Neil's Stuff

Back to Luton airport for a trip to Belfast. Thought I would have breakfast at the airport, this time, as I noticed that Pret does porridge. Turns out to be good porridge, I guess because it has been on the heat for a while the oats really get a chance to expand, so the whole thing is much more creamy. I opted for a dollop of honey for £1.99, which means they are making big margins on materials. I get a kg of Tesco value oats for less than a pound, and all you need for a portion of porridge is half a mug full. A bag lasts me a couple of months.
On the way in I stopped off in W H Smiths to get a paper, and noticed that the advertising screen above the tills was showing and error message, as I like to collect public error messages I thought I would share it with you all. It is an AVG anti virus message complaining that the license had run out.
Anyway the plane is about to push off and so am I.

Helen is going to have her 40th birthday party this year, and we have decided have a party to celebrate at a local golf club. I have been designing the invite. We needed a good picture for the front of the card. I used a picture that Marshall drew for Helen for her 21st birthday. First I scanned it then I used Inkscape an opensource vector graphics drawing package t trace round all the bits and colour it in. It was surprisingly easy to do once I got started and had figured out how to do all the bits I needed.

Things are hotting up. After the IE hot fix and the German and French government advice not to use IE. Google takes the chance to gather some momentum for Chrome.

If you follow the instructions here http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/19/guide-install-google-chrome-os/ you can get Chrome OS up and running in no time.

You will need a bit torrent client I used uTorrent which you can get here http://www.utorrent.com/ and Vitrual Box or VMware player or other offering.

You saw it here first!!

Google wave touted by some to be the next big thing on the internet. I applied for an account but sadly in the latest round of invites I missed out, guess I’ll have to wait for the public launch. But if any of you blog readers have an account if you could send me one of you invites I would be very appreciative. What is wave you ask? Well it is a collaborative document editor that allows users to share and create documents in real time. From the demo videos I have seen you see the participants cursors as the documents develop. I guess in that respect it is also an instant messenger. I imagine that you could use it to organise events with friends, so rather than emails flying around we just create a shared space and start contributing. After the event you could post pictures etc. So also has features currently fulfilled by facebook. Please if you have a spare invite send it to me.

I have not been to good recently at adding posts to the old blog. Today however an email arrived which has compelled me to blog something.

I applied to be a windows 7 launch party host, was successful, and today I got confirmation that DHL have shipped the Windows 7 Signature Edition with free upgrade to 64bit version.

The goodies are actually very nice, Windows 7 tote bags, Windows 7 branded napkins, a puzzle pack, Windows 7 playing cards, a colour poster and of course the piece de resistance, a FULL copy of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (Steve Ballmer Signature Edition), and an anytime Upgrade to Ultimate Signature 64 bit edition. A nice bonus!

Thanks to all those who accepted the party invites.

This blog entry is bought via windows speech recognition.  I thought I would give the features a try.  I am using windows of this for you access the speech recognition features from the speech recognition option in control panel, you need to make sure that your microphone is well placed and the sound levels are right.  It helps if you go through the tutorial as lists is the way of teaching your computer help to understand the nuances of your voice.

This blog entry is bought via windows speech recognition.  I thought I would give the features a try.  I am using windows of this for you access the speech recognition features from the speech recognition option in control panel, you need to make sure that your microphone is well placed and the sound levels are right.  It helps if you go through the tutorial as lists is the way of teaching your computer help to understand the nuances of your voice.

So far so good as long as I speak then this seems to do a good job for recognising my voice.  For example in this blog entry I have trouble with the first sentence two of the words were not recognise correctly.  I have also noticed that’s even though I selected United Kingdom as the language it appears to be using American spelling, for example if recognizing oneself with a Z.

If this works out well the idea for me to record blog entries on a recording device, then find a way of getting windows to convert the recording into a text.  I am not sure how successful this will be part I have noticed that there are quite a few open source software programs that claim to do the job.

I suspect that I’m need to get a better microphone because the one that I am currently using does not go very far into the from the section on the microphone test programme.

Well we are off to Tess + Roger’s wedding. Congratulations guys. Unfortunately that involves a rather slow journey down the A40 in the rain. We keep being passed by the same cyclists when the traffic lights change. Our previous feelings of sympathy for their damp plight have been replaced by those of envy as they are actually getting somewhere. Anyway that’s enough about the weather, let’s discuss mobile communication devices.

Helen says she does not need a new mobile phone, yet often in the car the complaint is she would like to be able to browse the Internet, something that her wind up phone does not do. There appear to be two front runners; the I Phone or an Android phone [ed. I dunno the difference TBH - Helen]. The I Phone scores for its slick UI, I Tunes capabilities and Apple design. On the other hand, the Android has a slide out full keyboard, is open source and backed by Google. Decisions, decisions, guess its up to Helen. Might be good if she turns the bloody thing on too.

I have recently been trying out a new (free) GPS tracking system called BuddyWay (link). It works with any GPS enabled phone (pucks work too), you can set the frequency of the updates and how often they are sent to the site. there are clients for most mobile phones. See the screen shot of a walk Helen and I did at the weekend.

It had to happen no sooner had the flu thing hit the media, someone comes up with a google maps mashup.

Take a look at the link to the Google swine flu mash-up it seems fairly easy to do you just need to find some example code, the difficult bit is finding some data worth mashing (is that correct English?)