bunker

Zopa On BBC News

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 13:37:00 +0000

Whahey! Go on the Zopa!

(I worked on the redesign @ Poke earlier this year - it went on longer than I could remain there for - but good job chaps)

...now TIOTI will be on BBC News at Ten this coming monday or tuesday... Pod for the win!

National Service Mr Cameron?

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:52:27 +0000

So he finally lets those core values out we've been so lacking until now.

Linking rights to responsibilities would encourage youngsters to show they are responsible citizens, Mr Cameron said today as he challenged the notion that rights should automatically come with age.

The Tory leader made his comments as he unveiled the Young Adult Trust charity, which was set up following his calls for a scheme to teach youngsters social responsibility based on the national service model.

Aw, and you were doing so well Dave until now.

Make that a triple launch week

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:31:07 +0000

moo | we love to print : Goes live

I got my cards last week, they are smaller than I thought but perfect as that not-a-biz-card but not-a-back-of-fag-packet for handing out your contact deets.

Lovely site, the application worked like a dream, cheap and fast.

....but $5m from VCs raised my eyebrow - 5 mil for an online biz card printing biz? Hmmm...

Double Beta Week

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:00:49 +0000

TIOTI will hit beta this week, probably tomorrow, and we can finally let everyone in to see what we've been slaving over for what seems like an age. In reality, it's been a part-time affair for much of the year with the real work on my part completed in Feb and only ramping up the past couple of months. I'm just putting the finishing touches to the company site and blog while we get the last bugs out and add a very new Tv content source to the mix.

Meanwhile my day job project with Aggregator is taking pre-beta registrations for
MoeTV - The best of Russian TV, online, their first 'niche content' subscription TV download site while internally they are hurtling towards a good looking beta of their site.

The difference between the two? Aggregator have $16 million to work with and have staff and an office in London. TIOTI is cool.

Amazon Fumble The Ball

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 04:33:25 +0000

Uninnovate.com » Amazon Spends Over A Year Developing Movie Download Service Then Shackles It With Absurd Restrictions:

A year for this? Jeez. All eyes on Apple on Tuesday to breakthrough the increasingly messy implementations of all these DRM demands from the content biz.

Not like we all told the content biz DRM was a stupid idea or anything...

10,000 Email Addresses

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 03:46:18 +0000

Address Book Exporter 2.1.2:

Right, thats a lot - those are the signups from TIOTI.com - and I want to get them into something more useful for, let's say, invite codes going out in 10 days. Address Book to Text. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Bootcamp Hal.dll Fix

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:03:52 +0000

Partly for my own memory, and partly for what seems to be lots of people having Bootcamp problems when installing XP:

Problem: Nice clean Bootcamp partition - Check! Nice clean pukka XP SP2 disk - Check! Install and go... nuts - what is this C: \windows\system32\hal.ddl corrupt or missing you speak of? Ekk! Knowing *nothing* about this level of windows hacking I'm off to a bad start here. Here's how i got it working on my MBP.

Fixes: Apparently some people have had luck waiting till the setup off CD lets you hit 'R' and do some repair from the command line, specifically del C:\boot.ini ... bootcfg /rebuild ... fixboot

Apparently that has been know to work, but didn't work for me - this did though: Back in OSX use the Bootcamp assistant to remove then recreate the partition. Then boot off your XP install CD and when setup gets to your disk selector, delete the Bootcamp partition, and delete the 200mb partition bootcamp has also quietly made. Then create a new windows formatted partition from here and install. All should proceed well this time.

I'm not entirely sure why this works but it does and I get to play Half Life 2 now. Yay!

Getting Organised

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 11:03:07 +0000

So I've been entirely swamped for most of this year, working a minimum of two freelance gigs at once while keeping tabs on and shepherding TIOTI in the gaps. It has been exhausting and I'm starting to feel it, the breathers I get when I'm actually on top of all the things going on are too infrequent. So it's time to get organised!

First thing is the hellish .Mac performance these past few months - Sync? You must be kidding. It's rubbish, and I do rely on iCal to plan as well as record billable days. But its not working, nightmare. After messing with .mac sync once again i'm going to give MySync a whirl and report how that goes. I'm also going to try out OSX Leopard as that has entirely new syncing built in, and it's retro-fittable to Tiger too. Report will follow.

Ok, so that's my time, future and past, sorted. Next up, words and ideas. I'm trying out a few notetaking apps at the moment, to make sense of the far too much RSS surfing I do. Omni Outliner looks like the leader so far, but annoyed me by being seemingly unable to alphabetise a list of email addresses. Yo Jimbo looks good, has .Mac syncing of notes and deserves a more robust playing with. I'm also trying out Sidenote which sort of works for me but has a couple of bugs that have irked me already.

I'm going to give them all a week or two longer and see what works for me, but if anyone has suggestions, please tell.

Aggregator TV and TIOTI

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 15:31:14 +0000

Aggregator, the guys I work for most of the time have finally done their big PR splash, with funding etc. They are doing some really nice stuff along the broadband distribution of TV content, but it's a big job sourcing, licensing, acquiring masters, digitising, DRMing, metadating, selling it and finally delivering. An entirely different proposition to my startup TIOTI : Tape it off the internet as we are super meta, sitting atop all these rapidly appearing different delivery sites. The more the merrier, and the better for us. We are format and technology agnostic, with no view on the legality of what you do to get your media, but obviously cannot condone... blah blah. Either way, TIOTI will probably beat Aggregator to market - couple of weeks for the managed beta 1 - yay!

MX 2004 Upgrade or Migration Problems & Fix

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 09:05:58 +0000

Just a note to myself and anyone else that gets stuck upgrading OSX, or migrates to a new mac and suddenly finds Director MX 2004 and Flash MX 2004 now failing to start up correctly, characterised by a bouncing icon but never getting to splash screen, requiring a force quit.

This worked for me: run the macromedia hotfix for this issue, repair permissions using disk utility, run hotfix again, open the apps - the 30 day trial will be reset, and you can enter serial numbers at your leisure. I believe the real issue is the hidden files Macromedia used to protect the software and manage the 30 day trial got messed up - the hotfix deletes a Macrovision directory and files related to this, so deleting that manually may have a similar effect.

That little pain in the arse took the shine off an otherwise seamless migration to a new MacBook Pro replacing a tired, battered and well used 1Ghz TiBook. Old laptop will go to a deserving retirement home, the new one is very shiny and very quick - easily the speed of my 2x2Ghz G5 tower. Nice.

What, Hey?

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 01:05:13 +0000

The Mixtape/podcast is back!

Visit neuromantics.net/mp3 to download it or one click subscribe to the iTunes podcast. Podcast here: http://neuromantics.net/neuropodcast.xml

In other news, the information architecture for Tape It Off The Internet was completed a couple of weeks ago, and the site is now in development somewhere in the Ukraine. I think. Should be open for ~~business~~ fun and games in the spring, with beta testers sneaking in before then - so go and sign up: TIOTI.com

Blackpool, Diamond of the North

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:58:23 +0000

So there is yet another BBC TV series set in my home town of Blackpool. In recent years there has been "The Pleasure Beach" - awful real life characters exposed (i used to work there), the drama "Blackpool" which was great, if odd and now BBC3's Funland. These shows always upset me as to how they portray the town, all seediness, dark corners, twisted dealings and scum. It's pathetic.

The reality is much much worse...

Old vs New

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 03:34:29 +0000

Writing this entry actually hurts me, more than I can say, but it needs to be written. I had a drink with an old friend who works in a sphere very close to mine - interactive TV advertising - and we really had a difference of opinion that has thown me sideways. Our conversation, after the usual gossip and catching up, veered to the advertising industry, which I normally keep as far from as practically possible. Our chat turned towards the future and this is where we diverged dramatically (as we always do). He insisted that the media buying and owning staus quo would remain in play indefintely whatever happened technologically in the near future - I have a more optimistic view that we might finally be liberated from the strangle of heavyweight advertising interests.

It got nasty, he cited the fact that News International could demand a war when required, buy respected movie 'review' opinion when needed for any advertisers need. I throw back the destruction of flakey hollywood prospective blockbusters after a first night SMS frenzy from a disappointed crowd.

The battle between old monolithic "do what we tell yo" media and new distributed "I'll ask my friends, thanks" media has shaken me. I am shocked with the fierceness of his fight, the belief in the power of advertising. Am I following the wrong path here? Is this a battle that dispite the best minds of our generation, we just get bought out by Murdoch and eat the corporate dollar? Is there a point?

New Side Project

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 23:15:43 +0000

With all the hoo-har going on about the BBC iMP project both in public and behind the scenes, why the hell not:

Tape It Off The Internet.com pops it's barely formed head over the precipice. It's just a public place to work out some of the ideas for now, while we build on recent R&D projects for a non-tv-on-web medium, avoiding legal issues but sowing the seeds for a robust social tv focussed community.

Or something...

OSX Font Management

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:14:42 +0000

I probably ranted about this way back, but it looks like there is a solution.

I'd like to point out that this is really only relevant to designers, people who happily have hundreds of fonts kicking around, CD's full. Your average user will be fine with no font management, or just sucky Fontbook.

When Panther arrived, everyone had very high hopes for the new OSX Fontbook. Unfortunately it turned out to suck - really suck, so it was back to the 3rd party applications that never quite matched the elegant joy of old ATM Deluxe on OS9. I never really got on with SuitcaseX and ended up using Master Juggler for ages, although it was still sub optimal and very very slow. I had resigned myself to the situation and ignored it... until in walks Linotype's new Font ExplorerX.

Font ExplorerX is just exiting beta, is a free download, is cross platform, and just damn works how it should. It can intercept font requests from Quark and Indesign to load up your active fonts on demand if you handle lots of documents from different designers and sources. It offers you the choice of moving or copying fonts from your file system. it has an *almost* great interface - very iTunes... indeed it even includes a Linotype Font Shop online built right in - smart. Very smart. It also seems to handle previews quickly and crash free, unlike the competition.

Best of all ... it just works. Only took 5 years to get here, but I'm glad we did.