Well the launch of Sky Player on XBL was a complete disaster! I logged in straight away on the day of launch and downloaded the app only to be greeted with various network errors whenever I tried to use it. I had a look on-line and there were hundreds of stories from people in the same situation. It turned out to be a problem at the Sky end, they massively underestimated how many people would be checking this out the minute it launched and as a result it took down all their servers!

The deal is this: If you’re already a Sky subscriber then whatever package you pay for you can stream for free as long as you have Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. Current Sky subscribers can pay an additional £9.75 per month to stream for free if they don’t have either Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. If you’re not a current Sky subscriber you can pay £15 per month to have access to the basic package. On top of this there are options to rent some programmes for £0.98 per programme. That seemed fairly reasonable to me, though I certainly wouldn’t want to pay for a series like that. It’s more suited to one off documentaries. Films would’ve been good, but maybe Microsoft thought it would be in direct competition with their revamped Zune HD Marketplace.

You don’t use MS points to buy any of the programmes either, you need to sign up for a SKY iD and create an on-line payment account. This links in to your 360 so you don’t have to sign in every time (although there is a security feature to enable that).

You can only use Sky Player on one console per account. It’s linked to the actual machine not your xbox account. I believe you can change this on the web-page for your Sky account if you need to (new console/replaced console, etc.) but I think that’s limited to one change per month.

Watching the sample channel now (Sky News) and even on High Quality I have to say it looks horrible Certainly nowhere near as crisp as Freeview. I’m also disappointed with the programmes I could purchase as PAYG. Hardly anything on Sky One at all. There were a couple of History documentaries that looked interesting, but they also looked quite old so would probably end up on freeview very soon if they hadn’t already. Not as impressed with this as I’d hoped, but in fairness it is the first time they’ve tried it and if they have the technical side working now maybe this will open the door for more. I would love to see a browser on the 360 (even Internet Explorer) just so more opportunities become available for us. iPlayer on the 360 would be great.

There are some voucher codes to make it a little cheaper to check out the features, these are the ones I know of:

One month free Sky Player Multiroom for Sky TV customers: XBOX1MONTHFREE

Three months Sky Player TV for the price of 2 for non-Sky TV customers: XBOX3FOR2

As above but from the Sky site: SKY3FOR2

It feels like forever since I updated, as is often the case, on the few occasions I have anything to blog about I’m too busy to actually write anything!

Sooo what have I been up to? Well I finished my OU course at last! It was an experience that’s for sure. I don’t think Arts & the Humanities are for me. I loved the chapters on Architecture but the OU doesn’t do any architecture specific courses. So from October I’ll be doing an Engineering degree instead. Annoyingly starting at Level 1 again, but it should be a lot easier and won’t be full of essays!

My PC went a bit screwy so I decided to rebuild it, but then decided it’s worth doing an upgrade so it’s actually still not in use. It does work, but I’ve not been using it because I don’t want to have to back up any new data from it again and also because I’ve been using… my sparkly new Samsung NC10.

Yeah, I finally bought myself a netbook. With the main PC playing up and my final OU course assessment looming it became more and more desirable. I mentioned to my Dad that I really wanted one and he ended up giving me half the cash! Then there was a code for 15% off as well I love it, it’s lots nicer than most of the other netbooks around which are either built like fisher price toys or have terrible battery life. I do take issue with the weird keyboard layout though. I’d have preferred the right shift key to be the bigger of the two and the back-slash key to be before the Z not after the forward-slash which just confuses me.

Being nice and small I’ll probably be taking it out and about with me when I’m likely to be sat bored somewhere for any length of time and thanks to yet another code on-line I now have a PAYG 3G dongle from Three which I only had to pay postage for. looking forward to testing that out. It’s also easily un-lockable so I don’t have to end up stuck using Three forever.

On the baking side of things I finally bit the bullet and bought myself some food colouring gels and some food glitter. The stuff is amazing! A little goes a long, long way and makes even really simple cakes look that little bit better

To go with the Engineering degree I’m getting back into coding. Well I say coding… I never feel very confident with it because I know so many people who are capable of such great things and I feel very insignificant, but hell, I know more than some people out there making websites so sod it! I’ve given myself some projects as the basis of my learning. I’ve created a little page to grab my current location from Google Latitude (updates via my Blackberry Bold), find the nearest weather forecast to me and display an image and text for the weather (I’ve added it to my start page). I ended up using PHP as it’s something I already knew and worked well with JSON (which is awesome isn’t it?!). Once I get it working exactly how I want I shall play around at porting it. I’ve looked at the GeoRuby things out there and they look pretty good. Rails is set up on my host already and I wanted a reason to try it out. To get myself ready for all this I went through my website and made sure all the pages are valid XHTML (strict) and valid CSS (up to v3.0).

So apart from baking, coding, wishing the heatwave would leave me alone, getting pre-storm migraines and playing about on the netbook I’ve been watching the baby Buzzards out back. There’s three that fledged a month or so ago and an unknown number of newer babies who only just fledged. They’re really cute and strangely cat-like! If only I had a camera lens long enough to take pictures of them…

I’ve finally updated my website – yay! I still really need to clean up the blog as it’s cluttered and looks such a state. The new LaunchPad page is now done though.

A lot of my friends already have these pages and I’ve been meaning to make one for ages. I knew what I wanted, I just wasn’t sure where to start. It’s been years since I’ve looked at any type of code at all really. It turned out that playing around in Google’s Code Playground was all I needed to push me in the right direction There’s still a bit of tweaking to be done, but I’m pretty happy with it.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about Spotify. I have to admit it took longer for me to check it out than normal because it was being compared to Pandora, and try as I might I just didn’t along with Pandora. I occasionally used LastFM‘s radio feature, but I own a hell of a lot of music. I’ve been buying CDs since I got my first CD player in 1989, they take up a lot of room.

Unlike a lot of people I don’t hate iTunes, it is a bit slow with the amount of music I have, and since I got my new iPod Touch I am no longer able to use iTunes on my win2k server machine. This means most of the music is run from a network directory making iTunes on my XP PC even slower. Not great… it also skips sometimes if I have FireFox open. I used to use foobar2k but as I have an iPod that needs this PC to sync now I ended up using iTunes more and more. I gave SongBird a go but found it slow and it was worse at dealing with networked music than iTunes.

Anyway, I finally gave Spotify a go the other night. Signed up for the free account as I wanted to see how the ads worked. I was impressed. Linking it up to my lastFM account made me happy as I really love my lastFM and probably wouldn’t use anything that didn’t update it. It’s very quick, it hasn’t skipped on me at all yet which is good as my internet connection is pretty dire speedwise and most things give me the dreaded ‘buffering’ messages. The image/text ads are really small and unobtrusive. I didn’t get very many of them either. It took a good while to get my first audio advert. This is where it really impressed me. It’s not particularly clever, it’s just a small thing that pleased me greatly. When you get the audio ads (mine were nearly all about Climate Change awareness so I’m fine with that!) you can’t skip them, that’s expected, but the best things I found were that they aren’t scrobbled to lastFM and also they don’t show up in your IM status if you have ‘currently playing’ selected. Awesome! How good is that?! So simple, yet it made me really happy.

One downside I’ve found is that the radio options aren’t very good for me. They don’t seem to be all that accurate. You can skip as much as you like though. The best use I’ve found for it is to create your own playlist (or find one on the vast number of spotfy playlist sites sprouting up) and preview albums/artists you’ve wanted to give a go, but don’t want to buy just in case you don’t like them.

It’s been a while! I did get the BlackBerry Bold 9000 on the 2nd of January. I had one hell of a wait in the T-Mobile store! There was a different set of staff to the last time I went in and as we soon discovered everyone had been told to come back on Friday 2nd January for their upgrade… I felt so sorry for the staff they were clearly shattered. Words really cannot describe how much I love this thing. I’m a total BlackBerry fan anyway, but the Bold is just awesome. Everything about it is lush. You really have to see the screen on these things to believe it. I keep loading the same pictures on both the Bold and the iPod and the difference is staggering. They’ve also fixed the issue with the memory filling up and just wiping all your texts with no warning. Now you can set it to free up memory in the background (the dreaded ninja wipe) or just let it warn you. Soooo much better. Took a while to get used to the full QWERTY, but I’m there now. It’s bliss having WiFi and GPS on a phone too. They’re two things I’ve not had before because I kept hold of the BlackBerry Pearl 8100g instead of upgrading for a few years.

I’ve stuck a fair few apps on it already. Actually managed to get TwitterBerry and BerryStore to run which was nice. Would love a decent IRC client for it, but as I have the iPod Touch with me all the time anyway it’s no biggie. A lot of people have moaned about the poor battery life of the Bold compared to other BlackBerry devices, but once you get the latest firmware and manage your power settings it’s actually pretty good. I can get about 8 days out of it with WiFi/BlueTooth/3G only switched on when I need them. Admittedly I never make phone calls, rarely receive phone calls and haven’t been texting so much lately, but it does a fair amount of e-mail receiving. I also put it in bedside mode every night. Compare this with the iPod Touch which needs charging every 2 days or so even when it spends most of the day powered off! The thought of having to charge a phone every day horrifies me.

Well I wasn’t very good at writing more often, I spent too much time thinking “oh I would write about that, but maybe I should wait until something else happens” as if my life is exciting… These were the dying moments of 2008.

After NXE killed my 360s GPU I sent it off to Germany to be fixed and actually got the same one back! Shame they managed to leave black scuff marks all over the front It was pristine when I sent it out. Grrrr. Might be time to stick a decal on that now like the Wii I guess. Sadly Microsoft are completely mental and not only did they not inform me the 360 was fixed and being sent back until 2 days after I’d received it, but now they keep e-mailing me to remind me that they haven’t received my 360 for repair yet… Mad. Well NXE doesn’t seem to have broken it yet, even though it now looks like total arse through HDMI. At least I can play stuff. Bought myself Rock Band 2 to cheer myself up. Loving it so far, kind of liking the way you can mix & match levels, though the OCD side of me doesn’t know how to cope with not working through it on Easy then Medium then Hard then Expert. Songs are great though.

Since I started writing this entry I’ve actually played through most of Rock Band 2 (I’ve joined the Rolling Stone Rock Immortals List). Been gold starring quite a few songs on bass which I’ve never really tried before. That probably makes me happier than it should

Really need to buy a 120Gb HDD for the 360 (don’t be silly I’m not buying the Microsoft one!) then I can stick a few more games on the HDD and transfer the Rock Band songs to Rock Band 2. 20Gb was fine at the time, but now it’s a little puny. Kna‘s gone through the process and the world didn’t end so it’s time for me to give it a try.

I bought myself the 8Gb iPod Touch on Black Friday, I also used QuidCo so got quite a nice saving and cashback combination going on. I love it to pieces. A bit weird getting used to having so little space (it replaced an 80Gb iPod Video) but the coolness factor makes up for that. Only real gripe I have with it is that a lot of the apps are made for the iPhone and so try and work out your location using GPS on startup… the Touch doesn’t have GPS so it gets quite annoying. I’d like to be able to enter somewhere in the settings to say where I am or something. I’ve filled the poor thing with free apps too. Gradually working out which ones I can get rid of and which ones are keepers. Oh yeah and thanks a lot Apple for changing the Touch 2G (and iPhone) to use USB only for charging and not the usual hybrid of firewire and USB, now none of my old docks will charge the Touch – baaaaah!

My laptop died the other day (12″ G4 PowerBook), it’s been good to me for years but now refuses to charge. I will take it apart and have a nose about but I need a new one. I can’t afford another laptop let alone another Apple one so I’m looking at netbooks. Ultimately I really want the black Samsung NC10. It’s lovely. It’s also still over £300. Which sucks There is the Acer One with Linpus for £180 but it doesn’t come in black and it only has a tiny weeny 3hr battery (8hrs for the NC10). However, I could get the Acer + 9cell battery + decal for over £100 less than the NC10. Which is quite tempting. Baaah if I had a job right now I’d get the Acer without even thinking and get the NC10 as well when the price comes down a bit (probably in March when the MkII and the NC12 get released). Not sure I can survive with no laptop for that long though…

Finally going to get my new phone on Friday too. Upgrading my BlackBerry Pearl 8100g to a Bold 9000. Tried to upgrade a couple of weeks ago but was told it would be £250 to upgrade, or free if I waited until Friday 2nd January… errrr, I’ll wait please! I think my phone knows it’s being replaced though as it’s started wiping my text messages even when the memory doesn’t look full. There are at least 3 messages that I’ll never receive as they tipped it over the edge in the last week. So damn annoying!

I’m going to attempt to write more often, it’s part of my to-do list. We’ll just have to see how it goes…

I have a new obsession, staring into my lavatory. I can’t help it. It’s fascinating. I bought some of those Toilet Duck Fresh Discs that you fire onto the inside of the loo and they work like those hideous old rim-block things that my Dad’s always had a vendetta against as they can easily get flushed and clog up the pipes. They’re also a haven for germs and how anyone could touch one to clean/replace it, well… eugh! These things, though, are fantastic! You push the tube towards the bowl, press the button and push. SPLAT! It leaves a jewel like disk of fresh smelling disinfectant in the bowl. It lasts about a week, you don’t have to touch it to replace it, just zap another disk on, and there’s no risk of it clogging up the plumbing. Such a wonderful idea. (I am easily pleased.)

I recently found a place on eBay selling PSUs for old SFF PCs like my old Shuttle SpaceWalker SV25. I bought one and although the dimensions are perfect, it’s not set out in the same way as the original meaning I’ll have to cut a hole in the side of the case which is not ideal.

I really thought that once I’d plugged the PSU in it’d just be a case of sticking an OS on and away I’d go. I never envisaged the nightmares! I’ve built so many machines now I’ve lost count. Both for work and home. I just wanted a nice lightweight OS like FreeBSD or Fluxbuntu. Nothing would install! FreeBSD gives me a Fatal Trap 12 and reboots every time. All Ubuntu variants have kernel panic at installing files. DSL ran fine from CD but refused to install yesterday.

Today I managed a frugal install, but it wouldn’t boot without the CD. I’ve just given up and tried Windows 2000 (which was on the machine previously) and it did get to the configuration which is further than anything else, but then it crashed. I tried about 4 times. Same outcome. I’m giving XP a go now, more for a laugh than anything else. I’m not even sure it could run XP without the hardware problems! I’ve narrowed the issue down to the HDD, but sadly it’s the only spare IDE HDD I have. I’m not buying another as it completely ruins the whole point of rebuilding this out of spares.

As for my OU Coursework, I was 3 chapters behind due to being ill, playing some time-consuming 360 games(!) and general apathy. I finished reading all about Faraday last night and went though the DVD on him today. So now I’m only 2 chapters behind, but I reckon I can get the Stalin chapter read tonight as there aren’t any other exercises for that one. Then I’m on to ‘The Diva’ from Monday getting me right back up to date again. Phew!

I got a message the other week on my BlackBerry about google sync. So now I have my Google calendar synchronizing with my BlackBerry calendar and it totally rocks! Cos I’m now using it a lot more I have my Outlook synchronizing with the google calendar too and also added my FaceBook events to my google calendar, I also used an application to enter all my facebook friends’ birthdays onto my google calendar.

So now everything is to hand on my BlackBerry. I love that thing soooo much. Screw Nokia and their shitty CS department. Though it will be nice to upgrade my Pearl in December. Looking forward to getting one with GPS, only thing mine is really missing.

With things still not back to normal on TV with the writer’s strike (Bones is only 15 episodes this season) and everything (Bones & NCIS anyway) ending next week, I was looking to new things to watch. IRC people kept on at me so a couple of weeks ago I gave in and started watching BSG.

Haven’t done too badly as tonight I’ll be up to date with the current episodes of series 4. I watched the Razor mini episodes last night and the Razor special. I can blast my way through stuff so quickly when I put my mind to it. I pretty much just replace sleep with watching the screen.

I can’t say I’m addicted to it. There are a few too many errors (continuity and otherwise) that make me cringe. If you’re going to use the word “frak” as a replacement to “fuck” in order to show someone swearing without them doing so… you cannot then have people on the same show using frak instead of swearing. It’s one or the other (and every time they say “fraction” there’d be giggles… admit it)! Also Dualit toasters don’t pop up when done…

The camera work leaves you dizzy. Makes me wonder if a lot of it is done to hide the disappointing special effects. Some of the Viper footage looks like it’s lifted straight from V. You expect to see strings or a hand appear in shot or something. Oh and don’t get me started on Apollo’s fat-suit… christy. I’ve taken a dislike to a lot of the characters too. I’d have chucked Cally out of the airlock back in the mini-series to be honest… irritating bitch. I also can’t stand Starbuck, but that’s more because she looks and acts very much like someone I know and don’t get on with.

There’s not much point listing what I do like as most people who know me know of my hatred for the human race and my empathy for inanimate objects. Of course I cheer on Cylons! I want a pet Raider.

via videosift.com

I’ve been playing around with FriendFeed for a few weeks now and I have to say I really like it. I know Facebook has just added similar features, letting you incorporate your latest Flickr/Picasa/Yelp/del.icio.us/digg entries into your mini-feed, but I think it has a long way to go before it topples FriendFeed.

A couple of things I’d like to see on FriendFeed though would be a neater way of adding my Facebook status updates. I’ve currently added them as an rss feed to the blog section and while it works, it’s a bit messy. It would also rock if MySpace would make my friend’s mood/status updates available as an rss feed so I could add this to my FriendFeed.

The best thing by far about FriendFeed for me is the ability to create Imaginary Friends. This means I can set up feeds for friends who have blogs, etc. but would never get around to creating their own FriendFeed.