chrisgreen.co.uk

My car and the house

Originally uploaded by Chris Green.

Another piece of Google Maps Street View fun. It was a beautiful day when the car came past taking photos, so this shot of the outside of my house came out well.

Thankfully Google blurred out the registration number on my car (the green Rover 75) and the Peugeot 206 next to it.

As you might be aware, Google today added Street View images to the UK Google Maps service.

As luck would have it I was walking to the tube station on the morning that the Google camera car drove down the street where my house is, taking panoramic pics of the street as it went.

The car in question was a black Vauxhall Astra with a Google logo on the door and a set of cameras on the roof. Not as high-tech as you would expect from Google, but its how you do it.

Anyway, as I was standing on the pavement watching the car go by, I figured there was a chance that I might pop up in one of the subsequent images - and  I was right:

Google has smudged all the faces of people captured in the Street View images, along with car registration plates. Trust me, that really is me!

Street View also has a very nice pic of my house (furtunately it was a lovely day when the car came to do the pics). I’ll post that later.

One of my last projects of 2008 has now gone on sale - it is a bookazine devoted to one of my favourite technology subjects - the BlackBerry.

You can buy The Ultimate BlackBerry Guide from those nice people at Amazon.co.uk, where it is currently on sale with an equally nice online discount.

The book will tell you everything you need to know, from handy shortcuts to undocumented features, along with tips on the best third party software and games available for the current range of devices. There is even a section dedicated to using your BlackBerry with a Mac.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this book possible. It was hard work, but I hope you will agree it was worth it.

Stafford Road under snow

Originally uploaded by Chris Green.

Another pic of Ruislip under a blanket of snow. This one taken from the front door of my house. Look at the bins in the bottom right of the pic to get an idea of how thick the snow actually is.

I’ve posted a set of pictures of the snow around my home in Ruislip on my Flickr site - http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisgreen/sets/72157613229248285/

Enjoy!

Icicles

Originally uploaded by Chris Green.

Woke up this morning to find Ruislip under a blanket of snow. About six inches fell overnight in West London, the biggest snowfall to hit London for over 20 years.

I’ve posted a set of pictures of the snow around my home in Ruislip on my Flickr site - http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisgreen/sets/72157613229248285/

Enjoy!

Late Night Snow in Ruislip

Originally uploaded by Chris Green.

This is the view from my bedroom window. As you can see, Ruislip is already under several inches of snow and it’s still coming.

I was out in the car at about 8.30pm on Sunday evening, an hour or so after the snow began. How the car didn’t end up in a ditch or upside down I don’t know.

(Pic taken with my BlackBerry Bold).

Chris on CNBC Squawk Box talking about Apple's quaterly financials

I popped up on CNBC this morning on behalf of DMG Europe to talk about Apple’s quarterly financials and the business implications of a permanent departure by Steve Jobs.

You can view the video here.

I’ve just arrived home after a late-night appearance on Richard Bacon’s show on BBc Radio 5 Live as part of the business news segment.

We were discussing how to ensure your data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands should you (or your company) decide to sell off your old machine.

Which suggests the only way to be sure that your data won’t come back from the dead is to smash up your hard drive into pieces with a hammer. I agree, and to prove the point made by Which we attempted to do this on the show.

If we had been doing this for real we would have spent a few more minutes clubbing the drive in question to death to ensure the platter was well and truly destroyed and ripped into multiple pieces, however in five minutes we did manage to damage the drive to a suitable degree.

Of course, a hammer attack is not the only solution to ensure your data can’t be recovered after your hard drive leaves your possession.

There are several software tools available (many of them free) that can erase your drive in a way that ensures previously-stored data is overwritten multiple times, rather than just being flagged as erased. For most consumers, one of these solutions is more than sufficient. You can also use magnets. Not a guaranteed solution, but good enough for most people. A drive that has been magnetically wiped or erased to US DoD standard is pretty much clean. If anything did remain on the drive, the cost and complexity of extracting the information would make it pointless, unless the data itself was worth a colossal amount (such as the plans for performing a successful break-in at Fort Knox etc).

For businesses that intend to dispose of old computers, particularly those handling sensitive information such as customer lists, financial data, credit card details etc, destruction is well worth considering. In the same way that companies shred CDs, hard drives that previously contained sensitive data should be removed from the machine being sold off/given away/recycled and destroyed. Break the drive open, remove the platter (the magnetic spinning disc or discs inside the drive) and wreck it as much as possible - shred it into as many pieces as possible.

Some would still call this excessive, but it does ensure peace-of-mind.

Chris on CNBC discussing top gadgets and consoles for Christmas 2008

I had a very early start this morning as I was doing an early appearance on CNBC to talk about Christmas gadgets, the growth in the console market and whether the credit crunch would slow down gadget spending in the run up to the big day.

Click here to see the whole video, including CNBC team playing with the 3D video glasses.

If you have seen this morning’s edition of PR Week then you will know the news is now out in the wild. I am leaving IT PRO and moving into PR. You can read the story here - it’s only short.

This will be a surprise to you but it was an opportunity too good to pass up, and I’ll be working for a very exciting agency and with a great team of people. After two and a half years at the helm of IT PRO, it is time for a new challenge.

I have not gone just yet though so don’t panic.