Life took an unexpected turn for the ‘rather busier than I was before’ tangent in recent weeks, leaving little time to attend to my little corner of the Internet. Lots has happened since my last entry back in late October 2009, I’ll spare you the long-winded details!

Look out for more irreverant babbling very soon!

Over the past few days (rather, when I have had the time/energy/will) I have made a few changes to the site template (if you have never scrolled to the very bottom of the page before, you will not know this site uses a self-modified version of the excellent Journalist Wordpress theme).

If you take a look down the right hand side of the page layout you will find I have made a few text-based changes and also added a few external links. Before anyone waves a handkerchief in my face, no, none of the links are referrals in an attempt to make money from the site’s five minutes of popularity so do feel free to click away minus malice. I’ll be brief in my explanation of each new external link I promise!

Giftbox Wishlist
How often have you been (not ungrateful I hope) a bit disappointed with receiving a gift that has had zero thought put in to it with regards to the gift-giver having a clue about what you enjoy? “I just don’t have a clue what to get him/her” are the typical words to come out of the mouths of unprepared gift givers. Perhaps you are one of these people too?

I stumbled across Giftbox a few weeks ago, it suited my needs perfectly as not only can you create public wishlists to give hints to family and friends, but you can avoid being unprepared too and manage all the important dates on your annual calendar so you don’t forget what occasions have been or are upcoming. My favourite feature though is being able to keep track of what gifts you have given and to whom. This way you can make sure you don’t fall foul of ‘repeat gift giving’. All together Giftbox is a great site that does exactly what it says on the tin.

If you are curious and want to check out my (somewhat fanciful) wishlist, you can check it out by clicking the link.

Goodreads
The Goodreads website is a popular social networking site for bookworms. Being a bit of a book lover myself, you can click the link which will take you to my Goodreads profile page. Here you may see a list of books I have read, am currently reading and wish to read in future. You can also read and write reviews and comment on many books of virtually every imaginable type.

Take a look at my Goodreads page and maybe sign up yourself!

Backlogger
A great website for video game addicts. I’m actually not quite the hardcore gamer I used to be. These days I like to play the odd game on my Nintendo DS but video games don’t quite tug at my emotions the way they used to in my early to late teenage years. I signed up to Backlogger so I can keep a progress check on all the games I am playing and compare my efforts against those of other players.

Backlogger offers a free forum signature so you may display your catalog across the web. You can see what I am playing by looking at the image below. Want to see what I am playing on my Nintendo DS? Click the link to be nosey!

YouTube Channel
Occasionally I make videos for instructional or demonstration purposes. I may move in to making video reviews and/or features in future. I upload my videos to YouTube, to find all my videos in one useful place you may visit the Stuff I Wrote YouTube channel.

Want to see what you can watch right now? Have a look at the channel page on YouTube.

I’ve toyed with pod/video casting before albeit rather whimsically. With a fresh outlook and a renewed sense of joy and vigor I decided to crank things up a notch and introduce occasional videos to this here little website.

I have embedded my first YouTube video below (think before you click, you may have nightmares or die of terminal boredom after clicking play).  Not being a big fan of YouTube due to the poor video quality often delivered to my poor eyes, I have taken a stance of only creating and uploading high quality video. Opening and closing title cards were created using Paint.NET and hopefully you will agree convey the branding of the website over to my video content.

This first video gives you a quick tour of the site and gives you a little more insight as to what this site is all about. Please feel free to comment or send me an email, I would appreciate your feedback!

You can find future videos I post right here on the blog or visit my YouTube Channel for more information.

I don’t even need to confess, the date stamp says it all, I’ve not updated this site in forever. I apologize.

However upon embarking upon such a monumental feat as to write a new blog entry, I decided to couple it with a site makeover. I felt the old design wasn’t working out so I went for a different theme (plus my ever-ongoing tweaks) that I feel is much better suited and easier to use.

So what has been going on for all this time? Well, offline it’s been a very busy 5 or so weeks. I haven’t even had time to put any effort in to the music project at all, that has ground to a complete halt. Although with the schedule looking rather lighter in the coming weeks I should have a bit more time to dedicate to it.

I recently moved in to the world of the netbook by purchasing an Acer Aspire One. Would you believe it runs Windows 7 Ultimate astonishingly well? Windows 7 aside, the netbook and a copy of Notepad++ should provide ample opportunities to scribe new entries whilst on the go (or while the good lady is using this notebook to look at photos on social-networking websites).

I’m a keen follower of human rights issues, especially when it involves freedom of speech and privacy issues. I am closely following an issue close to home where a local ISP is looking to implement Deep Packet Inspection technology. The general public have been asked to provide input on the matter and I intend to submit my comments soon on the matter.

All of this should pack my schedule up quite nicely for the foreseeable!

In case you actually visited this site at some point within the last 24hrs, this quick test post is just to let you know the site is slowly making it’s way back online after a hack attack.

I cannot pinpoint the exact cause of the problem but after a extensive research I found I was not alone in my suffering. Other Wordpress users had suffered the exact same fate. Some nasty so-and-so has been exploiting a Wordpress, or possibly Filezilla bug and posting IFRAME code across random pages of blogs.

Needless to say I took stock of the situation and ran, taking the decision to start fresh seeing as I had backups of my data. With the site still in it’s infancy I have the luxury of starting fresh. Some may not be so lucky, I feel for you.

I’ve taken appropriate action on the security side of things too so hopefully this will not happen again. Hopefully the exploit will be covered up soon enough (whatever it is that is found to be the problem).

For now, please bare with me as I get the site back up and running.

A fair æon or two ago I would spend many an hour making music. A minor amount of success was attained as I was awarded Electronic Artist Of The Month by Yahoo! and Real for some pieces I wrote earlier on this decade. I also managed to get one of my pieces reviewed in (now defunct) MP3 Magazine which was a fantastic personal achievement considering I never really promoted any of my stuff on my old Besonic account! It’s been a couple of years now since I have written anything new but I’ve got a taste for it again and am starting toying with ‘beats and pieces’ (sigh!) in the aims of putting together some new material.

As I am living abroad right now and don’t have my full quota of equipment to hand I am looking in to some alternative packages to put simple music together, just to get the creative juices flowing again. One of my favourite packages is Fruity Loops although I also like to work with some of the great tools and the flexibility of Adobe Audition too (not really a fan of the multitrack feature so much though).

To whet your appetite I have included a link in this post to a track I wrote some time ago called ‘Love (How Do You Say?)‘ which I wrote under my artist moniker of ‘Delörean‘. Feel free to download it, redistribute it, remix it, cut it up, mash it up whatever your whim although if you do perform any of these actions please do pass the credit back. I’ve hosted the file with popular file storage guru’s MediaFire so as not to zap what little bandwidth allowance my hosting provider provides.

If you have any difficulty using the link please do leave a comment and I will fix it asap. Enjoy the free track, I would love to read your comments on it and keep a look out for future posts of new material!

CLICK HERE FOR DOWNLOAD LINK

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If you are clever, or even if you are not clever, you may well have noticed on the sidebar of this website/blog/collection of words lies a strange barcode-esque image.

What is it?

That, dear reader is what is known as a QR Code aka Quick Response Code. It’s actually very simple but incredibly clever. I’ll spare you the technical mumbo jumbo and get straight to the point. A QR Code is an image designed to be read by specific QR Code readers or (and this is the good bit) by your camera-enabled cellphone. The QR Code image itself is an image that is made from letters and numbers. For example, the QR Code on my website, when interpreted by a camera phone or a QR Code reader will display the text http://www.stuffiwrote.co.uk on the screen. An appropriately set up device can then transfer the results from the captured QR Code and take you to my website. Novel huh?

You may well have seen QR codes cropping up all over the place. Most notably in magazine advertisements or on billboards and fly posting perhaps. It is becoming quite the hot “in” marketing tool today.

One of my favourite uses of QR I have seen so far is a custom t-shirt with a QR logo on the front. Favoured by cheeky singles it’s assumed said wearer hits the local bars and nightspots using said shirt as a chat-up line to offer a member of the opposite sex their phone number. Cheesy but genius!

QR is still in it’s infancy in terms of how it is captured and used by the end user and for marketing purposes. Using a camera phone to capture QR codes requires the camera to be at the right angle with the correct amount of light exposure on said capture in order for the information to be read correctly. Of course you will also require a device capable of deciphering your images or a dedicated QR code reader alone.

QR however has been a staple part of the daily lives of those in (yes, you guessed it before I even had a chance to type it) countries like Japan, China and South Korea. Heck the Japanese are looking to introduce a QR Code on their new resident cards, aka Juki cards.

I like it, it’s interesting, novel and cutting edge. Prepare yourselves in the west for a tidal wave of QR Code action and prepare to be sick of it this time next year! Feel free to give my QR code a try and maybe try out capturing some QR codes yourself. Either way now you know what that odd looking bar code type image is doing on this site!