Trip diary 1
Car journey blues can be fixed with icecream.
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Chris Till
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Chris Till
My Picks from the 100 Top Brands 2006
My top 20 company’s out of the top 100.
My Ranking Official Ranking Company 1 39 Apple 2 24 Google 3 51 Nintendo 4 26 Sony 5 65 Amazon 6 66 Pizza Hut 7 20 Samsung 8 5 Intel 9 69 Motorola 10 31 Nike 11 18 Cisco 12 55 Yahoo 13 40 Kellogg’s 14 6 Nokia 15 50 MTV 16 63 Nestle 17 35 Canon 18 54 Heinz 19 23 Nescafe 20 13 Hewlet Packard I’m not sure if I put one or two in the wrong order and there are some that aren’t in the list but this is my top 20 from what I can pick from.
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Chris Till
Mobile Blogging is on
After finally realising the underscore is the space in my phones browser mobile blogging is on. More soon.
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Chris Till
Blended Thoughts
I want Pandora to be available in the UK.
Ubuntu is the best desktop linux. After installing it on two pc’s the only problem was wireless on the second one needing drivers to work which I’m still to do.
Other than that I can see linux becoming a far bigger player in home computing soon. I have tried suse and mandriva but for usability and style ubuntu is the distro to beat.
Linksys should fully support linux with their wireless adapters.
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Chris Till
New Yahoo is a dissapointment
I keep trying to use the new Yahoo Messenger for mac. I feel happy with it for a while and then all of a sudden it crashes and removes my faith in it.
I end up switching back to adium because it’s just reliable and use skype for calling.
Chris Till
Apple are doing well
I was pleased to read that Apple have had a great third quarter. I was one person who contributed to their success with my amazing macbook and a couple of itunes albums.
Here’s what it says on Apple’s hot news section:
CUPERTINO, California—July 19, 2006—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2006 third quarter ended July 1, 2006. The Company posted revenue of $4.37 billion and a net quarterly profit of $472 million, or $.54 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $3.52 billion and a net profit of $320 million, or $.37 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 30.3 percent, up from 29.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 39 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple shipped 1,327,000 Macintosh® computers and 8,111,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 12 percent growth in Macs and 32 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.
Apple Reports Third Quarter Results
Listen to the announcement and reaction to the results in quicktime here. What’s even more impressive about this is that this quarter is usually expected to be one of the slower in the year.
Chris Till
What does it achieve?
I’m struggling to think of any reason why these things are needed. In the middle east they are destroying lives and less importantly the city and buildings that take years to build and seconds to demolish.
I just don’t understand how in this time where we should be focusing on saving resources and going forward with new technology to make life better, countries still get into these conflicts which do no good whatsoever.
Another thing that gets to me is that Brits are being evacuated by the navy (nothing wrong with that) while imagine what it’s like being stuck there from a country which isn’t sending any boats to take you to safety?
In other unrelated news, George Bush has in my opinion shown once again how moronic he is. This time he has veto’d a law which would have lead to possibly huge scientific advances in treating diseases like parkinsons which makes a huge number of people’s lives a misery.
I’m sorry to those who are siding with Bush but in my opinion scientific advances are far more important than stem cells that would likely be destroyed anyway.
Chris Till
The Mac Pro
I wouldn’t be surprised if the rumours about the upcoming desktop mac having the same case as the previous PowerMac G5 because there isn’t much looks wise that can be improved for me. It’s the best looking case on any computer that I’ve seen (mods look overdone and tacky most of the time).
From what I’ve read on tech news sites it’s likely that the new one will have a second optical bay for future inclusion of a blu-ray or hd-dvd drive which would be a nice touch. Other than that I can’t see anything else to change except some flashy things like making the apple logo in the side light up somehow.
I’m more interested in what is being changed in the case. What chips are they using? Core Duo 2 or Xeon server chips? Two new dual core chips (4 cores) would give stunning performance without a doubt. I wonder how many times faster these computers will be than the powermac G5.
One thing I am hoping apple will change are the cinema displays. For one thing they should lower the price a bit to make them more appealing to the majority of people and including an isight camera in the top of the screen to bring it in-line with the rest of the mac line up, except the mac mini.
It will be a nice feeling when Apple ditch the final power pc chipped computer from their line-up because it will finally let them remove the two parts in the hardware and store sections of their site where it says Mac’s with Intel chips and Mac’s with power pc ones. It will also signify Apple moving away from simply consolidating all their current stuff to new chips and just going forward and innovating.
Chris Till
Blackberry to appeal to consumers more?
Media features and lifestyle applications will be key to the ability of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry e-mail device to capture a bigger slice of the broader consumer market, the company’s co-chief executive said on Tuesday.
“We’ll be definitely supporting more forms of media, it’s a big part of our direction,” Jim Balsillie told Reuters, adding that delivering features such as photography, music and video with the BlackBerry “opens up some bigger markets.”
“It’s totally adjacent and complementary in some respects, but also in other respects it lays right on top (of) our existing market.”
The BlackBerry has become a staple for business people, politicians, lawyers and other professionals, but has yet to gain widespread popularity among mainstream users of portable technology.
Balsillie declined to answer a question about RIM partnering with Apple Computer to create what has been dubbed by some as the AppleBerry, a device combining the BlackBerry’s features with iTunes music software, as well as potentially camera and video capabilities.
RIM sees media features building BlackBerry market | Tech News on ZDNet
This looks good. I like blackberry’s but right now although they do have some cool features like internet and email they don’t have a cameras or an emphasis on media or consumer related features.
A partnership with Apple would make them all the more desirable for me at least.
Chris Till
Happy iCal day!
This is the most non-news item for a while but anyway. Today is the only day each year where the icon for Apple’s calender app iCal is the right date.
Chris Till
A pre-review of Firefox 2.0
From beta 1 of Firefox 2.0 I like what’s been changed in it. Mozilla have added an x to every tab, unified the themes and extensions windows and made it a lot easier to subcribe to feeds using your preference of external app (netnewswire, newsfire, vienna etc) or just the usual firefox live bookmarks.
There hasn’t been anything really special added but it’s a good step forward for the browser.
Rating: 10/10 – Really solid browser, works fast and I like the new feed options. They might make more changes though before the final release so this might turn out to be pointless.
Chris Till
Hellodeo
It looks like the people at ODEO have been busy recently. I noticed they just added links to a couple of new products they are working on right now including odeo play and odeo studio that have been around for a little while now.
The two new services are called hellodeo and twttr (not sure how to pronounce that). Hellodeo is a webcam recording and playing service. I guess the point of it is to record short messages easily so you can embed them in private messages on myspace or in any other html code anywhere.
Twittr is a way to keep people updated on what you’re doing and how you’re feeling by text message and their site. I’m not sure if it’s US only but it looks ok anyway. Have to say it’s not very impressive compared to Hellodeo but it’s always nice to see innovation and new things coming out that may or may not take off.
Either way, back to hellodeo. I like it. It makes recording video so much easier for the less tech minded. It works instantly with my Mac’s isight cam with no settings needing to be changed which is cool. Then theres the advantages of not having to use iMovie or quicktime to record and also not having to spend time uploading the video to a site like youtube or google video which takes too long for just a hello message anyway.
I guess that makes this ideal for messing around and giving people video messages in a similar way to odeo in audio.
The next thing they should do to progress this is to let your videos be private and not be shown on the front page as they are right now. They should also add an ODEO style inbox so you can send someone a message that way without anyone else being able to see it.
Anyway, it’s all cool stuff.
Chris Till
I'm excited about gaming (again).
But as you get a bit older and wiser from the time when it was fine to throw money at expensive games you probably won’t play that much without really thinking about what else the money could do. This is one thing I’m really excited about. The Nintendo DS, and one of the best things about it is the browser opera are building for it. I only heard about the browser after I looked at the DS for it’s gaming (I’m a mario kart addict) but even so, I would have liked it without.
I’m just excited about Nintendo in general. I really appreciate how they are always innovating in gaming by doing things that no one else would dare try.
Sony and Microsoft are going to stick with the traditional control pad design trying to wow people with the wireless feature which was probably overdue. Not that it hasn’t been done before, I have a Gamecube wavebird wireless controller right now. Nintendo is once more one step ahead by completely reinventing how games are played with the wii-mote.
I do have a PS2 but I think now I realise I don’t play the kind of games that appear on non-nintendo consoles as much as on the snes, gamecube, gameboy, ds etc.
Aside from the games, it’s a lot about price. The prices of the other consoles seem to just keep going up as they progress from console to console. However, Nintendo seem to be able to invent and pioneer in gaming while still offering their products for consistently affordable (especially in comparison with the others) prices.
The PSP for example is double the price of a DS. I know it plays UMD movies and MP3 music, but who needs that? Plus we all know Sony’s history with their own formats. I like sony, but for gaming I think Nintendo have always been there while Sony and MS are the ones who have tried to come into their market.
The DS is for gaming, and the fact that I will be able to check my email and the latest news from anywhere with a wifi connection with much more portability than a laptop is great, especially for the price.
Chris Till
NewsGator Online
After having a look at newsgator online and it’s synching with NetNewsWire, I don’t really get it. The synching seems pointless for one thing. Not only this but the site also has a design tht doesn’t grab me at all.
It makes more sense to just use NNW by itself with no synching, and if you do need to store your feeds online, use google reader or personalised homepage.
Chris Till
Last.Fm Beta for Mac is here
They’ve finally brought out a Mac version of the Las.Fm app that combines the old scrobbler with the radio player in one which makes life a lot easier.
As you can see it looks nice. The only thing I don’t like about it is where if you close the program by clicking the x it closes the whole program instead of hiding which would be better. It’s not exactly hard to fix it though, just open other apps in front of it and use expose to get it back to the front when you need to change stations or something.
Rating: 9/10 – Way better than the former iscrobbler / last.fm player combo.