tomputer

The 2008 F1 season is almost upon us. For the next 9 months I’ll be spending every other Sunday afternoon shouting at the TV - don’t bother trying to call me during a Grand Prix, I won’t answer! So with the opening race in Melbourne less than a week away I’ve been gazing into the crystal ball to come up with my top 10 predictions for the upcoming season:

1. Ferrari and McLaren will again be dominant and will have a significant gap to the other teams (okay, I started with an easy one!).
2. Hamilton will not have the “difficult second year” that many have predicted and will again be fighting for the championship.
3. Raikkonen and Hamilton will eventually emerge as the only serious contenders for the title.
4. Williams will emerge as the next-best team, having overtaken Renault and BMW.
5. Rosberg will continue to improve and unless he is fighting for podiums by the end of the season, Frank Williams will lose him for 2009.
6. By mid-season Alonso will be wingeing about his team’s performance. This will be the trigger for him leaving Renault at the end of the year.
7. If McLaren manage to win at least one title, Ron Dennis will retire at the end of the season.
8. Barichello and Button will drive some great races that will go largely unnoticed as they’ll again be consigned to the midfield but they’ll make excuses that next year’s car will be better because it will benefit from the full influence of Ross Brawn. Same excuse just a different person to pin their hopes on.
9. Night races will get rave reviews from commentators and spectators but will be a complete waste of time for television viewers (the mass majority of the audience) who will hardly notice the difference under all those floodlights. Hardly environmentally friendly is it?
10. And the big question: Who’ll emerge on top by the time they reach Sao Paulo at the end of the season? Hamilton will take the driver’s title and Ferrari will take the constructor’s. Is that sitting on the fence?

Tags: F1, Ferrari, Formula1, Grand Prix, Hamilton, McLaren, predictions, Raikkonen

Intro
I’ve created a Chumby widget to act as a basic remote display for XBMC. I’ve been using it and reworking it over the last couple of weeks and I think it’s now in a state where I can make it available for others to try. It works by retreiving an RSS feed from the Xbox that contains a list of the next 5 tracks in the music playlist. If no music is playing, the RSS feed will be empty. To achieve this I’ve written a simple web page that sits on the Xbox and uses the XBMC API to retreive information about the current playlist. The widget also uses XBMC’s http API to provide basic controls to play, pause and skip tracks. This is my first attempt at using ActionScript so the functionality is fairly basic, but if others find it useful I may add more features, or release the sourcecode.

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Tags: Chumby, gadget, widget, xbmc, xbox

Testing an app for the Nokia N800 to publish directly to wordpress.

Tags: n800, wordpress

I’ve been monitoring the Chumby project since I first saw the device on an episode of Diggnation over a year ago… Kevin had been given one of the alpha prototypes at FooCamp and gave a quick description. I’ve been waiting since then for the device to get a public release - I guess that shows the power of product placement even though I’m sure no cash had changed hands for it to appear on the show. People who know me or have read my thoughts on this before will know that I think there’s a lot of potential for an “ambient” device that provides up-to-date information from the online world without the user having to be sat in front of a PC. I was disappointed with the Nabaztag because of limitations with the user interface, but eager to get my hands on a Chumby as it seemed far more advanced. The Chumby was originally pitched as a new take on clock-radio for the internet enabled 21st century but I think that description groslly undersells it (and at $179, it’s an epensive way to wake up in the morning).

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Tags: Chumby, diggnation, kevin rose, nabaztag

In early December I ordered a Nokia N800 internet tablet from Play.com for the bargain price of £150 (it was later reduced to £139 - I got a £20 refund - but it’s currently listed at £169. Play.com seemed to have trouble getting hold of stock as it took about 5 weeks to arrive but after our first few weeks together, read on for my first impressions.

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Tags: n800, nokia, rss