Well I know its been a long time, and I don’t seem very active – I have been working on a few projects, and hopefully they’ll come to fruition soon and I can talk about them… well at least blog about them.
You can always keep up or engage with me on twitter
On another note, I’ve had a few blog comments complaining about some broken download links, so those have been fixed.
CISCO Lab Software – PacketTracer: now available for download again. Please post a comment, it helps with my page rank (shows activity and relevance), and takes about 2 seconds to do.
Photo Booth (for osx): my solution/fix to the common problem of photo booth not initializing the inbuilt camera is available once more for download.
For a while I’ve been thinking about the importance and relevance of sounds in our daily lives, the sounds we notice, and the bulk of sounds we simply pay no active attention to. Like many geeks and techies out there I can sleep with computers whirring and beeping in the background, amongst my techie friends I am known for my very weird ability of sleeping in a loud datacentre environment. For most people this isn’t normal, they need quiet to have a good restful night sleep – perhaps all of these sounds are affecting me in my sleep somehow, that was the thinking, so I started to research.
My office (like many others) has lots of servers and computers running in it, and lots of background noise. According to Julian this kills productivity by 60+%… very worrying! So I started to look for ambient sounds that can play in the background while I work, this was harder than I thought it would be. Finding high quality both in terms of bit rate (audiophile that I am) and in terms of content was quite difficult.
This is a very nice MP3 and long enough to have in a constant loop without becoming mechanical and repetitive.
I also came across this podcast on iTunes (iTunes link), which is a regularly updated podcast of bird songs. One of the issues I found with podcasts and iTunes, is that although there are many ambient sounds and relaxing sounds podcasts listed in the directory, many are no longer updated, and many have broken links within them.
MakeUseOf.com (a blog I enjoy reading regularly) have also detailed some nice free iPhone/iPod touch soundscape applications. Although they’ve taken a slightly different slant on it, by looking at applications that can help you fall asleep, but still worth a read, and a good resource for direct links to the apps. My personal favorite, after having tried all the listed free apps, for its sheer simplicity is Naturespace (iTunes link).
Its been two weeks now, and while working, rather than having the news or music on in the background, I am mainly using the ocean mp3 listed above. Its working well for me, and as long as it does, I’ll continue to do it
Well, Windows 7 has launched, so no doubt they’ll be a few Windows 7 related posts from me over the next few days. Firstly, and very surprisingly I haven’t kept up with all the hype, I haven’t tried out the new OS from the boys and girls at MS, and honestly, I’m not all that bothered.
I find that I’ve evolved past a state of caring about the “mac vs pc”, and “windows vs linux” arguements, or paying much attention to what OS I’m running or how its configured. These days, all I want is for things to work properly, very quickly, without stalling, and with absolutely zero drama. So yes, I’ve ditched all my PCs (and millions of screens) with XP, linux, and BSD and exclusively work on my Macbook running OSX – why? It ticks all those boxes for me. Don’t get me wrong, I have XP on here too, running virtualiased under Parallels – whatever gets the job done
Anyway, here is some fun from the boys and girls on Apple’s “get a mac” campaign – brilliant as always
Polymath. Serial entrepreneur turned VC, now sitting on both sides of the table, talking tech, finance, and motorbikes.