS3's online play is also very dubbious compared to Xbox Live but its free and seems to work ok with Little Big Planet.

On the game front, Little Big Planet and Wipeout HD are killer reasons to own a PS3 while on the Xbox 360 I'm loving Geometry Wars and Burn Out Paradise. I also hear Rez HD is on the Xbox 360 for a cheap download, and I got to say I like the idea of little mini-games like Geometry Wars which you can have a blast at for a while then put down again. I think the last game I completed was Max Payne on the PC.

I don't really get the difference between the Xbox 360 Arcade and Xbox 360 Premium, it seems once you buy a couple of games you might as well have bought a Premium package. The PS3 comes in many flavors, but the cheapest I've seen one for is 179 pounds for the 40gig version. HDMI is all good for me, which they both support now. I think the fact the PS3 seems to play/run unsigned code seems like a good thing to me. Yellow dog linux is running on it no problem while on the Xbox 360 it seems almost impossible to run anything on it besides signed code (hackers have been trying for years). But then again that was before the XNA team showed off Kodu which really interests me. But then again some people are saying Little Big Planet has that end covered off on the PS3. I'm not so sure.

I think this will come down to economics, if I buy a Xbox 360 on ebay, I might be able to get one for less that 100 pounds and that means more for my home cinema upgrade which needs to happen sometime this year. I was also considering if I was to get a Xbox 360 and PS2 that might be a good compromise.

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