Sleep Interrupted

James and Ruth’s wedding yesterday was superb. The best day in August, beautiful Oxfordshire countryside and a chance to catch up with lots of people I haven’t see in ages. I took enough pictures to flatten the battery on my camera and some of them even looked okay. I’m going to upload the best to Flickr — I’ve used Picasa Web in the past but I feel I shouldn’t put all my eggs in a Google shaped basket, so this is a good reason to try something new.

I was going to upload the said pictures tonight but after staying up until 1.30am — and amazingly avoiding a hangover this morning — I’m just too wiped out; vegging out in front of a repeat of Top Gear is about all I can be bothered with. That 6am run tomorrow morning is looking mightily uninviting right now. And so to bed…

I’m very  glad to see that Mr Watkins is back. With Mr Moore rationing his output I was beginning to feel very lonely. Come back my wayward blogging buddies, all is forgiven!

On the BitTorrent front, I’m very interested to find out about Mininova from Tim. I’ve been using The Pirate Bay so far but the lack of dodgy adverts at Mininova is appealing. Since iPlayer came out at the top of the year we’ve started using it frequently. Having become accustomed to watching programmes on our laptop, I want to be able to access all TV programmes this way. Downloading them with BitTorrent works very well, especially because we get free overnight bandwidth from the nice folks at PlusNet. But that endorsement can wait for another post.

One tip I’d pass on to Mac and Linux (and *nix) users would be to use Transmission. It takes all the insanity out of BitTorrent downloads and just works.

I’ve been working heavily on a project with Mark for the last couple of weeks, hence the distinct lack of posts here. However, a spam email I received triggered a thought.

I don’t get much spam and thanks to Thunderbird’s junk filtering I barely have to spend any time even thinking about it. Recently, though, I’ve been paying it more attention because I realised that I can do my part in making the web a safer place: In Firefox you can report scam sites, or “web forgeries” as they call them. This information is then passed on to all other Firefox users and they are warned if they ever visit that scam site. Cool, huh? So that’s what I’m doing now, to try and give a little bit back. Want to help?

I was perusing Facebook the other day, as you do, when I came across a link to James’ blog. Cool! I’m always happy to see friends start blogging, particularly when I don’t get to see them very often. James had a bit of a slow start so I’m hoping if I mention him here it will encourage him to continue.

I’m on the fence about Facebook “friending” of folks I went to junior school with. Of course I’m interested to see what they’re up to now, that’s only natural, but I don’t think I need to keep tabs on them that much. I mean, I’ve wasted more than enough time on that site already and I’ve specifically stayed away from all the Pirates and Zombies and Vampires malarkey. Call me miserable if you like, I’m just trying to use my time wisely; I’m not very good at that as it stands.

And what’s with all this “wall” business? That’s got to be the most ass-backwards form of communication yet invented. Clearly I’m just too old to “get” it. Oh well, I am a dad after all, I suppose I can’t feel too bad about it, it’s my role in life.

Ever feel you’re losing the battle against entropy and chaos? Well, it’s certainly feeling that way around here at the moment. My boss is on leave at work, right when an important client is making a tricky hardware transition, leaving me to do the tidying up. Then I get roped into a sales meeting in the US, so I’m going to be away from home for two days, which will no doubt mess up my body clock nicely.

And at home? Well, the hard drive finally broke so I had to rebuild the PC, which was actually quite painless — thanks Ubuntu! Then the kids managed to break our bed this week by jumping on it too enthusiastically, meaning the mattress is on the floor until the replacement arrives next Tuesday, when, of course, I’m in the US and unable to put it together for Louise.

So, I may be losing the war at the moment but there’s one battle I can win: With some help from the Google Reader Widget for WordPress I’ve added the contents of my news feed to the right-hand side of the blog. Sweet. Hope you find the links interesting.

Also making an attempt for the most categories for a single post here.

Hmmm. To Facebook or not to Facebook? It would be my third social networking presence after LinkedIn and last.fm. Well, if it keeps me in contact with friends and extended family I reckon I can deal with the plurality.

Time passes.

There, done. Will upload a picture and blurb a bit later.

So, to round off my triptych of pointers to cool websites this month I’m going to suggest you check out last.fm. It’s an internet based radio station that you can listen to through your web browser or through dedicated software. You start by entering the name of an artist you like and then it plays tracks by similar artists.

The real coolness starts when you create an account — everything you listen to is recorded in your profile. You can skip over or even permanently ban tracks you don’t like. In this way the system learns what you like. Over time it starts coming up with recommendations for you and finds other “neighbour” users on the site who share your tastes. Then you can tune in and listen to what they’re listening to. What a great way to discover new music!

I’m really only scratching the surface here, too. You can download plug-ins for your “normal” music player (e.g. iTunes, WinAmp, Songbird or even your iPod) so that what you listen to “normally” is recorded in your last.fm profile. You can create groups. You can see when your favourite artists are playing nearby. You can add your recently played tracks to your blog. You can make recommendations to your friends. You can clear out your profile and “start again”. You can even listen to my very own radio station.

A quick pointer: If you read blogs and news sites, which is pretty much a tautology given that you’re reading this, you should take a look at Google Reader. It’s a website that lets you subscribe to your favourite blogs and news sites and puts all the posts in one place — like email for the web.

Google Reader has a few nice features. Firstly, it can order posts such that more “important” posts, i.e. those from less frequently updated sites, are shown before those from more prolific sites. You can also share posts, creating your own news stream, which other people can subscribe to and so on ad infinitum.

Tim W was over from Dubai recently and he asked me the best way to upload photos to his blog. My answer was “don’t put the photos on the blog, use a photo sharing site instead”. In particular I would suggest Picasa Web Albums from Google. You could use another sharing site like Flickr but I’d recommend PWA on the basis that you might already have a Google account (so that’s one less login to remember) and it easy to edit and upload your photos in bulk with the free Picasa photo management application.

So, there you go Tim, let’s see what you’ve got! Louise and I will be joining you as soon as I’ve upgraded our PC to the latest version of Ubuntu.

You may or may not know that Google search comes with a built-in calculator. If you search for 1+2+3 you get the answer to the sum instead of a set of search results. Cool!

One of the nice features of Firefox is that you get search suggestions from Google when you use the integrated search box on the toolbar. Cool!

Where am I going with this? Well, if you type “1+2+3″ into the search box with Google selected you get “= 6″ as the first suggestion, before you even press Enter. Super cool!