iPhone 3Gish: This iPhone was in carphonewarehouse on oxford street. It was set to WiFi, which I turned off to discovered it’s only getting an Edge connection. That’s right only edge in Central London - c’mon O2 sort out your network. I can get about 50% 3G signal on O2 via an N95 about 100 yards away. So quite poor really.

When I inquired about 16gb model availability the sales man told me to go to Apple Store as it would be at least 3 weeks before they got any and he couldn’t guarantee that.

Orange’s, Banana’s, Nokia’s, three for a paaaand: www.nokia.co.uk has gone all e-tailor bargain bucket. It seems more knock off 4 u than a global players website. All thats missing is free Wii/360/Ps3 deal’s and Cashback offers. They have basically let a third party - Direct Solutions - highjack their entire site. Even product pages are plastered with Start Shopping Buy Now. So its not restricted to the front page and store area. Classy Stuff.

Also - why is this page in flash? Madness.

Nokia UK Online Shop offers you the latest contract offers from many major networks, this shop is operated by Direct Solutions.
All contract offers on this website are brought to you by Direct Solutions. Please see Direct Solutions’ terms and conditions and privacy policy.

I’ve accepted the position of Portfolio Executive, Social Media at BBC Vision. What that means is that I’ll be helping to define, develop and execute BBC Vision’s strategy in relation to social media. Simon Nelson gave a speech in September 2007 about some of the progress made (and challenges faced) by the BBC in regard to multiplatform (more discussion about that here). That’s the backdrop to what I’m going there to help with. No doubt I’ll talk more about the specifics in the coming weeks and months. Oh, and I get to work with such cool people as Dan Taylor and Jo Twist.

IBM, Hursley, Hampshire

BBC, Wood Lane, London

10 years is a long time (I got my pen last year) so although I’m very excited about the new role I always knew that I’d be sad when the day finally came to leave IBM. Hursley is a great place to work, but more than anything I’ll miss spending time with some very good friends who work there.

Things I’ll miss about IBM:

• Friends. Lots of friends. So many very good friends. The good thing is that we don’t have to lose touch, but not seeing you all around on the intranet and in person is going to be sad. (Which leads us on to…)
• Regular tea runs. The Hursley Cha Bar is a sort of second home. 66p for a small PG Tips. The Starbucks in White City just might not be the same.
• Hursley itself. The site is a big gorgeous leafy campus with a nice walk around the site, a library, a reading room, 2 pubs in walking distance as well as an onsite bar/clubhouse and a couple of thousand geniuses. It’s beautiful.
• A short drive to work, with a lift-share. (A train + tube journey from Southampton to Wood Lane is probably going to hurt a little bit, even factoring in some working on the train. I haven’t started yet and I’m already looking forward to the London Overground line opening. Southampton - Clapham Junction - Shepherd’s Bush has to be better than Southampton -> Waterloo - Bond St - White City)

Incredibly, I’ve been an IBMer ever since I finished school and started my degree as a sponsored student, way back in 1997. I was initially based in North Harbour before relocating to Hursley because that was where the interesting technical work seemed to be. I had roles in middleware development teams including spells in test, service and development. I’m glad to say that each role was more interesting and fun than the last. I have never had a master plan. I’ve never had long term goal, other than to say yes to everything I physically can, and have as much fun as possible.

In more recent times, that attitude has meant helping develop Business Integration for Games (before IBM, or the world, really took games seriously). I went on to be the the lead developer for a small messaging product called Microbroker before joining the Emerging Technology Services team making proof of concept and first of a kind prototypes for clients. Most recently, I was pleased to see that it really is possible to carve out a new role when I joined Ian in calling myself a Metaverse Evangelist and we were both picked up by the CIO office’s Innovate Quick team on a virtual remote assignment.

I got to meet a lot of clients and business partners in this role, so I know very well that IBM continues to impress people as being surprisingly advanced and interesting for a company of its age and size. Not only that, but IBMers are treated as grown ups; we get to use our common sense. If it was not for the freedom and trust which IBMers enjoy, I’d have left a very long time ago.

The thing that has made IBM such a great place to spend a third of my life (!) is the people I’ve worked with. Don’t lose touch - I’ll still be on LinkedIn, blogging, Twittering, etc.

I’ve worked with some great people and on some great projects, and it’s good to be leaving on a high. I don’t regret anything about my time at IBM, and I’m only going because it’s time for me to have even more fun elsewhere.

Goodbye, IBM. Hello, BBC.

Well, as I've heard people say in the same circumstances, at least it was a good test of my backup policy. In the end I just threw up my arms, re-installed from an old Ubuntu Huffin' Heron, and pulled my home directory off the backup drive.

Of course, the painful bit with re-animating an old and familiar set-up is trying to recall all the tiny mods and tweaks that one gave one's system back in the ice age, then re-implementing them individually on the new system -- all without saddling it all with your later, senile wanderings.

I actually do backup my /etc folder, so it wasn't that bad -- Debian is pretty good at keeping most of the configuration files in etc, on pain of maintainer death. But I hadn't kept a list of the many extra packages I'd installed. Fortunately, Debian/Ubuntu machines, positively trembling with racial knowledge of how badly its users screw up in the past, keep their own backup copies of this list, in /var/backups/dpkg.status.0 .

If you're ever in the position of checking this list with your current system to try and work out what packages you should install to get to your old state, try package_list. You feed it the dpkg.status backup file as a command line argument, and it spits out the packages you need to install.

Here's some of what it spat at me. I'm off to see Eddie Izzard now -- when I get back, I'll highlight some of my favourite Ubuntu packages here:

Hello, I am back. I don't know whether your RSS reader will notice this, but here are my all new summaries of my dpkg list.

These are ones that I snuffled from other, non-official Ubuntu repositories. The SHAME!

amazonmp3

Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor. They have a Debian friendly MP3 downloader.

avant-window-navigator-bzr

Avant is in no way a fake MacOS dock applet.

chandler

I tried Chandler for a bit, but now I am all about the Kontact

ec2-ami-tools

Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor and virtual machine rental site

isight-firmware-tools

Yes, I run Ubuntu on a Macbook. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is screaming

skype

And I use proprietary software, so that's Stallman screaming back.

Here are the official Ubuntu packages.

adblock-plus

Who knew you could install Firefox plugins using the Ubuntu package system? Me, clearly, at some point.

alien

Alien lets you convert Redhat RPMs into Debian Ubuntu deb packages. Useful!

apache2

If MacOS laptop owners can run apache locally, then so can I.

apg

More useful! APG is an obscurely named password-generating utility.

avahi-utils

Avahi is the Linux name for Apple's Bonjour which was the name for Apple's Rendezvous which was the name for the Internet's Zeroconf.

blogtk

When somebody says "What can I use instead of Ecto on Linux", tell them about BloGTK. Then hope they don't ask any more questions, because it's not really that polished.

cheese

This is like Photobooth. Not quite as polished, but quite as useless.

compizconfig-settings-manager

This is, by contrast, awesome and lets you turn your poor user-interface into the most tweaked, weird, and customized cube-spinning zoomey wibble-wibble monster imaginable. Makes everyone sick with jealousy. Or vertigo, hard to say.

dillo

Dillo is the rude-sounding super-minimal super-fast browser. Good for checking what your site looks like to Victorians.

discover1

This is discover1, of course.

dovecot-imapd

Dovecot is about as sane an IMAP server as you can muster.

gammu

gnokii

gnome-phone-manager

gnome-vfs-obexftp

These are all for talking to my Nokia phone, and pulling addresses off it, and sending it SMSs and kissing it and hugging it.

gnumeric

I have a soft spot for Gnumeric, which was Gnome's competitor to Excel, and yet has somehow managed to not become as crazy-ass as Evolution (or OpenOffice, for that matter).

gsynaptics

If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, this lets you set up your trackpad just the way you like it. Sixty hours later.

hfsplus

If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, and secretly keep MacOS on it because you're not entirely crazy, this gives you some utilities to look at them.

idle

Idle is the standard Python editor. It's sort of funky.

imagemagick

Imagemagick is actually what you need to do all that graphical image conversion.

iodine

This is that program that lets you tunnel IP over DNS, like in Little Brother. The technique was popularised by Dan Kaminsky, who later went on to save the world.

kontact

Even though I use Gnome, Kontact rules my world. I live with the pain of all the background KDE libraries coming in and spilling their strong German beer everywhere.

lynx

Lynx is the text web browser. It's useful for "lynx -dump http://thiswebpageinasemblenceofatextfile.com/"

midori

Midori is another lightweight browser. It's useful for when you are tired of only having seven other browsers.

miredo

Miredo gives you IPv6 when other people only give you IPv4. Useful for ... well, it'll be useful one day.

miro

Miro is the new name for Democracy, which has been less popular ever since Iraq.

mnemosyne

I forget. Oh wait, it's a flashcard memory aid!

mozilla-firefox-locale-en-gb

What can I say? I miss the old country.

mysql-admin

mysql-client

mysql-navigator

mysql-server

ndisgtk

Do you know how long I've been scared of relational databases?

nmap

For portscanning the hell out of strange networks and broken machines.

ntop

For working out who the hell is using all the bandwidth on your network.

oolite

GPL'd Elite! For Linux! And MacOS! And SGI Irix!

pandoc

Incredibly useful for converting to and from various markup languages, like HTML, Markdown, RTF, etc. Written in Haskell for extra cred points.

pdftk

For doing hideous things to PDF files.

pidgin-libnotify

For actually telling me when someone is trying to get my attention on IM.

pommed

Handles Macbook hotkeys. From the really useful, somewhat obscure Mac support Ubuntu repository.

powertop

Use fewer watts!

privoxy

Part of my tor setup, natch.

pylint

Horrifically pedantic code style checker.

python-beautifulsoup

Leonard's damn fine, damn tolerant HTML parser.

python-feedparser

Mark's damn fine, damn tolerant RSS/Atom parser.

python-mechanize

When you want to webscrape like a pro.

python-nose

Python unit tests handled gently and kindly.

rtorrent

The best of the background, text-based torrent handlers.

sc

The 'vi' of spreadsheets. Really.

sox

The ImageMagick of sound files.

squeak

For wasting TOO MUCH TIME in happy Smalltalk land.

squeak-plugin

sshfs

Mount remote systems using just ssh.

swftools

For messing around with Flash files (like extracting images, etc).

terminator

Multiple terminal windows in the same (Python-coded) window.

tidy

Cleans up your (or someone else's) HTML.

tor

For anonymity and censorship circumvention.

torbutton-extension

trickle

A command line program that will throttle and bandwidth limit almost any other command line program

vlc

For when mplayer won't cut it.

vrms

Virtual RMS -- for nagging you about those non-free programs (see above).

wammu

The graphical bit of gammu, the cellphone software.

wine

For running Windows programs.

wireshark

For monitoring your Net traffic (and pointing out to others how easy it is to monitor theirs).

Phew!

]]> http://mostlythis.com/post/42625453 Chocolate Mess: Chocolate mix skittles, not as i expected  - a m&m style mix of chocolate styles, but chocolate flavoured chews.  Sadly they just taste of sugar and a mildly choc aftertaste.  Not bad as such, just not chocolate enough.  A real [...] Mostly This 2008-07-17T21:37:25+00:00

Chocolate Mess: Chocolate mix skittles, not as i expected  - a m&m style mix of chocolate styles, but chocolate flavoured chews.  Sadly they just taste of sugar and a mildly choc aftertaste.  Not bad as such, just not chocolate enough.  A real chocolate centre would help.  Aquired from cybercandy.]]> http://rooreynolds.com/2008/07/17/headphone-fun/ I have a pair of JVC HA-FX300B sound isolation headphones which come with three different sized silicon rubber earpieces and a pair of memory foam earpieces for a customized fit They look like this and cost me a bit less than $100 (somehow I only [...] Roo 2008-07-17T15:21:29+00:00 I have a pair of JVC HA-FX300B sound isolation headphones which

come with three different sized silicon rubber earpieces and a pair of memory foam earpieces for a customized fit

They look like this

and cost me a bit less than $100 (somehow I only buy headphones in airports, and usually American airports). These rely on a good fit from the memory foam to block out external noise. It’s a lot like popping in a pair of earplugs, but with built in headphones.

I have a pair of Sony MDR-NC22 noise cancelling headphones. These

have an inside microphone on each earpiece that work with an electronic circuitry to create an opposite sound wave to reduce wave. Up to 75% ambient noise cancellation (12dB at 30Hz)

They look like this

and also cost me a little bit less than $100.

Taking the memory foam earpieces from the JVC HA-FX300Bs and fitting them to the Sony MDR-NC22s cost me nothing, and really works. The fit is (just) good enough that the memory foam pieces don’t fall off and get stuck in your ear canal, which is what I was scared of when I first tried it and still terrifies me. Apart from that, I can’t see any reason not to upgrade them in this way; now I have the best of both worlds: sound isolation and noise cancelling. Great for long flights.

]]> http://mostlythis.com/post/42586590 iQueue and Queue and Queue: The iQueue continues, apple’s reliance on signing people up via o2s groaning systems means this queue is unlikely to ever go away.  Theres a pre queue queue downstairs too. NICE! Mostly This 2008-07-17T15:13:23+00:00

iQueue and Queue and Queue: The iQueue continues, apple’s reliance on signing people up via o2s groaning systems means this queue is unlikely to ever go away.  Theres a pre queue queue downstairs too. NICE!]]> http://mostlythis.com/post/42585473 Holy PreReleases: So close you can almost touch it, about as available as a 16gig iPhone, it’s the nokia N96 -  behind glass in the nokia store.  It’s hard to get over excited about this as its basically an upgraded n95 in new nseries garb, more [...] Mostly This 2008-07-17T15:03:19+00:00

Holy PreReleases: So close you can almost touch it, about as available as a 16gig iPhone, it’s the nokia N96 -  behind glass in the nokia store.  It’s hard to get over excited about this as its basically an upgraded n95 in new nseries garb, more memmory thats also expandable. Shame the dodgy tv thing is next to useless outside of finland.  Still tempting though init.]]> http://thayer18.livejournal.com/13998.html I've been doing various events work this year, for some interesing and leading names in the web space. As some of you may know, I helped found Chinwag as a commercial venture, which then went on to launch Chinwag Live series. We also did Big [...] Thayer Driver 2008-07-17T11:07:23+00:00
As some of you may know, I helped found Chinwag as a commercial venture, which then went on to launch Chinwag Live series. We also did Big Summer 07 last year, which was a free party for over 2,000 people. Just 5 of us organised the whole thing, in 6 weeks. And I still have some hair left! ;-)

Then, earlier this year I was working with Mike Butcher at TechCrunchUK to help him kickstart some events in the UK and Europe. He's now jetting off all over the place meeting people and creating meet ups off the back of other events, as well as organising some really exciting ones of his own, such as the recent (very successful) Pitch! event.

Now I'm working at the Guardian, and looking into events as part of my research for my current role. Guardian events in the past have been on large scale, with a full events team organising events such as the Guardian brand at Glastonbury.

All these different types of event has got me thinking, what would be the best event you would want to go to? If you could combine all the aspects of events you've been to over the last few years, and come up with some almighty geek/tech/online/networking fest, what would it be like?

Mine would be something along the lines of, in priority order: Incredible speakers discussing their visions (not pimping their warez!), affordable pricing (I guess sub £100), good accessible venue in an interesting city, an exciting delegate list - perhaps one that's been thought out with tickets tactically released to ensure a wide range and spread of people, cool freebies/swag from sponsors, and great networking - be that at the venue or the pub down the road.

So come on, spill, what would your ideal conference/event look like? And while you're at it - I'd love to know what was your favourite event or conference you've been to this year, from a geek meet up in a pub right through to something like Le Web. It's whichever one left you with a "that was so cool I want to do it again next week!" feeling. The very first FOWA was mine.]]>