Niki Dinsey on... whatever

Just favorited “Glade Homegrown DJ Competition 2012”...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:55:48 +0100

Just favorited “Glade Homegrown DJ Competition 2012” by Marcus Graham on Mixcloud.com

Just favorited “Bestimix 75: Psychemagik” by...

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 16:09:40 +0100

Just favorited “Bestimix 75: Psychemagik” by Bestimix on Mixcloud.com

Just favorited “Bestimix 22: The Correspondents” by...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:02:58 +0000

Just favorited “Bestimix 22: The Correspondents” by Bestimix on Mixcloud.com

Just favorited “TROPICORE # 11 - MOSTRAME SI PUEDES BAILAR...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:37:47 +0000

Just favorited “TROPICORE # 11 - MOSTRAME SI PUEDES BAILAR ASI ASI” by Luigi Sound Selectah on Mixcloud.com

Just favorited “Bestimix 84: Mr Mafro” by Bestimix...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:58:18 +0000

Just favorited “Bestimix 84: Mr Mafro” by Bestimix on Mixcloud.com

Just favorited “Bestimix 84: Mr Mafro” by Bestimix...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:57:59 +0000

Just favorited “Bestimix 84: Mr Mafro” by Bestimix on Mixcloud.com

Just favorited “Bestimix 82: Dave’ll mix it”...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:34:32 +0000

Just favorited “Bestimix 82: Dave’ll mix it” by Bestimix on Mixcloud.com

Welcome Back

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:44:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking for a while now that I will start updating this blog again.

Dear Internet. Its been 10 months since my last blog post. I promise to use November 2011 wisely blogging on important topics like mobile applications and such.

This is my challenge, should be fun!

Niks

Busy codin’ (Taken with Instagram at Harwell)

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:56:46 +0000

Busy codin’ (Taken with Instagram at Harwell)

Happy New Year (Taken with Instagram at Before the party)

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 16:45:59 +0000

Happy New Year (Taken with Instagram at Before the party)

Lovely Sunday Afternoon (Taken with Instagram at Wantage)

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 19:30:04 +0000

Lovely Sunday Afternoon (Taken with Instagram at Wantage)

Bertie watching Spirited Away (Taken with Instagram at Wantage)

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 16:22:30 +0000

Bertie watching Spirited Away (Taken with Instagram at Wantage)

Pencil needs more Sharpie (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:40:40 +0000

Pencil needs more Sharpie (Taken with instagram)

Living with an Acer Aspire Revo...

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:35:38 +0100

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now, I brought a Revo about 6 months ago and have been using it as the “Kitchen PC” ever since.

I’ve not made many major configurations to the machine since purchase. It still run’s Windows 7 OS and I’ve not modded the network card or installed an external wireless antenna, even though I would say wireless signal is the device’s biggest issue.

I’ve found the wireless card is very inefficient, even sitting right next to a router, it’ll still only get bizarrely 4 bars maximum. This has a knock on effect as to the way it’s being used.

The whole point as I see it about having a Revo computer is to serve content from either a central server (in our case the HTPC in the living room), or to stream content available from the web. This is while it’s ideal as a Kitchin, Bedroom or living room computer.

The device works well when delivering low bitrate content (mp3, 320/480 etc.) but goes into proper meltdown if you try anything higher. This is kinda frustrating, I’ve tried The Matrix I have in 1080p super-goodness and in all honesty it trys really really hard to play the movie, but when it comes to scenes say like the lobby shoot-out, it’s like watching “bullet time, in bullet time * 10” the bitrate just can’t keep up.

It’s strange, as you would think this would be the same with HD content from sources like the BBC iPlayer’s HD service, but alas.. these just don’t play at all unless you directly wire the device into the router.

Now I’m done with the crappyness for a moment, let me tell you about how useful a device like this can be. The answer: Boxee. What an amazing application this is. It turns the whole computer into a HTPC style super device and it’s causing a few waves in the states as to how online content is actually being delivered to people’s TV’s rather than just their computer screen.

With Boxee, firstly you arrange all your sources for music, television and movies and let the software just kick it.. 2 hours later (I have a lot of content), it’ll ask you to identify everything it could not auto-detect. Which in my case was less than 5% of the 4TB of content held around the house.

So once you’ve setup your sources, Boxee is excellent in providing online links to episodes of TV programs you’re interested in, but don’t currently have locally. If you’re American, this is awesome as Hulu and Fox Online will provide all the content (ad spliced) available for streaming. If you in the UK however… non of this content will play, you suck, period.

Well almost :) As with anything techie, there is always a solution.. in this case it’s VPN. Now depending how flush you are you could fork out for a US geo-located server, which acts as a proxy and VPN. My preferred solution is to buy a subscription to a geo-located VPN service. These have been designed mainly to get round China’s firewall and other such nasty stuff, but they also act as a great way to bounce content from one location via another if you get my meaning.

So, if you’re thinking about buying a Revo. Or any other (non-Apple) based nettop here are my top five suggestions:

If you’re going wireless, don’t place the nettop too far from the router as the signal sucks ass
If number 1 isn’t an option, either buy a router repeater, direct wire the device or upgrade the nettop’s wireless card
Don’t worry too much about changing the OS, Win 7 rocks in this environment
Install Boxee and use the device as an extension of your telly
Make sure the device is shareable with all your other fixed and mobile devices so you don’t have store the same content on different machines

In conclusion, the nettop is Ace(r), you can VESA plug it straight into the back of your fancy LCD TV and enjoy all that Internet goodness via your HDMI link.

Image nabbed from http://www.testfreaks.com/desktop-computers/acer-aspire-revo-r3600/

If you’re like me and already have that solution, then the nettop acts as a great accompaniment to your existing home theatre solution.

Our best photos from Bestival 2010

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:34:00 +0100

Our best photos from Bestival 2010:

We had a great time at our first Bestival last weekend. Uploaded and edited took about two hours! I’m not used to this stuff but hey it was worth it :)

Classic cockney birthday track found as part of an old Lemon...

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 22:52:23 +0100

Classic cockney birthday track found as part of an old Lemon Jelly mixtape.

Couldn’t find the original artist so sliced it out of the mix - enjoy!

3D Movies increasingly becoming a fad - Fact

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:55:00 +0100

Personally, ever since Real D movies started to hit the cinema screens, I’ve been quite a sceptic. I’ve seen quite a few, Monster’s vs. Aliens being the first and then Avatar, Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, Alice in Wonderland and finally for me was Clash of the Titans.

Out of all the films seen in 3D, it’s sadly true to say I’ve been totally underwhelmed by the “added” experience Real D is supposed to provide.

The effects it provides seem quite flat and “layered”, like you would see looking at a magic eye picture. Mostly the 3D is managed on only two levels; foreground/background, which leads to lots of dialogue type scenes where one character is sitting closer to the screen than another.

I’ve also found it difficult to make-out fast moving scenes, especially when small objects are subjected to 3D layering on screen; Alice’s scene with some small rocking-horse insect/bug type creatures were almost impossible to make out.

I’m told it’s due in the most part to adding the 3D layering post-production. Which is why out of all of the movies I’ve seen, only Avatar seemed to provide real extra experience when viewed in 3D due to being produced from the get-go 3D, it really shows.

My real scepticism comes from the following, monetary reasons:

Movies in 3D are harder to pirate
You have to pay extra to even with an “unlimited card” it’s an extra £1.50 per movie
You have to buy the glasses, if you haven’t got/remembered you’re existing plastic Thunderbird-style pair
They (Hollywood) can use it as a gimmick to up-sell movies that are utter drivel (Step UP 3D - 4.4/10 on IMDB & The Final Destination - 4.9/10 on IMDB to name a couple)

So after seeing Clash of the Titans, I made the concious decision to stop watching movies in 3D. But the cinemas are still make it difficult (mainly for the reasons above).

We took the family a couple of weeks back to see Toy Story 3 at Cineworld Didcot. Can you believe they only had one showing on a whole Saturday in 2D? Where at the same time they were showing the movie in 3D over two screens 10+ times.

I have to say, although Toy Story 3 is obviously a great, moving, flick. Seeing it in “normal” mode vs. 3D made absolutly no difference to our experience and from now on I’ll be opting for the 2D versions of all films.

It seems I’m not alone in this revolt, there’s been increasing stats on the interwebs backing up the fact that 3D movies are a fad and starting to wane in popularity.The following graphic has been taken from The Wrap, a Hollywood blog site.

There are some truly dire movies in that chart, The Last Airbender - 4.4/10 on IMDB is the stand out train wreck of a movie, take this classic line: “I knew from the moment you were born, you were would be a bender”.

But check out Toy Story 3 for-instance, one of the biggest releases of the year and there is a marked drop in attendance with the T-Bird goggles on.

It seems, at least some of Hollywood are getting the message.

Reading this article in the New York Times: Resistance Forms Against Hollywood’s 3-D Push it would show that a lot of directors and produces have had enough of the the whole 3D thing and are starting to push back:

“Out of 450 people surveyed, 450 don’t want 3D for ‘The Hobbit,’ ”

From the same article you see:

Inception’s excellent director Christopher Nolan, stipulated that his movie must not be made in 3D.
JJ Abraham’s Star Trek did $350m bucks in 2D
Even newer films like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World all have dropped 3D from the production schedule.

So in conclusion, I’ve had it with 3D, there is no way I’m watching or paying for another film in this format, let’s just hope the rest of the world catches on soon.

iPad vs Netbook - on Holiday

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:38:29 +0100

Just a little on our latest holiday to the Isles of Scilly last week. We camped on St. Agnes, the most westerly “off-island” and I have to say it was fantastic. Quite expensive but I can easily see why our neighbours come back year after year. Speaking with one couple in a lovely 80’s monster tent they said they had seen kids our age grow all the way from 3 & 4 though to teenagers.

It’s safe to say we’ll be going back again, probably in 2012 when the kids are a bit older.

Anyway, seeing as I like talking about tech I thought a quick post about two of the devices I took with me worked out. The Jolicloud loaded Asus Netbook and the Apple iPad.

Easily the most useful device was the netbook, both devices were used daily, but the iPad was only used as a kids games machine where the netbook worked out really well as an emailer, browser and movie machine.

Firstly just getting content onto the netbook was extremely easy, a 600Mb AVI file would work without any issues at all. I dumped our entire collection of Disney films to the device as usual 6 hours before we left to get in the car and drive to Penzance. The netbook plays 4(!) whole movies on a single charge. Trying to upload my AVI files to the iPad was a whole other experience, basically the device will not play files without conversion. Conversion is easy enough using Handbrake on Mac, problem is Handbreak every frame in the whole movie needs converting, which mean per movie to convert I would need to spend 45 per 90 min flick! so with 6 hours to go.. the ipad had no movie content.

The other thing to mention is just how difficult it seems to be to create any word processing content on the iPad. With the kids hogging the netbook to watch movies in the late afternoons (after trekking around the island), my wedding speech for Ian had to be written up on the iPad. The problem is that although it works /ok/ to create content, editing or cutting which without a proper set of cursors ok *keyboard* writing anything substantial becomes very laborious.

So to end this quick post, the netbook is easier to use for creation, where the iPad is better for consumption but with the problem of taking your existing content to the device, plus the problems with editing content it makes the device in a lot of ways.. irrelevant.

St. Agnes, Isles of Scilly - Sun setting over the Atlantic

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:11:07 +0100

St. Agnes, Isles of Scilly - Sun setting over the Atlantic

Check out the screeshot above, that’s 220+Mb of downloaded...

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:30:54 +0100

Check out the screeshot above, that’s 220+Mb of downloaded data using Android’s new “personal hotspot” feature on Froyo v2.2

Can’t see A ple adding this feature to the iPhone anytime soon, although I think you can pay through-the-nose for similar features if you jailbreak your device.