If HTML was really useful...

<noboyfriend>Let's have sex!</noboyfriend>

Google AdWords

So I logged on to Google Mail today and saw this "targeted" Google AdWord:

She Pee. P-mate UK Shop. - www.shepee.co.uk - No more squatting. Women can now pee standing up easily & discreetly

Penis envy or what?

Note to Google (as I post this on their Blogger service): I have a real cock.

Facebook Crap-lications

Sweet baby Jesus and the orphans. I am pretty sure that I haven't actually been "invited" to this amount of crap by actual, real-life people. These scummer applications seem to be just spamming everyone whenever anyone else installs them. Please, stop installing this crap, everyone!

New Remix, new website, new direction

In just a few weeks, my remix of Dan Stone's Road Test will be released on Red Force, along with the original mix and two stonking remixes from German trance legends, Signum.

It's been a long time coming - just over a year, in fact - but this release marks my debut commercial release, which is something I'm very proud of.

To celebrate, I decided to give my website a lick of paint and give it a new name. Gone is DJLXJ.COM, replaced by the newfangled LXJMUSIC.COM, something which looks slightly less like a random assortment of letters that a hypothetical cat might have come up with whilst walking across my keyboard. I don't think I have ever called myself "DJ LXJ" anyway, save for one Internet forum that wouldn't let me sign up with just the three letters, "L", "X" and "J".

More significantly, however, I decided to drop the "DJ" thing because it's something which I believe has its days numbered. "Discs", both vinyl and CD are rapidly on the decline, and for good reason. 2007 blesses us with 20 Mbit Internet connections, and insanely powerful live production performance tools such as Ableton Live, and I don't see things going forward at anything less than light-speed as we approach 2008. DJing as we know it is dead. Long live progress!

Road Test will be available on CD and digital download from most good retail outlets, including iTunes and Audiojelly, in September.

Leeds Reading Festival

Why would anybody want to go to a reading festival, in Leeds of all places?

And why is it sponsored by Carling? Carling make lager, not books.

World has gone mad. Kill me please.

Cameras, phones, and all that jazz

I've been the proud owner of a Sony Ericsson K750i since July 2005. I bought the phone as an upgrade to my old Nokia 6100, but mainly as my first digital camera - just in time for Global Gathering. The phone sports a 2.0 megapixel camera and has taken thousands upon thousands of exceptional quality photos over the years, many of which I post to Flickr and DontStayIn.

By far the most important thing to credit for the quality of my nightclubbing shots has been the MXE-60 flash that clips on to the bottom end of the phone. As a proper xenon flash, it gets much better results than a more typical, white LED. Furthermore, the distance from the camera lens to the flash is sufficient enough to guarantee that you never get any "red-eye". Ever. This is something which cannot be said of newer cameras that come with a built-in xenon flash, including even Sony's newer models. These cameras typically have to employ red-eye-reduction routines that make taking a picture a five-second, multi-flash ordeal.

In July 2006, my contract came to an end, and I was now in a position to upgrade my phone. Incredibly conscious of how awesome my current setup was, I was unable to find anything that suited me. So I put off upgrading for a while, every now and again checking to see if anything new was worth the upgrade.

Fast-forward another twelve months, and I still hadn't found anything that really pleased me. Instead, I had become obsessed with the prospects of the OpenMoko (.org) project - a project whose commercial arm (.com), backed by Taiwanese electronics manufacturer extraordinaire, FIC, will soon be mass-producing and selling the world's first, truly open mobile device.

The product is the Neo1973, and what makes it so special is that all of its hardware and software is completely open. Hardware specifications and software source code are all freely available, meaning that I can make whatever tweaks I want to my phone, without having to do any prohibitively time-consuming and illegal reverse-engineering.

This is a completely orthogonal approach to what usually happens, where hardware is secret, and software is locked down. Cellular network operators sometimes even remove functionality from the original software in order to benefit themselves. Such an example of this is a certain UK operator removing a certain mobile phone's ability to use uploaded MP3 files as ringtones, forcing the user to pay a premium for "mobile content".

Typically, phones will have Java (J2ME) support that allows you to run special Java applications on them, including small games and utilities, as well as more useful things like Google Maps. Unfortunately, the kinds of things that these applications can do is pretty restricted. Being able to develop real software for the Neo1973 means that I can for example, write a program that takes offline voice mail for me when I miss a call. That's right - no more being extorted by 901 just because you couldn't get to your phone in time. You can bet that if operators could lock that down, they would. But they can't, so nnerrrrr.

The device does not require a nonsensical, proprietary charger or USB connector that retails for £35. Instead, it uses an industry-standard USB cable that can be replaced for about £2 and found anywhere you care to look. It's so simple that it's unbelievable to think that more phones don't do this.

And naturally, the phone is not locked to a single network, unlike the AT&TPhone iPhone. Plug in any GSM SIM card and go.

The reality of the situation, however, is that the Neo1973 is far from perfect. The device lacks a camera, 3G, and even a sane place to store the stylus. In fact, it's obvious that they just admitted defeat with the stylus issue and decided to make it a gadget in its own right - it features a pen, a torch and a freaking laser pointer! So Rome wasn't built in a day, but at least you get to laser the eyes off anyone who doubts that you have the coolest phone on the planet.

So, it has become apparent in this day and age that mobile devices are all having a bit of an identity crisis. Mobile phones, PDAs, audio players, gaming devices, cameras and lasers are all suddenly becoming one and the same class of product. The German word for "mobile phone" translates back to "handy", and I see that as a much more fitting description of these technological pieces of madness that radiate our thighs and tie us to our chargers.

Back to my problem, then. I currently have one, aging "handy", which does my mobile-phone-ing, my camera-in-your-face-ing, my FM-radio-ing, my music-playing, my Google-Maps-ing, and once in a while, my SEGA®-Super-Real-Tennis-ing. If I get a Neo1973, I would definitely need to buy a camera, and would definitely miss the convenience of having an integrated bananaphone. I mean cameraphone. I think I should probably stop thinking too hard about this and go to bed.

Mmmmm, pie

Pie pie pie pie pie pie pie!

So I just hacked up the Ubuntu Notification Daemon theme to make the pie chart drawing a bit nicer:

Before and after, top and bottom:

And again... before and after, left and right:

Wooties!

Kinda surprised

People seem to be very good at drawing stuff with the new Grafitti application on Facebook...

Linux - I'd hit it

Phwoar. (YouTube)

Misspelling of the moment 1: "arguement"

I've read this about a million times over the last few days, blaaaah!

Correct spelling is: argument

kthxbye!

Africa

Wow.

http://www.frogview.com/show.php?file=1745

Absolutely breathtaking.

Kite

From xkcd:

It's easy to regret your awkward conversations but hard to regret the ones you didn't have.

Sigh...

Goodbye, Great Grandma

My great-grandmother died today at the age of 105.

When my mum told me the news, I wasn't quite sure how to feel. Truth be told, she was really quite mental being as old as she was, and didn't really know what was going on anymore. I don't feel particularly sad, but rather proud that she lived as long a life as she did.

So goodbye for now, Great Grandma. If only my milk could last as long as you.

ATHF:MFFT

AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FILM FOR THEATRES. OMG.

Bad Vista

Saw this poster for some kind of talk in one of our CompSci lecture theatres today, and just had to Bad Vista it! :P

God said it, I believe it, that settles it!

Fucking idiotic.

Dear Christianity, Science isn't out to get you. Just because you selectively refuse to accept science when it doesn't suit you, doesn't mean to say that it is out to get you. Stop being so fucking paranoid.

Thank god that's over

So Valentine's Day is over for another year, and, once again, I didn't have the balls to declare my undying love to anyone.

Here's a look at some of the highlights (lowlights?) of Valentine's Day 2007.

If you get a dozen your loved!! Happy Valentine's Day

......... , . - -.- - . , .......
......... ) ` - . . - `(.......
........ / . . . .`\. . .\ .. ........
........ |. . . . . |. . .| .........
......... \ . . . ./ . . / ...........
........... `=(./.)=` ...........
............. `-;`;-' .............
............... || ... , .........
.................|| _.-'| ..........
...........|'-._ || . / .........
....... . ..\ . || .' / ..............
........... \ . || . /.............
............. \.|| . /.......
.............. \.||./ ..............
........ .......\||/...............
............. ...|| ..............
.................|| ..............
.................|| ..............
.................|| ..............
.................||.......
.......
..........................
.........

send this rose to everyone you care about including me if you care. See how many times you get this back

How shit is that? Not only does the grammar suck, but that is the shittest ASCII art I've seen since "YUO HAVE BEENE HIT BY TEH VODKA TRUCK! @#@[}{}&%]#~::*&$][]]]&" started showing up on my Facebook wall. Needless to say, nobody sent me one of these this Valentine's Day.

These special Valentine's Day *ahem* "gifts" have been all over everything on Facebook today, "...designed by Susan Kare, the designer of the original Mac icons". Yeah, as if any fourteen-year-old kid with Photoshop and five seconds away from World of Warcraft couldn't do better. They cost a dollar each, with all proceeds going to charity or something. I don't think I saw more than a single one go between sexes, either implying that the world has become incredibly 21st Century, or more likely that everyone is just taking the piss.

Frankly, this one pretty much sums it all up for me:

Needless to say, nobody sent me one of these this Valentine's Day.

Time for bed. Goodnight!

xXxXx

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD copy protection cracked

Already.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/13/bluray_and_hddvd_bro.html

Now that the system is cracked, it makes ripping Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies as easy as it became after they cracked the copy-protection on DVD. That is to say, very easy. All this copy-protection serves as now is to make reading these discs more computationally expensive, pushing the price of your player, and its energy consumption up to unnecessary levels.

When will people learn that copy-protection is a crap idea?

Can't Sleep

Kill me.

Damn illness! :'(

MySpace

...is like a shit version of the real Internet.

Except on the real Internet, you can't make friends with a movie.

That is all for now.

2007!

HAPPY BIRTHDYA! In case you have been living inside a cave, it is now officially the year 2007 AD in regions that are UTC and UTC+0100 PPLUS PROBABLYT MORE BY THE TIME YTOU READ THIS!!!! AD stands for ANNO DOMINI and that means years after the birth of JESUS CHRIST our saviour. So I wish that 2007 is a good year for everyone in general because it;s a bit of a shit number TBH and it'll only redeem itself if everyone gets laid lots and wisn the the lottery or something!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY WORLD!