Panoramic moTweets is certainly a good piece of software for Windows Mobile, but there is better out there and it costs less. If you head to the Marketplace on your device you can download the wonderful Twitter client TouchTwit for the princely sum of £1.69. This is a real bargain for such a quality piece of software. It has all the features one would hope for in a Twitter client (such as: URL shortening, posting images to TwitPic, Geotagging (with links to Google Maps), follow and unfollow other Twitters, @reply, re-Tweets and direct messages, posting video, Twitter searching, deleting Tweets, blocking users, support for multiple Twitter accounts and much, much more).

So why choose this over moTweets? After all, they both have a pretty similar set of features. Firstly, it is cheaper, which is a good enough reason by itself. Secondly, TouchTwit has a much faster and generally more slick user experience. It is filled with useful little features like swiping your finger from left to right to page between views and give you more options about what you want to do with a Tweet. Finally, the design of the user interface itself is far more pleasing and less clumsy than moTweets, it looks like a piece of software that has been touched by a skilled designer.

Here are some screenshots to give you an idea about how good it looks:

This is clearly a very well-designed and smart piece of software, all the more impressive that it has been written by two 22 year olds; well done those chaps! If you want to Tweet on your Windows Mobile device then clients do not get much better, or much cheaper, than TouchTwit.

It appears that the judge known as Cherie Booth, aka Mrs Tony Blair, has some pretty dodgy ideas when it comes to sentencing religious people. To summarise, she gave a violent offender who happened to be a theist a suspended sentence because (as she said), “You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour”. Does this mean she would give an atheist a prison sentence in the same circumstances on the grounds that non-believers have no guiding principles that tell them that smashing people in the face for no good reason is not the right thing to do? Being lenient on religious people seems the first step on a slippery slope which will result in people being treated differently by the law just because they have different beliefs. That would be terrible.

The generally hilarious Charlie Brooker has formulated the perfect ‘generic news report’

I laughed and laughed.

For the last week I’ve been playing around with Twitter and been trying various clients, both on my desktop and on my phone; it has been surprisingly fun. After all of this fiddling around I have settled on two clients in terms of their speed, size and features.

Windows users in search of a good client and who do not want to install Adobe’s AIR package will not go far wrong with Bitter. These are some of its features:

• Supports Twitter, Plurk and Friend Feed
• Single column UI
• Shows unread tweet count
• Fast install
• Manage multiple accounts
• Twitter tweets, mentions, direct messages, and favourites
• Twitter group tweets
• Twitter search and hash tags
• Twitter screenname intellisense
• View Twitter user's profiles
• Powerful menus to allow you to reply, reply to all, direct message, retweet, copy tweets or link, and more
• Auto spell check
• Colour schemes
• Auto shrinks URLs
• Posts pictures to TwitPic
• Low memory usage

And this is what it looks like:

The best thing about it? It is free! Hooray! Go to the developers website to download it.

On my brilliant TG01 I have been using Panoramic moTweets. There as a free, advert supported version, but since you only have to pay $3.99 for the full version I’d really suggest shelling out the cash. Some of its features are:

• Support for multiple Twitter accounts
• Ability to upload pictures using your device’s camera or from the photo album
• Post your location manually or by using your device GPS
• Tiny URL and bit.ly Support
• Three (3) skin colors
• View Trends, Lists  and Conversations
• Finger friendly, kinetic scrolling menus
• Translate Tweets and Search Twitter topics with ease
• ReTweet, Follow, Unfollow, Direct messages, Replies and Favorites

This is what it looks like on my phone:

You can get the free version or pay for the ad-free offering on Panoramic’s website.

With these two programs you can Tweet to your heart’s content, whether at home, in the office, or on the move. Enjoy!

I’ve mentioned one method of always showing a battery meter on the Windows Mobile taskbar, but I’ve found a better way of achieving this.

There is a piece of free software called BattClock, which you can get here, that allows you to always show not only a percentage battery meter in your taskbar all of the time, but you can also show your choice of a clock, the date or the amount/percentage of free memory in addition to this. My taskbar now shows the time, date and battery meter as you can see below:

One thing that I did have to do was slightly increase the width of what BattClock displays, as a couple of pixels from the Windows Mobile standard clock were visible poking out from the right of the BattClock information. This is really easy to achieve as the program has a configuration application (the icon in the Programs folder called battconfig) which allows you to change not only the size, location and colours its output, but also what information it does display.

I am very pleased with this bit of software. When I next get some cash I will certainly be donating some to the author.

The cat I had whilst in Oxford, named Thin Cat, died a couple of days ago. I was saddened to hear of it, but not too surprised as she looked pretty tired and old when I took a picture of her last Christmas. She had a right to look tired as she was over twenty years old. A good innings for a cat.

You may be wondering about the name ‘Thin Cat’, yes she really was called that. My family got her at the same time as another Russian Blue kitten and they looked pretty similar, the only difference was that one was slightly smaller and the other was slightly thinner. So they were named Small Cat and Thin Cat. My mother was somewhat embarrassed when she registered these expensive pedigree cats with the vet, she had to give their names and thought the vet would be disdainful of our naming strategy.

Thin Cat was quite social but I was clearly her favourite person; she would usually be found hanging around where I was and loved sitting on me no end. I used to feel I had been particularly favoured by her attentions when she wanted to spend the night asleep on my legs. How could I possibly throw her off me when she loved me so, just for the feeble excuse of me needing sleep?

She did have a close escape earlier in her life. One night she came in through the cat-flap with her face bleeding and covered in cuts. When we looked at her we noticed that she was also missing some teeth: she had clearly been hit by a car. My dear mother was a bit concerned about her and so started looking through the phone book for an all night vet. As she was flicking through the phonebook pages Thin Cat walked over to where I was sitting, jumped up onto my lap, curled up and started purring very loudly. At that point we realised seeing the vet could wait until the next day. The only fall-out from her run-in with the car was that she lost some teeth and this would occasionally make her tongue loll out of one side of her mouth; it looked quite funny.

Small Cat was a much more nervous, neurotic cat, far less friendly than Thin Cat. Indeed, Small Cat was so meek that she was even bullied by my sister’s budgerigar, which would land on her head and bite her ears. Bold budgie! Small Cat hated this but didn’t seem to realise that, as she was a cat, she didn’t have to stand for it and could eat the bird if it was vexing her.

Fast forward to three years ago and the partner and I decide that we want to get a cat. I’ve told the story before, but once we made this decision we acted with speed and efficiency. Within a few minutes we had found a reasonably local breeder of the variety of cat we wanted, the next day we visited her and met the little kitten we would call Kisu. With his big ears and hugely long back legs we thought he was extremely cute and could not resist buying him. Why is he named Kisu? I wanted to follow my historic pet-naming strategy and call him ‘Cat’, but the partner disagreed. He suggested instead that we call him Kisu, which means ‘little cat’ in Finnish (the partner is of Finnish extraction), I approved and his name was settled.

Kisu has grown to be rather large for a ‘little cat’, now weighing almost 6kg, so when he jumps on me whilst I am asleep I generally notice. He is certainly one of the most friendly, well-adjusted and social cats I’ve experienced. He may not always fancy sitting on someone’s lap, but he generally likes to hang around where there are people; he wants to be involved in what is going on in the flat be it eating sushi or appreciating fine ceramics. He may like to hang around with us, but he generally does it in a very relaxed style:

When the BBC reports stories with a religious angle, no matter how trivial it is, the theists usually get an easy, uncritical ride. Consequently, in this BBC News piece about why god allows natural disasters to happen it is good to see holes being picked, albeit in a fairly gentle manner, in the drivelly arguments religious people are wont to spew to anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot.

Employees of the church of England, that domain of mild, incoherent and woolly thinking, have given some typically vague responses when asked why their god would allow the earthquake in Haiti to occur. I quote from the BBC article:

Faced with this question, Archbishop of York John Sentamu said he had "nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while another senior clergyman Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond "not with clever argument but with prayer".

These responses avoid answering the question in a really base and duplicitous manner. What else could one expect expect from senior members of the drivelly and confused waffle-mongering Anglican church?

There are plenty of other examples of theists’ bonkers reasoning and avoidance of giving straight and meaningful arguments. How about this laughable attempt by some theists to define their frankly pathetic beliefs in a manner which avoids saying anything definitive or concrete about them: Others say their talk of God is supposed to acknowledge … a thread of meaning or value running through the world, or perhaps something ineffable. Utter crap, obviously, but then so is the whole idea of religious belief. If people are fool enough to to subscribe to the preposterous idea of there being any form of god, I suppose one cannot really expect consistent and articulate arguments from them about their theism.

The final paragraph in the article clearly encapsulates one of the many problems theists still have:

But, as for those who believe in an all-good, all-powerful agent-God, we've seen that they face a question that remains pressing after all these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by the horrors in Haiti. If a deity exists, why didn't he prevent this?

Edit: I’ve recently heard from theists that all religions share a common thread of compassion. This news article really demonstrates that such a thing either does not exist or if it does it is routinely ignored. Might religious people be somewhat hypocritical? “Do as I say not as I do.”

I was sitting next to a Catholic priest on my last flight to the US and he said, “I think gay marriage is wrong because it is not mentioned in the bible.”

I replied, “You are flying.”

Here in the UK we are suffering from an excess of interfering busy-bodies who have pet theories about how the world should be run. All for our own good, of course, we cannot be trusted to be in charge of our own lives. No, rather we should all behave as these unelected control-freaks think we should and be damned grateful that they are saving us from ourselves. Most of these unspeakable swine work for fake charities that are really funded by the government to lobby the government on the subject of their weird ideas and distorted world views in the hope that it will result in a change of policy in line with the meddlers’ latest whim. These people are always publishing reports or appearing in the mass media in the hope that if they keep banging on and on they will eventually be taken seriously and so justify all that money that has been thrown at them by the government.

I’ll give you some recent examples. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is the perfect example of a bunch of self-satisfied pen-pushers who will take any opportunity to get themselves in the press. Some of their lunacy was reported on the BBC News website today. After the Christmas day bomber, Mr Abdulmutallab, hid explosive materials on his body and tried to blow up an aircraft heading to the USA there has been the usual knee-jerk, ‘something must be done’ reaction from the government who have committed to installing body scanners at UK airports. “That doesn’t sound so bad?” you might well be thinking.

The EHRC realised they could get themselves in the press and show that they have some point to their petty, whining existence by criticising these scanners. Apparently the devices risk breaching an individual's right to privacy under the Human Rights Act. Does that sound convincing? It sounds like a load of tosh to me. They go on to suggest that body scanners could generate illegal images of children and images of celebrities that could be leaked online. The BBC News website helpfully provides a picture of the type generated by these scanners. I’ve reproduced it to the right of this paragraph. These are characterised by the EHRC as ‘naked’ images which are are likely to have a negative impact on privacy, especially in relation to certain groups such as disabled people, the elderly, children and the transgendered community.

It is clear from the body scanner picture that they do not generate pictures of people looking as if they are naked. They are a fuzzy blur, with no real fine details about the target’s body visible. You’d have to be pretty desperate to find the opaque images from these scanners in any way a breach of someone’s privacy, they are just not detailed enough to tell much about a person’s body.

Moreover, even if body scanners produced a more defined image of someone’s body under their clothes, it still would not mean that the scans would be child porn as the EHRC suggests. Nakedness does not equate with pornography and body scanners do not automatically upload the images they scan to Flickr.

Finally, why should body scanners, with their fuzzy, indistinct images, be a particular worry for disabled people, the elderly or the transgendered community? It is just totally vacuous to suggest such groups would have any more difficulty with being scanned than anyone else. These kind of statements, which try to bring victim status to particular groups by saying they would be unfairly treated, are just a feeble attempt by the pressure group involved to make the whatever they are raving about seem a more serious, iniquitous problem and so justify the idea that ‘something must be done’. There are legitimate reasons why body scanners might not be a great idea, for example security experts have claimed that body scanners would only have a 50% chance of spotting the bomb carried by Mr Abdulmutallab, but the extremely vague possibility that a body scan may reveal that someone in a dress might have the suggestion of a penis being in their pants is not one of them.

There are more of these fake charities spewing out countless reports about how only their pet theories can improve the world and everyone else just cannot be trusted with anything important. A few days ago I discovered an excellent blog devoted to debunking the ravings on Don Shenker, chief executive of the government-funded pseudo-charity Alcohol Concern. Quite why the government should be funding this nutcase organisation is beyond me, but then the Labour government under the odious Gordon Brown is only too happy to let his ‘big government’ and the unelected special interest groups nanny us all.

The desire of the government to interfere with our drinking habits has been much on my mind of late. The recent report from the Health Select Committee (HSC) into alcohol consumption was woven from half-truths, manipulated data and unfounded assertions. These people clearly want to dictate how much we can drink, where we can drink it and how much it will cost. Most people have a perfectly healthy relationship with alcohol, I know I do, and yet all of us are being demonised by these jumped up farts who think they know better than us even if they have to publish reports which are a tissue of mendacity and duplicity to show they know best. I dropped by a good beer blog earlier and the author of the site has written a number of articles which debunk most of the claims in the HSC report. He demonstrates that alcohol adverts do not encourage under-age drinking, that cutting overall consumption of alcohol does not necessarily result in a drop in alcohol misuse, that alcohol is getting more expensive rather than cheaper as the neo-prohibitionists claim and much more. All of these blog posts of his are well worth reading; if you know how the bastards are trying to mislead you it is easier to stand up for them.

The problem with all of these hideous gits clamouring for their own ideas to be adopted as government policy is that, even if their most extreme ideas are not implemented, the propagation of the view that there are problems and ‘something must be done’ will result in legislation creep. Bit by bit our freedom will be eroded until it will be impossible to do anything without the government’s express permission. The suggestion floated recently that adults should have ‘entitlement cards’ that have to be produced when buying alcohol and act as ration books to control the amount we purchase shows that this is the aim of some of these nutcases. They want to control us, and unless we stand up for ourselves and our rights the filthy swine will get their way.

The Daily Telegraph has an interesting article concerning a twelfth century poem that has just been translated into modern English. The poem itself is piece of propaganda composed by English intellectuals of the time to whip up anti-French feeling. Seems we English have not got on with the French for some time; the poem characterises the French as lazy, arrogant cowards. The stanza I particularly like is:

People remind them often enough about
This source of shame, but they may as well not have bothered;
For they take neither offence or account,
As they know no shame.

Naturally, I love French culture and the French people, even if sometimes they can be a bit… well… French.

I’m reading an excellent history book at the moment: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England. It is quite an unusual take on the history book genre in that it aims to explain what life was like for all the social strata of people living in the fourteenth century and how we, as modern people, would respond to life during that period. It covers everything from food to recreational activities, from the structure of towns to the effects of the great plague. It provides a lot of detail on aspects of life that most history books just would not contain. An example of this is the section on medieval humour, and I shall reproduce a medieval joke here:

Two merchants are having a chat and one of them says, “I’ve been married four times now, and each time my wife has hung herself from the oak tree in my garden.”

The second merchant replies, “Can I have a cutting from this noble tree?”

So you can tell medieval humour was not terribly sophisticated. The book is filled with fascinating details like this, and reading it gives a real sense of how the people and life was so different back then. Another example is the staggering misogyny in medieval England, no modern English woman would allow themselves to be treated as the distinctly inferior people that women were in the fourteenth century.

If you enjoy history and want a compelling and engaging book to read I can highly recommend this.

The nutcase theist Pat Robertson blamed his particular god for the earthquake in Haiti; apparently his flavour of god was angry with the Haitians for rejecting Jesus. Obvious bollocks, of course. If he really wanted to be taken seriously he should have gone with the currently fashionable idea that we get punished with natural disasters because we are evil, consumerist, free-market swine who fail to treat the world with the delicate touch it needs. This is also manifest bollocks. Whenever there is a natural disaster, or even something as minor as the recent cold weather in the UK, the environmentalist nutcases all get terribly worked up about how they are warnings from nature that our shameful ways will lead to the end of civilisation at best and the total annihilation of the world at worst. They get a cheap thrill lecturing us that they know best whilst the rest of us cannot be trusted to live on the planet like responsible people (ie. living in yurts made from cow dung and only eating grass clippings. Sorry, organic grass clippings).

Some appalling examples of this hat-stand thinking* can be found in this excellent article on Spiked.

*A good example that is shows how misanthropic the environmental extremists can be are the Australian bush fires of 2009, which killed 173 people and destroyed 2,000 homes; they were started by arsonists and so are not really linked to any bogus environmental problems. However, these fires  were characterised by Jonathon Porritt, a green who has advised both the UK government and the royal family, as being linked to Australia’s pursuit of ‘unbridled affluence, California-style’. So Australians burned for their sins; how dare they to try to generate wealth! He went on to say that the problem with the Australian bushfires is that they clearly weren’t ‘bad enough’, because Aussies straight away went back to pursuing their ‘dreams of unbridled affluence’. Too many people spout petty, vindictive, sanctimonious drivel like this.

You have to fiddle with your device’s registry to do this, so if you are a bit nervous about that you may want to stop reading now.

In a registry editor (I use Resco File Explorer’s registry editor plug-in) go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shell\TaskBar and change both values to 1. This will make the battery icon always visible. You’ll need to restart your device for the registry change to take effect.

Unfortunately, the battery icon in Windows Mobile 6.5 is ugly and uninformative, so I suggest you install a better one. The best battery icon I’ve seen comes from the Misfortune Taskbar, but the complete installation of that does not work on WM6.5. However, if you go here you can get just the battery icon and it does work. As the instructions there say, install SDKcerts.cab (there is a link to it on that page) then download and install the Ahen 6a taskbar. Restart your device and you’ll have a much better looking and useful battery icon.

I’ve been vaguely following the stories about non-Muslims in Malaysia using the word ‘Allah’; here is the latest piece. This started when a Catholic newspaper there used the word Allah to refer to their Christian version of God. This has resulted in some of the Muslims majority in Malaysia getting a bit excited and throwing petrol bombs at Christian churches, schools and the like. The Muslims claim that Christians are using the word Allah to try and convert Muslims to Christianity; the logic behind that being so opaque and risible that it must be one of the crappest excuses for violence the world has ever seen.

The air over there must be thick with hypocrisy. Is it really alright to say that one group of people cannot use a particular word, whilst it is fine for an arbitrarily different group to be able to say? Religious people think there is something special about their brand of lunacy which allows them to say what they like about whatever they like. Of course, people who don’t belong to their nutter cults (be they atheists or other flavours of religion) are not allowed to comment on anything, certainly not violate the ‘theologically-correct’ religious-person’s right to say whatever the fuck they like.

Some weirdos have the strange idea that people have a right not to be offended, especially when it comes to religious beliefs (see this utterly appalling article for a weaselling defence of this). This is of course complete toss (as this extremely good article points out). There is nothing special about religious beliefs that means they must automatically be protected and respected; respect always has to be earned. If someone offends you then that is your problem, not theirs; it is you who chose to be offended by them for whatever personal reasons you have and your reasons will never be universally held. If you do not like a newspaper using a particular word do not buy the bloody newspaper, it is quite easy. Free speech is the safeguard that protects all of our other rights. The right to say only the ‘right’ things is a sad, shallow idea not worth defending as there is clearly no objective list of acceptable things we can say and the objectionable things we cannot say.

Of course, some things people say do have to be taken a bit more seriously. If the Malaysian newspaper published an article saying that all Muslims were evil molesters of little children and it is every Christian’s duty to kill as many of them as possible then this would be incitement to commit violence and you can legitimately think such things should not be given uncritical coverage. When it is incitement it is not a case of offending people, it is a case of people having their lives threatened. I don’t think people should be in fear of their lives because the hard of thinking disagree with them. Extremists demonstrating in the streets carrying signs saying “Behead people who insult our religion” (whatever religion it is) are inciting violence and they should be watched carefully in case they go on to commit it.

Freedom of speech must be absolute. Once people start picking and choosing what can and cannot be said this list of proscribed words and ideas will only ever grow as more and more partisan and un-representative organisations start petitioning governments and courts to protect them from offence in their much-vaunted victim-status. This does not mean you cannot protest and demonstrate against outrageous peoples’ behaviour, but not by violence or seeking to restrict their rights.

"Let the idiots and bullies speak openly and they will be revealed for what they are!"

*I am happy to admit it is not just the religious people who do this. A few months back Nick Griffin, the odious leader of the odious British National Party, was invited to appear in a serious political discussion program on television. I was scandalised by the number of people who said he should not appear on television and not be allowed to expound the racist views of his party. Of course he should, he and his voters have a particular world-view and, even if we disagree with it, they are allowed to talk about it. By all means demonstrate against these views and try to propagate more civilised ideas, but you cannot gag or infringe someone’s civil liberties just because you do not like their ideas.

Christmas and New Year holidays are a great excuse to nosh on vast quantities of lovely food. Indeed, before Boxing day much was being cooked and consumed. Then, from somewhere, I picked up a vom-tastic stomach bug. This has spoiled my fun somewhat. I had to cook for a dinner party on the 27th and even though the food and wine was brilliant none could pass my lips. The guests enjoyed it, which I suppose was the important thing. I hope it wears off soon. Much as the weight-loss angle is good, feeling like hurling all of the time is a lot less good.