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Not to worry though also have a nice little Dell Mini 12 which I use when I need to be portable. Coupled with a USB 3g Broadband device I can be quite mobile.

Accessing the big machine!

So in the past few weeks I have discovered some applications that I would simply be lost without. The first of which I would like to talk about is LogMeIn. This is a very compact web based remote access program. The program itself sits the computer that you want remote access to and then you take control via any web browser. Super simple and for home users free. I use LogMeIn when the task at hand is a little to challenging for the 1.6GHz Atom processor or 1GB ram on the Mini 12.

I do not always log in to my main machine at home though when I am working on the bus. Sometimes I use the little Dell. Despite the relatively low spec, there are times that I need to open a file locally to get the full range of colour etc.

Keeping files in sync

In the first few weeks this meant duplicating files right left and centre on the two machines. Often meaning leaving home with the wrong (outdated copy of  a file I had been working on. Enter DropBox. The basic service is again free of charge. Setup is straight forward and the application is quite small. You set a directory on your machine and DropBox keeps  it in sync with any other machines that you have linked to your DropBox account.

I have been using it to very good effect in the previous weeks. It also means that I am rarely carrying a USB stick with me as I can access all of the files in my DropBox account via their web interface also. DropBox works on Windows, Mac and Linux which is very handy as I work on a Mac in the office.  You can buy a premium account to increase the storage though the 2gb free account will be enough for most people.

Mobile

Of course I also use my iPhone when I am on the road. In recent weeks it has become even more useful with ActiveSync of mail and contact to gMail. I am considering hosted exchange for email having seen the advantages it has to offer after setting it up for a client of mine. We shall see though. DropBox above also has an iPhone app with limited support for opening certain file types. Really handy in a bind though.

I will be updating this a little more regularly as I find more useful applications for those on the move.

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2D Sonic to make return!

Well today is indeed a good day. First they confirm that The Hobbit is being made and now this!!!! There is going to be a brand new 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game in 2010. I know I am not the only one who has been hoping for this. I have been a massive fan of the spikey blue hedgehog since I was but a nipper with a Sega Mega Drive (That’s Genesis to you yanks). I truly hope that Sega get this one right. Two Sega stories in one day!

There is a teaser video…. I like it. They have brought back the “Seeegaaaaaaahhhhhhhh” jingle thingy, which rocks.

Now Sega there are a handful of ways that you can ruin this game for me.

1. Decide that it should only be released on the fucking Wii and DS. I don’t want to waggle my arms around like a twat to play Sonic. Bring it out on the Xbox 360 so I can play it with a decent controller. I don’t care if it comes out on PS3 or not.
2. Slow down the gameplay so that we can all take in the wonderful graphics.
3. Adding a poxy motion blur to make it look like everything is moving quickly even though it is not.
4. Introduce a shit load of pointless new characters.
5. Have lengthy cut scenes.

The end… please, please, please Sega…. don’t fuck this up!

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J.R.R Tolkien

Yippppeeee!!! *Ahem*

Finally all of the legal wrangling has been put to bed and the Hobbit will indeed be making an appearance in our cinemas. The legal battle brought by the Tolkien Trust against New Line Cinema has been settled. New Line have made a settlement for an undisclosed fee and intend on releasing the new movie some time in 2011.

This is certainly good news in my opinion. I have to say I loved all three of the movie adaptations from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. What makes me excited about the Hobbit being turned into a film is that I actually preferred the Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings in book form. I genuinely thought it was a better read.

It is a more than a little disappointing that the Tolkien Trust who are a charitable organisation were forced to bring New Line Cinema to court to solve this issue, especially with the LOTR trilogy making an estimated $6bn worldwide between cinema, DVD and merchandise.

A quote from Christopher Tolkien, who is the son of the great J.R.R himself:

“The trustees regret that legal action was necessary but are glad that this dispute has been settled on satisfactory terms that will allow the Tolkien Trust properly to pursue its charitable objectives.”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Legal path clear for Hobbit movie.

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Eduardo infamous injury

Now I will start by saying that I am unashamedly an Arsenal supporter. As is being widely reported Arsenal striker Eduardo De Silva has received a two match Champions League ban from UEFA following his dive in the qualifying game against Glasgow Celtic at The Emirites. I genuinely do believe that Eduardo went down far too easily and there should never have been a penalty. That said I do not recall Eduardo turning too the referee to look for the penalty after he went down, as we see from other players so often.

Now I am sure you are asking why this matters. Well the thing is that Eduardo has received his ban for deceiving the referee with intent. Now since he did not go for the now customary throwing of hands into the air and bemused facial expression.

There is also of course the issue that what Eduardo did at the weekend is no different to anything that other Premier League players do week in, week out. Some of them are evening applauded for it.

Now I am expecting the usual tripe from United, Sp*rs, Chelski fans, but hold your horses now folks and take a look at the evidence. This sort of diving happens all the time and it rarely goes punished.

Now this is the most recent one and happened against Arsenal in the following game vs Manchester United

So one assumes now that this decision has been taken by UEFA that we can go back and retrospectively ban all of the above players for their dives?

My other question is. How does a dive that would ordinarily get a player a yellow card, become a two match ban if the referee misses it?

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Darragh…. you don’t update this nearly enough! You need to come up with some kind of repeating feature to force yourself to update this more regularly!

Now you see the thing is, I quite like writing. That said, I don’t do it nearly enough. So with that in mind this is the concept that I have come up with. I am going to do a week in review post… well once a week obviously. Anyway it is going to be a bit of a mixed bag with regard to content. I will cover stuff that has directly affected me (in keeping with my usual personal blogs) and also some interesting news stuff from the past week. By interesting, I mean interesting to me.

Lacking direction

That heading more or less sums up this week in my head. I had a few projects on this week and for the most part, good progress was made on them all. These projects were all well defined from the previous week however so I already knew where I was going with them. Most importantly they were already designed (last week) so this week was all coding and content which I can do without a whole heap of motivation or drive.

What I really struggled with this week was creative work. Now that can be an issue for a graphic designer!! I had every intention of starting to design stock template for sale this week. Indeed I made a really good start on no less than 7 templates for websites (Wordpress). That’s the problem though. I have started 7 templates and finished zero of them!! My Documents folder contains many of these website templates in PSD form that have never made it passed that stage. Yesterday while looking for some inspiration I actually looked though a few of these to find that I have almost no memory of designing some of them. Some are almost complete and others are in the very early stages. In some ways I would be better off scrapping them entirely but it does seem a bit of a waste.

Anyway!! Im other news. I am supposed to be at a bike rally this evening in Limerick but alas due to several issues I am not. I don’t really even need to get into much more of that, sufficed to say I am not too happy about it, but it cannot be helped. So a big hello to all of the lads and ladies in the Dennis The Menace MCC.

Football (That’s soccer to you Americans)

Well as a supporter of the super Gunners, it has been  a good week. The lads followed up a good start to the season last week with an impressive 2-0 win over Glasgow Celtic in the Champions League qualifier. Then just earlier today, they added a 4-1 win over Portsmouth in the first home game of the EPL season. Happy days!! Anyway, I am just happy the football is back. Makes for another good reason to be in the pub at the weekend!

Internets!!

I have already covered the “Eircom are yellow bellied surrender monkeys” story, so I won’t go into that again!

Facebook have bought the Twitter type micro blogging service FriendFeed
This I suppose is no real surprise but it does come as a statement of intention from Facebook that they are taking Twitter very seriously indeed. Indeed they have added a twitter like search to Facebook already.

In odd tech related news, American broadcasting network CBS are to run the first ever video advertisement in a magazine Autumn.
Yes that is what I said…  they are going to run a full video advert in a printed magazine!! Here is what CNET had to say about it:

Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320×240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord–there’s a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It’s a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail

It’s all a bit Harry Potter no? Newspapers with moving pictures and what not?

Ireland

There are a few Irish related stories floating about this week. So in an unformatted link laden paragraph, here goes!! It appears that despite our current recession, Irish workers are still amongst the best paid in the world. In other job and work related news UPS have announced they will be letting 200 staff in Tallaght go. Never a good thing to hear.  The Virginia show of course was on this week. A painful event for me, living in Virginia. As one of those blow in Dubs I will probably never see the attraction in spray painting the black bits on cows or looking at old tractors. I know, I know it’s all our heritage and stuff. But to be honest…… I really, really, really don’t care!

Bikes

This section of the weekly review will most certainly be a regular feature. So this week there is no MotoGP, no World SBK and no BSB. Last weekend of course saw Lorenzo crash (again) and gift yet another race victory to Rossi. It must be said that it appears young Jorge is starting to feel the pressure that many before him have felt in the past. It is nice to see him put it up to Rossi on the pace from but he is still lacking the consistency to run Rossi down to the wire in the championship.

Last weekend also saw the Ulster GP which threw up some excellent racing as always. Next week when I am covering the bike news I will try to be a little more detailed and add some photos from some of my favourite photographers. With their permission of course

So although the big boys are taking a break this weekend, there is still a lot of racing on offer. There is clubmans racing from Bishopscourt and the Manx Grand Prix.

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The Pirate Bay... a sinking ship?

It appears that the hapless folks over at Ireland’s largest ISP eircom, will make good on their threats to censor sites that violate copyright laws. Eircom will take this action based on the advise of the IMRO. Now under ordinarily  I would be outraged at the blocking of  The Pirate Bay (or indeed any other website) on the grounds of my objection to censorship and my concerns for the privacy of my data. However in this instance I am quite looking forward to Eircom taking this action.

Why do I want Eircom to block The Pirate Bay?

Well this is simple really. As most web users will be aware The Pirate Bay is in the process of being purchased by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF). This deal is now almost completed and is due to be come into force on August 27th. Well what difference does this make I hear you say. Well the shock move to buy The Pirate Bay have angered much of the users of The Pirate Bay as it is the intention of GGF to legalize The Pirate Bay. They will do this by offering copyright holders the ability to request the removal of their data from the Pirate Bay. What is interesting though is that for those copyright holders who do not wish to have their IP removed from the site, GGF will be reimbursing the copyright holders every time their files are downloaded. Thus making The Pirate Bay a legal service.

So with this in mind there are two reason that I want Eircom to block The Pirate Bay.

1. I probably won’t use The Pirate Bay anyway!
2. There is a very good chance that GGF will not be overly happy at the fact that Ireland’s largest ISP is blocking their completely legal website. This will of course impact on GGF’s hope that The Pirate Bay will generate revenue through advertising (something the Pirate Bay already does quite successfully). I would assume that GGF will take legal action against Eircom in this instance. To be quite honest I would like nothing more than to see Eircom getting into hot water in relation to this issue as I absolutely hate the fact that a body such as IMRO can influence an ISP to block websites. It goes against everything the internet was created for. Not to mention that it is an entirely pointless exercise. The problem with block out a community which thrives on circumventing copyright protection mechanisms is that they will have little difficulty getting around the blocking.

Now I am not convinced that GGF’s plans for The Pirate Bay will be successful. We have in the past see illegal downloading services such as Napster becoming legal services only to flounder at the very early stages. One thing I will certainly miss is the banter over at TPB and their wonderful responses to legal threats.

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I'm a Happy Camper!!

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iPhone 3g

I go through phones quite quickly (probably a hazard of keeping them in the pocket of a bike jacket) and the time had come to change again. I have become accustomed to using a smart phone have gone through a Blackberry Pearl 8100, then a Nokia N95 and then back to a Blackberry Pearl. So I was set on getting another email/internet capable phone. This time however I had no intention of spending hundreds of Euros on one. So with a bit of research I decided to go for a phone that  I swore I would never own. So off I went to the o2 store to pick up my iPhone 3g. I went for the 16gb model in black. My reasoning behind this is that the iPhone is just €169 on a bill with o2. It also has all of the features that I was looking for. I originally stayed away from the iPhone becuase of the rediculous price of the first generation models, the touch screen, the lack of 3g network support on the first generation models oh and becuase it is made by Apple and would require me to install iTunes!!

First Impressions

Despite my apprehension about the iPhone I was amazed at how intuitive the touch screen interface became after just a few uses. The phone is much larger than my previous Blackberry Pearl but also has a much larger display. It is quite heavy also but to be honest I quite like to know that I have it in my pocket, unlike other smaller and lighter phones that I have owned I can actually tell if this has slipped out of my pocket.

The operating system is certainly very responsive and in a lot of ways reminds me of using a desktop Mac with OSX. I am sure this is exactly what Apple hoped to achieve.

Browsing

Slashdot.org on iPhone browser

Web browsing on the iPhone is a joy. It is the first mobile browser I have used that does not feel painful to use. The screen size if excellent and the Safari browser renders pages just as you would expect them to appear on your desktop computer. The image here shows the popular nerd hangout Slashdot.org. As you can see the browser renders exactly as it should. Another advantage the iPhone for web browsing is the ease of scrolling in web pages, something I have always been frustrated with on other phones.

Music

As you would imaging the iPhone is very well featured with regard to playing music. In short it has the exact same feature set as the iPod Touch so I have no intention of going into much detail about it. It works, battery life is acceptable though nothing to write home about. The headphones that come with the phone are awful and I only used them once before binning them.

Applications

iPhone App Store

The App Store on iTunes and the on the phone itself is excellent. It is easy to navigate and makes adding applications a walk in the park. A word of warning though, it is addictive and not all of the apps are free so expect to spend some money!! I won’t delve to deeply into what applications are available however as I am going to make another post shortly with some applications that I think no iPhone user should be without.

Summary

I genuinely like the iPhone, though it is not without it’s flaws. Notable ones being the lack of ability to copy and paste text and the inablity to run two applications at the same time and switch between them or run one in the background.

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1. Designing on the move In recent weeks I have been doing some freelance work...