Tiny Pirate

I recently picked up a Nike+ kit for an Ipod Nano. The kit consitsts of a small device that plugs into the bottom of your nano, and a pedometer you put on (or in) your shoe. You then run, and the device talks to you while you listen to music and tells you your pace, distance and time. You can use the Nike+ website to check your stats when you synch your iPod, and you can set yourself goals, or your friends challenges. It’s pretty damn cool! If you’d like to challenge me, send something workable to TinyPirate on the Nike+ site.

You can check out my runs via the cool Nike+ sidebar on this site. Scroll down a bit and there you’ll see it!

Saw an amazing video for Photosynth, which is a clever piece of technology put together by a company bought out by Microsoft. Imagine a piece of software that reads every public photo (eg, off flickr), and links them all together to create seamless 3D models and environments. Spread that across the world. I don’t know whether to be excited, or scared! You can also try a simpler demo yourself.

I was checking the blog stats and discovered something interesting. I’m convinced Google thinks I’m a very strange, twisted, if not sick individual. Next to ‘tiny EVE’, the top result to produce a click-through to my blog was ‘group masturbation’! You can see the full list of searches that resulted in click-throughs to my blog below: Read the rest of this entry »

Today I logged in to DarkLife to see a disturbing message from the coder, Bram (aka. Mark Busch in game). The post describes how we’ve had $400us stolen from our main ‘account’ holding our cash in Second Life for the DarkLife game. Read the rest of this entry »

Here in New Zealand we like to think of ourselves as a small, nimble, technical country, however, when it comes to eCommerce we’re rubbish! Take a look at this newspaper comment about Air New Zealand simply refusing to support Mac users who want to book online. You heard me, if you use a Macintosh you can not do online bookings with Air New Zealand. This is supposedly an internationally recognised top-quality airline who are pretty much giving the finger to some of their customer base. What makes it worse is if you book over the phone with them you are charged an extra unwaivable $15!

Further examples abound in the terrible website design that supposedly modern companies employ. Read the rest of this entry »

This guy has a couple of handy tips to make Firefox go even faster. Suitable for broadband users only. It really seems to help!

Recently I’ve been enjoying podcasting, a technique whereby sound files are delivered to people via RSS. The sound files are collected by programs such as iPodder and then added to your iPod library (I assume it works for other MP3 players too.

This wonderful tool means I need no longer listen to the radio at all. With the BBC getting involved already I will soon be able to tailor any audio entertainment to my exact tastes. I can be going to work, at the gym or at home and by listening to a documentary on quantum physics, a news show on new technology, a Spanish lesson or any one of hundreds of Podcast feeds.

Right now Podcasting is pretty new but I expect it to become very popular quite quickly. It’s almost like a TiVo for radio or the internet and it’s a lot of fun so far.

But this leads us to the question, is it better to have a wide range sources or information or to be able to tailor exactly what one wants to hear. This challenge to our collective understanding of the world, indeed, this challenge to society itself, is something we will have to tackle this century and I’m not sure we can handle it just yet.

Flickr is a wonderful service that lets you upload, store and share pictures in a flash. If you haven’t noticed already I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I am completely in love with it. It can have my little ginger babies if it wants and I promise to never ditch it and fight over who owns the dog. Never! You are mine flickr, MINE!

Ok, well, yes, you should all go and check out flickr. It lets you use a tiny application to directly upload images to your image store and you can also send in images by email, mobile phone and via a web page. Once you have loaded the images you can title them, send them to groups (kind of like a shared image noticeboard) and you can quickly post them into blogs. You can also stream them to web sites easily as you can see further down in my blog.

The groups function is quite nice. I started one for my family and joined ones for Second Life, Auckland (where I live) and Wellinton (where I studied).