Category Archives: Tech

Today’s political triumph

Irritating Twitter feed @NottinghamNews announced today:

As part of the redevelopment of Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cy.. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

It irritates me no end that the Council muck up Twitter like that – they use it just to duplicate a feed somewhere and they never care that their titles are too long for Twitter’s character limit. It means that the important word from that press release CYCLE or BIKE is totally missing from the tweet.

Still, that’s not where the success lies. I haven’t persuaded the media people to use Twitter correctly.

No, I retweeted their announcement, fixing it so that all the necessary words were included:

RT @NottinghamNews At Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cycle parking opens. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

And got an immediate query from a friend: how much does it cost? Is it free?

Good question. At the time of writing, the press statement on the Council website is silent on the issue. And because it talks of the investment and the cost – new facility, CCTV, solar powered LED lighting – it all invites you to think, ooh, expensive!

It seemed pretty likely to me that it would be free, so I phoned up an officer in Transport Strategy to check. Didn’t get the officer I know from committee, but the polite receptionist had exactly the same reaction as me – um, I expect it would be free, but I’d better check. She checked, phoned back. Yes. It is free.

So I phone the media department, and here it’s the same schtick: person answering phone needs to go away, but in a few minutes, the press officer who made the press release gets back to me. He agrees with my point. It is free. It would be a good idea to mention that in the press release. I’ll get onto that, councillor.

Hooray!

Five minutes and five phonecalls later this paragraph:

The facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

… becomes this paragraph:

The free facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

Can you spot the difference?

If I hadn’t had two copies of the statement open, I’d just have assumed I’d overlooked the word on the first time through. But that is not the case! Today, something good actually happened because of a suggestion I made.

*sigh*

In these Coalition days, you have to take your triumphs where you find them.

Will has a point about Bejeweled

Will Howells writes a good piece about removing the game Bejeweled from his phone.

Bejeweled is a PopCap game and they are very good at making games. Worryingly good.

From their stable I have enjoyed Zuma, Zuma’s Revenge, various versions of Bejwelled, and Plants vs Zombies. Especially Plants vs Zombies. But I came to PopCap firstly through Peggle.

Once you move beyond Bejeweled, they have a curious “try before you buy” policy. You can download any of their games and play them for an hour on a free trial before you have to pay up to continue.

They know they can afford to do this, because they know their games are so good that you’ll play them for an hour, barely notice the time passing, and then feel seriously aggrieved when your time is up. So aggrieved, you’ll reach for your card and stump up the usually fairly reasonable sum of money just to carry on playing.

Each of their games starts really simply, so anyone can play them. They even run on an average specced machine. They ramp up the skill level fairly steeply, but train you as you go so that you keep pace. Plants vs Zombies, for example, teaches you a new plant and a new zombie each level, and it’s fun, cutely drawn, and the music is good. Before you know it, you’re battling with dozens of zombies in a wide variety of scenarios. Peggle was the same. Start with the simplest of levels, and build up gradually.

Many of the games are easy enough to complete, but even if you play every level and defeat the ultimate boss monsters, the game doesn’t end. You can replay every level with a higher win ratio. There are seemingly infinite challenges based on the basic game engine. And the reward for even little wins is pleasing enough to make you want to keep playing: every successful Peggle level end ends up with rainbows, unicorns and the Ode to Joy. Srsly. And despite how that sounds in words, it’s great! Here’s a review of PvZ – and I endorse everything in it.

Peggle, PvZ and Zuma have a basic level structure and a game you can complete. Bejeweled, Chuzzle and their ilk get increasingly more complex, but technically if you got good enough, they’re probably infinite. (( Much like Cybertron Mission, where after the first four levels, you just got the same levels again with nastier bad guys )) They even have normal modes, where you get hazards, and “zen” modes where you just have the fundamentals of the games without the pesky threat of dying. So you can keep playing for ever.

I’ve been more than happy to pay for several of these games multiple times over, so that I can play them on more than one computer. Then, when I got an iPod Touch, mainly for leafleting (( and mainly because the UX of trying to get podcasts and music onto my Nokia N95 8GB – and still use it as a phone – is just too ghastly to do routinely )) I bought the games all over again through the iTunes store.

I have an ever so slightly addictive personality. If I like something, I get a bit obsessive about it. This usually manifests itself in reading all the books by an author, renting all the films with an actor and eating all the chocolate in the house. (( Unhelpfully, the addiction generally only manifests itself in unproductive ways. I have never been addicted to work. Or canvassing. Or leafletting )) Heaven knows what would happen to me if I even started taking a little bit of drugs. But with videogames it manifests itself with unhelpful obsessive playing. I’ve had nights where I’ve played PvZ all night. 6 hours straight is not all that uncommon. I’ve definitely played each of the games for so long that they have caused me pain in the mousing hand. And when I’ve switched hands, they make the other hand hurt too.

But the worst game I’ve been playing lately from the Popcap stable is Bejeweled Twist. Like Bejeweled, you have to match gems into rows of 3, 4, 5 and 6, and when you do, they explode and new gems cascade down. The method of moving gems is different – you have a rotator cursor that takes four gems and moves them clockwise. If you can pop gems with every turn for a successive 10 levels – well over 100 consecutive mini-wins – you get a Fruit Gem. If you pop 4 gems, you get a Flame Gem; 5 gets you a Lightening Gem. If you fail, the game makes a heart-rending “disappointed :( ” noise at you. On the way, there are hazards like gems that are stuck and won’t rotate, bombs that tick down with each turn, and DOOM GEMS that tick down with each non-productive turn, but that can’t even be exploded!

Bejeweled Twist screenshot

Look at the screenshot. I’ve been playing this game for days. I’m on Level 57. There are fruit gems galore. I’ve over 9 million points. Somebody stop me!

Colleagues, if you value your free time and your wrists – and Will, this is especially applicable for you – DO NOT DOWNLOAD BEJEWELED TWIST.

And if you don’t want to download it – here’s a handy link

Personal productivity – printed diary sheets #lazyweb

Can anyone help with with a query?

One of the great features of the late lamented Sandy, the online PA, was that she produced a daily sheet which had all your diary entries, a bunch of your to-dos, along with a peppy repeat of your current goal. It looked good, it had loads of handy things in one place – and it even had a space for handwritten notes that could be typed up once you got home.

Since Sandy was killed off, I’ve not found anything quite so good.

I’m trying to use RememberTheMilk for to-dos, and as ever I have my diary on my Nokia N95, synched with Windows Calendar at home, and synched over the air with Google Calendar using GooSync.

If anyone knows a way of kludging those together to get greater synergies, I’d love to know.

Footnote:

I’ve been meaning for a while to write up some of my struggles about getting better organised. I’ve had a bit of a go at Getting Things Done, but not really done it properly, so have ended up in a rather chaotic mix of things being undone. At one point, I tried to read Do It Tomorrow, but never quite got around to it.

Which speaks volumes about me and personal productivity, eh? I’m always feeling like I’m two paces from drowning, but by and large I get enough done each month to just about keep my head over water.

One final note: I loved @miketd’s tweet a few months ago which went something like: “personal productivity blogging is as much an oxymoron as military intelligence or gay culture.”

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=0340909129 http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=0749922648

Passive aggressive Twitter lists (this means you @eddie_grundy)

Here’s the latest in passive aggression after naming your Wifi router to send a message to your neighbours: putting people on a Twitter list that asks for refollows:

pa-tweets

I think I ended up on this list after tweeting about Brian Aldridge.

I’m still not going to follow Eddie. He might try and sell me some dodgy cider or garden paving.

PS my wifi router has my URL in it – the theory being if anyone geographically near me wants to find out how to contact me, they can use my website to find details. Half of me wonders if that might actually be a bad idea, but I can’t quite pin down why?

A rather lovely thing happened to Mike on Twitter

My once-met net friend Mike who used to blog at Troubled Diva, now uses his blog as a repository for his successful but (to me) incomprehensible music writing for the Nottingham Evening Post Entertainment Guide.

Last week, I mentioned on Twitter that Giles Coren, star of the Supersizers, looked hot in his 80s gear. Deliberately a little ambiguous, but of course I meant that he looked attractive.

Mike agreed on Twitter, conceding that his “Guilty crush” might move on from Alistair Campbell to Giles Coren.

A few hours later, Mike got an unexpected personal response from @CampbellClaret:

@miketd why move on, say I?

Awww!

It’s a lovely graceful reaction to news of a covert crush that might fox a lesser man: although Alistair Campbell is definitely a sex god to a number of Labour women I know, I wonder how many gay men he counts among his followers?

It clearly shows that Alistair Campbell is carefully searching on instances of his own name showing up across the twitterverse – a latterday equivalent of grepping the newsfeed for your own name. I’m divided on whether that is a vain or sensible thing to do for someone in the public eye.

And it’s an object lesson in how a very simple gesture – five words! – can completely make someone’s day. A bit of a lovebomb from time to time can do great things to your reputation.

Writing more

One of the places the wedding news arrived at was UMRA, the Archers newsgroup, via an old friend who gave a link to tweets.

In the way that discussion does on UMRA, conversation digressed and included remarks to the effect that this place is less readable now it is cluttered up with tweets.

That’s an entirely true criticism and one I have heard before. The long pages of bulletted tweets, often only half of a conversation it is nearly impossible to follow, do change the nature of this place. And including them here is a short cut, because I don’t find time often enough to write more substantive posts.

And even when I do write more stuff here, I often get halfway through and think, “This would make more sense / reach a wider audience on LDV” so pack up tools here and post the piece over at LibDemVoice.org.

If you are bothered by the tweets, I’ve made two new links available over on the side bar – a link to the site without the tweet posts, and a link to the feed for the site without tweets. You’re more than welcome to use those if you like, and I shan’t be the least offended!

These are possible thanks to the magic of wordpress. The tweet category on this site is cat 19, so adding &cat=-19 into an url suppresses posts in that category. The url does however get a little bit lost if you keep pressing “older posts” and gets completely broken by page 3,

The magic of wordpress is also helping to bring more content to these pages. I’ve also installed a WordPress plugin called FeedWordPress which will automatically copy across the posts I write for LDV onto these pages. This may be a little weird. The posts will be in a category called “First appeared on LDV” and you won’t be able to comment on them. There should always be a link back to the main website, so do comment over there. Some of the posts may make little sense here – not least the Weekly Catchup… But we’ll see how it goes and make changes if necessary.

Solar Panel performance 08

I nearly forgot to report back with the first full year’s worth of performance from the array of solar evacuated tubes on the roof that feed our hotwater system.

Fortunately the basic datalogger I have access to still gives the basic ’08 readout, and it tells me the system ran for approx 1100 hours during the year and generated a staggering 3498 kWh.

Annual solar output

Nottingham Energy Partnership’s comparison cost table suggests that might have cost me around £100-£150 if I’d had to pay for it in gas.

Although I didn’t watch the system too carefully throughout the year, I don’t think there was a single day on which all our hot water came from the sun.

It was an unusual year with a pretty lousy summer and the highest energy costs for gas and electricity we’ve ever seen, so there’s maybe chance for a better financial return in future. But at this rate, my payback period is 28-42 years.

It’s still one of the better gadgets I own, and second in cost only to my car. I like the readout that always tells me exactly how hot my hot water is – I know that for a good long hot shower I need the tank to be over 60deg, and I can check before going in if necessary.

Other posts about my solar panel:

Talking of Twitter

A meme has been doing the rounds amongst seasoned twitterers to find who you followed first. If you hop along to this helpful website it will tell you.

It told me that the first person I followed was Alan Fleming, who now seems to twitter once a day, like clockwork, and seldom blog. You can read my first post about Twitter here – and Alan’s here.

As you’ll see from my post, it was a toss-up between Alan and Troubled Diva about who it was who really first got me into Twitter.

It’s rather flattering, but since the meme came along, at least three people have disclosed that they followed me first, so I got them hooked. (@willhowells, @jonxyz and @rfenwick)

But perhaps the tallest claim I can make in relation to Twitter is that I got the Lib Dems tweeting. You can see from my first blog post on the subject that I thought politics was ripe for the twittering. I suggested it in a forum to the Innovations Dept, who were at first hostile, and then later took to it like ducks to crepuscular water. That led quickly to Lynne Featherstone MP taking up the twitter baton and it spread through the party and then through UK politics more generally.

Of course, had I not come along, the Lib Dems and politics more generally would have caught on to twitter without me just fine.  I’m sure Innovations had been thinking about twitter before I made my suggestion.  And the US presidential election was a massive time for twittering to catch on in US politics – @barackobama, @hilaryclinton and @fakesarahpalin all made their marks.

Why Twitter?

Stephen Chapman asked in a comment earlier:

As you are obviously an educated guy – can you explain Twitter to me. I just dont get it!

I have no interest in knowing what my friends are doing all day (I have seen such entries as “having a coffee”, “having another coffee”, “the sandwich lady is near to my desk” etc).

And I doubt anyone wants to read about my whole day!

What am I missing!???

http://thestateofthenationuk.blogspot.com/

I don’t get what there is to get. Some other people ask “why read/write blogs?” – it’s more or less the same, but on a slightly different scale, and plenty of people don’t understand that either.

If you are reading twitters of people who are dull enough to narrate the boring minutiae of their lives, then you are reading the wrong people, as there are many more fascinating twitterers out there. In the very same way there are people who write interesting blogs and there are people who don’t, and each has their opinion about who is worth reading and who isn’t.

I was first interested in Twitter because I think it might be a useful way for elected politicians to communicate with constituents – and indeed, a number of MPs and councillors now do just that.

However, although I am a councillor who twitters, I don’t do it as a campaigning way of communicating with residents. In the same way, this is a personal blog about a person who happens to be a councillor, rather than a councillor blog. Not everyone gets that either.

Since starting to use it, it’s increased in size and the number of people who use it. It’s now a useful resource that a number of my friends are using. I can get occasional updates from people I care about the other side of the planet and I’m following enough witty people to find interesting things to read every time I log on.

The most important thing about Twitter is the way it plays well with hundreds of other web services in ways that develop on a daily basis. So Twitter can update my Facebook status, and my blog can archive them. Postcrossing can update Twitter when I send a card (jury’s still out on the benefits of that, to be honest). And there are new and interesting ways of slicing twitter feeds every day, so I think it’s safe to say that Twitter will continue to be interesting in the new year.

I entirely understand that not everyone gets it, so, thanks to the magic of WordPress, if you want to read this blog without reading the Tweets, you can do that using this link (which is also available as a feed).

World of Goo

World of Goo is just amazing! Friends were playing it on t’Wii the other day whilst the rest of us were playing boardgames (struggling with the complexity of Power Grid, winning it large in Diamant, not quite getting around to Pit, Perudo featured also too as well) and all I noticed about World of Goo then was its name.

Then I started to see the name elsewhere, so downloaded it on the Wii to see what the fuss is about.

It’s amazing. It reminds me very slightly of Lemmings – the idea is to solve puzzles using simple rules to get balls into a pipe. That sounds dull, but it really isn’t. It’s amazing. There are lots of different types of goo balls, which sing, cheer, make funny noises. They float, stretch, stick, fix, pop and more.

And now when I close my eyes I can see gently oscillating agglomerations of balls wafting gently before my eyelids.

It’s not just a Wii game, it’s on PC and Mac too, and you can either buy it on a disc in a shop, or pay and download it from their website.

The really great thing is there is a huge demo – the entire first quarter – available for free. I imagine this is because it’s difficult to explain just how brilliant a game is – once you’ve played the first levels, you’re sure to want to fork out 1500 Wii points or $19.99 for the full game. Download it! DOWNLOAD IT NOW!

The gameplay is unique, the design is superb, the music is actually… moving and stirring. I can’t praise this game enough!