James Simmonds

Announced in the recent Microsoft press release is the news that Media Centre will be bundled with certain editions of Windows Vista, check it out here :)

Talking on the train home with a colleague yesterday and we were discussing "web 2.0" (awful expression IMHO) and how the big players were trying to dominate/flood your life with their services rather than providing one piece of the puzzle and let another player provide another. The phrase "tribe" cropped up - do you think the service providers (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) you align with now are providing the basis for virtual tribal cultures or even religions of the far future? Will it be harder to mix and match services from the major players as they try to strengthen their grip on the market and you as an individual? Something for a long train journey home to think about!

(via Gizmodo UK ) Here is a tale to warm the heart and engage the power of internet for a good cause. I thought I'd do my good deed for the day and link to the website of the kind person who found a camera in London and is trying to reunite it with the owner by enlisting the help of all of YOU ! Visit the site here Look at the pictures - do you recognise the people on the pictures? Do you know them?! Someone, somewhere does! Contact details on the website if you do know something that could restore the camera to its rightful owner. ( As an aside, how "big" do you think this will get? - I give it 5 days before the press pick up on this as it sweeps the email/blog-o-sphere )

As with many things the smallest impediment to something that requires you to go out of the way to do something can seem like Mt. Everest. Often categorised or named " Friction " you usually need something to help remove this "Friction" and smooth the way. I'd like to introduce you to two utilities that rate as good as WD40 in helping remove said "Friction" (you knew I'd get there in the end!). Enter stage left, NCoverExplorer . If you do professional Microsoft .NET development you must be aware of the whole raft of tools out there to help you improve the quality of your code. NCover is one of them but code coverage in a lot of peoples opinion falls slightly down the rankings in terms of importance compared to unit testing, continuous integration etc (I have revised my opinion of it and actually think it should be the first thing to implement in a project now, more on this later). So lets cut to the chase (did you know that term originated from th...

This post is brought to you by the letter 'S' - for shuffle! I use an iPod whilst commuting to listen to my music. I almost exclusively use it in "Shuffle" mode. Amongst the regular music it has a number of audio books, podcasts and audio learning resources (learn French type thing) contained on it. I'm working from home today and listening the same library of content from within Media Centre via my awesome Sonorix bluetooth stereo headphones (and very pleased with them too!). However I'm in danger of wearing out the next button on them (hold down the volume up button for 1 second). The non musical content (audio books etc) are not differentiated from the muscial content as a consequence I'm forever encountering "Page 34, how to tell people what you do" (in French of course!) or some random podcast episode! So in the future we will be able to exclude a specific genre from shuffle play by default . In fact you can do this now by creating an activ...

One thing I seem to be doing recently is pruning my RSS feeds...I hope its not like the arboreal equivalent where you prune to promote growth, I'm tring to cut back on the amount of stuff I can get to comfortably cope with during the day without interfering with work! This post introduces the "Attention" concept and the next big thing, "filters". I do think that people will suddenly realise they don't have time to actually read/sift through the 50/100/1000+ feeds. Identifying the quality posts within feeds, especially aggregator type feeds is difficult. The real difficulty is that you don't want to filter out too much because you don't get the opportunity to see new and exciting things that would usually be outside your "filter" criteria. For instance, this looks amazing fun, " Pillow Fight Club " (via The Cool Hunter ) but not in a million years would you have filter to capture something random like this. I use desktopsidebar a...

Quick round up of some gadgets I've come across recently. Sonorix Bluetooth Stereo Headphones (OBH-0110) After finally getting vexed that my headphone cable had tied itselves into yet another mess of knots I started to look around for some wireless headphones and had the Creative Bluetooth headphones in mind. Some googling later had me on the Sonorix UK distributor website looking at the Sonorix OBH-0110 BT headphones. The A2DP & AVRCP profile support finally convinced me that these were for me. Although I don't have a Windows Mobile device with AKU2 (and therefore A2DP support) I will do soon. First impressions - excellent. Why? PC (USB) or headphone stereo jack connection to BT sender dongle. I can connect this to my iPod, leave it in my bag and listen to my music completely wirelessly. I can connect it to my laptop/pc and use it to listen to music and even control Windows Media player using the AVRCP profile (play, pause, next, prev song) Simultaneously works as my mobi...