As I’m not a big one for doing Twitter and such like I thought I’d share on this blog a few interesting little things that have crossed my path over the past week or so.

To be honest I’m not one for wadding through pages and pages of “social media comment” on the events over in Japan – reading the papers and the TV and Radio bulletins give a good over view. However one on the ground report I found was this one: Japan Earthquake – a full diary which I found from a pointer from John Myers blog.

Over on the CMA mailing list (the place were you often skip over e-mails from “Office -ccr fm”) I spotted that the guys at Canalside Community Radio have produced this Promo which they have offered freely to other Community Radio stations to play. If you do use it please contact the guys at Canalside Community Radio to let them know.

As part of my weekly Tuesday commute I normally listen to the Podcast of Talk Talk Radio, this weeks programme had some interesting chat about the events in Japan as well.

Finally I caught on TV yesterday morning this episode of BBC Click – looking at the use of the internet and technology in the quake. I hope the link I’ve given above is a world wide friendly link, rather than the UK geolocked iPlayer version.

Rather spookily I’d been reading some things about nice new things in the upcoming WordPress version 3.1, such as in this post and others which I have failed miserably to make a note of (too much WILF’ing was going on at the time). Then last night when I was tweaking one of the other WordPress powered sites I have a hand in the ‘upgrade to WordPress v3.1′ message magically appeared in by admin Dashboard.

We’ll after my text this afternoon to my local WordPress guru of “have you updated your sites to WordPress 3.1″ was “I hadn’t seen that news” I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and upgrade this site.

So far so good – it still works!

The most obvious change is the ‘admin bar’ at the top of the screen when you are logged in but browsing the site. It also interesting to see developments in native support for custom post types (which I’ve previously achieved via plug-ins) which along with streamlined admin pages are going to make for some tense moments with some sites I’m involved with – I see some late nights tweaking on a development server is in order. (Shh… don’t tell the family).

If all else fails this new release has prompted a new blog post from me (assuming you didn’t notice my ‘test’ posts which stayed live a little longer than I’d planned while I was testing my custom XML-RPC scripts).

There has been a lot of talk about the loss of more ‘heritage radio brands’ as Capital FM is rolled out quasi-nationally. Of course this will get the radio anoraks putting on their rose tinted glasses mourning the losses of all that was great before.

There has been plenty written about Global Radio’s master plan for the ‘Capital Network’ and lots of analysis from radio people who can and have written things much more enlightening than I can.

Today’s loss of the ‘Galaxy’ name in Manchester takes me back just over 13 years when there was concern over the loss of an equally respected at the time radio brand ‘Kiss 102′. Here’s a clip from a broadcast in Manchester in October 1997:

stormfm-oct-1997

The re-brand from Kiss to Galaxy came very quickly following board room manoeuvrings and the new owners being unable to licence use of the ‘Kiss’ name. There was much concern at the time over what this meant for the loss of some of the more notable Dance Music output on the station – given this was well prior to facebook campaigns there was not the opportunity for a major public outcry, only much smaller mumblings.

So how much of a loss to Manchester was loosing Kiss FM – here is a list of Radio Stations in the Manchester Area back in October 1997:

BBC National Network Radio’s 1-5
Classic FM
Local Radio:
BBC GMR (Or possibly still in it’s 1997 ‘GMR Talk’ incarnation) launched as Radio Manchester 10 September 1970
Piccadilly 1152 – launched 2 April 1974 as Piccadilly Radio, later Piccadilly Gold
Key 103 – launched 3 September 1988
Signal FM – launched 17 February 1990 as KFM, then became Signal Cheshire, dropping the ‘Cheshire’ tag in 1997 (Now Imagine FM)
Lite AM – launched on Sept 9 1996 (Previously est 31 May 1994 as Fortune 1458 , later became Big AM, Capital Gold and now Gold)
Kiss 102 – launched 16 October 94
Jazz FM – launched 25 July 94 (Now Smooth Radio)
Asian Sound Radio – launched 29 April 96
Wish FM – launched 19 April 1997

What’s interesting to see is the variety of stations in Manchester back then, I suspect only bettered in the capital.

It’s also interesting to note that other than BBC Radio One that Kiss 102 was the only outlet for Dance Music and certainly the only local outlet.

In the meantime we have the addition of many other radio stations in the Manchester Area:

Century 105.4 launched 4 Aug 98 (later became Real Radio)
Tower FM launched 14 Mar 99
96.2 The Revolution launched 16 Aug 99
Wythenshawe FM launched 22 Mar 02
AllFM launched 22 May 02
XFM 20 Feb 06
Oldham Community Radio launched 1 Mar 07
Salford City Radio launched 20 Sep 07
Tameside Radio launched 25 Sep 07
Rock Radio launched 8 Apr 08
Pure Radio launched 6 Nov 08
Bolton FM launched 27 May 09
North Manchester FM launched 12 Jun 09
Peace FM launched 27 Jul 09
Gaydio launched 8 Jun 10
Unity Radio launched 21 Jul 10

Again we can now comment about the wide variety of radio stations (possibly now not even beaten by the capital). There is also many more outlets for various specialist Dance Music programmes on the Community stations such as the established ALL FM and the cities latest addition Unity Radio.

Therefore if there was little outcry back in 1997 about the loss of Kiss 102 perhaps there is less reason for a public outcry over the loss of Galaxy 102. Of course for the pass year of so Galaxy has been migrating itself from ‘Dance and R’n'B’ to a ‘Hit Music Station’ so the people listening to Galaxy up to yesterday will probably be more mourning the loss of local identity than the loss of the Dance music. Which on a commercial front should be good for Key 103 if they push ‘Manchester’ and pick up some former Galaxy listeners.

It’s also potentially good for the Community stations if there is press coverage on the loss of ‘Galaxy 102 local radio’ then the Community stations should react with reminding the public that they are the real local service. They probably won’t pick up many ex-Galaxy listeners but might get a few new people trying out the station.

A few footnotes:
Sources of information on stations and launch dates:

Wikipedia
Some of the dates sourced from Ofcom will be Transmitter ‘switch on’ dates not necessarily the official station launch. Corrections welcomed.
I’ve only included stations based and audible in Manchester, not counted the several ‘out of area’ stations.
The embedded media player above doesn’t work in Firefox, as it’s an MP3 clip, it will either work in other browsers, or not display at all.
The audio was produced in 1997 so the Simpson’s sample might actually have still been cool.

No it’s not yet another new station from the nice people at Absolute Radio, rather this is a posting about a new software firmware update recently pushed to Pure’s ‘flow’ family of internet enabled radios, such as the one pictured above courtesy of James Cridland.

Earlier in the week I was listening to our Pure Siesta Flow, their rather niffty ‘alarm clock’ style Internet/DAB/FM combo.

As I came to switch off the internet channel I was listening to I saw it was asking if I wanted to update the software, so pressed ‘yes’ radio went quiet and I left it to do it’s business.

About fifteen minutes later I came back in the room and noticed that it had switched on again. Then a song or two later got a surprise ‘Absolute Radio’ ident -I assume that the radio had switched to the first station in the directory, rather than my previous station (I’ve not even got absolute in my presets/ favourites or whatever it’s called.)

Maybe I should I go off to set up “AAAAAAAAAARadio” internet radio service and get it listed in ‘The Lounge’ to grab all the unsuspecting listeners.

Of a more interesting note than firmware update unexpected issues, I’m assuming this update is to support Pure’s new music identification service, which once I’ve had a play I *may* get round to writing a blog post about my experiences.

Last year, our now Prime Minister, David Cameron made the legendary comment about Twitter. Admittedly on Absolute Radio not Radio 4 were he is pictured above* – but that’s not the point.

I was searching through twitter recently, looking up references to a particular radio station. I found a tweet from a presenter at the station, from their own personal twitter account, which if you didn’t know that the person was a presenter on Radio Smallsville you’d probably not know the connection.

That was until they tweeted that they had some “Professional publicity pictures for Radio Smallsville taken yesterday” which they were not impressed with (you got the feeling they are one of those people who hate having their picture taken.)

So having wetted my appetite I checked out their other tweets – the next one “went out and got completely wasted last night” (or something along them lines – it may have been worded a bit stronger than that.)

As far as I know this presenter has never promoted the fact that they are on twitter ‘on-air’ – nor made any pretence that their Twitter feed is officially endorsed by Radio Smallsville. But never the less to the end reader just finding the person they heard on the radio on twitter “could” by association of taking about the radio station and their behaviour outside the studio make the radio station be seen in a negative light. Of course it could just reinforce to the reader that the presenter is a real person just like them.

Adds another dimension to what a radio presenter should and shouldn’t be posting on-line in a personal capacity, and what station management should be requiring their presenters to do.

Now as you may have guessed the Radio Smallsville presenter in question is a volunteer – so raises even more interesting issues when it is not a contacted employee you are dealing with.

* I’ve used the photo of Mr C at the beeb as they have published this under a Creative Commons licence – thus I can use it here, were as I couldn’t find an Absolute Radio picture under similar terms.

Just one that amused me – PSquared’s music scheduling software, Autotrack, has an option to do a web lookup on a track’s details.

Above is what I got when I wanted to check the date of The Cult’s classic “She Sells Sanctuary”.

If you are a regular commuter via mainline train stations in the UK you’ve probably picked up your morning cappuccino or a sneaky pint on the way home and felt the premium prices in the coffee shop or one of the interesting titled “real pubs on stations” make a hole in your wallet.

What would you say if I told you of a not that well publicised way to get a 20% discount on your purchases?

What you need is to get a BiTE card – it’s free – and unlike my vain attempt at finding a illustrative picture above – girl is not included. However also not included is any supermarket loyalty card style tracking of your movements. This is no swipe card – just a piece of card you flash and the nice person behind the till puts through your discount. All they seem to want to know is a few questions of how often you travel and through what stations when you sign up.

Given the pounds I’ve spent at stations over the years I just wish I’d paid more attention to the unassuming little flags stuck on some of the tills sooner.

Up till now I,ve been not that impressed with the idea of getting an iPad. After all what is it useful for?

Still trying to answer that one but two minutes in the Apple store in Manchester playing with one and I,m hooked by the Apple magic.

I,m writing this post on a iPad in said store and been throughly mesmorised. Even typing on the o screen keyboard is not as bad as I first though (Hopefully there is not too many typos in this to prove the point) althoug not sure if Id managed a long typing session. But that is not the point of the device.

But lets return to the point of do I want one? Well as I look up around the table at the front of this store there are a dozen iPads on disply, with crowds all having fun. But when I look at the price card I can safely say that my credit card will be staying safely in my wallet and saving me the “starting at £429″ price on the card in front of me.

Following on from lasts week tip about Robocopy, if you are backing up to a USB drive there is a chance that every time you use the drive (maybe on different machines) under Windows you get a different drive letter.

So if you have a batch file saved on the drive with your finely crafted backup script, it may fail if your drive D:\ is now drive E:\

Enter to the rescue just the variable you need:

%~d0

Which gives you the path to the file in which the script is being run from,

so something like

robocopy \\my-server\files %~d0\backupfolder /mir

saved as ‘backup.bat’ in the root of your usb drive will work everytime.

My new favourite tool for doing backups is Robocopy. A little microsoft utility, previously in the Microsoft Resource Kits, but now “standard issue” in Vista and Windows 7.

Even for my mainly XP based work, Robocopy is a great advance over using the xcopy command with /d flag – which only copied newer files and could easily fall over with files in use.

The basic syntax I use is as follows

ROBOCOPY “Source Folder” “Destination Folder” /MIR /R:5 /W:5 /FFT

The flags I’m using:

/MIR – mirror the source to directory – will delete files in the destination that are no longer in the source (the main benefit over xcopy)

/R:5 – retry 5 times on error, the default is 1 million, which effectively halts your command unless you are very patient!

/W:5 -wait 5 seconds on error – default if 30 seconds, I find a shorter time better

/FFT – uses Fat File Times – only compares file time to accuracy of 2seconds as used on FAT file system, needed if you’re copying to an external drive formatted as such. Also found works more accurately if copying from / to a Samba/Linux server with this flag.