Year: 2005

Konfabulator – now free

July DesktopJust read on Ricky’s blog that Konfabulator has been bought by Yahoo and is now free. Yippee. Yahoo even. This should give the desktop widget market a good kick. DesktopX has been around for a while but is still too awkward to use and configure. Same for Samurize although you could get some stunning results if you put in the effort. Konfabulator was always nice but cost money and was short of widgets the last time I tried – not any more.

I’ve put up my new desktop which has also taken on a Longhorn Vista look and feel to celebrate the fact we’re a year away from a new Windows environment. So much was promised with Longhorn and on the face of it so much has been stripped out. Here’s hoping there will be a radical yet stable product at the end of it all.

 

MediaMan

dvds movies collection
I’ve always had a desire to catalogue all my media – dvd’s, games, music etc. Every package I tried seem to have some shortcoming – cumbersome to use, costs too much, didn’t look very nice. Then I stumbled on MediaMan. Easy to use, integrates nicely with Amazon, supports custom fields and allows you to scan in barcodes via a web-cam. Also allows you to make up some nice virtual shelves as you can see in the picture (link to big picture on Flickr).

The reason for doing this – I like to keep a track on what I’ve watched and how I rate the films in my collection. The virtual shelf is a really nice idea which I first saw in the Apple package Delicious Library. Thankfully someone made this pc clone which is free.

 

Upgrades

upgrade
Switched on the pc this morning and as I got my AVG updates I thought…that was damned fast. Checked my e-mail and sure enough – my 2Meg upgrade has finally arrived. To celebrate I’m downloading 3.5Gb’s of N64 roms to go with the 2000 SNES roms that I downloaded last week. They’ll live on the Xbox for the odd time I fancy some retro gaming. As Ricky would say…woof!

 

Google Maps API

I registered for a Google Maps API key earlier this week – I’m full of idea’s about how to use the maps, some just for fun but others for (admittedly small) bundles of cash. My first stab was to map out the speed camera’s in Scotland. This looks to be working well although needs some tidying of the shadow graphic. A more complete example can be found here (thanks Henry). Well worth a dabble if you find maps and satellite images interesting.

A decade has passed…

…since I graduated from Uni. A lot has happened in the last 10 years but strangely some things are still the same. Have things turned out as I expected – feck no. But things could have been a whole lot worse so I guess I should be relatively happy with my lot.

The graduations at Glasgow Uni are pretty cool (well I thought so). Bute Hall, quadrangles, nice weather, loads of folk dressed up all made for quite a special day. Photo’s can be found here (although they’ll be moving to a Flickr account soon). We haven’t aged one bit, or put on any weight. Ricky’s take on things here.

PSP Warez

A couple of months ago I posted that UMD’s (Universal Media Disc that games are supplied on for the PSP) had been cracked. Two months down the line not only can all UMD ISO’s be downloaded from the net – they can now be played from a memory stick – PSP Warez is alive and kicking. The hacks that allow this only work on firmware 1.50. Sony has released two firmware patched since 1.50 but they are not compulsory so if you want to play warez, home-brew software and emulated games on the PSP stick to version 1.5. Some games will not play unless the firmware is at the latest version. What’s the betting that GTA:Liberty City Stories will be one of them? But then again – who’ll buy the original if they can download it from the internet and play it for free from a memory stick.

Gutted

Picked up the kitten on Friday. She was a handful and not very friendly – lots of spitting and just unhappy. By Saturday she had really brightened up and was friendly, eating and drinking and getting use to her new home. It was then I realised that I was sneezing quite a bit, my throat was sore and my eyes running. I spent a couple of hours away form the kitten and then went back for another play – same again. Crap – I was allergic to her.

We were both gutted and the allergic reaction to her only got worse. I couldn’t believe it – I’ve always been around cats and pets and never suffered before. We took the decision to take her back to the cat protection league this morning before we got too attached. Although we only had her for two days it was still heart breaking. Hopefully she’ll find a new home quickly as she was a lovely wee cat.

Bombing

Tragic. Appalling. On the face of it so easy to do as well. Plenty of news and proper content elsewhere – visit Binary Bonsai for links to good news sources. While the mobile network was down in London and news reports sketchy, blogs were the most up to date and quickest way of finding out what was happening, and from my point of view conveyed the fear that had gripped people far better than any other news site.