RobTucker.co.uk » General

Vintage British Argos 1985 Catalogue

Rob — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:59:16 +0000

Vintage British Argos 1985 Catalogue, a set by trippyglitters on Flickr.

This is all kinds of amazing!

Thank You Steve Jobs

Rob — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:20:14 +0000

Steve Jobs : 1955-2011

I think Lex Friedman echoes my thoughts perfectly in his article here.

This is still the most inspirational speech I’ve ever heard, and if you have a spare 15 minutes, it’s most definitely time well spent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Written on my iPad.

Where The Hell Is Matt?

Rob — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 19:06:03 +0000

Ok, so this isn’t new, but my brother recently directed me to this video and I just had to stick it up here. At first, it’s just kinda cool and a bit funny, but as the video goes on I just found myself grinning from ear to ear, with a few ‘woah!’s thrown in. It was first thing in the morning when I saw it, and it totally set me up for a great day.

“14 months in the making, 42 countries, and a cast of thousands.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY

Outbox – Break Your Heart

Rob — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:30:26 +0000

I came across this video as a link from a story on the BBC News site. It’s a cover of the current UK No. 1 single by Taio Cruz – Break Your Heart. I much prefer this cover to the original. I think I might have to check out some more of this bands work. The singer has a great sounding voice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtaXFaEVcPQ

The (iTunes) Digital Divide

Rob — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:40:36 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve had a rant about something on here, but this one has been bubbling for a long time.

I’ve read several articles over the last few months relating to how Apple always seem to be ‘working’ with record labels and movie distributors to improve sales of albums and movies on the iTunes store. Most recently is the news that they may be looking to include better ‘digital booklets’, or some kind of ‘interactive digital booklet’. Now, dont get me wrong, I like iTunes. I regularly buy my music from iTunes, but mostly, it’s just singles, or the odd specially-priced EP. Sometimes even a music video. I’ve not bought a single movie or music album from the iTunes store. I also know that I’m not alone with this. There’s a very good reason I don’t buy movies or music albums for download, and one that Apple (and the record companies/movie studios) seem to be ignoring.

As an example, let’s look at the top 5 albums currently in the iTunes music store:

1. Now That’s What I Call Music!, Vol 73 – Various Artists
iTunes Price: £16.99
CDWOW CD Price: £ 10.99

2. iTunes Price:Lungs – Florence & The Machine
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

3. Number Ones – Michael Jackson
iTunes Price: £5.99
CDWOW CD Price: £5.99

4. The E.N.D. (The Energy Never Dies) – Black Eyed Peas
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

5. La Roux – La Roux
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

iTunes albums have been getting cheaper, but the £6 difference between the prices of the ‘Now’ album is staggering. Out of the other 4 albums, there’s no difference between the Michael Jackson album versions, and the remaining 3 all cost £1 less for a physical CD. If you prefer the instant gratification from instant download, then the iTunes version may be preferable. Personally, I think that the short wait for a physical CD to be delivered is worth it for original-quality backup purposes alone.

Now, lets look at my biggest issue with the iTunes store – Movies. Again, going with the top 5 movies in the iTunes movie store:

1.Marley & Me (2009)
iTunes Price: £10.99
CDWOW DVD Price: £10.99

2. Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)
iTunes Price: £3.99
Amazon DVD Price: £4.98 (Double Pack)

3. The Dark Knight (2008)
iTunes Price: £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £5.98 (2 Disc)

4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
iTunes Price: £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £3.98

5. Borat (2007)
iTunes Price: £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £3.98

I’m impressed with some of the lower priced movie offerings from iTunes, especially the Ice Age pricing. However, for less than £1 more, you can buy the Double DVD version, which includes the first Ice Age film! With the exception of Marley & Me (a new release), which is the same price for both download and DVD, all of these movies can be purchased cheaper in DVD format. Not only that, but some are even the 2 disc versions, offering much more than just the movie.

How can these download prices be justified? Whilst I appreciate that there are hosting, admin and bandwidth costs to consider, these are inconsequential in comparison to the manufacturing and distribution costs of physical media. In my opinion, Apple need to stop worrying about bundling unnecessary ‘digital booklets’ and other such gimmicks, and just make these downloads cheaper. If they truly want to stop people from illegally downloading music and movies, stop making them so prohibitively expensive! I’m a big believer in the KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Why keep trying to add all the superfluous nonsense in order to keep the price high? It’s the movie/song that people have come to your store to buy.

Rant over

Note: I’m not affiliated with Amazon or CDWOW, nor endorsing their services, I just mentioned them as they were the cheapest I could find at the time.

Reassign Default Applications in Mac OS X (Leopard)

Rob — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:15:55 +0000

It really irritates me how some applications will ‘steal’ ownership of certain file types on my Mac. The biggest issue I have with this is with images. More often than not, I just want to open an image in Preview to take a quick look at it. I expect that when I double-click on an image file, it will quickly open in Preview. On several occasions, Adobe Photoshop has taken it upon itself to assign itself as the default application for many image types that Photoshop supports (.png, .jpg, etc). If you’re a Photoshop user, you’ll know that it’s not a quick application to start up.

In Microsoft Windows, you can right-click and select ‘Open with’, choose the relevant application and check the box for ‘Always use the selected program to open this kind of file’. This has pretty much always worked for me. Mac OS X has a similar right-click option, but this doesn’t always seem to work system-wide, as you might expect.

In order to make this change system-wide, you need to take a different approach. Right-click on the file you wish to always open in a particular program (the .png file in my case), and select ‘Get Info’. There is a section in the pane that opens for ‘Open with:’, and the ‘rogue’ application should be selected. Choose the required application (‘Preview’ in my case) from the pull-down list, and select the ‘Change All’ button. Confirm that you wish to make this change to all files.

Now when I double-click any .png file, it immediately springs open in Preview, and doesn’t try to launch Photoshop instead.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same procedure for Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) too.

Fiat 500s & Pandas Crossing Poland By Train

Rob — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:43:02 +0000

As can probably be seen from the design of my site, and some past updates, I adore the new Fiat 500. It’s such a fantastic little car. Excellent to drive, extremely economical, and doesn’t cost the Earth to own. Over the past year, I’ve been a regular visitor and poster on the popular FIAT Forum website.
A couple of days ago, one of the other regulars on the site (who is also one of the organisers of the brilliant Isle of Wight Fiat 500 Fun Run) posted a link to the following YouTube video, which I just had to pass on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDaTAURMCXQ

If you missed it, the train is completely full (about 39 carriages!) of Fiat Panda’s and Fiat 500′s, as it’s leaving (if I read Google’s translation correctly) Stacja Ostrów Wielkopolski (Ostrow Station) making its way north across Poland, about 240km from Tychy (where the cars are assembled).

Making My Epson All-In-One Printer Wireless

Rob — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:00:13 +0000

When I bought my iMac almost three years ago, I decided to upgrade my printer at the same time and take advantage of the Apple printer rebate offer. So I went for the more-than-I’d-usually-spend £160 Epson Stylus Photo RX640 All-In-One Printer, Scanner, Copier. With the £60 rebate, this made it £100, which was a bargain for a printer of this specification at the time. Although I didn’t have a particular use for the feature, I quite liked the idea of the advertised bluetooth connectivity. I know the range of bluetooth isn’t as good, but WiFi home inkjet printers were few and far between at the time, and using a USB print server would have left me unable to use the scanner function.

So the printer arrived, I got my rebate, and it has served me brilliantly over the last few years. I really can’t fault it. However, I was really quite baffled when I originally set it up as to how I enable the bluetooth connectivity. I found out shortly afterwards, that there was no bluetooth connectivity…at least not built-in. To enable the bluetooth functions, you have to purchase the optional Epson USB Bluetooth Adapter! This was a small-print item on the original product brochure, that I’d annoyingly overlooked, but what a swizz!! Feeling slightly misled after spending £160 on the printer, I was in no hurry to be spending yet more money on a bluetooth adapter for it.

I’ve recently had more and more need to be able to print to my printer whilst my iMac has been turned off. It’s such a pain having to wait for it to boot up, just to print a document from my laptop. So I decided to look into purchasing (begrudgingly) the Epson USB Bluetooth Adapter. I found that the price of this adapter varies wildly, but can be found for around £30. Well, I say ‘found’…..I couldn’t actually find one in stock anywhere. I even tried the trusty boot-sale in the sky – eBay. Trying to be as vague as possible, I searched for ‘Epson Bluetooth’, but there were very few results, mostly from overseas.

After searching a bit more though, one of the results was for a generic mini USB bluetooth adapter, but it was being being described as an alternative to the Epson USB adapter. Many eBay sellers stock them, and some call it a ‘nano’ bluetooth adapter. They can generally be found for less than £3 including delivery charges. It just so happened that I was bought one of these very same adapters as a gift about a year ago. I’d been using it to make my old laptop bluetooth enabled. As that laptop has now been replaced with one that has built-in bluetooth, the adapter was just sitting in my drawer doing nothing. I had nothing to lose by plugging it into the printer and giving it a try.

I plugged it into the ‘EXT I/F’ port on the front of the printer, and the little green LED inside the adapter started to flicker. I checked through the ‘setup’ function directly on the printer to see if the bluetooth options were configurable, and they were. It had a valid MAC address, and I was able to set a pairing code. I set the printer to discoverable, and scooted over to my laptop. I scanned for bluetooth printers in the area, and it found the Epson! I continued through the setup of the printer on my laptop, and sent a test page. It printed perfectly. It wont print from the lounge, as it’s too far away, but as I only intend on using it wirelessly with my laptops, this isn’t much of a problem.

Wireless printing for £3? Bargain!

Isle of Wight Fiat 500 Fun Run 2009

Rob — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:41:21 +0000

I recently took part in a Fiat 500 Fun Run. I haven’t taken part in one of these kinds of events since I was really young, so I couldn’t quite remember how it would turn out. The event mainly involved following a set of clues, which would lead you around the picturesque roads of the Isle of Wight. All done, of course, in a Fiat 500! All of the cars then assembled at the endpoint, which was an excellent sight.
As I bought myself a Fiat 500 last year from the dealer that organised the event (Harwoods), I was invited along, although the event was open to all Fiat 500 owners. It was even attended by a couple of original Fiat 500′s. I’ve uploaded a few photos from the day in the ‘Photos’ section. More photos to come soon.

It was absolutely fantastic event, superbly organised, and as our team won, it was even better! ;o)

Free POP3 Hotmail on iPhone (part 2)

Rob — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:33:05 +0000

In an earlier post, I mentioned that Hotmail was now able to be configured in the iPhone’s Mail application, using POP3 access, directly to the MSN Live Hotmail service. No 3rd party tools required. No Hotmail Plus required.

After adding my Hotmail account to my iPhone, I dug into the settings to find out what the server details are. These should then be able to be used with any POP client:

Incoming Server

Server: pop3.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 995

If the option is available, ensure ‘delete messages from server’ is disabled.

Outgoing Server

Server: smtp.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 587