Weird, I was joking with a collegue earlier today that Apple’s new iPad sounded like a hi-tech item ladies might use, then I spotted Kira Cochrane’s post on the Guardian Tech blog today which reported MAD TV has been talking about the iPad as far back as 2006…..

At the grand old age of 55 I became a grandfather for the first time today.  So, yet another box ticked on the list of things whist on the planet, I now need to start wearing braces, a flat cap and have a never ending supply of Wethers Originals to hand.   Mother (Emily) and daughter (name yet to  be chosen) and doing just fine and my dearest has gone into overdrive making phone calls like there’s no tomorrow.

30 years ago when  Emily herself was born we couldn’t decide on a name.  At the time I was working for HM Coastguard at Calshot, and my boss – Station Manager Bert Downing sent out a telex simply entitled “and they named her..?”

The telex was forwarded from Coastguard station to Coastguard station right round the UK coastline and back to Calshot with each Coastguard station adding a name, the result being an enormously long telex with hundreds girls names to choose from!

I thought it might be fun to invite anybody who reads this post to add a girl’s name in the  “comments section” below (by clicking the speech bubble) so that Emily has a fine selection to choose from, just one name per post please. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be crashing my ISP’s server with comments but I did manage 145 comments back when I did a post about hacking your Sky Broadband router, so that’s the record I’m hoping to break…

Update 27th Jan

Well that was a waste of time then.  Guess I should have put this on  ‘twatter‘ but that’s one of those ‘technologies‘ that like Ricky Gervais I just don’t get.  Anyhow, who gives a stuff…   She’s since been Caroline Elizabeth…

In case you haven’t seen it this is a clip from a Uruguaian home-made Sci-Fi movie which cost just US $300 to make.   Hollywood producers liked it so much they are reported to have  offered the movie’s producer Fede Alvarez a US $30,000,000  deal to make a full-length sci-fi thriller.   Looks great in full screen mode…

Apologies up front, unless you work on the GIS business this post is a bit of an in-joke . If you DO work in the GIS business I suspect at the very least this could raise a smile unless you are prudish…zzzz.   This is a real book you can buy from Amazon and is getting rave reviews… just ordered mine… 

Spotted this little puppy via Tim Verpoorten’s excellent MacReviewCast podcast:

A free iPod Touch/iPhone game every day almost until (almost)  Xmas – the app-a-day advent calendar.

I am unable to offer reviews yet of the quality of these apps yet as they are untested here but as this stuff is free it’s not like you could complain or cast aspersions eh…

(Ho ho ho…)

Just spent a few days getting some “Winter rays” on the Island of Fuerteventura where it seems to be around 25 degrees even in December and a litre of the local brandy is 7€ a litre…

Anyhoo, the choice of TV in out apartment is a tad limited, the obligatory BBC World, CNN, CNBC and the obligatory  dollop of German, Dutch and Italian channels. Thankfully my Geek travel bag includes an iPod video-out lead and phono-to-scart lead meaning the dearest and I have been overdosing in 2 episodes of Midsomer Murders each eve courtesy of the iPod Touch and an iTunes-enabled netbook I’ve been feeding it with every day.

My point is that any video  iPod is a superb portable video player you can easily hook up to hotel TV Scart or comp video in socket  in most countries enabling you to watch what you consider to watch premium pre-recorded content you’ve already amassed. In my case premium means all of the Star Trek series, Columbo, The Outer Limits and lots of (mostly B-rated) Sci-fi movies grabbed from Channel 5 and late night BBC using eye TV on the Mac though Hauppauge kit for Windows boxes would do the same job.

Although the official 4th/5th Gen Apple video-out lead is circa £30 you can buy a Hong Kong knock off for under a fiver on eBay and a phono-to-Scart adapter for a couple of quid.

(Sent from apartment 237, Player Park Club, Fuerteventura using the hotel’s wiFi which only works by the pool and 3G is very hit’n'miss..)

P.S - interesting to note that Google ads has spotted I’m blogging from a Spanish speaking IP address and placing Spanish ads at times.. clever eh..

A site worth bookmarking or adding to your RSS feed is Giveaway of the day.  Most days the site features free PC or Mac software with licences you might normally expect to pay for.  Often these are the sort of programs you would expect to see as the star freebie ” worth £20″ or whatever on on magazine cover disks, however the download link and registration links are only valid for 24 hours.

From what I can tell these are often earlier versions that have been superseded or perhaps heavily pirated, at least this way you can use the software with a clear conscious effectively following the  try-before-you-buy route though the programs are generally fully featured and not crippled in any way.

Today they are offering Paragon NTFS for Mac 6.5, a utility that allows OS X to read and write to NTFS drives, ideal if you have an externals media drive you share between Windows and Apple machines….

Die-hard Pink Floyd fans might want to wander over to eBay where the late Syd Barrett’s garden shed is up for auction at a starting price of £1,000…

Looks interesting for anyone who wants to share on a fixed Ethernet connection or 3G connection. OK, so you can do this natively in Windows but not with WPA2 encryption on offer.  Currently in beta, download link here ….

A few years ago the tech media was awash with talk of Second Life, a virtual existence in Cyberspace where players could choose just about any lifestyle they’d care to imagine performing virtual commerce including dealing in property and goods, in some instances actually converting newly acquired cyber wonga in to real world dosh.

For years Radio Hams often sat in dark little rooms (affectionately known as radio shacks) communicating with fellow hams across the world thanks to the magic of radio propagation.

In keeping with Second Life there is now a virtual radio environment in cyberspace called Hamsphere where the ionosphere and other factors are synthesised in a very realistic way to emulate many of the atmospheric conditions you might expect to find over a real  HF radio circuit.  Amazingly us hams can communicate to other each in real time over this virtual radio circuit with many of the associated pops, crackles and fading scenarios we’re used to in the real world.

You don’t have to be a Ham to use Hamsphere as there is a receive only option, requirements are a Windows PC with an up-to-date Java installation.