Tom Stacey's Weblog

Mon - November 6, 2006

Public Service Announcement

Ok, its not bad customer service, rather bad governmental representation but anyway...

The Violent Crime Reduction Bill, whilst on the whole a very good idea to help reduce crime, is seemingly out to ban the harmless sport of Airsoft Skirmising.

Please support the Association of British Airsoft and make sure people can continue carrying-out their leisure persuits.

Posted at 03:49 PM

Tue - August 8, 2006

Quicktime in RealPlayer?

I didn't realise RealPlayer had a web browser in it!

I was playing with RealPlayer on Mac OS X earlier and thought it'd try putting a http (web) address in the open URL dialog. Lo and behold! A webpage appeared!

So just to be really sneaky I thought I'd try and load Apple's OS X Leopard page with its embedded QuickTime movie, the results are below..

How odd. I thought I'd share that with you all.

Posted at 04:24 PM

Thu - June 8, 2006

Monthly Update

OK, I've resigned myself to the fact that I only blog on average about once a month, infact, its probably less. Thats pretty poor for someone who is meant to know about this sort of stuff, but hey, no one reads my blog so that suits me just fine!

Anyway, I'm gonna change my blog strategy. Instead of sitting there once a week thinking of something that has happened to me that might interest others, failing and leaving iBlog closed for another week until something happens to someone else (and I blog that off the back of their "interesting" news), what I'm going to do is a review of the month, every month. If something genuinely interesting happens (like Greef blogs!), I'll fill in the gaps, but I will honestly try to blog consistently, with these updates, if only to keep my sole reader (my Mum) happy!

So what happened in May?

Hmmm....

Well, I'm still pissed off with courier companies (especially the ones who hide up the road from the depot to avoid being given more drops tomorrow, thus keeping me waiting for 2 hours), telephone companies and second-hand furniture merchants. I'm still spending too much time and money on the Celica and Tamiyas. I'm also managing to sell some of my collection too. We had a lodger, then lost them (probably a good thing in hindsight seeing how tiny our flat is!).

We saw the rather excellent Room 3, and the rather local Doctor Schlong at the Zero Degrees bar in Bexleyheath, I also tried micro brewed beer (also in Bexleyheath) which was odd to say the least, but it certainly did the trick on my brother (in that it gave him hiccups for 3 days).

Greef and myself renovated the Kitchen at long last, this took longer than predicted, like all our DIY. We also bought one of those fancy LCD TV's to replace our aged CRT beast, although it doesn't play well with our Hard Disk recorder which is a sod.

I went to Japfest with the Celica folk (pics here).. but the weather was awful. Oh, and speaking of bad weather, I cooked a BBQ on May day in the pouring rain!

So all in all, a wet, costly and thoroughly superb May..

Posted at 11:52 AM

Fri - May 12, 2006

Aggregated!

My blog has recently been added to the Ultralab Blog of Blogs. My thoughts should now be fed straight through to subscribers of Ultralab bloggers. Well, aren't I lucky?

Posted at 03:44 PM

Wed - April 26, 2006

GoogleJuice

Is that like BeetleJuice?

We all use Google everyday. If you don't then unfortunately the following recommended site may not apply to dogpile.com... But in all seriousness, as a user of Google for search results you really can't beat it, they are still head and shoulders above anything else and monopolistic worries aside, fair play to them.

What friend and colleague Matthew Eaves has done with his new site to find out how to best utilise the power of Google as a Webmaster to help people find you and your site. His site GoogleJuice isn't unique in it's analysis of Google but it is free and is written by a guy who knows more about SEO (that's search engine optimisation to the rest of us) than just about anybody I know.

Click onto www.googlejuice.co.uk

Posted at 12:02 PM

Mon - April 3, 2006

Interested in classic or vintage Tamiya RC cars?

Did you once have a Grasshopper, Frog, Hornet or Hotshot? Do you want to re-live your past? There is a thriving trade in old Tamiya Radio Control cars out there, you never know, you might have thousands of pounds worth of plastic in your loft!

A recent trip by my Sis-in-Law to Japan brought me back a part of my childhood I thought I'd lost 15 years ago. It's called a Tamiya Top Force, and for those of you not versed in the kind of geekery I am, a Tamiya Top Force is a child's radio controlled toy. I'm not gonna make any bones about this, in my ever-advancing years I find myself still interested in toys I should have left behind when I discovered beer and women.

If I was supporting my fellow addicts, I'd try and rationalise my obsession by calling it a "hobby", or saying I was interested in "models", then perhaps people would foolishly believe I was interested in women as my age might suggest. But no, lets be honest guys, these are toys... and they're flipping brilliant! Partially because these things are fantastically intricate, partially because they are unashamedly retro but mainly, as I'm starting to find out, they are worth big bucks, and I like big bucks (Steph, of course, would say I like spending big bucks)!

I visited a chap the other day who had a pile of these radio control cars, not unlike what you may have seen if you'd walked into Gamleys in 1988, there weren't many, maybe 10 kits - Value in 1988 at retail: £1000, value now: £10,000! I'm sure, pound for pound, they must be worth more than gold, or possibly even class A drugs(!)

So, where am I going with all this? Well, in the true style of Peter Perkins and LoveJoy, I plan to become a collector of these little plastic kits and therefore leave as my legacy a bunch of Tamiya Top Forces, whereupon my inheritors will have wished I had been a dealer in gold or class A's and weren't stuck with load of useless toys in their boxes.

Oh well, at least people will take the piss when they visit antiques roadshow with them!

If you are serious about joining me on my trip to retro heaven, you could do a lot worse than visit Tamiya Club where we trade and show off, or ebay - occasionally you'll find a bargain. (tip: look for mis-spellings)

Posted at 03:05 PM

Tue - February 7, 2006

Honda Advert update

I wrote about the new Honda Civic TV advert the other day.. The first time I watched it I thought it was wonderful.

Unfortunately I'm getting sick of it now. Its like being subjected to having your head stuck under the bonnet of your car every 30 minutes.. The equivalent of an automotive bog flush!

I take it back Honda, I don't like all that bloody whirring and vrooming!

What do you think? Comment Below!

Posted at 10:23 AM

Mon - January 30, 2006

Alex Blanc's Weblog

Is worth a visit...

If you've got a moment, its worth visiting the new, improved webpage of Alexander (Alex) Blanc. A cutting edge thinker in the world of web design, Internet culture, connecting people and new thinking on the WWW, Alex has a lot to say and i think it's worth reading... Its slightly less rambling than my blog (which has to be a good thing) and you never know, you might learn something new!

So head over to all roll over and Alex's Weblog @ www.allrollover.co.uk

Posted at 09:34 AM

Fri - January 27, 2006

Old video formats..

Intel Indeo 5 on Mac OS X??

I've been doing some work for the V&A recently following on from the work Ultralab did on Every Object Tells A Story. Basically, they needed some videos compressed to work on an iPod video (specifically a Vodcast). Now having the target videos all one format meant that the job wasn't too bad, but the problem for us was that the source videos had completely different specifications. We had various types of .mov .wmv and .avi all with different codecs, frame sizes and framerates. Most of these didn't faze the incredible ffmpegX; a tool I find myself relying on more and more these days...

One of the videos (an AVI) just didn't want to play ball... ffmpegx spat it back at me in disgust! I tried Quicktime (unsupported), VLC - still no cigar, Windows Media Player... anyway nothing wanted to play it. So I went back to ffmpegx and clicked the info button which told me the codec was IV5. After a little bit of Googling this turned out to be Intel Indeo Video 5, the last version of a very old hardware accelerated format built by Intel for Windows playback. After discovering this I realised I'd have to fire up a PC to get anywhere with this vid. Or would I??

Another quick Googling showed that Apple had indeed built support for this codec into QuickTime with the aid of an extension (shudder) to be placed in the System Folder. Ahh.. System Folder.. Mac OS < X! Back to the PC! After the PC refused to boot I was back to the Mac again scratching my head. I thought, "what If I load up classic and convert the video to something more modern?" (My PB 1.67Ghz is too new to boot classic y'see) This would be fine if I had QuickTime for classic, but as i have QuickTime for X I'd deleted QuickTime classic years ago, or maybe Apple had during a System upgrade. ;-)

No problems, I'll install QuickTime for classic. This was fine but QT 6 for classic requires you to pay to export files to another format, and my QT 7 Pro key wouldn't work in QT 6! So the search was on to find an old version of QuickTime, not crippled by QuickTime Pro. Not much was available on the Web anymore, and again I realised I could have been finally stuck, if I hadn't noticed the QuickTime VR authoring studio box on the shelf here at Ultralab. This ten year old piece of software included in the box a version of QuickTime 2.5 which surprisingly worked with Indeo plug-in above. Finally I could see and hear the video submission. A quick save as turned the offending AVI into a MOV and then ffmpegx could happily continue chugging through the videos.

All in all a funny little tail and it makes you wonder how and why people create stuff in such ancient formats.. Oh, the video itself was really excellent!

Posted at 09:27 AM

Tue - January 17, 2006

PhotoBooth

No, we're not talking about the EOTAS photobooth, but rather the shiny new app Apple include with their iSight enabled Macintosh's. Friend and fellow researcher Matthew Eaves has just taken delivery of a G5 iMac (officially old hat, but very desirable nonetheless) so having a play was irresistible!

Although the rest of the machine was nothing all that new to me, the in built iSight just blew me away, especially when used in conjunction with the PhotoBooth app. Its just so simple, yet so magnificently engineered, I'd love to have a tiny pic of me when i do every blog entry so you can see what mood I'm in! How cool would that be? Novel ideas for a built-in iSight on a postcard (or my lovely new comments function) please!

Myself and Matt "playing"

Posted at 10:20 AM

Fri - January 13, 2006

Honda advert..

I was blown away by the latest Honda ad just on the TV.. It uses a choir of singers to simulate the noises of a car on an imaginary journey, the windscreen wipers are particularly amazing, although the actual engine noise is a bit of a giveaway... Still, they do a better job than James May did on topgear the other way around!!

I liked the Cog ad they did before which was done by Wieden and Kennedy UK, I wonder if they do the new one.. very impressive if you can catch it.

Posted at 09:29 PM

Wed - January 11, 2006

NYC visit

What can I say?

I sat here:

And I ate this:

You can probably imagine the noises I made!

Posted at 02:36 PM

Mon - January 2, 2006

Old New York was once New Amsterdam...

Start spreading the news!

I'm off to New York City for a wee shopping/sightseeing trip this week. Greef and I have spent the last week preparing ourselves for our first visit to the US of A, Greef has itemised the whole trip down the last toothpick, and we no doubt have an itinerary syncronised with NASA time. I on the other hand have the addresses of all the New York state model shops and have booked a session at the Genius Bar in the Apple Store Manhattan for a session on the Mac Quiz...

We're flying AA so hopefully we might get a reasonable amount of legroom on the flight.. ooh, and i'm looking forward to buying clothes that fit me with "M" written on the size label!

Write up next week, until then good luck finding a blog as riveting as mine to read in my absence!

Posted at 07:48 PM

Sun - January 1, 2006

Stop Bugging me ok!!

Avoid compulsory website login

I know most people probably know about bugmenot but for the sake of my mum who reads this blog, if you are sick of websites that force you to register and login to read articles click onto www.bugmenot.com.

Its basically a database of known working logins for websites (even ones that charge, but you didn't read that here ok!) ;-)

Rather unsurprisingly, the top requested sites on bugmenot are the US news sites (latimes.com, nytimes.com)... thank goodness auntie doesn't require me to register to read news, but if she did you'd know where to go!!!

Posted at 07:18 PM

Sat - December 31, 2005

Comments on my Blog

I've held off allowing comments on my blog due to my early experiments giving me more spam than the local cash and carry.. The problem is that without comments my blog feels rather incomplete.. I mean, its fair enough prattling on down the ether at you all, but what if someone actually agreed with something I said??? I wouldn't know!

Anyway, after a little research into avoiding spam (and thankfully the world has moved on a little in this respect since 2003) I am starting comment experiment 2.0 (maybe that should be 0.2b in 2005?) with a little help from those guys over at haloscan.com. Who provide free commenting tools for bloggers, AFAIK its all free with no catches so I'm giving it a whirl.

Now blog readership, here's where you come in! Why don't you drop me a comment so I can see it working?