Building Bridges, literally

At the back of my house, there’s a railway bridge that sometime last year we were told was going to have something done to it so that they could transport bigger things under it or something like that.

Several months later and they are STILL at it, and as they do any major work overnight, they use floodlights which nicely light my room up and stop me getting any sleep.

It is through this lack of sleep that I start writing stupid rambling blog posts on the pathetic excuse for a website which when I read it back at a later date I find that none of this makes sense and because I typed this all out on my tablet random letters keep appearing in words and the spelling is truly crap.

Seeing as I am using this blog more and more for this type of thing I think I might change a few things including shifting my portfolio of sites etc to a separate bit and away from this drivel.

marksuth.com Version 3

When I first started this site, I had all the best of intentions to make regular, meaningful blog posts with some actual purpose to them. As it turned out, most of my posts from last year consist of “my next post will be worthwhile” bollocks.

Starting this year having got rid of a lot of stuff and sorted out some major problems elsewhere, I can finally give this little site some attention.

Over Christmas I got a Samsung Galaxy Tab, which has probably been the best addition to my life in a long time and, twinned with the Springpad app, I’m finally getting everything in order and should hopefully stay that way.

Seeing as I now have approximately 4 or 5 different webcams in my possession I am going to give vlogging a go as so far all I’ve filmed and posted on YouTube is of a Pacman toy my aunt and uncle gave me as a present.

In other news, I had an unfortunate incident involving my right thumb and a corned beef tin which resulted in a trip to A&E. Never before have I realised how much I use my now bandaged thumb for things like opening packets, button pressing and writing and how much I suck at doing things left handed.

Christmas 2010

As I am always looking at new ways to tweak, break, and consequentiality fix this website, I shall be unleashing the latest round of modifications to this site over the next few days or so, I’m hoping to move the site away from being a blog with a site attached to it to more of a site with a blog if you get my meaning.

Aside from that, I am continuing to refine my online presence and hopefully get to a point where I have one service that I use with appropriate content aggregated where required so as to keep in tune with friends on Facebook etc. In general, my move to the cloud is progressing well, with my email server now being a hosted exchange service which suits me exceedingly well. Outside of this, I make good use of the Windows Live Essentials suite for things like document sync and remote access courtesy of Windows Live Mesh and SkyDrive, Windows Live Messenger for chatting with people whether they are on Facebook chat or WLM thanks to the level of integration. The other great tool within this mix is Windows Live Writer which I am currently using to write this blog post.

At present, my utilisation of cloud based services has generally being through a desktop client, for example my email aggregates through Outlook, courtesy of Microsoft Exchange. There are a couple of reasons I chose this approach, partly due to the offline caching it provides and cross device integration it provides between my laptop, PC and phone but also that for one reason or another, there were faults or annoyances in other services such as Gmail and Hotmail that were enough of an issue to sway me otherwise.

On the Hotmail side of things, the single issue that is preventing me from fully switching is the incompatibility of their ActiveSync implementation with Android that prevents me from syncing my contacts, emails and calendar with my phone, making it impractical for the way in which I intend to use it.

On the flip side of this however, the reason I decided against going for the Google option was due to the requirement of a continual internet connection on the desktop. Although I usually have an internet connection on whichever device I am using, the requirement of this, and the requirement of a separate tool running in the background in order for contact and calendar entries to sync irritated me sufficiently to go to a hosted exchange option.

Whilst this does cost approximately £3 a month, for the benefit it gives me, I feel this is a price worth paying to get what I require. I will continue to look at all the available options, for example I will try Office365 when it becomes available to see if that provides everything I need and so on.

Moving to the cloud.

Over the past couple of years, I have been making more and more use of cloud based services. As one of my uni modules focuses around this topic, I’ve decided to see just how much of my daily life can be done through the cloud.

Up until the new wave of Windows Live Essentials I’ve been using Live Mesh to keep all my various documents etc. in check across different PCs and also accessing the odd file when required via the web. I’ve since adjusted this to use Windows Live Mesh (Sameish name, sameish product, but in a way different).

I am more than aware of the Google Docs way of doing things, but I have always found myself drifting back to Windows Live/Microsoft based services for one reason or another.

When it comes to doing work, OneNote’s SkyDrive integration has been exceedingly handy, especially when taking lecture notes. The other added bonus to this is that it allows for me to not lose notes etc. and makes retrieving them much easier as well.

Personal entertainment has changed a great deal over the past few years, with services such as Spotify, making it easier than ever to realise how many crap versions of Bohemian Rhapsody exists (Pan-pipes anyone?) and of course there’s the BBC iPlayer, which has become my normal method of watching Top Gear or listening to the Radio. I mean, who needs a £1 FM Radio from Poundland when you can spend upwards of £400 on a PC to listen to it on the net eh?

However, with this entire integration means it’s harder to escape things when you go out. More than once have I found myself sat in the pub helping someone fix their iTunes library via emails synced to my phone or fixing some rouge setting in WordPress.

I’ll probably make another post later on that makes more sense than this, possibly including pretty pictures if I can be bothered, depicting a personal cloud for a uni student in the UK.

Now with added CSS3

Seeing as the beta of Internet Explorer 9 is released today, I’ve been playing around with the styling elements of the site, and either making things look generally better and more polished, for example the shiny new date blocks to the left of these blog posts and the refined menu bar. I don’t doubt I’ll tweak about some more over the next few days or so, for example I’m looking for a suitable replacement for the background image and the sidebar needs sorting out but aside from that, it should be back to business as usual sometime soon.

Lonsdale Pool Website Updated

A new look website has been released for Lonsdale Swimming Pool, which has been updated to make use of new CSS3 styling techniques, in addition to a more friendly, appealing design than previously implemented. The new template is built on the same bespoke template framework used for my own site, and all other sites I manage, utilising the new features of WordPress 3 and modern web techniques.

As the framework allows for standardised code across the various websites, it has made it possible to evolve the underlying code to become increasingly sophisticated and feature rich. Whilst the main target of my framework is to keep it to the bare essentials without the inclusion of  “what if” code, it allows for a far more streamlined experience for all involved.

To view the updated Lonsdale Pool site, please visit www.lsst.org.uk

Bile? There’s an app for that

As I own an iPod, I have the misfortune of using iTunes to sync my music collection from my PC to said iPod. Although this can be done using apps like Winamp, I’ve never really got on with it and it just generally irritates me.

However, now that this “shiny” new version of iTunes has been released, the newness of it being made apparent by a new icon and volume slider, has been released, I think I may start getting back into the habit of using good old Winamp, even if it’s little systray app irritates the hell out of me which could probably solved if I could be arsed to untick boxes when installing.

Aside from the general dislike of iTunes as a Windows app, there are many other aspects of this software that I just do not like. First of which is the way that by default it places all your music in a sub-sub-folder of your music folder making it a pain when using other applications, the smattering of helper applications it insists on installing, the worst of which being Quicktime, which by any means is the bastard child of codec based runtimes.

The single worst ‘new’ feature of iTunes 10 however is their attempt at Social Networking; Ping. This spam magnet of a feature has no use outside of the iTunes eco system as you can only use it within iTunes. It’s as if they looked at last.fm, got as far as making it work within their own application then gave up adding the ability for it to interact with the outside world. The thing is intended essentially for fans of a band or artist to follow them and get the latest info on gigs, Single releases etc. Which is definately nothing like twitter, facebook, myspace, bebo, last.fm or anything of that nature.

In my opinion it’s time that iTunes goes the way that Real Player has and just become some little niche media player that no-one really uses or cares about.

Spring Cleaning (in late August)

Seeing as the cesspool of files that is my PC is complaining of low disc space, I’ve decided to have a good clearout of files, software and generally my approach to organising files.

Bearing this in mind, I’m going to take the chance to look at what software is installed on my PC, for example I have 5 or 6 different media players installed, a number of different web browsers and a smattering of different PC maintenance tools and runtimes.

Having scanned my pc using belarc advisor, I attacked the list of installed software with a good old highlighter pen and have got rid of about half of what I have installed on my machine.

Thankfully, when it comes to reinstalling everything, I can simply use a combination of Microsoft Update and ninite to install pretty much everything I need, aside for a couple of major apps like office and creative suite.

Simples

Leo Laporte’s recent rant on social media has got me thinking about my own approach to social networking and was the main motivation for me to get my site properly setup for blogging and to act as a personal hub for my various accounts on sites such as Flickr, Twitter, lastfm and everything else.

Whilst I’m just a uni student who doesn’t bear any real importance in the grand scheme of things, based on the various projects I’ve worked on previously. Aside from which, it’s probably best I try this sort of thing on my own site first rather than putting widgets and aggregated content on a site I’m building for someone; only to have it break their site down the line.

Having sorted through the various accounts, I have become aware that through one way or another I have 9 different email addresses. as a way to combat this I’ve created a new GMail account which I intend to use as an aggregator for all my various inboxes and just use my @marksuth.com email address to send said mail to the world courtesy of fiddling around with the settings. Using a GMail account ties in well with my HTC Wildfire, being an Android phone and all. Streamlining everything down into this one account has also allowed me to have a good cleanup of my contacts, merging duplicates and the like so I can be sure which Dave I’m sending something to instead of have a lucky dip of 4 of them.

jamie-keeling.co.uk Revamped

In addition to the Respect Academy website, jamie-keeling.co.uk an updated and refreshed version of Jamie Keeling’s website was also released, in order to fully make use of the new functionality in WordPress 3. The site design was also tweaked to give a more polished and accessible feel.

To visit Jamie Keeling’s site, please goto www.jamie-keeling.co.uk