Inchoate

KY Jelly Fake Ad

via Eva

Fantastic!

(More fake ads back here)

The hard bit about cycling

As part of a six week coding contract with these fine gents I'm commuting from south west London to east central. This takes about 70mins assisted by public transport and slightly under 40mins when I ride. For the first time in a while I really didn't want to cycle this morning, it felt like a drag, and how much I'd rather just sit in a train reading a book. Odd, I thought, it's not that far (15km), what's the problem?

Then it dawned on me...

My First Pocket PC Application

Woohoo! A real-life little program running on my phone with a label that toggles "Hello..." and "World!" on the press of a button.

Click the image to see what the emulator looks like:

Yes, I've even had that app running on my very own phone!

Developing phone apps

Ever since working on the Urban Tapestries project I've been becoming increasingly excited about the possibility of phone applications. These possibilities and their scope from having a highly networked portable tiny computer always about one's person continue to amaze and intrigue me. This evening alone a friend and I came up with an outstanding gadget for tourists; it feels like the Web in the mid 90s.

Enough breathlessness, what's out there?

DVD drive arrived!

The MSDN subscription I've been eagerly anticipating to allow me to create phone apps arrived in a carry-case of DVDs a little while back. Giddily trying to install it, I realised my PC doesn't have a DVD drive (I really pay so little attention to computer hardware these days). A trip to Dabs and one NEC 3500 later I can play!

Why that DVD drive? Because it had a black front, and "16x" and "dual layer" sounded impressive. Buying hardware based on its colour scheme? Don't say I'm not in touch with my feminine side...

Dorkbot London classic!

Last Wednesday's Dorkbot, its return after way, way too long was a real treat. The evening went from self-modifying music software being edited by its author and itself in real-time, to an oil-painting of a stereogram (a celebration of functionlessness aka "being shit"), progressing from a clock made from a Mark's & Spencer's prawn sandwich(!), into the possibility of using other people's wireless networks to communicate without their knowing, and finally quite possibly the coolest ever wiki.

Saul Albert (one of the Dorkbot London co-dork-founders-organisers) wrote up a nice review of it that I've posted below with his kind permission.

(To hear about these events in advance check out my events mailing list and the archives and upcoming.)

Netgear sucks

For at least half a decade I've really liked Netgear's line of hubs and switches. They have a pleasant deep blue colour, reassuringly solid metal case, and Just Work. I must've been quite taken with the quality of these products, or certainly the lack of bad experiences using them because it's only just dawned on me and with some reluctance, years later, that every single Netgear product I've used since then has sucked.

Fake ads

These via David Rosam who runs an occasional and generally decent quality jokes list (mail jokes at davidrosam.com for the hook-up),

(that should be "it's" -Ed)

And's there another dozen...

First rule of data-centre visits

It's quite simple:

However long you think it'll take, multiply that by about five

...and you'll get a considerably more realistic view of how long you'll be freezing your ass off and accumulating ear damage thanks to the aircon and army of fans, discs, and blowers.

Acrobat Reader tips & tweaks

Via an intra-office circular via Nik these handy tweaks to having Acrobat Reader behave better. Both of our edits included.

Great day

Hmm, haven't really done a true diary style "Today, I did this, and this, and this, and this!" entry but today was been so much fun I think I will anyway.

First tomatoes

Woohoo - I "harvested" my first crop of cherry tomatoes today. I've picked a couple off in the past but this is the inaugural picking session.

Satisfyingly tasty!

Flux Challenge

I was looking for a replacement for the audio notes recorder on my Orange SPV PDA/phone when I discovered this first-person 3D fly-through game, Flux Challenge. Usually with PDA/phone games they're generally boring barely-animated block pushing exercises. I've seen some cool-ish 3D games on the P800 so I had some idea what a game could be like on a modern PDA. But holy cow, I wasn't prepared for this.