When I was in New York last summer I picked up an AppleTV set top box.  Personally I think it’s the bargain of the century — for £200 I got a fast, virtually silent, easy-to-use replacement for my noisy old Windows Media Centre PC.   Best of all, I managed to sell the old Media Centre on Ebay for £270.

I liked the AppleTV when I first plugged it in with its Version 1.o software.  I liked it even more when they added YouTube in 1.1.   But it was Take 2 that really made it special.  Being able to find and stream Podcasts directly on AppleTV is my favourite addition.

However, the one niggle I’ve always had is the need to convert videos to MP4 then add them to iTunes before I could watch them.  Software like iPodifier made the process pretty simple, but on my old ‘always on’ server machine (a 1.4GHz Celeron) it would take a couple of hours to convert a typical half-hour show.

Fortunately, a group of like-minded individuals have now come up with the solution, and it works both on PC and Mac.  Basically, the key is to build a ‘patchstick’ — a bootable USB memory stick that you insert into the AppleTV which then enables SSH access into your set-top box!  There’s a fairly long-winded process available to Mac users, but if you’re on a PC you can now shortcut the whole process thanks to ATV4Windows.com.

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A few weeks ago I bought a Peugeot Ludix Blaster RS12 scooter.  It’s really just to get me to work and back.   Between parking and petrol, taking my car to work was costing me about £9 a day (£4.50 petrol + £4.50 parking, and that doesn’t account for tyres, petrol, servicing, etc).  The scooter isn’t properly run in yet, but already it’s costing me just £1.50 a day in fuel and is free to park at my work.  At that rate, it’ll have completely paid for itself in about nine months.

The only thing that annoyed me about the Blaster as standard was its instrument panel.  The odometer is in kilometers, there’s no trip counter, the speedometer is pretty inaccurate and it doesn’t have a clock.  I decided the best way to solve all those problems at once was to fit a cycle computer.

I settled on the Specialized Speedzone wired cycle computer.  It has a fairly heavy duty cable and two well-spaced, hard plastic buttons — perfect for operating with thick motorcycle gloves.  It cost me £20 from Dales in Glasgow.

Details of how I fitted it are after the jump…

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Earlier this week we launched the latest extension to s1jobs.com – a portal targetting current and prospective Public Sector workers.   You can see it now at public.s1jobs.com.

Although the site is mostly static content, it still contains a number of innovations for s1.  Firstly, there’s a complete content CMS powered by Adobe Contribute that allows our SEO experts to tweak and add content whenever they like, without tech team intervention.  Secondly, there’s a new Flash-based carousel for employer logos that allows more logos to be displayed in a smaller space, and in a more interesting way.  Finally, there’s a host of server-side tweaks to make all of this possible — not least in the classification of all our exisiting Public Sector employers into their particular sector.

Hopefully the end result will prove popular with Public Sector workers, and with the search engines.

Today the Evening Times launched 12 new local community sites for areas of Glasgow.   The sites are based on the “s1local” platform I developed last year.  The first sites based on the s1local launched in December under the s1 brand, so we had to build in some customisations to allow the Evening Times to launch sites under their own brand.

I’m sure you can expect to see more community sites launched across Scotland in the coming months, both Evening Times branded ones in Glasgow and s1 branded sites elsewhere.

Next Monday (10th March) I’ll be handing over ownership of the local sites to our newest Web Producer, Graeme Smith.  I’m sure his team will extend the s1local platform and provide a lot of exciting new features over the coming months. 

Please take a look at the new Evening Times sites, and if you live in one of these commuities, join in:  Shawlands; Hillhead; Maryhill; Gorbals; Cardonald; Easterhouse; Partick; Robroyston; Whiteinch; Springburn; Dennistoun; Tollcross.

s1jobs.com, the recruitment site I’ve been working on since 2001, has just been independently reviewed by WhatJobSite.com.  The “secret shopper” review was conducted without our knowledge and the first we knew of it was when we saw the results published earlier this month.

The site got a lot of praise, in particular for the emerging technologies we use: “including RSS job feeds and a rather exciting new mobile phone application called txt2apply.”  It’s good to see txt2apply being acknowledged — I’ve always been proud of it as a piece of mobile innovation, and the fact that David McLaughin and I developed it from scratch in just a few days.

I’ve been running a free Sudoku game for a couple of years at www.grantgibson.co.uk/sudoku.  It’s available to play in desktop and mobile formats as well as on widget sites like Netvibes.com. 

The Flash part is really my area of expertise, but I also had to hack together a PHP script to generate the puzzles.  I found a script that does the right sort of thing, and modified it to output in my required format.  However, over the years I’ve had a few people complain that it produces puzzles with multiple solutions (and then only accepts one of those solutions as the ‘correct’ answer).

I don’t know enough mathematics or PHP to correct the problem, so I’m putting out an appeal.  If anyone wants to have a go at correcting the problem — or rewriting the script — please do so.  You’ll be helping me and thousands of other Sudoku fans around the world.

Requirements

Input parameters (via GET URL):

• Difficulty [currently 1, 2 or 3, but can be tweaked if necessary]
• Random [currently a six digit integer, but can be tweaked if necessary]

Output format (plain text):

puzzle=<TITLE>
Daily Random Sudoku: Medium
<AUTHOR>
Your Name Here
<COPYRIGHT>
Your Name Here and Grant Gibson
<DIFFICULTY>
2
<GRID>
.ooo..o..
o.o..oooo
o.o…ooo
o.o..oooo
oo.ooo.oo
oooo..o.o
ooo…o.o
oooo..o.o
..o..ooo.
<ANSWER>
528631974
163974285
497285631
235716849
671849352
984352716
859123467
312467598
746598123

… where answer is the unique grid solution, and grid represents the intial state of the puzzle - dot for blank, o for a displayed number.

I’ve attached the Current Grid Script here.  If you’d like to suggest any revisions, or post up an alternative version of the code please do so — either as a comment here, or directly to me by email.  See my contact page for email details.

Thanks, and good luck!