Hopefully we’ll have something even bigger to give away next month, so keep looking for more updates!

We’d have to admit that the tackiness element of those laminated menus is largely absent in this very futuristic dining emporium, with touch-sensitive tables allowing you to interactively browse and preview the grub on offer before placing your order from the table.

Diners at the West End restaurant, Inamo, can even change the ambience of their table by selecting the coloured patterns projected onto their table, play games other than footsie, and even use the table to check out local services, including getting your stuffed, drunk arse into a cab.

While it excites us to know the Wii will be capable of more precise controls, it’s difficult to avoid wondering if it was the right move to make. The MotionPlus will segment the Wii’s market and potentially cause confusion among the casual crowd — the same audience that Nintendo has to thank for returning it to the position of top dog in the videogame hardware biz.

The Instant Blogger is a free blog service, which is making its name by not charging a penny (which isn’t all that new) but giving away quite a bit of webspace for free. In fact, from my last post, this free space has been finalised at 50 MB. Which means that you should be able to run a pretty useful blog without ever needing to upgrade.

The new feature which was installed today is actually quite a big deal, The Instant Blogger has started hosting all uploaded files with Amazon S3.  This may not sound like such a big deal, but if you think that the average blog maybe has a dozen images on every front page, and some are now including video and audio, it means that all the work in hosting those files has been moved across to someone more adept at hosting them. This in turn means that, when the site is under high load (which a site offering free blogs is bound to be) the problem isn’t made worse when people start downloading large amounts of data.

The two features being added on Monday are also a little exciting for the new startup. The first is the ability to host podcasts for free. Apparently the functionality is already there ready to be used, and the S3 hosting has been integrated here as well, all the TIB team are waiting for is the correct instructions to be written up. Now 50 MB of free space to host a free podcast which is hosted using bulletproof servers sounds like a good deal to us, but 50 MB isn’t all that much when you think the average 30 minute podcast is about 20 MB. This is where the second addition comes in, for $25 a year (about £15) you get an additional 2,000 MB (not 2048 interestingly enough) to host you files using the same S3 hosting. Now this is a huge gamble, as a very popular podcast will probably use about $25 a month’s worth of fees, but TIB promise us that except for exceptional circumstances they will stand by their pricing.

I’m going to be following the progress of these guys over the next couple of months, so far the service is looking extremely useful, but maybe they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

We may be getting one step closer though, with adobe announcing that it is working on an official flash player for the iPhone, Whether it will work from within safari (would be a bit rubbish if it didn’t) and whether apple actually allow it, which after the Ad fiasco they’re bound to, is yet to be confirmed but seeing as the software already works on jailbroken phones, it probably wont be that long before those few of us who haven’t jailbroken get that warm fuzzy feeling that comes when someone flashes at you - through the internet.

Technorati : Apple, Flash, iPhone
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I, however, call bullcrap. The problem is, Movies and Music are still very firmly in the hands of the consumer - and that is exactly where they are likely to stay for at least another couple of generations, in the consumers hands. To do that, they need to be presented with a physical item and I’m afraid that the internet doesn’t fill that. People are again failing to realise that simply because the technology is there and is better does not mean that it will be used.

There is one small exception to this, which I can see coming. Software, all types of software. Steam and its various competitors have been around for a long time, and have shown how slightly technical people (gamers) will quite quickly adopt a new delivery model. But what would happen if that delivery model was made even simpler.

What if, you installed a shell of an operating system and all programs, features, updates and service packs were installed on demand as they’re needed? The technology is already there, I use it in the company I work for. It’s transparent to the user too, they click on a program and don’t realise it’s streaming to their desktop, some must be installed locally yes, but all get updates streamed to them without them realising. What if we were to blow this feature out to the cloud for home computing. Suddenly your Windows license doesn’t look too bad value, you get constant updates to all the programs you use, critical updates to the ones you don’t and your machine will be pretty bulletproof (as most virus and security flaws exploited in the wild have had patches available for ages).

So how long before the death of DVD, for software I’d say it’s already on its last legs for home computing, I give it until the end of the next Windows cycle before everyone downloads what they need - th only downside is that you’ll actually need to buy coasters now.

Technorati : Cloud Computing, DVD, New Tech
Del.icio.us : Cloud Computing, DVD, New Tech

There are 2 ways to host a blog. If you think you’re going to receive a lot of traffic straight off the bat, it may be worth you buying your own domain, hosting package and setting up your own blog.

If however, you are like most of us are when you start out blogging you may want to find yourself a good free host. Now there are many out there, but for sure the market is dominated by the google owned blogger.com and wordpress.com. They are both hugely successful, and to honest really good hosting platforms. There is another which I would recommend though

The Instant Blogger has setup a new service, allowing you to setup a blog for free and has today gone into open BETA. The service is built on the same software as Wordpress.com, so is brilliantly easy to use, but because TheInternetBlogger.com doesn’t have to appear neutral it can offer what both Blogger.com and Wordpress.com can’t. Hundreds of templates, plugins and customisation options. In fact, on launch of the BETA there are over 75 different templates to use straight away.

The most impressive thing about TheInstantBlogger.com though is its speed of setup. You literally fill in 2 screens and read 2 emails and you’ll have your own subdomain and blog and be ready to go.

So how would I recommend you start out blogging, well you couldn’t go to far wrong with TheInstantBlogger.com which offers all you’ll need for a small to medium sized blog for free, and plan to only charge a one time $25 to be upgraded to over a gig of storage (from the current 50MB)

Come back Monday for an official announcement

In his post Techies just don’t get business and marketing, sometimes Andy talks about how techies really don’t always make good business decisions, because the decisions we make are mainly logic driven.

As an example, I recently wrote about how Google Chrome is likely to be an important, disruptive technology. In the various comment threads, folks were vehemently deriding this idea as ludicrous given that Google is a “one trick pony” and that their other attempt at products and services have “failed miserably,” citing examples such as Google Mobile, Google Docs, Book Search, etc.

Meanwhile, out in the real world of business (the world where money changes hands), they are saying exactly the opposite:

The report meanwhile attributed Google’s success to “innovations like Google Mobile, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Book Search” which has extended its “reach and ubiquity”.

I’ll concede that in the whole what he wrote is true. The product which ticks the most boxes is logically the better. Linux ticks many Techies boxes, Windows is still installed many many more times.

The main problem is, there is a disconnect between marketing and tech in most companies. Most companies can’t get the message out to the man in the street that their product is better, so they fall back to confusing the crap out of that man on the street in the hope of intimidating him to buy. There is only ever one outcome, it may take time to happen but eventually it always happens. Someone comes out with an inferior product, but packages it in a way everyman can understand.

iPod, iPhone, Windows, Nokia Mobile phones, Google Chrome, XBox 360, Dell Laptops, Nintendo Wii’s… in fact, I could go on all night. Not one of these items is technically the best in their field, but their packaging is great, marketing second to none, and in their Field in Europe each one is top of its market, and it’s because the tech guys at all the better companies have been relied on to brand their products.

Until the iPod no-one knew how many Albums would fit on an MP3 player unless they were a tech, most didn’t even know what an MP3 was (many still don’t), but that doesn’t matter - because with the iPod they do know, and they can fill it up easily with all their music, and buying music was cheap too. Does it matter that the Zune is technically better, and Creative’s offerings better still? No, because everyman doesn’t understand anything those guys say, Apple though, they speak the same language as the people buying their product.

Techies can’t be relied on to market a solution, because we can’t. It isn’t our job to market a product to man in the street, on the whole we don’t understand him at all and therefore resort to advertising to ourselves. Gigs, Megs, Bytes, Bits, Hertz, Mega’s, Flops and Bandwidth. If you have to use any of those words to describe a product aimed at the consumer, you’ve just alienated 80% of your market.

 I’ll finish by saying just this, would you let your marketing department loose with your dev tools?

Today they are reporting that out of the five areas they have been testing they haven’t received a single complaint. Whether this is because no-can get through to customer services, no-one is bothering or because there hasn’t been anyone that’s noticed is unknown though.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker (and one of the most hated by studios), may be getting into streaming, a tipster told us.

The Pirate Bay, which has 3 million users and is closing in on 15 million peers, first mentioned the possibility of a streaming service back in May, but little was heard about it until a cryptic birthday wish to Brokep, whose real name is Peter Sunde, the Pirate Bay’s co-founder, was posted on the service’s blog.

It’s now believed that streaming is right around the corner and will be kept on thepiratecity.org. Right now, the page is down, saying the test phase was completed successfully, but a cached image shows ripped DVDs being used as the streaming source.

The Pirate Bay may be on to something with its P2P streaming. P2P downloading was always the toast of the town in the piracy community, but lately the shift is moving towards streaming, which makes it easier for users to watch movies and TV shows. And if that will really happen, it only makes sense for The Pirate Bay to lead the way.

If you want to see what thepiratecity.org looked like before it was taken down, click here.

There are a couple of ideas I have, and although I’m about to post them here, it will be you guys (my fantastic readers) who decide which will go forward and be used because without you they wont be possible.

Firstly I’d like to ressurrect the PodCast. It was listened to by good few people, but when it’s just me talking it’s not as fun as it could be. I need at least one, but preferably many many, cohosts! This would mean that once a week, or more if needed, we all gather on Skype, and take a very loosley guided tour through that weeks tech news for an hour or so.  You don’t even need to able to do it every week, especially if there are several of us. If you’d be interested, throw me a mail podcast@bluenoseddog.co.uk.

I’ve integrated some review code to the site, which means that when making a post I can now rate things, and take an average of all my ratings in a post to give an overall star value. Now that just sounds boring, but as I’m planning on doing some BND styled reviews, should come in handy. However, no one person can do this, so again - anyone who wants to contribute to this site by reviewing anything even slightly technological just contact me! I’ll even give you a spot in your post to place an ad so that you aren’t just working for free. To get involved, just sign in, all users now have the ability to make post entries, but don’t even bother trying to spam as all posts are moderated before publishing.

Video reviews, again this is something I’m working on in the background, we now have the ability to upload and collaborate on videos, I’m thinking a vidocast every now and then would be pretty cool - but also how-to videos and such can be uploaded and posted which would be quite nice.

There are a couple of other things I’d like to get started, but I’d also like your ideas. You can either comment to this post with them, or mail me wayne@bluenoseddog.co.uk and I’ll be sure to take a look.

“We’re going to be extending Spore maybe more horizontally than The Sims where the Sims was being sold to the same customers over and over who had the game. I think with Spore we have a lot of opportunities that are broader where we can create other games around the editors, for instance, or take certain levels in the game and put them on other platforms. With Spore we’ll be looking at a wider range of expansion possibilities than The Sims. A lot of these may not even be things for people who didn’t buy the PC game, like downloading the creature creator.”

Being one of the most creative individuals in the business, it’s not surprising that Wright has a few other projects in the works. In the same interview, Wright says, “I’ve got a couple of new ones I’m doing early work on, but they’re not ready to be talked about.” He later admits “What I’m working on right now is pretty grandiose.” As if he could do it any other way.

Google’s YouTube has, over the last few years, been known to pander to governments wishes and ban video types which they deem to be inappropriate. From Thailand’s government banning videos which made fun of their King, to Senator Lieberman in the US ensuring they agreed to ban videos of terrorists.

Now comes the latest, and most vague, from here in the UK no less. Google has decided to give in to pressure to ban videos which show weapons used to intimidate people.

When I was at school, I studied a bit of politics, along with a load of other really useless subjects, and one of the terms my Teacher coined was “on paper politics”. It’s a very interesting concept, and one which can be applied to pretty much any walk of life, I would wager for instance that at one point in your life you have faced “on paper” management.

The whole “on paper” phenomenon can be easily explained. It is used to describe an idea which either solves all problems, or is a solution to something in particular which - on paper - seems to do the trick, yet out in the real world has ramifications which not only mean that the problem isn’t solved, but has in fact been made worse in one way or another.

On paper, banning videos of weapons used to intimidate people from YouTube makes sense, because it will instantly stop the teen phenomenon of looking up something cool on the internet and then copying it. Unfortunately for the paper based internet experts, politicians, there is not only one YouTube. Sure there’s only one site called YouTube, but the same content can be put up on a plethora of other sites, and don’t expect them all to congregate on one of them - because in that sense, there really is only one YouTube.

So instead of making the problem of violence, and in particular crimes involving this sort of weapon, go away - rules such as this will simply push the content underground, making it much harder for the authorities to catch those responsible whilst at the same time taking nothing away from those who seek this type of content. It would have been much simpler just to leave the content congregate in a central location, and pick off offenders from there.

Technorati : Ban, Google, Government, YouTube
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Wrapping up Security updates, Address book, Spotlight and iPhone synch enhancements along with iCal, eMail, MobileMe and time machine performance tweaks this update treads quite a lot of ground.

Full details can be found at the apple site, here.

If you think you may be better to cover apple news than me, I try I really do, just throw me a mail - wayne@bluenoseddog.co.uk.

Technorati : Apple, OS X, Update
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LG has just launched what it believes to be the first 32 inch HD-Ready plasma screen in the UK. Coming down from their usual haunt of 40 inches and above, this plasma screen apparently brings with it all the benefits you’d get with a larger unit.

The 720p screen (1024x720) comes with a 30,000:1 contrast ratio, up to 48bit colour processing, 4 HDMI ports and 100Hz picture shenanigans to smooth out motion. Not only does the TV outgun LCD’s in there native home (screen size) but also, by merit of being Plasma, beats them to next Sunday when it comes to motion and contrast ratio. The other big surprise is price, coming in at £485 on amazon.co.uk.

There is no doubt this TV will make waves, picture quality, sound quality and the vast array of connectivity (only 1 set of component in though) along with integrated freeview and very aggressive pricing make this a real threat to the current LCD HD TV market. (Video after the break)

Technorati : HD, LG, Plasma, TV
Del.icio.us : HD, LG, Plasma, TV

The most famous site of them all, The Pirate Bay, is still running - because it is still legal in Sweden, but torrent search engines hosted in the US or UK are been taken down daily because they are offering people easy access to copyrighted material. The main problem with most of these services is that they are simply search engines, and trackers, which do nothing more than tell you where files people have uploaded are. We all laughed when the paedophile blamed Google for making his predilection for underage kids easily accessible but we’re meant to take the Movie industry seriously?

My question is though, if they are going after the torrent sites, why aren’t they going after the easier catch? The place where most of these files come from to begin with? Why has noone thought to take down newsgroups?

To my eye, to have a successful case of copyright infringement (it’s wrong, but it still isn’t theft) you need to have a reliable way of knowing who uploaded, who downloaded and who hosted. With torrents this is only partially available. You may never know the initial seed unless you catch the torrent early enough, noone keeps logs of what’s been downloaded as there is no single point of data collection, and as noone really hosts the files you have noone to even go for to get the information. With newsgroups however, it’s far easier to get all three.

Most ISPs have a full mirror of most newsgroups, Virgin Media for example definitely do. They already monitor these groups for terrorism and paedophilia so we also know the infrastructure for tracking and convicting people is there, so all they need to do is turn it slightly. Your ISP hosts the files, can tell exactly which household downloaded them and more importantly which initially uploaded the files. They may not be able to tell who did this off other hosts (from which they are mirroring) but they sure as hell can tell from themselves, so you’d need more than 1 ISP to be on board. But with most UK ISPs already doing the bidding of the music industry for torrent users, you can reasonably expect them to be on board with this too.

Newsgroup files are usually more reliable, better quality and faster to get than their Torrent cousins, in fact the vast majority of torrents are first sent through newsgroups. But because Torrent sites have had all the press, these are obviously the ones which are under most scrutiny. because newsgroups are hosted at your ISP they are much quicker to get, I’ve watched a friend download from these at his max internet speed (20 Mbps) but with torrents you often struggle to get over 2 Mbps.

The only real issue is that you can still only track this illegal file-sharing to the household and not the user. Should you, for instance, have open wireless and your neighbour be downloading movies, it is your connection which is in trouble.

I’m not an advocate of copyright infringement, it is wrong, but so is the way it is being dealt with by the industries affected. By hanging on to old, out-dated methods of revenue gain they have left a massive gap in the market which is been filled by pirates, if they had the sense the Movie and Music industry would and should have been the first to see how useful new technology is - but just because they didn’t doesn’t mean that doing it for them is acceptable.

Technorati : Lawsuit, Movie, Music
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Whether this is a mimick of the very successful American campaign, or simply Woolworths trying to get more faces through doors is to be seen, but all out price warfare is only a good thing for us with the urge to splurge buy!

You may have heard of the term LAMP quite often, but after seeing the various articles on the net telling you how to set one up got a little scared and walked off.

LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These four components make up what the vast majority of websites are built from, especially dynamic sites such as this one.

Hopefully in this article I’ll be able to show just how easy it is to do, and how you too can have a simple LAMP server setup in around 10 minutes (depending on your internet speed). There are literally 6 steps, so it’s really not as complicated as some make out. The only thing you need to have done before following the instructions is install ubuntu and login to it for the first time.

OK, ready? Let’s rock!

• First thing you need to do is start a terminal session. If when you boot Ubuntu you’re greated with an all black screen with white writing, you’re done. If you have a desktop though, and a mouse, simply click Applications->System Tools->Terminal. Everything we do will assume you’re in terminal, so don’t shut this down.

Just a quick note, although the following may look very complex, it is in fact very very simple and extremely powerful. If you break down the commands I’m giving you you’ll see that they are in fact a lot simpler than using the mouse to install. sudo is a way of running programs as “root” or with admin privileges. apt-get is a pretty powerful tool you can use to update, upgrade, install and remove programs from your system, not only will it install the program you want but it will also install anything else that program needs to run! This one program takes away 99% of the headaches Windows users get when they first use Linux.

• Type “sudo apt-get update“. What this does is goes away and checks to see whether all the programs you have are up to date.
• Next we type “sudo apt-get upgrade“. This is important as it downloads and installs all updates which were found with the last command. Think of it lie installing service packs in Windows, except in this case it installs updates for everything you have installed.

At this point, with a fresh system, you may want to go and make a quick coffee. Depending on your network speed this could take 5-10 minutes. In this case, with a 2 MBb/sconnection it took nearly 4 minutes.

• When done, type “sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql wu-ftpd phpmyadmin openssh-server php5-gd” now this is the mother line. This one line goes off and downloads and installs Apache (webserver), PHP, MySQL, wu-ftpd (FTP Server), phpmyadmin (to remotely manage your database server), OpenSSH (a remote command line program) and a couple of other little programs which tie them all together.

This mega line will go off and download around 60MB of data, so again go make a sandwich and come back. You’ll notice when it asks you to confirm the download that it’s going to install a lot more than what you just typed. This is part of the power of apt-get which I mentioned earlier, it makes sure that if you install anything it will work afterwards - nifty eh?

During the install it will ask you to type in a MySQL password, this password is for the master or “root” account so make sure you pick a good one! But remember it afterward

After another couple of minutes you’ll be back at the helm and ready to type some more, and thankfully you’re down to your last 2 commands

• “sudo chown username /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini“
• “sudo chown username /var/www“

I’ve underlined username in both those lines to highlight it, you don’t have to try and figure out how to write an underline in Terminal. Where I’ve typed username, you just need to type the name of the user you setup when you installed ubuntu, f.ex in the video I setup a user called bluenoseddog so the command becomes “sudo chown bluenoseddog /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini“. Remember the spaces.

All the chown command does is change ownership. By default, where you installed php and apache as root only root can alter them. This is no good should you ever wish to install a site on your server so needs to be changed.

If you now type “ifconfig” you will get an ip address, on another machine on the same network type that address into an internet browser, and you should get the apache “IT WORKS!” message. You would use the same ip address in your favourite ftp client and login with the details you installed ubuntu with to upload files to the server. By default all files should be placed in /var/www.

The following video shows the above process, click through to youtube to watch offsite with annotations, it has been sped up to 1.5x speed just to save your sanity.

[kaltura-widget wid="tpxa23nn0w" width="600" height="507" /]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hp5MKeQ1Lk

Technorati : LAMP, Setup, Webserver, linux, ubuntu
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