system error

My last month can be summed up by the digitised voice in the old Mega Drive game, ESWAT.

In a moment of desperate bad luck, I fell in the street and broke my left arm. As ever, it wasn’t quite that simple…

Read more…

My mate Phil sent me a link to this forum thread, which inspired this post…

My SysErr WP install had been stuck on 2.8.5  for a while, due to a bunch of full dbs and laziness, so finally moved things across and sorted it out. Bringing it kicking and screaming to the WP 3.0.x era wasn’t easy, as I had the Automatic Upgrade problem where an upgrade file starts downloading, but the update screen stalls, giving no further information, and the file stays at 0 bytes. Read more…

Today was dConstruct, an excellent digital/online/geek event in Brighton. Unfortunately I had to miss this one, as I had other priorities, but I’d been to the last two years events.

This reminded me of another coincidence… Read more…

Not really a massive surprise, but probably had to be done in the light of the WebM video codec. H.264 faced no real pressure from OGG, as OGG was shit.

Read more on TUAW

So maybe it’s over a month, I’ve not kept count. What do I think of it? How have I ended up using it? Pros? Cons? Read on!

My mate Robbo was heading to Las Vegas about a month before the UK launch date of the iPad, and he was toying with the idea of picking one up. “Grab us one, kidda, I’ll sort you out when you’re back.” I says, and he did.

Pretty much everyone’s first question was “What on earth are you gonna use it for?” (except the wife, her’s was more along the lines of cost and current computer count in the house–5), to which I didn’t have a good answer. I have an iPhone and MacBook Pro, but being a nerd, an iPad was a prequisite. Read more…

You may have read about my frustrations about the current HTML5 <video> implementation, it’s short-comings and general deflating-balloon sad-trombone-ness.

Enter JW Player, and their HTML5 beta. Read more…

This Thursday saw the official re-launch of the Creative Times website at The Cornerhouse, Manchester. A limited ticket event, with some live acoustic music from I Am Kloot.

Creative Times, in their own words, is an online magazine for the creative community – produced by and for people working in the creative sector. They want to showcase creative work and talent, but also want to be community driven, so it’s their members who write articles and push for content.

Add to the magazine format a forthcoming diary, job board and a directory, and you can see how Creative Times would start to be a first port of call for creative types who dwell in the North West. Long term, these kind of things live or die by content, and I hope the community does well to provide and engage through it’s own content. Read more…

Andy Clark put a tweet out asking for some bearded web design folk to take part in a survey, because as he put it; “There is no way of discerning how the experience of a bearded designer might differ, simply because there is a complete lack of representation.”

I was honoured to have been asked, or maybe I was one of the few who could be arsed to answer. Either way, check out the hard hitting questions and answers session…

So Google bought the On2 VP8 codec for $124.6 million, then open sourced it (hopefully avoiding patent issues), hoping the up-take would make it the de facto codec online. Opera and Mozilla have been quick to support it, IE 9 says it will with a plug-in (err?) but no word from Apple just yet.

Told you OGG was shit.

Spurred on by @rewindgaming‘s massively misguided (I’m kidding!) top 10, I feel the need to set my stall out and tell you all what I consider to be the finest Sega Mega Drive games ever crafted. Read more…