Rediscovering Cluedo

It's been so many years since I last played Cluedo that I'm not even sure I've played it in my adult life. Santa kindly dropped off a copy for us to play this week.

My first surprise was that the board has changed, not just in style but also in layout.

The board I remember looked like this:

The new board looks like this:

I'm sure there are plenty of sites around discussing the differences and bemoaning the changes. I didn't find them that bad and the pace of the game seemed a lot better with each player getting to make a guess almost every turn.

Parsing the iPhone SMS Database (iOS6)

If you combined "How to Access and Read the iPhone SMS Text Message Backup Files" with "Parsing the iPhone SMS Database" in your iOS5 (or older) iPhone you'd have had easy access to your SMS data.

Recently upgrading to iOS6 broke all the queries I used on my database - the sneaky devils look like they've changed the database format.

A few Android apps

Inspired by my recent acceleration into the world of Android, and a recent similar post by Jason, I thought I'd take some time to promote some of the apps I've found interesting or useful on my Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 devices.

Google Play Applications

All of these are available from the Google Play App Store. Unless otherwise stated, they are free apps; any stated prices are accurate at the time of writing this entry.

Escaping the Apple

This week I've done something that isn't that common for an iPhone owner - I've switched to using an Android phone.

I've been pretty happy with my iPhone since my purchase of the 3G a couple or three years ago. Deep down I always wanted to be a 'Google phone' user; the mindset is closer to my techie, open-source mind. Sadly when I was making my first steps into the smartphone market, Android based phones were leagues behind the offering from Apple.

So I knowingly entered Apple's walled-off ecosystem.

First Post

I've decided it's time to fire up a new blog.

I've got an old LiveJournal blog floating around, but that's locked down for private posting.

I've got my perl blog but I'd like to keep that as perl only.

From time to time I'd like to post ideas and thoughts that don't fit well in either of those places.

I'm hoping this blog will fill that gap.