iand.net

So is identi.ca the new twiiter? Hope they have a whale ready. Feels a bit slow but then it’s new and getting hit heavy. Will people move though? If the community of Twitter is split between different services it’s a loss for everyone…and we’ll be using tools to update multiple services. IM all over again!

More importantly, will identi.ca have a status blog that’s as good to read as Twitter?

Generally my broadband connection behaves pretty well. Indeed I threw up a speed test on Friday night to Flickr showing how close to 20Meg I was getting. Quite impressive especially as it was peak time. I also had a voice in my head saying that posting the speed test will no doubt lead to trouble. Little did I know it would be so soon.

For the first time today I saw adverts on BBC News. As it happened first thing I thought maybe the BBC had decided to cash in it’s sites. I know the rest of the world get adverts so why not UK? But during the day the adverts would sometimes appear, then disappear. Hey ho. Then I tried to access some iPlayer content.

This content isn’t available in your country. What? I so want to see that Doctor Who trailer as well - you know - the one with Davros! So where in the world am I if not in the UK? Trust Google to know…

Yes. Ireland. Clicking on Google took me to what it thought was my home country page. Mmm. What was wrong - Virgin Media or OpenDNS? Disabling OpenDNS showed it was Virgin at fault. A reboot of the modem made no difference. A bit of digging about showed that I wasn’t alone with this issue and that using Virgin’s webcache proxy would solve the problem. So using a proxy of webcache.virginmedia.com and port 8080 I was back in the UK with iPlayer available again. The only snag is the drop in speed. Compare the two speed tests below, the first one with the proxy enabled - quite a difference.

Now I’m not convinced that the webcache speedtest is not reporting right as generally the browsing speeds all felt fine, except they should do, they are cached by Virgin. But site’s that aren’t cached all felt fine too. Weird. I’ll get onto Virgin after the weekend if this doesn’t resolve itself. Sigh. Should have never have done that initial speed test. Jinxed.

I love maps especially Google Maps and Live Search where I can happily spent time scrolling around and viewing the maps. Well I only realised today that Glasgow now has some Birds’ Eye photo’s on Live Search.

I’ve thrown some more up on Flickr. A glorious time waster.

Playing Halo on Friday and I managed to get a Killionaire. Woo hoo. So to celebrate I’d though it was time to take a video and test not only the Panasonic TZ5’s video performance but also to try out the different online video hosts to see which works out best. The video is of me laying waste with the gravity hammer in Halo. The video was shot in 720p mode using the TZ5. Some shady rawk music was added to increase authenticity.

Ideally I’d like to upload and show the video in HD. For that I’ll be trying Vimeo and Viddler. I’ll also throw the video onto Flickr, Youtube and .Mac website. First up is Vimeo.

Killionaire from Ian D on Vimeo.

The first realisation is that upload speeds really have to pick up as uploading 120Mb HD films is very time consuming. 120Mb is probably over the top for what this video is but it’s more of a test than anything else. Vimeo has a nice easy to use interface and once the video is uploaded it converts it into flash. The quality is very good (well I thought so) and you can also view it full screen. There is also a link to the original video so you can download it if you really wanted to. Currently there is a limit of 500MB of uploads per week.

(more…)

A couple of add-ons to Google Reader today. Firstly you can now add notes to content you share, or just plain notes. These are then added to your share stream which is something I’ve been meaning to add to the blog for a while. You should see my shared items to the right of this post unless you using, em, Google Reader.

The other addition is a bookmarklet for your browser which lets you swipe text in your browser, add an optional note to the text and then post that content to your shared items list. This sounded like an excellent addition except for one silly flaw. I can edit the swiped content before posting to my shared items but there’s no mention that the edit was done by me. Looking at my shared items I’ve linked twice to the Google post about these new features. However I edited the second posting adding in ‘crappy little’ - see screenshot above. The only way to see the difference would be to click on the link to the Google post and check for differences. Not hot. In the stream to the right of this post because only links are shown the issue is hidden. You would need to subscribe to my shared items for it rear it’s head but surely it’s easier to prohibit editing as the note feature is there if you want to add your own comment? Just need to remember to share more now that it’s added to the blog.