Lego Album Art

Here’s a new idea I’ve had: take an album cover, make it look like it’s made out of lego bricks, and then leave others to guess what the original album is called, and who it’s by. Here’s the first 5 I’ve made for a taster. Guesses in the comments!

Why iTunes isn’t as good as it could be

I find myself writing this post after reading this rather interesting and true article from the Guardian. I’ve come up with quite a few reasons why iTunes isn’t actually that good, and here they are:

• You can’t sync bookmarks from your web browser to your iPod touch. I mean how hard can it be?

• Syncing iPods on windows is a right pain. Half the time it crashes, an when it doesn’t it takes twenty minutes to sync a couple of songs. I know windows isn’t the best as far as operating systems go, but you’d think that Apple would actually go to some effort to get their software working well on the most used operating system in the world.

• Even when you use iTunes on OSX it’s more than prone to crashing and RAM hogging.

• Apple can’t be arsed doing a 64-bit version of iTunes. Every other iLife program is 64-bit, so there can’t be any big reason why iTunes can’t be.

• The iTunes store is way more expensive than it’s other competitors (such as Amazon MP3 and play.com) I feel sorry for the millions who know of nothing but the iTunes store, and are forking out good money for music that’s often half the price elsewhere.

• iTunes insists on authorising each computer you play your non-DRM-free iTunes goodies on. This might not seem like a bad thing at first, but after you’ve had your iTunes library computer crash on you a couple of times it isn’t. Apparently I’ve used up 3 of my 5 authorisations, when I only have two computers in the house and I know for sure that my iTunes stuff is only on one of those.

• It’s virtually impossible to find and set up genius mixes. I know this isn’t exactly iTunes’ killer feature, but when it was released I spent at least 3 days trawling the internet trying to find out where the genius mix button was. And don’t ask me where it is cause I’ve forgotten.

• You have to enter your password to download a free application. Extra unnecessary time wasting step much?

• The store homepage is a mess of scrolling down and scrolling across. If I had a pound for every time I’ve got stuck on one of those retarded scrolly-across boxes…

• The artwork is continually messed up on my iPod touch, and I now have podcast covers on my normal albums. And everything appears to be fine in iTunes.

And I’m sure there’s much more I could talk about. Seriously Apple, pull your act together.

My Thoughts on the Guardian News App

After taking the plunge and forking out £2.39 for the Guardian’s new app (iTunes link) I thought it might be worth a post, so here are my thoughts in a nutshell:

Positives

• It displays the news stories in a pleasing font and style
• It allows quick and easy access to each of the main and sub sections of the paper
• It has offline browsing, although the option to download whole sections is somewhat tucked away at the bottom of the home screen
• It has a slick tag browser, and the photo galleries are well designed
• Once you’ve read an article it’s entry in the news browser is greyed out so you know which articles you’ve already read

Negatives

• The settings pane is clunky and difficult to use
• You can’t seem to be able to search for individual articles (but you can search for contributors, topics or sections for some reason)
• There is no easy way to refresh a page (for example if you want to follow a football or cricket match live)

Improvements I’d like to see

• A landscape mode for reading
• Reader comments added at the bottom of news stories
• Push notifications for new articles
• A list of articles that are in the actual paper based paper today

All in all I think it’s a pretty good attempt at a first app, but it will only become value for money once the updates start rolling in

Dust Off Your 123s

I’ve just been having a poke around ebay for some used lighting equipment, and I just so happened to stumble across this beauty:

For those of you not in the know, this is a theatrical light, and one of the classic range produced by Strand in the mid 1960s. If you’ve got £450 burning a hole in you’re pocket, you can head on over to Ebay and put in a bid!

Project Euler – For the Programming Geek In You

I’ve recently stumbled upon a brilliant new website, which allows anyone to test their programming and mathematical skills to their limit. It’s called Project Euler, and here’s a brief summary from their website:

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.

You can use whichever programming language you want (so long as it’s powerful enough) and you can take on the problems at your own pace. I’ve solved 7 of the the problems myself, so see if you can beat me, and happy programming

Link : http://projecteuler.net/

Sheet music in our libraries!

A short but sweet blog post, this is solely to promote the new petition I’ve created on the UK online petition site. The petition is entitled

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to fund the introduction of sheet music to libraries across the country

and is aimed at getting a wider variety of sheet music widely available for free-of-charge borrowing in libraries across the country. You can sign the petition here: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/sheetmusic/. Please sign and spread the message!

Unseen Academicals – My Thoughts

Unseen Academicals is the latest book by Terry Pratchett, the world-renowned author who has written over 50 world-class books in the last 30 years of his writing career. This book is the 37th book in the Discworld series, and is centred around the rise and reformation of football in Ankh-Morpork.

After using chapters in the last two books, Pratchett decided to go back to the traditional continuous format that has been one of the signatures of the Disworld novels. In the beginning this device makes the plot somewhat slow and almost mundane, but by the end of the book speeds up and makes the plot much more exciting. And that seems to be the general theme of the book really. To get to the juicy bits, you have to read about 50 pages of what feels like prologue, and although necessary for understanding the more exciting plot at the end, I can’t help but feel that some first time Pratchett readers will be put off by this.

Although claiming to be a stand-alone book in the series (unlike the Night Watch and Moist Von Lipwig series’ for example), the book contains numerous references to past novels in the Discworld series. It is this feature that I found most enjoyable about the book, being a die-hard Pratchett fan myself. Without the knowledge of previous characters and places I doubt this book would have been nearly half as enjoyable, and I doubt that newcomers to the Discworld series would find much to be gotten out of this book.

For the die-hard Pratchett fan there are certainly plenty of humorous references to old characters and events. Dr. Hix, as the director of Necromancy Post Mortem Communications, is back in a fairly big role, churning out the laughs. There’s also a surprise change in character for the Dean, and as usual Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler is on the scene trying to try and scam money from the crowds that flock to watch the football. In the latter stages of the book there seemed to be several subtle hints that Vetinari is losing his grip on things, but by the end of the book everything is under his control. Whether this is me misinterpreting the text or the start of his downfall I don’t know, but either way it certainly kept me on the edge whilst reading the book.

On the whole I feel that this book was written for all the long-standing Terry Pratchett fans out there, and a newcomer to the series would certainly do well to read a few older books first. Having said that Unseen Academicals is an absolute treat for all those fans who have read every book beforehand, and I can’t wait for the next instalment to come out!

New Project: NovaBoard

I’ve now decided to join the NovaBoard team, and help out with their development. Since the old project leader has resigned, a new one has taken over and I’m going to be helping him to continue the on-going maintenance and upkeep of NovaBoard. From http://www.novaboard.net/ :

NovaBoard is a free, feature rich community message board software written in PHP & MySQL that allows you to set up your own forum within minutes. With a smart modules feature and the ease of creating your own themes you can style and manipulate your board to look and perform how you want.

You can check out the development and have a look at the latest SVN code here: http://code.google.com/p/novaboard/ Unfortunately due to hosting issues the forums and website may experience quite a bit of downtime over the next week or so, but after that it should be plain sailing. Please check the development code out and report issues on the tracker!

Installing ubuntu on a MacBook

Today I find myself ready to put ubuntu on my brand spanking new MacBook. I’ve spent a couple of weeks playing around with OSX, and I’ve come to the conclusion that although it is leagues ahead of windows, it’s time to go back to what I’ve been using as my main OS for the past year. I doubt that installing ubuntu on a MacBook will be as easy as doing so on a bog standard desktop PC, so I will document my attempts at trying to enable the full functionality of Ubuntu on a Macbook below, updating this post as I go along. Wish me luck!

Step 1: Downloading Ubuntu

The first step in my journey is to download the Ubuntu CD image. I’ve chosen to use the 9.10 64-bit alpha 3 alternate installer image for several reasons:

• I need the development releases to be able to create, test and submit bug fixing patches
• The development release should have some features that the stable release doesn’t, which may (or may not) assist me in getting the full functionality out of my MacBook
• I enjoy finding bugs, and getting regular updates to packages
• The daily images are too large to fit on a CD, and since I don’t have any DVDs I’m stuck there
• The alernate installer doesn’t have a gui, which may cut out graphical configuration problems before I’ve even installed
• My Macbook has a 64-bit processor, so why not get the most out of it?

The download took about 20 minutes, within which I was able to look at the Ubuntu wiki and figure out what needs doing now I’ve got the .iso.

Links:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/9.10/alpha-3/

Step 2: Burning the CD image

I have a feeling that this is going to be one of the easier steps in this process. I put a bog standard blank CD-R in my superdrive, brought up Disk Utility and then burnt the image to the CD. I did this at the lowest possible speed (10x) to minimize write errors.

Step 3: Creating some free space for Ubuntu

Whilst I still had Disk Utility up, I decided to create some free space for Ubuntu to be installed in. Since the Ubuntu installation CD doesn’t include support for HFS+ partitions, I simply created a free space for Ubuntu to slot into.

Step 4: Booting into the install CD

The next step was to boot into the install CD. Whilst holding down the option key I rebooted and selected the CD which my mac had decided to call “Windows” (it’s obviously just jealous of the linux awsommness) Selecting ‘English’ and then ‘Install ubuntu’ resulted in a blank screen though. This was nothing that couldn’t be resolved with some community help, so I went on ubuntu forums and found this thread, which pointed me to this bug. After adding acpi=off I booted successfully into the CD

Step 5: The installation

The installation was actually rather simple. It was all the usual stuff, along with the option to encrypt my home folder. Unfortunately I was informed later in the installation that this had failed, and I had to do it retrospectively. Apart from that one problem the installation went without a problem and all was well.

Step 6: Booting into Ubuntu

This is where the problems started to arise. After restarting and booting into my ubuntu partition (also named windows my the MacBook) I was greeted with a “No operating system found” error. Since this was before grub even appeared, I assumed it was a grub problem, so I booted up the liveCD to re-install grub. This presented me with the same booting problem as before, so I added acpi=off and away I went.

TwitterFeed: Linking your blog to twitter

Just checking out a new website I’ve stumbled upon called twitterfeed. This service saves you the effort of posting a new tweet manually, everytime you update your blog, posting a tweet for you every time you update your blog. The website is simple, and the sign up process simple, allowing you to get straigt into the process, with advanced features for power users like me. If you’ve just clicked on my tweet and are reading this now, thanks for reading, and please subscribe. The RSS link is in right hand column