Results tagged “geek”

Warning: geek entry, you'll want to bail now if you don't care about this kind of thing

I knew I'd posted a tweet with a link in it but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was or when I'd even posted it. Manually searching through my timeline was a monumental pain in the arse and I gave up in disgust. There had to be a better way.

So I wrote one. tweetlinkr is a very simple Perl program that retrieves your Twitter timeline, examines each tweet for the presence of a link, and prints any that are found to screen.

And while I did find what I was looking for, I really didn't care anymore as I was far more entertained writing code to talk to the Twitter API. Which, I might add, is incredibly easy thanks to the heroic effort put into the Net::Twitter Perl module.

When I get around to it I think it might be cool to store all the links I've posted to Twitter in some kind of 'these must be interesting because I posted them to Twitter' kind of storage/viewing thingy. Another project for another day.

I'm not sure these geek posts really belong here. But I don't really know where else to put them. So here they'll go. For now.

I install quite a lot of games on my iPhone. Some come, some go. After a little cleanup yesterday, here are the ones I decided to keep.

Of those, I'd say I've played Plants vs Zombies the most, closely followed by Doodle Jump, and Orbital. The two newest games are Leap Sheep - which is hellishly addictive and The Incident.

Do you game on your phone? Which are your current faves?

If you're anything like me, you love comment spam. Love it. And by love it I mean want to punch yourself in the face. Just recently I've seen a marked increase and while I think it's amusing that 'Ivan Trench Coats' is leaving me a comment, it is getting a little time consuming to remove it.

Movable Type itself does an ok job detecting and junking spam but some still sneaks though. I can't tell if it's automated or if someone is manually typing it in. So what to do? Turn on moderation for all comments? That's a bit of a pain in the arse so before I take that final step I'm going to give Jay Allen's Comment Challenge plugin a whirl.

So now when leaving a comment you'll just have to enter a little word.

Update: I haven't had a single spam comment since installing Comment Challenge. So I'm going to tentatively say that it did the trick.

I was a huge huge fan of arcades when I was a kid. I remember going down to the seaside and there would be arcades as far as the eye could see down by the seafront. They'd have the pretty flashing lights, music, and noise. I'd be drawn to them in some kind of zombie like fugue. I dread to think how much money I conned asked my parents for over the years.

I think kids these days are missing out in a way. It's different now. Sure you can play someone halfway round the world and hear them trash talk you. But that's easy. Anyone with an ego can be a cocky little shit over the internet, you're still anonymous.

Back in my day there was no anonymous. You had the cocky kids up close, face to face. I suppose there was an aspect of bravery about challenging someone else. They were a little older, a little bigger, a little more likely to punch harder than you. You had no internet connection to hide behind.

I remember playing Kung-Fu Master one year in Spain at the hotel our family was staying in. There were a lot of older kids who hung around that machine as cocky as can be. It took me a while to get the nerve to brush past them, put my 25 Peseta coin in the slot, and play while they tried to intimidate. But as it turned out I wasn't actually half bad at that game and ended up beating the top score. I dunno, I think I got their respect after that.

But the whole thing was nerve wracking. Kids today are missing out on the whole crapping your pants factor that was part and parcel of arcade gaming back then. Kids today don't know how easy they've got it. And I wish they'd bloody get off my lawn.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I was never a cocky little shit myself as I got a little older.

After renewing my Netflix subscription last November, I have to say I'm a very happy customer indeed. Add DVDs to your queue, the nice postman brings them to your house, you watch them at your leisure, and then you pop them back in the mail. Rinse, repeat. What could be better than that?

I'll tell you. Instant gratification. While waiting for DVDs to arrive is fine most of the time, sometimes you just want something right away. Sometimes your inner tantrumy five year old stamps his foot and wants to get his way.

That's where Netflix instant streaming is wonderful. You browse their site, find the movies you want, click 'Play' and et voila, movie plays right there on your computer. Depending on our mood, we sometimes watch directly on the laptop but mostly just hook the mac up to the big screen TV and stream fullscreen. For the most part, we've had no issues whatsoever.

Well, that's not entirely true, there are a couple of things I've had a wee grumble about. I've noticed that a couple of movies have looked a teeny pixelated. It's not so bad as to be distracting and it doesn't happen all the time. Perhaps some were encoded differently than others? Perhaps it's just my eyes. Old man Spencer.

Then of course not all movies are available to stream. Which can be a little annoying. Like, for example, you're really in a Ghostbusters mood. You go to Netflix, see that Ghostbusters 2 is available to stream but, wait for it, not the first one. So WTF?

Still, the oh hey, look, we can stream that one, let's watch it right now factor is so much fun that any annoyances can be easily put up with. So yeah, very happy customer indeed.

A few years back I created a Facebook account. It was fun as I added people I'd known 20 years ago back in School, got to say hello and catch up. For the most part it was good, well, as long as you ignored all the bloody invitations, pokes, quizzes, "are you a vampire", "what tree does your leg look like" type stuff.

But something else happened along the way.

Recently I think I've become uncomfortable with Facebook in general. With their ever changing privacy policy, the muddy rules on what data of yours they own, and their new found desire to be the web for all people, I realized I kinda disliked the the idea of Facebook's walled garden in principle.

So just over a week ago I deleted my account. Not the deactivate account thingy in your settings (that does nothing). The actual permanently delete your account, wait two weeks, and it's gone thingy.

To be honest this isn't really that big of a deal. I rarely used it anyway. In fact in the past 12 months, I think I've probably only really logged in twice. If that.

A while ago I wrote count-by-artist to go through my iTunes Library XML file and count up all the tracks by artist. I hadn't ran it for about 18 months so this morning while sipping my coffee I decided to fire it up to see if anything had changed.

Aha, and while Depeche Mode, The Cure, and Skinny Puppy have the most songs in my music collection, they're also who I've listened to most over the past four years. Coincidence?

Who do you find you end up listening to most?

I take a lot of photos with my iPhone and of the many Flickr apps in the App Store, the one I love the most is Flickit Pro.

Among its many features, one of the things I love about it is the ability to select more than one photo at a time when creating your upload queue. Kinda like this, you keep selecting and then tap 'Done' when you're, er, done:

Nice, simple, and ever so handy. Well, at least it was.

Today I noticed that Flickit Pro had a new update and after reviewing what the changes were: "optimized for iPhone OS 3.2" and "new icon" I thought, sure why not.

And to my surprise, the multi image selector that I knew and loved had been removed. Not knowing if this was deliberate or a little oopsie, I sent an email to the developer, Michael Bernardo, to find out.

What he sent me in response is an interesting insight into the App review process by Apple.

Unfortunately I had to remove the multi-selection feature. It was rejected by Apple during my last update. You can read more about it at my blog.

And it made for an interesting read.

What makes this frustrating from a developer perspective is that Apple had already approved Flickit Pro many times over. What makes this frustrating from a user perspective is that it now appears to be a feature regression in an existing app. I know I'm not going to be the only user that wished they hadn't "upgraded".

I've read horror stories about seemingly arbitrary App store rejections but this is the first time I've been impacted by it. And more importantly, the first time that I wished I had a phone with an open marketplace for apps without the need for anyone's approval.

Siteadministrivia

If you're one of the few who actually visit this site instead of reading in a feed reader, you'll no doubt have seen a "Photos" link in the header bar above that for the longest time, just sent you to Flickr. I've always thought that was arsey and just didn't fit at all. So I've changed that.

Clicking Photos now takes you to a local page on this server instead. It's all auto generated using the Flickr API, phpFlickr, and some dodgy PHP code I wrote last night to glue it all together. I write Perl code for a living so hacking away at something different appealed to my inner geek.

Apps I Use The Most

My current iPhone home screen has the apps I find I use almost daily.

Around Me - finds things, er, around you. Most handy.
Todo - best "todo" list manager I've found. Bar none.
Tweetie - I've tried just about every Twitter client for the iPhone and this is the one that appeals to me the most.
Flickr - Nice "official" Flickr app, little crashy but still useful.
blog - web app, uses the iMT plugin to control Movable Type blogs from iPhones.
Reader - web app, mobile version of Google Reader. Solid, fast.
Flickit Pro - best iPhone Flickr app I've ever used. Love it.
SplashId - keeps all manner of information nicely locked up for you.
Simplenote - the official iPhone note app blows chunks. This one doesn't.
CameraBag - apply filters to your photos. Lovely Helga filter.
Nike + iPod - tracks running progress via chip in your shoe.

If you have a smartphone, what apps do you find you use the most and have you organized them onto your home screen? No? Just me then?

A Little Vacation

For the next 10 days I'll be thoroughly in vacation mode as my family are crossing the pond tomorrow. I've gotta say I don't envy them the flight. Still, these days you can catch a direct flight from London to Phoenix so it's not as long a trek as it used to be. Hope they have decent movies to watch and their iPods are fully charged.

Every once in a while you run across a really cool photography idea and think to yourself "hey, that's a really cool photography idea". Kevin Apgar's, Stormin' Norman photography project is just such a beast. Really, go have a peek.

Over the weekend he expanded the idea somewhat. We now have a first hand account of what really happened to TK421 and get to see him tooling around the galaxy. Which is pretty cool actually.

But the thing I'm excited about, and why I love Flickr so much, he's turned his project into a pool and invited others to join. So join I did and became part of Norman's clone army. This is going to be fun.

This is more of a web server HTTP header issue than a MT one, but anyhoo. Something that has bothered me about running MT on this web host since, well, forever is the problem of comments not immediately showing after a user submits them. Refreshing the page in your browser always makes the comment show up so it's browser caching.

I ran into this again on another MT powered blog today and for the life of me I couldn't remember how I ended up fixing it on this site. After poking around for a bit I finally remembered that it was a quick ugly hack to one of my templates to force your browser to not cache MT pages.

Add the following to the <head> of your pages will fix things right up:

<meta http-equiv="CACHE-CONTROL" content="NO-CACHE">

I've never liked the name of this blog and always thought it was a bit crap really. So now I've just renamed it to, well, something probably equally as crap actually.

But hey, at least kevinspencer.org matches the domain name at last. So, er, yeah, nothing really to see here then. Just thought I'd mention it.

You know, as you do.

Like most geeks, I read about today's iPad announcement with some interest. I mean I do like the odd Apple product after all.

My initial gut reaction: underwhelmed.

But then again, I think I'm probably not Apple's target market. Don't get me wrong, it looks lovely and if someone wanted to buy me one, I'd say thanks with a big grin on my face. It just doesn't do anything I can't already do with the devices I already have. And I think that's why I was left with a meh feeling.

I have an iPhone and I love it. It's become like a second computer to me. An ultra portable device with which I can make calls, surf the web, read email, tweet, watch video, read books, take photos, and play games. And it fits in my pocket. In short, it's convenient.

The iPad, to me, is basically just a much bigger version of that. Except it won't fit in my pocket. Which isn't all that convenient. I'd have to tote it around in a bag. And I already do that because I have a laptop. A portable device with a bigger screen, more horsepower, and more storage than an iPad.

Now, if I was in the market for a netbook, if I didn't have a laptop or a smartphone, I would probably be extremely excited by today's big announcement. But I'm not in that market at the moment.

However, ask me if I'm kicking myself for buying my girlfriend a netbook for Christmas. Go on ask me.

I'm a self confessed music addict. I have been for as long as I can remember. I listen to music all the time: getting ready for work, in the car, writing code at work, in the car again. Well, you get the idea. Today it seems, I scrobbled my 150,000th play to last.fm.

I became aware of last.fm back in 2006 and since then have found it to be one of the best places to find out about new music. If you're into music and you've never tried last.fm I thoroughly recommend it.

How does it work?

After creating a last.fm account, you install software on your computer that submits every track you listen to back to the last.fm servers. They call that scrobbling. After you've been scrobbling for a while last.fm will learn what you like and offer recommendations of new artists. Which is all rather handy.

What's more, over time, other like minded last.fm users will come along, say hello, and leave their two-penneth on what they think you'd like to listen to. Plus you can always go looking at other user's charts to see what they've been playing recently. To be honest I love that the most as I've always been one for rummaging through other people's album collections when I'm at their house.

If manually poking through user's charts is not your thing, you can have last.fm stream their tracks to you. Streamable tracks and the ability to create playlists makes last.fm an invaluable service to me. I've been a subscriber for years because of this.

So, go give it a try if you're into this kind of thing. And if you do, stop by my profile and say hello. At the very least, you'll get to see the shitty drivel wonderful taste in music I have.

I've had my iPhone 3GS for about a week now and not surprisingly, I like it. I like it a lot. Then again, I am hopelessly late to the smartphone party and anything remotely better than my old Razr is going to feel like I swapped my Commodore 64 for a MacBook Pro. The 3GS is a great phone. It's fast and for the most part just bloody works.

My old phone contract expired a couple of months ago and since then I've been pondering which phone to get next. I spent some time playing with a Palm Pre, a Blackberry Storm, and a Motorola Droid. Of those, only the Droid seemed like it was almost good enough to own. Almost.

So, my one week in "far too soon to be giving this kind of writeup, but doing it anyway", er, writeup.

The Apps

One week in doesn't give anyone enough time to compile a decent app review so I won't even try. But what I have found that I like so far, and shown on my home screen are the following:

Google Earth
Evernote (iPhone port of my fave note taking, organizing desktop app)
AroundMe (finds businesses, er, around me)
TweetDeck (iPhone port of my fave desktop Twitter client)
Flixster (movie showtimes, information, and theater locator)
Shazam (music identifier)
Wikipanion (better than navigating Wikipedia in Safari)
Reader (mobile Google Reader)
Flickit (all round mobile Flickr gadget & uploader)
Last.fm (for listening to music streams)
IMDb (for movie junkies everywhere)

Most importantly, I replaced the Apple Mail client with the mobile version of Gmail. Which you must do immediately.

The Keyboard

The keyboard really isn't that bad. I thought that my big chubby digits would be a problem and to a certain degree they are, but the auto-correction is scarily accurate and I've found myself typing emails & texting at quite a good pace.

The Camera

The cameras in phones suck. All of them. The question then becomes, how much does it suck and can you live with it? Surprisingly, for a phone, the camera is not entirely made of fail.

Obviously it's no DSLR, but it's no slouch either. So that coupled with the rather spiffy Flickit app to upload directly to Flickr makes for a rather nice 'on the go' pic taking experience.

The Games

I haven't spent much time trying out various games because I really haven't gotten much further than Orbital. I'm hopelessly addicted and it might just be the finest $0.99 I ever spent.

Check me out with a high score of 40. Ahem. I didn't say I was any good at it.

Stop Waffling

Ok, it's fast, it works, I'm happy with it. Can't really say any more than that.

After owning iPods for years, and a MacBook Pro for just over 12 months, today I added one more to the Apple collection.

This replaces my old, beat up, downtrodden Motorola Razr that I've held onto for years. I'll be honest though, it was a bloody good phone that served its purpose well.

Now, off to the App Store I go and start downloading. What would you recommend? What are your must have apps?

Just why are...

...those Brits...

...those Americans...

...and the French...

[Moozik: Chris & Cosey - Walking Through Heaven]

At the weekend I performed my first OS upgrade since becoming assimilated by Apple last year. For $29 it seemed like a no-brainer even though there were no new features. It would make stuff faster we were told. I like faster, so I dove right in.

The upgrade itself was quick and absolutely painless. Like all good OS upgrades should be. Except for when they're not. And I'm looking at you Ubuntu. Still, it was that little suckfest that finally convinced me to become a Mac addict so that things just work going forward.

The verdict after using it for a few days?

The good? Well it definitely seems faster. The Finder is certainly a lot snappier - thumbnail generation is lightning fast now for example. I do like new dock menu colors and the scrolling stacks as well.

The meh? I haven't noticed any speedup on system wake up when opening the lid on my MacBook Pro though. I could have sworn that was one of the promised speed improvements.

The bad? iScrobbler broke which I didn't notice until this morning. Which is a shame because the official Mac last.fm client is a little temperamental when it comes to scrobbling songs from your iPod. Still, a downgrade to iScrobbler 1.5.2 seems to have done the trick.

So overall, I'm a happy Snow Leopard user and can count my first Mac OS X upgrade a success.

[Moozik: Jane's Addiction - Three Days]

From Bloomberg:

Apple's Fifth Avenue emporium probably has annual sales of more than $350 million, topping any of the chain's other outlets, said Jeffrey Roseman, executive vice president of real- estate broker Newmark Knight Frank Retail in New York. The location is 10,000 square feet, putting its sales per square foot at a minimum of $35,000, based on Roseman's estimate.

That's the equivalent of selling one Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan per square foot. Apple may be the highest grossing retailer ever on Fifth Avenue, said Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of the retail leasing and sales division at Manhattan-based Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

I visited it last year and loved it. The biggest, nicest Apple store I've been in. I don't find it hard to believe it's the highest grossing store on that street - It was simply jam packed full of people.

Mind you, it was absolutely pouring with rain so there might have been the odd one or two people in there sheltering and attempting to dry off.

I know I was one of them ;-)

[Moozik: VNV Nation - Solitary]

When I was younger I played an enormous amount of video games. I dread to think how much money I managed to con out of my parents to go to arcades to play Gorf, Bubble Bobble, Star Wars, Galaga, 1942. You name it, I played it.

At home I grew up with the Commodore 64 before eventually migrating to the SNES some ten years later. It was there that my addiction to all things Mario Bros truly began. I played every Mario game for every Nintendo console thereafter. If it involved that plumber bloke, I owned it.

So, fast forward to today, I got all excited to see the new Mario game for the Wii.

Drooling much? I can't wait. Now, first obstacle to overcome is the fact that we don't actually own a Wii. A minor inconvenience I feel. That will be remedied forthwith.