Cornell Finch

10 Prius Adverts Toyota Will Probably Never Use

Collin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:31:51 +0000

Prius: It looks like shit but saves the planet.
Prius: Boxy isn’t always good.
Prius: Celebrity endorsement doesn’t mean it’s a good car.
Prius: Average driver age 63.
Prius: Buy one and lose your ability to drive.
Prius: Save the planet and retain your credibility - walk.
Toyota: 30mph on the motorway is quite fast enough in a Prius.
Prius: Designed by computer, built by robots, driven by unimaginative arseholes.
Prius: Add more fake wood and we’d call it a Lexus.
Prius: Clarkson thinks they’re cool. He’s a twat too.
Prius: Driving skills not required.

The Obligatory iPhone 3G Post

Collin — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:11:55 +0000

But not what you’re expecting. I played with one on Saturday and simply? Meh. Can’t see what all the fuss is about.

So here’s something entertaining to do with your iPhone instead:

Go Tom!

In related news, I just spoke to Vodafone about upgrading my 2 year old Nokia 6300. I suggested the N95 and the lady on the phone suggested that the N96 would be available via upgrade in December. From the very quick spec run-down she gave me it sounds better specced than the iPhone too! Too long for me to wait, but we’ve ordered an LG Secret¹ for my wife so I’ll have a play and let you know what I think.

Flash website, but worth the wait! ↩

12 of 12 July 2008

Collin — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:23:47 +0000

I played! I remembered, had a fantastic day, took approximately 200 photos (we went to a summer fete/carnival) and got home all excited, 11.20 pm, put the memory card in the card reader and guess what. Nada. The photos are definitely on the card but my card reader just refuses to read the card.

Bugger. I will try and come up with a solution tomorrow and get the photos up asap.

Tonight? Bed!

Well, I managed to get the photos off the camera! I found the USB lead and plugged the camera in. So, with a little grandeur (it’s 11.45pm!) I present my first 12 of 12 since January! If you don’t know, 12 of 12 is simply where, on the 12th of each month, you take 12 photos to represent your day. You then upload them somewhere (doesn’t have to be a blog, could be Flickr or Photobucket etc), give a little commentary for each photo and leave a link to the set of photos on Chad Darnell’s¹ website so other people can visit and comment if they want to.

The day started with me cleaning my Minis. We were to go to Swanmore Carnival/Fete and I absolutely couldn’t go without washing the cars. I was going to do it last night but I didn’t finish work until 1830 and it was raining. :(

0900: First up, Lilly. She is a 1980 Mini Clubman and new to the family. I have had her for just over a month and have so far managed to do almost nothing to her.

0930: Except change the seats last weekend. I put one of my bucket seats in as I was finding the originals (beige ones, not the ones in the photo) far too bouncy. However, after a week of driving her while sat in the bucket seat, it didn’t feel right. I apologise for the pants quality of this photo.

09:40: So I changed it. These tartan type seats are ones I had in the garage from a previous Mini. Ah, matching, much better!

10:00: Then old faithful, my Mini Cooper called Harvey. I’ve had him 7 years and have vowed never to sell him. Doesn’t he look gorgeous! I have a new grille to go on at some point.

11:30: Now there’s an offer you can’t refuse! We all met at The Brickmakers in Swanmore, joining a number of American muscle cars. We all crowded into the pub and got us our baps. Yummy!

12:15: The obligatory big v little photo. The Fire Truck was originally from Skegness. We followed it for two miles, three mph all the way, onto the fete location.

12:45: Of course, driving at just three MPH means that I can get cool photos like this! The red car in the photo was built by the apprentices at Longbridge using spare bits and pieces. This meant that the car had not been through the main build line it could not be given an age related number plate, hence the “Q” Plate. A beautiful and extremely rare little car.

14:30 One of the displays in the main arena at the fete was bird of prey flying. This is a Harris Hawk called “Hope”. One of his party tricks is to fly really low along a line of people. He was actually moving up (!) and away from the people when I took this. All happened in about 2.5 seconds.

15:00: This is Monty. He’s a mixed breed Falcon (I can’t remember what) that was flying to the lure. I used a friend’s SLR to take about a hundred photos of him. This is the only photo I got with my compact camera.

19:00: When we got home from the show I decided to get some exercise and walk the dogs. Not far from home we have a disused railway line that’s now a footpath called The Deviation Line. The dogs and I walked about a mile further than I first intended. I was listening to a heavy metal play list on my wife’s iPod and missed the turn off. Never mind, the dogs enjoyed it and were knackered by the time we arrive at my Mum and Dad’s for…

20:30: Dinner! Yay Mum! A really nice bit of pork, followed by…

21:30 Trifle! Yay! My excuse for eating it is that I needed to put back some of the calories I’d burned by walking the dogs the extra mile!

I took some video of a brass band playing at The Brickmakers this morning. As soon as I can get it uploaded I will either post it here as an update or in a new post.

The creator of 12 of 12 ↩

Shakespears Sister

Collin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:11:02 +0000

Yes, it is spelled correctly! Remember them? Ex Bananarama Member Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit were the lead and backing vocalist respectively.

Their first single to chart in the UK was called You’re History. And that’s exactly what I say to Defensio on this blog today.

After 5 months using it, the first couple of months were great, after teaching it the commenting regime on this blog it caught all my spam comments with no problem.

Unfortunately, beginning of May is where it started to go wrong. It marked a number of genuine comments as spam and couldn’t process some other comments. Same thing happened in June. Last night I had to “unspam” 6 more comments (including one from Donncha and two from my Dad) and then today I had to self-process another 20 messages because Defensio seemed incapable. I then did the same thing on Mini! Mini! Mini!.

So, Defensio, You’re History.

Continuing the musical theme, Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town. Where “The Boys” = Akismet. Can someone remind me why I left please?

On another note, this theme is starting to piss me off. I don’t know why, it’s been great. But I feel a change coming on. Possibly single column with the “sidebar” at the bottom. Expect Change.

Realisations

Collin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:15:21 +0000

Making the tea after getting home from work, smoking a smoke and pondering my belly-button fluff (cleaned out this morning!) I made two self observations.

One:

When I speak to my Mum I always call her Mum. Always have and always will.

When I speak to my Dad it’s always “buddy”, “mate”, “Dude”, “Get up you lazy bugger!”¹ or something similar to that.

Of course, when referring to them they are always Mum and Dad.

With this realisation happening in the last five minutes I haven’t asked Dad if he’s ever noticed or if it worries him or Mum, but it’s gonna bug me now!

Two:

I don’t say thank you enough. Yes, if we’ve had dinner with them or they’ve done something for us, I/we thank them. But I can’t remember the last time I said thank you for everything else. For just being there. So:

Mum, Dad,

Thankyou.

Sunday mornings, generally 10.30 - 11.00 when I pop in to their house to say “Hi”. ↩

Recognition For Services To My Willy

Collin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:15:13 +0000

Well, if Russell T Davies can get an OBE for writing Dr Who (big whoop) and Tim Henman can get something or other (I wasn’t really listening) for never winning a major tennis title then why can’t I get some recognition from the Queen for services to my willy? I could flop him out in all his glory for her to see!

Seriously though, is there no-one doing anything important these days? I mean, Salman Rushdie got a Knighthood?? Come one! He wrote a book that pissed a few people off. Did he really deserve a Knighthood for it? Not in my humble opinion.

More On The Cloud, Linux and admission of Failures

Collin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:08:44 +0000

Let’s go in reverse order from the title. First, the admission.

There is a saying that goes something along the lines of

The best laid plans of mice and men…

In an attempt to revitalise my interest in the blog I started three new series on the blog:

Photo of the day. With over 20,000 photos on my hard disc I was intending to share many of them on this blog in an attempt to get some decent comment and traffic, both on my blog and my Flickr stream.
My Week in View. Was going to be released on a Wednesday and give a quick run-down of the good, bad, ugly and utter shit that happened in the previous seven days.
The Beginner Photography series. I was attempting to share some of my knowledge and help beginners with the basics and getting the most from their digital camera.

As you may have noticed, I have failed on all three counts. I had about 10 days worth of photos posted, I reviewed my week just once and three editions of the photography course. I ran out of time and enthusiasm, then I had one or the other but never both at the same time.

I apologise to both the people following the photography. If you really want to learn more then please leave a comment and I will point you at some sites and magazines that are running exactly the same thing and doing much much better than I have.

The “Cloud” and Linux parts of the post are intermingled, so excuse me if this makes no sense!

Freedom from the desktop is awesome. Plain an simple. I can dedicated more time to real life instead of stuck at the PC answering emails, all the new documents I create are staying on Google Docs and I can share them with contacts without having to block the tubes with attachments. I have hit a problem with it though.

We redecorated the lounge, taking about a month to achieve start to finish. In this time my Ubuntu machine was unplugged in the other room. I had a sudden thought that perhaps I could re-jig my Sony Vaio PIII 833mhz (128mb RAM) with a small Linux install. I had heard of Damned Small Linux through conversation with a geek buddy so I looked. 50mb download, 10 minutes to install and it was up and running on the laptop. Nice and quick too. I only want it to get on the ‘net in the living room and check my mail, possible work on some Google Docs and be happy. Two problems I have hit so far:

The version of Firefox that’s pre-installed is (quite rightly) a hugely cut-down version. There’s no flash support and although I have told FF to install the plugin, it’s not working. This kills quite a number of sites (including this one), anything with Video (YouTube etc), the Farnborough Arshw Website and limits functionality on other sites like eBay and anything else with flash embedded.
More importantly than the flash, Google Docs works a treat for Word type documents, but will not play with the Google Spreadsheets application at all. This makes it rather inconvenient as I’am doing large amounts of work with spreadsheets for various projects I’m working on.

So, Google Docs is great, but I might have to dump DSL and either try another Linux distro or set the Ubuntu desktop machine up again. No great shakes with that but I like the idea of being able to completely hide the laptop. Can’t easily do that with a TFT screen, keyboard and mouse…

Living In The Clouds

Collin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:32:58 +0000

I know that a number of people in my web friends circles already do this, but this afternoon I have converted all my mail accounts (except one!) to work through Google mail. I know Daze is a big fanboy and he’s part of the reason I have done it.

It was always quite a scary proposition to have all my personal data live on the web and it had always stopped me from taking the plunge. After reading a few articles about living in the “cloud” (ie having everything on the web rather than stored locally) I decided that if big name techie people can do it and be safe then why can’t I?

With my life changing the way it is I have less access to my own PC and that can make it awkward if someone wants to get me an important document. By putting all my domain email addresses (4 of them) into Google I can log on from anywhere and view as I need to.

I haven’t used Google Docs or Calendar yet but have been using Google Reader for a number of months with great success. I guess I could start using them much more and I will get the same benefits as with email.

The next step is to grab one of my old pen drives (USB memory stick), put a mobile Linux distro (I haven’t decided which one yet) on it and run PCs from that. It means that I can boot any (USB bootable) PC to my pen drive, get to my favourites, reference documents and other useful info without ever going near the host OS or hard disks. Of course, I could just go for the mobile version of Firefox for the moment although that would restrict me to using either a Windows or Linux machine for compatibility.

So, do you do live in the clouds or are you scared to trust Google (like I was) and are still tethered to your PC? What problems have you found? Got any useful tips or tricks that you want to share?

Twitterfone

Collin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:10:54 +0000

A couple of months ago, May in fact, Donncha posted about Twitterfone.

If you use Twitter, this is another way to tweet. Essentially, all you do is phone the local number and leave a message. When Donncha mentioned I thought it sounded cool so asked for an invite from the Twitterfone website. It came through the other day.

I had a chance to have a play this morning, signed up and left message. At this point I must issue a warning.

Think about what you’re gonna say before you phone!

My first Twitterfone tweet ended up as:

Oh! Some people need to know they got a lot to answer for. Hello, it’s me. I have absolutely no idea what to say, so I’m going away again now. Bye!

Far too long to fit in Twitter itself, the Twitterfone software did an awesome job of translating my voice to text. It only missed an “um”. You can listen to it here.

I have absolutely no idea if I will use the service much, if at all. I don’t even use Twitter much. I should, it’s awesome! I might start using it again and put updates into the sidebar of the blog. We’ll see…

This Is Just Nasty - SFW

Collin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:37:54 +0000

Due to the graphic nature of the image that I took of a mouse, I have put it after the jump. Please do not click through if you are of a sensitive nature. If you’re reading this via the feed then I apologise in advance.

Most of the muck that you find stuck to the bottom of your mouse is remnants of food and dead skin. This image was captured when I sat at a PC to do some work on it. I thought the mouse (an optical unit that is normally lovely and smooth) was moving slow and erratically. I turned the mouse over and this is what I found:

Clean your mouse you dirty fucker!