Microsoft IE8 Ads

I’m really liking the.. somewhat unconventional, but still pretty cool, new tv ads Microsoft has out for Internet Explorer 8 – I’ve Youtube linked a few below. Definitely different from the norm. Whatever they’ve got the advertising department on, they should keep them on it :P

Turns out they’ve pulled the above one, apparently some of their customers found it offensive. :P

While the ads are great, I don’t think their entirely representative, when I used IE8, I didn’t really like it, it seems almost as slow as IE7 (maybe it’s just my computer) and I didn’t like that. Firefox for me, still :)

BBC Blast

I went to a BBC Blast workshop yesterday afternoon, which was held at the seafront in Aberystwyth. And it was great. It’s really obvious the huge amount of planning that went into it, and while I only went to one workshop, Film Music (I’ll explain in a minute) it was great fun and everything looked really well run.

I actually originally wanted to go to the Dr Who prosthetics workshop, they were doing injury makeup and such, but I missed my chance with that, and went to a different one instead, which turned out to be great fun. We made music, using Mac software called Garageband, either just to our own, or to go with some premade videos that they provided.

I chose to do mine to the blast video, hopefully I’ll be able to link it from Youtube below. We had a great guy, I don’t remember his name, who taught us all about how to use it, very quickly, and then stuck around to help us out making some cool music.

Garageband is a really cool piece of software, and yesterday was the first time I’ve really had a chance to play with a Macbook Pro, and I think their great. Really great. I love the way the touchpad works, that’s one of the first things I noticed.

I’m *hoping* that my first EVER upload to Youtube will be a success, and that it will appear *magically* below :D

There’s a red box on Wordpress, so hopefully it’s worked :)

Anyhow, that’s the first I’ve heard about any of the workshops the BBC have been running throughout this year, and it’s got to be said, this one was really well run, everyone enjoyed the various different workshops, and everything was great.

And I even got a free t-shirt.

Increasing Battery Life on Nokia 6220 Classic

I’ve had a Nokia 6220 Classic for a little while now, since I changed my contract in April, and one thing that’s struck me is the awful battery life. I rarely get more than 12 hours out of mine, and while I’m a heavy user (i send mid range thousands of texts a month), it’s still pretty bad, and my old phone managed better. So I did a bit of digging, and I’ve found a few ways to boost the battery life. It’s still not amazing, but it’s a damn sight better than it was to start with.

The first way is to disable the 3g mode on the phone. I did this, and I found it almost tripled my battery life, from about 12 hours up to a few days. The way to do this is to open up the settings menu, and go to “”Phone Sett” > “Phone” > “Network” > “Network Mode” and switch it to GSM rather than dual mode. It should be noted that customers on the 3 network in the UK should probably not do this, as 3 rely on you using their 3g network, they have to pay to use o2 when you go 2g.

The second way I found was to make sure the minimum number of applications possible are open, this decreases drain too.

Turning off the menu transitions also helps, this can be done by heading too the settings menu again, selecting “Themes” then “General” and pushing Options (left soft key) and selecting “Theme Effects”. I actually disabled this not long after getting my phone, because it got on my nerves.

Turning down the backlight and time to screensaver is also meant to help, but in my experience, it doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference.

So.. What?

Let’s be honest. The internet has pretty much turned to shit recently.

By recently, I’m meaning the last year that I’ve been online, watching things happen, and there is just so much crap, that it’s not worth it anymore.

Two years ago I was passionate about the internet, I loved being online and working online, and I loved the income it brought forth. It was like miracle money. And the people I met were amazing too; I made some friends that I retain to this day; but more recently.. nothing.

It used to be great fun trying to make money online, and now.. There are so many people actually trying to live off of it, which, let’s be honest, was only ever going to work for a select few, and yet there are millions and millions of people descending on it like ants.

Everything is surrounded with spam, too. You can’t make a blog and keep it online for a week without some shitty comment spam. And it’s getting worse and worse, too. You look at Akismet, every day they block more and more complete trite, sent out by robots because their owners like fucking people over.

Hoardes of people sit infront of their computers on websites like DigitalPoint; trying to earn those last few cents, when, y’know what? You walk outside into the SUNLIGHT and walk a few miles, you’ll find a job. And you’ll earn 3, 4, 5x as much as you were online. Yet, nobody does. And that’s turned the internet to shit. Where is there that people can just hang out now; without it being centred about making money, or something like that? Nowhere; really.

So I’m done. I’m not going to pursue making money online anymore. I think it’s the best way; I don’t want to be part of the MMO hoard, and if I continue to run my two or three sites honestly without trying to profit from them, then they’ll do better without the rest of the money making getting involved. I’m getting out of the MMO community totally, probably out of the DigitalPoint community, and I’ll find somewhere else to go.

What’s more, I’m dropping the whole impartialness on my blog business. I’m not impartial, I’m 17, and I have a life. I’m going to write what I think, and maybe I’ll write more because i’m not avoiding stuff anymore. On top of that, this is my personal blog, and I’m not a businessperson, I’ll write what I’d be proud for a potential university to read, but further than that it’s coming from my heart from now on :] Some big changes afoot, possibly.

That, was long. And I enjoyed writing it. I don’t mind too much how much sense it makes, I wanted to write it, and I like it. I think 2009 will be a year of big change for me.