Will someone buy me one of these cars, please?

Mercedes Maybach

Ferrari 599

1973 Porsche Carrera (but not in orange, thanks)

Koenigsegg

How to create your own Sony Ericsson k800i theme using Mac OS X

Lasyk’s myThemeCreator is a nifty little tool for quickly putting together your own theme for your Sony Ericsson k800i Cybershot cell phone.

If it’s on the screen, you can change the way it behaves, using nothing more than your photo editing software of choice and a little patience.

Since the 3D graphics handling of the handset itself is so nifty, any image element on the screen can be either a straight forward JPG, as well as PNG and Flash SWF – for added flashy menu highlighters and backgrounds.

You can even add into your theme a ring tone and an alert sound and output the project as a .thm file, to share with other k800i users, over on the excellent www.lasyk.net, which also features themes, screen savers, games and editors for numerous other handsets from Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Bo!

Why I don’t agree with ‘Anonymous’ attacks on Scientology

In 1979, just 33 days after being sworn in as Pope John Paul the first, Albino Luciani was murdered for his want to change the Catholic church, into a better organised faith for the 20th century. Those dark forces within the Church, who covered up the truth about individuals within the Vatican, who were directly implicated in David Yallop’s book ‘In God’s Name’, in connection to Luciani’s death, continued to climb the ranks of the mother church throughout Karol Wotija’s papacy.

During Pope John Paul the second’s reign, several American diocese would go bankrupt, paying out millions of dollars in hush money and legal settlements to victims of clerical sexual abuse, while blatantly fraudulent claims of miracle appearances of the virgin Mary, in backwater towns around the world, enjoyed unprecedented levels of endorsement by association, from a pope who publicly offered up prayers to the apparitions, in pleas for peace and the ending of world hunger and the suffering of the poor.

Non of the people who brought these facts into the cold light of day hid from their findings. They wrote publicly about them. Neither of Yallop’s books on the subject of Vatican incompetence, complicity with organised crime or the murder of the pope were questioned on points of fact by the church, because its vast majority of members accept that they are likely closer to the truth than the versions of events which the church stands by to this day.

Christopher Hitchens didn’t have to go into hiding for revealing that Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s organisation couldn’t and can’t to this day account for the millions of dollars in donations which it received, without ever showing proof they were being used to help the people who the saint-in-waiting believed came closer to the suffering of Jesus on the cross, by being kept in the impoverished conditions her high profile money raising campaigns ostensibly sought to, but rarely delivered on her promise to ease.

When cartoons, which depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad, were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, neither the staff of the paper or the cartoonist in question, suggested for one second that they were engaged in religious hate crimes, merely airing their freedom of speech, and outlining in the ensuing media frenzy, the facts as they are written in openly available fundamentalist Islamic literature, about how non-believers are to be treated.

And yet, on the claim that these well documented crimes pale into insignificance compared to the crimes of Scientology, ‘Anonymous’ seems to think that the best way forward, in alerting the world to the truth as they see it about Scientology, is to literally remain invisible.

Yes, it must be frightening to be confronted in the street by people who accuse you of being a child molester. Yes, it must be terrible to have lost a loved one under extremely suspicious circumstances. And yes, it must be a tremendously painful experience to realise, only after spending thousands of dollars on courses and treatment, that there are some questions to which the only answers are more questions – but if you believe in something so strongly, that you are prepared to pick up a protest banner, you must accept that the only logical next step to this direct action, is face to face dialogue.

I would be astonished if there is not a single person of authority within Scientology who is not prepared to answer head-on, the specific accusations made against the organisation; namely that they are responsible for the deaths of Josephus Havenith, Heribert Pfaff and Lisa McPherson. But I can not find a single shred of evidence to show that David Miscavige has been asked directly about these allegations – either by mainstream news media or the text-to-voice YouTube clips posted by people, claiming to belong to the Anonymous group.

If I have simple not looked hard enough, I apologies and I would appreciate links in the comments, but it seems extremely odd to me, that in the early part of the 21st century, an organisation which boasts so many high profile public figures among its number would score so many own-goals, in terms of completely ignoring these claims, if they were not essentially baseless or had simply not been addressed to them directly in a calm and respectful manner.

It is not my concern what followers of Scientology think about alien souls in volcanoes, anymore than I am interested in what celibate men in dresses think about the line between eternal damnation and eternal salvation being dependant on a piece of rubber between the sexual organs of a married couple. It is my concern that these attacks on Scientology, which are clearly being carried out in the name of Anonymous, while having no direct relation to the peaceful search for the truth among its genuine membership, are going to lead to the sort of violence and hatred neither those who want answers to their questions, nor the vast majority of Scientology members who simply want to be left alone to think what ever they want to think, would want.

Silence and fear do not encourage dialogue. Talk to one another. We’re all on this rock together.

No really.. ..don’t buy Windows Vista

When you absolutely positively have to make your brand new computer ten times slower than it should be, Windows Vista is the only way to be sure.

Now, pro-Apple Mac ranting aside, I really must insist that even those of you who will never consider switching to anything other than a Microsoft brand of operating system, stick with me on this one. For I can report that, for the past week, I have attempted to do the unthinkable and exclusively use Vista Ultimate Edition, for my daily work-flow – and it didn’t go at all well.

What I should immediately get out of the way, is that I was a Windows XP user for about 6 years. A student loan and a long-term relationship with a house-mate who couldn’t turn off the immersion heater kept me out of the Apple Mac game for quite some time, although I did have an old Motorola Mac clone machine, which I used for MIDI music sequencing now and then, it’s not for the lack of any familiarity with the way Windows does things which made the whole experience so much of a challenge.

My main machine for the vast majority of the dot com boom was an IBM – at first running Windows 98 and later XP. In other words, my introduction to what later became understood to be the early days of Web 2.0, was viewed entirely through the eyes of Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player; which are in many ways the standard browsing, mailing and media play-back experience millions of people still use to this day, despite a myriad of far superior alternatives out there for free download.

The Windows Vista incarnation of these applications do attempt to improve on the woeful performance of their forbears, at least in their aesthetic appeal. Unfortunately they fall so far short of delivering any real improvements, that I find myself, despite eager to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, still unable to conclude that there isn’t some kind of hatred of real usability behind the ethos of Microsoft software design. It’s as if they’re determined to cling to outdated paradigms out of some fear that a significant shift away from the traditional look and feel of Windows, would scare off their traditional users who have learned to settle for less.

Where they have attempted to break with tradition, such as in the ribbon tool bar for the latest version of Office, all they have succeeded in doing, despite I’m sure quite genuine attempts on the part of an eternally suffering development team, to do the opposite, is make things even harder to find and use. Throwing out the perfectly acceptable menu tool bar convention baby with the lukewarm bath-water.

Setting up Bluetooth syncing between my mobile phone and Vista was an utterly slow and painful experience. All you’re really asking Bluetooth to do, when you want to move your contacts and phone numbers from a cell phone to your computer, is move a formatted text file from one place to another, and then read that text in an application which can decode the format. Since this format is a recognised standard, I can only presume that the need to restart Vista, click various ‘Yes I am sure’ boxes, cancel various failed attempts and eventually download a whopping 32 Megabytes of buggy, ugly software from the cell phone manufacturer, is some kind of attempt by Microsoft to make me feel as I have achieved something special, simply because I managed to coax the damn thing into doing what it is supposed to do in the first place.

Compare and contrast Bluetooth syncing under Mac OS X. I turn on Bluetooth on the phone. I browse for Bluetooth devices from the system wide tool bar. I find the phone. I sync the phone. I go about my day. No fuss, no bells and whistles. It just works.

Then there’s the general feeling of instability. While Apple’s OS X Leopard is not without its issues, Vista feels like it is fundamentally unfinished. Control Panels is higgledy piggledy – as if they started to change the way it works, but then left in elements from Windows XP, like Desktop and Appearance controls; entirely out of character with the rest of the Vista Aero interface. In an attempt to maintain the status quo Microsoft couldn’t have done a worse job of changing things which didn’t need changing by leaving behind things which haven’t changed since Windows 95 – from THIRTEEN years ago.

Why do I need a two centimetre thick border of Ford Cortina blue gunk around the edge of every window? Why is the width of the column which sorts icons alphabetically always 10 pixels too narrow to show the full file name? Who puts a recycle bin in the top left of their screen but no by-default way of showing the actual contents of the hard drive? What did ‘My Computer’ do to deserve being, literally, thrown in the bin?

To find the answer to these and many questions besides, you don’t have to look too far. As I blogged earlier, many third party vendors, such as Dell and retailers like the US giant Walmart, have expressed concerns in a lawsuit which revolves around the use of terms like “Vista Capable” in Microsoft’s pre-launch marketing of the product. The top and bottom of which appears to indicate that in the years (and I do mean years) in which Vista was delayed, sneak peeks of the operating system, which were known among the developer community as ‘Long Horn’, were dogged repeatedly by incompatibilities with hardware drivers, for everything from printers and faxes to cell phones and Web cams.\

The twisted part of all of this, is that bricks and mortar retailers, as you read this, are busily putting their massive marketing power behind media-wide advertising campaigns to convince you to buy something they knew years in advance wasn’t going to work properly for the vast majority of their own customers.

In my experience of this past week, I can honestly tell you that I tried and tried again to find something to like about the whole experiment. But the only way I can best sum up, is to underline and not for the last time, how relieved I am to finally come back to Apple Mac OS X.

Coming soon, a week with Ubuntu Linux. Wish me luck!

Sony Ericsson K800i Cybershot cell phone

My old Motorola RAZR didn’t have the best start in life. After just a week in my Dad’s back pocket, it somehow managed to get a bit of grit under the cover, which obscured the first line of text on the screen.

Thanks to my Dad’s original sense of humour, when I offered him a swap for my brand new Motorola PEBL (I didn’t like the girlie shape), he neglected to tell me this and ever since then, people were forever getting text messages off me which made little or no sense, as I had to use sheer guess work as to what I was writing in the first line, made even harder thanks to the simply awful implementation of predict-a-text which Motorola make nearly impossible to turn off.

Then, when I flew to the States, the change in air pressure was enough to force this little dot of grime under the plastic, down into the LCD display and everything took a turn for the even worse. I spent the entire trip using the Jedi force just to retrive numbers from the address book, and the least said about SMS texting the better. When the return journey rendered the entire bottom row of the screen a nasty spilt black, with squished crystal colours, the writing was on the wall for a change of handset.

I’m one of those people who likes to do my background checks when buying any new gadget and a close contender to the K800i was the Samsung U600, which has a similar sized screen, a 3.0 megapixel camera and boasts being the slimmest slide-up phone on the market. But I settled on the K800i thanks to it being essentially a Sony Cybershot camera, with a 3G cell phone built-in.

As a keen photographer I’ve been waiting for someone to take this approach, since the actual phone / SMS text part of the device is secondary to my needs, which (to be honest) anything with an address book and an actual phone could more than meet.

The large image resolution (2048×1536) in Fine mode is likely to get me snapping a lot more than carrying around my hefty Canon SLR everywhere I go, and the real flash and 9 shots at once function sounds like the sort of innovative approach to pocket photography some of the camera-only manufacturers could learn a lot from.

The built-in 66MB of memory might prove a limitation if you’re looking to leave your “proper” camera at home for a long trip or big night out, especially given that it’s easy to fill twice as much as that with just one shot on the sort of pro DSLR I am used to, but the Memory Stick Micro format is upgradable to 2GB for just £15 from mymemory.co.uk, which should extend the video recording time quite considerably too.

Of course, as is normal these days, the phone has an MP3 player, the down side being the Sony proprietary headphone connector. While the phone is unlikely to replace my iPod in-car, it would be nice to be able to carry music around with me that can be connected ad-hoc to a friend’s stereo system, for those unplanned occasions when I want to play something and just happen not to have my iPod with me, but it’s nice to see the full complement of Mac and PC compatible connectors, which should act as a work-around in most situations.

A big plus side, which I’d never thought of looking for in a sub-£150 phone before, is mobile blogging. The phone can send a text message to a blogger.com account for instant mobile photo sharing. Since blogger supports RSS, I can see me experimenting with micro-blogging, if only to see what all the fuss is about, though I already smell the suspect aroma of a passing fad; useful only to people with a busy social life, which if anything I actively avoid.

I can’t personally see the point in 3G video calling, but by all accounts the phone can handle it well, with it’s secondary user-facing camera and speaker phone.

Stay tuned for first impressions, once the man in the van drops mine off tomorrow!

Full CNet.co.uk technical review…

Boycott the murder Olympics

Whenever I think about China, I get a twinge in the back of my head; like there’s something in my DNA that intuitively knows they’ll bring about the end of the world, in my lifetime.