Category: Web/Internet

Kick-Ass needs it’s Ass-Kicked over marketing..

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 11, 2010

As I continue to watch the marketing campaign for Kick-Ass unfold, I wonder what exactly is going through the minds of the marketing folk responsible for bringing this film to the attention of the public. Firstly there are the web sites. The official site, kickass-themovie.com is being run by Lionsgate and is reasonably decent in execution other than for the lack of content.

Kick-Ass’ campaign seems to centre around the major social networking sites. Updates are posted via Facebook which then filter out to a Twitter feed. Unfortunately the team responsible for managing these social networking sites seem to either be very new to this sort of thing, or are somewhat clueless. They’re clearly favouring Facebook (a company with perhaps more privacy concerns than MySpace these days, particularly with regards to the allegations that one of the founders has been illegally accessing the accounts of rivals and journalists (according to various sources, but I’m quoting the Daily Mail here). There’s no engagement from the marketing team on Twitter at all. It’s merely being used as a news feed.

Until a few weeks a go, the UK web site was undecided as to which domain name to use. I registered several back in 2008 to avoid domain squatters from taking them. I pointed them at the official site and had the attitude that if they were wanted, MARV could have them for nothing (despite being told by various people that I should sell it to them given that Kick-Ass was too generic a term to be considered IP/trademarked) or I’d just like the domains expire this year. Eventually I was approached directly by MARV via Universal as to the domain they wanted. They would have got it without any further fuss if I hadn’t found out about the whole Universal/LOVEFiLM thing, but thankfully MARV through their web design shop secured the one THEY wanted before it went to another cybersquatter (the one that Universal wanted went to an individual/cybersquatter in less than a few hours after I had deleted the domain through Nominet).

Then there are the competitions. Lionsgate offer the chance to win tickets to the world premiere. The competition has strict rules and regs and the rules are clearly laid out on their web site. The European side is a little less organised. There is a competition to win tickets to the European premiere, but there are no rules or regs which is problematic if not for the British Advertising, Sale Promotion and Direct Marketing code of conduct. After all, this is a promotion and applies to a UK run business. They could have at least stuck up the official rules on their UK web site and linked to it. This would avoid any potential arguments from breaking out for those entering the competition, especially if complainant attempts to sue. As social networking sites become the starting point for many marketing campaigns, companies behind official Twitter and Facebook feeds need to be transparent as to what’s on offer and must still comply with the relevant advertising codes.

Despite two years of development, the whole marketing side to this film seems very much all over the shop and very last minute, and that’s a shame. MARV make exceedingly well made and highly enjoyable films but the marketing side is seriously letting them down (ironic given that one of the MARV team originally comes from Matthew Freud Communications, a huge and successful PR firm).

Buzz Off Buzz: Disabling Google’s Buzz..

Posted by Martyn Drake – February 11, 2010

1) Make sure that you’ve deleted all your Connected Sites that are currently connected (Twitter, Picasa, etc).
2) Delete any specific Buzz posts.
3) At the bottom of your Gmail page, you’ll see a list of options: turn on/off chat, turn off buzz, etc. Select the “turn off buzz” link.
4) Verify that no Buzz information is leaking by visting your profile: http://profiles.google.com.
5) Unfollow any other Buzz users. They will still be able to follow you, though. You can block them from following you by clicking on their username while looking at your follower’s list in Google Profile. You’ll be taken to their Google Profile where you can then block them following you.

All in all, this is a bit messy.

What I think Google should have done is turned Buzz into a snazzy RSS reader for Gmail. Here you can subscribe to Twitter RSS feeds, web site feeds, etc. and read them all from one place rather than having to switch to, say, Google Reader.

The call of *COUGH* Hulu

Posted by Martyn Drake – February 10, 2010

Well, I had to sneak that one in.

This blog post has nothing to do with great old ones, but plenty of current great ones.  I’m currently playing with SeeSaw, an IPTV platform which was previously known as Kangaroo, the controversial video-on-demand system which was blocked by the Competition Commission back in 2009.  Kangaroo was then sold to Arqiva and has been since become SeeSaw.

Having been given a beta invitiation, I’ve had relatively short amount of time to give it a spin.  It’s not without it’s problems, but looks promising.  I’ll give a more informed opinion once I’ve had a chance to play around a bit more.

What about Hulu?  What about Canvas?  Well, at this point my head is spinning with all these different systems and I’m not one to be confused easily.  All I want is a open standard platform which I can watch what I want, when I want, and in a format of my choosing.  I don’t care how it’s done, I just want it to work without too many (if any) restrictions.  The day Murdoch and chums play nicely with the Beeb, Channel 4 and Channel 5 will be the day I’m tap dancing naked to work.

Today’s the day: Apple to reveal iPad/iTablet/iSlate*

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 27, 2010

(* delete as applicable)

I’ll be bitterly disappointed if Steve Jobs doesn’t walk on stage in a toga, wearing a false white beard, holding an iPad/iTablet/iSlate tablet device under his arm and shouting to the crowd, “Behold! The 10 Commandments of Apple!” and recites things like, “Thy Shall Not Covert They Neighbours Macbook Pro – buy your own you cheapskates!” and “Thy Shall Worship The One True Computer Company”. You get the idea.

The cult of Apple comes full circle today, I think.

Update: So it is going to be called the iPad. Looks good, I’ll admit, and I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one for review, but Apple isn’t exactly in my good books at the moment and I’ll wait until the iPad 2 before even remotely thinking of asking for or buying one. Not until I see how the uptake of this device goes.

Nexus One: Days Three & Four

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 22, 2010

Battery usage is now most satisfactory.  Can happily Spotify/listen to Android’s music player for considerable amount of time while emailing, tweeting, reading news, etc.  Similarly taking and making calls (after all, this is a phone..) don’t drag down the battery too much.  I should mention that I am NOT using a task manager (auto or otherwise – I’m just not using one full stop).

Have become adept in typing using landscape mode and using both thumbs to “touch” type.  Getting a relatively decent word rate, but still prone to errors which, thankfully, the predictive text system helps correct almost instantly (although I keep referring to Google Alps and not Google Apps).

The only real issue at the moment is the phone has twice failed to automatically join our home wi-fi network and needs manual intervention.  But this isn’t too big an issue and I can live with it until I can figure out what’s going on, or if it’s an Android bug, Google fixes it in an Over The Air update.

The Nexus One is still the best damn smartphone I’ve ever come across.

Nexus One: Day Two

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 20, 2010

Battery life improving.  Lasted around 16 hours from single charge and medium-ish use, including an hour and half’s Spotify use on the bus into work this morning.  Experienced small lock-up during Twidroid application in that the keyboard wouldn’t respond properly, and whenever I tried to press the H key, I activated the voice input.  It was if the CPU was taking a bit of a battering.  After a minute or two the problem soon went away.

Still very impressed with the phone despite these couple of small issues.  Have been playing around with Google Goggles and am very impressed by the way it’s able to detect objects and locate information on them online.  Also very impressed with RingDroid which takes your music collection and turns them into ringtones or notification sounds.  It has one of the most impressive user interfaces I’ve seen for the touchscreen.

Call quality is excellent, and I love the way that the phone disables the screen while you have it up to your face (so you don’t accidentally hit any buttons).  As soon as you move your face away, the buttons are there and are easy to access.  Far better than the HTC Hero.

Nexus One: Day One

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 18, 2010

So far, everything has pretty much gone swimmingly.  The only issue I’ve seen is where I’ve been running TasKiller with the “automatically kill when screen is off” option enabled.  When pressing the power button to take the phone off standby, I’m greeted with the in-call display except I can’t activate any of the on-screen buttons.  If I hold the Home key, it then takes me to the security pattern draw unlock and all is well.  Disabling TasKiller’s automatic kill seems to have resolve this issue, so I can only think there’s a process that TasKiller is killing off that’s causing the problem.

As for the voice input, we’ve had marginally less success.  It comes out around 70-85% accurate now.  However, trying to search DediPower using voice input comes out as “Titty Palace”.  Working becomes “Wanking”.  And my name is really “Protein Drink”.  So there’s a fair bit of work to do, but I’d imagine Google will continue to improve this to almost perfection soon.

More later!

The Nexus One

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 18, 2010

I now have a Nexus One Android phone.  This runs the Android 2.1 operating system and comes with a massively impressive screen and a touchscreen that responds beautifully.  As all of my contacts are stored in my Google Apps account, as well as my email, transferring from my previous HTC Hero to the Nexus One took literally just minutes.

The touchscreen keyboard operates a lot smoother than the Hero, although the Nexus does not contain HTC’s Sense UI and consequently does not feature a few refinements that make typing numbers and punctuation which means that one has to press a few more buttons to get to them.  But this doesn’t particularly bother me, and I’ve been typing away like a madman.

I’ve yet to try the voice dictation system whereby input fields can utilise the phone’s microphone to allow you to dictate words and sentences rather than having to use the keyboard.  Apparently the hit rate is anywhere between 70-80%, but will hopefully improve as Google’s voice recognition technology improves.

From what little I’ve been playing with it, this is one very impressive phone.  Android is blossoming as a mobile phone operating system and it just keeps getting better and better.  Now the hardware is catching up, Apple have a serious contender on their hands.  I am very glad I’ve given the iPhone the elbow.

Update: The voice input is absolutely bloody marvellous – so far it’s had 100% success rate, but that’s with a very limited test (I’d like to see what it can do with a tongue twister!).  I shall continue to experiment and explore.

Christmas without a TV is brilliant!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 26, 2009

Jennifer and I have been a TV free household for a considerable while now.  And we’re still coping nicely, thank you.  There are, however, a few issues that prevent us from accessing everything you might see on an ordinary TV.  The four main Internet catch-up services suffer from the dreaded regional licensing issues whereby certain programmes and films cannot be streamed or downloaded through these services.  Films, unless otherwise co-financed or co-produced by the broadcaster, are often off-limits as are big popular US imports (such as Family Guy).

That said, the BBC have excelled themselves this Christmas with their iPlayer.  Firstly they have been very quick to make available programs after they have first aired.  Usually this can take many hours up until a full day before aired programmes start showing up on iPlayer.  This Christmas period they’re now being made available at a much quicker pace.  Then there are films.  iPlayer is now streaming major Hollywood films through it’s service.  The Incredibles and Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End are just two of the big films that can viewed online.  For free (to those in the UK, of course).

On the other hand, the commercial catch-up services are beginning to suffer.  Firstly I’ve noticed that unlike the BBC, the quality of the video stream is considerably poorer than that their non-commercial, TV license funded competitor.  ITV is particular appalling.  When made full screen, compression artefacts make everything look horrendously blocky.  During the X-Factor programs, the constant changing of lights during the live performances turned everybody into lego men (and women) because ITV must have limited bandwidth or resources required to encode these shows in a more sensible format.  Torrents of ITV shows would, I imagine, offer better video quality to that offered by the broadcaster themselves.

The quality of these commercial streams probably lies with the (lack of) advertisers who pay to advertise their goods on them.  Judging by the same adverts repeated over and over in the same advert block, multiple times in a single program, must mean that there are very few companies choosing to advertise this way.  For example, on many ITV programs over this Christmas period we’ve seen the same Tic Tacs advert appear up to EIGHT times in a single hour’s worth of programming – repeated TWICE in each advert block.

Channel 4’s 4oD isn’t much better.  Slightly better encoding, but they too suffer from the same problem with the same old repetitive advertisers coming up again and again.  It gets to the point whereby you don’t want to buy their product or use their service because it’s far too repetitive to see the same thing.  It’s far worse than sitting through adverts on the over-to-air TV services.

Speaking of advertising on the commercial catch-up services, I’ve also noticed that the “controversial” Waitrose Christmas advert which featured a solider coming home for Christmas that was subsequently edited to remove that part, took at least two weeks to be updated on 4oD whereas from what proper TV I’ve seen during the day (whether it be at a takeaway, etc.) clearly had that part removed as soon as it was announced.  So it seems that it’s a slower process to get (or update) your advert on these services.

I had a look at Sky Player over the past day or so to see if they might offer Neil Gaiman’s short film, Statuesque, to rent.  Sky Player allows non-subscribers to watch Sky TV for either a monthly fee (identical to that of those WITH proper TV’s and satellite dishes) or a one-off fee for certain programs or films.  Sadly, Sky Player does not offer any of the Ten Minute Tales at all.  And Murdoch wants to charge you the same price for using their catch-up service as regular TV subscribers?  What a fecking liberty.  To rub salt into the wound, they don’t support the Google Chrome web browser – unlike all the other catch-up services which happily work with it.

So this Christmas, it’s been great watching the programs I do want to watch – for the most part – when I want, and for free .  I’m annoyed that Murdoch and chums have not considered opening up all of their programming to individual rental – especially when you consider the Ten Minute Tales were an original Sky Productions commission – for non-Sky subscribers.  Murdoch has long been bemoaning that the BBC makes it difficult for them to compete  in the marketplace for certain services, but yet Murdoch & chums are not making it easy for people to get their content how they want it.  Which is precisely what the BBC is doing, and doing a far better job of it to boot.

What’s also great about ditching the TV is that one doesn’t sit in front of the TV and flick channels.  It takes time to plan and choose what wants to be watched and you watch it when you want to watch it.  And to be quite frank, the lack of original ideas in the broadcasting industry these days makes it very easy for us in terms of what we choose to watch.

Protecting your data with SquirrelSave..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 8, 2009

Making Cedric the Squirrel work harder, faster, stronger for you!

Disclaimer/Caveat: This is a personal blog, and all opinions within are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employers, Memset.  I provide support for the SquirrelSave service and therefore everything you read here is merely a personal view rather than official Memset opinion or documentation.

Online backups versus traditional backup methodology

Over the past few years, I’ve found online backup systems to be absolutely invaluable alongside backing up to DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as using external hard drives.  An online backup account allows you to instantly retrieve a deleted file from the Internet much faster than it takes to find the right discs, put them into the drive (or hook up the right external drive) and then copy the files across.

Additionally, with historical online backups, you can delete a file – forget about it for 30 days or more, and then suddenly realise that you need it again.  Big problem if you’re simply dumping/overwriting the contents of a backup on a hard drive.  Your physical backup may also die when you least expect it.  DVDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life, and hard drives are quite prone to failing at any time for any reason.  Online backup services could be seen, in my eyes at least, to be like an extra insurance policy against both your computer and your physical media backups from failing.

Where SquirrelSave steps in

The service that I provide support for, SquirrelSave, has been successfully running for the past few years.  The datacentres in which data is stored are based in Reading, UK.  All data to and from the datacentres is encrypted between your computer and the backup server, and the filesystem in which your backups are stored is also encrypted.  But the real beauty and major advantage of SquirrelSave, for me, over all the other online backup providers (Jungle Disk, Mozy, Humyo, Carbonite, Backblaze, etc.) is that it’s based around existing open source software.  SquirrelSave essentially provides a GUI wrapper around SSH, rsync and SCP.

With SquirrelSave you define your Include and Exclude lists within the GUI (SquirrelSave ships with a set of sensible defaults – generally your C:\Users\<username> directory is set for backup, and many temporary/system directories are set for exclusion[1]) and then hit Start Full Backup.  This kicks off the long backup process which can take several days to several weeks depending on how fast your broadband provider’s upload speed allows[2].  You can specify a limit to the amount of bandwidth SquirrelSave uses if you find that Cedric the Squirrel is feasting a bit too much on your uploads.

Examining backed up data or restoring is simplicity in itself.  While SquirrelSave does not provide a web based interface for this, it does include the WinSCP client that makes it easy to navigate through the backup server directories to recover your files.  It is then simply a case of dragging and dropping directories and/or files over to your hard drive to restore them.  SquirrelSave also has multiple historical backups, so that if you do delete a file from your machine, you can restore a file from 2,4,6,12,14, etc. days ago (the historical data doubles each time).

I’ve used SquirrelSave myself both at work and at home to recover files that I’ve been stupid enough not to back up manually first.  The most recent case was when I had to reinstall the Macbook due to serious rainbow beach ball issues upon start-up.  I recovered all of my documents, SSH keys, etc. within a matter of minutes of installing the SquirrelSave client.  Note: the Mac SquirrelSave client is still in development/testing at this time.

SquirrelSave Tip #1

If you see “Some files not completely transferred (23)” when performing a SquirrelSave backup, don’t worry.  This indicates that somewhere within your Include list, you’re backing up temporary files which existed when SquirrelSave (or rather, rsync) was compiling it’s list of files to back up.  By the time the backup started, those files were deleted or moved.

Restoring files to a new PC

There’s no right or wrong way of restoring files to your new/replacement PC.  But there are several ways of doing so.  My suggestion would be to ensure that you keep a backup of your local SquirrelSave config directory.  This is located (on Vista and 7 machines) under C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\SquirrelSave.  I’d make sure that you’re using something like WinZip, PowerArchiver or any ZIP utility to back up the contents of this directory and keep it safe.  Not a problem if you forget to do this, as you can restore without this data – but any customisations made to your Include and Exclude tabs will be lost.

On the new PC,  if you’ve kept the config files, then restore them to the same path as was on your old PC.  Install SquirrelSave.  If you don’t have the config files, you’ll be prompted to login and run the configuration file from your SquirrelSave online web account.  If this is the case it is VITAL that you pause/select backup later when prompted.  You do NOT want SquirrelSave to start backing up your new PC just yet.

Once SquirrelSave is installed and configured, you can then use the View Backup button to connect to your files and then copy them over to your new PC. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not want SquirrelSave to back up these files again, or delete the contents of the current directory hierarchy on the backup server – make sure you copy these files back to the same paths on your new PC as before.  If you put files into different directories, SquirrelSave will think these are new and back them up.  Eventually the files in the old folders on the backup server will be deleted.  So files and folders must be like-for-like on the new PC if you wish to avoid these issues.

Once the files have been restored, you can unpause SquirrelSave and it’ll start to back up your new PC.

SquirrelSave Tip #2

The more advanced SquirrelSave user can use any SCP client to connect to their backup store.  Your private key is stored as ssh_key in the config directory (see above), and you can use this to connect to the backup store (the host that you need to connect to is formed from your SquirrelSave username, followed by .backup.squirrelsave.com).

There you have it.  SquirrelSave is a safe, easy-to-use, online backup service which costs just £4.95 + VAT per month (with 30 day money back guarantee) for unlimited storage.  While it is offered and supported on the Windows platform (XP, Vista or 7) at the moment, it WILL be expanded to the Mac and Linux platforms in due course.

If you need assistance with SquirrelSave, please do NOT contact me directly here – please use the official support email of support@squirrelsave.com.  We aim to reply within 2 hours of receiving your email (Monday-Friday in office hours).

Footnotes

[1] Users of Microsoft Outlook will need to explicitly declare the path to their PST files as SquirrelSave exlcludes the AppData path by default (this is because it can contain a LOT of unnecessary data).  To backup Outlook data on a Windows Vista/7 machine, you’d need to include C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook within your SquirrelSave Include tab.

That said, I HIGHLY recommend Outlook users consider buying a copy of AJ Systems OutBack Plus 97 which can bundle Outlook configuration and PST files into a single file, as well as other Windows application preferences.  The resulting file can then be backed up by SquirrelSave quickly and easily.

[2] I’ve found that Virgin Media customers are seriously disadvantaged due to the peak usage caps that they place on customers.  I would advise that Virgin customers seek another broadband provider if you’re wanting SquirrelSave or other online backup provider – regardless of whoever you choose, you will see major delays in uploading your data versus other providers who do not impose such limits.

Amazon.co.uk search FAIL: Kodak Zi8 != Adolf Hitler

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 3, 2009

Was looking into the possibility of getting a Zi8 this Christmas now that it does 1080p and image stabilisation.  Apparently Amazon.co.uk has other ideas (larger version here):

Capture-HDHitlerCam

New feature: service invites

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 3, 2009

For those that are reading this on an RSS/news feed reader, the blog itself has a new sidebar section which advertises how many invites I have on offer for a variety of new and existing services – such as Spotify and Google Wave.   The figures will, obviously, be updated as and when I have new invites or have used up existing ones.

To request an invite, just drop me an email to either spotify@drake.org.uk or googlewave@drake.org.uk and I’ll issue them on a first come, first served basis.

I’m a Mac AND a PC. Yet I’m not complacent.

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 2, 2009

Interesting article over at the Mail Online about the so-called Windows 7 “black screen of death”.  Even more interesting is the comments where the forever OS snobbery war continues.

People saying “Get a Mac”, or “My Mac has never seen a virus” are far too complacement for my liking.  In the six years of working in an industry where Macs are the dominant platform for creatives (followed behind by Linux – yaaboosucks to Microsoft!), I’ve seen Macs become infected by trojans – installed by users who have unwittingly given the trojan access to their system by giving it their admin user password (which is usually only required for major system operations, such as installing kernel extensions or amending system configs).  This has resulted in an compromised system – and this is because the users have usually downloaded something from a dodgy (warez, illegal torrent, etc.) web site and believed their Macs were invulnerable to viruses, etc.

The same can be said of some Windows users.  Despite the almost universal paranoia of Windows systems getting viruses, I’ve also seen some Windows think along the same lines of the smug Mac owners in that “I’m careful – I’ve never caught a virus before and therefore do not need anti-virus software”.  Subsequently their machines have been compromised and it’s re-install time.  NEVER think you will be affected because one day you’ll most likely be kicking yourself.

Regardless of whatever platform you use – it’s always worth having some form of anti-virus/anti-malware software installed (free or otherwise) to ensure that you’ve got some warning about the new application you’ve just aquired will do.  Never willingly grant strange applications access to your system and always verify their source first.

Mac users – I highly recommend Sophos Anti-Virus.  Despite a few wibbly moments which have since been ironed out, Sophos is one of the most trusted and respected security vendors for all the major OS platforms.  Certainly, I’ve been very impressed with their Windows products in the past when I’ve used them.  For Windows users, I do not hestiate to recommend ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus.

Another thing that bugs me are people who do not take care of their system backups.  It’s now so incredibly cheap to buy an external hard drive, CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray rewritables to back up all of your sensitive data.  And add to this the numerous onlne backup services (my favourite being SquirrelSave – but then again I provide the majority of support for this as I work for Memset who own and run it!) and you’ve got no excuse for losing data.

The Internet is a bit like an elephant..

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 29, 2009

.. in that it never forgets.

All this talk about Twibbles has brought home a good point about search engines and Internet archiving.  For those of us in our thirties, our parents used to embarrass us in numerous harmless ways – like your mum waving to you when you came out of school, or your dad dancing at the school disco.  Or your parents enthusiastically showing your girlfriend a video of your own birth, followed by all the baby and toddler pictures – usually the ones in which you’re nappy is being changed.

The Internet now amplifies this embarrassment by a factor of a thousand.

Young people (namely students and twentysomethings) who regularly blog, tweet or video themselves vomiting at parties will find that all of their activities are likely to be archived away by the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft so that if these same people eventually reproduce or adopt, their children can then be embarrassed by their parents in a whole new way when they do a Google search on them fifteen years later.

It’s not just blog or Tweets that can come back to haunt your children and grandchildren (and many more generations to come), but as video is now being archived on the Internet at a phenomenal rate, your children can groan at watching their parents do all manner of embarrassing things as they did as youngsters.  The difference between home videos of the past is that the rest of the world has probably already seen your parents embarrass themselves hundreds of times before you have.

I think some of the children of more infamous celebrities are going to have to go into therapy for decades as a consequence of this..

(Yes, I do realise the irony of this blog post)

The Trouble with Twibbles

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 27, 2009

Twibbles can be defined as an online Twitter quibble.

I’ve started following on Twitter movie director extraordinaire, Kevin Smith.  Recently he re-tweeted a post he received from somebody who told him that he was being unfollowed.  Kevin then posted in big unfriendly letters BLOCKED!  Fair enough, although why everybody has to know this I just don’t know.  If you’re going to unfollow somebody – JUST DO IT.  Don’t explain to them or to anybody else.  Just do it and walk away.

Twitter is an extraordinary social media system that allows plebs like us to see what the more famous/important folk are up to.  But bloody hell, can it get catty.  I recall following Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Duncan Bannaytyne, whom I’ve always thought of as a honest and fair man.  I was a bit shocked when he started to talk about one of his followers without mentioning much of the context as to why this particular person was being mentioned.  Looking through both sets of tweets, I was astonished to see that Duncan Bannatyne had, rather than blocked and ignore the user in question, started a pissing contest as to who donated the most amount of money to charity.  It was at this point I unfollowed Bannatyne (and no, I didn’t tell him!) as I completely disagree with that sort of thing.  He is in a fortunate position to donate as much as he does.  The person he was referring to may well do a lot of work for charity too – but clearly does not have the same kind of funds that Bannatyne has at his disposal.  It was if he was saying that he was a better human being than the other person because he could donate all this money.  And that should never be the case.  And besides which, charity can extend to offering one’s services and not just financial assistance.

I note that “celebrities” get rather riled when people tell them that they’re being unfollowed.  That, or if somebody really gets up a celebs nose, they use their legions of fans to fight their battles.  Maybe they deserve it, maybe not.  But it’s almost akin to the old pitchfork and torches brigade that was all the fashion back in darker times.

I myself managed to do something utterly stupid on Twitter in that I was following Noel Clarke, actor, writer and director.  And a talented one at that.  He posted a series of jokes involving his kids which I thought a little harsh as he came across as being a little unappreciative as to having kids.  So I unwittingly performed the first rule of Twitter faux pas – I told him that I was unfollowing him for this reason.  He went ballistic and tried to direct message me (althoughly clearly thought the better of it and posted publicly) before announcing to his followers that “this idiot” didn’t understand the joke and went on to belittle me in a few more tweets than than I did with my single post criticising him.  His followers dug into me as well.  And he never gave me a chance to explain or apologise (as I would have done).  As such I haven’t apologised to him as he  subsequently acted in a similarly unprofessional manner – he chose to pounce on me  in public rather than simply ignore and block me.

Still, I got what I deserved.  And was a great lesson to think about what you type (just as you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face – God, I HATE that hat you’re wearing – without at least knowing them well enough that you could get away with saying something like that).   I still like Noel Clarke’s work, but I’m not so sure I would like him as a fellow human being if I were to ever meet him.  I just don’t know.   Humour is very subjective and personal, and what one person finds funny another may find offense (which what happened in this case).  After all, these were merely words typed away on a computer.   A souless machine without a face.  As it is most Twitters don’t know each other from Adam.

And this proves that if you’re not careful, the consequences can turn around and bite you on the bum.  And Twitter is one of those social networks which rely on spontaneity.  The war on twibbles will always continue, as much as trying to converse with 140 characters and complete strangers will allow.

iPhone, Blackberry Bold 9700 or Sony Ericsson Satio?

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 26, 2009

My T-Mobile contract is up for renewal (we still cannot exactly agree as to WHEN – all I know it’s somewhere between December and February) and as such, I want a new phone.

I MAY still stick with T-Mobile providing they promise to brush up their act (the most recent frustration was that their web site wouldn’t allow me to disable the Flex-T alerts, the last one was sent out around 4am and when you’re on-call, being woken up at 4am to be told I have X number of minutes left in my allowance does not strike me as being terribly competent!).  But I may go with O2 (despite the iPhone being offered by multiple vendors now – with O2 I’d have the confidence that they’ve had the phone on their network for some time and therefore now what they’re doing).

Depending on how O2’s contract and the iPhone selection pans out, I may just stick with T-Mobile and go with either a Blackberry Bold 9700 or a Sony Ericsson touch-screen Satio.  The Blackberry would be good as Jennifer already has one, and MDaemon will (when it comes out of beta) support BIS and thus I can directly push my mail to the phone.  On the other hand, my last few phones have all come from Sony Ericsson and SE have proven themselves to be an excellent phone manufacturer.  The Satio is a touchscreen model and boasts a 12.1 megapixel camera.  The downside is that I hear quite a few reports about the responsiveness of the touchscreen – and my experiences with LG’s Viewty makes me somewhat nervous.

So I’m in a conundrum.  Let’s see what O2 say to me having a contract phone with them and take it from there.  I will say that I will NOT be buying a pay-as-you-go iPhone.  In fact, pay-as-you-go is right out the window regardless.

Back to Wordpress..

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 9, 2009

Have found the ideal theme, so here I am.  Drake.org.uk is now entirely self-hosted at Memset.

iTunes 9 & iTunes Extras: Users short changed – Apple/film studios double dips

Posted by Martyn Drake – September 11, 2009

I'm sure my regular readers (all one of you – ha!) will know by now that I am very much an advocate for video on demand and content delivery systems.  I have been following (and using) iTunes for a good many years.  Similarly I have been using Apple products (iBooks, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, Mac Minis, iPods, etc.) for equally as long.  I've come to see Apple as a company which tries very hard to provide the consumer with good value for money and fights to give consumers what they want.

With iTunes, we can rip our CD collections and organise our music.  We can now purchase DRM free music on demand (when iTunes started it was all DRMed to the hilt, but it brought convenience for the user of buying music on demand despite the inconvenience of locking everything down to a single portable platform and licensing system).  We can now rent and buy movies and TV shows.  We can even buy TV shows in HD (and I'm sure movies will soon follow).  iTunes is a media centre par excellence.

The downside to buying movies from an online store versus buying it on DVD or Blu-Ray is that you don't get the extras like audio commentaries, documentaries, etc. that come along with the physical disc purchase.  With the release of iTunes 9, this changes things – consumers can now buy movies such as Wall-E, Iron Man, Quantum of Solace to name a few, with extra features alongside the main film.

But what about consumers who have already bought these movies through iTunes?  Do they get to download these extras now that they've installed iTunes 9?  The answer is a big fat no. 

I've attempted to contact iTunes Store support to find out just what can be done about that, but so far I've had absolutely no straight answers from them.  All they've said is that they can't re-authorise the download of any films and that, when I got back to them to say that it doesn't answer my original question, they simply gave me 5 song credits to shut me up and once again avoided answering me directly.

I can only assume that if you have already purchased the movie via iTunes earlier than version 9 and want the extras, you're going to have to pay for the film again.  A neat way of making Apple (although to be fair, I doubt they see much of that cash you pay them – most of that goes to the studios) and their clients, the film studios, more money from the same content (you'll be paying for and downloading the film twice).

Given my previous post about how my boss, Kate Craig-Wood, has quantified the carbon emissions from producing CDs versus music downloads, I applaud Apple and the film studios for making video on demand more attractive.  But unless they either allow existing purchasers to buy the extras separately, or give them the ability to download them for free now, then I must question how well this system is going to work (one issue is that you can't resell these downloads unlike a physical CD or DVD).

How does one plan for long term archival of photos, video, etc?

Posted by Martyn Drake – July 17, 2009

Reading Robert Llewellyn's tweets about his shiny new Drobo desktop RAID hard drive cluster, I was wondering just what people are doing about long-term archiving their photos, videos and other important valuable data? 

Back when I was working in the film industry, we were using near-line storage and tape backups to archive assets.  For the most part, this worked okay, but required a heck of a lot of room, was very complex (one full time person dedicated to the job) and during my time there, the kit evolved at least three times.  When I was working at previous web hosting companies/ISPs we used tape backups.  The type of tapes we used are now redundant and about as much use as a betamax video.

When I've been shooting video, I had been using Mini-DV for both SD and HD material.  Unfortunately I no longer have access to a Mini-DV system because my own camcorder has died (so I would need to repair or buy a new one) and the HD stuff used a specific encoding system.  If I back up what material I've transferred to DVD or Blu-Ray, I'd have a limited shelf life of around 100 years before the surfaces started to deteriorate and a new medium found.  These days I shoot on SDHC cards, but even these are evolving and new formats coming out all the time.

I like Blu-Ray as an archiving medium at the moment, but (a) it's too slow to write 50Gb of data, and (b) something's going to take over sooner rather than later as a superior format with a greater amount of capacity.  But at least it's a format that allows me to put all of my iTunes collection and photos onto a single disc.  And that's good enough for me.  At the moment.

The trouble is that storage is constantly evolving.  I no longer have access to a vinyl record player or even normal cassette tapes that we used to buy in bulk to record music from the radio (or if you were like me (probably not), record your own "radio shows" and give them to your friends to listen to – who would then do the same.  Hey, we were cheaper than Jonathan Ross back then).

The trick is to find a medium which is going to last, can be passed down the generations, and not cause our future relations to have to resort to building a tape, DVD or HD player from scratch to play their ancestor's video of a day trip to Canvey Island.

A prime case of rapidly evolving technology being a right pain in the arse.

Trouble at t ‘ mill

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 24, 2009

Unfortunately the ZyXEL router (provided by AAISP) rebooted itself three times last night, after starting a BitTorrent which got to about two-thirds of the transfer before the router rebooted itself, and continued to do so in 30 minute increments until we went to bed.  I pray the 660HW doesn't have a connection tables problem like the dreadful Thomson Speedtouch 585 supplied by Be, as iPlayer was constantly causing that to reboot.
Jennifer is NOT impressed with me, or AAISP so far.  She has made it quite clear on her opinions and now I need to re-assure her that I've done the right thing.  Which may not be easy.

Update: There seems to be an issue with the P660HW router's bandwidth management feature that can cause the router to reboot when certain wireless devices are in play.  AAISP remotely disabled this for me (they've seen this happen before, apparently) and now everything is now peachy.  They sorted this out within a few hours of submitting the ticket by email (to be fair – I did submit the ticket around 6:30am!).