Tea-and-Crumpets

Even though I’m still pissed off that I had to pay £5.99 for a much needed firmware update, I’m glad I did it. This is because I’ve just found out that they have activated the Bluetooth Chip on the iPod Touch’s hardware, now Skype.app is actually useful.

Something that I would like to see in future versions of iTunes is the ability to be able to “Pass Over” the current playlist or music selection from your iPod to your computer. Here is a example of my idea.

I’m listening in to a Genius playlist in my car, that I have made on my iPod Touch. At the end of my journey I am only half way through my songs but I have switched off my car and I am now heading into my house. As I am within range of my Wireless LAN I am able to boot my computer from sleep and instantly start listening to my computers full music collection. The problem lies with that if I wanted to carry on listening to the playlist that I have just created, I would either have to synchronize my iPod directy with my computer, or hope that Genius would create the exact same one then manually start it from the current song.

My solution would be to “Pass Over” the current Playlist/Album/Artist or whatever your current music selection is directly to the computer with the help of bonjour or an existing LAN. The iPod would then tell iTunes how far into the current song it was and all the other meta data needed to carry on the playlist. A simple “Pass Over” would then reduce the volume of the iPod and increase the volume of the computers speakers.

Of course this idea has flaw (so does everything), especially when taking into account the majority of iPod’s in use at the moment, ones what do not have WiFi, but this is a suggestion for future versions of iTunes, ones where the ratio to WiFi enabled iPods such as the iPod Touch and the iPhone out number non-WiFi ones.

Love to hear your thoughts on the matter and if this kind of functionally would benifit you in your day to day iPod use.

This week I go the fever and bought an iPod Touch and, just like every other fanboy in the Apple universe, I love it! I got all the standard applications that everyone seems to have, Facebook, Flashlight and Tap Tap Revenge. After looking into what networking apps there were I even got RemoteBoot and MochaVNC so now don’t have to get of my ass to turn my computers :D

But there still was one problem, the iPod only has WiFi access unlike it’s older brother with 3G, so whenever I left the house I no longer had internet connection. This is where JoikuSpot comes in.

JoikuStop, the light version specifically, with a click of a button will turn a Nokia Nseries into a Wireless Access Point for any other WiFi device. Currently the light version only supports http and https protocols, premium version support more, see their website for more infomation.

Obviously you are going to get a slow speed as with any 3G device, but who can complain with internet access anywhere on a Touch.

Normally I don’t get along with flash websites, but as soon as I saw this one I instantly fell in love. The website that I am talking about is ilovedust’s, their homepage speaks for it’s self. So many things going on a such a small area, damn brilliant. Their work and illustrations aren’t too bad either.

Recently, Gary introduced me to piwik, an open source web analytics software (mouthful), and it’s pretty great. I’d recomend you take a look at it. My intention with it is was to use it on my mum’s holiday home website, but after uploading to the server and running the installer, piwik was quick to mention to me that the server was only running php 4.4.3 and that it was unable to work on it.

This was really annoying as she’s paying a nice fee to 1&1 but still getting an old version of php.

Quick search of 1&1 revealed that their servers defaulty read .php files with the php4, but this can be easily changed with a little .htaccess editing.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Fixed. Remember though that you need to keep it in the root directory of your website.

Today I finally unplugged by BT Home Phone for the last time, and it was amazing. Now I’ve got a shinny new Netgear DG834GT. I’ve had a terrible experience with BT ever since we moved into my current house, but thankfully March was the last month of the contract. They still said I had to pay a leaving charge as they’d extended the phone line service until October, leaching bastards. Now however, we are with Sky, paying half the price for broadband and the phoneline. They also supply us with digital tv so it’s even cheaper, which is great.

The best part about the switch is the connection speed, the BT Home Hub was previously getting 578-1200Mb/s downstream 448Mb/s upstream, and the downstream would always change. I’ve just done another test on my new shinny Sky line and the results are good.

My Sky Broadband with Speedtest.net

The Netgear is saying 1856Kb/s downstream and 416Kb/s upstream, so all in all I’m pretty happy with the switch.

One of the current project’s that I am involved in at the moment is redesigning my College’s Intranet website. Originally, I was given the site to try and fix some major php bugs which had caused the site not to work as it was intended, but after reading through the documentation and getting to grips with the inner working of the system it was pretty clear that the 4 year old code needed a revamp all together. After a few chats with Steven (Head of IT) we said that if it was in the best interests of the site then striping it down to it’s bear essentials was fine for the time being.

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No sadly we’re not back as a Comic Strip, there isn’t enough time to do that anymore, and we won’t be pumping out content like we used to. Tea-and-Crumpets has now become more of a place for me to bounce idea’s from now. At the moment I’m pretty tied up with College work as well as re-designing (hopefully) my College’s Intranet site, but in between I’ll be trying to get the dynamic IP address tracker that I started writing late last year.

In the mean time I’ll try my best to get Tea-and-Crumpets back up and running, ripe with content.