Still don’t have access from home. Will have to do some more poking.

I might as well get around to doing one ‘top 2009′ list (even through it’s late), and here’s mine for technology I purchased this year (but not necessarily released this year):

1) BlackBerry Pearl 8100

Aquired around November (for free!) to replace a breaking Motorola Razr v3, and it’s a great phone that does nearly everything I want it to. Upgrading to a phone that can actually access the internet / MSN / Facebook / Twitter is a big step-up for me, and yet I still want to go bigger and better – maybe to a later model that can use 3G and WiFi. Not that I have the money, of course, but I guess that’s part of the ‘crackberry’ addiction.

2) Sandisk Sansa Clip+

I lost my Creative Zen Stone at some point in October (it had served me well), and took the opportunity to upgrade to something better. The Clip+ came well recommended from various portable media websites, yet it wasn’t advertised very well at all in the UK, and it was being sold dirt cheap, so even better. It’s a fantastic little thing with 8GB internal storage and expandable with microSDHC cards, and I’m glad I bought it. And so are the other people I know who own one, including my father. If you’re looking for something cheap and good, go for it.

3) Microsoft Xbox 360

So I actually got around to purchasing a next-generation console this year, and I’m glad I did, as I’m enjoying it far more than the Wii. I’ve enjoyed games like GTA IV (100%’d, including all DLC), Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge, and I still have a big stack of 30+ I’ve bought over the past month to play through at some point… although with the current state of university work, it doesn’t look like I’ll have much free time in the future at all. Hurr.

I’ve managed to restore everything pretty quickly, with props to Host Media UK for the cheap and fast hosting service I’m now on. I fucking love Fantastico. I lost a few months of blog entries, but I managed to copy the text over from LiveJournal, so it’s all good. It’s made me remember the value of the blog, and now I wonder whether I’ll be able to go for post-a-day again. Wish me luck. See you tomorrow

http://www.nearlyphil.co.uk/

My birthday was a few days ago, and I did spend most of it packing my stuff, and unpacking it all in my new house. Especially when that house won’t have internet for another week or two… but I can survive. It’ll give me a chance to watch some shows that have bee piling up, play games on my ‘to play’ list, and maybe even do some work before the new term starts. I do feel a bit naked without Facebook, MSN and Twitter, though ._.

RocketDock – Yes, I know it’s a copy of the standard OS X dock, but it works really well. I used to find myself moving and minimising windows until I got to the desktop icons to open an application… now, all I need to do is move the mouse to the top of the screen and the dock pops up in front of anything that’s open. It’s especially handy on my laptop, where I have docklets showing my Wi-Fi and battery life replacing the ones in my system tray. Plus all icons look prettier at high-res. Oh, and it’s free – check it out.

UltraMon – A program that’ll handle a multiple monitor setup much better than the standard NVIDIA control panel. The main addition is additional taskbars on each monitor, just displaying the windows on that screen (which makes a lot of sense). It’ll also handle multiple wallpapers, screensavers, and a lot more… including custom theme support. Unfortunately, it’s $40 to purchase, but there is a limited free alternative (that I haven’t tried) called MultiMon.

DropBox – Backups and syncing files between computers can be hard sometimes, especially if you get confused and wonder which file is the newest version. Dropbox integrates itself right into Windows Explorer (or OS X), and then all you need to do is drop a file into the folder located in My Documents. It’ll upload the file onto the web server (2GB storage for free), and then download / update the files on computers linked with that account. You can share folders between people pretty easily as well. What I like is the two special folders – upload something into the ‘Public’ folder to instantly get a URL for the file, or upload a folder of images into ‘Photos’ to instantly create a web gallery to share with friends. I think it’ll be replacing my USB stick for work next year, to be honest.

I’ll probably add another tweak post soon, once I’ve re-installed everything again. I realise that there was so much stuff on my PC that I didn’t need – I’m making do just fine with Firefox, MSN, Spotify, VS08 and WoW. I guess I’ll try to limit the crap in the future. And if people have recommendations for good programs, let me know.

In other news, I bought a hard dance mat off a friend the other day, and I’m enjoying it. Sure, it’s making me feel dead, but it’s fun. I only played DDR for the first time last November at Auchinawa, and I’ve been wanting to play more, but the crappy plastic dance mats put me off – this is a nice compromise. Plus, I have 6th through 10th to work through, so it’ll keep me busy (and fit) over the summer. And at least keep me off WoW a little.

*edit* I thought I’d used that image before. Right here.

So instead, I’ve give the blog a nice new theme. Oh, with the addition of my face up there as well. So enjoy.

She wanted to level her profession skill,
‘Enchant Gloves – Expertise’,
But there were no buyers to be found
Even if she waived her fees.

So she scoured the world for vendor gloves
To do the deed herself;
Wowhead found some in the sewers,
Sold by a shady elf.

The quickest way to the underbelly
Was through the city’s well,
So she hopped into the swirling void
And instead of teleporting… she fell.

She hit the ground that was not there;
Floating in thin air,
Her hearth was down, no guild online,
And nobody in /2 seemed to care.

As the Horde rode past to point and kek
Jaide begged for help with /y,
And when ‘Auto-Unstick’ failed to work
She could do nothing but cry.

The mouse reached for the GM ticket button
As the priest was getting bored,
But even after 20 minutes of waiting
The QQing still went ignored.

So she stared up at the Northrend sky
and as her eyes began to weep,
Maybe this was a sign from Blizzard Entertainment:
‘For fuck’s sake Phil, log off and go to sleep’.

Sorry Ed, bad joke. My actual New Year’s resolution is to try and write a blog post every day this year… well, that’s three days down. I’ll probably run out of things to talk about in about a week’s time, though.

My GS1 work is going okay at the moment, but for some reason the tile rendering ain’t working properly with Release mode outside of Visual Studio. As it runs fine in release mode from within VS2008, this is gonna be very hard to debug… don’t you just hate programming when this kind of stuff happens? ^^;

Oh, and I forgot to mention… every blog I make has to be over 100 words long, or it doesn’t count. It’s just as well that this last paragraph pushes it over the limit.

*edit* I’m the #1 result for Natalia Tena on Google Images… fuck. Not this again.

5) Xentient Thumbnails

By default, Windows XP can show some thumbnails of images, but only a few common formats such as .jpg and .gif, and only in ‘Thumbnail’ view in Explorer. If you’ve got a lot of images in a folder, it can be hard to see what image is which… Xentient Thumbnails makes things easier, by replacing icons for the image with small thumbnails of the images, in all views, for all image types. This integrates into everything, including open/save dialogs, and makes managing image files a whole lot easier. Grab it here.

4) uxtheme.dll Patcher

I don’t like the look of  the default luna skin that comes with XP… everything seems too chunky and ugly. By default, Windows won’t allow unofficial skins, but you can patch it using this program and make your computer’s UI look a whole load prettier. You can grab tons of new skins from Customize.org, maybe grab a Vista or OS X skin if that’s your thing, but my personal favourite is Tener VS.

3) TrayIt!

Especially on a single monitor, room on your taskbar is a precious resource that can fill up quickly if doing multiple things at once. TrayIt! is a nice application that you can run once to configure the options, and then it’ll invisibly load every time you start your computer… it’s function? It lets you hold Ctrl and click ‘Minimize’ on any window to hide it down in the system tray, very useful if the application doesn’t provide that function in the first  place. I’ve uploaded it here, ’cause I had trouble finding the invisible version.

2) Mozilla Prism

One that I bet nobody’s heard of… It’s an extremely cut-down version of the Mozilla web browser, used for integrating web pages into applications. In English? Create applications out of your favourite websites – for example, I use it for an online radio player but it can be used for pretty much anything. It’s just a proof of concept, but I like it… grab it here.

1) TweakUI

The ultimate tweak of tweaks… grab it from the Microsoft website and instantly  have so many more options to modify Windows, it’s unbelivable. Go download it. Now. I’ll probably cover other stuff from the Powertoys website at a later date, because I think I have enough stuff for a second ‘tweaks’ blog post in the future ^^