Achieving New Year’s Resolutions

Just discovered Derren Brown is blogging and twittering. One of the things he reblogged was a link to achieve your New Year’s Resolutions.

  1. Make only one resolution – Many people make the mistake of trying to achieve too much
  2. Plan ahead – Don’t wait until New Year’s Eve to think about your resolution
  3. Avoid previous resolutions – Deciding to re-visit a past resolution sets you up for frustration and disappointment
  4. Be specific – Think through exactly what you are going to do, where you are going to do it, and at what time
  5. Set S.M.A.R.T goals – Focus on creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time based (SMART).
  6. Carrot not stick – Focus on how much better life will be for you, and those around you, when you achieve your resolution
  7. Go public – Many people keep their New Year’s resolution to themselves.
  8. Be persistent – New habits take time to learn, and once in a while you will slip up and revert to the old you.
  9. Visualise – Visualise yourself doing whatever it takes to achieve you resolution as this will help you believe you can do it and see it through.
  10. Be positive – It is better to think about the good things that will flow from a healthier lifestyle than the bad things that will result from an unhealthy one.

So looking at these recommendations, I’ve pretty much failed on every point except number 7, a bit of 6, 9 and 10.

7. Go Public – Many people keep their New year’s resolution to themselves. Unfortunately, this makes it all too easy to simply forget about them. Instead, go public. For example, write down your resolution on a large sheet of paper, sign it, and place it somewhere prominent in your house. Tell your friends, family and colleagues about your resolution, and ask them to provide you with helpful nudges to assist you in achieving your goal. Either way, do not keep your resolution to yourself.

New Years Resolutions 2011

So after reviewing my 2010 resolutions its time for my 2011 resolutions

  1. Ski on real snow
    Yes every year I say this but seriously this coming year, I’m going to do it at that indoor snow place (Chill Factor) in the Trafford Centre.
  2. Organise a Trance night in Manchester
    Not only can I dj but i’ve found 2 djs from work and 2 other geek djs who are interested in djing out. Enough to surely put together my own night. Ok no one would get paid at the start but heck we’re all doing it for the fun of it.
    On top of that, I’m also hoping to get more involved with music and maybe do a few live broadcasts via the pacemaker. Either on my own station as such or else where. Of course you’ll certainly see more mixes on mixcloud.
  3. Read more non-news stuff
    Since I bought my ebook reader (the sony one) I’ve honestly read more that ever more. Even when I had my ipaq and use to take 3 hours to cross South London. But I seem to be reading lots of news and blogs rather that books. This isn’t necessarily bad but there are lots of books I would like to read. So now I got the Kindle, I’m hoping to slow down a little more and read more non-news.
  4. Live even more in the public
    I’ve come around to the fact that I’m a very public person and although there are certain things I won’t reveal to the public (isn’t a person able to keep a few secrets) I’m generally going to be more open and public that before. I know some of my friends will be saying heck no, please no more but I don’t really see a seriously bad side to all this. i’m already considering making my dating profile public, right now it links to my online persona in parts which might be why I’m getting the type of woman reply that I do.
  5. Document more online (including films, books, photos, etc)
    Luckily this should be much easier this time. I did microblog (twitter/identi.ca) every film using the hash tag #film but then I noticed Twitter was cutting off my entries past a certain date. Identica fairs much better going right back to Jan 09, but I only really post to identica when I’m at my laptop (really need to find a identica/statusnet client for android). Anyway, now I’m using Trakt, things should be easier. Although I got to say having my film collection online does raise lots of questions.
    On the photo front, the Nikon D40x (DSLR) is helping a lot, but I’ve still not picked up the courage to shoot people on the street like pebaline (susanna’s great work). I’ve also got first dibs on shooting our work area at Media City for Wovox. Of course Dataportability is still high in priority as always.
  6. Meet more young, progressive, single and central located people
    My boss (adrian) made the point a while ago when he took me to hospital with Tim (my ex-flat mate) I know lots of people from all over the world but I don’t know many people in Manchester or the North. I live in one of the party central locations of england and I should be out all the time but alas I don’t really have many people to go out with (yes cue the violins). So its time to change that and get to know more people. I say single but thats only because I already know lots of couples and its nice to go out with people with a similar status, be them male or female.
  7. Consider going out with woman who have kids
    I’m 32 this year and its becoming more and more difficult to meet women who don’t have kid(s). Although I’m not really bothered either way about single parent families, I’ve tried to only date women who have no kids to date. I spoke to my ex-wife (Sarah) and she gave me some advise (thats how we originally got talking online, she was giving me advice about a girlfriend I was having trouble with at the time) regards to meeting woman who have a kid. So I’m not going to rule it out like I was before.
  8. Get my finances in order
    Now I got a mortgage again, its time to be a little stricter about my spending. I earn quite a nice salary and heck I live in quite a reasonable place for going out. So I should be paying off more that I currently am. I was actually doing ok then I blew up my scooter engine and spent the good part of a grand buying a another one. I also think this might be the last motorbike regrettably
  9. Work more on my healthy lifestyle
    Although I had the bleed on my brain back in May/June, I’m certainly a lot more healthy that I ever was before. I had no idea I had high blood pressure and a lot of the small things were tied to that. So now I have that under control (thanks mum & dad for the blood pressure monitor for Christmas). I generally eat healthy but I do eat quite a bit. So hopefully little things like buying smaller woks will help aid with this.
  10. Play much more
    I have a feeling that play is going to be massive. Its going to be weaved into almost everything around us. I would go as far as to say play will be as big as social was in the late 2000’s. I say play because it doesn’t mean we’ll be playing more Xbox games, no the concepts and mechanics of gaming will make it into more and more things. So its time to get a lot more serious about my own playtime.
  11. Spend more time thinking deeper and focusing
    After the life/death experience I’ve had this year, I’ve done a number of things to improve myself but what still amazes me is our brains. Between hypnotherapy, mydreamscape and a few other things I’ve observed. I’ve come to realize that our brains are extremely powerful and even the idea of positive thought can do amazing things. My social worker (yeah they assigned one to me when I came out of hospital) said these type of life or death experiences makes you question your religious outlook. Although this hasn’t happen for me (although I am thankful to everyone who prayed for me) it has certainly made more interested in what can be done when you really focus hard.
  12. Take Geek Culture to new heights
    This is a bit of a aspirational one (not that there is nothing wrong with that), along side running a full barcamp at Media City UK and putting effort into the BarCamp WikiBook. I’ve been thinking, I’m really interested in what happened to the girl geekdinners, Sarah Blow and the other ladies worked very hard to make it the success that its has become. I feel there might be something with the geeks talk sexy series. We’ve only done one so far but there is something surprisingly compelling about geek culture right now and I think now the general public has the taste. So hopefully the rest of series will be even more successful and the chance to do run at the green room will really kick off something extra interesting.

A review of last years resolutions 2010

Its that time of the year, so first up the review of last year.

  1. Go skiing on real snow
    Yes this has been on going and to be honest, with all the spare time I had this year I could have but it would have been against the doctors advice. Anyway this coming year it will happen for sure.
  2. Blog more
    Yep achieved
  3. A better routine and live more healthy
    Yeah this is certainly in effect, never guessed I would have ended up in hospital midway through the year. Crazy stuff.
  4. Kick off Manchester werewolf night again
    We did kick off another werewolf night but its always at the wrong days, so I need to do more about this.
  5. Find my perfect development stack
    Yeah to be fair I still need to work on this but I did end up buying XML Oxygen editor and played with PHP and Xquery. With mydreamscape I got into the type of development I rather liked. Stitching together things which work like lego bricks
  6. Playout live more
    Yeah I didn’t quite achieve this one but I have plans for 2011. I certainly like to play Trance out live.
  7. Use even more graphics
    This didn’t quite happen, but hopefully this will change
  8. Upgrade sooner if it makes a noticeable difference
    Yes this is working for me
  9. Be involved in a regular podcast
    Indeed this worked out great. Techgrumps is fantastic and hopefully we can develop this even further.
  10. Buy a flat in Central Manchester
    Yes I finally this year bought a 2 bedroom flat in Islington Wharf, just on the east edge of central Manchester. I owe my sister and Billie my amazing mortgage advisor greatly for this whole thing
  11. Avoid all online services which don’t perform to my acceptable levels of data portability
    I’ve done this but I certainly could do more in this area.
  12. Play more games
    This is certainly something I am still not doing enough of. I did buy a Xbox 360 a while ago and to be fair I did buy a whole selection of games when I was recovering from my bleed on the brain, thinking I would now finally have the time to invest in them.

The TV tracker

Tioti tv tracker

via Paul Pod at Tapeitofftheinternet

In the last blog post about SharetheTV and Trakt.TV, I mentioned the need for a way to track TV episodes which your social network were on. It got me thinking what ever happened to the promising startups of the time including tape it off the internet (tioti.com) and sharetv.

Back then, all these services relied on you putting all the data in and to be fair it might have been a little early. Now you got serious processing power under the TV from boxes like XBMC, Boxee, GoogleTV, etc. Setting up a TV tracker site would be pretty easy now. Almost all the boxes now talk to the Internet and there’s APIs a plenty now.

It is surprising no ones really pushed the idea yet. Like the prototype above shows, it doesn’t take much to get it right.

Know your meme public message broadcast

I love know your meme and have been catching up with the episodes I’ve missed for a while but I love this almost like a public service message episode which is attached to downfall.

In response to Constantin’s attempted takedown of these satirical videos, the Institute for Internet Studies offers this helpful public service announcement explaining how to dispute a wrongful copyright claim on the grounds of Fair Use.

XBMC dharma goes online

In a surprise (surprising to me at least) move to XBMC there is now a couple of services which allow you to show off your collection to the awaiting public. Something a little like Boxee does but much more like Last.FM (or rather Audioscrobbler) does.

Trakt.TV

The first one is Trakt.TV which simply tracks what you watch, just like last.FM/Audioscrobbler but for TV and Film. Of course its still early days, so theres not a lot of data right now but the database is powered by other open source projects the movie database and the TV database. Of course the scobbler plugin is built directly into the new Dharma XBMC, but you can force it into Camelot too if you don’t want to upgrade quite yet. One of the nice settings in the plugin is the ability to only send a update when you watch a certain percentage of the film/TV show. And of course you can blacklist certain directorys if you want to protect your p0rn for example. You can imagine the Lol’s when someone finds your secret stash of p0rn on the site. Credit is certainly due to trakt.tv for the global stats and chart pages, alas OKtrends.

Oh by the way my profile is here but its quite empty right now because I’ve not been watching anything from my xbmc library today.

Share the TV

Share the TV is the next one which aims to be less like Trakt.TV and more like a place to just dump your whole movie collection. Like Trakt.TV theres a plugin directly in the new XBMC and its just a matter of enabling it. Also like Trakt theres a load of options you can configure so its only uploading you collection every once in a while. Unlike Trakt, share the TV uploads the whole of your current movie and TV database to the site. So ideally you can show your friends what you got. Its also powered by the movie database which is a nice touch.

My profie is here again.

The crux of the issue

I like both of them but its very handy being able to see the whole collection with sharetheTV. I do worry somewhat that someone will look at my collection and decide that a film which isn’t out yet is obviously pirated (Grow up people!) (I tend to download a lot of trailers of course and XBMC picks up the metadata for them). I would really like to see trakt.tv and sharethetv come together to form a much stronger single site really.

Nothings perfect but theres room for change in both. Being able to change the update perious is useful in sharethetv because for example, Notorious auto scans as the 1946 film with the same name. So I need to change it before it syncs up the cloud.

Its great they both use the open movie/tv sites but it would be great if in turn they would also provide a export option for your own data collected. I’m sure there both working on it but sooner rather that later. I’d also like to see the ability to embed your collection elsewhere (actually trakt does support basic embeding). I’ve been burned on this front before with myfilmz.net.

Finally it would be great if either site could solve the problem which was highlighted by tape it off the internet (or tioti.com which is now findmetv.com) When your watching a TV series such as for example The Event. Some friends are following the UK Channel4 series, some are downloading it and some are waiting for the boxset. It would be fantastic to be able to track all that in a simple web/gui.

A new hope, a new blog

Me

During Christmas I thought I’d do some maintenance to blog because I’ve been meaning to clean up a few things for a while. I’m hosting with GoDaddy.com mainly because there cheap and there pretty hassle free.

I had my /wordpress blog which you might have seen stuff like this at. Then I also had storytlr at the root of the cubicgarden domain and a couple other blogs which I was testing things on like mydreamscape. So I deleted the couple of test wordpress blogs and started putting a axe through storytlr (which is a real shame but I could never get the cron to work). Then I noticed there was no blog in the management option for /wordpress. Which meant yes it was either lost somewhere in the management interface or it was gone….

I was generally pissed off with Godaddy for not making it clear which blog I was deleting. Worst of all, its all happening on bloody Christmas day, when I should be relaxing not wondering what happen to my bloody blog. I almost canceled my contract with Godaddy right there and then, I got a message from the Godaddy twitter account with some somewhat useful information.

So anyway although I wasn’t able to recover everything back to how it was before, I now have a new blog and lifestream.

I had a backup of my blog from Mid December and I’ve been using Disqus for comments so pretty much everything up till then was safe. All the blog entries I usually write in Blogilo, and I had a backup of all the recent entries. So it was just a matter of digging them out and publishing them again with the correct date stamp.

The first thing you will notice is that the /wordpress is now gone (yeh!) and the lifestream is now finally working (double yeh!).

But….

There is still a lot of work to do. I still need to design the bloody thing and this time I’m hoping to do a proper job. On top of that I’m going to sort out all the external links to my life all over the web, so there all linked here in some logical fashion.

I also need to link up ianforrester.org to my lifestream and add in lots of lovely embedded goodness into my pages.

It was certainly quite hairy at one point but it kind of worked out… Happy Christmas everyone…

The next version of XBMC (Dharma) is now available

XBMC

Almost missed this one.

Unfortunately I’ve not had a chance to play with it on my home cinema setup because I switched off the machine just before I went away for the holiday season. But reading through the list of changes and finally having a little dabble on my laptop confirms this will be the first thing I’ll do when I get home.

XBMC 10.0 “Dharma” is ready for consumption. Those who have been following development know that add-ons are the main focus of this release. In the past, in order to find a new skin, you would have to dig through the forums, find a link, and hope it worked. Ditto for plugins, scrapers, etc.

Those days are over. All of these things are now available within XBMC, no need to put down the remote to find new content or change the look of your HTPC. Just head to the “add-ons” section in the system menu. At the time of this writing, there are 11 different skins available, all with distinct looks and personalities. But we didn’t stop there. Want to watch your favourite youtube videos? Listen to some web radio or podcasts? Install a web interface to control your living-room experience, or even one to manage your media? It’s all available in the new add-ons system. Even before the final release, we have seen an average of 50,000 add-on downloads per day. It’s time for you to see what many others have discovered! And remember, the best part is that the add-ons are very much alive. New ones are being added every day, and current ones are continuously updated.

So finally XBMC has caught up with Plex in regards to plugins and scrapers. The full change log is here.

Hacking the Pacemaker (progress)

Pacemaker Manager

At last a break through, someone (musicinstinct2) has cracked the way the pacemaker adds and removes music to the SQLlite database.

My initial experiments involved using the sqlite database browser to open up music.db and enter track information. Then manually copy the tracks over to the device, making up random hash values (as I couldn’t work out how Tonium were creating these hashes). It works! The device doesn’t rely on any particular naming convention, whatever is in the filename field in the database (music.db) is used by the device to load the track.

Fantastic…! Now this is cracked and Musicinstinct2 is working on a open source client to manage tracks. The next stage is to crack and understand the XML file which is attached to every single track uploaded on the device. The bulk of the data in stuck in a XML element called realBeatLocations.

I expect it won’t take long before we have the whole thing pretty much cracked. What would make things move along quicker is if Tonium would publish the source as it was created under the GPL.