Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

Finally caved in and bought Gitaroo Man when I saw somebody selling it cheap on Amazon the other day, as it’s not too easy to find any more– it arrived this morning. When trying to find the sort of game we might enjoy when the PS2 first arrived chez nous (Julie didn’t strike me as your Metal Gear Solid or Pro Evo sort of girl), it was a toss up between this and Mad Maestro, in the rhythm genre… we went for MM, and on first impressions of Gitaroo, it’s probably just as well– Gitaroo is a lot more difficult, or at least it gets difficult a lot more quickly. Looks like good fun, though…

Julie sent me this little gem of a game today (sound required)… so far I’ve only managed to get him into second grade though 🙂

Hot on the heels of the eminently-useful (but sadly illegal, in many places) cellphone jammer, Ananova reports on the inevitable mutation of the universal remote control– a keyfob zapper that will turn off any TV, anywhere.

Been playing a lot with various instant messengers this week, and generally being
frustrated by their limitations. Got to thinking how neat it
might be if GNOME just had a “contact” applet that you could add to your
panel, one for each person you cared about– then you could arrange
them spatially to suit you, rather than having them in a meaningless
list. The icon (perhaps the person’s photo) could show their
online status, clicking it would open a regular IM window, and you
could right click to do the usual other stuff (send them an email, schedule
a meeting or whatever). Drop a file on their head to send it to
them. That kind of thing.

If Davyd’s idea takes off and the whole panel becomes a notification area, you’d have your own action-packed
desktop hackergotchi cartoon whenever somebody IM’d or /msged you, or
posted a new entry in their blog, or did anything else you were interested in (that you could write some sort of plugin for, anyway):

It all falls down a bit when you want to do something with a group of
multiple contacts though (email them all, arrange a meeting at a time that
suits them all)… ah well.

It’s official– I still have one of the worst-selling cars in the UK[1]:

Pos	Model			Number Sold
1	Honda NSX		12
2	Lamborghini Murcielago	12
3	Maybach 57/62		15
4	Fiat barchetta		29
5	Rolls Royce Phantom	47
6	Aston Martin Vanquish	61
7	Alfa 166		77
8	Bently Arnage		79
9	Renault Vel Satis	108
10	VW Phaeton		114

[1] Yes, I know Ireland’s not in the UK, but that’s where I bought it…

Once upon a time, before Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Roland Rat, getting ready for school in the morning was accompanied by one of two things. Listening to Good Morning Scotland[1] with Neville Garden and Malcolm Wilson; or turning on the telly and pretending you were posh enough to have teletext, by pointing an imaginary remote control at the TV while the BBC ran its rolling Ceefax InVision slot before daytime programming began. (Okay, maybe that was just me.)

Anyway, this week, the world’s first teletext service, Ceefax, is thirty years old and still going strong (unless you’ve got satellite telly). Originally just an experiment in subtitling, there was a time when half the UK’s population booked their holidays from ads on Ceefax, and there are probably few BBC licence payers who don’t know what’s on pages 302 or 606. And it’s not a bad way to get the latest headlines without the waffle, either– circumlocution isn’t a luxury granted to journalists who have to distill a story into 100 words or so. Online help writers take note 🙂

[1] Coincidentally, in 1980 BBC Scotland broadcast live pictures from the Good Morning Scotland studio while it was on air– the first breakfast TV ever shown in the UK, predating BBC Breakfast Time by three years.