archaeologist, tech geek, cornishman
Being @tag on Twitter
Oct 19th
When I signed up to Twitter in early February 2007 I wanted as short a username as possible, and as Twitter was still young, I was able to get a three letter username – @tag – which are my initials (@tom had gone) to save on those precious 140 characters. Twitter didn’t do tagging, and it didn’t look like it could ever make sense, so I settled on @tag and have happily used it ever since.
But since Facebook allowed the @username reply (@username on Twitter is a reserved term, and no account exists) people decided to say that you could now “@tag” your friends. For a few weeks after introducing this, and various tech blogs mentioning “@ Tagging” my Twitter replies were, shall we say, a little busy. It actually made Twitter a lot harder to use for me. But thankfully it died down, and I now only get a few erroneous “@tag” mentions.
But when I launched Tweetie this morning to check my Twitter account, it seemed that I had a few replies:
Hmm. I found out that this is the culprit tweet:
So now, hundreds of people have decided to start tweeting “Meet the Genius behind the creation of this site.. join me! @tag http://bit.ly/4DvS27 #followseachange” – slightly missing the point of putting someone else’s username into their tweets.
I think I’ll just have to weather this one out and see what happens. I really like my username, and don’t want to change it!
New Gong album “2032″ coming soon
Aug 22nd
Pioneering psychedelic space rockers Gong, who have been making music for well over 40 years, are soon to release a new album, entitled “2032″. This track, “How to Stay Alive”, along with its outstanding video, is a taster of what is to come when the album is released on 21 September 2009. From what I have heard so far (i.e. 45 second samples and this track), 2032 is going to be jaw-droppingly good.
[Edit] I now have the 2032 CD, ordered from Planet Gong, and it is jaw-droppingly wonderful. I urge you to buy this album at once!
The lineup for “2032″ is incredible:
- Daevid Allen – guitar and vocals
- Miquette Giraudy – synthesizers
- Steve Hillage – guitar and vocals
- Gilli Smyth – vocals
- Mike Howlett – bass
- Didier Malherbe – soprano sax, flute
- Theo Travis – sax, flute
- Chris Taylor – drums
- Yuji Katsui (Rovo) – electric violin
Head over to Planet Gong to find out more.
Stonehenge at the Summer Solstice 2009
Jul 22nd
It’s just over a month since the summer solstice, and, if you have never spent the night at Stonehenge with 35,000 other people, this short film should hopefully give you a hint of the sights, sounds and atmosphere.
The film starts in the evening as the sun sets, through to partying in the dark of the stones, a cloudy sunrise, and is rounded off with morris dancers and a very early bus.
Shared Items in Google Reader
Jul 16th
I’m just getting into the idea of using the “shared items” feature of Google Reader (Google’s online RSS reader). I’ve been a heavy user of Google Reader right from the start, after using NetNewsWire (which is great) but wanting to read my feeds on a variety of devices (not just my Mac).
Google Reader has, for some time, offered a way for users to share interesting news items. You simply click “share” at the footer of an item, and that article is instantly available for others to see via RSS or your “shared items” page. I hadn’t really thought about the utility of being sociable with articles in my newsfeed, and have usually used Delicious or good old email to share things.
You can see what I have recently found interesting in the sidebar of this blog, or view my shared items via Google. I expect to syndicate a digest of them here as well, making my blog into a bit more of a hub for my online activities.
It will be a fun little experiment, if nothing else..!
Here I am, airing the house on a Sunday morning, when lovely neighbour does this
Jul 12th
I suppose he has to burn what he has, but that’s a lot of smoke!
“To Do” managers on Symbian S60 – where are they?
Jul 10th
iPhone users seem to have it all (except battery life) these days. There’s a slew of ToDo managers available for it, with beautifully designed interfaces, and crucially, for me at least, those that sync with online services such as ToodleDo or Remember the Milk.
Folks have been asking Remember the Milk developers for a Symbian S60 app for years, to no avail.
It took long enough for the perfect Twitter solution (Gravity) to arrive on S60, I wonder what’s up with developing for Symbian? Given the tens of millions of Nokia N95s, N96s, etc, out there in the world, why isn’t the Symbian software market flourishing? Where are the decent ToDo managers for our Nokia smartphones?
Anyway, enough pondering and ranting. If anyone has any good suggestions for a Symbian S60 To Do manager that has over-the-air sync capability, please leave a comment, and I’ll update this post.
The fabled Google OS
Jul 8th
Well, it had to happen eventually. Google have just announced their latest project: Google Chrome OS.
You can’t download it just yet, but we can expect to see products (initially netbooks) running it next year:
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Running on a Linux kernel, the Google Chrome OS will have its own windowing system, optimised to run the Chrome browser, and the browser alone. The web will be the development platform. Google don’t want users to have to worry about viruses, malware and security updates – “It should just work”. Sound familiar?
Expect to see the source code later this year.
Sample photos taken with an LG KC910 Renoir
Jun 17th
In the last few days I’ve taken a lot of photos with my new LG KC910 “Renoir”, and I’m quite taken with the camera.
Here’s a slideshow of photos taken with the phone – this will update automatically via Flickr:
I’ll do some more movie recording soon, and post samples here.
Adjust your sets, the look of my blog ha…
Jun 11th
Adjust your sets, the look of my blog has changed!
I’m using the wonderfully clean and simple P2 theme by Joseph Scott, Matt Thomas, Noel Jackson, and Automattic. I’ll probably get around to customise it a bit, so ’scuse the scaffolding for a while 
