Basically a news feed (commonly referred to as RSS)  is a means by which a website or blog can let you know about new content it has published without you having to visit said site or blog every so often to check up on it. This feed takes the form of a normal internet address that you can put into a news reader and from there on you can keep track on what is going on in all your favorite websites.

There are many different readers you can use to do this, I recommend Google Reader as its very simple to use and if you use gmail (if not you should!)  its easy to get to when checking email.

Here is an example of what it looks like once you have it setup and have added in some feeds:

So you can see I have loads of folders setup with feeds from all my favourite websites. Every time I log in I can immediately see what about 30 websites and blogs are up too. All you need to do is copy the link to a website’s feed and add it as a subscription in Google reader and ya on your way. I know a load of folks out there that’d benefit from this, it takes a few minutes it set up and really improves how you use the interwebs.

YouTube tip:

If you want to add in a feed of a specific channel from YouTube you can do it! Just copy the channel address and Google Reader will do the rest, e.g. ‘http://www.youtube.com/user/BBC‘

Anyhoo might as well get it kicked off with what I am working on at the minute which is a World Eaters chaos space marine army which I have had lying about for a few years since I worked part time at Gamesworkshop. Back then I had a staff discount so this army is made up of some pretty expensive parts with some new additions here and there.

Here is a tester marine I painted, the aim of the army is to be pretty straightforward to paint, nothing fancy:

Heres a lord I have converted who’ll get used as a daemon prince (since lords royally suck)

Rhino i put together ages ago:

Land raider I finished chaosifying the other day:

Today on facebook one of my chums on there wanted to know how to link his blog posts into facebook automatically. This is something i’v been wanting to do for a while and after a bit of searching the interwebs i found out how.

There are a lot of tutorials out there on how do do this but most of them focus on the old style layout of facebook not the new one. So without further adieu heres how you do it.

Find your feed

Every blogging site/software worth their salt has a mechanism to feed out posts in a format online readers can use to access the latest blog posts as they are published. The first thing you need to do is find out the link for yours, here are where Blogger and WordPress feeds are located:

Blogger:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

WordPress:
http://blogname.wordpress.com/feed/  (or just http://your-blog-url/feed/ if you have WordPress on a webserver)

Once you have this link highlight and copy it.

Add your blog to facebook

Now you have your feed link all you need to do is login to facebook and in the top left hand corner of the screen go to settings -> Applications.

This will load a list of applications, one of which is called notes, click on the word notes.

This will load another screen with a link on the left that says Edit import settings, click on that.

This will load a further page with a text box, copy your blog feed code into that box and tick the agreement button that it wont be feeding horse porn and terrorist bomb making tips and after a bit of a wait it will now be setup!

Now whenever you add in a new blog item it will automatically show up in facebook. Think of all that time you’ll save pasting it in your status update as a link, at least 15 minutes a year

Here have a Poem I wrote while watching Pirates of the Caribbean on tele and realising i’v seen it a million times already. Its rubbish, it does not rhyme, I am not a poet just a nob.

keira, keira, keira knightley
facially you shine so brightly
smile or froun you look so awesome
almost as fit as Natalie Portman

wern’t you her double in star wars?
yea, imdb said the job was yours
she spoke like you and wore makup
but enough of that film it fkin sucked

later on you became mainsteam
as Elizabeth Swan the pirate queen
we loved you for it, you english rose
from your perfect feet to your perfect nose

well not quite perfect in everyway
call me a bastard but i have to say
talents, prettyness and a bag of wit
but oh my days luv, what about tits?

The Tesco’s extra was packed out with shoppers so we decided to use the self service machine – what a mistake.

First a little rant about this machine, its supposed to be easy? pffff, I scanned all my beer through and of course not thinking at the time, some fkin member of staff needs to come to the self service machine and check you look ’25′ and push a button before you can continue.  Ok fine we’re done it’s asking me for some cash, at this point i’m thinking this is one of the most clinical shopping experiences of my life. I love technology but I must be a bit oldschool in the back of my head.

I was actually missing some spotty chavvy teen chewing gum, or a sour faced old crow who resents the fact shes 60 an working with chavvy teens or a foreign student who smiles far to much and utters words you understand 50% of. Not stereotyping till workers of course but in my experience those are the groups that 73.7% of them fit into.

So I get my card out, my brand new shinny HSBC debit card which i’v already used in a few places. My mate Neil who’s just done the self service thing before me advises me I might need to hold my card in place as the cradle is a bit dodgy. So I do this, enter my pin….  errror wrong pin, ok I might of entered my pin in wrong, the same pin i’v used for the last 11 years, eeerrroooor, I continue and then eventually the machine says ‘Last chance…’ on the screen! like its mocking me, like i’m actually a thief trying out 9999 possible combinations so i can get my hands on a few cans of Heineken.

At this point the machine tells me my pin or chip or something has been locked and by this time a queue of people are amassing behind me, no doubt pissed off with some bloke punching number after number into a machine, I know i’d piss me off.

So in the rush my mate Neil still stood there, uses his card… which works and we get the fk out of there.

So panic sets in on the way back to the car, what’s wrong with my card? has it been locked? I need money for the rest of the week…. argh I best give HSBC a call. So stupidly but understandably not having HSBC’s number on my phone I called good olde 118118 and got a bloke called George, (George must be a popular name in Asian countries) and asked to be put though – second mistake

Good thing about HSBC is once you actually get through they are one of the few companies that most often have someone you can tell is from the UK on the other end of the phone, I’m not racist I think most people are equally rubbish but when a telephone service is concerned you’d hope for someone who shares your first language as their own first language, it kinda makes sense don’t you think?  Do you get a lot of disabled folks in wheel chairs acting as PE teachers? no, no you don’t its not practical is it!

Anyway I have a chat to this lady at HSBC and she just says it’ll probably be ok, I just need to go to any cash machine and it might ask me to reset something and I need to call again while at the machine if there are any further problems.  So as it happens we need to get some petrol which luckily has a HSBC cash machine!, I put my card in, type in my pin and what happens? success.. normally screen normal options everything normal…  So i gets me a tenner out to pay Neil back for his card aid and we jump back in the car for a night of beer, games and good times.

I swept this little episode under the mental carpet until this morning when my phone bill came through:

27 Feb 10 19:15:02 118118 All Day 00:05:25 £6.915

holy fucking titiyfucking muther son bitches! NEVER call 118 from your mobile, NEVER EVER let them put you through, you get charged through them for the call! at whats that? £1+ a minute! What if it had been a big problem with my card or I was on hold for a lot longer….  Fuck 118, i’m gonna start calling them from phone boxes drunk and giving them abuse like a 12 year old from now on.

This has more or less convinced me i need a smartphone with the interwebs on the move, it’d of avoided this horrible situation. Now if only they made one with a decent camera ugh woe is me.

I found out a way of doing it thought using the Windows key:

Bad Religion are a Punk band from America who have been around since the early 80′s. I’v always known ‘of’ them but never really listened  and whoa was i missing out all those years.

It’s a great feeling to discover or get into a band as I did with these guys last year, despite how I look I have quite a varied interest in music, punk being one of my favourites.

The thing with these guys is that they are not your typical rock’n'roll Lemmy like drugs and alcohol binging nutters, they are bizarrely intellectual.

For example the leader singer Greg Graffin has a PHD and teaches life sciences at UCLA in the US, not your average punker no doubt.

As you can imagine this is reflected a lot in the band’s lyrics which often as you can tell by their name are related to religion or more so how silly it is. They have some duff albums (being around 30 years ye gonna have a few) but for me two of their later albums are actually their best, which is strange for a band but as we’v established these chaps are fairly atypical.

I suggest you at least grab this album and give it a listen, i must play it at least once a week if not more.

BR are firmly rooted now as one of my favourite bands evva

So what are these things and what have I been upto this month you cry? I can hear your edge of the seat heavy breathing even now, well?! well?!!! what?!!….. Nothing exciting i’m afraid, i’v mainly been back to my old habits of being a digital whore with tv shows and computer games.

First of the bench is the game Assassin’s Creed 2

Ok so I randomly watched a review for this game and thought hey that looks freaking awesome and a great improvement over the first one.  The only problem with this was the fact that I never finished the first game and had uninstalled it from my ps3.  As a lot of people know i’m very much a sequence freak, I cannot deal with media out of sequence. I can’t miss an episode of a TV show and then just carry on next week watching the next one, skipping a season is stomach turning! heh its the same with computer games.

So of course before playing my shinny copy of Assassin’s Creed 2 I had to play through and complete the first game! It was not as repetitive as the first time I played it, perhaps my anticipation of installing the new one kept me going though the boring bits. It’s still a great game and once finished (literally) I installed the new game.

Now where the first game is a great game, Assassin’s Creed 2 is nothing short of a masterpiece of a game. I wont go into it in detail  as review sites (see below) can do that a lot better than I ever could or would want too. Needless to say this is a monumental improvement over the first and from the moment I installed it I was actually hooked. It is truly one of the best games I have played in a very long time. So how much time did this rack up? well the game tells you how long you have played and when I had completed it I had racked up a good 36hours not forgetting playing through the first game which would of been at least the same if a little less.

Reviews:

Gamespot Video Review
GameTrailers Video Review
IGN Video Review

The Shield

Now I watch a lot of American shows, Sopranos, Lost, Oz, Prison Break etc etc… But good golly miss molly have I been missing out on cop shows over the years. After discovering and devouring all five seasons on The Wire last year and loving it, my attentions have moved onto what other police based shows there are out there that i’v missed, very quickly I came across one called The Shield and once again I am hooked!

The show is basically around this fictional Los Angeles special police department and the corruption and drama and grittiness and oooo its awesome. I am only at the end of season 1 and there are 7! seasons, so i’v got my work cut out in getting through them.

I love discovering shows that have finished with such a big run of seasons because if you like the first you can generally assume you are gonna dig most of the others and the prospect of having so much good stuff to watch is great, often following a show from the outset can be disappointing if it is cancelled prematurely. I loved shows like Space above an Beyond and Invasion but they are just one season footnotes of what could of been classics.

So this has racked me up a good 11-13 hours getting though. S’ok only another 75ish episodes to go heh.

Court

So for the past two weeks I have been on Jury service. For those not in the know, if you are on the UK electoral role and between the ages of 18 and really old you may get called up for jury service, This happened to me and its pretty much a legal requirement to do it. I think I am going to save the details of my jury service to it’s own blog post as this one is getting pretty long already.  All i’ll say that it was a long and actually quite draining experience but kinda rewarding at the same time.

Of course this meant I was not at work for the best part of 2 weeks, now working where I work this isn’t really possible.  Since I manage a lot of projects and we are constantly working to deadlines I did have to work in the evenings a fair bit after my days in the court to make sure everything was still running smoothly. Vegging out with some shield or assassin’s creed 2 was about all I was up for come 7-8pm most days.

Lost

Oh lost, lovely mind fuck argh addictive omfg what’s going on Lost. I am a lost fan, if you are still into lost well done you must also be in the ranks of the obsessed if not you are one of the ‘its bollocks’ camps, lost is like Marmite. The FINAL (6th) season of Lost kicked off this week and i’m back into it like a paedophile in an orphanage.

Now you may think that this could not of taken up much time since it only just started I could only of watched a couple of hours of stuff, you’d be wrong.  I am a sado when it comes to lost, I not only watch each episode twice I look up theories on blogs for other things i didn’t spot, I have even go as far as to load up old episodes from other seasons to check-up on stuff.

Without going into a rant about how I think it’s going to end (again another blog post or several) all i’m gonna say is they better do it well. If they leave it even somewhat ‘wtf’ or up in the air i’m gonna find out where the writers live and send them some chocolate cake in a box.

Its so easy to get very very enthusiastic about those two words ‘new’ and ‘year’, the fact one of them is the word new right away inspires hope and rebirth and a drive to improve your self and everything around you. Like turning a fresh page on a sketch book and leaving the previous unworthy page of scribbles to the ether as you sit there sharpened new year pencil in hand, eager to start the scribble all over again, this time though, this time it’ll be a master piece.

Or so you tell your self. You may go back a few pages in that sketch book and see page after page of senseless scribble, yet there is something about this blank new year page that cannot and will not dent your faith that when that pencil starts drawing, good things are gonna happen.

Its that blank sheet, the endless possibilities and imagination it inspires… as soon as you start drawing though or living the year (this analogy is flaking apart) your actions choices and dedication are going to be the things that result in that master piece, as inspiring as that blank paper is, it is just a blank piece of paper.

I’m just as bad as anyone, I sit in awe of my blank sheet of paper I get each year and end up scribbling away. I don’t think I have the formula for a master piece yet I don’t think there is one. heh Quite uninspiring really, I don’t have the answers to make your new year grand and action all the great things you want to happen, but if it gives you any comfort i’m drawing away with you.

Some things I aim for in 2010:

1. I want to finish learning to drive and overcome the opinion that the DVLA are a bunch of corrupt nazi fucks.
2. I want to be more involved with the geeky toy solider hobby I have and the people I know who share this hobby, this includes playing and painting more with the lil 2″ mens.
3. I want to care more about my physical fitness as the odd grey hair has told me that I am in fact getting older and although I can still drink like a mur fucker and stay up till the sun comes up,,, its not doing me much good.
4. I want to do something drastic with my hair, I’m not sure what but I know I want it to be drastic
5. I want to spend more time and energy with friends and family that matter and less time being that person everyone knows
6. I want to take up some kinda of fighting related hobby, this kinda depends on point 3.

That’ll do for now, sure i’ll think up more.