The Device

Fairly pretty to look at, it's light and about the same size as a phone. I can't help but feel they would have been better off making it fatter and shorter, but its curved edges means it fits into pockets nicely.

So, plug it in by USB and it's a 32GB flash drive with middling performance. Unplug it and switch it on and it becomes a wireless hotspot for accessing your content. You can then connect to this using up to three devices. It's designed with phones/tablets in...

Another silly early start today - and the ThinkWall on the UKTI stand is working perfectly as expected. As well as showing the tweets and photos being submitted, it has a ticker at the bottom showing the schedule of seminars - and these pop up full-screen as a ten minute warning too. Nifty.

So right next door to where we are exhibiting, Twonky is showing off their stuff. Rather topical for me as I was researching into UPnP/DLNA for a video I was doing for TechInStyle (the first ones came out today BTW - apparently I'm fat and annoying according to one comment!).

Twonky is basically a really good implementation of UPnP across all platforms. They have a server you can run on Windows/Linux and this also communicates with their website, giving you a cloud service for seeing what content you have, and where...

One of my biggest regrets as a technology journalist was not going out to MWC (Mobile World Congress). I figured at some point, I'd get the opportunity and this year was it.

ThinkWall has been growing from strength to strength, and thanks to the UKTI I'm going to be running ThinkWalls on their booth (you can see the bespoke design above), as well as at the UKTJPR party on Wednesday, showing relevant twitter streams to those events.

The whole ThinkWall system is configured to run through the cloud - so that in combination with LogMeIn, allows me to look after a whole host of walls from my Xoom tablet. So I won't be breaking my back lugging around a laptop!

It does feel strange having an exhibitors pass instead of press - but I am still intending on doing some coverage of anything unique I see (I...

Possibly the best thing I managed to do (and that says a lot) is do a cover version of "Rocket Man" by Elton John, but using alternative lyrics to become "Snow Man". It's chilled out and done on acoustic guitar. My lovely house mate James Looney did the guitar work.

The lyrics, for those want to be spared of my ever diminishing vocal skills, are as follows:

Got packed from snow last night, pretty tight
A bunch of kids, maybe twelve or ten
And I came to life, thanks to them
A carrot for a nose and a bowler hat
A scarf not...

I've been lecturing part-time at Ravensbourne College and being on the O2 - you have to use their O2's car park facilities. At £10 a day, I've started parking a 10 minute cycle away and flinging a bike in the back of the car. I managed to build myself a fixie out of spare...

It is now November and I still don't have my central heating turned on. This is the first time I've lived in a flat - and a poorly converted one at that (although very nice, and very big). Right now I'm getting enough heat from the flat below, and in some ways the flat above (think about it) that my flat is at a rather comfortable temperature. In fact - I'm actually getting a little too warm at night!

Granted -...

So the right piece finally started cutting in and out often enough that I had to do something about it. Anyone with a keen memory will remember me repairing these previously by attacking them with a scalpel, resoldering and then gluing together. It really wasn't the neatest of mods and as it turns out - could have been avoided because the unit can actually be opened up.

I apologise now for taking these photos on my phone. They looked fine on screen, but...

For those who own a pair of E4Cs - don't do it this way - instead...

So Ubuntu 11.10 came out this month and figured I'd have a play as I'd heard that Unity was seriously improved.

I was previously running 11.04 and the upgrade wouldn't work for me. Not only that, but it gave me an error message that didn't help me at all - merely that it couldn't find an upgrade path. No "see this log" or "these packages are causing the issues", instead "E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks". Mats Lindh offered up a solution to his problem which didn't work for me.

So I decided I may as well do a reinstall. One of the nice things about keeping most of my important stuff on my file server, and the rest in the cloud is that doing a reinstall is usually pretty painless.

However, like all good boys I did make a backup. I booted up to the Ubuntu USB stick, mounted my file server and...

The sound quality is very good, but the biggest disappointment is the delay - I can't listen to myself through the headphones whilst I'm singing because there is around a 240ms delay - by my trial and error calculations.

Another project I've been working on, was talking about doing a viral song - using the Avenue Q "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" as a base for the parody. So, whilst slightly bored with doing voiceover and wanting to test out the adapter - I did the first verse of the song in a couple of takes. The hardest...

A couple of weeks ago I was reading about reflow soldering, and was putting an order into Farnell. I picked a 1500W heat gun up for around £11 thinking that at some point I'd get to use it. I mentioned this Karl and as it turned out - he still had his laptop, so bought it around.

In hind sight - I probably should have watched more YouTube videos in advance - but I knew the principle and just went at it alone. I had a spare graphics card that was broken and decided to use this to experiment on - after all - we had no idea how long it would take for the solder to...

The biggest downside, is that now when I take my glasses off - my vision is the worst it's ever been! I can only assume, the past couple of years my brain and eyes have been compensating quite a bit, which they are no longer having to do (in fact - the first 2 days were hard work as my eyes adjusted).

The downside to that, is I'm finding riding quite tricky (not impossible) without my glasses, so I'm going to have to consider some contacts for...

I think Max speaks for all of us, when he says "Ho Ho Ho - Merry Christmas".

After hearing about my friend Rich Trenholm's surgery going so well, I started wondering if it might be for me. Somehow, I saw an advert for Optical Express, and put my details in for them to get in touch. I must admit, they went a little overboard - I got a *lot* of phone calls and being an 0870 number, when I missed the call, I wasn't exactly motivated to call them back, so I just waited for the next call, which thankfully wasn't too long.

Optical Express offered me a free consultation, and I thought...

So first, create a new file in /etc/init.d - I'll call mine SpodeVM. I personally do this in an terminal using nano, but you could use gEdit. Remember that you'll need root privileges to write to that folder, so "sudo nano /etc/init.d/SpodeVM".

Inside the file, you'll want the following. Change "spode" for the user that your VirtualBox VM is owned by, and change "My VM Name" for the...

The property has just been completely refurbished - brand new boiler, kitchen, carpets etc. It's got a nice little driveway and garage (currently renting one externally - so that's a money saver), garden and my office will be the biggest I've had to date!

It almost feels too nice a property. Somehow my furniture just won't feel good enough to be seen in it! I'm sure I'll find a way to smarten things up...

I'm going for a...

You can read the awards for yourself on their website. I'm currently using Virgin 50Mbit and it wins "Fastest Broadband" without a sweat. It's the only broadband I've ever had that gives you *more* than what they quote, rather than less. It's also nice to see a hat tip to Three having the best value mobile broadband - another company really trying to push broadband in Britain forward. BT winning an award for Innovation though? They have to be the least innovative company I can think of..

I see a fair few celebs whilst out and about at press events and very few of them do I ever bother to talk to. Top10 was an exception...

As per usual, available in every colour under the rainbow, at £15! Buy it, buy it, buy it!

The first thing I would say, is that my knee didn't fully start to feel "normal" again until after about a year. Then it frankly felt the strongest it's ever felt in years. Before the surgery, I was in constant pain and on an assortment of pain killers to keep the pain at bay. Although I still get occasional tendon pain now - it's 10000% times better - I take the occasional Diclofenac/Naproxen to keep any swelling down if it gets irritated.

The question I have to ask, and I still ask, is - was it the surgery, or simply the amount of time I took off the bike? Even after I started riding again, I kept...

The biggest problem I've been having is IO throughput - a common issue with shared VPS systems. I keep getting complaints from the server admin that our IO usage is too high whilst running JournoTwit - occasionally, it snowballs and the whole system just grinds to a complete halt.

What's annoying me - is that the only figure he quotes to me is IO Wait - not IO throughput. As far as I'm concerned - they aren't the same thing. IO Wait suggests...

Baxter, the newest edition to our cat family, at only 10 months old, was unfortunately put down today after a rather severe spinal injury. He went missing for two days and finally turned up at our back door, dragging himself along by his front paws.

As you can see from the X-ray, it was a pretty severe break to his spine. The chances of his spinal cord remaining intact after that are pretty slim. We still have no idea what actually happened - as other than the spinal break, he has no other injuries.

Baxter was comfortable in the end, and he's now gone to a better place (Hannah's garden...). We'll always remember him, I only wish we had more pictures like this...

We haven't done many indoor shows, and so I invested in some protective flooring from floorprotec. These came in 8x4 sheets, so I bought 24 of them and cut them all in half (took a while). Then using gaffa tape I created hinges, connecting 6 sheets at a time together, for a concertinaed section of flooring. Using 8 of these, we could quickly cover the area we wanted to, then simply gaffa tape the gaps!

This worked out really well, leaving no trace on the gym floor underneath. We had some great photos taken of us, which we put on our Facebook/Twitter pages - but this one was probably my...

As Dave is leaving Think Bikes, leaving me in charge - I decided a bit of a revamp was in order and had a new logo designed. This is what we came up with (in this image, we were experimenting with some different colours...).

Certainly it's a lot more lively than the current logo, which is thinkbikes.com in Tahoma But whilst we were there I mentioned I had an idea for a t-shirt. 5 minutes later, the design was sitting in front of me!

I spent a while researching various print on demand t-shirt companies and found that spreadshirt.co.uk had the best pricing...

It's pretty simple really - you are put in your own private booth where you strip off and take a shower. Then you put in some ear plugs (partly to block out any extra noises - but also to stop salts getting into your ear canal) - in my case, I also had to smear Vaseline over a large cut I have on my shin from a tumble I took a few days back on the Velo.

Once fully prepared - you step into one of these...

This tank contains about a 12-16" of water, mixed with Epsom salts. These...

I did love living in Tonbridge, and specifically, the house I was in was perfect – only a few minutes walk from the station, huge rooms, garage and garden and at a price I could easily afford. Living up to it was going to be tricky!

The main reason for leaving was so that my girlfriend of 16 months, Hannah, could commute to London at considerably lesser cost. Plus, with Dave leaving Think Bikes to me, I was no longer so tied to Kent.

Our original plan was Orpington, but after months of hunting, nothing came up that was close enough and cheap enough. Finally, we came across...