Just realised I only have thirty days left to go here at work, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I am able to get out of here much earlier than contracted till because I have pleanty of annual leave to take, a whole month in fact, to pad out the rest of my tenure. This was always the plan for both financial and personal reasons, the rent saving alone was well worth it.
July 29th can’t come soon enough, I am ready to go home and when I do I will have pleanty to say about my year here. And that my friends will be no holds barred.
Looks like the podshow network has been the hardest hit of all after today’s release of iTunes 4.9. At the time of writing I cannot download any of their shows or gain access to their sites. On Saturday Adam talked about Bit Torrent being the future for distributing the shows as the number of subscribers increases to new heights. This latest outage makes it even more apparent we have a long way to go as I can’t see Apple adding Bit Torrent support in a hurry.
I have tried to add my podcast feed to the iTunes directory but it may take a while to show up, I believe they may even check the content first. Good thing is iTunes doesn’t purely rely on the directory to add podcasts, just drag the RSS feed into your list and it will start downloading.
I will look into the new iTunes more when I get the chance but so far it’s looking very effective as a podcatching client.
Update: Grrr. You can’t import OPML files with your subscriptions in, Dave Winer won’t be happy.
The government are trying to push ID cards through the commons again but they still don’t seem to realise we don’t want them for a number of important reasons.
Firstly the cost is astronomical and it could increase to £19 billion according to the LSE, looks like we will wind up with another over priced system, something that the NHS can tell us all about.
Will it prevent terrorism? What terrorism? I am sure the police, intelligence services and the army are doing their best to insure this country does not come under attack from extremists but the simple fact is that the threat to this country has been exaggerated to a ridiculous and unrealistic level. The terrorists are not a well oiled machine with an international network that the Bush and Blair administrations would have us believe. So the impact of any such scheme would be minimal, if at all, on the small threat we face.
Immigration is the other justification but this is completely the wrong approach. Biometrics are already being taken on entry into the country and that seems to be doing its job very well. No ID card and you get deported? I some how doubt that.
Which brings me to the flawed biometrics part of the scheme. It looks like it will be finger, 2D face and iris so that’s one good, two bad. It’s widely known iris can be beaten with clever contact lenses. 2D face is pretty lackluster from what I have seen and for a supposedly foreword looking system they really need to be scanning 3D face maps from day one to guarantee a good level of accuracy.
Of course let’s not forget about the civil liberties issues involved. There will be a central database of biometrics data for everybody in the country, something that is only currently done with criminals and immigrants. I don’t even want to think what would happen if your finger prints were found at the scene of a crime you didn’t commit and they ran a search against the ID card database. This could have the effect of devaluing the biometric data currently held on criminals, a very bad thing indeed.
The card is pretty useless in day to day exchanges apart from a proof of identity so it will be good for people without driving licenses (all three of you). If they phased in biometrics onto passports that would be a cheaper and more effective way of accomplishing some of their goals but right now that seems like it’s falling on deaf ears. They want to be seen to be doing something about terrorism and immigration and this is a very public way of doing it. It is just a shame that it will have no affect on either of those issues in the long run.
I am having some problems with my RSS feed and am posting this as a test.
UPDATE: Well that was ugly, had to update Wordpress from 1.5 to 1.5.1.2 and thought I had lost my content for a minute there. Should be fine now but please let me know if you see anything wrong feed wise or site wise.
I am not sure if there are many examples of this but TNA Wrestling our now making all their future episodes of Impact available through Bit Torrent (first episode). This is excellent news and furthers the case for Bit Torrent’s main stream acceptance of a way of distributing legal content not just illegal.
Of course they would rather have an actual TV deal in the US but for international viewers it’s excellent.
Whoa, the AMD X2 Dual Core Athlon 64 4200 is on sale! Whoohoo!
Doh! It’s ¬£386.57.
And neither can I but this week’s heat wave has really put a strain on it, pushing the CPU up to 70¬∞C on a regular basis. I can’t keep this up for much longer so I am finally going to buy a new case. About six months ago I was in the market for the Chenbro Gaming Bomb 2 just because it looked very slick (ala Mac G5) and had 120mm fans at the front and rear. Unfortunately it turned out to be far too loud for my tastes (a pet peeve you develop when you sleep in the same room as your PC) and I had to look for something else.
I find it really hard to find cases that I like as they are either too bland or too extreme. It seems like the only choices are plain ugly beige boxes or stupid looking cases that feel more at home on the set of Doctor Who than in my room. There are very few cool looking cases around, something that Apple has a bit of a monopoly on.
So I am going to sacrifice a side window for performance and go for the Antec P180 which seems to have quite a following over at Silent PC Review. It looks pretty good, plenty of space for 120mm fans and a unique sectioned off area at the bottom of the case for the PSU. It’s not available in the UK yet as far as I’m aware which will give me more time to read reviews and decide which colour to go for ;-). Hopefully when all is said and done a few degrees will be shaved off and my system will run much quieter which is all the more important when it gets stupidly hot like this.
I have actually already gone for the ¬£15 Egg travel insurance specifically because it covers winter sports. That’s darn cheap considering you can throw yourself off a mountain strapped to a plank (or two) every morning for 17 days and still be covered.
To be honest after seeing all the previews and videos of Quake 4 I was a little disapointed. Each of the last three games defined the FPS genre we know today and set standards for their peers. So it is a shame that it looks like alot like Doom 3 rather than being a unique entity. Of course, we all know how that turned out.
So I was delighted to see this video of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Wow! Looks like they have really pushed the Doom 3 engine further than the Quake 4 team and have created a distinct and great looking game. This is the Quake I am most looking forward to.
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