March 2008
4 posts
Now WordPress 2.5
WordPress 2.5 is now powering my site. Very nice it is too, and a huge improvement in the UI department. One thing I like is the new way to upgrade plugins. It’s a one click deal, and works lovely. But I also hate it. Cos, with me me being a little thick, I one click upgraded my plugin that powers this feed, and my Flickr feed reader… and obviously lost all of my little hacks...
A New Racket
Oooh this is a lovely surprise. The Raconteurs have announced their new album. Normally this would mean waiting at least six moths as the PR machine wound itself into a frenzy. However, Mr White and friends have decided to release it next week instead. They only finished recording it in the first week of March! You’re probably thinking “Oh… just downloads then?” - Not a...
IE8 Beta
I’m sure you all already know, but the IE team have released the first beta of IE8 to the world. It does install over you current IE version so some caution should taken. Which of course I did… ahem… Looking at a few sites it does semm the baseline engine works better, however, there are loads of glitches around. Elements will pop out, seemingly at random, but pop back in to...
Flip Flop
Blimey! Microsoft have turned around and decided they don’t want to force that meta tag business after all! Have they actually listened? It looks like they have! Long may it continue. I’m still waiting for a sting in the tail, though, it’s never this easy. Never.
January 2008
2 posts
Last.F(ree)M(usic)
This is very interesting. Last.FM has struck up a deal with a host of different record labels to provide full length to stream for absolutely nothing! They aren’t paying actual cash, it’s a sort of profit sharing thing… very interesting. It’s not just open to the majors either. If you’ve got a band and you’d like a slice of the action - well you can sign up to...
Newsgator Set Free
I’ve been using Newsgator - and more specifically NetNewsWire - pretty much since I made the switch to Mac. Today is a good day becuase they’ve just decided to make all of their excellent RSS fedd reading software completely free! That includes NetNewsWire 3.1, FeedDemon (for windows), NewsGator Go! (for mobile devices) and NewsGator Inbox (Outlook Plugin). NewNewsWire was well wothe...
December 2007
5 posts
Dave Gorman
I like Dave Gorman… even if he did seem to go a bit odd for a while. I’ve got a signed first edition of Are You Dave Gorman? He’s been a bit quiet of late, but randomly the Flickr Blog randomly featured his Three Part Polaroid Portraits. I’m not sure they even know who he is. He’s a massive Flickr fan (2,100+ photos), it turns out, and has taken some bloody good...
Oh Dear
I wish I could think of a differnet title for this that the man would approve of, but I can’t. It’s been revelaed that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with “rare form of early Alzheimer’s disease”. Fortuntaley he seems pretty upbeat about the whole thing… “I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe...
Gold(III) Oxide
My fake band - Gold(III) Oxide - are about to release their debut album Lee Todd (footballer). Here’s the track list… 1. Minamikanbara District, Niigata 2. Maison Blanche (Paris Métro) 3. Naughty Girl 4. Arena Active Protection System 5. Human Chess 6. WTXF-TV 7. St.Fintans, Multyfarnham 8. Stade Akwa 9. Difference (album) 10. Frostenden 11. Dan Duryea 12. St Dominic’s Holy...
Widget Three
A new version of the tumblr dashboard widget has been released. This one is in nice because you can actually add a title to it! You can do the other types of tumbls too - like photo, video, quote etc. Go and download it.
Air Analytics
I’ve still not quite got my head around this Air business. Making desktop apps out of apps that already work perfectly well in a browser just seems a bit odd to me. Anyway there’s a new one for Google Analytics out. It’s nice - it does exactly the same job as the site, but does it slightly prettier… Kind of pointless, but there you go. Is there an actually useful Air app...
November 2007
6 posts
HTML Emails
It’s not exactly new news now - depsite only happening yesterday - but there’s a new standards movement in town: The Email Standards Project. Depsite some of the biggest names in the industry having an unparralelled hatred of fancy emails, I’ve alway kind of liked them. “But Emails are for plain text!!”, they wail. So bloody what! Letters were plain text until...
Tailored Shirts
This is quite a cool little move by good ol’ M&S. You wouldn’t really equate them with quite nice online apps for designing your own custom shirt - but that’s what they’ve done. From a very reasonable £30 - £49.50 you can choose you fabric, collar style, cuff style, sleve style, contrasting fabric, etc etc - then you enter your height, weight, collar size and they...
RCRD.LBL
Today saw the proper launch of RCRD.LBL - a very interesting project for providing free, downloadable, legal, DRM free music. It’s setup essentially as a sort of commercial über music blog really. There are some community elements, and widgets to spread the word. With labels like Warp, Kompakt, and Modular thing look pretty tasty.
Musical Beeb Pods
Finally the BBC is starting to roll out proper podcasts - with music in and everything! For ages they’ve had the likes of Moyles and Mills putting kind of crappy exteneded DJ chatter podcasts up… but now they’re expanding the shows out to loads of different peeps, with loads of different styles. From 17 November we are promised the likes of Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone off of...
Stud Farce
Apparently a school in Bexley, South-East London, has decided to ban it’s pupils from wearing football boots with studs because they are too dangerous. Incredibly they are making the poor kids wear pumps (plimsolls) instead - beacuse skating around in mud like a spider on rolerskates is much less likey to crack legs in half. Wearing footy boots as a kid was great, giving you a chance to...
Not Dead
I haven’t been posting much - anywhere - recently. I’m not aplogising, I have proper reasons! Well one really. I am neck deep in hacking together the super duper Escape Crate V3.0!! It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally settled on a design, and I’ve been mucho busy with slicing and dicing it into XHTML and CSS (with a spriklin’ of PHP). in fact this...
October 2007
9 posts
Fiery Furnaces
I really want to like the Fiery Furnaces. Their debut EP was lovely. Since then they seem to have found melody, rhythm and lyrics far to basic a concept for their obvious massive musical talent. So these most staple of musical attributes are buried 15 feet deep under a thick steaming pile of what can only be described as dicking about. Quite frankly I can’t be flippin bothered wading through...
“The PRS (Performing Rights Society), which clearly isn’t really that busy,...”
– Seriously, you couldn’t make it up… via TechDigest
808 State
I was (still am really) a bit of a fan of the early noisy hardcore stuff of the the early 90s. I’ve recently got hold of a couple of 808 State albums, and I’ve been lapping them up. Completely separate to that I today discovered their website via the fantastic Dialated Choonz site and found a mahoooosive archive of loads of the guys radio shows from back-in-the-day. (I’m so...
Halo 3 and BioShock
I finished Halo 3 yesterday (only on normal - heroic next)… Blimey it was tons better than expected! I didn’t like Halo 1, never really played Halo 2. Halo 3 was awesome. BioShock was also a cracking game, but in a different way. Both are FPSs, both very different. BioShock is your French Indy film. Halo 3 is your Die Hard style Holywood Blockbuster. They are both worthy of all the...
Free Sitepoint Ruby PDF book →
Just sign up for their newsletter thingies… don’t know if it’s any good yet… but Sitepoint’s stuff is usually solid!
ScpCrt
My blog doesn’t really work in web 2.0
There is a dashboard widget here that lets me tap in a quick post to tumblr too… it’s a bit feature light, but could be useful occasionally.
Pennell speaks my mind
So Matthew posted about the exact same thing that I could have posted myself… I’ve wanted a dumping ground for my none post worthy thoughts. I was going to add something to my new design (now on iteration 13c and very, very close!) for Escape Crate… Now there’s this tumblr… which does things for me… and should give me some easy integration options. A great idea....