Naquada

So Having now installed Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger on the Mac, its starting to feel like home again, starting to feel like my mac, and not someone’s I’ve borrowed.. But where do the little green dots fit in.. ? That was kinda of a side note when I started the entry..

I have over 2000 CD’s that I’m slowly trying to encode into iTunes. Once encoded the album or CD gets a sticky green dot on it.. It’s about the only way I can sensibly keep track of what’s been encoded and what hasn’t.. Blue Skies from Ima by BT just got a dot.. One of my all time favorites.. I’m slowly filling up the 1 terabyte of attached storage I put aside for audio..

I’m also posting to the blog using ecto on the Mac now. It’s actually a pretty cool blogging client, interfacing directly into my Amazon associates account, iTunes and iPhoto. At first I hated the whole interface, since it uploaded images into the wrong place, didn’t seem to work the way I wanted to, and generally didnt have that nice feel. But like with most things, with a little playing its working out really well, and very cheap too at £10.50..

I’ll definitely be buying it on the Mac, and will be checking out the windows version to see if its got the same functionality.. I always find that primary Mac applications that get ported to windows just aren’t the same..

I forgot about this photo I took some time ago.. Its another use of a slate based TabletPC..

Propping up the TabletPC on a normal cookery book stand, it makes a great electronic cook book for cooking all those tasty meals..

..With the built in wireless I could follow the instructions on the website, or hook up to the reciepes I had stored on the servers upstairs.. and yes thats the Delia Smith site over wireless..

On its one year birthday Googles again are saying something about Gmail people arent sure whether to take as a April Fool or not.

If you remember Google Gmail with its 1 gig of storage was launched on April Fools day last year, but it was far from a joke..

Gamil’s exclusiveness has caused alot of hype over the last year, the demand for getting a gamil invite skyrocketing, some invites at the beginning even being sold on ebay.

Now google are even poking fun at themselves with their GoogleGulp site today..

But back in reallity, Gmail has now upped its storage to a massive 2 gigs per user..

Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn’t mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we’re giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people’s lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.

..And by the way I still have plenty of gmail invotes, just post your email address below..

Ok so this is very cool, the ability to create silk screen quality labels for all your CD’s and DVD’s directly from your DVD and CD burner!

Up until now if you’d wanted to label your CD’s or DVD’s you’d have had to use sticky labels with applications like NEATO or the like, that or label them up with a CD pen (sharpies or similar).

Hp’s LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling technology allows professional-looking labels using the same laser that burns the data onto the media.

Special LightScribe Drives from HP, Philips and Lacie, when used with Lightscribe coated media allow you to design and produce precise, laser-etched labels. Media and drives will have the LightScribe logo if they are compatible.

With LightScribe, the disc is the label, you burn the DVD or CD in the normal way and then flip the disc over, reinsert it into the burner and burn your own unique label.

It’s so simple it hurts! I’ve seen the drives today in places like PCWorld and on the web with prices around

WNewquay who writes a lot for TabletPCBuzz has a nice little post on his blog about why his thinks the TabletPC platform is so good;

It is for me the most transparent computing technology in my computing cluttered life.

So here we are, a little over a year later, and I’m a bigger fan now than I was then. Why? Well among other things, the Tablet PC continues to deliver on the promise that led me to adopt in the beginning. It’s been a good year.

I’ll completely agree with WNewquay here 110%, I just love my TabletPC, and going to IBM and having to loose it is probably going to be the single biggest downturn in my productivity.

Right now I have a huge seemless information system, all my meeting notes, my mail, everything in one unit, its become to me just like pen and paper, it goes pretty much everywhere when I’m working, and is never far away when I’m not. Once you have used a TabletPC in the way its intended to be used.. you won’t look back..

Everyone sees the TabletPC when I’m in meetings and its more of an ice breaker than a distraction.

I’m going to miss it going forward.. but I’ll be fighting to keep it..

..Maybe IBM could buy Toshiba??

How much do all those label they stick on your new laptop annoy you, but how much more annoying is the sticky residee that is left behind when you peel them off?

My Toshiba M200 came plastered with sickers, Designed for Microsoft Windows XP, Centrino Mobile Technology, nVidia G-Force FX, and OneNote 2003 installed..

I do know whats in my laptop thank you..

but how to get rid of that annoying stick residue? Well odd as it sounds..

Olive Oil, vegtable oils, or pretty much any oil you fry with (avoid the sharwoods chinese oil, its a little heavy on the garlic for your laptop), sounds crazy, but it works.

Take a little oil and work it into the residue left after peeling the label off, then leave to disolve the glue for a little while, then wipe clean with normal PC cleaning cloths..

Theres nothing overly new about flat network cables, but the Japanese company Elecom have announced LD-VAPF/SV05 network cabling, coming in at 1.4mm thick.

Given the cable is so thin, you can run it pretty much anywhere you like, especially under carpet, or like shown here in doorways. The Cat5 standard cables support up to 1000BASE-T, and are reinforced with aluminium.

I posted quite some time ago about search engine optimization, and I’m pleased to say I’ve ranking pretty high on the search engines.

For most terms I know are in my site I rank at least first or second for almost all search engines.

I’ve been ill the last few days, but thats given me some time to flick through Shari Thurow’s book a little more.. There definately seems to be some logic in the search engine optimization methods, and it has nothing to do with the metatags, its 100% about the content of the site (or in my case the posts). Generally if your getting the content right, you’ll start hitting the top few entries in Google, A9, or Yahoo or any of the other search engines.

Blogs seem to help as well, as the search engines seems to like consuming blogs, with their ever changing content, add to that the linking from blogrolls, bloglines, Technorati and other blog listing sites.

I guess my struggle here is what is my blog about, its a kinda of mish mash of ideas, thoughts, reports and feelings, sure it gets ratings, but in what market area??

To this end I’m thinking of starting to use some of the other domains I own for some more specific content, initially probably my www.stuffiwant.co.uk, which will be my definitive list of stuff that I’d like, but probably cant afford in the gadget, technology, and general geekiness area..

Well it seems that it is true.. As I mentioned previously if you switch on your skype client at any Ready to Surf hotspot, the WiFi hotspot will log you on, automatically. You dont need to be a Broadreach customer or Ready To Surf customer, or have a voucher; you just sit down, and talk away, even just send chat messages to your Skype buddies.

It works with any Broadreach or Ready To Surf hotspot, including trains.

Basically all you need to do is switch on your notebook or PDA with Skype running, and wait till the Skype window shows the list of contacts.

Niklas Zennstr

Engadget talk about a fairly simple and useful trick to setup a gig