I just finished my presentation on PHP at the London, Ontario Podcamp 2010. There's probably not much here for seasoned PHP hands, it's oriented towards someone who wants a basic introduction, especially oriented towards theming a content management system. If you're just getting started and have a question, be sure to put your PHP question in the comments below and I'll do my best to help you out.

I was recently looking for a little diversion, so I fired up my iPhone and looked up the top free games. It's not uncommon for this list to contain limited demos and other apps that try to sell you on premium, paid version, but usually a little time on the free demo is enough for me.

This time I decided to download a game called GodFinger which is a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game with a cute, drag-and-drop interface. The reviews weren't stellar but I thought I'd give it a try.

In yet another fit of late night browsing, I came across a little gem called Tidy Service:
http://www.upstartblogger.com/tidy-service-101

Sure, lots of the web editors out offer some kind of markup validation or cleanup, but what excited me about this one particular is that as a service, it can be used anywhere. Sure you can use it to beef up free (but excellent) editors like Textwrangler, but to me the biggest opportunity here is cleaning up code in the browser.

At Podcamp London today co-web geek Anthony Vella-Zarb and I gave a presentation on using Drupal for social media. Includes some introductory information on Drupal, including why it's great for online communities, and the power of the community behind it.

We also talked about some of the modules that make Drupal great for social web sites, focusing mainly on Service Links, Flickr, Picasa, iTunes, Embedded Media Field, Activity Stream, the Facebook modules, and Twitter. After some illustrations and a quick example, we moved on to offering up some resources for learning more.

Over a year ago, I started to play around with using my MacBook Pro as a media center. I had bought a new HDTV a couple of months prior, and wanted to see how I could get the most out of its display capabilities.

I started with VLC, which worked OK, but at the time it was incapable of 5.1 surround output. The next application I tried was MPlayer (using the GUI version), which did everything I needed but all the commands required a keyboard, using arcane commands.

Came across this interesting application of twitter, implemented as a kind of exclusive subset:
http://www.exectweets.com/

It'll be interesting to see how many more of these spring up.

One of the coolest things I've seen of late is a new compact projector. Here are just a few of the specs that make me ga-ga:

• Only 4.5 inches long, 2 inches wide, less than an inch thick.
• 5.6 ounces
• Resolution up to 1280 x 768 (nearly the same as my HD TV!)
• Runs up to an hour from its internal rechargeable battery
• Image size from 6" to 50"
• VGA or RCA video input
• No fan required (lamp runs cool)
• Initial street price of just $360

Last Tuesday saw yet another Apple product release, and once again the fervor of Apple's fan base worked against it. Apple released new hardware with some impressive new features, but because the rumor mill had raised the expectations even higher, the announcements have been greeted with a cool, and at times hostile, reception.

To be fair, some of the rumors were probably unrealistic to begin with. For example, the $800 price point that had been rumored. Apple has never been known to be aggressive with their pricing, and dropping their prices that low would be a major shift.

Usability's most famous (and infamous) guru posted an interesting article about how successful sites are in conveying core organizational information in the ubiquitous About Us page. A good reminder that no matter graphically compelling you make your site, if people can't quickly discern the most basic information about your company, you've lost sight of what your site is meant to do: communicate.