There once was a time when twice a year the man of the house would change the two clocks in the house to switch between normal and summer time. Then clocks multiplied and starting squatting in microwaves and televisions and the man’s job got almost impossibly hard to the point where come the middle of December he’d find one still living in the summer.
But then scientists (in true evil genius style) invented a way to control all the countries clocks by broadcasting an evil time signal from the massive tower atop their evil lair in Cumbria. People flocked to buy these new self setting time machines and soon they were everywhere, so that this weekend all I needed to do in order to switch back to good old GMT was to set my phone’s daylight savings time option to off and to set one clock, the only clock I’ve got that doesn’t set itself, my alarm clock.
I could just leave it at that but I’ll expand. Portal is the ‘other’ game you get when purchasing the Half-Life 2 : Episode 2 Orange Box bundle. Not only does it introduce a truly unique style of game play and puzzle solving but it also teaches the user about Newtonian physics and features the cutest most comic gun turrets that will ever try and shoot you.
On a slightly different note, buying the thing means I’ve got a Half-Life 2 and an Episode 1 key to ‘gift’ to someone via steam. Any takers?
Overlooking the various other issue that surround the bbc at the moment, this week saw two steps forward and one step back for the bbc’s iplayer catch-up service. I’ve been using the iplayer since they launched the enlarged beta a couple of months ago and it’s been working flawlessly (even though I’m using an unsupported platform), so the news that it’s going to be made available through the 7500 wi-fi hotspots operated by The Cloud for free is good news. While only the few people who use iplayer on windows laptops will actually benefit initially, the news that ‘all’ bbc websites will also be available freely accessible from the same hotspots can only be good news for those of us touting wi-fi enabled media players.
Now to the step back, the news that there are currently no plans to offer the iplayer as a download service for mac or linux. There will be a youtube style flash viewer for all platforms but cost (and therefore value for money) is holding back development on an all-platform download app. I can understand their stated reasons for this, including the fact that the overwhelming majority of people will be using Windows and will therefore be supported, however there are a couple of reasons which aren’t mentioned, namely that the iplayer is built on a 3rd party peer-to-peer system (the same one that Channel 4’s 4OD service uses) which may not be available for non-windows platforms and that the iplayer is designed to use Microsoft’s proprietary DRM which although I believe is available for macs, hasn’t been licensed by the BBC. So to paraphrase the last couple of sentences for the less tech savvy among you, the BBC built the current system on the cheap to get it out the door for Windows users and is reluctant to put the effort (and money) in to do the job properly for any other platforms, which is a shame.
However, take both these announcements forward a couple of years and the situation might be a lot more rosy. I imagine that standalone iplayer box is in development. Something like sky+ but which downloads selected programmes rather than records them and which can then play the downloaded programmes on your tv. Then if the bbc and apple got their collective heads together, the resulting itunes assisted iplayer could then support macs of all kinds (mac/apple tv/ipod/iphone) which would leave linux, a problem which I’ll leave someone else to solve.
Plus it’s a real novelty to have to use three escalators just to get to the concourse. It was just a shame the game was rubbish.
For a while now I’ve felt like mixing things up around here. There have been many attempts at creating a new design which still sit half finished in folders on my pc, some I liked for a while then got bored of, some which I quickly realised simply weren’t going to work. So to force some action, I’ve switched the site to use this theme, Plain Jane by Kyle Schembri.
This means one of two things. Either you’ll get to see as the site change before your very eyes (probably very slowly) until I’m happy with it, or it’ll stay like this for a few days and then revert to the old theme. Either way, it’ll look a mess for a few days but should get better after that. You’ll just have to live without proper access to the photos (and the other junk) for a while.
Let’s see where this goes…
Updates
- Post images now working.
- Site menu restored.
- About page complete.
- Archives are now live.
I’m going to need a lot, about £4,000,000 to be exact. You see, I need to have this house. I’ve seen it grow a little more each time I’ve been down the beach for the last 6 months or so and apart from the fact that it’s miles from where a prospective owner might want to work or shop (and even further when the ferry is out of action) it seems like just the kind of place I’d like to live. Not sure I’d need a wine cellar or gallery though.
