Taken at Witton Park
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Summer shadow
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 Taken at Witton Park
Flowers
Monday, June 27th, 2011
Snail on hosepipe
Monday, June 27th, 2011
Scotland Yard and the Press Reporting Arrest of LulzSec Member
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
The internet is currently awash with claims that Essex police have arrested a 19 year old male who they claim is a member of LulzSec, the hacking group who have been accused of being behind a number of high profile hacking incidents including those involving Sony and The CIA. Today the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) was allegedly taken down by the group and there have even been claims that they have hacked the UK’s 2011 Census data.
The operation to arrest the unnamed 19 year old was a joint operation between the FBI in America and Scotland Yard.
Various news agencies including the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 are reporting the arrest though the arrest. There is nothing on the Essex Police site but the Metropolitan Police do have a news article relating to the incident. The article says that the individual has been arrested under the Computer Misuse Act and the Fraud Act.
There is little more information at the moment but Twitter is already in overdrive and this is likely to become a trending story very soon.
Schindler’s Lift
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
Taken at The Mall, Blackburn
River Ribble on a Spring Evening
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Underside of Bridge
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Windows Phone 7 Update Went Well
Friday, April 8th, 2011
My phone of choice in May, Windows Phone 7
OK, I admit it, I own a Windows Phone 7. It’s an LG Optimus 7 if you really want to know, and just for the record I love it! I have an iPhone for personal use and an Android phone (Nexus One) for work, but secretly I love my Windows phone. The camera is far better than either of the other two, and it has a separate button onthe side to activate it, which is a real improvement on either of the other two major players in the smartphone market.
This evening I decided it really was time I agreed to allow the update that the phone has been quietly reminding me about for the last month. I have read one or two horror stories about this online and so had a little trepidation about starting this process. How did it go? Pretty smoothly.
I had to first install the Zune software that handles the updates. Zune, for those that don’t know is a sort of Microsoft version of iTunes. The interface is much better than iTunes though. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all my iTunes purchases play through Zune. The update took about 10 minutes, not 23 as my laptop suggested. This was particularly encouraging as I must have one of the slowest Internet connections in the UK, let’s not get me started on that again!
The update went through without a hitch and I can now, among other things, copy and paste on my Windows phone. I have also now added my music library to my phone and am debating whether to pay £8.99 a month for a Zune pass that will give me unlimited downloads from their music repository.
There is a free two week pass to they it out and I think when my programming schedule calms down in a couple of weeks I might give it a whirl. In fact I think thatnin May I will make the LG Optimus 7 my main phone for a month to really give it thence over. I also have the perfect companion to go along with it as you can see in the pic.
A is for Apple, B is for BBC, C is for Conflict
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Is the BBC afraid of being devoured by Apple?
I have been getting to know my Apple iPad over the last couple of weeks and also upgraded my Apple iPhone to iOS 4.3.1. One of the features of this upgrade is Apple’s Airplay which allows me to connect either device via WiFi to my Apple TV box and stream media through it. This is useful for video that has been shot on either device and it also allows content from certain sites to be streamed onto your TV via Apple TV.
While the iPad is a fantastic media player it can be advantageous to be able to stream content to a TV sometimes when there are a group of you all trying to cram round the iPad to watch, say a YouTube video. I was really disappointed to find that content from the BBC provided via the BBC iPlayer cannot be streamed.
I missed last Sunday’s “Wonders of the Universe” with Professor Brian Cox and thought I could catch up with it online and stream it through my TV. Well sadly this is not allowed. I am not sure if it is being blocked by Apple or the BBC but I can only think it is by the BBC who are happy for you to catch up with shows you may have missed online but do not want you to gain the full TV experience at the same time.
I have spoken to a number of people about this and one suggested that maybe the Beeb where concerned that if people could watch stuff online any time then it would lead to a dip in TV sales. This could prove disasterous for the funding of the BBC who rely on a licence fee paid by every household that owns one or more TV sets. My counter argument is that if anything this would be less likely to lead to a dip in sales as you would be able to watch your favourite programs when you wanted on the medium that it was really designed to be viewed upon.
Another suggestion was that the BBC may be concerned about the impact on viewing figures. These are currently calculated based on people watching a program when it is broadcast. However, peoples viewing habits are changing. With the onset of DVR’s, Sky Plus and cable stations we are now more able to watch what we want, when we want rather than having to watch a program when it is transmitted.
In the last decade there was a sea change in the way that music charts were calculated. They now take into account of sales of music on download as well as CD and vinyl. We do not base our top 10 on vinyl sales anymore and yet we seem to be doing the equivalent with TV viewing.
One possible solution would be to take into account the number of people who have played a program via a TV station player. This would be relatively easy to implement. When a TV program is viewed online information can be collected from the browser to say what has been watched, how many times it has been watched on that machine etc. You could even tell if the program has been watched through to the end to get feedback on what programs work the best. It is possible that TV companies are already tracking this sort of information already. In my scenario all the views of a show that were watched between Sunday and the following Saturday would be counted. This would be likely to swell viewing figures rather than diminish them.
Perhaps now is the time for TV channels to change the way that they view their output over the airwaves. As people change their viewing habits and move to a more On-Demand society then maybe it is now time for TV stations to look at how they interact with consumers. Rather than seeing a TV station as the pinnacle of programming perhaps they should adopt a different model in which the TV channel is merely a shop window of the content that they can provide. Sure, they will put the content out first on TV, but then have the facility for those that missed it for whatever reason to be able to catch up through streaming direct to their TV set. This could be just the thing that our TV channels need to adopt in order for them to still remain relevant in an ever increasingly connected society.
Google plays a trick on smartphone users?
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011This only works if you have a smartphone. Go to Google and type in either “tilt” or “askew”. You might be surprised with the results page that is displayed. Looks like somebody in Mountain View had some fun last Friday! Undoubtedly this was an April Fool, it works on iPhone’s and Android but not on Windows Phone 7 or the iPad. So it looks like the page checks which browser you are using and then if it is either an iPhone or Android phone works it magic. My question is did they do it with CSS or HTML 5? If you have any theories on how they achieved this I’d love to hear them.
