Hull Computer Science Twitter Feed

We now have an experimental Twitter feed for the department at Hull. This will be used for sending out messages as a supplement to the RSS news feed that we run internally. You can find it here:

http://twitter.com/HullCompSci

Since Twitter has an API I was thinking of writing a program that reads an RSS feed and tweets any item under 150 characters in length to twitter. This would make it a completely automatic extension to our message system. Does anyone know if this has been done already? Does anyone fancy doing it?

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/RobMiles

I'm not a very good twitterer (or is it twit?) to be honest, I have enough problems thinking of something to say in daily blog posts, but if you want to follow me you are more than welcome.

Voice from the Dark Side

Andy Sithers (who we call "The Dark Lord of the Sith" - no he doesn't think it is very funny either) has started a blog. Andy is a Microsoft Academic chap who is very clued up on the ways of Microsoft and is also a top bloke. Well worth a read.

One of his early posts brings great news. The Ultimate Steal is back. This puts a copy of Microsoft Office into your hot little hands for less than the cost of a video game. You can get all of it for 39 quid. Hence the name.

PlayTV

Went up town and bought a gadget. What are the chances? Sony have released their PlayTV add-on. This turns your PS3 into digital video recorder with two tuners. It works well, although it is a bit expensive at 69 quid. Some time back I got a complete recorder for around the same price. However, if you want to watch and record TV via your PS3 and you don't want to have to put another box under your telly then it is well worth a look.

The picture is good, although they don't seem to be doing the fancy upscaling thing that the PS3 does with DVDs, which makes them look really amazing and close to Blu-Ray in quality (which probably counts as a bit of an own goal really).

You can stream video off the PS3 onto a Playstation Portable over local WiFi and even configure your router to allow you to watch home telly using your PSP from anywhere in the world. Some time ago I had a thing called a Slingbox which did something similar with a home video signal, but that could target PCs rather than the PSP.

One other thing which is nice is that the system supports Digital Teletext too, which puts it one up on the Windows Media Centre (although it won't record all the episodes of a program automatically, which probably puts it one down again).

The only thing I really don't like is the way that the device (which is a rather ugly little box) connects to the USB cable on the front of the PS3, leaving a wire trailing across the front. The Xbox 360, rather cleverly, has a USB port at the back for connecting devices like this, which is a bit neater.

If you haven't got a video recorder, but you have a PS3, this is well worth a look.

Heading Home

Came home today. To the land of working networks and big monitors. I've not done much with computers, honest, and it has been nice. But I like coming back too.

A Walk in the Woods

Went for a walk in the woods today.

This is what you seen when you look down.

This is what you seen when you look up.