Netflix UK video streaming review
Filed under Review, Uncategorized

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Jan15
Filed under Review, Uncategorized

Jan15
Filed under EVE Online

…and all was quiet in the Nullsec belt… except for the occasional missile explosion!
Yes, a solitary young pilot was finding out that Space can be a very lonely place.
Luckily early Xmas presents from the great ‘CCP in the sky’ cheered him up somewhat.
* Image attributed to CrazyKinux (from Flikr)
Dec22
Filed under Uncategorized
Animated gifs seem to be making a come back..
Heres two that made me laugh:
Loads more at Movie Moron.
Sep11
Filed under Android, Featured, Review
You’ve all seen em: those hideous plastic universal car holders with ‘Sucker’s that stick to your Car windscreen leaving the tell tail ‘circle’ on the glass saying ‘I probably have a Sat nav hidden in my car, break in’!
Well, Ive found a rather unusual alternative to those sucker based holders. Its called the ‘Spider podium’ and it is based on the idea of a spider with bendy legs that can crawl and hold onto things in your car (or more like that ‘face sucking’ alien out the the film ‘Alien’ that holds onto their poor prey for dear life).
Packaging:
As you can see from the pictures, it comes in plastic packaging with a simple green and white piece of cardboard. But who cares right? Just rip the packaging open and start bending this little critter ;-)
How does it work and whats the quality like?
Well, it works much like the good old ‘pipe cleaners’ that kids often play with. Basically its a series of bendy wire legs coming out of a centre loop. All of the wire and loop is covered in rubber (it comes in either black or white ribber colours).
What you basically do is bend say four of the legs around you mobile phone and then bend the remaining legs around or into the object in your car.
Now the back of the cardboard in the packaging shows some ideas for you in nice little stick outline drawings – The likes of making a little stand for your desk/dash, grabbing hold of a Car seat headrest or letting it stick its legs into a car vent.
For me it was the car vent that made the most sense: after all i wont be sitting in the passenger seat for the head rest approach to work and there isnt a chance in hell that I’m letting my nice shiny mobile slide around on my dash!
As for the quality, there isn’t much too it (this is a pro), the rubber is
well ‘rubbery’ and will stop anything being scratched. The legs seem like you could bend and reform them till your hearts content. Overall, not bad.
Ok, lets see it in action…
Approach 1: Span two centre air vents:
In my car there really isnt much on the dash to wrap this little spider around, so I immediately went for the spanning of the legs across the centre console air vents. It amazed me how you dont really have to do anything but thread two of the legs into the air vents and then use the other two legs at the bottom to prop the spider up.
As you can see from the screen shot, it stays in place and can be easilly removed when you leave the car.
But the disadvantage here is that you have stopped two air vents from being adjusted. Now Im not too bothered, but my partner who likes ‘arctic condition air conditioning’ was not too pleased. So onto approach 2…
Approach 2: Use just the air ventr on driver side (by door):
This little critter can do just as well grabbing onto one of the air vents, so I decided to put it onto the drive side door air vent (see below picks).
I went on a nice little run to basingstoke to give it a try and it worked very well, no vibrations as it is rubberised. Also no movement (my mobile didnt fly out the window as I pulled my car park ticket out of the window).
Conclusion
I think this little critter is a success overall and I will keep it. Here’s a quick rundown:
Pros:
Cons:
Price:
Halfords are doing them for £12.99, but I’m sure you can find them on the net for cheaper -Even at 12.99 I think its OK values – but it is only metal pipe cleaners covered in rubber after all!
Aug13
Filed under Android
So this is a very quick review about a little util called ‘Screebl’ that fixes my pet peeve with Android… screen timeout: You need to set it to a low value because the screen takes up soo much of the battery power, but then the phone keeps locking when you are reading emails, browsing the web or otherwise using the phone!
Screebl fixes this in a rather obvious way – that is only obvious now that they tell you ;-)
Basically it detects when the phone is in an orientation that is unlikely to be a useable viewing angle (laying flat on tablet etc) and only lets the screen timeout when its in these unuseable states.
Combine this with monitoring of complete stillness detection and the lowest timeout system setting of 30seconds and it seems to work well.
The app itself is rather simple UI wise, theres only really:
The authors site states that it can save battery power because it can reduce screen power by turning off the screen more often, but I am yet to see if this really works out. As with all these monitoring apps, it is difficult to know if the monitoring is actually using up more power via cpu cycles than the display power it saves.
My recommendation
Download and try it, its free (there is a pro version that I suggest you get if you like the app – support that dev ;-)
TIP: I found that enabling the ‘stillness detection’ under prefs improved the detection. I think it basically assumes humans cant hold the phone completely still – time will tell how this settings works when mobile is in car holder (I guess the car vibrations will keep the screen on).
Heres the QR code to install it:

Scan this QR code using the barcode scanner app on your Android mobile to download directly from market place.
Or you can goto the screebl developers site here.
May04
Filed under mac, Tips, Windows
I recently got a laptop running Windows 7 Home premium and wanted to do as bit of file copying between my mac mini and win7 over local network.
Only to find that Windows 7 out of the box doesnt see macs (even when Samba sharing is turned on in mac network prefs).
Alittle digging brought up a solution which is shown below, but wait it doesnt work on home premium…
Mar23
Filed under Android
A colleague gave me this little Android toy today… apparently he’s called ‘hexcode’ due to the design. Nice. Thanx.
Feb22
The IPad is a great device and there are many things you can do with it. I was not that sure that apple was onto such a game changer other than for ebook reading, but the iPad has definitely opened up the tablet Market. Hell, pundits are even calling 2011 “the year of the tablet” due to the shear number of competitor tablets being announced!
But I still find most of my use to be for ebook reading using the great iBook app by apple.
Yesterday I noticed another great feature of the ibook app: “audio book style reading of any book”.
Feb12
Filed under Board games
Their has always been a close link between high tech and my hobbies (and my career for that matter).
I have generally enjoyed spending my spare time messing around with computers, RC planes/copters, gadgets or playing racing/shooter games on my console.
But, sometimes it is nice to go all ‘low tech’ and unwind.
I had seen and heard of people often playing strategy board games like Risk and all manner of ‘role playing’ turn by turn based board games, but the amount of setup and play time has always put me off.
Thats why when me and my partner found a different genre of board games known as ‘abstract games’ they have been more and more appealing.
For the non board gamers (i still kind of class my sell as that!), Abstract games can be defined as many things, but I guess I am thinking they are usually:
Feb10
Filed under Android
Anyone who has ever read a Android app review on the net probably has seen those little Square barcodes (you know the ones with little squares at each corner) at the end of a review.
These are called ‘QR codes’ and are one of the multiple barcode standards commonly used. In this context, the QR code can be scanned by your Camera on your Android device and the Application can be easilly installed via the Market place app.
To do this, you usaully install the very common ‘Barcode scanner’ by ZXing Team developer.
Which is a fine simple efficient barcode scanner… But what if you want to do more with the information from the barcode? continue reading »
Jan21
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