I know, I know, I haven’t updated for ages! But I have been very busy and so here’s a big recap of what I’ve been up to, imagine it as a montage in your head, if you will:

Scotland

Me, my Mrs and some friends went to Nairn just outside of Inverness for 4 nights at the end of January. The scenery was gorgeous! Lots of snowy mountains and lochs and waterfalls. We went to Loch Ness which was really huge and to the top of Cairngorm Mountain which was really high – we really had a great time and I highly recommend it – here’s a panorama I took of Loch Ness:

Nexus One

So if you’ve already read this post you know that I’ve been monitoring the price of the Nexus One phone from Google for some time now. Recently as the Pound gets weaker against the US Dollar its just been slowly rising, so I bought one from the google.com/phone store a couple of weeks ago.

I am extremely happy with it, its better than any phone I have ever seen or used before. Its incredibly fast, it looks great (better than an iPhone in my opinion), the screen is amazing, the camera is great, I love the dock and Android 2.1 is fantastic – the best phone OS out there. Oh and it makes a mean gaming machine! I barely played anything on my G1 because it was so slow and it would just kill the battery, but the Nexus One is so quick that gaming is a breeze. I recommend Shoot U!, Radiant, Air Control, 2 Player Reactor, Jewellust, Labyrinth, PapaStacker, What The Doodle!?, and Gem Minor, I’ll recommend more on the blog as I find them.

There are only 2 negatives I have to report - 1. No turn-by-turn navigation for the UK yet, but this is coming soon – 2. I’m still on T-Mobile until my G1 contract runs out and it is rubbish. I started a Buzz thread asking others about UK networks and found that while at best I get 800Kb/s over T-Mobile 3G, on the ‘Three’ network people are getting over 3,000Kb/s! Nearly 4 times quicker! And by all accounts their coverage is better too! So I did a little shopping around and I’ve decided when my T-Mobile contract is up at the end of April (Grrr) I’m switching to a Three pay-monthly tariff - £15 a month, no fixed term contract, 1GB data usage, unlimited SMS messages, free Three to Three calls, 300 free other network minutes, free voice-mail (you don't get that on T-Mobile), unlimited Skype (?). And the nice thing about having an unlocked Nexus One of course, is that I can change networks whenever I like! So I’ll always be on the best deal there is :D

For those who would like to know, the phone and dock were £413.48 mid-February and the UK VAT on top of that was £65, a grand total of £478.48, and worth every penny.

Resolution Test

My Google Chrome extension, Resolution Test, has seen several updates and has reached 6,850 users and still rising! This is probably the most popular thing I’ve ever put out on the net and its great to know so many people are finding it useful. I am working on it when I can and have a list of feature requests I’m working through, its the first time I’ve written JavaScript in any real volume and I’m finding it really fun.

Android Development

I’ve started working through the Android Development SDK and I’ve decided on what my first app will be; something small and something that I would use and that will improve my Android experience. It will probably be free. That’s all on that for now.

Work Blog

At work we’ve been setting up a blog for us to post updates and stuff, its now live here. I’ll be posting about all the bits I’m working on and I’m gonna work out a way of piping my posts through here so you can read them without following another RSS. I’m looking forward to having a better way of showing what I’ve been working on.

In other news…

My Mrs passed her driving test! Really, really proud of her and finding it weird sitting in the passenger seat in our car.

Been playing through Half-Life 2 again, so much that I totally forgot about! Love it. Wish we had more info on Episode 3 :(. Wanting to play Bioshock 2 but need to play the first one first… Also wanting to play Heavy Rain. 

Got the Swype demo/beta/trial on Android and it is really cool! Looking forward to the full version.

Started using Buzz, you can follow me here.

Ok, we’re up to date, I think, I will now blog more often!

Happy March,

-Ben

Happy New Year to you all,

As I’m sure you’ve all seen, Google is now selling the gorgeous Nexus One android phone with its stunning AMOLED screen and 1GHz Snapdragon processor.

Needless to say - I desperately want one - but how much will it cost in total to get one shipped to the UK? On the Google site they say taxes will apply but they don’t say how much, so here is a calculator I made in Google Docs that should give you a pretty accurate total price based on Google Finance’s exchange rate at the time you visited this page:

£420 (at time of writing) isn’t bad for an unlocked Smartphone with those specs considering the iPhone 3GS is around the £800 mark.

Now all you have to do is decide what network to go with, I’m looking at Orange and O2 currently, let me know what you decide if you buy one in the comments,

-Ben

Hi everyone, hope you had a good Christmas!

I had a great one, got lots of nice presents and now that I’m working  its really good to be able to buy presents for others too.

So what’s new with me?

My Chrome Extension has seen over 2,000 downloads which I’m well happy about! Going to push some more updates out for that soon.

I’ve started using DropBox which is pretty awesome.

I got myself and my Mrs a new Samsung Q320 laptop and we are loving it – its so nice to have a laptop with actual battery life and without a screen that’s falling off.

Played Super Mario Bros Wii, its not the most groundbreaking or innovative game you’ll ever play but it’s damned funny – strongly suggest you get it and play at least 2 player at all times.

The Steam Holiday sale has started, GTA IV for £4.99!! Awesome.

My Dad got a Kindle 2 for Christmas and I had the luxury of playing with it setting it up for him. Its such a cool gadget, I want one just because its so cool. If I had some money to spare and perhaps some more free time I’d probably get one and read a lot more as a result. The podcast/audio book support is great too, definitely recommend it.

My Mrs and I have been looking at holidays for the summertime, we want somewhere warm and islandy, not too basic but not overrun by tourists, its hard to find that balance. We also want to get married abroad so we’re kinda looking at potential wedding/honeymooning worthy destinations too as we might as well enquire whilst we’re there.

So yeah, I think that's everything for now, have a great New Year if I don’t speak to you before ;)

-Ben

Evenin,

I was just thinking about creating a background for my Twitter page when I thought it would be useful if there was a chrome extension that would resize your window to mimic different display resolutions. I did a search but I couldn't find one, so I thought I'd have a go at creating one myself.

I haven't done a lot of javascript before and its still very rusty, but if you're running chrome on the dev branch you can install the extension here.

Enjoy :)

-Ben

[Thanks to famfamfam for the icons]

Update on Feb 6, 2010 at 11:46 AM by Ben Beckford

This has become quite popular :D over 4,000 downloads and counting!

Get it here, on the official extensions site, or at chromeextensions.org!

Current version: 1.80

Changelog:

• 1.80
  • Added Google Browser Size support (as requested by Steve)
  • Tidied up look and feel
  • Added icons for tasks
  • Reduced overall width
  • Fixed reset bug where sometimes the width wasn't recorded correctly
• 1.70
  • Added reset button (as requested by Kirk, t-dub)
  • Added 1024x600 as standard (as requested by danio)
  • Added checkboxes to open multiple resolutions at once
• 1.61
  • Fixed large icon not showing up in extensions list
• 1.6
  • Added new icons
• 1.5
  • Added 1280 x 800 and 1280 x 1024
• 1.4
  • Polished UI a bit
  • Auto-updating now works
  • Added custom option to fill in your own resolution

Just generated a tweet cloud for my last year of tweets at http://tweetcloud.icodeforlove.com.

Some of the sentences it makes are pretty funny; "watch people mate windows", "facebook home looking pretty"

Top three words: lmao, time, awesome - http://w33.us/10jv

I think that sums me up pretty well,

-Ben