I’ve previously had one or two ideas put to me for iPhone software, and also have thought of some myself. Objective-C looks like a bit of a pain in the backside to learn, but challenges are fun! The only obstacle left in my way is Apples decision to only let you run their iPhone development software on their own OS.

This leaves me with a couple of options. Firstly, I could put together a hackintosh on some old hardware, providing I’ve got some hardware lying around that it will work with! The only downside of trying that approach is that this is likely to happen. The other option is to buy one, I’ve been having a look at Mac Minis, which would probably cost somewhere in the region of £600 with student discount.

I don’t know if I’m ready to give up my Mac-hater stance and actually buy one, but I’m tempted…

The feature that finally sold it for me is the inclusion of your existing music library within Spotify. As someone with a fairly large music collection built up and organised over many years, it would have been a horrific task to transfer everything across from iTunes into Spotify, but thankfully the new version makes this extremely easy to do, albeit with a few issues with tracks being lost in the process. I’ve noticed that as soon as tracks are imported into Spotify, it queries Gracenote CDDB to try and find the best information possible, however this does not play very nicely when iTunes is trying to organise your music for you, since I’m a fan of having my music sorted into folders automatically!

As an iPhone owner, I obviously want to take some music with me on the go, and my main gripe with having Spotify as a primary music store is the lack of ability to easily sync across to my phone. Although Spotify released this a while ago, I never really had chance to play with their iPhone app, but again – I’m impressed! The wireless sync is brilliant for me, as I hate iTunes tying up my phone for ages at a time to update my library (I download quite a lot of music, which I inevitably want on my phone straight away, at least to start with). As soon as iPhone OS 4.0 drops this summer, and Spotify supports background playing – I’ll be resigning the iPod application to far far down in my pages of apps! However, having to remember to start the Spotify app when you get home could be a bit of an issue, I don’t know if iPhone 4.0 will support anything to allow Spotify to download in the background – but we shall see.

The other new feature of this latest Spotify update is the ability to link back to your Facebook account, giving a whole new depth of social networking with regards to music. I’m happy that Spotify didn’t try to create their own network, but decided to tie it in with what is probably the one website everyone uses! The ability to have friends suggest tracks and share playlists right from within the Spotify application is a brilliant (but rather open to abuse – how many people have you rickrolled already?!!) feature. I’m amazed someone else (Apple?) didn’t come to the market with this feature first!

One major feature I think is missing is the lack of support for podcast downloading within Spotify. I know it’s not really what they set out to do, but they’re clearly going after iTunes with all these new features, and quite a few people I know do like having podcasts downloaded automatically, and transferring to their phone/media device for playing on the move. I really hope this one comes along soon, as I’ll then have no need to carry on syncing my phone with iTunes on a regular basis, instead relying on Spotify syncing over the air whenever I’m at home and the app is running.

All in all, I’m very happy with my subscription – money well spent. However, I think I’ll probably wait until the iPhone update before renewing my subscription so that I can make full use of its features. Well done Spotify – you’ve earned yourself another happy customer!

This means I’ll be jetting off to Sweden next summer for 2 weeks of sleep deprivation and hard work, but hopefully will get a good laugh out of it!

Waiting to get the various forms and information though (should be waiting for me by the time I get home), and now really looking forward to the meetup weekend in July with the rest of the UK IST team, should be an awesome weekend.

You can download the podcast by visiting the Tech 107 website or by using the iTunes store.

Install was a breeze, OS booted fine first time, all drivers found and installed by Windows Update – apart from one…

Seems I was stuck with the 640×480 VGA resolution driver, Intel doesn’t think their 8XXGM series drivers work well with 7. Never fear – a bit of Googling revealed this site: http://www.groundstate.net/855GMWin7.html, which contains instructions for tricking 7 into installing the old drivers! Result! Although Seb may have had a slight point on this weeks Tech 107 (episode 3) about Macs being easier due to them not needing separate driver install. Ah well.

So – I’m now officially off Linux and 100% Windows again. Lets see how long it lasts this time!

The show goes out live on Purple Radio every Tuesday at 1pm, with a podcast available on our website (when Seb gets round to posting it!). You can listen now to episodes #1 and #2.

Hopefully this should make it a bit easier to browse around, and will definitely make it a lot easier for me to maintain!

I’ve tried to redirect all old links where possible, and for the time being the original site can be accessed here.

As a poor student, I’m always on the lookout for ways of making cheap alcohol more appealing to the palate. With a house party approaching, and wallets thin as usual, my housemates and myself decided to experiment with Tesco Value Vodka and Skittles. The recipe (as one would imagine) is ridiculously simple – you stick a load of Skittles into the vodka, let them dissolve, and then drink it.

To get the best flavour, we found that there were enough of each colour Skittles in 5 large bags. To begin with, simply separate the Skittles into the different colours (trying not to eat too many!), and drop them into a bottle of vodka (we used the 90cl Tesco Value). Shake vigorously, and then leave overnight to dissolve – the result should look something like this:

Filtering the sediment from the bottom of the bottle is a rather tedious process – made much easier if you have spare bottles and funnels lying around the house. I have it on good authority that a folded piece of kitchen paper makes a good filter, however we splashed out and a used a mixture of coffee filters, and proper chemical filters ‘acquired’ from the university chemistry labs.

The filtering process took us several hours, since each funnel would only hold a small amount of the mixture at a time. It’s important not to rush this stage, as getting sediment into the final drink does not look particularly attractive! That said – the end product will never be completely clear, however it is worth filtering 2 or 3 times until the worst has been removed.

Your Skittles vodka is ready to consume! Be warned – it is very easy to drink this stuff neat without tasting the vodka. Enjoy at your own peril, or mix with lemonade to save on the hangover.

The assignment set for this term was to create a wind turbine…

Above is what I created! Obviously you cannot see here, but the blades move round the appropriate axis, and the entire head of the turbine rotates around the Y-axis when you click on the mast. Pretty impressive – huh?! I didn’t think so either! If, for whatever reason, you do think it’s impressive – you may download the .jar file here. It will need Java3D and possibly some other stuff installed to run.

The main thing I learnt doing this was how much of a pain J3D really is – it’s a completely obsolete extension of Java that doesn’t really have much use, apart from for making simple animations such as this one. I can’t think of anyone who would use Java to make a serious 3D game, the processing power just isn’t there to allow decent use of physics, lighting or anything else essential to make an immersive environment. For example, when I was trying to make the turbine cast a shadow on its environment, I found it wasn’t just as simple as allowing the light source to throw a shadow onto the grass object – oh no – I had to calculate the exact shape that the shadow would be, based on the position of the light relative to the turbine, then draw it manually to the floor. As you can imagine, this would be a huge task – and lets not even get started on running this 40+ times a second to get the moving blades, or even considering the opacity of the shadow in different places, or the fact that multiple light sources exist, or that the turbine would shadow itself in parts…

I’ve used programs before (GameMaker stirs a memory?) that will do all that for you in 2 or 3 lines of code, however in J3D I was looking at separate classes, and 2 or 3 times the existing code I had to make the turbine work. No thanks, I’ll just pretend it was a very bright day!

I’m quite glad I’m rid of J3D now – I’ll be even happier when I’m rid of Java completely. I’d be really happy if I never had to see a wind turbine ever again… but they had to go and drop that into our Software Engineering project as well. More to follow on that…

Over the last 3 months, I’ve watched said list grow and grow as my department shoved more and more assignment deadlines towards me, and watched the things I really want to do get moved gradually towards the bottom. This term has been a rather bumpy ride in terms of deadlines, assignments and exams – and I’m told it’s downhill from here! I’ll write some follow up posts soon showing off what I’ve achieved in creating recently (I’m actually proud of some of it!).

The happiest moment of my life occurred last week, when said list of ‘essentials’ finally reached zero, when the final assignment had been sent to the abyss that is known as ‘DUO’, and the end of term benchtest was over. I’m told that after spending a night out marking this occasion, I was heard celebrating in my room… Which involves me yelling a lot, before your minds jumped elsewhere!

Anyway – I get home, having promised myself a fortnight to enjoy Christmas before getting stuck down to work, and I find myself unable to even get started on that list of ‘want to do’ items. Congratulations to the CompSci department – they’ve killed my work ethic even for things that I enjoy!