From 0 to 1

Ubuntu 11.10 DVD Booklets?

2011-12-23T02:34:00.000Z

So, I've been burning some Ubuntu 11.10 DVDs for use in my classes at College.

I found a really nice image to use as the Lightscribe Label (since they are Lightscribable discs, and I do have a Lightscribe drive it seemed a shame to forfeit the chance):

I hacked about with a previous DVD Wrap to make the case look really nice:

All seems ready to go, but something's missing... a booklet.

Anyone know where I could find a decent booklet to include inside the DVD box? I was thinking that something like the content of these pages would be nice, but presented nicely.

Drop me a line if you have any thoughts.

Cheers.
Grant. :)

Google finally doors right by its Apps account users

2011-10-31T22:49:00.001Z

Finally Google got Google Plus working for Apps users and got the Android app for it working pretty quickly too!

Could this be the start of Google finally paying their Apps users the attention we deserve instead of being left behind the test of the Google world?

Let's hope so.

Not impressee with Gogle's behaviour

2011-07-09T10:36:00.001+01:00

So I have a Google Apps account that has supposedly been "transitioned" to a fully-fledged Google account. But I have just found out that I can't have access to Google+, even if someone were to send me an invite, because Google+ requires that your Google account has an associated Google Profile... which is a feature that transitioned Google Apps accounts still don't have. I did read a post somewhere quoting various Google staff that Google Profiles will be coming to transitioned Google Apps accounts "in a few months". Funny that, I've heard that statement before! As I.understand it, Google Buzz also requries a Google Profile and we Apps users were told that Google Profiles would be coming to Apps accounts "in a few months" then... this was a good year ago, if not more!

Anyway, enough about the Google+ thing. There's something else that has irked me even more: Android Market.

I have had a 10" tablet running Android 2.1 since Christmas - a good 6 months or more. One of the reasons I went for this particular tablet is because, unlike others, it seemed to have access to Android Market. Hooray! I have downloaded and installed many, many apps from the Android Market - including a good many paid-for applications - in this time. This week when I visited http://market.android.com, signed in with my primary Google Apps account (the transitioned one) and started browsing the apps I discovered that my tablet had mysteriously disappeared from my list of devices. I duly contacted Android Market support only to be told that my device isn't "supported", and then the rest of the email gave me details of the Android Market licensing scheme... hmmm... not supported, or the manufacturer hasn't got a license? What sounds more plausible here?

So, it would seem that Google are retrospectively disabling access to the Android Market - even where the devices in question have had access for a significant period already. Now, although I'm a died-in-the-wood Free Software man, I do understand Google's need for licensing the Android Market application. The bit that irks me? As the user of the device, I have no way to change the situation. They are retrospectively penalising us - the users - for actions or inactions of the device manufacturers!

Android Startup Madness

2011-04-12T11:34:00.001+01:00

Why does Android insist on running pretty much all installed applications on startup? I can't see any benefit in doing this. Anyone know how to stop this? I'd rather find a way to prevent it from happening instead of finding (yet another) application that merely sits there and kills the app once it has started.

Thoughts?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

Amazon App Store for Android

2011-03-22T20:41:00.001Z

So Amazon have launched an app store of its own for the Android platform (much to the chagrin of Apple, I'm sure). But guess what... it's only available for the US market.

I don't know about anyone else, but I for one am getting a bit tired of large, international companies treating us non-US techies as second class citizens. I do not believe for one moment that Amazon have found any technical difficulties in releasing/deploying their App Store for non-US country where they already have a working Amazon presence.

Come on Amazon, why won't you give us the same benefits that you're giving our American cousins?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Apple's newest big mistake

2011-02-03T10:01:00.000Z

El Reg article here showing one of the latest mistakes from the orchard.

Apple are to reject any application that enables the developer to pursue a revenue stream outside of the AppStore. So if you're writing a cross-platform application that allows your users to purchase content on one device and use it on another, or even if you're thinking of writing an application which only gives users the full content if they've purchased a subscription (like certain newspapers), then think again.

Personally I think this is going to cause one helluva backlash against the orchard keepers. How are people like Spotify going to react to this news? As I see it, essentially Apple are saying, "30% of all subscriptions to Spotify for user of Spotify for iOS must be paid to Apple".

Ridiculous.

How cool would this be?!

2011-01-30T22:25:00.000Z

How cool would this be?!

3 bedroom house for sale in TORPOINT, PL11

Why I don't like the Ubuntu Messaging Menu...

2011-01-16T16:28:00.000Z

It seems that every where I look about Ubuntu apps, everyone is obsessed with the Messaging Menu. I really don't like it and here is why.

You don't know whether the entry is something you want to read until you've performed some action.

Picture this. You have your work email, your personal email, your Freecycle email, your Twitter, your RSS feeds and God-only knows how many other things notifying you of a new message via the Messaging Menu. It sits there, quite serenely with a green envelope telling you that you some some new form of communication. But what is it? You're kinda busy but you don't want to piss off your boss by missing his email, but equally you don't want to be disturbed from your work by yet another useless retweet by some twerp.

How do you tell, just from a quick glance, whether the new item causing your Messaging Menu to go green is important or not?

I have removed all aspects of the Messaging Menu from my Ubuntu system. I have all my applications with their own icons in the Gnome Notification Area. I can tell at a quick glance that I have 2 new tweets, an unknown number of RSS entries, 6 non-work emails, 0 new work emails and no new Skype or other instant messages. The only action I needed to take in order to establish this was to glance to the top of the screen. Had I still be using the Messaging Menu I would have had to stop what I was doing, move the mouse to the top of the screen, click on the Messaging Menu and find that the green envelope was hiding the fact that I didn't have anything important to warrant stopping my work.

Why do so many people love the Messaging Menu?! It's a time wasting menace!

Rant over.

Dental Adverts

2011-01-08T13:55:00.000Z

Why do all dental adverts - especially those for toothpastes - have to be shot at silly angles?

Answers on a comment please.

A new year for Free Software?

2011-01-02T13:52:00.004Z

Today (well, it is now yesterday) marks the beginning of a new year, but does that mean anything new for the world of Free Software? 2010 has seen some interesting trends which involve Free Software in some direct or indirect manner.

The rise of the iPad and the inevitable million or so Android powered tablets after it - this can only be a good thing... more Android exposure means more Linux users (in one form or another) which means more Free Software developers.

Apple's fight with Adobe - I happen to think Apple are partially in the right on this. Yes it is bad to restrict the languages and development environments available to developers for your product, but it is the issue about having Flash on iOS devices that really got my attention. Flash has long been, in my opinion, an easy get out clause for web developers who really can't be bothered to write their content to meet with existing standards. Sure JavaScript might not always be the nicest of languages to use, but it is consistent across all but the most obscure platforms. Hell, the vast majority of the (pretty awesome) WebOS platform is built around JavaScript. It is a very capable language if you give it a chance, and with God only knows how many pre-built libraries for it already available for you to use (can you say AJAX or jQuery?) it seems daft to stick with an outdated web platform such as Flash.

Anoer interesting thing that really caught my eyes in 2010 include the increased availability of data. This so-called "open data" approach enables some really cool projects to work. I watched a really cool programme on the BBC about statistics (yes, you did read the correctly - I used the words 'cool' and 'statistics' in the same sentence) and there was this little snippet in there about these guys in San Francisco who've made a (Google?) maps based approach to viewing crime statistics in their city - you could see locations of the highest reported instances of any given crime category right on your screen!

I have also become more interested in the Digital Freedom in Education & Youth project. A very grand title for something to encourage the discussion of, use of and involvement in Free Software projects by our younger generation. Thie something I hold very dearly as I am a firm believer that if we can encourage enough of the next generation to be savvy about Free Software then it will gradually become the norm everywhere rather than the exception.

So, my plans for 2011? I plan on being much more involved in the local Free Software scene - planning and attendning meetings and events, as well as making a concerted effort to get something happening in Plymouth about the DFEY.

Got any interesting predictions for 2011 regarding Free Software? Let me know in the comments.

Grant.

So glad I don't have an iPhone!

2010-12-30T18:46:00.000Z

I'm sure I could probably populate the entire of this site with my autocorrect mishaps if I had one!

Damn You Auto Correct! - Funny iPhone Fails and Autocorrect Horror Stories

A week with Android

2010-12-29T23:58:00.001Z

So, I've now had the 10" Android tablet for about a week... how is it going?

I've seen a couple of kernel panics; I've had a number of complete system freezes; many applications seem to be written with phone screen dimensions in mind without a thought to those with other sizes... but on the whole it's been a pretty good experience. I'm blogging this from it now.

Let's take those points in turn:
Kernel Panics
It's quite interesting to see these - I've not trawled through the logs yet to figure out what's causing the issue. I've seen it a number of times now, so I fully expect I will see another one soon. Having been using and abusing Linux systems for quite a while myself, I don't find the odd kernel panic too much of a problem. If it was paniccing all the time, then I'd maybe make a point of investigating a bit more quickly. Ordinarily I would now start banging on about how it shouldn't be this way with a consumer device, but 10" tablets don't seem to (yet) be the focus for Google so I don't expect my tablet is running a completely stock Android OS.

Complete System Freezes
It is quite annoying that some applications give no warning at all that they're not cut out for certain hardware. At least that is what I am currently presuming is the problem. Some applications I have downloaded from the Android Market have installed fine, but when I go to run them the whole thing freezes hard. It's times like this that I start to miss the whole "press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a text console" thing. Ah well.

Screen Dimensions
My tablet's screen is 1024x600; this is (I believe) a 16:9 aspect - not an uncommon aspect among phones, but certainly a larger number of pixels than most phones. Some applications (yes, mainly games) already get it right - the image scales really nicely. Others seem to do silly things like "place the image in the lower left corner of the screen" without finding out the dimensions of the screen and establishing if the image needs scaling or not. It does kinda make it hard to use and it does bring in to question how well these apps/games work on other sized screens too.

One more whinge and then I'm signing off.

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to control just what gets run upon startup. I initially installed a handful of different Twitter clients until I found one I was happy with (Plume gets my vote... for now) and all of them get run on startup... and yet not one of them seem to has an option to suggest this (or indeed turn it off). I really don't want my tablet to be running 30 different applications in the background immediately after starting it up.

Ok, I'm gonna quit now.

Adios.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Language is evolving, why stop it for politics?

2010-10-06T20:39:00.001+01:00

I am thoroughly sick of people insisting on using the objective form of the female general pronoun in order to be politically correct, ie using "her". Example:

it should endeavor to strengthen the ties between a user, her family, her close friends, and her true community

Fair enough, the author probably wanted to avoid using the politically-charged term "his" and implying that article was either targeted at, or in some way only relevant to males.

But what is wrong with the verbally accepted term "their". Yes, officially "their" is the objective form of the general plural pronoun "they", but it has been generally accepted in spoken English as a general substitute for "his" or "her", especially when the gender is unknown. Why can this not be used instead? It is gender neutral and doesn't require the author to re-write the sentence structure in order to accommodate using "one" (which also tends to sound quite pompous in modern English). Example:

it should endeavor to strengthen the ties between a user, their family, their close friends, and their true community

See? It works perfectly well.

Good Induction

2010-09-06T22:55:00.001+01:00

Today was the first day of our Induction week for new students. I think it all went relatively well.

Traffic Shaped

2010-08-24T18:29:00.001+01:00

Ouch! We're being traffic shaped until 10pm. *grumble*

Bad Neck

2010-08-18T00:23:00.002+01:00

My neck still hurts. It is slowly getting better, and I have a Dr's appointment tomorrow evening, but it's really quite painful to do anything.

*sigh*

Back from the Food Festival

2010-08-14T18:00:00.002+01:00

Phew! Just got back from the Plymouth FlavourFest - 'awesome' is the only word I can think of to describe it. Sure it rained (a lot), but we were holed up in the kids' tent for the worst of it. Got a fantastic deal on Westaway's Sausages, which are bloomin' lovely, by the way. :)

Obligatory "Hello World" post

2010-08-13T20:20:00.001+01:00

Ok, so this is my new blog. It is my intention to keep a log of all sorts of things on here, so expect small updates regularly... I hope.