Not posted for a while, not least because I've been putting off doing the upgrade from MovableType 3 to 4. I came across problems with the DB migration (UTF-8 please), new templates, conflicting CSS - nightmare.

Many tears later it's roughly complete. Please give me a shout if something seems bust.

I give up trying to stay up to date with technology.

Walkers recently changed their Salt & Vinegar flavour to include milk-derived lactose, which is a bit of a bummer for those of us that are lactose intolerant (mine is Crohn's and not hippy related you understand) as it was one of the very few fattening snack products that were.

I emailed them and they've changed the formulation to exclude MSG (why?) and added lactose. Anyway, they were fairly good at responding with a list of lactose free products, which I shall share with you now.

Walkers Products suitable for Lactose Intolerants

May 2009

Crisps

Walkers BBQ Rib Flavour Crisps
Walkers Pickled Onion Flavour Crisps
Walkers Prawn Cocktail Flavour Crisps
Walkers Ready Salted Crisps
NEW Walkers Roast Gammon Flavour Crisps
Walkers Steak & Onion Flavour Crisps
NEW Walkers Sweet Cumberland Sausage Flavour Crisps
Walkers Worcester Sauce Flavour Crisps
Walkers Salt & Shake Crisps
Walkers Lights Simply Salted Crisps
Walkers Sensations Balsamic Vinegar & Caramelised Onion

Flavour Crisps
Snacks

Walkers Baked Mango Chilli Flavour
Walkers Baked Ready Salted
Walkers French Fries Ready Salted Flavour
Walkers French Fries Salt & Vinegar Flavour
Walkers Quavers Prawn Cocktail Flavour
Walkers Quavers Salt & Vinegar Flavour
Walkers Sensations Oriental Crackers Peking Spare Rib Flavour
Walkers Sensations Poppadom Bites Lime & Coriander Chutney Flavour
Walkers Squares Ready Salted
Walkers Squares Salt & Vinegar Flavour
Walkers SunBites Original
Walkers SunBites Sun Ripened Sweet Chilli Flavour
Walkers Wotsits Flamin' Hot Flavour
Doritos Chilli Heatwave Flavour
Doritos Lightly Salted
Doritos Sizzling BBQ Flavour
Smiths Chipsticks Ready Salted
Smiths Chipsticks Salt & Vinegar Flavour

Please Note:

This list is published using the best possible information that is available at the time of compilation. Whilst we take every care, Walkers Snack Foods cannot accept liability for any errors that may inadvertently occur. Recipes may change so always check ingredients on the pack.

I did an in-place upgrade of our living room media centre to the Windows 7 RC last weekend. I was a bit hesitant, not least because it's our main TV and therefore has to have a high wife-acceptance-factor (WAF>90). I had updated to Vista TV Pack a few weeks ago and found some issues with reception of a few channels (C4 mostly) so I felt that things probably couldn't be any worse.

The upgrade went amazingly smoothly and things pretty much "just worked". I had to update my network card drivers as they blue screened on standby, but they were 2 years old. The iMon LCD display also doesn't work as their app crashes on startup. I presume an updated version will emerge sooner or later.

But, down to the good bits:

- If you hadn't already gone to Vista TV Pack, then you'll get interactive ("red button") on DVB-T and subtitles.
- Speaking of subs, when you mute media centre, subs get turned on automatically. Neat.
- TV quality looks better, a bit sharper perhaps.
- I love the new screensaver of your favourite pics / cover art when TV is paused or stopped.
- In the guide, hold down the arrow keys and you'll super-speed through the days.
- The now/next mini guide is much improved for browsing around channels.
- The new movies section automatically categorises and grabs cover art for any movies you record from TV or play back via DVD.

The only thing I don't like is the media centre startup noise. It sounds like Fox News' jingle or some American anthem. At least you don't have to hear it that often.

Went to this last night with some friends at the Hippodrome. Whilst the fantastically bodies and named Brett Pfister wasn't performing, David O'Mer replaced him, which was also good.

I can say that I've never laughed so much in my life as at Captain Frodo :) And there is also the friend-of-a-friend that does an interesting vanishing and reappearing act!

You totally have to go :)

I've just finished building a media centre PC. I've wanted to be able to do timeshifting and simultaneous recording of TV for a while and the added benefit of using a Vista box to do this is that I can play all my music and HD content too.

A quick overview of the components I used:

Zalman HD160+ HTPC Case
Zalman ZM600 600W PSU
Zalman CNPS9500 CPU cooler
Samsung Writemaster DVD
Gigabyte Radeon HD4550 graphics
Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4 motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 CPU
Samsung 1TB Spinpoint
4GB DDR2 RAM
Hauppuage Nova-T 500 PCI dual tuner
Acoustipack soundproofing material

It's not quite the ultra silent PC I was after, but it's not too bad. The only noise is a small bit of CPU fan noise. At the moment it doesn't fit into my AV cabinet under the TV (the case is pretty big.) but if I get another one in the future then that should really help cut down on the audible noise.

Um ok:

I wrote a small case study for Microsoft and it's now been published. Hope it's of use :)

Is this a good or bad thing? I think good :)

Clicky.

Sorry about the photo quality, I only took my compact with me on this trip.

Using the fabulous ping.fm? Want to use your own Custom URL? Want to use Perl? Use this!

The attached script takes only status updates from ping.fm and writes it out to a file. In my case, this file is then "included" by apache dynamically on the front page of my site.

Bit rough and ready, but hey, it only took 60 seconds :)

   1: #!/usr/bin/perl

   2:  

   3: use strict;

   4: use warnings;

   5:  

   6: use CGI qw/:standard/;

   7: use CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser';

   8:  

   9: my $file = '/path/to/my/file.include';

  10:  

  11: open my $FH, '>', $file or die "Unable to open $file\n";

  12:  

  13: if ( param() ) {

  14:  

  15:        print header;

  16:        my $method = param('method');

  17:        my $title = param('title');

  18:        my $message = param('message');

  19:        

  20:        print $FH "$message";

  21:        

  22: }

  23:  

  24: else {

  25:  

  26:     print header;

  27:     #Do nothing

  28:     

  29: }

  30:  

  31: close $FH;

It'll teach me to be an early adopter but I've had nothing but troubles with my Nike+ Sportband since I bought one a few months back.

My first one suffered a "bleeding" crystal display:

I sent this back to Sweatshop and they sent me a new one. A week ago, lo and behold, the bleeding display was back. I dropped them a quick mail and they replied saying that there was a known issue with the very first batch of devices and would I like another one or my money back.

So, I've gone for third time lucky! I can't say enough how good Sweatshop have been in sorting all this out.

The Nike+ utility also seemed to have difficulty in realising that not everyone used Pacific Time on their computers, which meant the time on the device was always -8 hours out. v1.1 seems to have fixed this though.

I've heard some other complaints about the calibration not working, but I've not had much trouble with that.

Anyway, I shall hold onto my wallet next time :)

Not only does it have a funny name, but they suggest that you "Drink Yourself Happy"...

The DROA are at it again and I'm the lucky recipient :)

For more information take a look at http://www.synuk.com/droa/ but definitely don't sign up with them!

I'm half tempted to stake out MBE on Gloucester Road to see if anyone picks up the mail, but I assume it's just a forwarding operation. Scum.

Leaving aside the awful Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee PC I really like the Aiguru S2. It will certainly go well with the as-yet-unreleased Essentio CS5110 which I'm rather drawn to as a new HTPC and Blu-Ray player.