I see dead pixels

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New site sections

I have just created a few new sections to the website to try and make myself some money so I can afford to replace the ageing Anubis (shown in the two images). They are in the menu above called “IT Services” and “For Sale” of which both are pretty self explanatory.

The issue I am finding is that some of the new games I wish to enjoy I always have to run on moderate graphics settings because of the bottlenecks present in the system. Not unexpected as my computer is now five years old, although it is annoying how a machine I spent nearly £2000 on is now worth just a few hundred… Damn computer industry, moving so fast!

IT Services” section I added will probably remain up forever though, as in time I would like it to be a useful resource for what I can do for friends and family and also as a place for people to leave feedback perhaps to reassure others seeking help? Comments have been turns on for that purpose anyway.

Now I just need to some how find £1250 for a new computer… I have already made a number of cuts in my spending to increase my expendable income but its tough because Bath is so expensive to live in and prices for everything seem to increase all the time.

As my income remains static or increases at a slower rate than that of the cost of living I have to supplement my income. Its just a bit of a pain, as I have to work harder but not actually become better off as a result. Guess that’s life as usual then.

Sherlock sister sites

Guessing many people have been keeping up with Sherlock over the past few weeks on BBC as the series of 90 minute programmes have been quite entertaining. Hopefully they do more in the future.

I wanted to share the following websites the BBC crafted to help with immersion which I thought was pretty cool to be honest. They could have just made the series and be done with it, but they went the extra mile and made these mock sites that relate directly to the series progression giving you extra insight to the story.

Thought I would share the links for those who missed it anyway as its an interesting read.

Sherlock Holmes / Forum: http://www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk/
John Watson / Blog: http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk/
Connie Prince / Forum: http://www.connieprince.co.uk/
Molly Hooper / Blog: http://www.mollyhooper.co.uk/

All four of the sites have characters cross posting comments in the forums. Watson’s blog is probably the most entertaining though.

Thoughts on my Nexus One

So I have had my Nexus One for a few months now and I have to admit… I am even more impressed with Android now. Migrating from one Android phone to another was brilliant…

  1. Turn off old T-Mobile G1 Handset
  2. Turn on new Nexus One Handset
  3. Provide Google Account details

That’s it, all my contacts are downloaded near instantly, email synced, calendar synced and what surprised me was that some phone settings were retained. Nexus One even knew what time I had set my alarms for example.

Furthermore, I could provide my Facebook credentials and my work Google Apps credentials and all three accounts are brought into the phones one contacts list, but names get merged just on the handset, consolidating things on the phone neatly but keeping things separate in the cloud still.

Wireless Tethering also works well. My main concern was that Vodafone would use proxys or port blocking that would prevent me from running many of the applications I would need. However I can share wireless internet to my laptop and run Citrix ICA Sessions and Eve Online over the mobile connection perfectly out of the box.

After a few weeks I had refined the battery usage so get 2-3 days worth of use although as long as it lasts one day its fine. I am rarely away from a power supply longer than a day. WaveSecure seems to have kept my lifetime account valid too which was nice and it does not seem to impact battery either.

Finally, I recently got hold of WireGoggles off the Android Market. Some photos are below, its quite interesting and kept my interest for a while so worth the £0.60. I may purchase Vignette camera application at some point though, perhaps before I go to Denmark in September.

Desire vs Nexus One

As my T-Mobile G1 (Dream) contract finally comes to an end at the end of this month, I have to decide what handset I should upgrade to. There are two main smartphones that I am interested in, the HTC Desire and the Google Nexus One. Choosing is tough.

From a technical standpoint, the Desire and N1 are almost identical. They are probably the most powerful and feature rich handsets available on the market in the UK at present. Both being made by HTC, what is different?

Perks of the Nexus One

  • Noise cancelling microphone
  • Voice to text functions

Perks of the Desire

  • HTC Sense UI
  • Improved battery performance
  • Working FM radio
  • Slightly more memory
  • Optical trackball

For most users looking at this, it becomes clear that the HTC Desire is probably best.

However… I am a two year old HTC Dream user being accustomed to Android 1.6 UI. Perhaps I am a Android purest, but I really don’t like HTC Sense. So I am not sure I would like using the phone with such.

As for the Battery, seeing as both handsets have exactly the same CPU, Screen and Battery it has to just be optimisations that HTC did, which I can probably do myself. Regarding the memory of the Desire… I can only guess it has a little extra for the HTC Sense UI?

Both are great handsets to be honest, but I am learning towards the Nexus One. Not the right choice for many, but probably best for me. Just have to wait until the end of the month until I can get my new toy… :(

Something old and something new

Many years ago I used to have a Playstation, with X-Com: Terror from the Deep, and while it was the most ridiculously hard game I had played and took an age to load on the PSX, it was certainly fun. Always loved the music and atmosphere of the battles.

Steam in there wisdom published the entire X-Com series recently which was not special by itself, but they also did a special weekend offer of all of them for just £2. Not only that, they released it with a dos emulator so it worked straight out of steam on my 64bit Windows 7.

Damn, it felt good to get back into it and enjoy it again. I know the bugs now, but I still ran into a few with the good old research tree, but that does not matter really. The screenshot here is not scaled down to give you an idea of how old school the graphics were back then.

Its a totally awesome game, and if anyone has spare time and money to burn I would definitely recommend it. Its got a hard learning curve though, and takes a good few games to understand what to do and how to do it. Expect high casualties, lol.

Next is the new thing… Google recently launched Google Buzz. At first when I was reading the blog I was not overly impressed by what it could be capable of, as its nothing overly new or revolutionary.

It does however do what it sets out very nicely indeed. I can certainly understand how it will make social networking easier and more pleasant. For example, the issue I have with Facebook is its 100% confusing as hell and keeps changing, so you never really know who can see what, or what is public and what’s not.

Google Buzz sits inside Gmail, so its not confusing as it looks and works like you expect. Its also much more clear as to what is public and what’s not. It actually reminds me a little of the Google Reader interface. The only thing I don’t get at present is how content is pulled from other sources and displayed into Buzz yet, but that’s trial and error.

Either way, its a new shiny thing for me to play with, which is always welcome! :D

Seasonal Tier System Mark 2

In a similar fashion to last years successful christmas, I had hoped to set a budget on my Christmas spending based on how much excess cash I had availible and then use that divided into different tier’s as a means to budget the cost of christmas.

However, due to some ever increasing costs of living, even after cancelling some Eve Online subscriptions, it turns out from my cash flow monitoring that there is no cash flow. lol?

Below is the estimate for December 2009. I realise I will have to tweak that.

So this year we only have two tier’s and a new application process…

Tier 0 – Infinate Members
If your application as a Tier 0 friend or family is successful you will get an seasonal themed email from myself wishing you a Happy Christas and pleasent New Year. The email may even contain seasonal images for your enjoyment.

Tier 1 – 15 Members
If your application as a Tier 1 friend or family is successful you will one of 15 availible Christmas Cards. These will be given to you in person in most cases and be hand written by Ross Stone.

To apply as a Tier 0 or Tier 1 friend or family all you have to do is fill out the below Application Form.

Click Here for Application Form (Link Removed)

While I object to anyone buying me seasonal gifts, for family members that are instantant, please consider the following things that I am in need of:

  • Black trousers suitable for work (FYI: Waist 32in, Inside Leg 33in)
  • Shirts suitable for work (FYI: 16in Neck, Easy Iron!)

I don’t think there is anything else I need. Comments welcome below, but require moderator approval for people not registered on the site.

UK Government Fails…

I am referring to the recent news that the UK Government is even considering the idea of forcing ISP’s to disconnect users for whatever reason. It seems that Lord Mandelson and the Labour Party who seem to be even considering this are a bunch of idiots.

Almost everything I do now revolves around the Internet… From my work, gaming, shopping, and most importantly furthering my education and knowledge.

The idea that a Government seeks to control what households have internet, and what households do not is wrong. Imagine what that would do to a family, let alone a geek like me.

Of course, if this were to happen, people like me know workarounds. Mwhaha! But those who would be most effected will probably be family households. Next they will want to censor internet sites or control bloggers when we want to express our one sided opinions on our sites.

Anyway, it seems my concerns are being addressed, as we now have a Pirate Party UK. While it won’t be able to do much directly, if people support that party, over others. I would hope mainstream party’s realise users concerns when they start losing votes to the Pirate Party UK, and start adopting some more sensible policy’s regarding the Internet.

Hopefully they will have someone in my area I can vote for in the next General Election.

Creative endeavours

As I am not feeling down now, so back to my usual emotionless self. I wanted to share a few things that you can expect to see published soon on the site. As I have a number of artistic or creative projects on the go at present keeping me busy. From photo editing and sketching, to some php programming. (programming is art too)

One of these projects is a new poster I have been working on. Normally the images I create on the computer have a distinct amateur feel, or “MS Paint” look to them, so I spent some time with Photoshop working out how to do things professionally.

I actually had to make it look more amateur looking than what it was, so that the style will make people laugh and read what it was trying to promote.

To finish it, all I need is someone in Bath to spare a few minutes of there time to take a photo of me in a specific pose, and I can crop myself, past it in, tweak the layers in the image and job done.

Failing that, I will reluctantly do the “photo shoot” in the office at work… But walking through Bath with a Star Trek uniform is not something I would want to do too often.

I have also decided to try and pick up my sketching again, although I often get distracted… Its not great as its been a long time since I did this kind of thing, but still. I do love the architecture and culture around Kyoto.

Finally, the php stuff, which I mentioned in my last blog entry, so I won’t mention it in detail again. So yeah, I hope to have a few new things shared soon when I get them finished.

Beating the Recession with PHP

As well as a bit of self control, and more awareness of my spending. Actually, I am not too effected by this so called recession either to be honest, I am just spending too much money, so something that allows me to manage my money better, and learn coding more is a good thing.

I have been feeling a little down lately, so this helps keep my mind busy too, but I digress. So the plan!

Create a website written in PHP to track my finances, and present the information in easy to read reports.

  • Web Based Application
  • Import Natwest CSV Files
  • Automatically Parse Data
  • Display Cash Flow Report
  • Display Outgoing Summary

So lets say once a month I log into my online banking website and download my credit card and current account statements as .csv files. Then I upload them into my app and it processes all of the months transactions.

Now when I view the information from my app, I will be able to see my outgoings by category easily. So I will quickly see how much money I spent on food, as it automatically adds together all of my cash withdraws, and supermarket transactions for example.

The end result will be that I can both easily see how well I am doing with my self control, and also be able to see my cash flow hopefully increase month after month as I start to save money.

Such information would be formatted in a way where I could quickly spot areas, or categories where I think I am spending too much and could save more money, by keeping things in perspective and allowing you too maintain seeing the bigger picture.

  1. Learn PHP Properly, Back to the basics to learn how to code well, and to a high standard.
  2. Design Specification, Decide on everything it should do.
  3. Write Application, Spend time working on writing the application.
  4. Profit, Enjoy the benefits of more controlled spending.

Granted, by the time I finish, this recession may be over but at least I will then have something I can use to quickly monitor my finances for the foreseeable future.

The Greatest Story Ever Told…

I refer of course to Final Fantasy 7, of which I have a entire shelf in my bookcase dedicated to a shrine almost of FF7 related merchandise.

Final Fantasy 7 is finally availible on Playstation Network for Download!

Its a cheap £7.99, and 1326 MB Download…

Unfortunatly, my PSP has only got a 1 GB Memory Card!

Anyway, its truely a benchmark game, and a great story even if its now over a decade old. I encourage all to download it and give it a try.