I recently joined Screen Select, an online DVD rental store. I had previously been a member of Amazon’s effort, but I cancelled as I was bereft of a DVD player for a few months. I pay £12.99 a month for an unlimited number of DVDs, and I can have 2 at home at any one time. To be honest, I rarely have two at home, it’s more the case that one is, and that the other is being either returned or sent out to me. Means we manage to get through quite a few films, which is good given that TV is so rubbish these days.

Here’s what we have had so far:

• Alien – Though the DVD was apparently the Director’s Cut, a studio release that Ridley Scott hated, it also featured the original version, which I watched. It’s visually stunning, claustrophobic and tense, and gripping from the very start. But it isn’t scary is it?
• Supersize Me – Entertaining bit of corporate America bashing. The science is all a bit dubious though, isn’t it, and the message obvious, at least for sane people.
• The Big Lebowski – Loved it. I am now tempted to change my Palimpname from Wavid to ‘The Dude’.
• The End of the Affair – Found this strangely unlikeable.
• Spiderman 2 – Even more stupid than the first one. Enjoyed it, but felt thoroughly ashamed of doing so.
• Hitchiker’s Guide… – My other half liked this more than me – she thought this might be because she hasn’t read the book for 10 years, while I re-read it all the time. It was ok, I guess.

This has been ripped and edited slightly from my Film List on Palimpsest.

Both Scoble and MJR have referred to Jakob Nielson’s tips for a well designed site, which is actually presented as a list of mistakes.

A lot of the stuff in here prompted me to change the layout of this site.

Have uploaded and slightly modified a new style. I wasn’t unhappy with the last one, but was concious that it was completely non-standards compliant and very graphics-heavy.

The other advantage of this one is that it goes against the annoying blogging grain of only using three-quarters of the screen. Font size might be a bit big, mind.

So, I am going to give this a go for a while. Let me know what you think!

Interesting debate on IE vs. Firefox on Palimpsest.

We have done loads this weekend. I was taken over with a real desire to get out into the fresh air, and fortunately we have tonnes of it around here. Here’s some photos of the places we went – more on my flickr page.

On Saturday, we visited Whittington Castle, which is remarkable for being run not by the National Trust or some large organisation, but a community trust set up by those who live nearby. A great project.

On Sunday we headed deeper into Wales. This is a small stream running between two buildings at William Morgan‘s birthplace at Tŷ Mawr, which is a National Trust site now.

Morgan was the chap responsible for writing the first Welsh language bible. The photo below shows the house where Morgan spent his formative years.

I have always been a self-taught bodge job type of web designer, and nothing I have ever designed has passed the w3c validator test.

So, I decided recently, just as a technical exercise, to try and create a site which was both reasonable to look at and standards compliant, using XHTML strict and a CSS style sheet. I also wanted to make the site as small as possible, so not using any graphics.

It took quite a bit of work, and most of this was my own fault in being lazy and reusing a CSS template that I had stuck on my hard disk for a couple of years.

Anyway, it was a useful exercise and the finished result looks alright, and is standards compliant, so I guess I reached my goal there.

In truth the whole stylesheet needs to be gone through and re-written to get rid of a lot of bloat, which I either left in because it didn’t break anything, or just commented out.

MyPimp is an online personal information manager, using the latest flashy ajax technology that many of the Web 2.0 apps are using, like Writely, for example.

Interestingly, when using it with IE, a big message in a red box appears at the top of the page:

The browser you are using is not currently supported by MyPIMP. All development and testing of the site has been done using Mozilla Firefox. Using any other browser may prevent some features of the site from working properly (some may not work at all). We will add support for other browsers in the future! It’s just easier to focus on one browser at a time, especially one that follows web standards. For more information and a free download of Mozilla Firefox please click here.

They aren’t supporting Internet Explorer! This would have been unthinkable less than a year ago.

Saw a strange thing on logging in to Gmail this morning:

And here’s the explaination:

We have been involved in a dispute regarding the Gmail trademark in the UK. Another company has claimed rights to the Gmail name. We have tried to resolve this dispute through negotiations, but our efforts have failed.

We are still working with the courts and trademark office to protect our ability to use the Gmail name, but in the meantime, we want you to have an email address you can rely on.

The Gmail Team is dedicated to offering the best email service to our users. Our email service stays the same no matter what the logo is or what follows the @ symbol. This change lets our team focus their time on continuing to bring you excellent service.

…

What if I’m a UK user who already has a Gmail address? Will that address ever change?

Unfortunately, we don’t know. We would love to say that your address will always remain the same. But the trademark issue is still unsettled, and unfortunately, we cannot predict what the other party or the courts might do here. You can always use your same username with an @googlemail.com address to avoid this issue later on. But trust that we will do the best we can to make sure your email address won’t ever have to change.

I immediately invited myself back to Gmail (or Google mail, or whatever) and tried to register davebriggs@googlemail.com and couldn’t, so obviously the last sentance is true.

Still, this is very confusing. Why didn’t they just call it Google Mail in the first place?

Reader is the new RSS aggregator from Google. And I am rather sorry to say that it is rubbish.

It uses a lot of the java technology that works so well on Gmail, and alright on the personalised home page. But Reader just seems unfinished to me – no make that barely even started. Fair enough, it is in beta, but it is genuinely more-or-less unusable.

It does allow you to import an OPML file of your subscriptions with another aggregator, so I did this with my large collections of feeds from FeedDemon. This process took a long time, which I guess is fair enough. But the problem is that it doesn’t keep the categories, so you just end up with this mind-numbingly long list of feeds to browse through.

edit: it does in fact retain the categories, but not in the default ‘Reader’ screen.

The browsing through itself is absurd, as from my brief play last night, you have to scroll through your feeds in a tiny little window using little buttons that give a lovely smooth scrolling effect but which take forever to actually get anywhere.

I think this tool needs a lot of work before it even comes close to services like BlogLines.

John Naughton links to Writely, an online word processor.

This is the sort of thing I have discussed earlier, that Google could provide after their link up with Sun, using the OpenOffice.org applications as a base.

This might be useful for something I am working on, where three people are editing the same file. At the moment it is a Word file being emailed around, and obviously version control can be a nightmare.

The Writely folk also maintain a blog.