10 Types Of People

Nothing really can be said…

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I do like the muppets new videos. Very well made, and also they have full 1080 on their videos (which looks beautiful on my screen btw). So, enjoy this new one from them. (ps, you’ll have to go to the youtube page if you wanna watch it in hd).

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Thought I would do another blog post with lots of exciting tech news. So, here is what I’ve been seeing over the past few days.

• Amazon buys “TouchCo”. Touchscreen kindle in the works? One might wonder if they are going to be using this company for just that. The other question, however, is “If it is made, when will it be available in Britain?”
• Symbian is officially opensource. Symbian^2 (previously S60) is now open-source. It turns out the #symbiancountdown was the number of packages left until Symbian was totally open source. Well done Symbian. Now you need to step up and make sure than Symbian^3 is amazing and it better really step up and do what Symbian^2 hasn’t done. It needs to do a lot to be any good.
• JooJoo near launch. Fixes lots of problems that would make you not want an iPad (except the price).
• With or without you: Arm Ceo to Microsoft. The market will grow with or without Windows arm support. Good news for linux?
• Sonic 4 in production. A blast from the past, in high definition. Thats right, Sonic 4 is being made and will be available in the summer on PS3, xbox and wii. On PS3 and Xbox it will be in 1080p. Thats great!!!
• Apple yet again show how pathetic they are, by turning down an app because it is “not interesting enough”.

So, theres just a few bits of random news that I thought I would share with people. Have a great weekend guys!

Now, you may be thinking “Man alive…no posts for days, and now a post about that iPad thing.”. Well, yeah, I know, it is shocking. Sadly, there hasn’t been much for me to blog about. I’ve been trying to think of something else, and my mind has been mulling over whether or not to blog about this “iPad thing” constantly for the past week. So…I decided that I would hurry up and post about it so I can free my mind to think about other things. So, I’m just going to talk about random things about the iPad.

What the iPad is not:

• E-book reader

The iPad is not an e-book reader. At all. Why would you buy an e-book reader rather than a laptop/netbook? The e-ink screen. It is nice to read, and it is very low power. Weeks of battery life and no strain on the eyes are the main reasons why you would buy an e-book reader. Now lets look at the iPad. No e-ink screen, wouldn’t be good in sunlight (I’d imagine) and would cause strain after reading lots. And battery life – 10 hours. That is not even a full day. It has less battery life than my phone, but it has a similar processor. Therefore, the iPad is not a replacement for an e-book reader. Don’t buy it to read books.

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No, this is nothing about the iPad. Take a look at this link.

What do you think? Pretty nice in my opinion. Not a huge amount of information about it yet, and I’m assuming it’ll take longer to actually get over here to britain. But it shows that my perfect e-book reader is getting closer and closer.

Looks beautiful doesn’t it. The screen looks amazing. I’d have to see it in real life, but it looks like it could be as good as OLED. And in that case, it would be much better because OLED is rubbish in sunlight, e-ink is nicer on the eyes, and e-ink lasts much much longer.

It also is a really nice size. 13.1 inches is amazing for an ebook reader (about the size of an A4 piece of paper), and look at the size of that border, it is tiny! None of this 7″ screen with 2″ either side of border. Well played. It also has wifi and 3G connectivity, although no details on what networks you can use with it.

A couple of things I want to know about this:

• Battery life. How does colour change the battery life? Is it much shorter?
• Refresh rate. How fast is it? Fast enough for video?
• Video. Related to the last one, can it play video?
• Content. Are there any content providers with this? What can I view on it? Can I view pdfs and epuds?
• UK availability. It only says that it will be available in “Q2″, which I assume is just in US.
• Price. There are no details on price at all.

So, all in all, this looks like a really really nice device that I would love to get my hands on. It has note-taking abilities, so it includes almost everything I want in an ereader. Maybe this is the device I will finally buy. Or maybe not…

Just thought I would put a wee blog post out to let people know that I am now officially engaged to Faye (@framemybear on twitter). I will post picture and explain how it happened another time, but I’m kinda busy just now

**EDIT** Spelling mistake – “not” changed to “now”

Ok, what is the point of patents? Now, here I thought patents were to stop big corporations stealing little peoples ideas and selling more than them and running them out of business. Is that, or is that not, the idea of patents?

Today I heard the news that Kodak are sueing Apple and RIM about image processing and image viewing. I, to be honest, think this is pretty pathetic. How are Apple and RIM doing image processing and viewing that Kodak do in their cameras going to affect kodak??? Would you use a cameraphone over a camera? And if so, would you buy a camera if they didn’t quite process them the same way? No you wouldn’t. How is this going to affect Kodak if they didn’t file this.

Software patents are so pathetic. Can you think of the last time you heard of a patent that was decent? I know that software patents aren’t valid in Europe (citation needed), but they are in general a stupid idea. The fact that you can patent an idea, for example apple getting a patent on docks, an unknown company getting a patent on podcasts and another company getting a patent on an xml-based way of saving word processing documents. Are any of these good? No…they are not. They are all stupid. What happens if I code something that is patented, that I honestly thought up all by myself. Does that mean I shouldn’t be allowed to use it? Really? What gives them the right to use it when I thought of it, just a wee bit later than them.

What do you think, internets? Do you agree?

**Edit** Just to prove my point, turns out apple just applied for a patent to “add a contact to a homescreen.” It probably won’t go through, as android and also symbian, already can do that. But still, it shows the patheticness of patents.

Well, some of you will think that I seem to be changing my blog every second week. Yes, that is true, however this time I have moved it to my own VPS. I shouldn’t be moving it for a long time.

I have been wanting to move my blog to my VPS for a while now, and finally did it today. I changed the DNS a few hours ago, and it seems like a lot of servers have already updated it, but if you have problems with my blog, that is why.

I also have a new theme for my blog. I felt like my old theme was a bit…tacky…and this one is much nicer. It is a gpld theme that I have made some changes to, so I will upload my changes very soon. Bear with me on that one.

Just a few things…if there is something wrong with my theme, please let me know. If there is something that is broken with my site and the domain etc…also please let me know, I’m very new to configuring apache, so I may have got it wrong. Also, if you have any ideas for changes in my theme etc, please let me know. There is no decrease in functionality, I think, so please feel free to enjoy my blog.

Also, the twitter stuff is broken, I know, I’m trying to figure it out.

First of all, happy new year!!!

Ok, so, in light of the recent year change, I decided it would be good to do my 2nd annual tech predictions. I also realised that this is the beginning of a new decade as well. So, because of this, I’m doing a bunch for the coming year, and a bunch for the coming decade. Obviously, the decade ones will be a bit more exciting, and probably a lot more wrong.

This year has been such an exciting year, that my ideas of technology, and what will happen in the future, are hugely different from what they would have been if I’d been looking 10 years into the future this time last year rather than just now. We all have different ideas, however, so please please let me know if you agree/disagree with what I’ve said, or if you have made some predictions of your own, let me know. If I get a lot of people telling me their predictions I may post a blog post about what I think about them, with links to your blogs and stuff, so that might be an incentive to comment. I want lots of comments on this blog post in the coming months, and even years as I have put the next decades predictions as well.

I think I said in my last post that I would have 10 predictions, well, I couldn’t keep it to only 10 for each, so there are more. But anyway, on with the predictions. Go through the jump to see them. (more…)

It is that lovely time of the year again. “The 50 random things of the year” are on the telly, podcasts are talking about what they want for the coming year, people are saying what a great year it was, how many fantastic things happened this year. And I am writing my predictions. Don’t think this is them though, I’m not releasing them until the early hours of Jan 1st (although that is GMT, so some Americans may see them before 1st Jan). This is, however, my review of the year. Looking at my predictions from last year and seeing how correct I was.

So, go have fun reading over what I said this year, and if you were better than me in predictions, let me know. They are over the jump. (more…)