Yes, after three days slogging at my computer, the next release of MiniGallery is finally available.  It’s still technically beta, which means I take no responsibility if it all goes pear-shaped, but you are welcome to download it and use it if you are prepared to take the risk.  I’ve tested it rigorously though, on all the browsers available to me (Safari, Firefox (Mac and PC), Opera (Mac and PC), Internet Explorer 6 and 7) and I’m reasonably satisfied that it’s safe to release to the world.

New in this release are improved themes, dynamic watermarking of images, improved handling of apostrophes in folder and file names, intermediate image previews (clicking a photo in the gallery brings up a screen-sized preview, clicking that gives you the full image), and a few new themes.

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I was working on the next release of MiniGallery today, adding some new features and ironing out some issues from the previous release.  The project is still officially in beta, which means I’m still ironing out bugs and to a certain extent relying on other people to tell me what needs changing, so it was useful to demonstrate the system to friends and family over the weekend – it highlighted where work still needs to be done!  I was down Gloucester way for a long weekend, seeing Ellie’s parents, my parents, various grandparents, and a few others, and the opportunity came up to share some photos from recent events here in Wiv, so up came my PhotoLounge!  Using it in front of other people made me realised just how badly structured the whole project is.

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Last week my shiny new iPod arrived in the post, an impossibly small MP3 player in an impossibly small box. Sleek, light and well-built, the 8GB black 2nd-generation iPod Nano is in a completely different league to the Tecknet V70 I purchased (and then returned) a couple of weeks back. But, I realised, that should be expected from a product that costs considerably more. The V70 cost under £50, the iPod Nano cost around £130, and you can tell the difference in every respect; you really do get what you pay for.

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“Knock, knock, knock”

I opened the front door to find a young man carrying two large cardboard boxes, both taped up with colourful blue sticky tape with www.iwoot.com printed on it. Well that’s a nice surprise, I thought to myself, someone has sent me a birthday present. I took the packages, signed for them on the young man’s handheld computer, and deposited the boxes in the lounge before going into town for a meeting.

Upon my return I opened both packages, only to discover that what was inside was not quite what one would expect.

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“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”

As much as I hate to admit it, I’m not sure I agree entirely with Paul’s statement, at least not in the context of birthday parties anyway. I guess there can’t be many people who celebrate their 24th birthday by inviting friends round for a short-notice fancy dress party! The general theme we were working towards was any character from film or stage, which was quite a broad spectrum, and produced some interesting costumes…

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I have just read an article on the BBC News web site about a television system on display at the Cebit Technology Fair that claims to be able to receive its signal through the power socket.  At present only one channel can be transmitted at a time, but the idea is that you only need to plug one cable into the wall to receive television.  Nice idea.  One channel isn’t really much good though, they’d need to increase that before letting it loose on the general public.  In addition (and this may come as a surprise to some), this is by no means a new idea – Acorn computers were exploiting this concept back in the 90s.

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I’ve spent some time recently looking at the some of the best 50 CSS-based web sites of 2006, as reported on Smashing Magazine.  It is interesting to see the quality of work that other designers are pumping out, and in many ways serves as a challenge to me to improve my own web design skills to meet the level of excellence they offer.  So this afternoon I set about spending some time on professional development, pushing my graphic design skills to a higher level.  I may not get paid for this, but hopefully it will ensure that future web sites I design will be of a higher quality, and as such I may be in a better position to advertise my sevices to a wider audience still.

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My birthday present to myself arrived today, a nice shiny Tecknet V70 4GB MP3 player.  I haven’t used it yet though, it’s currently plugged into the wall charging up the internal battery.  It is nice and small though, and the colour screen (or what I’ve seen or it so far anyway) looks very neat.  The most hilarious part is the small instruction manual it came with, which was clearly written in Chinese first and then translated by a computer program!  At least, I hope it was translated by a computer – any real person with such a grasp of the English language wouldn’t last long in day to day conversation…

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Last night I spent a fair amount of time researching MP3 players, as I fancied one for my birthday, which is later this month.  For some time I have quite liked the look of the Philips SA3115, which has a very respectable 1GB of memory and an enormous colour screen.  However, there were other factors to consider beyond the MP3 player itself.  The thing is, I currently play pretty much all my music through my computer, so the need for an MP3 player is somewhat redundant.  The only time I would need an MP3 player is in the car, which raises problems of its own.

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I went to church this morning to record the Rooted concert off the camcorder (it’s an old one that doesn’t have a firewire or USB connection), but the whole morning seemed beset by complications, as is usually the case when doing anything technical.  To start with it was a case of finding the right leads to connect everything up – I had to go out again shortly after arriving to pick up my friend Anthony to show me how to connect it all up!  We got there in the end and set it capturing, but because it does it in real time I had to sit around and wait an hour or so while it did it.

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