Pete's Eats

Today, I’ve retired some of my main, long standing email addresses due to the amount of spam. They’re some of my favourites, but it’s getting beyond a joke and increasingly difficult to stay on top of so I’ve taken the drastic path – unlike me I know

I’ve also adopted Jeremy’s style of managing blog comments and therefore turned commenting back on. Basically, no comments will be automatically published, everything gets held for moderation. Once anyone who has anything to say has said it, I’ll publish them all in one go and then close the thread. This way, I get to read the feedback, you get to leave it (should you want to), and I can more effectively manage the crap that was coming through before I turned it all off in the first place. We’ll see how it goes…

Technorati Tags: spam

Years ago, and I mean years ago, I started down the web design/development road by messing with various new technologies, one of which was Microsoft’s ActiveX. I joined my first ‘group’ in the Site Builder Network, the baby brother of the MSDN in the early days. One of the things that I got involved in was a competition to recreate Windows 95 in a browser using ActiveX controls… Sounds crazy now right? Back then it was great fun

If I remember correctly (and I might not) I achieved the heady heights of SBN Level 2 membership. The details are very vague these days though. Coincidentally, the other month we were turning out an old cupboard at home and I found my SBN Rucksack! This was probably my first piece of web related schwag and I hold it dear even to this day! I’ve carefully put it to rest in a box of dotcom era t-shirts but I’ll dig it out this weekend maybe and grab a quick pic Anyway…

I was flicking through some of the WPF/E experiments the other week and came across something that made me chuckle. Basically, someone has recreated Windows Vista using WPF/E – check it out. I can’t say for sure, but I bet it took a considerably less amount of time to develop than when we did it all those years ago! (Let alone the fact that it works, and looks, a whole lot better than our efforts too!) Still, as they say, what goes around comes around.

Makes me wonder if we’ll see a similar sort of thing in another 10 years with the follow on to WPF/E

Technorati Tags: activex, microsoft, wpf/e

Apple, in another amazing attempt at ignoring their customer’s needs, are seriously slow to update iSync with new phone profiles.

I just got a new Nokia N73 on the 3 network (more on this later). Needless to say, this is why I’m posting about Apple not keeping up with consumer demand, because the phone, which has been out for nearly 6 months now, is still not supported by iSync.

Thankfully, someone else does care about these ‘lost’ Apple customers and has written a plugin to make full sync’ing possible.

Have Apple given up on updating iSync?

Technorati Tags: apple, isync, Nokia, n73

Tom, a fellow Brightonian, is doing a very good job of blogging about LIFT 07 which has been taking place this weekend. I’m gutted about not heading out to the conference myself as the content looks totally amazing and challenging – something I could do with right now… Not to mention all of the friends who were on the speakers list too

I hope the conference manages to maintain the quality for next time.

Technorati Tags: conference, LIFT07

Wow – this is amazing. Perceptive Pixel has made a fully functional working GUI of the style shown in Minority Report.

Technorati Tags: gui, minority report

Charlie Brooker, a Guardian writer (beyond that, I know nothing about him) has written a piece on how much he hates Macs. It’s quite funny in places.

“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.”

He goes on to say,

“The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye.”

This is in reference to how Mac’s are being portrayed as more ‘fun’ than PC’s. Even more amusingly, is that the author has commented on his own piece (piffle), complaining about how the article was edited and so on.

Well worth a read (take it seriously at your own peril). And, I hope Mr Brooker is featured in the next outing of ‘Grumpy Old Men’ if this article is anything like his normal output. I’d imagine he’d be quite entertaining.

Technorati Tags: apple, funny, mac

Flickr started to enforce the Yahoo/Flickr account merging this week despite *much* protest from their earliest users. I don’t know why, and you will probably accuse me of overreacting, but this has damaged both Yahoo and Flickr for me. I signed up with Flickr *ages* ago, long before they were on Yahoo’s radar (actually, it was even before Flickr was a photo sharing site in the way it is now).

I have only ever had a Yahoo id because various people over the years have set up groups and things. I don’t use other Yahoo services much and probably never will despite them buying up almost every little site that has a bit of a following. As Tom rather more eloquently put it, “Everyone knows Yahoo will do it behind the bike sheds for jelly babies these days…”.

The point is, Flickr, in my opinion, has changed for the worse under Yahoo’s watch. The future doesn’t bode well, and as someone who has used Flickr extensively from several generations of mobile phones as well as to share pictures of my kids with far flung friends and family, I’m worried about where this is all going.

So, I’ve been looking at various ways to formulate an exit strategy from Flickr. I tried a few things, including writing my own script, but settled on a Java app that I found on Sourceforge called, imaginatively, Flickr Backup.

As you can see, at the time of taking this screengrab, I’m 94% done ‘backing up’ my photo’s from Flickr. The application worked like it should, with no nonsense at all.

The upshot is that I will probably continue to use Flickr for some things, but not as much as before. Additionally, I now have an exit strategy that, for now at least, works and I’m a little happier that I have control of my photo’s once more. And, before I get loads of emails telling me that Flickr hadn’t ‘locked’ them in or anything… I know, ok? But you try and manually copy down one photo at a time from 1300+ of them…

Technorati Tags: flickr, flickoff

I’m on my 3rd generation of 15″ Aluminium bodied Powerbooks. This one is an intel machine. With each iteration, the quality and stability of the hardware has declined.

Within a month or two of having this machine, the coating on the aluminium had started to wear off.

Within another month or so, the machine stopped being able to sleep properly when the lid was closed. Sometimes.

Now, I have to manually send it to sleep. It just won’t hibernate otherwise, despite trying all the workarounds posted in various places on the web.

More disturbingly. Actually, quite worrying in fact, is that the machine wakes itself up randomly when sat on my kitchen table before going back to sleep. This is with no USB or other devices attached, and no software designed to do this either. Obviously, the same happens in my backpack when it’s there on London (or other) trips too… The potential damage this could suffer if it didn’t go back to sleep in my backpack is too horrible to think about.

Come on Apple. We expect better than this.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook

If anything should stop you from buying battery farmed poultry again, it’s the culling of over 160,000 turkeys at Bernard Matthews factory near Lowestoft surely?

I hope the publicity surrounding this puts at least a few people off of the over-processed muck that company (and others like it) pass off as food in this country.

Some external info

Technorati Tags: bird flu, poultry, food

Brilliant design – would love to see it in person, and see how sturdy it is to sit on…

Movie of Japanese Folding Chair

Technorati Tags: design, Japan