• Ex-BBC DJ Greening dies aged 44 – Kevin Greening was the best thing to happen to the Radio 1 Breakfast Show for years. Shame he only lasted a year. Very sad to hear of his premature death.
• The Megapixel Myth – More on the myth that more megapixels makes better pictures.
• Ban helps more smokers quit habit – It wasn’t until I went to The Netherlands last week that I remembered how nasty and smoky British pubs and restaurants used to be.
• The more pixels, the worse the images – The mega-pixel race has been hurting consumers, and is one of the reasons that I’ve been more than happy to stay with “only” 6MP on my Canon EOS 300D.

I just read Daniel Eran Dilger’s “Winter 2007 Buyer?s Guide: Microsoft Zune 8 vs iPod Nano” but I felt that it was missing something very important for readers outside the United States.

So to fill that void here is my attempt. I have not actually used any of the new Zunes or iPods but I don’t necessarily feel that this has any material impact on the final result¹.

Last weeks PhotoFriday theme was “Travel.” If you’re observant you’ll notice that I didn’t make an entry despite most photography on my site being travel related and that’s because… I was travelling at the time!

In the next few days (maybe weeks depending on how busy I am!) you’ll be seeing some of my experiences in Jordan and Egypt. Keep your RSS reader primed…

Like the true Mac obsessive that I am, I was “tuning in” for all the news on todays press event.

Judging by the effect that the coverage is having on the UK store (see screen shot) it seems that I’m not the only one!

First impressions: I like the new iMac. I’m not likely to buy one (since a laptop is powerful enough for all my needs), but the glass/aluminium shell looks great, the new CPUs are fast and the price-points (in the US at least) look reasonable. Not so sure about the keyboard, but I guess it’s just a less mobile version of my MacBooks.

Am I getting old? Perhaps. I’ve been using email since 1992 when I first went to university so I just find it second nature now. It’s got to the point where I organise my whole life using it and I get quite frustrated when I actually have to call someone to get something done that could more easily be done asynchronously¹. But that’s not how many people think according to ZDNet.co.uk.

Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications¹. But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.

If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days² but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.

Sometime when bad things happen all you can do it show your support. That’s what I’m doing here. The first cause is “One Day Blog Silence”:

This is to honour the victims from Virginia Tech and all those other innocents throughout the world. Given that the “blogosphere” is where many students poured their grief and vented their anger it seems appropriate.

If you came to look at ZX81.org.uk a couple of hours ago you may have noticed that it wasn’t here. I’m pleased to announce that we’re back, and better than ever.

The reason for this outage was an upgrade. I generally find it easier to stay with the current version of WordPress but with the big jump to 2.1 I chickened out. Until this evening.

And, honestly, it wasn’t too tricky. I did a test upgrade on my laptop using the webserver and MySQL database in MAMP. I found that the template I use needed a quick update (as detailed on GFXedit) but otherwise the upgrade script seems to have done the job without any trouble. Please let me know if you do find anything wrong.

If you’re subscribed to my RSS feeds you may well have noticed already, but I have started, as an experiment, adding interesting links to my del.icio.us account and syndicating them from here. Is that a good idea? What do you think?

If, on the other hand, that first paragraph made no sense, read on.

First, let me explain terms. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a way to get your web browser¹ to tell you when a website changes. If you have Internet Explorer 7 you should see the feeds icon (an orange square with white lines) next to the home icon on the top right, just below the search text box. In Safari the bar with the URL will have a blue RSS icon to the right. And Firefox has “Live Bookmarks” which do the same thing. Simply click the appropriate button and see what happens.

The day has finally come. As previously discussed my other two websites are finally going away. Very shortly, links to darlingtonphotography.com and stephendarlington.com will no longer redirect here so please update any links you have. Pretty much all the content available on those sites is now here. A quick search should turn up something useful but let me know if something you liked has gone missing in action.