Windows 8 is intended to run on both tablets and full desktop systems which could be a fantastic boon when it comes to application design and making working on both a tablet and a PC simple and useful.  However Gizmodo are reporting that Windows 8 tablets running ARM processors (commonly used in many Android devices) are going to have solidly locked bootloaders with no option for manufacturers or end users to legitimately disable the ‘SecureBoot’ process.

Firstly this kills the idea of easily dual-booting a Windows 8 tablet with Android but it also hampers the sort of innovation and advancements that come from a vast community of interested, and capable, people being able to really tinker with a system.  It will also no doubt be poorly received by the more technical folk of the world who revel in tweaking and highly customising their kit to their needs.

Then again the market Microsoft will likely be aiming Windows 8 tablets at is probably not that technical end which is foolish as such folk often help push popular use of technical kit (except Apple kit, of course, which is pushed by shiny shiny marketing )

In very short they’re better than Facebook or Flickr but not as good as Mobypicture and Imgur. In simple terms when you upload a photo to Google+ / Picasa Web Albums you grant them the rights to use and adapt that image for display in any of Google’s services and for use in “promoting Google’s services”. What’s nice about this vs Flickr, for example, is that the “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license” in this case is specifically limited to within Google’s services rather than including “partners”.

Additionally, unlike Facebook, when you delete photos from Google+ / Picasa Web the licence you’d granted to Google will become revoked “within a commercially reasonable period” (i.e. giving Google a chance to catch up with removing content they may have used for promotion purposes).

A very nice touch is the “Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed” wording. So the terms of service are pretty reasonable. As always exercise caution with any content you feel particularly clingy about the rights of and always backup your photos elsewhere but as far as social photo sharing goes Google+ is totally acceptable. Now nip over to Facebook and grab your photos and content here and choose “Download your information” for happy transitioning to Google+.

But don’t take my word for it read the Term of Service for yourself here.

When I signed up to you’re once genuinely interesting and good service I was required to have an email address. So I think it’s safe to say that you know I have an email account my own. Kindly explain to me why the dogs I would want to complicate my increasingly muddy online communications by adding an @facebook.com email address into this?

No enough it enough. Your services were once useful and fun but now you appear to be attempting to become the messenger of all my social communications – photo sharing, instant messaging now email. I would not entrust such things to a proprietary third party service who’s privacy intentions are, to say the least, shady.

While Google+, strictly speaking, actually is offering a similar service it’s the attitudes have always been better and it’s critical services, like email and instant messaging, work on open common standards that don’t lock my data away.

Thank you for being better than MySpace several years ago and tak you for bringing social networking into the mainstream but the time is coming for us to part ways. I openly admit I shall remain on facebook while there are people I want to communicate with who, annoyingly, use it as their main messaging platform but more and more people are drifting to alternative services that will return things, for a while at least, to a less complicated more enjoyable social space.

Regards,
Me.

Samsung are doing the whole scifi to reality thing by teasing us with their working foldable 4″ AMOLED screen.  What’s better is that it doesn’t even suffer any noticeable ’creasing’ from a test of 100,000 openny-closey tests (technical term).  I’m a little more interested in those crazy rollable screens that seem on the edge of reality  so I can have me a stack of digital scrolls but a foldable screen makes an awful lot of sense when screen real-estate (to use a silly term) on mobile devices is becoming more of a premium while the devices are try to limit their physical size.

Next up Nicholas J. Bryan has cooked up a pretty nice use of the iPhone4′s gyro by mounting it to a record on a DJ turnable then, presumably, feeding the data back to a Virtual DJ type desktop application.  It’s not a finished thing but the idea is very cool and probably a lot more accurate that using the crazy (but equally impressive) special vinyles that tell the Virtual DJ desk where the needle is and how fast and which direction it’s moving based on encoded sound.  Seem, however, a little costly.  For this to work you would need an iPhone4 (or, I suspect, a current gen iPod Touch) for each turntable.  Love the idea of taking the iPhone’s motion sensing and using it in a totally new and unintended way but the reality of it seems probably shiny but impractical (but then it is using Apple products so…).

*takes a bite from tasty Pek chopped pork sandwich*

What else was there?  Oh yes, Apple up to their shenanigans again.  If you’re looking at the new line of iMacs but considering switching the hard drive at some point in the future then beware!  Apple no longer use standard SATA cables for their drives but some newfangled proprietary 7 wire mutated beast.  The extra wires seem to be related to, among other things, monitoring the drive temperature and feeding back to the internal fan controls.  ElReg note that switching out a drive for a non-authenticated standard SATA one results in the system fan ramping up to permanent, noisy, full power along with the bonus of the replacement drive causing the iMac;s Apple Hardware Test to fail.  The up side will be Apple ensuring their hardware works exactly as it should but it does also remove the ability for end users to easily conduct some repairs on out of warranty machines without costly visits to the Apple store.

In other Apple news they’re patented a keyboard that blows air at your fingers as a response to them bit hit.  It seems Apple don’t trust their users to use the feeling of actually hitting a key as evidence enough that a keystroke has taken place.  The keyboard also, like pidgins, sucks.  Literally.

Thus far I’ve been very impressed. Still very much a fan of the Android system but the over all quality of the iPhone 4 is undeniable. It’s taken them a while but I think Apple may have finally gotten it right. Of course time will tell.

For now enjoy a dusk snap from a nearby park taken yesterday from the in-built camera

I’ve recently tidied up my music collection and got the tags right and started re-ripping my real-world CDs to FLAC. I like FLAC because it’s an open format and it’s lossless (meaning it retains the same full audio quality of the CD in a slightly compressed format) but it’s a touch on the chunky side.

For portability I have my Sansa Fuze that serves me extremely well but I’ll run out of space sharpish with FLAC files so Ogg, another open audio format, comes into play. Ogg is lossy (meaning audio data is cropped to significantly shrink the files but in way human ears don’t notice too much) so I can fit oodles of it on my Fuze. Problem is the faff of converting the FLAC albums to Ogg then copy them over. It’s a little laborious.

I started to hunt around for some tools that might do the trick. First stop: Songbird. Sadly no file conversion options on the go here. Next up DB Poweramp, a Windows audio ripping and conversion package. No luck here either as I have to convert to Ogg then create the destination folder on the Fuze (repeat for each album… ZZzzz….). Media Monkey has the facility but in the free version.. argh!

With great surprise my salvation comes in the form of an audio player / library that I shunned years ago: Winamp.

Winamp on a BIG monitor works well but gets very cramped very quickly on medium to small screens. That aside it does support copying to portable devices while trans-coding to the format of your choice all within the free version. The level of configuration you can dive into for your portable device is impressive. Permitted formats, by file extension, can be specified with anything that doesn’t match being converted automatically to the format of your choice.

Converting to Ogg isn’t supported out of the box however a happy Winamp plugin adds this and you’re good to go! I’d go into more details but hardly anyone actually reads SpaceCookies at the moment so leave a comment if you’re interested to know more.

Yes yes I know things like iTunes are much simpler and easier to use but if, like me, you’re one of the minority that demand full control over the quality of their music and aren’t scared off by a little tinkering it’s a great solution.

The dawn of CD was greeted with a volley ‘oh look how small it is and harder to break’ along side ‘aaaaah it sounds rubbish’. Granted it didn’t help that mastering audio to CD was an art that took a long while to mature so CDs had poorer sound quality due to the content rather than the media. In my humble opinion a well mastered CD on average sound kit sounds better than a Vinyl – but it’s still a digital representation rather than vinyl’s physical capturing of sound which in the high-end of things should always sound better.

Times move on.. vinyl wanes in popularity as CD players become cheaper and more portable, CDs themselves become cheaper it gets it’s feet solidly under the carpet. Now digital downloads are nuzzling their mitts in too, now, I’m seeing some similarities to the CD vs vinyl argument.

Digital downloads are, by nature, again smaller physically (i.e. intangible) and harder to break (you can’t snap an MP3, only break the drive it’s on – but that’s ok, you can download it again) but also by the same token there is a quality trade-off. MP3 / WMA / AAC / whatever all are ‘lossy’ audio formats which means to get the file size down elements of the audio data is removed. The level of audio data removed impacts the quality of the sound. MP3, being one of the oldest lossy formats, suffers the most with quality degradation. I’ve played with legitimate MP3 downloading but always feel it’s lacking something so I’m returning to CDs for the most part.

With a CD I get the full audio quality which I can then convert into the lossy audio format of my choosing, rather than the music’s retailer’s, at the quality I desire while still retaining the full quality audio for home enjoyment. Perhaps most importantly though I’ve grown up with CD and feel at home with it, much like the generation or two before me hold vinyl in such high esteem.

Perhaps the time will come when downloading full-quality, or loss-less, versions of music will become commonplace but until then I strike a balance: listening via Spotify premium when something is new then bide my time to snare the CD once the price drops.

As ever thoughts and comments are open

Shiny for £100?

When digital cameras made their baby-steps to mass market they were pretty good but a little light on some features and depth of quality. Now, of course, even a cheap digicam can take a snap that compensates for even the poorest lighting.

I’ve been musing over the idea of getting the video equivalent of early digicams – pocket HD video recorders popularised by devices like the Flip HD. I know this line of consumer technology is in it’s youth but given that pocket camcorders are now around the £100 (such as the Samsung U10 I’ve been eyeing up) I’m thinking it might be worth a punt to see if they’re up to the chatter I hear about them.

Figure worst case scenareo I’ll get a couple of YouTube giggles from it!

Thoughts, comments?

Oddly it seems the MPs have gotten this one right, in my opinion at least.  This tax would be used to fund ‘ultra-fast’ broadband along the lines that is already seen in more technologically advanced countries.  Problem is that ISPs, along with all communications companies operating in the UK, are lazy and greedy.  Why shell out for better infrastructure when they can still sell poor quality horrifyingly limited connections over copper-wire?

Better communications infrastructure is badly needed in the UK but tax is not the way to pay for it.  Government intervention is needed to kick the ISPs up their ethernet and force them to pay to for the upgraded.  ”BUT”  I hear you cry “then they’ll pass on the charges to us!” – quite right!  Problem is this:  if the Government via tax were to foot the bill they’d still charge us more for their “improved and faster service, because we care about providing the best facilities possible”.  So anyone paying for their internet connections will be stung – but if improvements were to be funded by tax we’d be stung twice >__<

Comments, thoughts?

Firstly that adding all this at the bottom of the email wastes more paper in the event that the message *is* printed.

Secondly that adding all this to the base of each email adds to the amount of hard drive space required to store the message on mail servers.  Hard drives use power to run, the more data there is to be stored the more hard drives are required.  The more hard drives that are required the more power will be used.

On a side point all this including the body of the email you’re replying to has the same impact.

I know it seems petty but if people are going whine about printing emails at least be brief about it!

Thoughts, comments?