It has however been working with Google on a Flash player for their PPAPI (Pepper) plugin API. PPAPI is an experimental cross-platform API for dealing with browser plugins and it is currently only found in Chrome and Chromium. This will be the only way for Linux users to get a new version of Flash. The upside being that Chrome and Chromium are pretty good browsers anyway, but if you must have Flash you’ll at least benefit from some feature parity with Windows and Mac users.

What this will mean for other Linux browsers (Firefox, Opera, Konqueror etc) while Flash continues its slow, steady decline into irrelevance I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound that good. In a year or two it probably won’t matter, given that Flash is already dead on mobile devices, the upcoming Windows 8, 64bit Linux and anything else Adobe finds a bit tricky.

Still, I’d imagine pro-HTML5 talk to start radiating from the offices of Mozilla with renewed enthusiasm very soon.

Woohoo, there’s a new Borderlands 2 trailer out.  This one is a lot more helpful than the previous one, what with the actual gameplay clips and some indication of what we can expect.

On the face of it it looks like we can expect a lot more of the same, which is no bad thing in my eyes.  The cell-shaded art style is all present and correct and Claptrap is back once more.  The same dazzling variety of guns, the RPG elements and the weird-looking enemies are there too.  There’s also a split-screen two-player option to get your teeth into.

I was a big fan of Borderlands and a sequel is definitely on the shopping list when it is released in September 2012

You may remember the Motorola Atrix from last year. This was an impressive device that had the ability to be docked in a (hilariously expensive) laptop-like docking station and work like a normal laptop, all from this one phone. Unfortunately the operating system it booted into was not the greatest. Whilst it was Linux it was not a shining example of the Linux desktop.

It looks like Canonical spotted an opportunity there and now it wants to be that desktop OS you boot your phone into.

It’ll be interesting to see if anyone takes them up on this, or whether anyone will care if it does. The main problem with these high-end devices is the compromises they have to make in order to achieve the headline specifications – battery life, user interface, looks etc. It’s all very well having a phone you can use as a laptop, but not much good if it’s a nightmare to use as a phone.

Anyway, take a look at the Ubuntu website linked to above, perhaps this is something that interests you.

You’ll find the consultation here. Alternatively, you can jump straight to the PDF document here

Our approach will enable the Government to work collectively together but effective open standards for software and systems are required to ensure interoperability between software systems, applications and data.

Having scanned through the document it’s worth mentioning that this is all about the concept of openness and there’s no mention of Linux, ODF, Unix or any vendors or technical detail. If you are looking for that then you’ll be disappointed.

On the 2nd paragraph of page 5 it does seem to suggest that there is no universally accepted definition of the term “open standard”. They clearly need your help!

You’ve probably seen the Linux Action Show on here before, but I’m sharing one of their episodes again because it concerns KDE 4.8.

KDE is one of those desktops that I’ve spent ages trying to like. The most recent versions of KDE 4.x have been achingly gorgeous to look at and extensively customisable, but yet I find myself getting a little turned off by it somehow.

Annoyingly the reason for this is not something I can put my finger on. It is arguably more straightforward to use than Gnome 3, less annoying than Unity yet I still don’t opt for the KDE version when I go to download a new distribution.

Still, the Linux Action Show seems to think very highly of it, so maybe 4.8 will be the one…

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Mildly amusing video here which sums up why I do most of my questing alone! Non-player characters invariably get in the way or end up dead and using them tends to be counter-productive. Lydia seems like too nice a girl to risk her becoming dragon-food…

Today I played a few different games and had more time to adjust to the controls and my opinion took a bit of a jump.

I had a quick game on Reality Fighters first of all. This is a fun augmented reality fighting game which has a number of pre-made characters and the option of creating your own with your own face. You can also use the terrain around you as a backdrop, but there was already an “English Countryside” stage installed and ready to go. Even when using a pre-made background it uses the motion sensors and camera to track the device in 3d space. Before you start the fight you are asked to place the characters onto the screen, but once you do that any movement of the device results in your character drifting towards the edge of the screen. This took some getting used to initially, but it would make more sense out in the real world rather than a shop demo unit. Still, it was an entertaining game that could be fun with another Vita around.

Next up was Wipeout. This is a very pretty game that remains faithful to recent Wipeout games on the PS3. It doesn’t seem to do anything different from what I’ve seen before, but it’s a very attractive and faithful representation of a well-worn racing franchise.

Finally, Escape Plan impressed me. It puts the front & back touch interfaces to good use, allowing you to manipulate the environment with taps and swipes in order to provide a safe path for your character. Platforms can be pushed out into the path of your character using the rear touchpad and obstructions can be flicked out of the way using the touchscreen. It uses the touch screen for all movement, which takes a bit of getting used to. Your character will walk off a ledge if you are not careful! Still, of all of the games I’ve played on the Vita, Escape Plan is probably the one I’d pick up with the device.

Sadly, February is an expensive month for me, so I’m going to have to wait for a bit longer before I can get one of my own. In the meantime I’m going to have to make do with watching videos of it.

I’ve watched a few video reviews of the new Uncharted title for the Vita and there appears to be a common thread running through all of them – the controls.

Whilst it is true that the Vita is well equipped where control methods are concerned, it appears that developers are trying to use all of them, whether it benefits the gameplay or not. Such a shame. I had high hopes for Uncharted on the Vita and it sounds like they’ve bottled it.

Still, it looks very nice…

It suggests that while the Swiss will be quids in when the change happens, the UK will see prices increase by between 20 and 35%. This has sparked fears that struggling businesses are going to be seriously out of pocket at the worst possible time.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We need to seriously think about cutting the umbilical cord we have with mother Microsoft. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t go our own way in terms of enterprise-class software. There is no gain for us in sending billions across the Atlantic ocean to Microsoft when we could be taking the initiative ourselves and perhaps forking a Linux distribution for our own corporate and government needs or just using what is already out there.

If your business is going to be affected by silly software cost increases, give Linux a chance. It costs nothing to try and if you like it and need support, most large Linux vendors offer support contracts.

Good news everyone! Apple has announced the follow-up to OSX Lion and any questions over which large cat they were going to use next has been answered.  Coming in the summer of this year is Mountain Lion (Leopard – Snow Leopard – Lion – Mountain Lion…it fits!).

As many will have predicted, the “iOSification” has been cranked up a notch and more features from its smaller, more portable siblings are making their way across:

• Airplay mirroring
• Gamecentre
• Twitter integration & a share button across applications
• Reminders
• Notes
• Notification Centre

You’ll also be able to make use of iMessage on your mac thanks to a new Messages app.  You can actually get your hands on that right now because Apple has released it as an open beta for OSX Lion users.  Get it here.

Presumably they’ve also fixed the Documents In the Cloud integration that has been sorely missing from Lion too.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the tech press (specifically those with developer accounts!) for more details over the next few weeks.  Still, it looks like a fun update.  Right, on with the Messages app download…

Unfortunately, if you’ve arrived here using a mobile device you may have noticed a bit of an issue with embedded video in some of my other posts. I use Jetpack short codes to embed video from YouTube and Vimeo, but with WPTouch 2.6 the videos appear in a narrow banner across the page.

I’ve yet to try conventional embed code to see if that works any better, but there certainly seems to be a problem with using the short codes in any case.

The solution involves uploading a text document containing some custom CSS as described here, but until I can get to a desktop with an FTP client the embedded video on dozens of posts on this site will look odd.

The normal desktop view works fine however, so I’d be grateful if you would scroll to the bottom of the page to switch to the desktop view until I get it fixed.

All credit to BraveNewCode for responding so quickly to my support form post. Their customer service has been hard to fault so far. It’s just a pity that the update is having teething problems.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Update!

We’re all patched up, so the videos on this site should be working for you now.

Phew!

Uncharted Golden Abyss may be grabbing the headlines at the moment, but this game looks really good. It’s seems like a pretty authentic & good looking Mortal Kombat experience you can play on the bus. An encouraging sign for Sony’s new handheld.

The PS3′s web browser has finally received a much needed update. The Netfront-based browser has been beefed up in firmware version 4.10 to deliver a fairly respectable 99/100 in Acid3 and 7992ms in Sunspider 0.9.1. It also scores 2253/50000 in ClubCompy. This is way behind the current crop of desktop browsers, but it is a step in the right direction.

It isn’t yet HTML5 compatible, but is flagged as HTML4 with some HTML5 components.

It isn’t going to be your first choice for browsing the web, but it is at least a bit more functional now.

I’ve been waiting for this game. The Darkness was a largely forgotten gem from the folks who brought us the Riddick games. It had a great story, an awesome vocal performance from Faith No More’s Mike Patton and an alluring feeling of power.

The Darkness 2 has a different developer and a different visual style, but it still looks interesting.

Sadly, I’m still very much engrossed in Skyrim so I won’t be picking this up immediately. It’s on the list, alongside Arkham City.

On the strength of the demo, which features a carefully scripted mix of scenes to settle you in to the game, rather than simply dropping you into the opening section, it is clear that the Darkness 2 is going to be a fun, gory romp.

Your Darkness powers have been ramped up and can be upgraded XP earned from particularly bloody kills.

It’s hard to tell how the story will pan out, but it’ll be a fun journey nonetheless.

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Being away actually led me to this first post back after my break. I’m an iTunes Match subscriber and use it with an iPad, iPhone and a Mac. I took the iPad and iPhone away with me, but both were without data for a week or so. Whilst I was bored (believe it or not, I failed to escape the tedium of “Homes under the Hammer” even out in Tenerife) in the apartment I decided to make a couple of playlists using tracks from my entire library, ready for when I returned and could listen to the tracks that were not on the device.

As it turns out, this was a very bad move. As soon as I returned to data-rich UK soil my new playlists went crazy and started to replicate themselves. I ended up with a few thousand identical playlists which contained no tracks whatsoever. The sheer quantity of playlists that spawned from this meant that my iPad, iPhone and mac ran rather slowly when trying to do anything with them. A few people have found that this usually happens when Airplane Mode is turned on too.

Manually deleting them from the iPad is time-consuming and frankly a waste of effort and deleting them from the phone is no picnic either. Thankfully, deleting them from the mac is a little easier.

Automator

On the Mac you have a really useful little application called Automator. This basically takes all of the legwork out of any number of pre-defined laborious tasks you can perform on your system. As luck would have it, there is an Automator script for deleting empty playlists.

It’ll take a few minutes to rattle through a few thousand playlists, but it’ll get there in the end. However, the situation is complicated slightly by the way iTunes Match works.

Now, the way I managed to get rid of everything is as follows.

The Fix

I tried restoring from backups for my iOS devices and this didn’t help at all. I also tried turning iTunes Match off and on with all devices, but this didn’t work either. So, to get back to a more reasonable number of playlists, open up iTunes on your mac and briefly scoff at the thousands of playlists in the left-hand list. Open up Automator and pick the new workflow option.

Make sure iTunes Match is turned on on any iOS devices you have attached to your account before proceeding.

Select the Music option in the first column, “remove empty playlists” in the 2nd list and drag it into the 3rd column. Press the run button and go make a cup of coffee.

When it has finished deleting them, go to the Store menu option in iTunes and select “Update iTunes Match”. Now, you may look at your iOS devices and see that they are all still there. It’ll take some time to filter through the system and they may well reappear in iTunes a few more times. Just keep running the Automator script if they do come back and they should eventually disappear and stop returning. Turning devices on and off, manually closing the Music app on iOS a few times may help to speed the process up too.

Why not turn iTunes Match off? If you do that, the playlists remain on the device and when you re-enable iTunes Match they’ll just spread around to the other devices again.

I offer no guarantee with this method, but it worked for me. It took all day to get there, but it worked for me.

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Also fixed is the wifi issue experienced when waking your machine from sleep mode and a few new RAW formats have been added to the compatibility list.  Full details of the update can be found here.

As with most other update packs for OSX, there’s also a number of security fixes too, although the link they provide for details on that seems to go to a page that doesn’t really give a lot of information away.  See here.

I know that as human beings we have a deep-seated fascination with what was cool when we were younger.  I personally love watching movies from the 80′s; love listening to the same bands I did when I was in high school and find myself wearing a lot of the same sorts of clothes.

I’m also aware that now that we have digital photography, film is on the rise in select groups.  Lomography and the fascination with taking photos that look like they’ve been pushed through a lavatory u-bend is all the rage these days and I must admit, there is a certain charm to these images.

However, retro IT is not cool.  Software development moves on and things usually get better, more secure but in some cases more bloated, but this is progress whether you like it or not.  Rolling out software that is over a decade old is really not a good idea.  Your IT administrator may like it because it means he/she doesn’t have to learn anything new, but it is going to be bad for you and your users in the long run.

IE6 isn’t secure, it isn’t standards compliant and it can’t even handle RSS feeds.  It’s a bad browser, hated by people who have to work on the web, loved by very few.  There is no reason for it to grow in market share.

Considering Windows 7 was showered in such praise it’s a little hard to understand why XP is also on the rise.  I’ll admit than in both IE and XP stakes we’re only talking about small changes in percentages, but it’s still a rise at a time when it should be falling, fast.

If you are about to embark on a new enterprise network rollout and your IT contractor (or anyone else) suggests using software from a time when the internet made a loud shrieking noise before it started working and people still used Netscape Navigator, you may want to show them the door.  Please.