Running very behind on getting the new project up and running. The domain is registered, wordpress all set up and working.

Still need to get the template finished and the first version of the project running.

Where do people find the time for all these things outside of work/family?

Google Docs goes offline and lets you publish blog posts.

I had no idea, until today, that you could use Google Docs to publish blog posts. This is actually a test posting to see how well it work with text and images.

So here is the pic of me I use for avatars etc.

Really looking forward to getting access to the offline version of Google Docs as announced today. You already have RSS access offline. I wonder which will be next, Calendar or Gmail?

Not had time to do any updates here in a while. Been working on a new project with my wife that is due to launch in the next two to three months. Exciting stuff.

Details of the project and the official launch date will follow soon.

Well it’s been over a week and I have had no reply from the customer services people at Parallels.

The two questions I asked them were as follows:

When you add the standard product to your shopping cart it also lists “Extended Download for Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac [300134581] (12 months) “. This costs £3.94

Does this mean you have to pay extra for the ability to redownload the software after your first purchase? If so why does it only last a year? Surely once you have purchased the software and obtained a license key, you should be able to download it as many times as you like. I would assume you could just download the trial and activate it. So what is this charge for?

The second question was why they were charging VAT at 19% when we in the UK pay 17.5%? It’s possible that they are selling it from another EU country that has a higher rate of VAT and we are liable to pay it. If that is true there is no mention on their site of this and as they didn’t reply to my email it looks like I will never know.

I have been happy using the VMware products for years and it looks like I will be continuing to use them. Parallels works fine. I have no complaints about the actual product but I am not going to give money a company that doesn’t reply to a simple pre-sales email. Not exactly good marketing in my opinion.

** Updated **

I have just found this on the FAQ page:

What is Extended Download Service?
Signing up Extended Download Service means that after you purchase our product, we’ll keep a copy of your program for ONE FULL YEAR. If you need to reinstall your Parallels product, you will be able to download it again for free.

What?????  You limit people to one download?  So if their hard drive crashes and they didn’t back up the install file they have to pay for it again? Yeah - not gonna happen.

While checking through my web stats today I just noticed I had my first visitor using an iphone.

How exciting!

Have you ever had to create a screencast while using Linux?

What I thought was going to be the nightmare task of finding usable software to do this actually turned out to be incredibly easy. After a few quick Googles I settled on recordMyDesktop which seemed very lightweight but quite powerful. It did, in fact, capture screencasts and save them in the ogg format. A quick pass through VLC to reencode them and I had them in a format usable for a standard Windows machine to play. This is a far as I could go though. There is no way of adding text or graphics to the screens that you have captured.

A bit more Googling brought me to Wink. Wink is dedicated Tutorial and Presentation creation software and does exactly what I needed. You choose which window or area of the screen to capture, and away you go. Once captured you are free to edit the screencast, add titles, pause the show to add back/next buttons, or just add titles to the whole screencast.

Output formats are flash (.swf) or standalone .exe for windows users. I think you can publish to other formats too but haven’t had time to look through all the options just yet.

Learning how to use it took less than twenty minutes and within an hour I had my first screencast all saved, edited and published to some users to test.

Overall a very impressive bit of free software.

I was looking at purchasing a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac today. I had used the 30 day test version and it appeared to fit my needs.

Before purchasing I emailed a couple of questions to their pre-sales team. If I am right, they have some very strange agreements for people to accept.

If I am wrong then all is fine. If not it’s VMware fusion for me.

A few days ago I posted saying that I was in two minds about local tagging as the tags didn’t get copied up to various online services.

Well, today I noticed that an updated Picasa Uploader that was released last October now adds the ability for you to duplicate iPhoto tags (or keywords as they call them) into Picasa Web Albums.

I tested it out and it works very well. Nice one Google.

With the updated Apple TV more and more people are going to want to start watching TV/films via the Internet rather than using traditional media such as DVD.

I even attached an older, G4 powered, mac mini to my TV this weekend and have been copying over ripped DVDs to it so I can get the boxes out of my living room.

Just out of curiosity I went to the Apple store today to have a look at the price of UK TV shows. Let’s just say I was not impressed with what I found.

As an example, let’s take The West Wing season 2. Amazon has the DVDs for £17.97 while the Apple iTunes store has the same series for a whopping £31.99, which is just madness.

Why does Apple insist on charging such ludicrous prices? I can understand putting a premium on their hardware but downloads of a TV show?

If they want people to stop buying physical media and trust them to deliver good quality content, the first thing they have to do is make sure that the pricing of their downloads reflects real world pricing.

I’ve been using Nokia’s flagship n95 for a few months now and up until recently I have been using it with a bluetooth headset while in the car.

About two weeks ago my old, and up till now trustworthy, Motorola headset finally gave in and decided to hold no more than 20-30 minutes worth of charge. At the same time my wife was looking at getting a cheap sat nav unit and an MP3 player to use in her car. The obvious answer for me was to give her my ipod nano and my old sat nav and to use the n95 for both of these tasks in may car.

The first thing I had to do was get a universal car kit for the n95. All it needed to to was hold the phone. I managed to pick one up on Amazon for about £5 including shipping. Not bad at all.

I already had a decent FM transmitter so my setup was complete.

Having used my old ipod with the transmitter I was fully aware of the quality and what to expect. What I did forget is that once you plug headphones, or in this case the transmitter, into the n95 it takes over all of the audio.

It was great using the n95 as my mp3 player, synced with itunes using the excellent synctunes app. What I didn’t expect was that when the n95 was in sat nav mode that the audio would come through the FM transmitter too. The result was excellent. Instead of having to listen closely in case the sat nav gave me directions when a loud bit of music was playing, the sat nav spoke directly over the music. Very cool indeed.

Now for the best part. If a call comes in while you have the transmitter attached, the callers voice is piped through your speakers too. So it turns the transmitter/car cradle into a fully working car kit for your phone.

So rather than looking for a new bluetooth headset I am just working with my cheap cradle and transmitter. You do lose the privacy element of taking calls with a headset but I’ll take full handsfree kit over a BT headset any day.