subsphere.co.uk

I spent a bit of time updating the Quadrophobe website yesterday, using the fantastically flexible Wordpress platform and a number of plugins to bring together content from Flickr, provide a nice interface into upcoming gigs and performances and link off to their other digital identities (MySpace, Facebook and Last.fm). The band seem really pleased with it (which is nice :)) and hopefully it is simple (yet powerful) enough that they’ll be able to run the day-today functions of the site. Next addition is a Flash MP3 player for the band, so people can listen to the tracks on their website.

Check it out: www.quadrophobe.com

As part of the site I got round to uploading some photographs I took at the JackFM Next Big Thing competition a week ago to my Flickr account.

This coming weekend I am heading up to Scotland for a friends wedding, not having an airport handy (what a world we live in - cheaper to fly than drive or train) I decided to investigate the trains.

The price of train tickets in the UK is ridiculous, often leaving people feeling like they’ve been mugged paying £83.00 for a day return Didcot Parkway - London (46 miles as the crow flies), without even guarantee of a seat!

On my journey from Bristol Temple Meads to Edinburgh the return ticket price was quoted as £132.00. One-hundred-and-thirty-two pounds!! A lot of money. In the end I only paid £41.00 by splitting the journey into multiple ‘Advance’ singles. Admittedly I did use a railcard, but even without one the ticket price would have been £62.00 - a saving of over £70!

Bristol - Birmingham, then Birmingham to Edinburgh cost me £10.25 each, the same with the return leg. It’s exactly the same train, just by splitting my journey into singles I saved £91.00! Read the rest of this entry »

I updated my version of the excellent VLC media player today, to version 0.9.8a, which was punted my way from their download page. However regardless of the configuration and settings I chose (restarting the application inbetween) I cannot get it to output fullscreen video on my secondary monitor.

Buried under “Tools -> Preferences -> Show All -> Video -> Output modules” you can set which module to use for the output, and under *another* level of menu you can define settings for those modules. The options for DirectX are “Default, display, \\.\DISPLAY 1, \\.\DISPLAY 2″ and they all leave me with video being displayed on my primary monitor.

So after much cursing at what is, after all, an excellent application, I have taken heed of the ‘alpha’ status and downgraded to 0.9.6, which fixes the problem. A bug must have slipped in between the versions (no 0.9.7 version is listed on the download FTP), which hopefully will be fixed soon.

Until the bug is fixed in a future release, to fix this problem, download VLC 0.9.6 (Win32) to output the fullscreen video on the correct monitor. Other versions for MacOSX, etc, can be found here.

I hope this helps!

Twice this week I have seen a weird car driving around Wantage. A black Astra with a 5ft odd pole on top with what looks like 8 cameras pointing out in all directions. I commented at the time to family “wouldn’t it be cool if that was Google Street View, like they have in the States” and low and behold yesterday Google go an announce Street View for the UK!

Unfortunately on one occasion I was making lunch in the kitchen and the other time I was driving, so wasn’t able to snap a pic, but here is a pic from a quick image search…

So, look out for the mighty Wantage which is presumably just behind the top 25 UK cities to be added to Street View. In particular, look out for me in my kitchen window and sat behind it in my silver Astra at the traffic lights on Portway

The web is a wash with speculation over the coming iPhone 3.0 preview along with the new SDK scheduled for tomorrow, March 17th, at the Mighty Blue Apple’s HQ in Cupertino. It is worth noting that this is version 3.0 of the firmware, not 2.3, so we should be expecting something fairly major. Although the major works could be under the hood. Continuing from my iPhone 2.2 Wishlist, here are some of the additions I would hope have made the cut.

One of the most fundamental things (still) missing from the iPhone is the ability to copy and paste. This seems to be one of the most common rumours doing the rounds at the moment and, whilst not being particularly groundbreaking, would be greatly received by many. Read the rest of this entry »

Spreading like wildfire through Twitter and the social web yesterday were rumours, then confirmation, that YouTube and the Performing Rights Society (PRS), who collect money on behalf of record labels and artists whenever their music is played, had fallen out over licensing negotiations.

The dispute further highlights how traditional national bodies are finding it increasingly difficult to operate in the global village of the Internet, which has had a particularly profound impact on the way we ‘consume’ music in the last decade. Understandably each of these regional organisations don’t want to miss out on their slice of the pie, but bizarrely seem intent on destroying the very thing they are trying to embrace engulf at every turn. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent launch of the UKeSA hasn’t gone unnoticed by the mainstream media. There is a blog post on The Guardian website asking “could competitive gaming finally be entering the mainstream?” - something to which the answer is ‘yes’, if they keep covering it!

I’ve just posted the following musing in response:

I’m all for “eSports” breaking into the mainstream. I myself have enjoyed watching a number of very close matches between extremely talented teams, with professional commentary bristling with the kind of enthusiasm you would get from Murray Walker in Formula 1. It was a very enjoyable experience and was equally as entertaining as watching a football match. What’s more it’s not a patch on the ‘rock star’ status and high production values seen for eSports in Korea (@Greg Howson: where PC gamers are sexy!). Read the rest of this entry »

Some people find it hard to believe that I use Internet Explorer. Many of these people because of their unwavering fanaticism towards setting woodland urban animals ablaze. In fact I use pretty much 6 browsers almost every day (IE7, FF, Opera, Safari, IE6 & Chrome). I probably spend the most time in Firefox (developing using the excellent Firebug), however IE is my default browser. The truth is I’m not so much a fan of IE as much as a fan of the Google Toolbar for IE.

This wonderful Swiss Army knife additional to my browser transformed the way I browsed the web, long before I was using tabs. Adding a handy search box, spell checker, in page search for keywords at the click of a button and bookmarks you can get access to from any PC were just some of the features I found incredibly useful; and still use today. Some of these (such as custom search) I’d seen before, but these 25px across the top of my window seemed easy to use. Even now, Firefox users are still catching up in this regard, with version 5 of the toolbar, with syncing widgets and buttons, fully released for IE, whilst it’s still in beta for FF.

Perhaps then this was part of my excitement when I learned that Google were going to be releasing a browser.

Ok, so I’m slightly late to the party on this one, but I finally signed up for a twitter account the other day, to see what all the fuss is about.

I’ve read a number of articles and blog posts (many of which I’m afraid I can’t for the life of me find) about the scalability and load issues faced by the chirpy social site and my initial (and subsequent) experiences using the site have confirmed each and every one of them. Page load times are slow, often with CSS failing to load at all. It took me a number of attempts to even register to use the service!

I also question the how on a service called ‘twitter’, the individual updates are ‘tweets’. Surely they’re ‘twits’, or is that the name to a user? Not very good for marketing, granted, but perhaps more gramatically correct?

Not put off, although confused as to how anyone ever manages to post anything given my registration experience, I’m gonna give it a go and have found me some people to follow! How exciting!

I’ve also got the twitterific app for my iPhone, which seems nicely polished.

All I’ve got to do now is use it a bit, I suppose… see you on Twitter @rtoldham!

This has completely slipped me by (until now), but Youtube are in the process of putting together the world’s first virtual symphony.

The deal is simple, download the music, practise (there’s even a condctor for you to rehearse with ;)), then upload a video of you performing.

The best will be invited to perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.

The music is compose by Tan Dun (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame) and you can see a video of the pro’s (London Symphony Orchestra) performing the piece in October below.

Quite a cool little project, it’ll be interesting to see how it goes!

More at youtube.com/symphony