Bloggers United!

Evening guys, I thought I’d just take the time to acknowledge two of my fellow bloggers that I actually know personally and are quite close with.

The first is, of course, our very own Sadia Deen! She made a rather unexpected comeback on her blog in January, and I hope you’ll check out, like, follow, and do whatever you need to do on her blog at My thoughts… My views…. My life…<3. She’ll also be helping out over here too as an admin, so I won’t be the sole owner of this blog.

If you weren’t surprised enough already, she also has a Flickr account! That’s right, fellow photographers, she is also one of us! Armed with a Nikon Coolpix P500, she takes some mean shots, but would also like some constructive criticism to help her on her way. So, to check out some of those ‘mean’ shots, and maybe post a comment or two, you can go right ahead to her photo stream at Flickr: Sadiaelenaa’s Photostream. I have to say… I’m mighty impressed myself!

Over in the right corner, is my buddy in poetry (though I write none myself), Brynmawr. You may remember me mentioning him a while back in a post that dealt with his ‘Poem Revolution’. Well, he was talking to me on Twitter a while back on how he was going to start up a blog, and keep it updated with his poems and the like. It took him a while to get the whole thing together, but that’s understandable with Uni and all. However, on the 29th February 2012 (that’s right, he can’t have a blog birthday for the next four years), The Real Minipoet was brought onto the WordPress servers of the world. Seeing as he is quite a busy guy though, and sometimes can only post the body of poems, I was made his humble editor shortly after, making sure that what was meant to come out, did come out. In the correct english.

If you want to check that out, then simply head on over to TheRealMinipoet, and look around. Remember to subscribe though, as the poems may not be as consistent as the posts are over here.

So, those are my two pals and their endeavors, but what about over here, eh?

I sadly realize that I haven’t been posting much variety lately, with only the routinely Photo Of The Day, and Newsspot coming through. Now I’m not complaining, and I know you guys enjoy those posts, so I’m not cutting them off or anything. All I’m going to be doing is cutting the Mail, Article, and Post off, and be putting more original titles. Sure, I’ll maybe slip in one or two, but the problem is that the title doesn’t really give anything away, which can have one of two effects on readers who see it. They can either become disinterested, and not look, or they can be intrigued, and see what it’s about. I have a feeling the latter are the minority, so I’ll be changing that up a little bit. Also, I’ll be bringing the Tweets and quotes back, as I’ve really slacked on those two aspects. Now, it’s a little hard to do the Newsspot, Photo Of The Day, Tweet Of The Day, and Quote Of The Day all… in one day. As a compromise, and hopefully as a better system, I won’t be posting all on the same day, but rather two of the four a day. Which two get posted depends on what I find on the web, and what catches my interest. That means that if I find a Tweet I really have to share, and an article, they’ll be what goes up fort that day, and vice versa for the other two. This gives more time for people to like, comment, and view a post before it gets updated or replaced with another in it’s ‘series’ so to speak. In a nutshell, this should give a few more views for me, and more time for you guys to make sense of whatever Klingon I’ve posted.

Anyway, coming to the end of my post, weekends are off. That obviously means no posts on Saturdays or Sundays, as standard. If I do post on a Sunday (Saturdays are 100% off), then it’ll be something good. The rest period gives me a break from typing, and you guys a break from checking your emails or RSS feeds.

On a closing note, I’d ask all you guys to keep spreading the link to this site, and if you’ve got any recommendations, comment below and I’ll do my best to make your requests a reality!

亞歷克斯的！

Of Minipoets And Blogging Conventions!

Why hello, readers! I’m only doing a small post today (although I’ll be posting the usual news and photo later) so it won’t be much of a burden for you to just read this little snipped that I have to share with you. The title for this post is unique, because I’ll be sharing two things in this post that’ve been started by two unique people.

First up is my good friend Daniel Blyden (@danielyep). He’s doing a blogging event entitled ‘Bloggers Collective 2: How To Write Online‘ in Birmingham. Entry costs £5 and the event page can be found here. I’m hoping to be going myself, and I hope that some other blog enthusiasts will join me. It’ll be a good experience, I think, to connect to other people, and learn about other blogging styles. I may even see some of you readers there!

Second, is another good friend of mine who is into poetry. He calls himself ‘Minipoet’, but those of us close to him will know him as Brynmawr (@therealminipoet). He’s starting a Twitter poem timeline, and hopefully we’ll be seeing his poetic half more often in his tweets. Head over to his Twitter profile to see for yourself!

Well, that’s my post for today. Be sure to follow my people on Twitter, and check out what’s going on!

Alex Out.

再見!

iOS 5 & Site Changes

After being housebound for the entire day due to sickness (blame the weather) I decied to give my blog the once-over and finally finish updating my iPod to iOS 5 with a tethered Jailbreak.

First of all, the blog. I know many of you won’t be able to utilise the changes made but I decided to enable the ‘onswipe’ feature and create a iPad friendly app-like safari alternative to the original site. If you do have an iPad you should be viewing it right now. Secondly, I decided to use my logo instead of an ‘S’ as the website icon so you may notice that change since that goes for all users. Those are the only changes I’ve made so far today and hopefully there won’t be any more.

Now then, iOS 5. It took me a while to decide between a tethered Jailbreak and no battery percentage and a fully working iOS 4.3.3 with no notification center and addons…the choice was pretty clear. After around 4 hours of backing up, upgrading, jailbreaking, restoring, tweaking settings and finalising I have finally got my fuly functional iPod back and I have to say I am mightily impressed. Let me just go through some of the features:

1. iMessage – BlackBerry Messenger Rival (Finally I have something to knock down BBM and be proud of)

2. Wireless Sync – Does what it says on the tin, wirelessly sync with iTunes

3. None-Lockout Sync – You can still use your iPhone, iPod & iPad whilst sync

4. Reminders – A simple To-Do list app built in

5. Twitter Intergration – Does what it says, you can Tweet from Safari, Photos & and any other native Apple application (developer API’s coming soon to build into other apps)

6. Newsstand  – Save the forests! Get your magazines delivered straight to your News folder.

7. Game center – A bunch of improvements, including profile pictures.

8. Photos – You can delete and create photo albums on the device itself

9. Music – You can delete music on the device

10. Wireless Activation – Instead of the ‘Plug Into iTunes’ screen you get a friendly ‘Slide To Set Up’ prompt to activate your iDevice. Steve included this feature as part of the Post-PC era (no more standard computers)

11. FaceTime – Now over 3G networks

12. Notification Center – Finally! No more blue popups! The noticifations silently appear on the top of the screen and wil dissapear unless you click them. If you dont, they remain in the notification center so you know which ones you haven’t checked. The center can be acessed by swiping down from the top of the screen (it also includes weather and stock widgets). Also, the notifications you get whilst you device is off the put on the lock screen and can be chacked by swiping the icon on the lockscreen to the right.

13. iCloud! MobileMe is dead, according to Steve Jobs and I’m glad it is! With iClud you can get 5GB of free storage, backup (for non iTunes users who still want to backup their devices), a free @me.com account, photo storage, document storage, settings storage, contacts and calander. There are pictures below that will show you some of the features graphically.

14. Camera – How many times have you missed that moment because you had yo put in your passcode? Well no longer! When you double tap the home button on the lock screen the ‘Slide To Unlock’ bar shoretens and reveals a camera button that you can use to quickly take pictures. The volume-up button can now be used also for taking photos instead of touch-only.

There are over 200+ new features in the software (suprisingly it’s only an extra 52mb for the iDevice) so I won’t go indepth but, to all those non-apple users out there, it may be a good time to get yourselves into your local store! For all who want to contact me I would request that you use my new email for test purposes on: alexholyoake@me.com 

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The Evening Post – Issue 7

Finally, after a days hard work, Alex rested his head on the pillow, and fell straight to sleep. The End.

That would be a nice ending wouldn’t it? Unfortunately for me this isn’t the case. So let me begin my day. I started off as usual with groggy eyes and a hungry stomach so I headed for the kitchen. After having breakfast and a shower I got dressed ready for a day of toil and labour. I set about my work at 9 A.M. and finished at about 2 P.M. There’s not much to talk about in-between then, so I’ll skip till after. When I had finished my work I set about updating my My Flickr, deviantART, Portfolio and Blog. After this I went outside and, to my amazement, I found a ladybug! Now, I, being the person I am, decided to name my new found friend Steve and kindly treated him to a photo-shoot of which some of the products are included in this post. Continuing on with my day I then found myself on the phone to my loyal cousin Cadeem talking about how the world would be different if all wars were just on Facebook and consisted of pokes and friend requests. The conversation ended quite abruptly when he was told to ‘get off the phone’ so he could go to his Grandma’s house so I was then left alone for a time until I ended up here, at the computer desk, blogging and typing on msn as I usually do at night.

Finally. A less that 300 word post that still has meaning. Sorry I haven’t got anything deep to ask you today but I’ll think up something for tomorrow.  再見！

Another Long Day

So today has been a long day since I last updated you people on my morning. So I’ll begin.

After I posted my last blog post, which wasn’t very informing apart from the fact that the burger I had didn’t come off my plate, I left out for a social at the Bradmore Community Centre where I met my good friends George, Loren, George, Hannah, Georgia, Tart and Danny. We just generally sat socialising and talking about our week and how we’d been since we last came together. Nearing 2pm me and my good sidekick George headed out to the park and, as luck would have it, we were hunted down by my distant relatives. Now don’t get me wrong, he’s nice and all *cough*, but sometimes *most times* he steps over the mark and today was one of those occasions. So as he came we went back, knowing that he had to stay with his dad and not us. We watched some TomSka and found the latest University advert quite funny. When we arrived at the community centre, since it was time to leave, we were reunited with out parents and taken home. Now we had been there for 3 hours but it just didn’t seem enough. All the things that had gone on since we last met couldn’t be talked about and all the things we wanted to do didn’t get done.

All in all the day’s been good and I’m happy with what’s gone on. I’ll probably post tomorrow night since I’m out all day so stay tuned!