Went into town last night to catch up with an old friend. Have not seen USA-C since she was married 2 years ago (I know, I am a v bad friend). We had a great time - drink at the Lowlander and then a meal at Belgo (mussels and beer!). We must meet up more often!
Dension released a new version of the IceLinkPlus firmware 2B3 - the fixes are nothing major for me but include full support for the UserInterface mode if you have an iPod video. So - figured I might as well apply them. Whilst there I experimented again with text diaplay on the sat-nav screen. It works (ish) but still grabs focus from the sat-nav map to the text display. Although it would be nice to have the song name listed and be able to scroll through artists etc on screen I could not live with it stealing focus from my sat-nav map all the time. Maybe it'll be fixed in the next firmware....
Watching Dave Gorman tonight and his stand-up comedy about googlewhacks got me thinking.... How long would it take me to find a googlewhack..... about 5 mins it turns out. May I present pontifex homogolation - look it up - only one result :)
With the purple sofa having exited stage-left it was time for a new look. K finally got the dresser she has been wanting. Only problem is that now the desk doesn't fit :)
Upgraded the MINI sat nav to V28 today. Install went well and took all of 2 minutes. No obvious difference from V27.1 but I hear from others it is mainly a map rendering speed increase. Will see how it looks over the next few days...
K and I went to Bath yesterday just for the night. I had some work in Bristol and Bath and K tagged along. We stayed in the Windsor - and were given a 4-poster room upgrade for free! Dined at OneFishTwoFish and then met H for a pint in the Crystal Palace pub. The conversation steered to chillis and it turns out H is quite the grower too. He even bought in 2 samples this morning for us to take home - thanks! Last thing this morning before leaving K bought some buns from Sally Lun's famous shop - bringing one back for J as he goes on about them all the time!
Some more pics of the chilli plants - we split them into several pots as they appear to be growing so well - I only thought I'd get one or two to germinate :) BTW - these pics were taken on the new camcorder - not too bad!
With thanks to the hard working team at X5World I managed to finally hack the MINI sat nav DVD in order to add speed cmaera locations. In the process I also found that my MINI DVD reader accepts DVD+RW allowing me to muck about a lot and not burn too many coasters :) Next think on the hack list is changing to two colour themes (silver or blue) to silver and night where night will be more subdued colours....
Thew new crop of chilli plants are growing fast - we had to go and get some more pots to repot them before they get too big. Meanwhile the mature plants are still producing lots of nice red chillis for me :)
Just trying to see if I can blog videos....appears I can but I have to decrease the standard width from 425 to 400 in order for it not to bust my page.
My new camcorder turned up today. Neat little thing - very small, 1M-pix CCD, super steady shot, super night shot, 12x optical zoom, 800x digital zoom, 60GB HDD, docking station, USB2 transfer etc etc. Only thing I am unsure of is the MPEG2 recording format. Although straight to DVD will be easy it is proving troublesome to edit. UPDATE - review now on RICHIE BOYS TOYS
I just bought myself a little present - a new camcorder (well, half bought - K has decided this is an easy way out of having to think what to buy me for my birthday and as such offered some help on the £££ front). I have been waiting for the right bit of kit to come along for more than a year now. My requirements were true 16:9, night-vision, HDD recording medium, small dimensions and pref. touchscreen. A while back I became quite interested in the JVC Everio GZ-MG505 but was put off by its lack of night-vision (more useful than you think). In then end Sony finally bought out a range of HDD cameras that weren't the size of a shoebox. I opted for the top-of-range SR70 as it has a 60GB drive (£50 more than the 30GB model). It also has a large touch-screen LCD - front mounted mic and comes with a USB2 docking station allowing me to charge and upload at the same time. So, ordered this afternoon and should be with me on Thu - can't wait!
I planted some chilli seeds about a week ago - our good friend A had given them to us some time ago. Well, unbelievably (if you know how non-green my fingers are) they started to shoot. I cannot tell you how excited I am - more chilli plants!!!!!! The two adult plants we keep outside are producing more and more red-hot killers every day, so the thought of even more and of different varieties makes me dizzy with excitement :)
Hurrah for Sainsburys - I managed to make an entire meal without really cooking anything - perfect!
I finally added my Bleutooth mouse and TyTN docking station to RICHIE BOYS TOYS - I would add pics but for some reason blogger beta (which I am trying) is having problems linking them - might try later...(added)
Spent the night in Bury St.Edmunds with work as B was over from Italy. Good meal at Cafe Rouge followed by a few beers in the Nutshell (UK's smallest pub - although this is currenly being contended by someone who has converted a signal-station to a bar).
K has a new website to go hand in hand with her new business venture. It contains only a cover-page for now but will be changed soon to a full design - www.haighs.biz
I bought a new office chair today after um-ing and ar-ing for over a week. It cost a fair ammount but it is SOOOOOOO nice to sit in, and I do spend a lot of time in it. I consider it a treat to myself :)
I thought I'd try a little experiment today. I had to go and feed S's cat this morning and then return home via the post office to pick up a parcel - a walk of about 10 mins that involved a basic lap of the village. So, I set my wifi sniffer up on my TyTN and left it running. I caught 17 access points in total and, surprisingly to me, only 4 were unprotected. So, is the world becoming more secure? Well, by ratio I think so....but a couple of years back there were only 4 access points in knebworth and they were all unprotected! It is interesting seeing what people have named their routers though - everything from the number and road of the house it is in to 'The OC':)
I recenlty broke (well, chipped) my trusty Nextlink Bluespoon AX headset. After 3 years use I figure it has done fairly well. So - what to replace it with...well, the new version - the AX2 of course! Same idea, same size but newer bluetooth stack and much longer battery life. Info here: http://www.nextlink.to/webshop/
K and I went to the beautiful viallge of Benington today for the Benington Lordship Chilli Festival. The Lordship is a fantastic old manor house with sprawling grounds and part of the building consisting of some ruined battlements. The festival hosted 10 or so stalls selling eveything chilli related - spices, sauces, clothing - everything! We hung around for an hour or so soaking up the atmosphere and wondering why we had not found this picturesque village yet! We left with a Thai Dragon Chilli plant which should produce 200+ chillis every year. They are small and evil looking and are VERY hot - should come in handy for fajitas tonight :)
Been watching an interesting post over at the xda-developers forum. A new ROM has been released by HTC for the TyTN. Several people are reporting speed increases but I am more interested to see if it fixes my SMS voicemail notification problem (basically none being delivered).
There are however a couple of problems:
1 - the update is not a Vodafone update (but an HTC one)
2 - the update contains a basic extended ROM (missing the Vodafone plugins)
Item 1 appears fairly easy to get round with this machine. In the past I have had to hack ROMs in order to tell them they are actually different than they are. Once hacked the phone accepts them. With the TyTN you start the install and when it gets to point of telling you the phone has the wrong vendor code you simply leave it plugged in in BOOT mode and re-run the setup. The vendor check code can no longer run and as such you can flash the ROM - nice!
Item 2 is also fairly straightforward as long as you have a copy of the extended ROM you with to use. Simple complete the upgrade, unlock the extended ROM, copy in your preferred files and hard reset - the device does the rest.
We will see how successful this all it - I am currently only 10% though the 25min upgrade process detailed as step 1 above...fingers crossed!
I received today my notice of expiration for my KellyCult domain. With less than 100 hits a month I figure it is not worth renewing. So, as of 18th October it will be no longer at its own domain, instead at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richandkris/kellycult
The site was up for two years and was inspired by my Jacskon Kelly bought for me as a wedding present. It was fun to make and, at the time, a laugh to maintain. RIP KellyCult :)
Found a nifty tool allowing me complete control of my TyTN PDA using my computer. Have turned my £1,200 laptop into the world's most expensive PDA keyboard :)
