Why did I move to Android?
For as long as I can remember whenever a friend of mine asked me Android or iOS which one should they go for I have always said Android. In my heart I didn’t want to move to android, I had grown accustomed to the quirky things of the iPhone, I didn’t want a sub par camera on the GN compared to iPhone 4S super camera but in the end I had to practice what I preached.

72h of Android what do I think of it?

It’s good, it’s different, I am happy with it, I can live with it.
Just like how I moaned about little things on iOS when I first got my iPhone the Android OS has it’s own little quirks. With time I am sure I will get used to them just like I did with the iOS.
Bottom line is Android is pretty good, not light years in front nor light years behind Apple. It’s just a different approach but you can do just the same. Sometimes better sometimes worse but I think they are on par with each other.

What differences have I noticed?

APPSSSSSSSSS
They are about the same, all the main apps I used on iPhone are available on Adroid, don’t let that be the reason why you don’t migrate.

+ Android
So much easier to upload music, pictures and videos. You don’t have to convert things into apple format, you don’t have to use iTunes, just drag and drop it to your phone and it works.
Multi tasking did not work great for me on the iPhone, not sure if that is because I had it jailbroken and unlocked or not but multitasking is great on Android. An example of this is whatsapp staying connected all the time even when I open other apps.

+/- Android
This one is a bit biased as I am a heavy google user but I only had to login once with my email and password and all my contacts, calendar and email were sync. Absolutely love it how little I had to do to get it set up. It is fairly easy on the iPhone as well but more clicks and options.

+ iPhone
Gallery – I am not keen on the way the gallery work on Android. All my music albums show as folders with one picture on it. It’s not easy to manage the folders, deleting a picture takes a lot of clicks.
Camera – The camera is not a problem of Android more with the hardware, but the camera is sub par to be honest. The Samsung Galaxy S II which has been released a long while now compared to the GN has a better camera.

So in general I am very HAPPY with my Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
If you are thinking of going from Android to iPhone or vice versa don’t hesitate. It’s not that difficult to be honest. (unless you are a apple fan with your iCloud everything and apple macbook laptop and apple tv, then fair enough stick with iPhone and iOS)

It has now been 2 weeks now since I been able to access https://web.barclayscyclehire.tfl.gov.uk/

Finally found a simple solution to my problem

Change my DNS to Google DNS simples

If you need the DNS they are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

The bloody game freezes up in my Quad Core machine with 8Gig of RAM

After reading a few pages like this and this the thing that worked best for me was to assign the running program to just one core.

Really don’t understand why a program that has just been released has trouble running on Quad Core CPU, but that seem to do the trick for now.

Just thought I would share this with the masses.

If your StarCraft freezes in the game for 1min or 2 then just go into  TaskManager and assign the affinity of the program to just one core like the picture bellow

StarCraft 2

Nothing to do with dual or quad core it was my graphics card “ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3″

I thought it was fairly new and powerful. The default settings were High and when I set it to slow it works just fine on all 4 cores.

I am going to try to update the drivers and see if I can play it in a high setting.

This time I’m writing about how I am saving a bundle every way by commuting to work with the barclays cycle hire scheme rather then Bus/Tube.

I bought a bike about a year ago, cheap a bit broken from www.gumtree.com thinking I got a bargain, just need to fix something here and there. Truth was I have never been bothered and therefore never cycled into work or anywhere for that matter.

Along came this scheme from TfL sponsored by Barclay to hire a bicycle just around the corner from me and drop it near work. The benefits is I don’t have to maintain the bike, I don’t have to worry about anything apart from paying and driving it. The downside is I need to go somewhere to find it, there might or might not be available.

So let’s get down to numbers. How much do I spend a year travelling to and from work yearly.

365 days a year of which I commute 231 (excludes holidays and weekends)

I travel by bus and tube, depends all the time. Day return by bus is 2.4 and tube is 3.2 so lets average it at 2.8 a day.

The expenditure comes to a grand total of 646.8 pounds a year.

The cycle hire scheme costs 45 pounds a year and because I cycle to work in less then 30min it’s free (check out the full costs here). That reduced my year commute from 646.8 to 45 or 2.8 a day to  just under 20p a day yes 20 pence’s a day.

I cycled to and from work today and my first impressions of the bicycle are good, only negative is the saddle but maybe I’m not adjusting it properly, I shall post a more in depth review of the bicycle another time.

Seeing a lot of status updates from friends saying

”

I lost 8 1/2 pounds in only 2 weeks with this new pill! visit PurgeColon.net to get your free trial pack!

”

All this status updates are made via “Mobile Web”

Does this mean the hack is on the facebook account?

Has to be said, it is very strange.

In yet another trial post i am going to test a few feature of the nextGEN gallery.

This is the browswer feature

200703115803-4678

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 7

Don’t like that it refreshes the page every time you go to the next picture, but i like when you click on the picture brings out the over lay just like you will see in the gallery.

This is the gallery feature

[Show as slideshow]

Shows a preview of all the photos and you can click and navigate in them with an overlay, sweet if you want people to see a thumbnail of all the photos.

These two feature, the gallery and browser are my favourite

One deficiency I can already sport with nextGEN gallery which Tony Wu aka StillLive brought to my mind while chatting about this stuff yesterday is when you are navigating between pictures on the overlay, you can’t do it with a tap of a key left / right, you always have to use the mouse.

So whatcha think?

Lets give it a try here

this what the thickbox 3.1

now a wordpress feature, the gallery is under here

Seems to work fine, well happy

I recently went to my first Proms concert, Prom 12.

Program:
Elgar Overture ‘Cockaigne (In London Town)’ (13 mins)
Delius The Song of the High Hills (28 mins)
—- Interval —-
Holst The Planets (50 mins)

I have to say the first half was very difficult to stay awake. I did manage to take it all in, but without much tempo and beat to the music I find it rather difficult to stay focused.

The second half was much more enjoyable. Holst The Planets which I think inspired some star wars tune and possibly some song from a movie like Braveheart, had a lot more rhythm to it. Maybe some of you more eloquent people out there can tell me which sound tracks does Holst The Planets feature on.

As far as I could tell the music was executed very well the little singing that happend was good to, with particular notice to the end of The Planets when the singing was made from the gallaries or some boxes high which worked very well in the Royal Albert Hallacoustics.

The atmosphere was nice, a good mix of young people and old folgies.

I love the Royal Albert Hall as a venue although it is being repaired outside and has some exterior scaffolding the inside is still as awesome.

Had a peak at the BBC broadcastin the iPlayer to see if I had come on but could not spot my self, maybe next time. Look out for me with a Portuguese flag in the Last Night of The Proms, will be in the right hand side of the choir/orchestra.

For starters I will say I AM PLEASED WITH WINDOWS VISTA.

Yes really, windows vista is not as bad as people said. Sure its not as good as XP, but once you get the hang of it and its silly hiden menus and settings it’s alright.

Now 64bit is a different thing.

A lot of the applications are still 32bit therefore I gain no advantage when running them on my new machine, if anything some of them have given me hassle.

Couter Strike Source for some reason somtimes freezes, for no aparent reason and I am sure it has to do with it being “emulated” from a 32bit running on a 64bit CPU. It is so frustrating how it happens sporadically, it just drives me mad.

Had a slight problem with my graphics card ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 and my Dell monitor on Windows Vista 64bit.

If I used the VGA cable from the monitor it worked fine, if I used the DVI cable it woudnlt work. Basically after windows booted up when you see the Windows logo before you Login the monitor would turn off saying no signal found. After a few windows updates there was one for a Dell monitor, I then tried the DVI cable again and things worked fine.

Think this will be it for now with regards of post on my PC for now

But i finally got time to buy all the parts for my computer and what did I buy for £614 britsh pounds

Find out after the break …

Case:

Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gamers Case - No PSU http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=CAA-900U

£77.11

Mobo:

Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P

£130 

RAM:

OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Platinum Series DDR2 (OCZ2P10664GK)

£123

CPU:

Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - OEM

£129.99

HD:

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103UJ)

£71

PSU:

Tagan PipeRock TG500-BZ 500w Modular BZ Series PSU

£66.99

HeatSink:

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775)

£17.99