Over the past two days (Friday and Saturday) I haven’t been on my computers very much,. On Friday it was my 6th form Valedictory (which I scrubbed up for, put a suit on and gelled up my hair) and yesterday I was out for a friends birthday however I get back today and find that the internet – it’s missed me.
 Google Reader has over 600 unread articles waiting for me (I’m sure other people have more however) and Facebook seems to have missed me even more having sent me loads of emails to inform me of new goings on.
Do you think I perhaps have a little too much of my life on the internet? – I don’t, I think its great that I’m able to be spoon-fed so much information and keep up to date with stuff other people are doing on Facebook, isn’t technology wonderful!
One day I might actually use my phone to get onto both those services and they won’t miss me as much as they have done over the last few days.

Do you find that if you step out of the internet bubble for a little while, it misses you so much?

I saw this video a while back and its just popped up again in the good old rss but I still think its brilliant. The EEE Pc is charming me over evermore with its ability to run xp now and this touchscreen mod which would mean not having to use the tiny little touchpad. I was also looking into an oqo umpc but the eee with the touchscreen mod is cheaper and newer than the oqo model 1. Has anyone had any experiences with the EEE Pc – is it really that usable?

Update:- I’ve just noticed that the iPlayer Beta is now available here and its looking amazing and the stuff below still applies, but to be honest I don’t want to update it all.

I’ve just heard through the grapevine of rss that the iPlayer will be getting a version 2.0 in beta form very soon which will run alongside the normal version for a while and then replace it eventually. The new version attends to one main feature - radio. The BBC Radio ‘Listen Again’ or iPlayer radio will be fused with the iPlayer potentially doubling iPlayer visitor numbers apparently. Other changes include:

•  Radio fused with iPlayer
• ‘Last Played’ - shows your most recently played items for you to go back to and continue watching if you haven’t finished it.
• Full Schedule showing all of the schedule for the BBC (presumably) which then indicates what is available on iPlayer
• ‘Yesterday on TV’ - pretty self explanatory, basically for those people wanting to see what they missed last night and catch up.
• Rss Feeds - not sure why you’d want these, perhaps so you cant watch something as soon as its available or to keep in touch with a particular program
• Bigger playback window for watching in normal mode
• Better radio quality - presumably higher bit rates

Source

A little while ago I made this blog - here

And I can confirm that I have managed to make it! - demonstrated below, I had to have the lights off as it works by finding fingers locations based on light and the way it shows when touching the glass. The video is low quality as it was filmed on my normal camera (Kodak V1003) because my camcorder was in the box being used for the whole thingymabob.

Thanks to the creater at: http://ssandler.wordpress.com/mtmini/

When I first saw this I thought that it wouldn’t be that easy to make or that it would require some parts which I just wouldn’t have but the reality is that I am SO going to be able to make it and hopefully, it will actually work.
It looks cool just from the perspective of being able to do what we’ve seen in those Youtube videos of multitouch screens for ages.
I would highly recommend visiting here and checking out the video below, I will be trying to make it and will hopefully succeed. Wish me luck!

I am a software addict – I love what software can do, the different tasks that it can perform and the completly wide array of those available, for photo editing there are loads, from the free Gimp and Paint.net to the Fireworks and Photoshop, they are all brilliant and so adaptable, with the plug-ins available for Photoshop its difficult to imagine what it can’t do in the field of photo editing.
Video editing is just the same with the preinstalled – Windows Movie Maker to the Sony Vegas Pro, Cyberlink Powerdirector, MAGIX Movie Edit Pro and finally Adobe After Effects (and Final Cut Pro). I’ve recently been following through loads of the tutorials done by a guy called ‘Andrew Kramer’ on http://www.videocopilot.net/ and I must say that they are brilliant, I’ve found them to be the first place for anyone to look to learn Adobe After Effects – they are fantastic and cover loads of different things related to applying effects to footage but also creating videos without pre-existing footage.
I do of course use web browsers the most followed closely by office software but I’ve also found that I’m using more and more pieces of software – video editing, photo editing, web design, flash animation and so on – there is just an endless supply of time consuming activities which can be made fun. Sure they can also be used in companies whereby I dare say they’d become less fun to use but I find them very amusing to use.

So – anyone got any recommendations for software for me to get addicted to?

Right then, I’m in for a bit of reader interactivity so here’s the question – how do you waste time on the internet? or even on the computer? (Please don’t say Spider solitaire).

Here are mine, in no particular order:

• Google Reader – with approximately 91 subscriptions ranging from geek news to Youtube updates.
• Windows Live Messenger – I’m thinking this will be a popular one, its a great way to waste time without dedicating yourself to one method of wasting time.
• Listening to Chris Moyles online through the BBC radio player
• Youtube – how could I not include that one?
• Collegehumor.com – I love their CH original videos (including Jake and Amir)

So can anyone think of some interesting additions?

I read a while back on CNet about wubi, I also watched  a quick video showing how easy it is to install, I then proceeded to download it and install, this is where I left it – I haven’t been back to it much more, and now I’ve decided to restart it in order to document it:

The story therefore begins here – Wubi is a distribution of Ubuntu Linux which requires no ‘live CD’ or any CD of any sort at all really, nor does it require you to create a partition of have a spare hard-drive lying around, All it needs is a windows box, 10gb of space free on the hard-drive (or less if you’re willing to sacrifice less etc) and around 30 minutes to an hour. You start off by downloading Wubi a small exe file from there website HERE. Then you run the program and it downloads an ISO of a recent release of Ubuntu (sadly they haven’t got onto 7.10 so their stuck at 7.04 at the moment). Then when you run the installer (after backing up all your important documents of course) it just goes through the process automatically, asking you for a username, password and amount of space to use. Then when you restart your computer you will see a Ubuntu option on the partition list, when you go into this it’ll start the very complicated looking installation of Ubuntu in this partition with blue screens and white writing and so on. After a second restart when you boot into this option it’ll start all hunky dory and be ready to use – which is brilliant!

To summarise:

Download Wubi

Start Wubi and allow it to download Ubuntu

Start Wubi installer after download finished

Tell Wubi some details

Enjoy Ubuntu and enjoy a cup of tea in the knowledge you’ve become a Linux user of sorts

A challenge that I would like to set myself would be to see how much I can use Ubuntu seeing as most of my computer usage is on the internet, so I shall report back on how well I do.

Wubi Website

I’m sat here trying to do work when all of a sudden I decide to open firefox and check my news feeds, I then find an article with ‘goodbye Monday’ in the title and decide it would be a good idea to read it, I then download the articles subject ‘Phun’ and the article has succeeded – I no longer want to do work.

Let me put this into context – Phun is a 2d physics playground type thing, it lets you make objects and find out how they would interact, but really its just a bit of fun to experiment with, heres a Youtube video and the link for the download – I highly recommend it as a cure for ‘Monday Blues’

Phun