Integration

As I wander around the cyberworld to read other peoples blogs on other platforms, I have this slight twinge of jealousy, not because a lot of them are better writers than I or that they have lives I could only dream of living, but because they have Twitter integration in their comments and on their posts.

You know what I mean, if you want to leave a comment on some blogs you can sign in using your Twitter account, which in a way validates that you are a real life breathing human being.

I'd love to have this feature here at Vox. I know that a lot of my readers pop over here from Twitter and many of them do not want to register with Vox just to leave the odd comment. There are a few who have signed up, and I'm very appreciative of their support, and I do realise that I have locked my blog down to stop a couple of trolls from annoying people, but I would like to catch up with the times.

It would also be nice for individual posts to have a Tweet button, so if any reader really liked a particular post they could tweet it for their followers to read. Such a button would increase site hits and exposure for us little known bloggers.

I wonder what you Voxer's think about this? I also wonder if anyone at SixApart have plans for such a thing….

***edit***

Trying out @Jencull's solution.  Exactly what I was thinking of but or some reason I'm getting a huge blank space at the bottom of the widget.

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Am I Right or Am I Right?

Don't you just hate it when you're always right? It's a terrible thing to bear and only a few individuals alive on this planet seem to suffer from perpetual correctness. I hate to admit it but I am a sufferer.

Of course, there might be times when the degree of correctness could be interpreted to be almost wrong, but those cases are far and few between, after all, I'm never wrong, just sometimes incorrect.

Many of us well informed people can be often seen getting vexed at the local pub when stating the bloody obvious to a dimwit who is hell bent on perpetuating an old wives tale or insisting that Pi is actually something you buy at a bakers shop. It's at times like these you will see the true boiling point of a person, usually around 40.6˚C if you are interested, or how extremely patient a person can be.

Personally, I tend to be on the patient side until the fourth or fifth pint, then watch out all ye believers in unproven deities or misinformed luddites. That's about the point where my objective reasoning usually leaves the building as well, so putting forward the obvious argument isn't as easy as it should be because I forget how I began the sentence by the time I've reached the midway point. Obviously, any gaps in your knowledge can be filled up with useless babbling at this point, usually the idiot you are talking to doesn't understand a word you're saying anyway.

For us sufferers of Perpetuus Rectus, to give its proper name, we often dream of soirees with enlightened luminaries, my personal evening of intelligence would have to include Einstein and Hawking amongst others, but alas we always end up with a sub-standard pint of cider with a butch woman called Brenda who believes that dinosaurs are there to test our faith. Little does she know that her mere existence tests my faith in humanity.

Luckily for us technology is slowly coming to the rescue, the advent of smart phones and that ever 'correct' Wikipedia can usually be dragged out of your pocket to back-up your argument to shut up that oaf who thought that the capital of Peru is Lime. 

But where's the fun in that? 

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Hipstamatic

I bought a lovely photography App for the iPhone. I bet a lot of you already know about it but I thought I'd shout about it anyhow.

Hipstamatic App

Hipstamatic

It has a lovely retro feel to the pictures and if you are like me, I only have an old iPhone 3G, then it certainly improves the quality of the photos that you can take from your measly amount of megapixels.

It will take me a while to get to understand what each lens can do, you can also change the film quality and use different flash modes and you get a pretty decent amount of presets with your initial purchase with more add-on packs if you wish. I suspect I'll be buying these packs in the future as the results are truly lovely, I only wish I could import the program into my proper digital camera.

Wooden Stuff

On the right is one of my first pictures, its just my table and chairs on the patio, but as you can see, without any tweaking from me the result is amazing. I love the flash stain and the washed out colours, I suppose anyone who grew up during the post war era will fully appreciate what this app can do.

It just gives me a warm fuzzy feeling as most of my old family photos were pretty much the same as this.

Over the next week, weather depending, I'm going to go out and take a few pictures and I'll share the best on here and Flickr. I think a few retro looking photos of the town and environs will go down a storm with the locals. I'm wondering if I can dupe a few people into believing that these pictures are really from the 70's.

Let's find out. 😀

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Deepwater

You know, I'm hearing a lot of silly nonsense about this huge oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and how Britain will suffer immensely from BP's involvement. All fair enough, BP as the oil company that hired Transocean to do their drilling for them is ultimately responsible for what happened, but let's face it, it's not Britain's fault for what happened.

Like many huge companies BP is no longer a British company, it's a global power and British in name only. They may have their headquarters in London, but they also have headquarters in Huston and I will bet my bottom dollar that all the real dealings happen in the US.

Transocean, a company with its headquarters in Switzerland is inherently an American outfit, I suspect they only have their HQ in the Swiss capital for tax avoidance purposes and yet the blame is being solely directed towards Europe.

Nobody is mentioning the fact that all the workers aboard the Deepwater drilling rig were American, nobody is mentioning that all the oil drilled there was for American purposes, all the mistakes were made by Americans, but Britain is to blame. Figure that one out.

I don't know about you, but I do have a small bit of drilling experience, although on a smaller scale, and I do know how dangerous it can be, so if you feel something isn't being done correctly you stop immediately, regardless of what the CEO of the company is telling you. Any safeguards that should be in place must be in place but it seems that there were a few corners cut by the American workers and an explosion resulted. 

Obviously Britain and all the people over here are at fault, let's boycott anything related to Europe to make sure that we feel better about it.

It all sounds a bit too childish to me.

Okay, it happened so now they have to deal with it.  My favourite quote so far was by James Cameron of Avatar fame, he stated that 'those morons don't know what they are doing' and I suspect they really don't as the leak should have been capped weeks ago. But instead of waxing lyrical, why not go out there and do it yourself Mr. Cameron? You obviously know how and have the relevant deep sea experience after filming Titanic and spending three years filming sub-standard TV documentaries under the sea. 

By his own admission he doesn't know what to do but he knows 'some people', well I expect the people dealing with the leak know them as well.

Obviously if you are American and you are reading this, boycott the BP gas stations all you want, they are all mostly franchises so you are only putting innocent hard working Americans out of work, a typically knee-jerk reaction.

But if you really do care about what is happening, why not volunteer to help clean up the beaches and help the wildlife instead of trying to trying to push the culpability of what happened onto innocent countries who really had bugger all to do with it.

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A Bit of Fun!

All of these people in the pictures below have one thing in common, they are roughly the same age as me and would have been in the same school year as me.  Although I enjoyed my time at school, it would have been amazing to have some of these people instead of some of the oiks I had to put up with. Hehe…

I suppose I could say that I have the ability and drive to be as successful as these people, but not even all the money in China would push me to live their lives.

So, here's the bit of fun part. Can you name them all?

I know some of the pictures are a bit small, but you can click on this link to see a slightly enlarged version. Have a go and leave your answers in the comments.

My School Year

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DEA Consultation Document

Yup, a very boring title to a very boring bit of reading. Ofcom have finally released their consultation document on the Digital Economy Act which outlines their code of conduct in regards of the Bill.

For those of you inclined to read such pieces of paper, here's a link.

But to summarise, there are a few interesting points within the document that may be worthy of any illegal file sharers attention. Mainly that their three strikes and you are cut off the internet is not mentioned, but what they propose to do is to give your name and IP to the copyright holders who can then drag you into court, which is basically all the power they had previously.

Secondly, the Act can only be applied to ISP's who have 400,000 customers or more, so if you are hell bent on downloading your music illegally you just need to find a small operator that has a cheap plan.

Also I'd like to point out that the Act does not cover mobile operators, so if you wish to avoid being dragged into court, get a 3G account with O2 with an unlimited download limit, you're pretty much covered.

So, as per usual, the government departments have absolutely no idea how to do things. The growing trend of people using mobile internet connection is one of the fastest growing areas and they have totally neglected to legislate for it. In fairness it would be next to impossible to do anything about it, but to not even try?

Limiting the Act to the major ISP's is also a big faux pas, I bet they are all up in arms about it as they will surely be losing a lot of their customers pretty soon.  If I had a load of capital I'd invest in a small ISP company in the UK, or if I was a large ISP I'd simply break down the company into smaller segments to avoid any problems.

Let's face it, almost everyone downloads something illegally from time to time, even Stephen Fry has admitted to doing so because he couldn't get an episode of a program he was in by any other means. So rather than put in place a half arsed piece of legislation that was paid for by David Geffen at the Rothschild's family villa in Corfu, why not do things properly and scrap the whole thing altogether. 

It must have been quite expensive for Geffen because Mandelson, who previously had no interest whatsoever in a Digital Bill, not only lobbied to get it passed, but made sure it happened during the wash up process when government was breaking up for the elections, which I'm glad to say Labour lost.

You could call me cynical but I think this was the plan all along. Get the populace angry over such draconian measures and then when it comes down to the boil just make the legislation strong enough for the copyright holders to sue and win every case that they wish to take to court. If my cynicism is to be believed then I expect to see many more cases where 17 year old kids and their parents will be sued for millions for downloading three songs and an episode of South Park. Just imagine the amount of cash these copyright holders already have, I'm sure they don't need to bankrupt a family because their dirty emo son has been downloading something you can't see in this country because it's not available through any legitimate means.

Get with the times already!

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Time Saver

I have just discovered a neat little time saver for people who write a lot using Mac's.

If you are like me, you tend to type a bit too quickly for your fingers and I make myself angry by mistakenly using a semicolon instead of an apostrophe due to the keys being next to each other, so I end up typing can;t instead of can't. When you're in full flow and barely taking note of what you are doing you can end up with a document that needs a huge amount of corrections.

So what's the answer then Mr. Spock?

Simply go into the Language & Text control panel in the System Preferences and hit the 'text' tab; you will see a list of symbol and text substitutions, mainly for replacing 1/2 with ½ and such, but the cool thing is that you can add your own. So you can make your Mac correct all of those annoying mistakes you always do when you type.

Teh can be made the. You;re can be made into you're. The possibilities are endless. My only beef it only works within word processing programs, so any posts I make on Vox are still subject to these silly typos because I type my posts directly in Safari. Now if Apple corrected this oversight this little gem of a fix would really come into its own.

Just thought I'd share. 😀

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Film Distributors

An open letter to film distributors.

Do you know why I don't buy DVD's anymore? Let me enlighten you.

I don't like to branded a thief because you obviously think that I download films all the time or I buy them from an Uzi wielding child molester with ties to Al Qaeda. The fiver I spent down the pub, that was most likely spent to buy a couple of pints on behalf of this terrorist, will obviously go to kill American and British troops in Afghanistan. 

I really should take care where I spend my money, nothing worse than supporting drug traffickers and murderers.

You know what I'm saying here, each and every film I watch in the cinema and on a dvd has this warning, don't pirate films, it destroys the process, people don't get paid, before you know it life has turned into walls bleeding blood and dogs sexing up cats.

But on top of that, it was bad enough just having an erroneous warning about stealing a film I just bought, there are twenty minutes of trailers that I have to watch before I can watch the film I want to see.

Let me tell you about how I like to see films. I like to put my dvd into the dvd player and press play, I want to see the film start and enjoy my purchase. This seems impossible if you actually buy a dvd, so why should I buy one?

The distributors are pushing me away from legitimately buying because they are purposely pissing me off.

Same goes for a cinematic release, I don't mind paying to see a film, but obviously a theatre or showhouse can't make a profit from just showing a film because they are pinched so much by the distributors, so we end up paying through our noses for refreshments and snacks. If you are like me you don't, I begrudge paying a couple of quid for a shitload of cola that would cost me a quarter of the price in a supermarket. So theatres are running so close to the bone the standards are slipping. My home cinema system has more oomph and a better screen if I push it.

Now this is the huge bugbear for me. Release dates.

There are some films that are released worldwide simultaneously, usually British made films, they seem to get a pretty good return. Most American films are staggered worldwide, so this leaves a vacuum, what are we expected to do? The films are there to be downloaded illegally and we want to see them! There is no legitimate way of seeing what John Doe is seeing in the States, so places like Pirate Bay are making a killing.

The producers will have us all thinking that 'stealing' films harms the industry, but if you take Wolverine as an example, a film that was leaked very early on, well before the cinematic release, it made $375 million on a $150m budget. Now how can they argue that a few pirated copies hurt the production of that film? And lets face it, this was the fourth film in a franchise too! If doubling your money on one film is harming the business then I want in!

I'm three kites to the wind at the moment, so I expect theres a lot I'd like to add, but please comment with your own thoughts on this subject.

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iPhone Apps

I thought I'd share with you my favourite iPhone Apps, these are the ones that I generally use most, if not on a daily basis and I find that without these my user experience would be diminished.

My-Fave-Apps

1. TweetDeck – For me this is the most used App I have. As the name suggest it's a Twitter client, but it also allows you to connect to Facebook and other sites to keep up with updates.It's quick and reliable, plus free!

2. Reeder – Another fabulous App, simply the best RSS reader for the iPhone. If you use Google Reader then this is a must, it's super quick at synching and the interface is simple and intuitive. I think I paid £1.79 for this one, worth every penny.

3. Facebook – Alas, a necessary evil.

4. Word Warp – My most used game on my iPhone. If I'm bored this is what I turn to, a simple word game where you have to make up as many words as possible from six letters, but you must find the six letter word to continue. Sounds easy, it is, with my high score of 39,650 I thought I was a master, imagine my dismay when I found out someone has a score of over two million. You can get a lite version with ads or buy it for 59p.

5. Ping! – Handy little free text messaging client for when you have no credit. Currently only three of my friends have it, but it's been very useful. Again a free version is available, which is what I have, the ads are not intrusive so I didn't bother paying for it.

6. The Guardian – A pretty good effort by the Guardian at a news App, maybe not as slick as The Telegraph App which is free, but the journalism is better. Bit hefty at £2.39 but when you get the news for free forever after I suppose it's cheaper than buying a daily newspaper.

7. Stanza – An E-book reader, and what can I say, it is the dogs bollocks. The main reason why I have started to read much more, it's fantastic to be able to carry your latest novel in your pocket for those boring moments on the bus. The bonus is that it's free, so is the desktop client! My only concern is that Amazon have now bought the company so I'm not so sure how long they will support it.

8. NHS Drinks Tracker – Does what it says on the tin, it monitors how much alcohol you drink. I find it comforting to know how much I drink, after a few months it actually surprised me to see that I drink rather sensibly as I thought I overdid things a bit too much. It allows you to input individual types of drinks or quantities on whichever date you wish, as long as you can remember Luckily for me the local has a loyalty card scheme so I know exactly what I had the day after. Another freebee.

9. Evernote – Another amazingly useful App. If you are like me and you;re hopeless at remembering things this is for you. You can make any type of note you can think possible, even voice memo's and it uploads them to a central server so you can access the info at any time anywhere. You can also share any part of your notes with other users if you wish. The type of things I have here are bus timetables, maps, train information, all types of useless information you find you need when you are lost and alone. Brilliant and also free!

10. IMDb – Does it even need an introduction? The Internet Movie Database at your fingertips, not as amazing as it should be, but adequate to find out who that actor was and where you have seen him before.

11. Dictionary.com – Again, just simply useful to have for so many reasons. I usually drag this out when I join crossword corner down the pub, settles a lot of arguments.

12. TrainLine – If you travel by rail anywhere in the UK, this is simply a must. You can book your tickets, see train times, changes, etc. I possibly use this twice a year, but I wouldn't be without it.

13. Doodle Jump – A fun platform jumping game that uses the acceleratometer to it's utter best. Very addictive and a lot of fun for 59p.

14. Cube Runner – Another simple free game, just steer your craft trough a maze of cubes. Sounds simple but it requires a lot of skill once the speed picks up. Don;t bother with Cube Runner 2, it's not as well made and you have to pay for that version. This is my game of choice when I'm on the throne. 😀

Well there you go, not the definitive list I'm sure, but these Apps make the iPhone for me. I'm sure a lot of you will have many other brilliant Apps that you use, as all iPhone users know, it's a very personal thing.

Why not share your favourite Apps in the comments.

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Vox Management

I'm sure that all of you are getting royally pissed off by now by the lack of anything being done by Team Vox about these constant spam comments. It seems to me that there have been as many posts written on Vox about the subject as there are spammers commenting, yet there hasn't been any kind of response from the people who can actually do something about it.

At the moment I'm getting a few spam comments each day, some on my recent posts but mainly on posts I have written ages ago. I get the email through that someone has posted a comment and straight away I know its a spammer because whoever is responsible can't even string a coherent sentence together, which makes me feel that our culprits are masters of Engrish.

Apart from filling up my email inbox, they are taking up my bandwidth as I have to come to my blog each time to delete the comment and block the user. For me bandwidth = money!

The sad thing is, my blog is pretty much locked down, only people who have registered with Vox can leave a comment, so obviously Vox's registration process is lacking in some way as these spammers are most certainly bots of some kind.

So, who the hell is going to do something about it? Try contacting someone who works for Six Apart and you will be met with a wall of silence. I suppose that is as much as we can expect to receive as this is a free service and we have no right to complain, I expect this is rather different over at their other blogging service, Typepad, those poor buggers, sorry, bloggers, pay through their noses so some modicum of customer service is still required.

If someone who works for Six Apart reads this, it would be nice to hear some kind of response, use that blog of yours once in a while, keep us updated. Communication lets you get away with murder, a wall of silence just breeds animosity.

/rant

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