Today was the first Nano Show; a bi-monthly series of science lectures presented simultaneously in real life at NPL and in Second Life. A real life presenter, in front of a real life audience in the NPL auditorium discusses Nanotechnology related topics, while an audience in Second Life, listens and watches the presentations in real time, and all having a chance to participate in voting and questions at the end.

All in all it went successfully, and hidden amongst a tower of cables and computers I came out ok! The set-up was - and is - quite hectic! The speaker, and thier Second Life avatar use and are logged in to the main Auditorium computer on the main screen. Then there’s a moderator taking questions from Second Life attendees and managing the presentation slides on his own computer.

Then there’s me… managing the audio, from three microphones - one for the speaker, one for the moderator, and one for the real life audience when they ask questions, all feeding into Second Life as and when required. I’ve also got 2 laptops, one showing the second life audience for the real life audience to see on a TV, and a second using Wirecast, to record everything as it happens from the computers, and two video cameras.

Here are some photos taken before, and during the event of the real life speaker and audience!

More Photos >>>

An interesting meme which has been travelling the blogosphere lately is people’s ‘media consumption diets’. I found this on Ian Forrester’s blog where he had written his media ‘diet’, however it was originally started by Jeremiah Owyang. It’s a detailed list and explanation of how individuals recieve and digest thier news and information, and generally get entertained.

Web: I get alot of news and information from the web, from subscribing to RSS Feeds, to browsing websites in general. For all main news, current affairs and some technology and entertainment news my most popular resource would have to be the BBC News website, and it’s Have Your Say section. I also find myself often on the ABC News site just to try and get perhaps a different perspective on certain stories.

Other sites I reguarly browse to for news is Digital Spy for media news, E! Online for entertainment news, and Neowin for technology news.

I subscribe to just over 30 feeds, which include friend’s blogs, technology and media news feeds, and various people who work within the industry.

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop which I use most of the time while at home, and all of the time when I’m up at university, as well as a old Time computer at home I use on the odd occasion. At home we have AOL Platinum 8MB Broadband, and in our flat at Kingston while at university, we have Virgin Media 4MB Cable Broadband.

Communication: Out of the four main methods I reguarly use to contact people, the first would have to be my mobile phone. I have a Sony Ericsson W810i, which is a great phone which I use to text and call people on Pay as you Go from Orange. I also have a bluetooth headset with it to use in the car, even though I rarely use it, and I’m pretty much sure it’s out of battery anyways.

Secondly, there’s email. I have many accounts, three of which I reguarly use; Hotmail - for circulars, subscription emails etc.; Kingston University Email - for all things university related; and my lloydengland.com Email for everything else.

Then there’s Windows Live Messenger which I pretty much use daily, to communicate with friends and family.

Finally there’s Facebook, which since last Autumn has become a main focus for me to keep up to date with friends from the past and now!

There’s also Skype I use on the odd occasion to talk to friends and family, and to use while playing online games.

Music: I have a large collection of albums of all genres on my home computer and laptop which I listen to while at home. I rarely listen to the radio anymore and have an MP3 CD which I listen to in the car with 130+ tracks on. I also own an iRiver H140 MP3 player with alot of music on, even though I rarely use it these days, as I only listen to music while at my laptop or in my car.

Television: I reguarly watch TV at home, as well as downloading American and British TV shows online. I tend to watch Drama’s such as; Lost, 24, Studio 60, West Wing, Greys Anatomy; Comedies such as; Scrubs and Only Fools & Horses; and Sci Fi’s such as; Doctor Who, Stargate SG1 & Atlantis, Enterprise and Eureka.

At home we have Freeview (Digital TV), and reguarly watch digital channels, even though the main 4 are most watched.

Pictures: I have two cameras, not including mobile phones. A Sony P12, 5 Megapixel, point and shoot camera which until recently was my main and only camera. I now also have a Canon D400 (Digital Rebel XTi) SLR camera which will now become my main camera which I’ll take with me to capture places, people and events.

Over the past few years I have gathered a large collection of digital images, using over 16GB of space on my laptop, with partial backups on both my home computer and an external hard drive. I use Windows Explorer and Adobe Lightroom to organise my ever growing collection.

I store and save virtually all photos I take so I have a library of past photos. I upload selected photos online, such as Events to my gallery on my blog, as well as uploading the best photos I take to Flickr.

Movies: I enjoy watching movies, both at home on DVD and at the cinema. My tastes in film are similar to that of TV, where I find myself watching and enjoying Dramas, Action, Thrillers and Comedies.

Gaming: I have a Playstation 2, however have not used it much the past year or so, as well as playing several PC games, such as Sim City 4, Flight Simulator X and Supreme Commander.

Newspapers & Magazines: I rarely buy magazines, even though since getting my SLR camera I suppose I may start buying the odd photography magazine if it takes my interest! I also rarely actually buy newspapers, however reguarly read the headlines, and if I do happen to find myself reading one at home it would either probably be the local paper, The Daily Mail or The Guardian.

A run down of the top ten blogs I keep an eye out for and read on the net regularly in alphabetical order;

Rory Blyth
Microsoft Channel 9 employee, interesting reading his often bizarre and crazy posts! Even if they’re sometimes on the long side, often most of the time worth the read!

Evan Davis
A business look and viewpoint to current affairs from the BBC’s Economics Editor.

Nikki Denis
Friend from the States! Good to keep up on what’s happening on the other side of the pond!

Ian Forrester
Another Beeb Employee, writing some good blogs on all things technology.

Thomas Hawk
Professional photographer from San Francisco, good general technology orientated and photography related blogs, and even better actual photography!

Joseph Mallozzi
Exectutive Producer of Stargate SG:1 & Atlantis, getting all the latest info and spoilers from the two shows!

Ben Metcalfe
Ex BBC Employee, now living in the states, writing interesting technology and media related blogs!

Myles Noton
My fellow friends blog, who I read to keep an eye on what stupid or evil plan he’s plotting next… Oh, and to snoop on what he’s writing about so I can compete against him to produce a better blog. Hah.

Kristin Veitch
Columnist for E! Online, dishing the dirt on all the latest news and insider information about all your favourite American TV Shows!

Long Zheng
A student in Australia, blogging all things technology and Microsoft!

While I sit here typing away with James Bond; Tomorrow Never Dies playing in the background on our seven year old standard definition (SD) television, people around the world are snapping up the latest in technology - High Definition (HD) televisions. With the chance to watch much better quality TV, and with prices becoming lower and lower you can’t blame people for moving over.

But already, the next generation of TV’s have started being developed, in the form of Ultra High Definition (UHD). Back in November 2005, the Japanese public service broadcaster, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), first demonstrated the technology, but with the recent news development has begun, it only shows that we’re one step closer to it becoming a reality in our homes.

Now, how does UHD compare to HD you may ask? Well, its alot. An awful lot. If UHD was a Ferrari, HD would be an everyday Ford, and SD would be, well, a Skoda. An old Skoda at that, from 1981. Anyways, UHD is capable of a very impressive 7680 x 4320 resolution compared to 1080p HD (thats the decent HD, not the cheap ass HD) which broadcasts at 1920 x 1080. Yes, I know that’s alot of numbers which probably mean less to you than anything. But, in a nut shell, you would need 16 HD TV’s, placed into a 4 x 4 grid to replicate what UHD TV can produce.

To make it easier to understand and actually visualise, the image on the right is an accurate representation of the sheer magnitude of UHD TV. The blue area represents UHD TV, the yellow area represents 1080p HD TV, and the white area is 720p HD TV. The picture quality is undoubtly un imaginable until we actually see it for real, but my question is, what size TV would you need to make UHD TV actually worth it?

But with this increased resolution brings an increased file size for video and television broadcast. One minute of uncompressed video footage is 194GB, which would mean a two hour movie would need approximately 25TB of storage, (thats 25,000GB). The transfer rate currently is 24 Gigabits a second, something which is unbelivable in todays current broadcast systems. This is one of the biggest hurdles at the moment facing this new technology. The video data would have to be encoded to be able to be broadcast to make it feasable, but seeing as how at the moment each encoding unit (you technically need 2, one at the broadcast end (ie. TV Studio) and one in the TV itself) being as tall as a person, they would need to be the size of a few chips able to fit into the back of a TV to make this technology work.

Either way, there’s no doubt UHD TV is years and years off yet, so there’s no need to throw away those sparkly new Blu-ray and HD DVD’s just yet, but it does go to show that one day we will have to again, and with his new technology already in development, it’s only a matter of time.

According to a news blog post at CNet, the average American household has 994 digital photos, stored on CD’s, DVD’s, Websites & hard drives, holding about 3 to 4 years worth of photos. Now, for the everyday household this may seem ‘average’, but after a quick snoop through my digital photos on my laptop, I have approximately 8048 photos of my own, a little above the average 994 for an entire household.

Now as these 994 photos are supposedly taken over 3 or 4 years, lets assume the latter, as I too have digital photos since 4 years ago. This would mean that each household takes 248 photos per year with their digital camera, supposedly on holiday and the odd family outing. Seeing how the average household has 2 children, lets assume one is old enough to have their own camera, and there is also one camera for both parents. So, with two cameras snapping away, thats 124 photos per camera, per person, per year.

Then theres me, 8048 photos over 4 years brings my average to 2012 photos per year, a tad higher than the average 124 per year everyone else is taking. But with over 8000 photos brings problems and that is how to easily store and manage photos in a way which makes them easy to locate and categorise. The main hurdles which I’ve been facing are exactly how to categorise over 8000 photos, is it best by name, by location, by date which I can always adhere too, and something which will be future proof.

On the right is my current folderisation method which I sorted out only a couple weeks ago; sorting photos by main location first, and then by date, however this poses a few problems in itself, such as if I wanted to find a certain photo from a certain place, I have to try and remember the date, or atleast the rough date that it happened. My America folder is slightly different, categorising photos just by place rather than date, which too works well to some extent, but as always has its problems, and would be difficult to implement on a full scale basis as I would have to merge photos from different times, sometimes years apart into the same folder, and that would become messy, and something I wouldn’t like to have.

There is always of course 3rd party applications, such as Adobe Lightroom which tries to help with photo management by using folders and tags and such, but its not future proof, and Lightroom won’t be around forever, so knowing my luck I will tag and categorise all my photos for Lightroom, get use to it and then have it replaced or become defunct. For now though atleast I’ll continue on with my current system until I get frustrated with it more and try to change it again, but with an ever growing photo collection, the future doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy!

For the second time in my Acer Travelmate 8104’s 18month life, it decided to break at the most inconvienient time once I had arrived back in Kingston from the Easter break. This time the laptop simply failed to turn on at all ever, and after being taken to a repair company to confirm my worst suspicions, the motherboard was at fault and would need to be replaced, which would have then been the laptop’s 3rd motherboard. However, as Myles’ Acer laptop also broke a few months ago with similar problems, a replacement motherboard was priced at £800 by Acer + £300 labour.

So, with the laptop being far too much to be worthy of a repair, I went on the hunt for a new laptop, and as Myles blogged at the time, the number of decent laptops in the high street are few and far between, especially if you want Vista. So, we looked online, and after a while debating I decided on a customised Dell Inspiration 6400. But, thats where the second wave of issues arose, which was after ordering the laptop, I recieved a phone call from Dell telling me that they won’t deliver the laptop to Kingston as my debit card was registered in Torquay, to help prevent fraud. So with not many other options, I went to my bank to change my address, and then re-order a new laptop the next day.

So, for the next nine days I waited for my new laptop to arrive, using Myles’ laptop to check my emails hourly it would seem, and try to sort out Dell to make them not charge me for the original order which they had reserved the money out of my account for. But today, all was resolved, and my laptop arrived at the door! So now I’m back online and able to do work again alot more easily, and at a much faster speed since my new Dell laptop has alot higher specs than my old 18 month old laptop now has.

If you’re like me and have a laptop (like my lovely Acer Travelmate 8104) which seems to like to melt itself internally when using graphic intensive software like Notepad (or the most awesomest new game Supreme Commander), then here are my six fool proof steps to getting you back on the road again!

 Step One - Move to a desk! There is no use actually trying to use your laptop as a LAPtop - it just isn’t going to work… well… unless you either want your laptop to melt itself to your legs… or your legs to actually melt off.

 Step Two - Still not working? We need to get some air under that thing… go into the kitchen and get the metal grate thing which is in the cooking tray… Plonk your laptop on top of that and hey presto - instant air!

Step Three - If you’re like me with your desk right next to your window - open your window! - Added air flow with help prevent you from those unexpected shut downs…

Step Four - We need to take some drastic action; go get your vacuum cleaner, and use the nozzle pipe to hoover your laptop - yes - hoover your fans and such and get rid of all that dust and dirt in your fan vents!

Step Five - Alright, this clearly isn’t working… pop down to a computer store and buy a notebook cooler to go under your laptop…

Step Six - What? You CLOSED the window!?!?! You fool - open it back up again! We may now have a fan system… but extra wind power is always a helpful bonus

Now you are set! You should now be able to play Supreme Commander or write in Notepad at your heart’s content!