Llama (Llama location aware mobile application) is a great little application that changes your phones settings depending on your location, and/or time of day.
When you first install the app, you'll need to teach it about the areas that you frequent. You do this by telling it your current location (home, work, etc.), along with how long you're likely to be there, Llama then starts to monitor the cell towers that the phone can detect, it records all these and then the next time it sees the cell towers it'll know which area you are in.
Once Llama has learnt your area then you can tell it what settings to change when you're in that area.
So when you arrive home, you can set your ringtone volume to medium, and turn wifi on. When you leave home, your phone can switch off wifi, and set the volume to loud. Then when you arrive at work, switch to silent.
You can also combine location with time, so if you're at home, and it's gone 10 O'clock, then you could have your phone automatically switch to quiet.
Llama is a really great app, it does everything it's meant to do, without being intrusive, it's also free! Although there is a donation option, which at 80 pence, seems like a very small price to pay.
Oh, and the app also has a few Llama jokes in it too, what more could you ask for?!?
I've always been interested in animation, and I've done quite a bit of computer animation in the past, but I don't seem to have ever got around to doing any stop motion animation before.
As a kid I used to watch programmes about stop motion animation, but I never had access to a video or stills camera that would allow me to put together an animated sequence.
But of course these days, most people have access to at least a digital stills camera if not a video camera too, along with a computer to put all the frames together with.
So I finally got around to creating something, it's nothing special, but it's taught me a lot about the process, and I made a lot of mistakes that I should be able to rectify the next time I do a stop motion video (and I will be doing more!).
The Video
If you can't view the video, then check out A Brief Search on YouTube.
Read on to hear about the lessons I've learnt from creating this video.
Recently we took a trip to Twycross zoo, in Leicestershire. We'd never been to Twycross before, but it's a zoo that I had heard about a lot as a child, it was often mentioned on the likes of Newsround and Blue Peter back in the eighties, so it's a zoo with a lot of history behind it, and one that I've always wanted to visit.
Our visit was in mid-march, before the completion of the new 'Himalaya' visitors centre, and before the completion of the Elephant Walkway. Despite all the construction going on around us, we had a very enjoyable day, and there was still lots of animals to see and enjoy. The weather was quite cold and windy, so the all the bigger apes just wanted to lie around inside and sleep, which was a bit of a shame. But we did get to see a lot of the smaller monkeys and gibbons, along with assorted other animals.
I took at lot of photos while there, along with quite a bit of video footage, feel free to check out my Twycross Zoo set on flickr, and my video on youtube.
Wow! It's been a heck of a year for me. Particularly the last 8 months or so.
The year started with quite a bit of DIY on the house, including getting the cellar ready to become our new office/study/computer room, in order to allow us to use the second bedroom as a nursery. We got all the computers moved down there, and although half our stuff is still in boxes at the moment, I'm hoping that 2010 will provide me with some time to start building shelving and cupboards so that we can get things unpacked properly.
April saw the birth of our wonderful daughter, and since then it's been an incredible 8 months watching her grow from a small little thing, with only the ability to eat and sleep, to the noisy, crawling, laughing, bundle of fun that she's become in such a short time.
Since April life has really revolved around her, everything we do is all tailored around her needs, and while this can sometimes be annoying I don't think we'd want it any other way.
Some consequences/benefits of having a child that you don't necessary consider beforehand, the need for more hard disk space, in order to sort all the photos and video footage. Not to mention the requirement to get a video camera, and additional photography equipment! There is also a complete change in how much spare time you have, which is making it very hard to actually get much done these days, including updating this site.
In September I finally got around to moving all of my websites to a new server, and I'm now using Vidahost for my hosting, and so far they've been really great. So I can highly recommend them.
Finally I also got around to moving away from the Geeklog software that this site used to run on, and I'm now using Joomla instead, which so far, seems to have been a good move.
So there we go, a very brief round up of my 2009, hopefully 2010 will see some more articles on this site, and maybe with more regularity. :)
I posted up my first YouTube video just recently, and while I've created some videos in the past this is the first public one, which meant I had one additional thing to consider, namely I had to find some suitable music that fit the video, but most importantly I was allowed to use for "Free".
A quick search on the net for 'Free Music' will bring up a lot of results, but the vast majority tend to be "Royalty Free" music, rather than really "Free". I understand that people want to be paid for their work, that's only natural, but these days with the amount of internet videos knocking around I figured there must be some sources of really free music and sound effects.
Eventually I came across this site, Incompetech, which has a large library of music, covering many different genres, and all created by one person, Kevin MacLeod. All the music is covered by a CC license, and he's quite happy for people to use it as long as he gets credit for his work.
For this particular video, I also needed some sound effects, and again I found a lot of 'Royalty Free' sites, but eventually I discovered FreeSounds. This site also has a large and varied library of sounds, again covered by CC licenses, I haven't had a chance to fully look through the site, but I did find the sounds I needed pretty quickly.
I'm sure I'll be using both of these sites again in future video projects.
Finally, as this is a post about my experiences in creating my first YouTube video, I might as well link to it, the video itself is nothing special, and will probably only be of interest to those that know the person starring in it. But nevertheless, here it is: BigFoot Revealed.
Of course the fact that I'm using a piece of copyrighted film footage at the beginning of the video isn't lost on me.. In my defense, it's fairly short, and poor quality.. :)
When you first install the app, you'll need to teach it about the areas that you frequent. You do this by telling it your current location (home, work, etc.), along with how long you're likely to be there, Llama then starts to monitor the cell towers that the phone can detect, it records all these and then the next time it sees the cell towers it'll know which area you are in. 
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