Text driving

Number one in our series of “games that are so controversial they need a disclaimer” is this little flash game on the washington post website.

Driving game

It gets you to drive a car and text replies to text messages to demonstrate how texting while driving affects your concentration. They do however make a point to say:

Regardless of your results, experts say, you should not attempt to text when driving

Which as a sad indictment of America’s litigation culture…
But don’t let that stop you. Have a go. Surprisingly after a practice round, I magaged to get more checkpoints while texting than not, and my reaction time only went down 0.01 seconds. However,

Regardless of your results, experts say, you should not attempt to text when driving

So I don’t think I’ll be putting my new found skill into practice. Not that there is much chance of me doing so as I hate the bastardised incarnation that is modern day mobile telecommunication. But thats a rant for another day.
So go and test yourself and test yourself, and post the results in the comments section if you dare

Google wave

This is a video from google’s developer conference where they showcased the new google tool, google wave.

Before I get to talking about he features, I’d like to say how much I like the google presentation (in this instance). There were no fireworks or flashing lights; none of the Steves throwing out buzzwords or screaming “developers, developers, developers “. It was just 4 nervous geeks showing 2 years of work. Is was especially refreshing to hear the developers breaking into spontaneous applause because of the features, and not because some floor manager had whipped the audience into a frenzy

Right now to what google wave is its self.
From what I saw it was basically an improved email system. But that doesn’t give it justice. This was a redefinition of electronic communication. An abstract form of conversation. Imagine an email client, IM client, document portal and micro-’social network’ rolled into one.  (100 points for noticing that ’social network’ was in inverted commas because like ‘bootylicious’ I don’t consider it to be a real word.)

What especially excited me was seeing messages relayed in real time, almost per character. So no more looking at the bottom of you IM window to see “so and so is typing” for 30 seconds. Image transmission is integrated seamlessly along with captioning and the interface as a whole looks so sleek. And this is the clincher. Its ALL browser based. And this is the magic of HTML 5; you can now develop a full app in the browser.

In conclusion, when this comes out in late September I can see no reason not to use it and replace all my IM clients with it.

Higlights
I know that pretty much no one is actually going to watch the whole 90 minute video so I’ve selected a few highlights.

1. Basic operation (email type)
2. Basic operation (IM type)
3. Playback
4. Attachments
5. Simultaneous changes
6. Spell check
7. Rossi the translator

Real subjects

After a ‘brief’ month long pause from writing to sort out my exams, and take a general break from life, I’ve decided to mark my glorious ascent thorough the 6th form, and all 4 a-levels that I WILL get presented with halfway through august. Whether they are all A’s remains to be seen.
So to mark the end of OCR, MEI and the rightfully maligned edexcell in my life (and because for certain reasons it turns out I’m NOT allowed to triumphantly burn all my 6th form notes and books), I’ve decided to publish the quasi-definitive list of subjects and their realism.
For those of you that have known me in any academic respect, you will have no doubt already heard of this in part, and you can feel free to indulge yourselves in an almost complete list.

Real subjects
Maths
Further maths
Physics
Computing (almost not in this list)
Geography
Politics
Biology
Chemistry
Psychology

Not real subjects (and therefore FAKE subjects)
DT or product design or whatever you decide to call is this week
English
Citizenship
Critical thinking
Any MOFO (MOdern FOreign language) especially french as there is almost no point learning to speak it in the first place

Have NO PLACE IN A SCHOOL
Drama
Philosophy
Any subject ending in ’studies’ ie media studies, film studies, puke stain studies
English literature

Subnote

While chemistry and biology have managed to make it onto the list of real subjects, it should be noted that they are actually not real sciences. In the case of chemistry, it’s the  general refusal to accept the fact electrons cam exist outside of the atom and the casual brushing over of the paths of P orbitals. The nails in biologies coffin however are the fact that there are no rules, or method to it. Its basically, just ‘remember this, remember that’. Oh, and the seemingly paradoxical qualifications system in medicine in general. I shudder to think that that my GP has less qualifications that a vet, a man who makes his living shoving his hands into dogs’ *ahem*.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few subjects off this list, so if you not sure whether you wasted two or more years of your life, just send me an email with the suubject that you wish to be clasified.

Open office 3

While open Office 3 has already been out for a LONG time, I thought I’d still do a quick review of what a like about it.

1. Office 2008 compatibility
When Microsoft office 2008 came out with its new and distinctive marmite-esque ribbon layout, it also wheeled out a new document format, the most common of which is .d0cx. (Obviously should this be taken to its logical conclusion, my children will be saving word files as a .docxxxxxxxx). But not to fear, Open office can now open all of the new micirsoft office file types almost perfectly.

2. Export to PDF
If you feel the irresistible urge to save your documents in the quazi-homophoicly named PDF format you can do that now on Open Office as well. this feature was hidden away before, but now it has a prominent shortcut on the standard toolbar.

3. Improved notes feature
In previous version of open office annotations were absent or very poorly supported. Now the notes are displayed on the side. there are also colour coded to show which user posted the note and the date ant time are displayed as well.

4. New icons
While I’m obviously not one to put style over substance, it’s nice to see that all the icons have been redesigned, and the while UI is becoming a bit easier to use.

5. Macro support
Open office now supports macros which is a welcome addition.

So there it is; open office is going from strength to strength, and while I focused on open office writer in this post there are also many additions to other programs in the suite.

Its up to us… or is it

For centuries the powers that be have been deceiving us; I didn’t have sex with that intern; I am not a crook; Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 30 minutes, the list goes on.

One particular noteworthy occurrence of the government talking advantage of the  public’s emotions was during the second world war. In order to “help the war effort”, park railings and sometimes those at house fronts were taken by the government to melt down and turn into weapons. The truth of the matter was that the railings were useless they were all covered in thick lead paint and melting them down to convert into any kind of weapon would have probably resulted in a gun that was melted by its own fire. It later became apparent that government had simply dumped the railings, and they were only taken to give the public the feeling that they were helping the war effort. A similar thing happen in America where the government encouraged housewives to knit sweaters for the troops despite the face that automated knitting machines were infinitely more productive. (And by infinite, I mean a vary large integer.)
The bottom line was the government had it under control, and they just wanted to make the public feel a little better.

My thought is simply this: What if it’s the same thing with recycling?
Google currently spend more money on energy than hardware, there are millions of factories and large industries that make a large contribution to global warming simply because it’s a more efficient way to produce their products. Could it really be that in my humble abode, sorting out the rubbish into infinitely (large integer again) many small boxes so that the bin men mix it all up again by tipping the entire thing into the back of the same truck, would have any bearing on the environment. I mean if your going with the old earth theory -which is another blog post in itself- surely the earth has been though ice ages, before humans even existed. And even if we were genuinely a threat, does the average consumer really have any power or influence, or is the ominous council green box just another way to make the proletariat feel better about themselves while the government just sort it out.

PS:
Next time I promise to stop all this pondering crap and actually do a post about computers or something at least distantly related to IT. Probably that review I said I’d do on open office, but never got round to.
Also the date for the first (experimental) video blog post will hopefully be here on the 25th of June. That gives me 6 days after exams to write and produce the thing.

The hand is quicker that the eye

To continue with the news ‘theme’ that that I have inadvertently foisted upon myself, I wonder whether I’m the only one that has noticed that through all this expenses palaver, I haven’t heard anything about anything else of ‘relevance’. To give an example, I haven’t been updated on the death toll in Iraq for quite some time (thank God), or even heard a single thing about the bankers and their pensions.

In fact the only thing I have heard about anything other that the expenses row is the collapse of general motors, another sign of the perpetually collapsing car industry. And to fly off on a wind tangent here; exactly how large was the car industry? Ever since I was old enough to recognise my surroundings, I’ve been aware that the car industry has been collapsing, and miraculously it still manages to continue its apparent demise.

Basically I’m saying that (in the UK at least), the papers seem to have performed a slight on hand on the public, by providing saturation coverage on this shenanigan – that basically amounts to civil servants in the petty cash office – at the expense of all other news. To be honest I myself wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the whole thing was just a ploy by the government to distract the public from other things.

Randon thoughts to make me look clever

As someone who gets the majority of my political news form news satire panel shows such as mock the week and news quiz, I remain in a relative political ignorant squalor. (I still have no idea why it is expected that I watch the news on a regular basis, and no one has of yet provided a well presented reason that I should. I’m open to suggestions.)

So in order to impress those people that judge me when I say ‘would of’ rather than ‘would have’, I’ve decided to draw up a list of things that I’ve heard in the news but still don’t understand. Some of then might be quite regional, so a few of you will be wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

1. Am I missing a trick or shouldn’t Governor Bush – I say governor because that’s the only elected position of office he has held so far – be tried for war crimes due to the illegal war he started in Iraq

2. Why does Nick Cleg feel he is in a position to ask the speaker to resign when he himself is the leader of a party in which 60% of its SUPPORTERS believe that “It doesn’t matter what the lib dems put in their manifesto as they have no chance of getting into power”. Remember these are SUPPORTERS of the lib dems.

3. On the same  vein, why does the chairman of the PTA (at TBSHS) feel he is in a position to decide whether the school moves site or not when the board of governors was deemed the worst part of the school in the last OFSTED inspection.

4. Seeing as women are more… lets say ‘emotionally developed’, why did Maggie Thatcher think it was an achievement (rather than genetic mutation), that the she wasn’t only the first female prime minister, but the first with a science degree

5. Why does HSBC (the Hong kong Shanghia Banking Corporation) claim to be the LOCAL bank

6. Why does Jeremy Vine feel he is i a position to criticize the bankers  in the  documentary that he presents for getting paid for nothing when he himself, gets paid to do a 20 second intro to a documentary he had absolutely or creative input in

There I feel cleverer already. Who said philosophy is a waste of time. (I still think it has no place in a school though).

Coming soon:
A review of open office 3 (hopefully in the next week)
My trial at a video blog (in the next few months)

STOP THE PRESS

The new open office is out, and it supports .docx files and all the Microsoft office 2007 file types. I haven’t had much time to test it yet, but the new icon designs look quite nice and the UI has been upgraded slightly.

Hopefully, I’ll have time to do a proper test soon

Bump

Since I’ve been terribly busy in the last month, and its only going to get worse in the next few weeks, obviously the view count has dropped significantly.
So in order to quench the insatiable appetite of the hit counter I’ve decided to drag my now lethargic typing fingers once again to the keyboard and write a small post.
But once again, I’m too lazy to actually write out a proper rant, so I’ll just post a link to one of David Mitchel’s ones, so pay attention you ‘handsome bastards’

http://www.channelflip.com/2009/03/12/david-mitchells-soapbox-unusually-smart/

Songbird

OK OK, I’ll do a real post today.
Well I Was just looking through the PC and I happened to find songbird. I downloaded this a long time ago, but never used it because all my music was locked up in iTunes’ DRM, but we’ll get to that later.

Songbird is a free music player, (though who’d pay for one nowadays is beyond me). Its currently under in the beta stage, but from what I see, it can only get better. Then again I said that about piclens. HOWEVER, I do think songbird does look promising, and from what i can see, it already outperforms quite a few music/media players out there. From the brief use I’ve had I’ll list a few pros and cons that I’ve seen already

Pros:

Lovely interface – I never thought it would be possible to improve on the iTunes layout, but these guys have just gone and taken it a stop further. In addition to the long list of songs (the aptly named list view), you also have what they call filter view. This adds three small boxes to the top, containing lists of common search parameters like artist, genre and album. When you click on one of the items  in the list, it filters the items in the larger song list below. This feature is great for quickly traversing large media libraries  organized to facilitate searching.

None of the bloat – Songbird comes with none of the bloat that comes with iTunes, and don’t even get me started with windows media player. First of all it runs in one process, so you know its all in one place, and comes with none of the (frankly scary) sharing ‘features’ that iTunes, and WMP use to beam your music collection to the world.

Drag and drop album artwork – album artwork can be dragged and dropped into the app rather than having to navigate through a select file dialogue.

Add ons are available – This just goes to confirm my thoughts that the way forward is super customizable software. Plugins are available from the songbird website. I haven’t had a good look yet but there seem to be quite a few good ones.

Built in browser – I don’t really get this. It’s a nice feature to have, but I’m not sure when I would use it. Maybe if I wanted to look up lyrics or something while I was browsing my music library. What WOULD be nice however would be if the pages didn’t take an ungodly length of time to load.

Cons:
The only one that I’ve been able to find so far is that fact that there is no cover flow feature. Though to be honest cover flow was always a bit gimmicky… If you do want to go for the gimmicks however there is an add on which does pretty much the same thing called media flow. Now why does that name sound so familiar?

So in conclusion, this seems like a great application., and i’m seriously considering converting from iTunes to songbird

If your music is locked up in iTunes’ DRM, there are two options.

1. The longer and more cumbersome method. Burn all your music to CDs. Yes I said ALL your music, and re import it using songbird. I told you it was the cumbersome method. This works because iTunes doesn’t put copy protection on the CDs it burns. If you don’t have enough CDs to burn your entire music collection, or don’t want to incur the cost involves, a much better idea would be to burn your music library to virtual CDs. I’d tell you how to do this now, but I’m a bit tired. If your really stuck , send me an email, or leave a comment, and I’ll write a step by step guide

2. Use the plugin to import your library. I’m not sure how well this will work though as I’m yet to try it for myself. I’m also not sure whether it will allow me to uninstall iTunes when I’m done.

EDIT:

I’ve recently discovered that if you keep ituines import and import the library into songbird, it plays the music ‘through’ itunes, meaning you still have access to all yout DRM’ed music through songbird. The only caveat here is that you have to still keep iTunes instaled on the computer, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.