archaeologist, tech geek, cornishman
Random
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!
Posted via email from Tom’s posterous
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 
Testing posterous
Apr 27th
I've just signed up to Posterous to give it a whirl, and I'm hoping that this text will also end up on my blog. Fingers crossed.
A short tour of the British Museum made shorter
Mar 10th
A short tour of the British Museum made shorter from Tom Goskar on Vimeo.
I took a little wander around the British Museum’s Great Court and some upper galleries, and filmed as I went on my cameraphone. The original video was 11 minutes long, sped up here by 800%, so I suppose it’s a 24mph walk about the BM…
The music is appropriately by A Single Voice, the musical guise of archaeologist and author David J Knight.
Nokia E71 Battery Life
Jan 15th
I’ve just noticed that the battery level on my E71 is down to just one bar. This doesn’t worry me, as I’ll be charging it in about an hour’s time. I wouldn’t normally blog about something as mundane as my battery being low, if it weren’t for the fact that the last time I charged it was Sunday evening.
Since today is Thursday, it means that my E71 has lasted a full four days. I am impressed. Thinking back to what I have done with my phone since Sunday evening, it’s been used rather a lot. I’ve listened to internet radio for about 15 minutes each morning, surfed the web, made phone calls, used a bit of Skype, taken a short video, taken some photos, sent some text messages, checked my email, used the alarm each day, and used Twitter via Twibble.
The E71 is quite a workhorse. It’s stuffed full of features, and, unlike the N95, I don’t have to worry about using them all.
Live streaming video from the Nokia E71
Jan 4th
Recently, while on holiday in Penzance, I saw some spectacular waves breaking on and over the sea defences. It was so amazing, I wanted friends and family to see it as well. I’ve had Qik installed on my phone for a while, going largely unused, so I thought that I’d load it up and give it a try.
Qik allows the E71 (and other S60 phones like the N95) to stream video direct to the web, where people can view it via an embeddable Flash player:
I had a good 3G signal on my E71, so I muted the sound in Qik’s settings (so that we could talk without the world hearing me say “wow!” repeatedly) and set it to “normal” quality (which is less than 320×240), then hit the “stream” button, and away it went, beaming live video to the world.
Qik’s interface on the phone is very simple. It tells you how long you have been streaming for, and what the delay will be for people watching via the web. Sometimes there is a delay (perhaps due to network congestion), but I found that it didn’t take long for the network to catch up, and the streaming video to be more or less instantaneous.
So how do people know that you’re broadcasting live video? When I opened my Qik account (which is free, by the way), I linked my Qik account to my Twitter account. Whenever I broadcast a video, a tweet is sent from my account to all my followers with a link to the live feed. In turn, my Twitter account is linked to my Facebook account, so people on Facebook can see too.
If people want to, they can chat to you while watching. Qik allows viewers to use a text chat window next to the Flash viewer (if you’re watching on Qik’s website) to interact with other viewers. All chats are displayed in the viewfinder on your phone, superimposed over the lower half (not on the streamed video itself, or the archived video). You can then answer questions (with your voice, of course), for example.
When you have finished streaming, the URL for the live stream remains the same, but links to an archive of the stream, which can be watched at any time.
There are other solutions out there for the E71 (I’m aware of Stickam and Kyte.tv) but since I’ve been so impressed with Qik, I’m not sure I’ll try them!
Link: My videos on Qik
Test post from Flock
Jan 2nd
This is just a test post from Flock’s blog editor. I haven’t tried it for the best part of a year, and now it’s reached a full version 1.0, thought I’d give it another test drive.
It looks like it supports tagging. Very smart.
(edit after posting – they’re not internal WordPress tags, but Technorati tags…)
Tags: flock, test, web browsers
RIP Netscape Navigator
Jan 2nd
AOL have announced the end of support for the Netscape web browser.
Netscape 2 was the first web browser that I ever used, on a PC running Windows 3.11. Good memories, but things have moved on a long way since then.
I’m now split between using Safari 3 as my main browser, and Firefox for the things that don’t work quite so well in Safari (hello, WordPress WYSIWYG editor…), and quite frankly, apart from a dash of nostalgia now and again, won’t look back for long…
