1. Complain less and remain positive
   I think it is a very British thing to do to complain and be negative, but I think if you live your life complaining all the time, your just looking for bad things in life. Speak positive and you will be happy, at least that is the idea.
2. Don’t hold Grudge
   Much like the first resolutions, it is a matter of remain positive and happy. Holding onto angry is not good for your soul.
3. Get up earlier in the morning and have breakfast
4. Go to Orange Wednesday every week
5. Visit all of my friends at university
6. Go on Holiday
7. Start the process of learning to drive
8. Don’t buy anymore games until I complete all the games I have
9. Go swimming once a week
10. Drink less caffeine
11. Redesign all of the sites that I run.

What are your new years resolutions? What would add to this list?

1. Past my third year of University
   This is quite easily the hardest thing have ever done. It took every part of me, every piece of fire in me to complete that degree. It was one of the best days of my life when I found my result.
2. Get a full time job
   As I have previously mention on this blog, I managed to get a job with MW kellogg. But I only ended up working there for a week, when I got another job with a web design company, called Xanda. It is my dream job and I love it.
3. Try to swear less.
   This is something that I didn’t achieve, be a mixture of stressful times or living in the port city of Portsmouth. But F*** it
4. Find a place for important object, such as keys and wallet.
   After moving home, I managed this. I still loose things, but isn’t that just life.
5. Make sure my phone is always charged and on me
   I did manage this one to, it was a matter of keeping a charger in the living room and bedroom, so I can charge my phone anywhere I am. I also got a AirCurve dock for my desk at work, which will charge my iPhone.
6. Write a free application, either online or for your computer or phone that will aid the general public
   I have written a plugin for jQuery to get posts from Twitter, but I am yet to test it correctly and publish it on my portfolio. This will be completed within the next month. I am currently in the process of writing a scripts section of the portfolio, where I will open source lots of stuff I have written to date.
7. Go on holiday
   This one was a lack of money from not having a job. I have had weekends away, going to Portsmouth for some reasons, but not a real holiday. It is on this year’s list.
8. Closely monitor the amount of time that I spend on computers
   As I now work on computers everyday, I spend even more time in front of computers than ever. I do notice that I am doing it and do try and get away from my computer for at least 5 minutes in every hour. I also check facebook on my phone, spending less time in front of a big screen. Is that better?
9. Use my time more efficiently
   This is something that I do feel an have achieved by completing all of the above and manage to get out to socialize. If anything, I think that I need to slow down and chill out more.
10. Try and go out for a date-night once every two weeks.
    If you know me personally, you will understand why I do not want to dwell on this one. I will admit that I didn’t achieve this, as I was busy with number 1. Something I regret deeply.
11. Make sure the people around me know how important they are to me!

For the most part I am extremely happy with the year. I got more done in one year, than I thought I ever could. The things I didn’t manage to do was only stopped by the fact I had to focus on getting a my degree/job. Maybe I can work on these in the new year, I know that at least one of these resolutions will make it into this years list.

This overpricing of hardware, is known as the Apple Tax. Apple tries to make it impossible to install their OS (OSX) onto other vendor’s hardware. But there are groups that are working on hacking the software to work on any hardware. These computers are called Hackintoshes. The first main stream hackintosh device, was the Dell Mini 9, which I know friends have successfully installed Mac OSX on. Since then a number of netbooks have been hacked to run Mac OSX. In my research for this post, I found an impressively detailed compatibility chart for hackintoshs. With this number of netbooks being able to run Mac OSX, the question has to be asked, how does the Macbook shape up to other laptops. Below is a table comparing the Macbook to one of the more expensive netbooks in the compatibility charts.

Name	ASUS EEE PC 1000HA	Apple MacBook
Price	£250	£800
Processor	Intel® Atom™ N270, 1.6GHz	Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz
Hard Drive	160GB	250GB
RAM	1GB DDR2 SO-DIMM	2GB DDR3 SDRAM
Screen	13.3-inch – 1280 x 800 pixels	10.1-inch – 1024 x 800 pixels
WIFI	b/g/n	a/b/g/n
Network	10/100 Ethernet	10/100/1000 Ethernet
Bluetooth	Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR	Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
USB	£250	£800
Mouse	Multi-Touch trackpad	Multi-Touch trackpad
Optical Drive	None	DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW
SD Card Reader	Yes	No
Audio	Head Phone & Mic-in	Single input/output jack
WebCam	1.3* megapixel	1.3* megapixel
Colours	White, Black, Pink, Blue	White
Weight	1.27Kg	2.13 kg

Admittedly this is a bit like comparing apples to oranges (mind the pun) as the speed of the Macbook is far in a way better than the netbook, but as for features, I think the 1000HA stands up pretty well. For many the £550 difference, could be a months rent and for me, it is a large percentage of my monthly wage. I think personally that I may end up getting a Macbook Pro, but I am not sure that I could talk others into doing the same.

Today I am very proud to announce our love child, and it is called Unbored. Unbored is a reviews, articles and videos site, written by geeks, for geeks. What is great about the site, it is by young people who write about what they love. The writers say what they really think of thinks and poke fun at things that need poking fun at. This is where you can find bright new writers find there voice. What is best about this project, is that we did it all ourselves, from the ground up. I love the site, I know you will to.

Unbored is a social site, that loves comments and hear what you think. The site is also social and you can interact with them on your favorite social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Check the site out at Unbored.co.uk and remember to subscribe to the RSS feed or follow them on twitter.

This came about because they implemented a policy requiring students and parents to be responsible for their children’s absences and missing homework. The school and teachers are being sued by parents who want their children’s failing grades changed to passing grades – even though those children were absent 15-30 times during the semester and did not complete enough school work to pass their classes.

Finding a job “in these troubled times” (drink!) is hard but you have remember to stay focused and keep trying, something will come along. I will write a post with a list of my top tips for finding jobs, but for now, I will try and think of ways to spend my first paycheck. Any ideas?

Hyperlinking is an issue for many websites, as most refuse to do it. The BBC news website for example does not embed any links to external sources. The reason for this is two fold. Firstly when a writer puts a hyperlink within a post to an external site, their content is then link to the content of a third party’s site, which they do not control. This lack of control is a problem as if the third party, changes the content on the linked page to something different or inappropriate, the author may become libel. Secondly, if the linked site decides to take the post/page down, change their URL structure or the entire site goes down, this would therefore brake the hyperlink. Hyperlinking on a BBC’s news site would be complex, as it would add overhead, as a team would have to be created to check each linked site is still up and content on the linked page is the same. Then is there really a place for hyperlinking on news sites and the web in general?

I think that hyperlinking is extremely inportant if you understand how to do it correctly. Sites such as Lifehacker have the best way of crediting stories. I think what Lifehacker and others like Gizmodo,  understand that news is disposable. By this I mean that most news/blog posts are read within a week of posting and are rarely read again. It is perfectly reasonable to post hyperlinks within a page as the problem of broken links is not an issue as content on an external site is unlikely to change in a week. As most of the blogosphere is an echo chamber these days, I feel that many don’t wish to hyperlink as it only proves that their job is not one of a reporter but a reposter.  If you are going to repost a story with little more than rewriting the facts in it, the least you can do is give complete credit to the original post.

The most important use of linking is the ability to recap someone new to long running stories such as the recent E.coli infection at petting farms. This is an on going story, but what if you didn’t see the first story if you were away from a tv/pc? Would you be able to understand later posts on this subject? Would you be able to come in to a story half way through and make sense of it? Personally, I have had this problem a number of times and found it extremely hard to catch-up to a story from the start as, when I search on google news, I only get the latest updates on the story. If for example, BBC news put a link to the original story in the first line of the post, this might make the process of getting up to speed a lot easier.

The biggest thing that is pushing linking forward is social networking sites. The first site that started social link sharing was digg. Instead of having a blog that you post links to pages that interest you, you can “digg” a story, increasing it’s ranking and likelihood it is on the homepage. Where digg started, Twitter has now replaced social linking. With URL shorting services such as bit.ly, the micro blog service has become an internet giant, simply by being able to posts links to their followers. Not only can links to pages be shared, people can even be referenced as a hyperlink, which can be seen  by the biggest social networking site Facebook which have recently added the Twitter‘s @symbol linking system.

Linking is important for any post or site, it helps people get a more rounded understanding of the subject that is being discussed. It also shows that the writer doesn’t live in a bubble and that they understand that the internet is a fluid and social media. That information can be linked so easily together is amazing in the first place, in books, if the author wishes to reference another text, they would have to give the book name and page number. On the internet it is so easy and so useful, there is no reason not to do it.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2. Citizen Kane (1941)
3. Casablanca (1942)
4. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
5. Rocky (1976)
6. The Shining (1980)
7. Apocalypse Now (1979)
8. Alien (1979)
9. The Graduate (1967)
10. Jaws (1975)
11. Trainspotting (1996)
12. The Good, The Bad, The ugly. (1966)
13. The English Patient (1996)
14. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
15. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
16. Raging Bull (1980)
17. Taxi Driver (1976)
18. Withnail & I (1987)
19. Annie Hall (1977)
20. The Usual Suspects (1995)

If you can think of a any that should on this list, please leave your thoughts or the number of these films that you have in the comments. This list was created with the use of the times online’s Top 100 Films.

What is the reason for this? People complain that they don’t want to carry around lots of devices with them. How lazy are these people? Music players like the iPod Nano or creative zen series fit easily in a jacket pocket with a phone. It is not like anyone carries a brief case anymore, all most people have to carry these days, is phone,wallet and keys. You can’t carry a music player to? Personally, I have a Nokia phone, iPod touch and a Casio camera, which is how I like it. Each device is amazing what it does by itself, I can’t see how putting these devices together would give me any gain what so ever. But with all these devices coming together, the standalone devices may stop being sold. There is already talk about getting rid of the iPod Classic. Well I tell these device makers, I am not buying your toaster phone!