Yesterday I decided to treat myself (given my recent sale of a soundcard on Ebay) to the Motorola Milestone, a recently launched phone running Google’s Android OS.

I’m posting this using the even more recently launched WordPress app for Android, which appears to be a highly polished app for managing multiple WordPress blogs. Nice work Automattic!

The Milestone feels good. Beautiful screen, responsive, easy shifting from one app to another. I just read my feeds over breakfast and it was definitely a pleasant change from the small screen on the E71. It’s one of the reasons I decided to get this phone – my move to Cambodia has resulted in me having a lot more time away from a laptop/desktop and I’ve been using my mobile for a lot more web browsing, communication and social interaction. Having a phone with a nice big screen might save me from going blind.

I had been tempted by the Nexus One, but the high price over here, coupled with the lack of a physical keyboard pushed me towards the Milestone.

So here I am, sitting on my balcony in my new flat, sipping coffee and posting to my blog. Nice. The photo at the top is the view from my balcony and taken with the 5mp camera on the milestone.

Date Added: February 9th, 2010 | 3 Comments

Am I stressed? Yes.

Remaining time to complete film

Timer courtesy of countdown.onlineclock.net

Date Added: November 6th, 2009 | 4 Comments

What happens when there’s a terrorist in your child’s drawing?

I’m not exactly sure whether this is originally by House of Grindlebone, or not, but it’s a great image.

Date Added: November 4th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Tomorrow marks the launch of “School Yard Food Yard“, a new market that’s happening every Sunday in Ranelagh, Dublin 6.

An exciting new Sunday food market called “the School Yard Food Yard” is being set up by a group of enterprising market traders and local producers who have come together to breath new life into an old and neglected market at the rear of Ranelagh multi-denominational school. The market will be open on Sundays from 10am to 3.30pm.

It sounds like they have a really good crop of organic and homemade treats, delicacies, and other food stuffs.

The launch will have music, face painting, and a variety of other entertainment. Check their website for the exact location.

School Yard Food Yard launch poster

Date Added: October 17th, 2009 | 5 Comments

via There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges + Jury Rigs.

Ok, maybe it’s not the best use of Duct Tape ever, but it’s a pretty good one. I’d say there’s a lot of impressive uses of Duct Tape out there.

Date Added: July 12th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

I’ve been undergoing some minor cash flow issues the last while. We may be owed a rake of money, but I don’t have enough money to buy bread. Nice.

Anyway, that’s not the point (though it should be), the point is that I hate banks. When things are going bad for you financially they love nothing more than to kick you in the knackers.

The bank rang me sometime last year and said, you’ve been having trouble paying some of your direct debits – would you like an overdraft facility as this might make life a little easier? Why sure, at this stage anything will help, I said. Now, I haven’t really used the overdraft facility much until I got staggeringly broke this month, and when you’re staggeringly broke, what better than to charge that person even more.

So I hit the bottom of my overdraft facility and then a loan repayment standing order attempted to leave my account. That’s a big no no. You don’t have enough to cover that, so we’re going to charge you €12.70 for not paying the standing order, and then, we’re going to charge an extra €25 because you attempted to go over the limit of your overdraft.

Nice, thanks bank.

Date Added: June 15th, 2009 | 4 Comments

I recently wrote about what some people were dubbing the “Irish Internet Tax”, a name which felt a little alarmist to me from the outset. The basic tenant of this new tax that was causing people ire was that any computer with an internet connection could be judged to be able to receive broadcasts from RTÉ, and would hence require the owner to pay a television license.

I decided, for once in my life, to actually contact the powers that be to request clarification of what this and wrote an email to Eamonn Ryan TD, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. I’m happy to say that I did actually get a proper response from him, or at least his aide, the content of which I reproduce below for your delectation.

Dear Mr/Ms Leonard,

I refer to your recent correspondence regarding TV licences for mobile phones/laptops/pc’s etc.

The Broadcasting Bill 2008 currently before the Houses of the Oireachtas (see Annex A below) will not require computer users accessing the Internet (through a broadband connection or otherwise) to have a television licence.

As the case with existing legislation (see Annex B below) a computer will require a television licence only if it is capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services (see definition in Annex A.  Key phrases are bolded) e.g. the computer is used in conjunction with a television tuner card or similar device and, as at present, if such is the case, a single licence will cover all the “television sets” in a household. A computer which is not capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services but can access programmes through the Internet site of the broadcaster concerned, for example, downloading programmes or clips from the RTE, TV3, TG4 or BBC websites or the RTE Player, or from sites like YouTube does not, nor will not under the new legislation, require a television licence.

I hope that this addresses your concerns.

Yours sincerely,

Colm O’Conaill
Private Secretary to Minister Ryan
Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources

From the looks of things this addresses and nullifies any fears that people had about this being a thinly veiled new way of taxing Irish people and supporting the hulking beast that is RTÉ. The key phrase, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that a TV license will only be required if a computer is capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services, meaning that it will only come into question if your computer has a TV tuner card.

I’m happy to report I don’t have a TV tuner card and feel reassured that I’m in no danger of being required to have a TV license.

As I say, correct me if I’m wrong.

Date Added: May 17th, 2009 | 2 Comments

Over the last while I’ve felt my computer system has been creaking a little under the load of everything I’ve been getting it to do. A recent application upgrade resulted in massive frustration with the speed the application refreshed when accessing different elements, opening new files and so on.

As a result I started to consider an computer upgrade, which has been in the back of my mind for a little while. Currently I’m running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, which clocks in at 2.0Ghz per core and I have 2 x 2Gb of DDR2 RAM, although due to 32bit OS limitations I’m only actually addressing just over 3Gb of that RAM.

So my intention with the next system upgrade will include moving to a 64bit OS and opening up the possibility of running 8-16Gb of RAM. This will make it possible for me to run a much larger number of sample libraries in Cubase (such as the large but excellent Vienna Symphonic Library). This will necessitate finally dropping WindowsXP and moving on. I’d like to be able to wait for Windows7 to come out – from the sounds of things it’s already running much better than Vista, and I was quite ticked off with Vista any times I’ve tried it (which resulted in a post over on my web design company website about the performance difference between Vista and XP).

However with these recent speed issues, I was seriously considering making the upgrade sooner rather than later, and this would of course necessitate Vista fun and games, not to mention some expense which I really can’t afford right now.

Enter The Obvious

At this point I have to say many thanks to Warren Daly of Invisible Agent for pointing the following out. I’d been chatting to Warren about different upgrade options, the differences between the new core i7 chips and AMD’s latest Phenom II range (which has finally gotten them clawing back a bit of CPU respect), and then Warren made the suggestion that I should just overclock my current chip to get a bit more running time from it.

I went off doing a bit of research and found a good overclocking introduction guide on Tom’s Hardware Guide and got to work.

Increasing my reference clock speed to 220Mhz seems about as far as I can go and has resulted in my cores going from 2.0Ghz to 2.2Ghz. It’s a small increase, and I’m sure if I tweaked things more I could get a bit more clock speed out of the system (although unfortunately I’m already at my maximum CPU Multiplier), but I’d probably need to look at tweaking RAM timings and voltage settings, which is a little above my realm of experience.

Still, things are definitely feeling a little snappier on this system, and hopefully it will be enough to tide me over for the next 6 months.

So shouts out to Warren!

I should point out that this is actually his computer as well. Warren’s been away for a while now and left a bunch of stuff in our house. One day I was looking at his computer box wondering what was in it when I realised that it was way better than my old computer and was just sitting there doing nothing. So I recommissioned it. Thanks again Warren..

Date Added: April 11th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Whoa, what’s going on here. Yep, it’s annual CSS Naked Day and I’ve decided to join in the fun by stripping off and running around naked as the day I was born.

Ok, not really, I’ve just taken my style sheets off, so I’m only naked in a purely geeky sense of the word.

What’s it all about?

It’s all a bit of fun really, but the idea behind it is to promote the importance of web standards and demonstrate the proper use of semantic markup (the content of the site, being what you are viewing now), and how important it is to keep this separate from the presentation of your site.

This day of nakedness actually lasts for 48 hours, being that it is April 9th somewhere in the world for that long.

So join in the fun and get naked.

Date Added: April 8th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

You would think that buying things would be easy. I have money, with which I wish to part, you have a product, which you wish to sell. A match made in heaven right?

Apparently not. Last week, having scrimped and saved for a long time, we initiated an order for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 Design Premium. As CS4 is so hugely expensive (€1999 ex vat), it exceeded the limit on our business credit card so I rang to place the order having found out that they do accept wire transfer. Much confusion ensued with the sales person assuming that I wanted to place a volume license order, and me having to explain that we only needed a single license, followed by her saying “Oh, if you can just give me your credit card details” and me then having to once again explain why we couldn’t order with credit card. This went on for a while until eventually it all became clear.

Finally, after a bit more confusion about what country we were resident in, the order was placed and we received a wire transfer payment request for €1923 inclusive of vat. I was somewhat baffled. This seems to have been some magical number that doesn’t equate to their advertised price for CS4 design premium, no matter what way I look at it. It’s not the US$ price (which equates to roughly €1300 – a disparity that causes me much irritation), and it’s not the ‘design standard’ price (as we initially feared). It’s just somewhere in between.

Still, I’m not going to complain if I actually get it cheaper than it’s meant to be.

Anyway, the fun really started when 4 days had passed since we made the wire transfer payment and absolutely no word was forthcoming from Adobe. We rang our bank to make sure the payment had definitely left. We rang their bank to make sure the payment had definitely been received (which it had), and then proceeded with phone calls to Adobe to find out the status of the order. This is where things started going wrong. Every person we spoke to had a conflicting version of what was going on. Most said either “that order number isn’t on our system”, or “that’s not even the correct format for an order number”, which didn’t exactly fill us with confidence. There then followed a multitude of phone calls trying to find out what the hell was going on with various customer service people stating we clearly didn’t make an order or telling us it was impossible because our email address is registered in the US. This, coupled with an annoying frequency of dropped calls whilst on hold, got me quite close to becoming seriously annoyed – with me needing to point out to the customer service agent that we’ve paid for something as instructed by Adobe with an Adobe order ID andno one can actually tell me what the hell is going on?!

Finally I managed to get back through to the original sales rep that I placed the order with, who, thankfully actually had the order details (why no one else could bring this information up I don’t know) and once I had explained the situation to her managed to handle everything quickly and calmly and we had our receipt of payment within 6 hours.

There’s still a few things I’m confused about, but at least the order seems to have gone through and we should receive a download link soon and then all will be well with the world (actually, I am assuming the worst and clearly we’re going to have all sorts of hassle with this in the future – I daren’t even imagine what confusion could occur with an upgrade process).

Date Added: April 6th, 2009 | Leave a comment!