Some of these are a bit old because I’ve been holding on to them for a while.

• Nerd Overload is experienced by Pete over at Time is Short.
• Samtfell visits London’s film and comic-con.
• Senny talks about the voices in  your  head. I am the voice of my own God.
• Stormkeeper give is this months update for July. That’s how far behind I am.
• Im Rhythmus Bleiben can be heard coming from Igor’s Darken Corner
• Anna Black is the lanky hobo.
• Finally a  post not about a dead person from Jamie.
• Ed has this habit of really liking things he thought I’d otherwise dislike.
• The Insanity Of Reality tells an all too true story called Pond.
• Obsolete Gamer has  a look at  Monty Python inspired Amiga Classic MoonStone.
• TMI, michael is on the Reavis Ranch Trail (attempt 1)

I’ve still got loads of these outstanding, so more soon….

I’ve been so impressed my new HTC Desire I thought I would have a try at developing an application for it. I’ve not programmed anything for ages, so I thought it would be fun to give it a try. (This is completely unlike when I said I would do this for in Morphun on my Sony Ericsson T310 in 2003, which never came to anything)

Turns out it’s a bit of a pain in the arse to set up. First of all I had to download the Android SDK, then download the SDK platform. The SDK platform matches the Android firmwear type (e.g. 1.6, 2.1 etc). So If you want to develop for different phones with firmwares I need to download each one. It also requires the Java Development Kit (JDK) so I had to download this from the Sun/Oracle website.

After downloading and setting up all of this you can start your programming. However you have to run everything via a command line interface, and didn’t fancy doing it that way so I installed the Eclipse IDE and the Android Development Tools (ADT) Plugin for Eclipse.

So after installing everything and setting it all up, I’ve managed to get everything to get an emulated Android phone to say “Hello World” and it feels great! Stay tuned to Project Android for further updates.

This blog has had the eRemoval men in. It has moved from a server in a building in Manchester to slightly fancier server in the same building. The new fancy server is a Linux server and has lots of fancy new features such as multiple MySQL databases and lots and lots of Subdomains.

It took quiet a while for it to be shifted and there was a few hiccups, but all is up and running now and so It’s now safe to leave new comments.

New posts coming soon…

Time is passing, it’s now less than five years until I will hit forty years old. So he’s an update on what progress I’ve made over the last year towards 40 things to do before I’m 40.

Updated 40 things

• Have a piece of writing published - (10% Complete)

I’m marking this one as 10% Complete, as I’ve had an article on Obsolete Gamer posted. I have plans to continue writing for Obsolete Gamer, and to start writing for some other websites too.

• Learn to cook, properly. - (10% Complete)

I’ve started to cook the majority of my own meals, but they are only simple meals. I beginning to wonder, how I should define being able to ‘cook, properly’ properly.

• Sort out a proper diet, so I eat many different health foods - (100% Complete)

After a bit of research I finally got a diet sorted a few months back. I’m now eating healthy and making sure I get all my required dietary supplements.

• Have 15% or less body fat - (95% Complete)

Not long ago I posted about my Body Fat being measured at 15.5% which make me just short of my goal of 15%. You might also remember I abandoned a goal of 10% body fat as I thought it was overly optimistic goal. I think when I hit this goal, I’ll replace it with the 10% goal again.

• Read all of the BBC Top 100 reads - (20% Complete)

Twenty books read now, and I can’t say I really fancy reading many of the ones left, but I’ll keep plodding on.

• Join a Gym. - (100% Complete)

I also posted recently about joining the gym, so this one is complete.

That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll get some more of this completed before this time next year. Keep an on posts using the 40 things tag for further progress,

In lieu of a proper blog post have a look at my Sensible Soccer T-Shirt.

I have a new toy, and this time it’s the rather wonderful HTC desire.

It’s something I’ve been after for a while, so on my contractual renewal data, I headed off to my local 3 shop with the assumption the shop would give better service than ringing 3 customer services. I Advised them of the phone I wanted and the tariff. The cheapest tariff was actually 2 quid more expensive than other carriers (e.g. Vodafone) for this phone however I since I my contract wasn’t finished I thought that wasn’t an unreasonable price to pay.

The staff at the shop attempted to process my upgrade, but there was a problem with the computer system. I had to sit there for 30 minutes while they attempted to phone my order (and another customers) through to some internal helpline. After waiting thirty minutes (without the store offer anything like an apology for waiting of anything) I was told I couldn’t have the tariff I’d chosen and I would have to pay other 3 quid a month (making it now five quid more than their competitors) and again I wasn’t offered an apology for the stores mistake. Now five pound a month extra is a lot of money when you consider I’d be paying for the lifetime of the 24month contract. It actually costs more than buying out the remainder of my contact (which had about four months remaining on it) and getting the phone from Vodafone. So I left the store rather angry and without a new phone.

When I got home I give the 3 customer service line a ring to cancel my contract, so I could swap over the Vodafone. However the nice Gentleman I spoke to one the phone, did not want to let me leave 3 and offered me a rather good deal with a tariff that was actually 3 quid less than Vodafone’s and 8 quid less than what I was offered in store, and with a few extra things thrown in too (e.g. picture messages). So I decide to accept the offer and stay with 3, at least I don’t have to worry about getting a new number.

So the phone arrived last  Tuesday. I gave it a charge, and then gave it a go. It’s the first touch screen phone I’ve ever owned (my last phone Nokia E71 having a full screen keyboard) and it takes some getting use to, I’m still getting use to it now a week later. but the phone it self is awesome. It is more like a mini Linux PC than a phone. I am very impressed with how Android works and with how it manages contacts. It lets you merge contacts very easily pulling contact information from your phonebook, GMail contacts, Facebook and Flickr. So your contacts will have an email, phone number and profile picture (where available).

The ability to quickly install applications from the Android Market is very good too. You can even get Frodo (Commodore C64 emulator) for Android, as shown on the picture below.

I’m still playing with it and trying new applications all the time so expect more posts about it soon.

There was a period of time where I would sign up to all the social media websites just to check them out, but nowadays I don’t seem to have time to be one of these cool early adopter types any more. That being said I’ve been playing a couple of  sites, most people used these months ago. Here is what I thought.

Formspring is a questions and answers website. You set up a profile page, from which anyone can ask you questions either public or anonymously.  The questions and their given answers are then published on the your profile page or you can however choose to disallow anonymous questions, and have the ability to block selected people from asking further questions, even if the asker has remained anonymous.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. It seems to be mostly used for by people sending abuse anonymously (rather than actual questions) or people desperately wanting other people to ask them questions.

Foursquare on the other hand is great fun. It is a location-based social networking website and mobile phone application, but a better way would be to describe it as a game. Users “check-in” at venues using  GPS unabled mobile phone (using a device-specific application). They are then awarded points and sometimes “badges. If a user has checked-in to a venue on more days than anyone else in the past 60 day they will be crowned “Mayor” of that venue, until someone else earns the title by checking in more times than the previous mayor. You can add “Tips” to venues that other users can read, which serve as suggestions for great things to do, see or eat at the location.

What I think the genius part of this is, it behaves like an XBox or Playstation game by giving you achievements for doing tasks and unlocking things, but instead of being stuck in the house playing a console game, your are outside enjoying the real world. It certainly tricked me into going outside.

Obviously an application like this could have some Privacy Concerns, but you can set your privacy settings however you want and they default to a setting the lets no one other the ‘friends’ can view your location or where you have been.

So I’ve been a Gym member for 2 weeks and 2 days now.

I’ve signed up a for some Personal Trainer sessions at the Gym as there is an offer on these at the moment. The offer is, If I visit the Gym 20 times in my first 8 weeks, I will get these sessions for free. I’ve already visited eight times in just over two weeks.

Part of this Person Trainer session is getting a health check. The health check was quiet interesting, it turns out I’m in ok shape at the moment. You remember on the last post when I said I was going to focusing on my Body Fat Percentage. My Body Fat Goal on 40 things to do before I’m 40 is to get my body fat down to 15%. I’ve been measuring Body Fat using my cheap little body fat reader I’ve got. When I started the diet it was just over 25%. The week before I started the Gym the little body fat reader said I was down to just over 20%. However when I got my Body Fat measured properly during a health check at the gym, it was measured at a meagre 15.5%, which was a massive surprise. So I’ve almost inadvertently hit my Body fat goal for 40 things already.

The plan now, is to start putting on more weigh and build a bit of muscle. Lets see how that goes…

The diet has come to a major turning point.

I’m still losing about one lbs a week, making it a total of 25lbs lost in eight weeks, but rather continue on losing weight I think I’ve reached a point where I am happy with the weight I am now, and I want to focus on my Body Fat Percentage, getting below 15%. So I’m going to start adding a few things that have been missing from my diet back in, increase my Carb intake (but not by too much), but still cut out all the crap such as fast food, caffeine, alcohol and fizzy pop except maybe on special occasions.

However, the big news is that yesterday, I took the big step that I’ve been talking about for the past five years and joined a proper Gym. I finally bit the bullet and paid out for a full years Gym membership. Now I’ve spent that money, I will not waste it by giving up after a few weeks. I’ve got a session with a personal trainer tonight to work out a programme for me, and after that hopefully I’ll be able to work out at least two or three times a week.

Joining the Gym also has the added bonus helping me catch up with my Podcast backlog, as I find Podcasts the perfect distraction while I’m working out.

This post just broke. I don’t know why, but it has. Oh, well. Never mind.