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Monthly Archives: April 2011
The Happy Foot Co is feeding my #VFFs Addiction
It’s ridiculous I know. I average one pair of new footwear every two years. I wear shoes until they fall apart and then I buy one more pair. That’s now utterly changed.
I bought my Vibram Five Fingers Bikilas exactly one month ago. Running on a treadmill with them is genuinely like having new legs. Unfortunately, like a fool, I ran on the road only two weeks in and I’m still suffering with a pain in one foot. But I’m a convert and an evangelist already.
The one downside – they stink and washing only helps for a day or two. I wanted to wear them all the time.
Tuesday I was in Dublin and after a really interesting mobile tech workshop, I wandered down to The Happy Foot Co on Liffey Street, off Henry Street. I remembered that the last shop I went into on Liffey St was Hector Gray’s when I was a kid.
The Happy Foot Co shop is amazing. Loads of different types of VFFs and a bajillion pairs of Crocs. I’ll be bringing the kids back soon to get their summer Crocs.
The two ladies running the place could not have been more helpful. They even offered to post down any pair that they didn’t have in stock. I wanted a pair for general day to day use that wouldn’t look too freakish. I tried on a few types including one of their new ones made of kangaroo skin. Sooooo soft.
In the end, I went with the KSO, the most popular men’s model. They are incredibly comfortable and equally good in a meeting or on a mountain (allegedly). They go beautifully with Black Tie, Pinstripe, Jeans, Shorts, Speedos or Thongs. I intend to try them in all those scenarios.
I’ve been doing a bit of reading on VFFs and it looks like I’m doing the same thing as all n00bies; I’m running almost on the balls of my feet because of everything we’ve been told about heel-strikes being bad. One blogger likened it to looking like a bizarre ballerina. Of course I’ve been told many times of my striking resemblance to the Black Swan, ignoring my bigger boobs and my opposite eating disorder.
Two pairs of shoes in a month and I’m already thinking about a pair of Classics instead of flip-flops for my summer holidays. Next thing I’ll be watching Project Runway.
Multiple Skype Accounts on one PC
How the hell am I only hearing about this now?
"C:Program FilesSkypePhoneSkype.exe" /secondary
Would still prefer if it was like all the decent chat clients out there and had multi-accounts built into one UI.
@Eircom, @VodafoneIreland and others need Twitter Status Accounts
I find that the @eircom account on Twitter is generally extremely responsive and is the fastest way to get an answer to questions. @VodafoneIreland is very good too. However, they both (and O2, Meteor, emobile etc) need to implement status accounts, either a global one each or regional ones. So rather than tons of people badgering them about outages (in particular), we can go to the status account and see what's going on.
But that's just step one, since it only covers the stuff that the support people know about. Imagine if every Eircom tech had twitter on their phone/laptop and could post updates to those status accounts? We'd then know about stuff before it happens. For example, whatever is being done on our Eircom line at the minute would surely have been known about by someone in Eircom in advance.
If we'd known about the planned work before it happened and not in the middle of a Skype call to a customer in the UK, then much hassle and embarrassment today would have been saved by us and the Eircom support team on Twitter.
Who needs a Mac when you have Macbuntu and a paintbrush?
I'm at a technology workshop tomorrow and you can be sure most of the people there will have MBPs and Airs. In a desperate attempt to blend in, I have covered my old Dell D420 in a coat of Dulux Pure Brilliant White Gloss and installed Macbuntu. I'm sitting here looking at my messed up Ubuntu and giggling.
See Amazon, I WANT to give you my money
Amazon on Android is a bad joke if you live outside of the US. Apart from a UK specific MP3 store, you are screwed everywhere else. So I was thrilled to get both their Android App Store and US MP3 Store working on my Irish phone this evening. (Hint: USUnlocked.com->Get US Credit Card->Create New US Amazon account->Set English-US on your phone->Buy initial apps on amazon.com incl MP3 App->Result)
What was the first thing I did? Did I rip-off some poor musician? Did I carry out copyright infringement on some record label? Did I ride roughshod over international IP law? Did I damage Ireland's reputation as somewhere an international IP brokerage could be created?
Yes I did, if you think like the idiots running the music industry.
For people living in the real world, I bought a real song with real money.
I'm sure a couple of cents will go to the musician whilst the rest goes on coke and hookers for their label and the music industry lobbyists. The sooner they can figure out how get the hell out of their own way, the sooner piracy will go back to being something only teenagers do and have always done.
Oh almost forgot, the Amazon App store on the phone is glitchy but the web buying experience is superb.
The Cloud Player is just awesome. Buy a song and store it to the Cloud. Takes a few seconds. Then stream to your phone or store locally on the phone.
It'll be interesting to see how the Google Cloud Music experience compares. I have the latest drop of the Google 3.0 player on my phone and it's so frustrating to see the streaming menu options greyed out. I also find the UI a bit confusing, as did my techie 11 y/o son. Also awful whilst driving. Needs big assed buttons.
Make an image of a live XP machine and then run it elsewhere
I blogged recently about the pain of upgrading a machine from XP to Win 7 due to the dreaded Sage. So I've continued to hold off. But I just had a total brainwave for a potential solution and it looks like it is possible.
I thought "what if I could snapshot the XP install some way using VMWare or VirtualBox?". The idea is that I could do the snapshot, save it somewhere, do a clean install of Windows 7, install VMWare/VirtualBox and then run that image inside Win7 to do any Sage work.
Turns out those fine people in VMWare are already miles ahead of me. I still remember installing a pre-release version of VMWare back in 1999 and thinking "this is gonna be huge". If only I'd had money I'd have bought stock. Funny to then be working in EMC when they bought them.
Anyway. I'll report back on whether it works for me or not. Obviously I'll try on another machine before zapping the source machine.
What new Irish Government Minister has been tasked with Open Government?
via data.gov.uk
Short but great video of David Cameron on transparency and the right of people in the UK to Government data.
It looked like something might happen here when the previous crew talked about a Government CIO/CTO and setup the Innovation Taskforce talking shop.
Have any efforts started in the new Government? If so, by who? Not a snark, I genuinely want to know.
I’m not a visual person but
IOIO for Android – Hardware Hackers Delight
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Android is the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro of this generation. Google AppInventor nails it on the software side. Now check this out: A USB breakout board with software to control it. Think of the cool things you could build!
Oooooh just had a thought. Google should buy MindStorms off Lego, integrate this IOIO, drop the price to $30 and send to schools everywhere along with AppInventor and a few dev phones.