For a while I've been noticing significant degradation of the backlight on my dilapidated iBook G4. So, yesterday, my dad and I spent a few hours replacing the CCFL backlight bulb.
Archive for 2007
O2 Cocoon: Review, Part 3: Wrapping Up
I've been using the O2 Cocoon as my main phone for a few weeks now, and I'm fairly happy with it. After covering the design of the phone and the music features previously, I'll wrap up by covering the rest of the features.
O2 Cocoon: Review, Part 2: Music
The first part of my review of the O2 Cocoon was mainly about the hardware: the look and feel of the thing you hold. This time, I'm going to look more at the phone's music features.
O2 Cocoon: Review, Part 1
As you might have gathered from some of my previous posts, I do enjoy playing with new mobile phones, and I really enjoy ranting about them at length on the internet. So, I was stoked to receive an email on behalf of O2 offering to let me try out their new "Cocoon" music phone.
LG Shine KU970: The 3G Shine
Thanks again to the LG Shine Blog, I received an LG Shine KU970 mobile phone to review. This is the newer 3G version of the KE970 I reviewed earlier this year.
iTunes Library Regeneration
The final major thing that "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod" has annoyed me from Day One: the monolithic bloaty binary library, and the accompanying tidy-but-inefficient XML backup. For a small library, it's no problem, but mine has major issues. Heck, and I don't even consider my ~40GB library to be particularly big!
iPod Video Conversion in iTunes
The kludginess of video conversion for iPod in iTunes is another one of the things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod". I don't like the conversion process, and I particularly don't like the bug I think I've found.
iPod Photo Bloat
In the process of replacing my iPod, I've noticed a couple of things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod". After my previous rant about iPod reliability, I'm now onto the sloppy programming behind iPod's photo functions.
iPod Reliability
Last week, I got a new iPod Video 80GB from eBay, and in the process of transferring my media a number of things caught my attention. Some of these are known about already, but they're things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod". I'm covering these in a few separate posts, as I've got quite a bit to say on the subject.
Mechanics Experiments with <canvas>
A couple of months ago, I spent a few weeks playing with <canvas>. The main reason was to write a game (currently on the back burner, but not "cold" as yet), and also to re-learn some simple mechanics and trigonometry I've forgotten since c.1993. I've put together a little bit of code ("testbed") which lets me put together simple interactive diagrams. Due to the lack of text support in <canvas>, unfortunately I can't label everything diligently. My old maths teacher, Mr. Slatter, would be horrified.
Transferred from GoDaddy to Dreamhost
I finally got sick enough of GoDaddy to buy a Dreamhost account and transfer (nearly) everything over to that account. Although I've only been using it for a few hours, I know I'm going to be far happier with it... especially the Subversion support. Setting up a post-commit hook as described below has made maintenance a lot easier.
Game Idea: Cowboys and Indians
Through Digg, I found a site called My Game Ideas, where you can post (unsurprisingly) ideas for computer games and let others comment and rate them. Anyway, this prompted me to post an idea I've been mulling over for a couple of days: Cowboys and Indians meets GTA. UPDATE: Unfortunately, it looks like I failed to notice Red Dead Revolver, which looks to be a more sucky version of what I was thinking of.
LG Shine KE970: Everything Else
Okay, I've covered the the physical aspects and the audio aspects, so now it's time to wrap it up by looking at the camera, the software and finally the phone-call-making bits of the LG Shine.
LG Shine KE970: Sound and Music
On Monday, I covered the external hardware aspects of the LG Shine I've been loaned. For the time being, I'm going to skip the actual phone features, and play with the sound effects, ringtones and music features it offers instead.
LG Shine KE970: The Hardware
Now that I've had a bit more of a play with the pre-release LG Shine that arrived on Saturday, I can now start to make a few conclusions. The first is that this really is a nice piece of kit.
LG Shine KE970: First Impressions
This morning I received a pre-release LG Shine KE970 courtesy of the LG Shine Blog, as a lead-in to the product launch in early February. I've spent a couple of hours using it, and I must say I'm impressed so far. I've got about five pages of notes, niggles and thoughts that I'm going to write up over the next few days. In the meantime, I took some pictures of it, my old Nokia 6280, and some fruit. Not exactly art, I'll admit.