Tom Fotherby’s Blog

Northern Lights

Children’s Fiction, 8/10 - Dec/Jan 07/08

I love reading children’s books, you know you’re in for an adventure. I watched the movie at the cinema the same day that I finished the book - I can understand why they sweetened the ending because it’s horrible in the book. I find doing the comparisons interesting, for example for me, Iorek Byrnison was a much stronger character in the book but Lee Scoresby was a stronger character in the film.

My Thoughts:

• I found the companionship of the daemons a lovely idea.
• It was brilliantly eerie in the Arctic experimentation centre.
• Excitingly dark ending

The Subtle Knife

Children’s Fiction, 7/10 - Jan 2008

The magical world that was created now gets rationalised a little with science (dark matter) and, as expected from the beginning, our own world is linked with the world from the first book with a new character, Will Parry.

My Thoughts:

• I thought the soul-eating Spectres were a bit weak (certainly not as chilling as the Dementors from Harry Potter).
• It turns out the golden compass is programmable on a computer and it’s possible to write a speech-to-dust-to-text plugin in one evening. P! Technology these days is so advanced.
• There’s a funny section of sexual innuendo between Mrs Coulter and Sir Charles.
• There’s a gruesome fight with the kids on the stone tower. Kid’s fighting other kids to the death is disturbing.
• The ending is completely disappointing. It’s a cliff-hanger like an episode of Eastenders - not a fully rounded story!

The Amber Spyglass

Children’s Fiction, 6/10 - Jan 2008

For me, the Trilogy has weakened and is not so hard to put down anymore. The land of the dead and the Harpies didn’t work too well in my opinion but I guess “Live life to the full” is a nice message to give kids.

My Thoughts:

• I liked the concept of the Mulefa even though it’s really hard to imagine an animal on wheels. They are good green role-models for the kids.
• I liked the gruesome part where Iorek Byrnison feasted on his friend, Lee Scoresby’s dead body.
• Childhood love is hard to pull off. “Their just teenagers, what do they know about love?”
• The ending is sad. It’s also an anti-climax because Lyra should be treated as a queen now? and won’t Will just go to prison?

All in all, a wonderful trilogy, something I’ll be reading my kids along with Narnia and Harry Potter.

We have a charging area in our house where the chargers for our phones, camera, Gameboy and Bluetooth stuff live. It’s always a mess of cables and adaptors so I decided to tidy it up.

A bit blue peter - But it’s better than before:

Before:

After:

1) I bought a box from B&Q that seemed the right size to fit a 6 socket power extension inside and felt quite sturdy.
2) I used a dremel to cut a plug-sized hole in the side of the box so I could fit the adaptor inside.
3) I used a drill to make a hole in the top of the box for each device I wanted to have a charger for.
4) I used sellotape on the inside of the box around the holes to stop the cables slipping back into the box.

The inside of the box can be as messy as you like:

I crashed poor Lance in a nasty high speed collision. I was driving down a duel-carriageway, came round the corner and saw the road was blocked with cars from a previous accident, couldn’t stop in time, went into a skid, spun 180 and crashed going backwards into a stationary van. There were 8 cars involved but no-one was hurt.

I got a Peugeot 206 which has a smaller engine but still feels like an upgrade. It cost £4000, was registered in 2003 but has only 25000 miles on the clock.

These are the things I like about it:

1) It has a “clicky thing” (remote central locking). Magic.
2) There’s more room on the window sill to rest my elbow while driving.
3) The seat belts actually roll up into the car when you get out (rather than flopping around and getting in the way of the door)
4) You can open the boot without using the key (i.e. don’t have to turn the engine off to open the boot like I did with the Ford Ka).

I feel sad that I’ve finally replaced my old PC which my dad gave me as a 21st birthday present. It was just too sluggish, even for browsing the web.

I bought a widescreen Sony Vaio. It’s interesting to compare the specs because it shows how much technology has advanced in the last 7 years:

Kix also bought a Sony. She chose one quite a lot smaller and lighter so it wouldn’t be uncomfortable on her lap (VGN-FZ21S). It only weights 2.8Kg’s but she has a smaller screen (15.4″ instead of 17″). Hers has a Blu-ray drive, bluetooth, Wireless N, faster HDD, extra 0.2GHz CPU and a extra 128MB of Video memory.

Old PC:

New Laptop:

I was very impressed at how well Ubuntu 7.10 runs on the laptop. The webcam doesn’t work but the wireless and battery indicator work fine.

One problem with the Ameo is that the webbrowser doesn’t open at your homepage, it opens with a useless T-Mobile page. To change this do the following:

1. Install “PHM Registry Editor” (smartphone edition). This is a free program that allows you to edit the registry values. Get it from http://www.phm.lu/Products/PocketPC/RegEdit.
2. Once installed, Run it and go to the root of the registry keys: Select Menu -> “Go to my Device”
3. Then drill down to the value we want. Go: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> HTC -> PIEplug (NOTE: You have to select with the touchscreen, then press Enter on the keyboard to drill down)
4. Select “Values” and you should see 3 items (home, Launch, WebStub).
5. Rename “home” to “homeBK” (to make a backup)
6. Select Menu -> New Value -> String. Then enter the URL of your start page. I suggest “about:blank” which will mean the browser starts with a blank page (nice and fast). When you have entered, select “Done”.
7. A value called “New Value #1″ will have been created. Rename it to “home”.
8. That should be it. Exit PHM and open the browser to check it worked.

One of the reasons for getting my Ameo instead of a normal mobile phone was so I could write my journal whilst on the coach to work. But the keyboard that comes with it turned out to be inadequate. So I got a replacement:

The HTC website for the Ameo has a link to a list of suggested accessories which includes the “Freedom Universal Bluetooth Keyboard for HTC (QWERTY)”

To get the “Freedom Universal Keyboard” working with the Ameo, follow these steps:

1. Download a file called “WM05SP.exe” from
   www.freedominput.com (The page is titled “Windows Mobile Smartphone 05″).

2. Make sure your Ameo is attached to your Windows PC and that ActiveSync is running. When you double-click “WM05SP.exe” it will install a progrm in C:\Program Files\Freedom Universal Keyboard. The install.bat file in this program didn’t work for me so I manually moved “bthkeyb.ARM.CAB” (a file that was included in the install) onto the Ameo via ActiveSync and installed the CAB directly from the Ameo.
3. After installation, a new icon will have appeared in “Programs” called “Bthkeyb”. The first time you click it, you will be given a “Device Code” and asked for a passcode.
4. To get the passcode, go to www.freedominput/unlock.html and fill in the form including the “Device code” and a 7 digit number on a sticker from the back of the instruction book that came with the keyboard. The form asked whether I was sure before continuing - Press the “Confirm” button to get a passcode which you enter using the Ameo onscreen keyboard.
5. The keyboard program shows a almost blank info screen except the bottom-right corner has a button labled “Main”. Select “Main”, then choose “General”.
6. On the keyboard, move the switch to “HID mode” so the LED flashes green, then press and hold the “B” button. On the Ameo, click the “Bluetooth keyboard” checkbox.
7. The connection is automatically made in a few seconds and a message “Keyboard was connected” pops up - it’s then safe to release the “B” button. Test the keyboard works in MS Word Mobile.

Problems:

• The connection isn’t permanent - You have to reconnect the keyboard every time you want to use it.
• The backspace key doesn’t seem to work (delete does though). The home and end keys don’t seem to work either.
• You can’t seem to hold down shift and then use the arrow keys to create a text selection area (vital for cut&paste).
• The keyboard doesn’t work in every program. It works in Word and Text Messages though.

We bought a Netgear aerial extension on Ebay because upstairs doesn’t get a reliable signal. But… It looks ridiculous:

Original Aerial	Custom Aerial

I measured the wireless signal strength on our two Squeezebox’s, one is in the room next to the router, the other is upstairs:

So it seems to have a minor decrease in signal close by but a better range. Worth the ridiculous form factor? Probably Not!

We Changed ISPs from “Freedom2surf” to “Be” because it is a faster and cheaper connection.

The connection details that Be supply are minimal to say the least. This is because they expect you to use their pre-configured “BeBox” that they send you for free. We didn’t like the way the BeBox looked and we didn’t like it’s web interface and we didn’t want to have to re-configure our whole network and firewall - so we messed around with our existing Netgear DG834G until we got a working connection. These are the settings you need to enter:

• Basic Settings
  • Does Your Internet Connection Require A Login? No (then leave “Account Name” and “Domain Name” empty)
  • Internet IP Address: tick Use Static IP Address, then enter the numbers supplied to you in the intro letter from Be. For me, they were as follows: IP Address: 78.86.193.198, IP Subnet Mask: 255.255.240.0, Gateway IP Address: 78.86.192.1
  • Domain Name Server (DNS) Address: tick Use These DNS Servers (then enter87.194.0.51 and 87.194.0.52)
  • NAT (Network Address Translation): leave Enable ticked.
  • Router MAC Address: leave Use Default Address ticked.
• ADSL Settings
  • Multiplexing Method: Select LLC-BASED
  • VPI: 0
  • VCI: 101
  • DSL Mode: Select ADSL2+ (but this option was only available after I upgraded the netgear firmwhere to “V4.01.28″ - It worked before without this option)

With these router ADSL settings, you won’t need to change anything on your machines (Ubuntu or Windows). What’s Be’s speed like? Disappointing considering it’s supposed to be 24MBits! (although it’s better than before).

We started messing around with the Netgears firmwhere and the MTU and RWIN size but didn’t have any better results.

The 7th Radiohead album, “In Rainbows”, is freely downloadable from their website till today only. After today it will only be available as a CD - Or, of course, from file sharing sites.

Since it is a free download (they let you chose how much you want to pay - including £0) I had a really difficult time understanding why anyone would get it from any non-official source. Ethics, freedom, rights, trending-setting are at stake - Jolly well support the cause! That was until I tried to buy it myself. The site is REALLY poorly designed:

• The splash-screen on the main page of the site doesn’t work on my Ubuntu 6.06 machine - I had to Google around to find the URL that gets past the splash-screen (BTW, it’s http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.htm).
• Clicking the “ORDER” button doesn’t order anything - you need to then click the “VIEW BASKET” button.
• You have to name your price, in U.K. Sterling. OK for me but a bit dawning for 90% of the world?
• After choosing your price, you click “PAY NOW”, at which point you set up an account enter some personal information (including your email address and mobile phone number) and agree to some terms of service (which are benign, but it’s more time and more clicks to verify that).
• Finally, you get to download the music.

After, jumping through all the hoops, I now understand why it wasn’t being lazy to get the album through the file-share networks. Since this is the first time a big band has snubbed the Record Labels in such a massive way, it is important that the experiment is a financial success (or at least a break-even) for Radiohead. Otherwise other bands won’t try following suite. They have a lot of responsibility. This is why it’s so wrong that they messed up the user-experience of the site. They reduced the availability to a level that is below what most teenagers are used to. Shame on them.

If people normally choose P2P over authorized channels because P2P is cheaper, we would expect customers to shift toward the authorized channel when it offers a zero price. But if people choose P2P for convenience, then we’d expect a shift toward more P2P use for this album, because people have fewer moral qualms about P2P downloading this album than they would for a normal album. (from Freedom to Tinker)

BTW, I paid £5 for it. Fair?

Microsoft released a software update that expands the number of video formats that the XBox will play. This is quite exciting for me because I usually have to watch anything I download on my unimpressive 15″ computer monitor but now I can stick it on a USB key and watch it on my TV from the comfort of my sofa (which actually isn’t comfortable at all!).

Even better than a USB key, we found out how to stream video from Ubuntu Gutsy. The protocol that the Xbox uses to communicate with Windows Media Center PC’s is UPnP. To run your own UPnp server on Ubuntu 7.10 you need to install “ushare” (open source streaming software developed for the “GeexBox” Linux distribution):

1. sudo emacs /etc/apt/sources.list
• add “deb http://www.geexbox.org/debian/ unstable main”
2. sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get install ushare
3. ushare -n Arbitary_UPnp_Server_Name -c pathToTargetMediaDir -x -i eth0

To get to the media in the XBox dashboard, you go to the “Media” tab, select “Videos”, then you should see “uShare” listed amongst the sources list. As a reference, the uShare version is currently 1.1 and the XBox dashboard version is 2.0.6683.0. Note: For some reason .avi files don’t show unless you rename them to .mov.

I would say thank you to Microsoft for this update except this isn’t really a fix, it’s more of an uncrippling. Why did they cripple it so it can’t play xVid in the first place? They must have been hoping people would just use WMV format videos but they must have received enough feedback to tell them that this isn’t the case.

There’s no reason whatsoever why I shouldn’t be able to lose weight by eating less, but I can’t, so I have had to resort to extreme measures. I’m going to go to Saturday morning weigh-ins. In my first meeting I was the only bloke so it’s more than a little daunting. Especially as how we have to clap when so-and-so has lost ½ a pound.

I feel being over the medically healthy weight just feels like I’m voiding my warranty. I’m 18 stone 2 lbs but the maximum weight for 5 foot 11 is 13 stone.

I need to keep the meetings up, apparently “we could still drop a dress size by Christmas!”

Our original Xbox (4 ½ years old now) has become too flaky, games crash and DVDs skip. We needed a DVD player and it’d be a shame to lose all our games so buying a new XBox makes sense. Halo 3 took any doubt out of the decision. I do feel suckered into the slick Microsoft marketing trap but it does it’s job as an entertainment system so I don’t feel ripped off.

The online capabilities of the Xbox is pretty impressive, I downloaded a few demo’s but I was disappointed with the fact there is no movie rentals available - certainly a wasted opportunity for Microsoft (I hear they have them in the USA - what gives?). Halo 3 online works flawlessly.

I put my original Xbox on Ebay - it got won with a bid of just £12.50!

XBox360, FPS,9/10 - September 2007

I waited for Edge Magazine to review Halo 3 and was surprised they gave it a 10/10 which only 5 other games have got since it was first published in 1993. An Edge 10/10 basically dictated I had to play it. so, we bought an XBox 360 (i.e. Basically Halo 3 cost me £300) and it was worth every penny.

There’s constant action that builds and builds throughout the game. There’s no waiting for loading and the graphics are the best I’ve ever seen. The events that happen and the scale they happen on are breathtaking.

I wouldn’t say it feels different to Halo 1 or 2 but at the same time, I’m not sure it should be called Halo 3 - it should be called Halo 5 because the developers seem to have put MUCH more work into it than merits a single increment version change. I’m trying to imagine what would happen if Halo 1 and 2 had never come out and this was the first Halo game. I think everyone would worship it like nothing before, however it has to lose a point for not feeling all that original.

Some of my favourite additions since Halo 2: Grunts with Jet packs, new vehicles, being able to use the grunt hammer, the flame thrower, deployable cover, marines being able to drive you about, Even better enemy AI, larger playing fields, being able to shoot down covenant spaceships.

I’m not really into games that much any more, but Halo 3 is an exception. How could anyone not be into it?

I’m a fan of happy endings