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.

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!

How do you do it?

Use the National Rail website to look for your fares. Enter the details of your journey as you would normally (including the return information). When you’ve got the results hit the ‘Check Fares’ button, and look for options in the ‘Advance’ row under ‘Singles’. These are the fares you are interested in.

By clicking the ‘See All Details’ button (under the timetable) you can view information about the train services listed; who they are operated by, where the service runs from-to and what stops it will make. Take note of the ‘Retail Service ID’ - this is the ID of the train, and if possible you want to match your tickets so you are travelling on the same train (to save you changing).

Have a look at the stops listed and then try planning a new journey, but split it into two parts (in my example above I split Bristol - Edinburgh into Bristol - Birmingham then Birmingham - Edinburgh). When you come to look at the ’second leg’ of your journey, plan from the time your first train gets in - it may be you can stay on that train (check to see if the Retail Service ID’s match under ‘See Details’, and save money just by using two single tickets.

That’s it. I’m afraid there is an element of trial and error, but if you can spend 20 mins - an hour on it, you can make substantial savings. There are restrictions in place on advance tickets, but if you’ve saving almost a hundred quid a pop, I think they’re probably worth it.

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!

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

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.

Tethering (using your iPhone as a USB or bluetooth modem to access the net) also seems high on the rumour mill, fueled by comments from an AT&T Mobility Exec that they would have a solution “soon”. Time will tell if users would be willing to pay (in the case of the USA) the $30 extra per month that their BlackBerry cousins do.

A hope of my own being mirrored by others is also that the widescreen keyboard in Safari will be available in SMS and Email programs to ease text entry, particularly in long emails and the like. Something which will no doubt be a shame to here for Michael Schneider, author of the $1 TouchType app which does just that.

Multimedia messaging (MMS) is rearing its head too. Something missing from the iPhone, but not something I’ve found myself beside myself without. There is a handy app to view your received MMS already, and you can send them by purchasing credits through the application, but it would be better to see it all integrated the Apple way. Something which should have been done from the off. Another ‘from the off’ is the ability to forward text messages, also rumoured to be on the way.

‘Spotlight’ search functionality is also on the rumour cards, along with turn-by-turn voice directions following the ‘talking’ iPod Shuffle this week and voice speed dialing for when you’re driving are  also possibilities.

One which would be a big seller for me, as I have said before, would be the inclusion of an A2DP (bluetooth headphones) profile for the iPod side of things. Oh how I long for a life (and car) free from wires trailing all over my dashboard!

The other biggie, of course, would be the inclusion of background processes for 3rd party applications. Even if it were just a polling/cron system to allow applications to check for updates/messages, for example, this would be a big win. The Facebook app makes use of the red bubble notification to tell you about unread messages in your inbox, but only after you’ve fired up the app (and most likely read them). This is just one way thing that could be improved by background processes. Of course, it’s only a small leap until your phone is buzzing every 30 seconds with Twitter updates - something which I’m sure we’ll all agree would be a bad thing.

So what’s in store? Only Apple knows at the moment. The rest of us will have to wait until tomorrow to find out, when I really hope they announce the following three (excluding Copy/Paste, which should have been in from the off ;)):

1. Landscape Keyboard
2. Background Processes
3. A2DP Profile

Update: 18th March 2009

So, lots of good things yesterday! 2 out of my 3 biggies are coming, and the background processes (which I wanted primarily for notifications) has been addressed. Copy/Paste is in (finally) and there was a weird round of applause for supporting sending multiple pictures in an email (really guys, that exciting? Everything else has been doing it for ages!).  Spotlight, voice memos and landscape keybords all look good. But some of the more interesting features announced yesterday I think have to be the peer-to-peer and in-app purchase functionality. That’s really gonna open up a whole new world of possibilities.

Links:

• CNET
• TheBoyGeniusReport

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.

The move by GooTube perhaps seems like a fairly huge overreaction, possibly a move to ‘bully’ the PRS into compliance (well, you can have this much, or nothing at all!). But bullying or not, at the moment everyone is losing out.

To look at it from another angle, perhaps YouTube should be viewed more as a continuous on-demand advertising platform (and a highly targeted one at that), rather than a TV station. I don’t know exactly how the PRS collect royalties, but one would hope they wouldn’t be so stupid to collect royalties from an advert commissioned by a record label to promote a new album, for example.

The new ‘click to buy‘ feature introduced on YouTube at the end of January you would think the PRS would be embracing, as it surely must have had a positive impact on sales. Except of course that money goes direct to the artist/record label.

Of course, YouTube is but the most popular amongst the myriad of video sharing sites on the net, I suspect many of whom pay the PRS nothing. Perhaps their time would, in the short term, be better spent trying to negotiate deals with those sites. After all, it’s where the UK consumers they are trying to protect will soon be turning for their music videos.

More at:

• YouTube row: Will music fans lose out? - Radio 1 Newsbeat
• Google and PRS in deadlock as music videos pulled from YouTube - The Guardian
• YouTube stands by UK video block - BBC News, Technology

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!).

Personally I think what eSports needs to succeed though is consistency. Traditional sports are familiar, they have rules which are infrequently changed and the games stay the same.

As it stands each year a publisher has a different title released and wants to push that, as a result the games seen in competition vary largely from year to year (CS and WC3 being pretty much the only ones to stand the test of time). The UKeSA is already talking about changing the line up and, whilst this will keep publishers happy (and give them somewhere to spend their marketing budgets), it will continue to be frustrating and confusing to Joe Bloggs sat at home watching ‘the match’.

Imagine trying to follow ‘football’ year on year if the game changed from football the first year to something akin to rugby the second, then hockey the year after that.

Once a stability in the games (and players) is established the perhaps significant leaps and bounds can be made to turn it into a ‘real’ sport the likes of football, cricket or any of the many traditional sports with televised matches and the like. 

On a separate note, and perhaps I’m being overly cynical, but I’m not sure about the people behind it decreeing they are the UK’s official governing body of eSports. It gets interesting if you do a bit of digging around on companies house. The director of the UKeSA, Spyro Korsanos, is also the director of TNWA Ltd (the company behind EnemyDown) who have, surprise surprise, been award the rights to host the first year.

UKeSA’s charter outlines it as a “not-for-profit” organisation, but I wonder how much TNWA is charging UKeSA for running the operation? It’s a cunning plan: name yourself the official UK body, which gains you credibility, generate income to a very noble ‘not for profit’ outfit, then slide the ‘profits’ out the back door to your sister company.

If it ends up being beneficial to industry and eSports in general, then fine, but I’ve seen a couple of “your questions answered” articles on UKeSA where they’ve been a little cagey about revealing the ‘hidden connection’ between the two outfits and it seems to me like there is a hidden agenda and something to hide.

Here’s a direct link to my comment.

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.

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!

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