The web is full of blogs which makes finding those few popular and interesting blogs quite a difficult task. Step in the “Top 10 Blogs” sites, amongst which we have a new contender: Blog of the Day ranks WordPress blogs on their popularity on a given day, if enough people visit a blog it will end up in the top 25, it has to be worth a look doesn’t it

The current second place Blog entry is from a site that’s a personal favoriteof mine BadAstronomy run by Philip Plait. A site that covers “myths and misconceptions in astronomy and related topics.”

Many films use a bit of artistic license and break from science in a number of ways claiming that it improves the enjoyment of the film. Others are just ignorant of the mistakes they’re making or do so due to the public expectation of how things work. Phil’s site provides an interesting insight into the ways films fail to make the scientific grade. One of his more recent reviews covers the science in Star Wars Revenge of the Sith (spolier warning for those StarWars fans that havn’t seen the movie yet – What are you waiting for?).

Philip now has a new “mission” for his website, the rebuttal of “Creationist Claims”.

Evolution rankles them because it contradicts the Bible which says God made man in his own image and describes specifically how God did it. But cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is even worse for them, since it clearly contradicts the very first passages of that Bible.

These are the same people that claim Crime Rates have increased since the teaching of Evolution began in schools. Which would normally be laughed at and forgotten, only their claims are disturbingly taking hold in the US. That article was from 2002 and I havn’t heard whether the ban is still in place or whether it was appealed, either way, I wish Philip all the best in his quest to rebute the claims of “Creationists”.

Skimming through the news headlines, as expected its full of news about the Michale Jackson verdict. There is another news item though regarding Microsoft and its blog censorship. Having read the article, it really doesn’t look like Microsoft can be blamed too much over this, they’re only following local laws (much like Yahoo and Google). It does make you wonder about the Chinese Government though. Requiring all Chinese bloggers to register their blogs by the 30th June with the Government and censoring words such as “freedom” and “democracy”.

Just as worrying though is the last paragraph of the news item,

Some net writers in the US have discovered that MSN Spaces in the US also censors blog names, though albeit in a way that is easy to get around.

The Internet is changing and in some cases for the worse. News such as this just shows the importance of anonymous networks such as Tor. At least via Tor people can air their views without censorship, with as much anonymity as they need.

In other news, Astronomers at the University of California have found another ExtraSolar Planet, bringing the total to 155. The planet was found orbitting the 10th magnitude Red-Dwarf Gliese 876 in Aquarius (which plays host to M2 one of the best globular clusters in the nights sky). What makes this planet special compared to the other 154 planets, is its mass. Around 7.5 times that of the earth, makes this the most earth like ExtraSolar planet found to date.

Don’t get your hopes up and expect to find life on this planet though. With an orbital period of roughly 2 days, the planet is so close to its Star that the Star fills 12degrees of the sky. To bring that into context, our moon and Sun fill a mere 1/2 degree, imagine if it filled 24x as much of the sky! The researchers predict the planets temperature as a result to be in the region of 200-400C.

I couldn’t resist. I’ve flashed my iHP-140 with the latest RockBox bootloader and cross compiled the latest rockbox iRiver version. The first thing that strikes you is the speed at which the player now boots up. It takes the original iRiver firmware approximatly 16 seconds to boot up and read the filesystem. With RockBox, it’s booted and playing music in approximatly 3 seconds.

That’s not all though. Due to the smaller font size, the file list shows 2x-3x the number of folders on the screen, don’t like the font, you can always change it. RockBox supports gapless playback of music, which is a welcomed addition, you can also create playlists on the fly rather than via your pc. The info page shows the exact percentage of battery power left and estimated time remaining. Then we have all the plugins, including pong, snake and minesweeper

Although the iRiver port is still in development, it is usable. Even in its current state, its worth using over the original firmware, which you can always boot to if you really need to.

I still havn’t found time to write an “About me” page for this blog, instead I’ve been browsing the web looking for more podcasts (the novelty will wear off soon I hope). I ended up on an open source project site known as RockBox. The project developers have created a custom bootloader is flashed onto the iRiver via a normal firmware update. The bootloader then allows you to boot the original iRiver firmware, or the RockBox firmware.

From what I have read, the iRiver version of Rockbox is not yet really ready for public use. However, it’s certainly a project worth keeping an eye on. The iRiver is already an incredibly capable mp3/vorbis player, however with such an open source project who knows what future features we’ll see.

For more information, have a look at the iRiver section of the RockBox wiki

On another note, I watched Ladder 49 last night. If you’re expecting an action packed film along the lines of Backdraft, then you’ll be dissapointed. Not that the film has no action, it has plenty, but the focus of the film is the characters and the way been a firefighter affects their lives. Which is does very well.

The real Ladder 49

anyhow the search for more podcasts continues…

Well its official, I’ve now had 2 MSI motherboards and a QDI die on me this year in two seperate machines. The latest is an annoying intermittent fault. Some times booting far enough to display the bios screen, other times refusing to display a single pixel. Glad I kept a spare motherboard around

They say bad things happen in three, my Epson printer has decided it’s going to be number 2. Although this may not be a bad thing considering how much ink it wasted having to continually unblock the print heads with the nozzel cleaning utility.

Its now little over a day since I found out about podcasting and my network bandwidth is feeling the strain. I really don’t think I’ll ever manage to listen to all these feeds, but it seems to be the quickest way to find a few intresting feeds. Out of all those I’ve tried so far, only a couple have been intresting enough to keep around:

Gaming Steve

Slacker Astronomy

2600

Adam Curry’s Daily source code

One possibly intresting feed is EarthCore, a novel broadcast a few chapters at a time. I’ve not had chance to listen to this yet, so I’ll reserve judgement.

It seems these days everyone and their dog has a blog ( I wonder if anyone really is sad enough to make a blog for their dog). Been a complete techno geek I’m actually suprised it took me this long to get my own.

I’ve no idea what I’ll be posting about in the future, although chances are it will be a rant of some sort, especially when we get news items like the proposal to charge motorists between 2p and £1.30 per mile instead of paying road tax.

Still, not everything is bad news. UEFA finally see the light and allow the previous years champions the chance to defend their title, even if they failed to do well in the domestic league.

Anyhow, I’m off to subscribe to another dozen or so podcast feeds , another tech area I’ve somehow managed to avoid until today. Oh, and as for the url of this blog, I’m sure you’ll work it out

When I get a bit of spare time, I’ll get a new theme created for this blog.

See ya.

Although KPilot provides a lot of conduits, its (afaik) missing the ability to synchronise between open office and WordSmith. Until I can find some time to learn about coding plugins for kpilot, I’ve knocked up a quick bash script.

It’s pretty basic and not guaranteed to work You provide it with a list of files to monitor/synchronise. The script then converts and uploads any new or modified rtf files to the palm. Next it downloads the pdb’s for any files that hadn’t been locally modified and updates your rtfs. So long as you don’t change both the local and remote copy between syncs, it should work fine. If you do change both, the local version will overwrite the palm version.

The script requires “pilot-link” and “wsconv” to be installed. wsconv can be obtained from the WordSmith website and pilot-link is in portage.

I’ve not done much testing of this script, so if there are any errors please let me know.

For the script code Read the rest of this entry »