chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
Facebook profile pic faux pas
Jul 27th
This is a compilation of the worst crimes against the facebook world. People should keep their profile pictures relevant on most of all the picture should be of you!
Gaming Soap
Jul 8th
Yes that is a NES controller made from soap! The great folks at Digital Soaps have made variety of fantastic gaming soaps for those that like to include their favourite console in their everyday life. Imagine getting a shower with your Xbox 360 controller. I can only imagine it may become a little confusing when you sit down at your friend’s house for a quick game of Halo and he’s wondering why you’re rubbing his controller all over yourself.
There are many different styles but my favourites are the Tetris soap pack, which you can create your own Tetris scene with. The SNES controller, which holds so many fond memories and of course the Xbox 360 controller, confuse your friends and yourself with these fantastic soaps. 
I’m thinking of ordering some myself, though the price tag is a little steep for some of them, it may be worth it to complete that geeky look you’ve been cultivating for all these years.
Mobile sized chunks
Jun 17th
I’ve been using my G1 quite a bit to browse the web lately and as you know I have an extensive image gallery which I like to use in posts on forums etc. Well now I can both directly upload to that gallery by using a handy ftp program on Android and browse the gallery in a specially designed environment. I sat up for a little while last night making a compatible and dinky gallery that reduces bandwidth and increases the amount of images I can view on the screen at once.
Before: 105Kb |
After: 32Kb
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Mobile Blog:
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As you can see in the first screenshot 2 images can barely even fit on the screen, after streamlining and making the thumbnails quite minuscule 32 images can easily fit on screen at once, I also upped the amount of images shown per page so there’s less clicking of links. I also streamlined the image page so that images fit easier and it is easier to get a link to the image to post elsewhere. Of course it still retains (and utilises) the ability for me to resize the images however I need to and to do a bunch of other image manipulation too.
I can’t leave without mentioning the last screnshot, which is of the mobile version of this blog, it’s clean, neat and fast. I used to use a more flashy version but I think it was a little cumbersome. This version just puts the posts ups there with no superfluous crap.
As usual it’s unlikely anyone will even visit the site on a mobile device except me, and as usual it’s mainly an exercise to teach myself more. But of course I will be using it all the time to continue the tradition of posting random images.
Coding pointless stuff
Apr 11th
Yeo that’s right, there’s nothing more time consuming than coding php and html for random stuff that no-one is ever going to see. But again that’s half the point of this site, to test things out and to see what is possible. It’s also fun to learn. Using this site and my own curiosity I have learned a great deal about php, flash, multimedia and more. I just wonder what use it will all be in the end.
Yummy tech demo
The first thing of note is the directory script @ http://media.csignal.org I was only using this to store the files, but now it’s easy to browse them all too. The script originally used JavaScript code to pop FLV videos up and play them on the page. However I recoded the thing to generate an actual html page with the FLV inside it, I also modified it to play MP4 extension too. So now anyone can watch any of the FLV/MP4 files on the domain without having to download them and I don’t have to make an individual page for each file. All I do is upload the file and the script generates the html code of a page for me, oh I also used mod_rewrite to make the URIs short and make sense. Check it out if you want 
I also coded a quick index script for small images, namely sprites, I had a small collection and felt like uploading them and displaying them in a visual fashion. It’s extremely basic and all I really did was take a simple file listing script and put image tags in it, no formatting so it the page just wraps the images as needed. Very simple and very effective Finally I implemented a proxy script so I can browse sites without disclosing my ip address. I know there are proxy servers all over the place, but at least this way I know where it’s going to be and I can customize it as I wish.
Chicken Pop Pops
Apr 9th
Ever been to KFC and loved their popcorn chicken? Me too, so I was jumping when I found these popcorn chicken style nugget things in my local Iceland. They are shamelessly called “Chicken Pop Pops” and the packaging has a more than passing resemblance to KFC, it even says “SFC” on the box. Well the marketing worked because I bought a whole bunch of them, the best part about it is that they’re only £1 for the same number of nuggets you get in a “regular” box at KFC.
And there was Sega and it was good
Apr 8th
This isn’t a real one
I’m not exactly sure why, but I dug the Dreamcast out of storage and hooked it up today. Last time I tried it wouldn’t work, just a blank screen, it did exactly the same thing this time, no video and no sound. Apparently there was some kind of gunk in the s-video prongs, once cleaned it worked a treat!
Had a quick game of SF Alpha 3, a few games of Soul Calibur and had a crack at Chaos Field, which reminded me how hard shootemups can be. It’s a joy to have the Dreamcast back out again, the only problems I have are that it has faded into some ugly beige colour in its old age and I forgot how big the DC jewel cases are. I set about moving them into smaller compact cases and they now take up one quarter of the space they used to. Made good use of my new printer too, printing off new labels
I think I might have a punt around ebay and see if there are any Dreamcast bargains to be had. Wow, already had a look and there are loads, pads for £5, a rumble and VMU for £3! It’s almost too good to be true. I think I’ll post up some kind of Dreamcast tribute some time soon, it was one of the best consoles ever 
Additionally, this guy > you.
Spud Bran
Mar 21st
So I got my shopping delivered today and when I was putting away some cereal I noticed some shoots coming out of one of the boxes in the cupboard, I was like “wtf?”. Upon closer inspection it appears that I had somehow lost a spud in the box of cereal and having not touched the stuff for a few months it has flowered into a beautiful tentacled beast.
Hong Kong Newspapers
Feb 5th
For some reason these came through my letterbox this morning, addressed to me in a brown envelope sent airmail from Hong Kong. I have no idea why, I can only imagine it’s some confusion on ebay or something from all the stuff I’ve bough from Hong Kong lately. Either way, there was some interesting stuff in them (more after the fold);
Lifestream
Jan 31st
Just a short post, but I’ve added a plugin which tracks stuff I do around the web like on Facebook, Youtube and bookmarks I make, thought it might be halpful to those few who read my blog to keep up to date with other stuff I do
You can get to it by clicking the link at top there ^ that says “lifestream” or by following this link: http://chaoticsignal.com/lifestream Or as I have just enabled in the menu on the right somewhere. Not that anyone cares 
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