The Artesea

For those who took part here are the answers to the quiz:

1. Chris Hoy
2. Fern Cotton
3. John Barrowman
4. Rachel Rice
5. Lily Allen
6. Chris Martin
7. Heath Ledger
8. Barack Obama
9. Lewis Hamilton
10. Peter Kay
11. Jeremy Clarkson
12. Paul Newman
13. Heather Mills
14. Kelly Osbourne
15. Tom Chambers
16. Katie Price
17. Boris Johnston
18. Davina McCall
19. Usain Bolt
20. (Robyn) Rihanna (Fenty)
21. Carol Vorderman
22. Melissa Joan Hart
23. Russell Brand
24. Robert Peston
25. Harrison Ford
26. Guy Richie
27. George Sampson
28. Fernando Torres
29. Paris Hilton
30. David Walliams
31. Judi Dench
32. Naomi Campbell
33. Miley Cyrus
34. Andy Abraham
35. Ian Smith
36. Seth Rogen
37. Laura Robson
38. Alexandra Burke
39. Alistair Darling
40. Rebecca Adlington
41. Jamie Oliver
42. Fiona Phillips
43. Luiz Felipe Scolari
44. Joe Swash
45. Amy Winehouse
46. Peaches Geldof
47. Jason Donovan
48. Gordon Ramsay
49. John Sergeant
50. Tina Fey

Congratulations to Ross Pepper who managed to get 47/50 correct.

I’ll be counting up the scores tomorrow evening of my Picture Quiz of 2008, so if you still want to have a go better hurry up.

For many years at Christmas Mum’s side of the family would get together and in the evening we would play Nana’s Picture Quiz of the Year. It would take hours as we only had one copy of each page and it had to be shared around. By the end of the night if any of the teams had achieved 80% they did well.

This year, I’ve decided to do the quiz and have made a nice PDF version which you can either print out or just view on your PC.

There are 50 “celebrities” to be named and unless asked otherwise you are to give the full name of the main person in the picture, not their character name.

If you want to be scored, please complete your answers in an email to quiz@artesea.co.uk (please don’t leave answers in the comments!), with the picture number and the name eg
1. Michael Jackson
2. George Bush
…..
50. Wayne Rooney
Winners and all the answers will be announced after Christmas

DOWNLOAD

Thanks to the Elders of the Internet I can now bring you a video of the internet. (sorry no audio)

As a non-smoker I was rather pleased with the ban on smoking in pubs. It made my life a lot nicer when I went out in the evenings. However the news that Tobacco displays set to be banned is just plain stupid.
I’ve never smoked, but that’s not to say I’ve never purchased a pack of cigarettes. And the one thing that I do know is that I can spend five minutes going “A pack of Rothmans”, “The blue and red ones”, “Up a bit”, “No to the right”, “Just a bit higher”, “20s not 10s” and fingers waving over the shop.
If they are going to be under the counter it’s going to be a lot harder.

When I first started blogging I used Haloscan to manage my comments instead of Blogger. This was because Blogger had only just introduced comments and Haloscan had a ton of features.
After a while I discovered that I was helping out a lot on the forum, and soon after I became a moderator and got a free premium account.
When I finally moved from Blogger to WordPress I decided to stay with Haloscan for the comments, however today I finally moved on.
There are several reasons. Haloscan was “sold” sometime ago, and the new owners just weren’t the same as Jeevan. I’ve also been running LibDemVoice and noticed that the built in WordPress comment system isn’t too bad (although still more spam than Haloscan which was around 0.001%). And with WP2.7 around the corner I might even play about with having threaded comments.

It’s been a good four years and I wish the new owners the best with running the site.

…content to the right, here I am, stuck waiting for the page to load as you’ve got some Javascript widget which takes forever to load and I give up reading your site.
It’s also really bad when trying to read your blog on a mobile* as you have to scroll past lines of links to blogs that I don’t care about just to read the punchline.
So if you are a blogger and are looking for a new template, make sure the sidebar is on the right and if you do insist on it being on the left, use CSS to ensure that the blog post appears in the HTML first.

*slight lie, with my new fancy phone webpages look the same as if they were on a PC but my wife still has the problem.

Yesterday whilst driving around town my brakes started playing up.
So I drove straight to the nearest garage which was open on a Sunday, the KwitFit on Newark Road.
I arrived just after 3 and the sign on the wall said they closed at 4.
Speaking to the man inside the conversation went something like this.

Me: I think my brakes are faulty.
KF: What’s the problem?
Me: The brake peddle is different and the handbrake is going up much higher?
KF: Hmmm… problem is I close in 25 minutes and if I take the brake pads off and they fall apart….
Me: I’m in no rush, don’t really fancy driving the car.
KF: You can bring it in tomorrow, we open at 8.30
(I start work at 8am)
Me: Any chance I can just leave the car here.
KF: Hmmm…. Insurance… Already have some cars… Hmmmm…… You “could” leave it outside (looks suggest that this isn’t actually an option).
Me: Well I really don’t want to be driving tomorrow morning, the forcast isn’t great for driving.
KF: (more looks)

In the end I drove home, and parked the car, at which point the brakes just gave up.
With customer service like this I’m not going anywhere near Kwit-Fit again.

Wow, my second blog post in as many days.

On Friday night the David, Estelle the misses and me went to watch the Zutons at the Lincoln Engine Shed.
Whilst at best I recognised around 7 of their songs (really should have listened to their albums before going), it was a great night.

The highlight was the encore where they just jammed for around 10 minutes including a great drum solo.

If you get the chance they are great live, and if you live near Lincoln and haven’t been to the Engine Shed you should. It’s one of the best venues I’ve been to.

7/10

Edit: 11/12/2008 The BBC have annouced that the X1 is now supported, however it won’t run over Vodafone at the mo.

Since the BBC launched the iPlayer for the N96 I knew it wouldn’t be too long until it would be available for other phones. However I can’t wait, so spent today looking for methods in getting my X1 to stream the shows.
I managed to extract the RTSP stream of Buzzcocks and successfully got that working on my phone. My next step was to find a way that didn’t involve me using my PC opening a collection of random XML files in order, to then email a link to my phone.

Several hours of coding and I managed to strip out the opening the files on the PC to a simple web script, however I still needed the 8 letter/number code for the episode to be parsed to the page.
Then when looking at the BBC source I noticed something. They now support the Samsung I900 a Windows Mobile device.
The method for checking if your phone is a Samsung, a simple User-Agent check.

Knowing how to modify the User-Agent in Opera on my X1 I placed the code need to pass the check and BINGO my phone now loads the BBC page and plays the shows.

These are the steps for an X1i Vodafone UK Branded
Run Opera
In the address bar enter opera:config (no http://)
Scroll down to User Prefs and click
Scroll down to Custom User-Agent and at the end of the pre-filled text add sgh-i900
Scroll down some more and press Save. You will get a prompt which suggests you may need to reset the phone, but for this you don’t.

Now point your browser to http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/ and enjoy.

If on your phone the Custom User-Agent is blank, try visiting something like whatsmyuseragent.com copying the User-Agent which your phone is currently displaying and then add sgh-i900 to the end.

WARNING: Please only use whilst on WIFI. I accept no responsibility for you running up HUGE bills due to large data downloads. Even if you have an “unlimited” add-on, check with your network for their Fair Usage (Vodafone’s is 500mb) as you can quickly exceed it watching TV on your mobile!

The quality isn’t exactly great on a WVGA screen as it’s been built for the Nokia N96. According to beebhack these are the specs.

Access Method: RTSP streaming
Video Codec: H.264
Video Resolution: 320 x 176
Video Bitrate: 128 kbps
Audio Codec: AAC
Audio Bitrate: 64 kbps
Overall Bitrate: 192 kbps

ps if you get a BBC 502 error, don’t worry. Looks like they are playing about with the site themselves. Just try again later.