My other half makes cakes, and like a good hubby I did her a website some time back - but like the old saying about cobblers children it should really be a bit more impressive than it is.

The main part is the gallery, and I started off with something I knocked up in an hour or so, but recently thought it needed some attention - didn’t look very good or work well, and was a nightmare to maintain.

So, the old quandary - do I start from scratch, search in vain for the perfect thing, or find something that’s close and adapt it (or put up with the failings)?

I went through a few gallery packages, and they either were to huge and clonky, or didn’t work (or I couldn’t be arsed to fiddle to make them work) or they had entirely the wrong feature set so I’d have to turn too much off. I didn’t want comments or other UGC / sharing / web 2.0 type features, I just wanted a nice simple way to display categorised groups of images with a little bit of description.

And since the images were being taken on a 6mp camera, and we didn’t want / need the full size image online, there should be an easy way to do the resizing / thumbnail generation etc.

And it should be light, and simple, and … nice.

I was just about to give up the search and write my own - I was thinking ftp images up into folders and have a very simple script that if it saw a new image would just display it, and if it found some meta-data in a text file or some such would disply that alongside. No need for databases or anything complex.

And then I found SPGM - and I found that someone had already written it. I’ve commented before on my love/hate with open source, but this is defintely on the love side. It’s just the thing, and almost exactly what I had in mind - in fact better because I didn’t have to write it.

So I install it, and it works first time, and I start thinking “OK, it’s great, but it could do with a basic tool to help with thumbnail creation and editing the meta-data” and then I read on and found that had been written too - SPGM Webministration - it was light and it worked first time and was just the thing. Two for two!

So I’ve knocked up a quick Firewoks macro to automate the process of generating 640×480 images to upload (don’t want to waste too much bandwidth by having the conversion done on the server) and 100 odd images are now online and looking funky(ish), in practically no time. And I start thinking “I wonder if there’s a tool to do that side of things too” and I check, and there is.

But I haven’t tried that one yet - no sense tempting fate.

Time for a new phone I thought, and I’ve been hankering for something a bit more high tech for some time. So having been reading about iPhone vs N95 I thought I’d find out what the computer has become.

First impressions - compared to my old K750i it’s big, but then it’s got that lovely big screen. However it’s been living in my pocket quite well for a few days now, so I don’t think it’s too big.

It’s a new interface to learn - I had Nokia before my last two Sony Ericssons and loved it and moaned about having to learn the SE, but you get used to things don’t you? Accepting that I still have to learn keyboard shortcuts etc. the current issues I have are getting confused with when the keyboard will lock, and the text entry could do with a preview of what the next button press will do. And the camera takes too long from going ‘click’ and freezing the picture, to actually taking the image and storing it (I suspect something in the order of half a second?), so you often miss what it was you were trying to shoot - especially in lower light.

Of course my main interest was the Internet browsing, and it was … underwhelming. I really don’t agree with the apparent trend to try and get mobile devices to render normal web pages on small screens. It’s a bad compromise, and will do nothing to encourage websites to make an effort to improve their rendering for lesser browsers. So it tries to render full pages, with a zoom function and a cursor, but it’s still a mobile device with a small screen and vastly reduced input device. And they’ve even removed one of the most useful features of phone browsers - using the keyboard hotkeys for fast navigation. Point it at a site optimised for mobiles, and I’m sure it’s great (although I haven’t yet found a shining example).

This is my initial reaction after not enough time - I will explore more as I’m very keen indeed to partake in helping the mobile internet evolution progress.

I was fascinated by the GPS functionality, having read so much about that’s the way mobile devices were going to go - and I was frankly very disappointed. It takes an age to get the GPS functionality lit up and knowing where it is, and it’s very flakey. And I don’t know that you can automatically geotag pictures. It may be the future, but it’s not here yet from what I see.

I haven’t yet explored the music / video / 3G features yet - I’m rationing the excitement.

I hate the commercialisation of phones - demo games, subscribe to additional features, constantly having to worry what doing anything will cost you. But I suppose it’s the price you have to pay for subsidised handsets etc.

That’s about it. Other than that it’s a phone.

We treated ourselves to a new telly, and I brought home a 32″ LG LCD.

“It’s got a PC input!” I thought, and a possible change in plan came into my head. The better half has been using an old laptop running Windows ME for some time to check email, play solitaire, and buy ’stuff’ on eBay - but it has been getting increasingly slow and temperamental and we were going to replace it. “Let’s build a media centre PC instead” I thought.

So I start window shopping - for me a very mixed experience; half pleasure, half pain. So many choices, so much to think about. I wanted to keep the budget under control, wanted a good looking functional bit of kit that Mel could use happily, it needed to be relatively fast to be future resitant, but it didn’t need to be too high spec as we wouldn’t be pushing it.

I found the Elonex Artisan LX barebones case on ebuyer which seemed like a good bit of kit and good value, so planning started on that. Next choice - processor. Now this is not the most current case, and the motherboard it comes with only supports specific processors (90nm skt 775 Pentium 4) and they’re a bit hard to get hold of now. I sound like I know what I’m talking about, and I may do now as I learned to tell my 65nm P4 from my 90nm, but at the start I couldn’t tell you much about even what a skt 775 motherboard was. So that was a problem - do I try and dig up an awkward processor and take the risk, or replace the motherboard with a newer, better supported one?

I’ll cut a long boring geeky story short - I stuck with the Elonex motherboard, found a 3GHz P4 on eBay, and we now have a swanky machine sat under our LCD TV running Windows XP, and all is great. Almost.

You see PC monitors are fine when they’re a foot or two from your face - I’ve not got the world’s best eyesight but I’m quite happy using a monitor at highest resolution. But a TV is quite a few feet away, and reading small text is a chore. So much so that we had to drop the resolution down from the max 1380×768 to a paltry 800×600 - and then you still have to strain. So no problems when watching video clips or playing spider solitaire, but reading email or web pages …

And I got a wireless keyboard with built in touchpad thingy - great, but it’s weird using that on your lap like a laptop, but the screen is a mile away and looking from one to the other ends up giving you a stiff neck.

The moral of this story - media centre PCs are different from normal ones in that you have to use them differently - lower screen resolution and different user interface. I’m glad I built it though - it’s a good bit of kit, but couldn’t replace a proper desktop or laptop.