FoxBoom!

Today’s XKCD comic, “Pod Bay Doors”, is a triumph.

Damn… I’ve just been reminded that my Skype credit’s gonna expire in 30 days.

Expect random phonecalls. Especially at inconvenient times if you’re in the States.

Ashley Highfield is the BBC’s Director of Future Media & Technology, and his blog is awesome in its frankness.

In a post about the difficulties of getting protected media into the living room:

“Mentioning this to a very tech savvy colleague this morning, he replied that he downloaded programmes through BBC iPlayer, stripped the DRM (hence his anonymity!), re-encoded the file, burned it to DVD from his PC, then took it to his DVD player connected to his TV in the lounge.” [Ashley Highfield, “IP to TV: How?”

The blog also confirms that the BBC wanted to get the iPlayer onto the Xbox 360 but it didn’t work out, and are interested in getting content on the new Apple TV — now that it handles rentals, and not just lifetime purchases. But at least I can look forward to iPlayer on the Virgin Media television platform.

I’m really interested in these new television distribution models. Not least of which because my 40″ TV still doesn’t actually pick up any broadcasts, and it’s gonna be so much easier for me to plug in some kind of IP TV than to get an aerial fitted.

I have a new public key for 2008.

The teaser trailer for the new Star Trek movie has hit the Internet via a mobile phone. You see that headline, “Star Trek Trailer Will Hurt Your Head”? They mean it. Wait for the official HD upload next week, or make do with this still of the Enterprise’s construction.

Speaking of J.J. Abrams, you lucks sods in the States got Cloverfield today. Man, I’ve been looking forward to this one for so long, but I’ve got to hang on for a couple more weeks.

I just followed these instructions to create a webclip icon for foxboom.com when you add the site to your iPhone/iPod Touch home screen. Cool!

On Flickr’s Places page for Plymouth at lunchtime, I was a featured photographer!

That was a bit of excitement.

For as long as I can remember Google being around, it’s been my favourite search engine. When I got my iPhone, I left its default engine to be just that.

This morning, whilst enduring an ad break during Deep Space Nine, I browsed through the settings on my phone, and found the “default search engine” page. Just for fun, I hit Yahoo!, and gave it a whirl.

For comparison, this is what a search for “Jon Eccleston” looks like in Google:

…and here’s the same search in Yahoo:

Wow! Look at that! Yahoo! has formatted the results for the iPhone, giving them a nice big, readable font, with iPhone-like list item separators.

Google, despite having the more accurate results (though I don’t mind my photo gallery being the top match) has to be zoomed to be useable. Yahoo! is useable as soon as it loads, and it looks great to boot.

Plus, you can’t tell from the photos, but Yahoo! lists the first few web matches, then also includes a few image matches, and any matching photos from Flickr. There’s a whole variety of results, presented in one simple, easy to read list.

Yahoo! oneSearch FTW!

JamBase has the world premiere for The Polyphonic Spree’s “We Crawl” music video. It’s awesome!

The last song I bought from iTunes was back in July 2007. My credit card expired, so I put the new one in and…

“Payment processing is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

I’ve been trying again and trying again for months. I’ve been trying my other credit card, and my debit card for months.

I don’t know why it took me months to write to Apple Support, but last night I eventually did… and they told me it was my bank’s fault. But all those cards work just fine anywhere else online or in retail…

I’m sick to fucking death of Apple Support telling me “.mac is fine, it’s just you” or “iTunes is fine, it’s just you”.

This is the company I had to take to court because their support team stole my iPod. This is the company whose support team had to repair my Macbook Pro three times because they didn’t test it before returning it. This is the company whose online backup service wouldn’t let me restore my backups! And now, the company I’ve been evangelising for years won’t help me buy from their music store.

They build great hardware, but so help me, Apple’s service and support really pisses me off.

I’m such a meme whore.

More things to love if they happened: “Penny Lane” covered by The Polyphonic Spree.

Today, I have been mostly eating — norovirus!

And: I found out this lunchtime that this guy I’ve been fawning over for, like, months, has, like, totally already got a boyfriend. I feel quite angry and slightly used.

And: tonight, Swolf cooked the best chicken I’ve ever eaten. Two large chicken breasts dusted in paprika and wrapped in bacon, then wrapped in foil and stuck in the oven at 200c for 30 minutes.

With thanks to Google Apps For My Domain, my Jabber ID is now the same as my e-mail address, “jon@foxboom.com”.

Happy New Year, mailbox-heads!