TweetNotebook

December 24, 2009 | Comment

In what must be one of the greatest acts of egotistical self-indulgence a couple of weeks ago I ordered a TweetNotebook.

For those that aren’t familiar with it the TweetNotebook is a notebook with a random selection of your tweets printed at the bottom of each page and with your Twitter icon printed on the front along with a customisable quote. A selection of pictures of mine are left and below.

Well mine arrived this morning and I have to say it is just fantastic and much better than I expected it to be. Why? Well for a start … Read the rest

A Better Perspective

December 17, 2009 | Comment

I consider myself to be a power Googler. Not only can I bang in keywords but I can also use boolean operators and search operators, such as filetype: & site:. However, I discovered yesterday that this all counts for nothing if you don’t know what it is that you are searching for.

One of my clients is going through a website refresh and was looking to put some screenshots on the home page but they wanted them to appear to be disappearing into the distance, rather like that shown in the picture to the left.

No problem I thought. I … Read the rest

BBC iPlayer on Nintendo wii

December 14, 2009 | Comment

The BBC has been doing a sterling job with its iPlayer making it available in all sorts of places. I had an opportunity to try out the Nintendo wii implementation over the weekend and I was pretty impressed.

To date all my iPlayer watching has been done on a computer of some description or another (or very occasionally on my iPhone). What was great about the wii was that I was able to hook it up to the TV and get access to programmes on the device they were originally intended for.

While the picture wasn’t broadcast quality it was … Read the rest

Online EPS Viewer

December 11, 2009 | Comment

I love timesavers like this.

EPS files are great for high quality graphics and are essential for press ready artwork but viewing the files can be a real pain. Typically you need a high end Adobe product or a specialised viewer which I don’t want to have to install just for the odd occasion when I need to view EPS files.

Along comes 3M to the rescue with their online EPS viewer and it is just perfect. You locate and upload the file you want to view, press the button and seconds later you see it on screen. No fuss.… Read the rest

My Space? Your Space More Like

December 7, 2009 | Comment

Really interesting article in the FT yesterday about the rise and fall of MySpace drawing a (contrasting) comparison to the current web sensation Facebook.

I have to admit that while I really struggled with the point of Facebook but I have never got MySpace. Not at all. Ever.

Potentially I can see Facebook being a real drain on peoples time (you need Responsinet to deal with that). I find the mindless games and quizzes that appear to be a waste of space and I still fail to see the business benefit but least people have stopped poking me. That said … Read the rest

Business Card Reader for iPhone

December 3, 2009 | Comment

Like so many people I still get plenty of business cards and despite many attempts to replace them with something a little more up-to-date nothing has succeeded so far (and won’t in my opinion until there is a common standard). Actually I like business cards but entering the details from them into my contacts can be a bit of a drag.

In the past I have used a service called ScanR and, in fact, it made the services I use and recommend list a while back, however, that could be about to change with the release of Business Card Reader … Read the rest

TweetCloud

December 2, 2009 | Comment

I have covered word clouds before when I looked at the service Wordle. Another, similar, service has popped up over the last few days offering a similar service for your Tweets, tweet cloud. Having pointed it to my Twitter stream @spokenlikeageek (you are following me, right?) it produced the graphic on the left showing the most frequently used words over the last year. Oh and what a surprise! I love my iPhone!

The top six words were:

iphone
google
windows
apple
netbook
chrome

Does that scream geek to you? I would be interested to know what your top … Read the rest

2009’s Must-Have Device

November 30, 2009 | Comment

There has been a lot of talk in the press recently about Rupert Murdoch taking his news off the web and off Google in particular. Murdoch feels that content has a value and that we should be paying for that value. In a sense he is correct of course but unfortunately he is too late. If he puts News International’s content behind a paywall other free sources will still be available – the BBC for example, where I get 99% of my news from now anyway.

So it was nice to see this promotional video from the News International title … Read the rest

MacBook Pro

November 8, 2009 | 3 comments

One thing that I particularly like about the MacBook Pro is its grunt. Even though mine is the bottom of the range model it has far more processing power than my old Windows desktop allowing me to rip DVDs in minutes rather than hours. This processing power has led me to make the MacBook my main machine, something that is possible with its excellent battery life.

I had intended to try and go completely Mac to the extent that I bought a copy of Office for Mac to ease that transition but there was one program that I found there … Read the rest

Windows 7 vs. Mac OS X Snow Leopard

November 5, 2009 | Comment

Well to date I have upgraded two machines to Windows 7 and I have to say that the whole thing has been a pleasurable experience. Not only has it breathed new life into a couple of old machines but also I am liking the improvements that have been made. I particularly like how you can drag a window to one side of the screen and it will automatically resize to fill 50% of the screen.

However, there is been a bit of a change at Thompson Manor with the addition of the first Apple Mac machine, a MacBook Pro to … Read the rest