Introducing the family

by Ian Posted on December 8, 2008

It’s time I introduced the family. No, not that one, this one!

recorder family from sopranino to bass

First we will start with the smallest member. I have had my Aulos sopranino recorder for over 30 years, since I played it at lower school. It isn’t the smallest member of the recorder family, that honour goes to the garkleine which is only 6 inches (16 cm) long. At 10 inches (25 cm), it is quite small and high enough pitched for me though. It isn’t without it’s injuries, I managed to break the foot joint within a week of getting it and it has been glued in the set position ever since.

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Swimming for our Future

by Ian Posted on November 23, 2008

Peoples MillionsArdley Hill Lower School, which is just down the road from the lower school our kids go to, is hoping to win on Wednesday in the ITV People’s Millions Competition. The overall aim of the competition is to improve the quality of life of local communities by funding projects that transform the local environment – its buildings, amenities, public and green spaces.
Ardley Hill are hoping to gain funding to build a new glass enclosure for their swimming pool to enable them and the community to use it all year round.
A couple of years ago Watling Lower School were able to make use of Ardley’s pool during the summer term, but were unfortunately unable to take advantage of the opportunity this past year.

Wednesday’s vote in the ITV Anglia West region is between:
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Going Mobile

by Ian Posted on November 22, 2008

A while back, when I got my new work mobile, I checked out my blog using the WAP browser. The blog was visible, but as it was faithfully reproduced, it meant that I had to scroll all over the place to see it. This was obviously not the best approach for mobile users.

I’ve had a look around at WordPress plugins and tried out two, WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King and WordPress Mobile by Andy Moore. I used the demo of Opera Mini to assist me in my testing.

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Kensington VoIP handset

by Ian Posted on November 15, 2008

Kensington Vo200I signed up with Skype a few months ago to give me another VoIP telephony option. Skype to Skype calls are free, so it seemed worth setting up.

I originally got myself a Bluetooth headset. Initially, I had problems connecting the headset to the Bluetooth on my laptop. I upgraded the Bluetooth stack to the latest Toshiba stack and then was able to successfully connect the headset to my laptop and configure Skype to use it. However, shortly afterwards, the headset locked up completely and I was unable to use it.

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Sky Channels return to VirginMedia

by Ian Posted on November 13, 2008

Although it was announced last week, today the Sky Channels returned to VirginMedia after a break of over 18 months.

A new agreement has been signed between BSkyB and VirginMedia that will see the Sky basic channels on Virgin until June 2011. It appears that VirginMedia are paying BSkyB £30 million to get the basic channnels, exactly the same amount BSkyB are paying VirginMedia for their channels. It looks like the loss in revenue from advertising have put VirginMedia in a strong negotiating position. When they were both suing each other 18 months ago, according to VirginMedia’s court submission, Sky initially asked for £55 million, but later reduced this to £40 million. Sky were only paying around £5m for the VirginMedia tv channels.

Cynic that I am, I can’t help wondering how long it will be before the cost rises to ‘cover the additional channels’. Of course it didn’t go down when we lost them, so maybe not

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Fixed library links

by Ian Posted on November 3, 2008

While checking Google Webmaster Tools I discovered that all the links to my library (bottom of right sidebar) had failed.

The Now Reading plugin that I use for my library requires Permalinks to be set to ‘Custom’ for it to work. Permalinks are what allow this post to have a URL like http://blog.ijhedges.com/2008/11/03/fixed-library-links instead of http://blog.ijhedges.com/p=379. In this case combined with the rewrite in the plugin they allow my library to appear to to be here http://blog.ijhedges.com/library/ .

I can only guess one of the WordPress updates reset this. I’ll have to keep an eye on it in the future after upgrades.

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