graemef.com

Need one of these!

The CradleVue, A Cheap Car Entertainment System

…The brilliantly designed CradleVue laptop travel harness. It’s basically a set of straps that attach to the front seats and can hold your laptop in place, facing baby. Pop a DVD in, and you’ve got yourself a $25 “entertainment system”. Laptop obviously not included.

Oops. I just had the bright idea of installing href="http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp">ZoneAlarm
on my old PC, which I now use as a server in the kitchen at home. I
don’t have a monitor, keyboard or mouse attached to it, so I use Remote
Desktop to do stuff on it.

Unfortunately, the first thing ZoneAlarm blocked was Remote
Desktop… D’oh! Looks like it’ll be a trip up to the loft at some
point to try and find an old monitor, keyboard and mouse, then.

In the meantime, I’m sitting in silence because that server
houses my music collection and runs href="http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html">SlimServer
for me, too!

Bink:

Windows
codename Longhorn will be called Windows Vista. Hmmm sounds weird. Well
I guess we’ll see if we can get used to it.

This will be announced officially friday morning 6:00 AM pacific time title="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx"
href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx"
target="_blank">here

Strange name, but it makes style="text-decoration: line-through;">Longhorn
Vista seem that much
closer to reality…

Update

href="http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2005/07/22/441790.aspx">Dan
says it all:

Windows Longhorn client to be named Windows “Vista”

href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx">Watch
the video here. Check the href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.mspx">Windows
Vista home page, and add August 3rd to your calendar for Beta
1.

That Beta 1 date makes it seem a lot
closer to reality!

I just got a Squeezebox2 and it’s fantastic (more on that later, maybe). In order to pay for it I’ve got a couple of things up for auction on eBay, and thought it would be nice to see how they’re doing on my Squeezebox2 using it’s RSS screen saver. So, here’s how to create an RSS feed showing what you’re selling (or any other item listing) on eBay:

1. Go to RSSxl
2. Fill the form in like this (leaving the other fields blank):
   

   Page URL	The URL of the eBay listing page you’re interested in, e.g. http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=graeme_f&completed=0&sort=3&since=-1 for mine, or http://listings.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQfclZ1QQsaspfZ1QQsocmdZListingItemList for the “Most Wanted” list
   Start String	<tr class="ebHlOdd single">
   Start Item String	<td class="ebcTtl">
   End Item String	<td class="ebcBid">

3. Press the Generate RSS button

Grab the URL of the resulting page and there you go!

If you have any suggestions, improvements or comments please post them here.

I gave AutoStitch a whirl the other day, and it’s impressive to say the least. Give it any old set of photos and it’ll do a cracking job of turning them into one big one, like this:

I’m sure with a little care and attention on the part of the photographer the results will be even more impressive.

Also check Flickr for other photos tagged with “autostitch”.

For sale.

This is the profile of my main character in World of Warcraft. If you’re reading this on my website then I’d like to apologise about the formatting - not sure how to fix that.

Anyway, say hello if you see me!

This is the current status of the camera order I placed with Pixmania, and it ain’t half confusing! Can you tell if my camera ready to be delivered or do I have to wait more than 10 days? I’ve no idea.

Make	Description	Availability upon order	Current availability	Ord. Qty	Qty Del.	Waiting to be delivered
Konica Minolta	Dimage Z20	IN STOCK	More than 10 days	1	1	0

Status description
Being Prepared Your order was sent to our shipping platform and is being prepared.

Can anyone help me out?

Update

Order status: Dispatched!

We received my son’s first school report this week. Here’s a choice quote:

Physical Development

Harry moves confidently and imaginatevely in Music and Movement and is learning to take more care with the safety of himself and others.

Nicely put, I thought.

My iPod Shuffle suffers from what appears to be a common fault: when turned off it frequently forgets the last track it was playing and when turned back on resumes from the previously-remembered track.

This is really frustrating; when listening to mix albums, for example, you manually have to skip through the track to find roughly where you want to continue from. More frustrating, though, is when you’ve listened for a while and turned it off. When you turn it back on you want to carry on and not listen to the same stuff again, but personally I find it extremely hard to remember whether or not I’ve just listened to something until I’m about a minute into it. At that point I’m always convinced that this song was definitely the last one I listened to, so I skip to the next one and listen to the first minute of that… And so on…

I was kind of counting on a firmware update to fix this, but it seems it’s a hardware issue.

Update

I have reported the fault and a new (or refurbished) iPod Shuffle is winging it’s way to me right now. Good service!