Never mind all this 3D rubbish that’s coming out in cinemas across the first world, this is the future and is really impressive. It’s a 360° interactive video showreel and well worth a play with.
via the talented @AdamWintle
Nov 19 2010
I’ve had this brilliant phone for a good couple of weeks and I have to say it’s brilliant. It’s much bigger than many phones, but not chunky – it’s because of it’s huge 4.3 inch LCD screen. The colours on it are brilliant and it is lightening quick. It comes preloaded with Android 2.2 (Froyo – which is an american shortening of frozen yoghurt, which is basically ice cream but not as tasty), all the features that comes with it, and is topped with a sprinkling of the much improved HTC Sense UI.
I have to say the htcsense.com website is a bit rubbish at the moment – the phone locator doesn’t work at all so I’m not relying on that if I lose my phone, and I tried remotely locking it, and that didn’t work either. None of my contacts were synced, and the messaging features didn’t work either. I have to say, it’s a brilliant idea, and if it actually worked would be a brilliant free rival to Apple’s MobileMe service – again if it actually worked and they introduced a bit more services for it.
But still – the phone itself I can hardly fault. As I said, the UI is responsive, there is all the apps you need on the Android Market – although I don’t install that many apps as I simply don’t have a need for 250,000 apps that are on the Apple App Store. Even Android Market’s latest figure of 160,000 is more than plenty apps than I will ever install, let alone need.
Those who know me know that I’m supposedly anti-Apple, but I’m not. I’m anti-their huge prices, although many Apple users justify the price with quality. But I really do think the HTC Desire HD is good value for money. It’s at least on par with the iPhone, and I’d possibly risk at saying it’s better, especially for the price. It’s not a cheap phone by many accounts – around the £470 mark but only a small dent in your wallet compared to the Apple iPhone 4 32GB which costs a whopping £681 (prices quickly pinched from a quick Google Product search).
The only quirk I’ve had with it is that after a few days of running it does slow right down to a crawl, and I’ve not figured out which app is causing it yet, but a restart fixes that no problem. Restarting the Desire HD isn’t even a problem as compared to my HTC Magic, which took a good 5 or 6 minutes to restart, the Desire HD probably takes less than a minute, so I hardly even notice it.
Well worth my money I think – I’m on a £30 per month contract on Vodafone via Phones 4 u who were probably the quickest to get it in stock, and I also got half price line rental for the first 3 months or something making it even cheaper! I highly recommend this phone to anyone looking to get a new smart phone but can’t stomach the high (and in my opinion unjustifiable) contract costs of the iPhone 4.
And before anyone thinks it, no I wasn’t paid to write this review, this is my honest opinion!
Nov 15 2010
Just a quickie mainly for my own reference. If you get this message:
The repository returned an unknown project. Please update the repository attributes.
The fix is pretty simple, but is not obvious unless you know it’s there… Just right click the task list query that has the error, go to “Repository” then “Update Repository Configuration”. Not sure why it happens, but it happened to me and this fixed it. Bling.
Sep 30 2010
Yes, it’s true. I can’t stand screen scraping for several reasons.
- It’s not exactly the easiest thing to implement in most cases (often the data you need is behind login forms that don’t use standard HTTP authentication).
- It probably breaks the terms and conditions of using the site you’re trying to scrape from
- Even a tiny change on the remote site could ruin your scrape, and its out of your control. Often when things change, you have to pretty much go back to the drawing board
- There are a few ways of screen scraping (regex, DOM loading, xpath etc.)
- It’s a lot of work when it would probably be easier to just ask the site in question for some sort of feed
- It’s a zillion times harder (if not impossible) when using AJAXified sites
- Using DOM loading may not work if the site does not validate
There is only one thing that comes to mind that makes screen scraping just marginally easier, and that is the much more descriptive HTML5 tags that are coming out, but even then I’m not sure how useful that might be.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that screen scraping is a total waste of time?
Sep 23 2010
I recently had a client who used a specific font for their design, and their designer sent me the font. However, the font was a Postscript Type 1 font in Mac OS X format, which meant it was split into something called a “resource fork” I believe. The easiest format for me working on a Linux machine is TTF or similar – i.e. a single font file that is truly cross-platform. After much Googling I’ve just come up with the solution that works for me.
Legal note: Please bear in mind that fonts have hairy licensing surrounding them and often their license does not allow you to convert to another format. Check with your legal beagle first. This tip is just for informational purposes, and does not mean you can just go ahead and convert fonts willy nilly! I won’t be held responsible if you get in trouble for doing this, you have been warned!
Install the prerequisite software for this, t1utils and FontForge:
sudo apt-get install t1utils fontforge
Now you need to convert the hidden file to PFB (Printer Font Binary) using t1unmac. The file you’re looking for will probably be in a folder called “__MACOSX”. The file will be hidden and named something like ._FontName and won’t be zero bytes big! If the files are zero bytes big, you’re in the wrong place. In your terminal, change directory to where the font file you want to convert are, and do:
t1unmac --appledouble ._FontName > FontName.pfb
Then you need to use FontForge to convert this to TTF. Press Alt+F2 (in Ubuntu) and type “fontforge”.
The FontForge open dialog should appear, and navigate to your .pfb file and open it. Go to File > Generate Fonts, select “TrueType” as the type and press Save. There may be a few warning messages, and I don’t know for sure how it affects the output, but I ignored the messages and it seemed to work fine.
