All you have to do is click on the picture to go to the competition website, find the out photo and give us your vote. Easy peasy .. so go on, what are you waiting for?

(The competition is only running for a few days, till Sunday 12th, so please tell everyone you know to pop by and give us a vote)

p.s. looks like the competition site isn’t behaving as it should. If clicking on the photo doesn’t take your the Gallery to vote, just go to the bottom of the page and click “Gallery”

Here’s my list of favourites in descending order:

• Google Skymap: Here’s a cute little app. It’s essential if you’re into astronomy, but if, like me you have just a passing curiosity, it’s still a lot of fun. It shows you a map pointing out the brightest naked-eye stars, planets, sun and moon, constellation lines, horizon, cardinal points, and Messier Objects. The awesome part though, is that it uses the phone’s GPS, accelerometer and compass to figure out where you are, where you are pointing your phone and therefore which part of the sky you’re looking at. It therefore shows you the night sky you’re looking at and helps you identify all the different objects you’re looking at.
  

  Read more about Google SkyMap

• Twidroid: An awesome Twitter client that does everything you may want from a Twitter client and then some. It can use your phone’s GPS or other location-based services to automatically post your location and the phone’s camera to snap and upload photos right to yourTwitter account. It does all the great things the best Twitter clients do, lets you retweet things efficiently, reply to tweets and DM people really easily. If you’re a Twitter fiend, it’s very much recommended.
  

  Read more about Twidroid.

• Shazam: Ever seen an application that looks just like magic? Well Shazam is one of those. Let’s say you’re sitting in the car and a great song comes on the radio. Don’t you hate it when the song finishes and you never learn what it was? Well, with Shazam, all you do if fire up the app, let it listen to a few seconds on your song and bang, it comes back with the name of the song, the artist and all the information you could ever want to learn about it.
  

  Read more about Shazam.

• Shopsavvy: Here’s another interesting application. It lets you scan a barcode on a book and tells you what the book is, giving you quick access to reviews about it. Big deal you might say; but there’s also another aspect to it. It looks for the book online and tells you what the prices are from a number of different online retailers; so if you’re in a bookstore, you can immediately tell if you have a good deal or not. But wait, there’s another twist. Using location-based services it also does a check of other book retailers in the area and check what they’re selling the book at. So, if the shop you’re checking the price in is too expensive, you can just nip next door and get it from the cheaper place.
  

  Read more about Shopsavvy

• Wikitude: This is just the most awesome application ever. Imagine you’re driving along and see a building on the horizon. You have no idea what it is. Well, Wikitude checks where you are, pings Wikipedia pulling down landmarks in the area, and uses the compass and camera in your phone to superimpose the inforamtion on the image you’re looking at. It’s a type of technology called Augmented Reality and you have to see it to realise just how awesome it it.
  

  Read more about Wikitude

These are just five of the applications I have tried so far. There are others out there that I haven’t got to yet, one particular area I’m interested in is live video streaming services, but I just haven’t managed to find anything that works for me yet. I also have a number of games that are going into a similar post to this, that is .. when I get round to posting it. There’s some amazing stuff in there, so if you have an Android phone and haven’t seen one of the five above, just pop onto the Market and give them a try. They’re all free!

So, after poking around the Web a bit, I came across Jamendo, a site I had never been to before. It’s a place where artists can upload tracks and albums that they want to share with the world, music which is covered by the Creative Commons license, allowing people to share and make use of their work without having to specifically ask for a license. Anyway, I found a track to use and created a video using it. But I wanted to mention the site on my blog so that I can return back there next time I needed some music. I’ve also downloaded a few tracks to listen to, maybe I’ll get to find some new exciting bands. Here’s the video I created:

They’re photos from a weekend we spent down in Butlins. We had an awesome time as you can see from the photos. Loads of swimming, photos with Bob the Builder, live entertainment, candy floss .. you get the picture. We’ll be back!

Do you have an antivirus and antispyware package running on your machine? Well, if you don’t, you should really get one, because you’re taking a pretty heavy risk by not staying protected. And nowadays you can find a combined package that does performs both these roles, instead of having to install two different packages.

One such product is VIPRE which is a combined Antivirus Software and Antispyware Software package rolled into one. It’s promises combined protection from viruses, trojans, rootkits and all sorts of other nasties. It’s also available to try on at 15 day trial if you want to give it a whirl.

Whatever you do, just don’t stay unprotected!

The Isle of Man Section of the BCS is organising a talk tomorrow focusing on Dependency Injection as a coding technique. Here’s some more detail about the event:

Our next event is about a programming technique called Dependency Injection. Here’s a brief outline:

As software applications grow in complexity de-coupling your code becomes more important. Dependency injection is one of these de-coupling techniques. Explore dependency injection and inversion of control design principles and how they lead to loosely coupled code (a good thing), very testable code and more flexible applications. We will also look at the use of DI containers as an aid to Inversion of Control. See how you can start using these today

The talk is aimed at professionals involved in different aspects surrounding the development of software. The talk will be presented by Zakir Hoosen, from Fuzzelogic Solutions, who specialise in the provision of technology services over a range of different technologies and methodologies. You can read more about them on their profile.

More details and  CPD certificate available for download on the BCS Event Details page.

I’m planning on being there. Any others with an interest in programming coming along?

So, who are BuyDig anyway? They’re a Digital Superstore operating in the US who have been around since 1996. They sell all sorts of electronic goods from flat panel TVs to security cameras; a wide range of SLR digital cameras (including the Nikon D90 and others) all the way to their Home and Garden category including kitchen gadgets and baby gear. It’s a pretty comprehensive catalogue which merits the name “SuperStore”. The pricing looks pretty competitive too, but as they don’t ship outside the US, this site is really for my buddies across the pond.

They have some cool kit too. For example, one of the things that I saw on their Twitter feed was the Wacom Bamboo Craft Scrapbook Kit which is a tablet, mouse and pen combination that lets you play around with your photos, create drawings and creating and maintaining your digital scrapbooks in a brand new way. Another product that caught my eye was the Celestron VistaPix 8×22 Binocular (shown alongside) which has a built in digital camera, now that’s a cool gadget.

So if you’re based in the US and looking for an online supply for your gadgets, check out BuyDig.com and make sure you follow them on Twitter.

photo credit: Many Cats 4 Me

Are you interested in Social Media and based in the Isle of Man? If so, you just have to join us for lunch next Thursday. Whether you’re interested in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Friendfeed, Mister-Wong, Buzzster, Mixx, Furl, YiGG, Fark, Hugg, Propeller, Simpy, Sphere, Spinn, Tumblr, Blinklist, Multiply, Netvouz, Bebo, StumbleUpon, Diigo, MySpace, Strands, Technorati, Squidoo, Spurl or any of the other millions (well it feels like millions sometimes) of social networks around; you should come and join us. If you’re interested in blogging, wikis, message boards and other ways of building community online; you should come and join us.

The Manx TT is over next week, so you don’t have any excuse that you’re racing your motobike, your zero-emissions vehicle or even one of your Yamaha Rhinos over the mountain. So go read all about it on Sherrilynne’s blog or just come down to Paparazzi on Thursday at 13:00. We’ll all be there.

(I’m sure I had some photos here from previous events, but I’m not sure where I put them!)

Mike has agreed to share is knowledge with us, and will be giving a talk on the 3.5 language features, covering Lamdas, Extension methods and linq. I’m sure it will be interesting for everyone.

As you can imagine its been challenging finding a venue especially around TT week. A company in Ballasalla has kindly allowed us to have a room for the evening of the 23rd June 2009.

So the second meeting will be : Tuesday, 23rd June 2009, Global House, Station Road, Ballasalla. Its the office park next to the Ballasalla station. Should we say around 6:15pm.

See u there!

The presentation is being given by Mike Cromwell who is to Visual Studio what Tiger Woods is to golf clubs. Come listen to some new ideas and technique that can help you up your game. It will be a great geeky evening.

Word of the new release has already started spreading, but most people will find out about it when they log into WordPress and it tells them there’s a new version. I’ve uploaded two blogs using the in-built upgrade mechanism and everything was smooth, thought I had to restart the process a couple of times till it completed. Presumably users on faster servers won’t have the same issue.

Most of the changes are a step in the right direction I think, faster admin UI and better handling of widgets are among those. I’m a bit unsure about the theme uploader/upgrader as I think some people may lose theme customisations this way and I don’t think I like the new plugin interface, but all in all I’ve been looking forward to this drop.

One interesting thing to report. The WordPress admin interface was broken with Firefox 3.5b99, but this new drop of WordPress has resolved that issue because of an upgrade in the Javascript components used by the admin interface. So go ahead and upgrade to the latest versions of stuff, things seem to be working nicely!

(P.S. I’ve noticed that the upgrade has disabled one of my plugins that provided paged comments, but seeing that this is now a built-in feature of WordPress, I was quite happy for it to deactivate it)

Simon’s talk was split into 3 section, talking about current views from accademia, some pointers from Obama’s recent campaign and some personal thoughts on eDemocracy. Rather than repeat his material, you can actually watch it here:

It’s interesting to see technology being such a major enabler of the way we live and the way the country is run. Not having an Internet connection is no longer an excuse, with technologies like ADSL and mobile satellite everyone in the country has the option of being online. The question, I suppose, is whether you consider Internet access the Fourth Utility.

(Oh, and a massive thanks to @sherrilynne for organising the event.)