Sign up and what is on offer

Platforms that you can view videos on

• PC (windows or mac) this is via the silver light plugin inside web browsers
• -PS3 via special Netflix app
• -Xbox 360 again via native Netflix app

Setup of your viewing preferences

A selection of films and tv is shown to users so they can select a rating between 1 and 5 stars. In the hope that Netflix can recommend content you will like.

Net flies rating and recommendation feature

Netflix suggests videos you may lie based on ratings and what you watch. Here it seems to have got onto my love for old film classics.

Number of films and tv shows available

If you love Meg Ryan you may find Netflix UK film selection very limiting.

The interface for film selection

Ribbons showing a selection of Film and TV episodes are shown for each Genre

Playback

Netflix uses the Microsoft Silverlight plugin to implement the video player (and main ribbons on the main page)

Facebook integration

Overall

Dont agree?

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.

The familar site of a "Drake" missile boat probably "ratting" on his lonesome out in Null.*

* Image attributed to CrazyKinux (from Flikr)

Heres two  that made me laugh:

Loads more at Movie Moron.

Doesnt look like much from packaging, but it does its job well.

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’!

Six ideas of how this little critter can grab a hold...

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.

Push two legs into the vent and bend the others around you device.

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!

Spanning two centre vents - Eskimo partner was not soo impressed with loss of Air con controls ;-(

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.

You can move and readjust the legs around the device in hundreds of different configurations

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:

• No ‘circle’ mark left on windscreen after removal.
• Very flexible – you can pretty much bend this little spiders legs around any shape or size mobile (hell, any device really)
• No vibration – the little rubber covered legs take all vibrations.

Cons:

• Takes up a air vent (in my case) – If that bothers you, you may want to look at those traditional sucker holders ;-(

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!

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:

• a skeleton app to set preference on how sensitive its monitoring is.
• a notification bar icon which turns green when screebl thinks you are using the phone and black when you are not.

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.

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…

• Goto Start Menu
• Search for: Local
• Hit Enter
• Select Local Security Policy
• Goto Local Policies> Security Options
• Double Click on Network security: LAN Manager Authentication
• Change level to: Send LM # LTLM Responses
• Then,
• Goto Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP
• De-select Require 128-bit encryption
• Hit OK

The ‘Local Security policy’ helper is NOT included in Win 7 Home premium (its only in pro or ultimate) – Great one Microsoft – another way to force people to upgrade and shell out another $130 bucks!

Oh, but wait, you can still fix the network WITHOUT upgrading:

Basically, you have to add a REG_DWORD value called ‘LmCompatibilityLevel’ to HKLM|System|CurrentControlSet|Control|Lsa and set the value to 2.

Do this by:

• Click on Start
• Search for ‘regedit’ (registry editor)
• Double click regedit
• Navigate to HKLM (Home Local Machine)|System|CurrentControlSet|Control|Lsa
• Right click on a blank area and choose ‘New’ then ‘DWORD’
• Enter name of ‘LmCompatibilityLevel’ with a value of ’2′.
• Now quit rededit and then click start and type: “advanced sharing settings” in run
• Click on the ‘Manage Advanced sharing settings’
• Click on ‘home or work’
• Change the ‘file sharing connections’ option to ‘enable file sharing for devices that use 40- or 56-bit encryption’.
• Restart windows.

More information about the ‘LmCompatibilityLevel’:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l…/cc960646.aspx

That just saved me a wad of cash! Sorry Microsoft!

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”.

Now, if you are partially sited or even completely blind you may have heard about the apple feature called ‘voiceover’ which allows users of iPhone or iPad to hear the names of the buttons as they drag their fingers over any apps buttons, lists or other user interface controls.

Well, with a little setup, this feature can be easily turned on to allow the text on each page of your ebooks to be read out to you.

Why would you want this? Well say you have had a long day at work and you are tired, then it is sometimes nice to relax your eyes,but still enjoy your current book.

Now, you probably don’t want to be hearing the voice announcements for every user interface control on every app,so I have found a nice little trick to make it very easy to turn on and off voice over just when I need it (i.e. Just when in ibook):

Pre-setup:
- go into the settings app and tap on the general list item, then accessibility.
- tap on the ‘triple click home button’ option and select ‘VoiceOver’

Now you can turn on/off VoiceOver at any time by pressing the home button three times in quick succession.

Using the VoiceOver ‘lady’ to listen to books:

Now, to use iBooks when VoiceOver is on, you need to know a few extra touch gestures:

1. When VoiceOver is on single taps will cause the system to say the button or word you tap on. Double tap will usually press or take an action associated with it (eg pressing a button, changing setting etc etc).

2. When in iBook and showing pages of a book, you can tap on the first line on the page and then do a two fingered swipe downwards to ask VoiceOver to start reading the book text.

By two finger swipe I mean placing two of your fingers on the screen at once and then dragging them across the screen in unison.

Once the ipad is reading in this mode, if left it will continue reading, even turning pages for you.

3. You can pause the reading by two finger tapping. Or restart the reading by two finger tapping again.

4. At any time you can move to the next page by three finger swiping from right to left. Or move to the previous page by three finger swiping from left to right.

I have found that although the voice quality of VoiceOver is not as good as the mac os x voices, you do get used to listening to ‘the lady in that ipad’ ;-)

Ps I have messed around with the VoiceOver language settings some more and it’s interesting to hear the differences in pronunciation when choosing different languages in the VoiceOver section of accessibility section. My favourite is ‘australian english’!

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:

• Formed around an ‘abstact’ concept that most people will understand - i.e. ‘army of frogs’ is based on the idea of how frogs jump over other frogs. These concepts usually help the player to also understand the rules because they can often relate to the concept.
• Often do not have many pieces of even a playing board – although the board part is optional, these games generally mean setup time is minimal.
• Quick learning time – generally abstract games have few rules and those rules are mostly in form of either how you can move and what restrictions you have to abide by when moving. Note that a quick learning time DOES not always mean it is quick to become a pro and hence has a short appeal. Blokus is an example where it looks at first glance to be simply laying blocks onto a grid, bit my partner keep coming back to it due to the multiple strategic ways of approaching the game.
• Think ahead mechanics – due to the restriction rules, strategy is often key to these types of games, beginners will happily play one turn at a time, but experts will want to try to think ahead many moves, attempting to ‘out smart’ their opponents.
• Have some visual appeal – some of the best abstract games work on the fact that the game builds up to some great looking structure or layout that visually appeals to the player. Skybridge is a great example where the pieces build up to make towers and bridges out of classically made wood pieces. Hive is another where the pieces are crafted out of bakolite with sculpted insects.

Based on the above we often play a single game every so often whilst listening to some background music (via spotify of course).

What games have I tried soo far:

Heres a very simple list of the concepts for the games I have been playing a lot recently, dont be fooled into thinking these games are too simple, i have just given a very high level summary of them:

• Abalone - a grid of marbles where you have the concept of a ‘sumo wrestler pushing the opponent off the board’ – very simple but addictive.
• Blokus – lay down all you coloured tiles first and block your opponent.
• Quirkle – like rummikub, but with symbols. You place a tile next to another of the same symbol. Often spralls out in all directions.
• Ingenius – lay down double ended tiles of symbols (like quirkle), but on a board. The key factor here is that the player with the ‘lowest highest score’ wins. making you keep your eye on scoring in all of your colours.

Games that I have my eye on, but have yet to buy:

As with most gaming, there are always games that catch your eye. I have just created a bit.ly ‘bundle’ list of links to review to some abstract games that I have been looking into…

Click here to view and comment on them.

I am currently trying to convince my partner that khet 2.0 or skybridge is a game she will like :-)

Where to get these games:

I find it funny that whilst you can buy all of the games online via the many online stores (amazon etc), I have refound the enjoyment of going into a specialist shop and talking to the staff members about the products.

This concept (in my opinion) has long gone from most other shops due to the products becoming less specialised and the staff members not having any real passion for what they are selling. No longer can I go into a Bookstore and expect to find specialist subject books (computing being a good example) and even less a staff member who can recommend a good comedy scifi fantasy book after I run out of the main stay authors like tom holt, terry pratchett etc.

So it was to my great surprise that a shop called ‘eclectic games‘ has survived in Reading, Berkshire (recently moving to a bigger storefront). This shops real appeal is its staff, they seem to know about every game intimately and will quickly recommend or even discourage you from a potentially bad choice (leading you to a better one ofcourse!) based on the games that you have previously enjoyed.

Although, often they cant match the online prices all the time (overhead and all that), they do have a ‘stamp system’ where you get money off after ten purchases.

They also have a discount rate for gamers that are in a local gaming club (but i havnt tried that out yet).

So, if you fancy some low tech gaming, i do encourage you to try out one of the above games.

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?

Say your work colleague has a book you would like to buy, you may want to scan the barcode on it and quickly be shown a list of online sellers (used and new)?

Well, I came across another app called ‘Scanlife’ (also free) which does this feature in addition to understanding the common barcode standards (QR code, UPC, QR, Datamatrix, EAN, or ISBN)

In fact it can handle a few different types of ‘information’ stored in the Barcode, including:

- Open market app for URLs to Android market place

- Showing sellers for most items, books etc

- Playing videos that are linked to by the barcode.

So, if you are bored of the standard barcode reader and you have a nagging urge to download a new app.. check out Scanlife.

You could even use the QR code for it – no, hang on that would be a catch 22 situation ;-)

QR barcode to download and install the Scanlife free Android app.

Plus Here’s some screenshots of me using the app to find the ‘Learning Jquery book’ that I had lieing on my desk…

Step 1: Launch Scanlife and hold camera over barcode

Step 2: Scanlife detects Item and downloads information

Step 3: Clicking on Online prices, allows you to see the places selling this item