Update - Found!
Missing Macbook - Reward
It looks awfully like I’ve lost my Mac laptop in York on the 23rd of december at 10.24pm around the front of York railway station before I got a taxi.
If by some christmas miracle you’ve got it, opened it up, seen my username, and googled me, then do email me at tom@tomoldfield.com and I’ve got a reward for you for its safe return.
It’s worth a try.
More new adventures at Zazzle, this time with a bit of abandonware!
I’ve been having lots of fun re-remembering lots of classic ZX Spectrum games by means of emulation. And with this fun, I’ve been selecting oldies with great graphics to make into T-shirts.
Go check ‘em out, and see if you can find an old favourite or two - Available in all colours & sizes, and not too hefty on the wallet despite the postage from America.
C’mon Zazz, open a UK manufacturing HQ already!
Well, yeah. You buy your name as a domain, you erect a blog, you just gots to, dontcha?
You might have noticed I’m blogging lots more. That’s ‘cos I gave up on being coy and not knowing how best to present myself online: it’s myself, and that’s what it’s about. It’s time for a return to the oldskool: I am Tom. I do various stuff. I never shut up. I like a varied buncha geekery. You might too. And forthwith, This is why I blog.
Why yes.
Buy Spore. Seriously, buy Spore, or I’ll come round and injure you. Okay, so I’m probably kidding, but on the offchance that I’m not, grab it anyway. It’s more accurate than creationism, more zen than Monkey Ball, and more fun than trying to watch Zita Swoon videos on Youtube whilst on a train. What, you can tell I’m on a train? Is it that obvious that I wouldn’t be blogging unless I couldn’t get into Second Life? You know me too well.
Anyway, if you don’t know Spore, then oldskool gamers may consider it an evolution simulator - from primordial soup to advanced civilization - but when I say simulator, I’m not implying endless screens of figures, more like stomping around being a darwinian nightmare.
Spore Origins (to give its iPhone incarnation its full name) is the first steps of evolution - you won’t be building cities or making horrifying penile rhinoceros monsters, but what you do get is a taste of life in the primordial soup.
And lo and behold, my train ain’t far from home, so it’s time to pop a cap in this demireview ’til I get more time…
Just…… get Spore. Okay?
So you’ve got an iPhoto library full of proper-sized images form your proper camera, but in amongst them are low-rez ones from your iPhone. Doesn’t mean they’re good, but they’re bound to occur all over the place, causing iPhoto 08 to spawn numerous events with only one or two photos in. Tedious. Better to have them all in one place, no?
then here’s a quick little one-shot solution for you. Make a Smart Album for them. Like this:
With the camera model set to iPhone, you’ll be able to see all your iPhone shots in one long reel.
Yup, it’s been a while since I had a phone I actually like, during which I’ve just about survived with 3’s SkypePhone v1, which is equal parts tolerable and absolute nightmare. But more on that another time.
Instead, I’m currently toting my cousin’s first-gen iPhone, which is in great condition, and barring a bit of teething (because of course the infamous infinite startup bug hit me while I was a few hundred miles from my home mac ‘pon which it was backed up) it’s pretty damn kickin’.
So, being an übergeek, I thought I’d wax technical now and again, and share some tips. Nothing has quite the nerdtastic satisfaction of blogging something that hordes of iPhone forum users haven’t worked out yet!
Also, since my loverly iPhone is my first bit of decent tech which can take photos and sustain a perpetual data connection, I fully intend to spend one day a month (if possible) photoblogging. And I’m not talking about 20 shots of ambient skyline and shots of what I ate that day, I’m thinking more like one photo every 5 minutes for 24 hours. Think it’ll be a horrible endurance marathon? Think it’ll be too much of a peek into my life? Think it’ll be hideously tedious? Think it’s an excuse to get USB gizmos to keep the battery juiced? Sure, it’ll be all of those things. But since I’m an artface, and since life can be pretty interesting sometimes, it might be a groovy little experiment. Keep an eye on mah Twitter, y’all!
Seriously, you have no idea.
After various sessions at Gav’s house poring over laptop and tape deck, I now have most of the recorded works of my teenage two-man semi-punk band on a format other’n tape for the first time ever!
If I went back in time and told my 16 year old self that, in the future, he’d be using the internet to publish snippets of his songs for use as mobile phone ringtones, my 16 year old self would have been pretty mindblown. But also faintly quizzical as to why his future self would be going about such an endeavour.
Nonetheless! A couple of clipped and filtered bits of Paisley Climax. With more to come. Download and use, then quail in horror each time your phone rings.
….Get it in a basket in the pub Yeah.
Got that bit out of the way, then.
Who needs jokes when one’s own illustrative laziness is the joke?
…are very nicely printed indeed.
I wasn’t too sure if I was going to make a move from Printfection to Zazzle, but having just ordered a test tee, I’m glorying at the print quality, and will definitely be using Zazzle from now on to sell my T-shirts. The whole range will be posted there soon…
Huzzah!
And so it begins: Introducing our heroes.
Right, that does it.
In the further name of having One Comprehensive Site, I’m going to use this blog for publishing my ill-fated webcomic: the imaginitively-titled Ghost Comics.
I started it months ago, meaning to accelerate to a pace of being almost daily, but generally failed to gather enough enthusiasm and/or momentum. instead, blogging jokes, sketches, and assorted comic-like crunge here, then eventually getting a bit meta and giving them a site of their own will be their inglorious fate.
So, one comic every few days for a while from my tiny archive, then I’ll see about making some more.
Now that firmware 2.0 is out, and everyone’s blogging their faces off about the new features of and/or failure to acquire their new 3G iPhones, I noticed a little nugget that’ll please iPod Touch owners that nobody else seems to have noticed yet:
Everyone with Maps on their pod will have noticed that it can sometimes find your position when you’re connected to a wi-fi network, but most of the time, there’s no point in leaving wi-fi on when you’re on the move, so this has gone relatively unnoticed:
The “locate me” button in Maps 
can now be toggled… and if you leave it lit 
blue, and you’re walking or driving through a reasonably urban or residential area with wi-fi on, Maps will pick up your location using networks you don’t have a password for. In the car this week, in a journey of just 4 streets, the iPod picked up about 8 networks on the way home, tracking us fairly accurately, if only every hundred feet or so.
It’s not quite GPS, and you wouldn’t want to drive using it, but if you’ve got enough map tiles loaded for your town/city, you can pretty much entirely fail to get lost ever again.
Nobody likes looking at an empty blog, so to give this, my new Wordpress blog, (and hopefully the blogging platform I’ll stick with for some time) a start, I’ve amalgamated all the posts from my other blogs to pop here.
Content plus confusion!
What more could you ask for?
