Greetings blog followers and visitors! It is with this post that I am, unfortunately rather unceremoniously, directing you to the continuation of this blog. Further information on the change and the explanation for it can be found there (for those visiting in the far future, this is the latest (and only) post there at the moment). This blog will remain here for the foreseeable future in all of its XHTML, CSS and RSS validity-related glory, showing off its 2006-2007 design and artwork, and content from 2005-2011. At the moment there are 459 posts here, but more will come if I get more time to continue converting the posts from my MSN/Windows Live Space (don't worry, I have them saved!).

So, in summary, newer posts that continue this blog can be found at g400.co.uk/cantabits/.

The website of the month is back on my blog after many months on Twitter (summaries for this period are here and here).

The website of the month for June 2011 reflects the fact that I have time to enjoy my environment for the first time in years. Bored In Cambridge is a collection of things to do in Cambridge. The information for each thing is simple and to the point and, with much expansion as there are many things to do, the website has potential to be a great resource for people who are bored and in Cambridge.

At the moment I'm sorting out the long-term future of a number of things. One of the things involved is this blog.

When I started writing this blog from around 5 years ago, it wrapped some new features around Bloxsom, the original software I used (which appears to have not changed since back then). Over time I replaced Blosxom with my own code and slowly added features (such as clean URLs, XHTML validity, emoticons, admin features and much more) as I needed them and/or had time to add them.

However, more is always needed to keep up with new design constraints/opportunities, standards and technologies. While at university I have focused my energies elsewhere (my course, the unique opportunities the University of Cambridge offers, etc.).

I am left with a difficult choice: find time to improve this blog or switch to third party software, relegating this blog to a historic achievement. For a limited time only, I shall enable comments again, to gather people's opinions (if anyone has any). (Update, 31/07/2011: comments are now closed again). Based on these and my own feelings, the future of this blog will be decided one way or another.

On the plus side, I can reclaim evenings and weekends for the first time in many years, so there will hopefully be more regular updates here.

Finally, I leave you with the websites of the month for the last few months and some nice music.
- February 2011
- March 2011
- April 2011
- May 2011
- (Full posts will resume with June).

It still seems that HTC has a thing with Tuesdays. Today they announced the HTC Sensation.

I don't think I've ever seen the HTC Europe team run a press conference before, but I think it was good. Skip to 11 minutes and 40 seconds to get a brief first look at the Sensation. Also, it's curious that the temperatures were in Farenheit which, Wikipedia tells me, is only the primary temperature scale in the US and Belize: Celsius is used for most purposes everywhere else.

Anyway, later in the day (after this post was initially posted) HTC ran a meetup in the same place, so I went along to check out the Sensational news. My overall impression is that the device is very impressive: the updates to Sense and the dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon CPU are good. Of course, many reviews will go through the full range of features, but I thought I'd share a few notable things that they might not cover:
- The contoured glass, while not a particularly notable feature, is a nice touch: it would be nice to see it on more devices. The glass is only contoured over the black area that surrounds the screen on most HTC devices, meaning that the viewing experience shouldn't be affected: see a photo of it here (notice the reflection of the lampshade being OK over the screen but not elsewhere).
- There still appear to be a few small bugs in the software and optimisation may not be complete: the weather live wallpaper seems to animate for only a few seconds (this may be the intention, though I would expect continuous animation) and the frame rate drops a bit as the homescreen recovers from the rapid (now 3D, similar to TouchFLO 3D v1.0) scrolling that invokes some new cool animation (where the screens move away from the visible surface, making many visible at once). I'm also not convinced by the supposedly improved speed of the camera's reaction to an attempted capture: it seems as instant as the HD2, though it may be a fix for an Android-related issue as Android does generally feel more laggy to me than Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7.
- The new weather is cool: thunder is the most interesting weather state now, with the sunny and rain states becoming less interesting and cloudy and foggy becoming much more visually pleasing (this is good in my opinion: the weather in many places isn't great most of the time, and if it is great then you're probably more interested in enjoying it than looking at your phone).
- Yes, the shortcuts on the new lockscreen are customisable and yes,the content shown on the lockscreen is customisable.
- HTC Sense now has a more glassy look by default.

Below are a few videos by me demonstrating some of these points, uploaded directly from my HD2 (beware: they are loud as it was noisy). The start of the first one is a perfect demonstration of where the HTC Sensation's video trimming software would be useful! (Also Facebook isn't allowing them to be rotated at the moment: if this is fixed soon, I will rotate them).







Also, here is an interesting YouTube video comparing the Sensation's screen to a HTC Desire (the latter is the brighter and more vivid device):


Finally, here are two photos comparing the HTC Sensation and HTC HD2.

Like Nick Clegg I have yet to hear any arguments against modifying the UK's voting system to use the Alternative Vote (AV) that make sense to me. As I understand it, there are two arguments for AV depending on your views on other aspects of the way democracy works in the UK: if you generally support the current system of First Past The Post (FPTP) then AV is simply an evolution of FPTP that optimises, in this age of many political parties, the satisfaction of constituents with the MP they end up with. For example, if a constituency had an anti-Conservative majority but they were evenly split between primarily supporting Labour and the Liberal Democrats, FPTP would make it easier for the Conservative candidate to win whereas AV would make it harder with no vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats being wasted. It is a minor change in that pretty much everything else is the same: the link between a MP and their constituency is kept, for example. If you are a fan of Proportional Representation (PR) and think of AV as the tiniest, most pointless step in the right direction, bear in mind that once FPTP is gone so will be the argument that the current voting system has proved itself over a long time: this makes future change easier.

Anyway, below is a short video about voting Yes to AV on the 5th of May. For more information, see this website.


(This is the first post in the new Politics category: I've done a few similar posts in the past so I thought it was time to create a category for them).