SPIRALOZDOTCOM » Nerdy

A Month of Stuff.

Sebconn — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:33:29 +0000

If there’s any way to give yourself renewed interest in your own website, it’s a redesign. I think I’m just about due. Once I settle with a design and slice it up and write it, it will be the fourth time I’ve given the site an overhaul. This time round the site will focus on converging all of my social networking accounts on to one page, the blog will still be there, but things like flickr, twitter, last.fm, blip.fm will stand out more. So far I’ve done one concept layout, which I’m pretty happy with, I will try out a few different colour schemes and styles before I commit to writing up the HTML .

In other news, I’m still loving my Macbook Pro, just runs smooth as hell, and the new 4 finger exposé gesture is just magic, it genuinely makes me work faster between multiple apps. When I’m not working on my pretty Macbook Pro, I’m wasting time playing all these new pretty games that have been released this month so far I’ve bought the following:

- Fallout 3: This is probably the first RPG I’ve ever really enjoyed, I love the post apocalyptic steam punk 50s theme and there’s just so much to do, I’ve run through the main story so far but there’s so much more to do, I’d say once I’ve finished messing with all these other games, this is the one I will go back to.

- Left 4 Dead: This one is just pure fun 4 player Co-op and versus mode, all you do is simply shoot zombies, and it’s great fun nuff said.

- Guitar Hero World Tour: So far I’ve just bought the standalone game using the GHIII guitars, but after trying out the drums and mic that a mate brought over, I think I’ll have to get the full kit. It’s just too much fun, and after 10 beers it would be even more fun. Hoping to give that a try this weekend in between poker games.

- Mortal Kombat VS DC Universe: One thing I always enjoyed on consoles is the 2 player fighter, so I thought I better get one. This game is great fun with a mate and you can lose 2 hours very easily with it, and the characters are great all the good oldschool MK characters, and some bitchen DC guys as well, Batman VS Sub-Zero? Hell Yeah.

So far that’s it, I still plan to get Gears of War 2, I was pondering Need For Speed Undercover but apparently it’s rather crap, and I’ll probably get COD5 at some point.

Have fun kids.

New Work Horse: Macbook Pro.

Sebconn — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:25:07 +0000

I’ve been wanting to get a new Macbook with more gusto for a while now. new Macbook Pros were announced on Wednesday (AU Time). I puchased it not long after. It arrived today after a small hiccup with the courier company TNT. I have the day off and I was hoping to be there when it was delivered, of course it arrived at the most inoportune time while I was in the shower and I got the normal “we missed you” card. I rang them up and the lady told me that I couldn’ pick it up till Monday, my urge to kill was rising, seemed crazy that I couldn’t pick it up on the day, and it was, I went to the depot anyway and I was able to pick it up straight away. I took it home feeling happy in my pants. I’ve been migrating data for the last hour from my old Macbook, and so far I’m loving it. The screen is great, the speakers are awesomely loud, and the new gestures, particularly the 4 finger Exposé ones are just so intuitive and will make getting things done without my logitech mouse insanely easier. I’m yet to really give it a working, gonna try some games on it, try out Windows XP running Parallels, few other things, but so far I’m wrapped.

Two Fairly Unknown iPhone Apps.

Sebconn — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:02:12 +0000

Was browsing the app store and came across 2 gems worthy of any iphone. The first is Just Update, it’s a barebones twitter client, simply for sending tweets and nothing else, the advantage of it is it’s much faster to launch than any full client and gets you tweeting straight away, even provides a list of your followees so you can send replies or DM them. The other App is Locly, which allows you to get information about your current location, local twitter tweets, local restaurants, local Flickr pics, Wiki pages, pubs and more, works really well, even in non-US regional areas.

I’ve got all things that are nice…

Sebconn — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:33:56 +0000

I really need to make sure this blog doesn’t turn into one of those 1 post a year wonders that always starts with “I haven’t blogged in a while”. They give me the irrits.

So anyway, I haven’t blogged in a while, I think Twitter may be taking up a lot of the time that I would/should spend on this site. This post is going to be a bit of a catch up rant.

I’m seriously backed up with web dev stuff to do, and I really want to get them all done and get a decent portfolio up and running, it’s looking rather stale at the moment, I tend to be a bit of a rollercoaster when it comes to web dev, sometimes I can find my creative side and quickly whip up a nice wordpress concept design, then I have a brain fart and struggle with making that concept into a theme, or vise versa, I think it depends on the music I’m listening to at the time, it has a big effect on the way my brain works. I might need to look at tagging songs for creative and for coding, I’m convinced it has an effect.

I recently bought a new toy to take my attention away from my iPhone, a nice Samsung 46″ LCD TV, it’s big and beautiful, and looks perty as hell, the purchase of this TV has given my xbox new life, through the HDMI cable I can finally play the games how they’re supposed to look, and since buying the TV I’ve bought 3 games for the thing; Guitar Hero III, which I already have on the Wii, but I wanted downloadable content and HD niceness. Project Gotham Racing 4, having heaps of fun with this one, haven’t got into a console racer in years, probably since the first Gran Turismo. The third game I’ve bought is Mass Effect, which is ok, only just bought it, not overly impressed.

I’m currently looking at Blu-Ray player prices, they are going for around $400 in the places I’ve looked, definitely a future purchase.

On to other Gadget goodness and me and my housemate have decked out the house with 2 airport expresses for streaming music, we’ve had one for a while but the things really shine with two, perfect synced streaming music throughout the whole house, one in the lounge, and one in the outside stereo with our recently partified deck, which proved to be awesome on Grand Final Day.

And Finally, just a bit of iPhone stuff, even though I’ve saturated this blog with it, I’ve finally hacked my iPhone, it was a breeze and the stuff I can do now is fantastic, live last.fm scrobbing, direct to device podcasting, themes, soundsets and video recording, particularly Qik.com streaming, which streams live video to my Qik profile, I’ve always been impressed with this service and now that I use it, I’m super impressed, check out my profile for some of the vids I’ve made.

I think I’ve rambled on enough, what a stupidly long post, oh well, kudos to you if you actually read it all!

Is Jailbreaking Your iPhone Worth it?

Sebconn — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:29:18 +0000

I’ve had my iPhone a couple of months now and I’ve held off Jailbreaking it until now. I never thought it was really worth it. Over the last couple of days I’ve been doing a bit of reading about it, what can be done, the benifits, the risks involved. The only risks involved is if your iPhone broke to a point where you couldn’t restore it to standard factory settings, you couldn’t do a warranty claim because it voids your warranty, but as long as you’re in a position to restore your iphone back to normal, there’s really not a whole lot to worry about.

The benifits are getting better by the day, the real seller for me was video recording support and particularly support for live streaming via Qik, which allows people to watch your live stream and send you messages, it’s a very cool technology and one I’ve wanted to try for a while.

It’s pretty easy to do, download the Pwnage tool, build your ipsw file (Aussie users make sure you have Activate UNCHECKED). Once the ipsw file is built, go to iTunes, hold down option and click restore, choose your newly created file and off you go.

So is it worth it? I’d say yes, there’s a bunch of Apps available now and it will only get better, for an example of just a few apps go here

Think I’m iPhoned out? Hell No

Sebconn — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:41:21 +0000

So yeah… Probably going a bit overkill with the iPhone posts, I’ll try and make this one the last jebusphone related post in a while, but I’ll make no solid promises.

So 3 new apps have found their way onto my home screen. First up, a proper Wordpress app, from which I’m posting right now.. Don’t believe me? Check one of the pics in this post. I’m going to post a few pics and see how that feature works with this app.

The next app is Twinkle, yet another Twitter client, this one has very smooth pic posting and a very cool nearby tab that allows you to see tweets from people within a specified distance. I have a small wishlist of feature quirks that would be pure awesome for a Twitter client like this one;

- Better location features, properly update Twitter location (not like the Twitterific long lat crap) and have the option of inserting your location in the actual tweet. Possibly auto create google maps link.

- Travel speed. No idea why I want this I just think it would be cool to be able to post your travel speed calculated by the gps signal.

- Insert current music playing. If you’re cruising down the street playing some tunes, so what are you doing? Walking down listening to travelling at .

It all fits dammit!

The last app ive installed is a spirit leveller, makes me wish I was a tradie.

Its late and cold and I need sleep.

iPhone is Pure Win

Sebconn — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 06:18:22 +0000

so despite my initial fears I I did manage to get an iPhone, there couldn’t have been more than 10 people at the Optus store I went to at 7am. They did however have very limited stock. I was 4th in line and by the time my turn arrived they ran out of 16gb black models. I wasn’t particularly fussed about the colour. So for the past 30 or so hours I’ve been installing apps syncing mail accounts, all that jazz. The verdict? Even more impressed than I expected to be. The interface is just so intuitive you pick it up and feel comfortable straight away. Physically it feels sturdy and robust, and the size is fine, I notice it less in my pocket than my old phone. I’m yet to find a flaw that truly irritates me, a couple of tiny ones that don’t fuss me too much, no video recording, no copy and paste, that’s all I can think of right now. When I first used the qwerty keyboard I thought oh oh, I’m not gonna enjoy this. But after just one hour of use, I was only marginally slower than my old phone. The trick is trust, if you think you’ve missed a key, just keep typing, 85% of the time it will fix it up, no matter how bad it looks. I’ve installed a bunch of fancy apps, I’ll post a list with mini reviews at a later date. Oh and FYI this post was written entirely on my iPhone.

Replacing the Macbook LCD screen

Sebconn — Sat, 10 May 2008 05:12:20 +0000

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So me and my friend Ben replaced the LCD panel of my Macbook last night, and it went pretty damn smoothly. There were some scary bits where we had to pull out plugs that didn’t look like plugs and strange plastic tidbits, but all in all, we simply followed the guide on ifixit.com and it worked quite well. AU$419 for a 120GB hard drive and a 13.3″ LCD panel, not too shabby, bought from Macfixit.com.au. Here’s some piccies.

Before

After

Just a couple of changes.

Sebconn — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:40:51 +0000

Made a couple of additions to my site today. As you can see all of the titles to my sidebar items have corrosponding icons for them, gives it a splash of colour I guess. I’ve also brought the Moblog back after being on hiatus for a very long time. My old moblog was a completely independant PHP script that I wrote, but not having control of my web host’s PHP settings and wanting to enable certain features, I had to abandon it. This time round I’ve gone with a much more simple approach. This time I’m using Flickr to host my photos, I can send a picture message to my assigned flickr email address and it adds it to my photostream, I’m using a Wordpress plugin called Pflickr, which was designed to display a random image for a desired amount of time, I modified it slightly to not grab a random picture but to grab the latest picture added. It works very well and I’m pretty happy with how it works. Kudos to Christos for developing such a nice simple widget for me to mess with.

Draw something and trade it with a stranger!

Sebconn — Sun, 04 May 2008 10:16:44 +0000

When you click swap, your sketch is uploaded. The next person to click swap will get that sketch, and you will get whatever they drew. Have fun!

Pretty fun. I’ve put my URL on some of my pictures, if you got that from this site. Post a comment!