In the last year technology has become more integral to my daily life, and has helped me to achieve a goal of getting to a healthy weight again. As most people are aware the key to weight loss is to have a deficit of calories, ideally by reducing your intake and exercising. Without some way of recording this information I would have failed so I decided to find something to help me keep track

MyFitnessPal is a free tool for recording this information. When registering with the site you enter your height, weight and information about your lifestyle then you can set your goal (to put on, maintain or lose weight) which in turn sets out your daily calorie allowance. You then record the food that you eat and any exercise that you do. There are plenty of entries for food and exercise already loaded into the community sourced database and you can add any that don't exist.

Mobile apps are available for iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry which makes the daily use of the site much easier - simply scan bar-codes of the food that you eat and it will search the database for you. Being able to record my calorie consumption and exercise wherever I am has been the number one catalyst in helping me lose over 40lbs during 2011 and will continue to be part of my daily routine for 2012 - although with a higher daily calorie allowance now I've reached my goal.

So how will technology help me achieve my goals in 2012 - well I'll keep y0u updated

I've always been interested in computers, ever since we got a commodore vic 20 way back in the 80's. Being a typical geek I loved to work out what was happening under the hood - both hardware and software.

Over the years things progressed in the world of the personal computer at an amazing pace and so to the 90's and an Olivetti computer sitting in our dining room,  a monster of a machine. It was a Pentium (nothing fancy like MMX) running Windows 95 - a major upgrade from the 286/Win 3.1 machine it replaced.

Then came the internet, I say internet, I mean AOL. Dial up modem and a monthly price plan for a certain number of minutes. Joanna Lumley would announce the immortal "Welcome to AOL, You have EMail" and so to my first experience of the internet.

Geocities web pages that took an age to load with <blink> tags, animated GIFs and progressive JPEG's that took an eternity to load - even longer if somebody in the house picked up the phone or you had call waiting! I remember finding it amazing that I could have instant text chat with somebody on the other side of the globe.

The World Wide Web was a strange place back then, good quality content was sparse and the best bits really belonged to companies like AOL or Compuserve. Creating content in a form that could be read by others was a small feat - you had to learn HTML and even then it was a different matter to make it look good.

Fast-forward to the early naughties (after the dot-com boom and crash) and broadband means much faster access to the content - which had increased in volume but not really in style. That's when things began to change, people wanted more and more and the tools existed for everyone to be able to take their content to the world.

Forward again to the present day - social networking has hit the masses. Celebrities communicating directly with their fans and a world where it is practically impossible to hide on-line. Now the internet is about user generated content, video on demand and always connected mobile devices. Life is changing and I doubt anybody can say where we will be in ten years time.

Introducing TweetDeck
One of the popular Twitter applications is TweetDeck, an Adobe(R) AIR application that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV has produced a short overview of the software which I suggest you view here.

Now Cali covers the main features of TweetDeck but there are some additional hints and tips:

Talk too much?
Twitter limits you to 140 characters and sometimes it's very hard to fit what you are trying to say into that small number. TweetDeck will let you know when you go over the limit by turning the Tweet box:

Sometimes, no matter how much you try, it can be impossible to get the character limit down. TweetDeck has a link to a useful service called TweetShrink. If you're over the limit why not try pressing the TweetShrink button and your tweet will be whisked away to the TweetShrink service and come back a little shorter.

TweetShrink replaces words and phrases with abbreviations for example You=U and Here=Hre. Hopefully it will bring your tweet within the 140 characters.

If you liked this follow me on twitter: twitter.com/jwheelhouse. Got a TweetDeck tip to share then Post it below!

I have a HP Compaq 6820s that Dual boots Win XP and Win 7. I installed Win 7 in standalone mode to start off with and I found the interface difficult to grasp at first. After an hour or so the difficulties were gone and I was away (very similar to my Office 2003 - Office 2007 switch.)  If you are used to using Vista then the general feel of the OS is very similar with one noticeable difference - it's much faster than vista is on the same hardware.

Several days later I decided to take the plunge and join the machine to the domain. I expected it to do exactly the same as Vista and slow down to a point that made it unusable. I was pleasantly surprised, there was a small slow down but not even as bad as the impact joining XP to a domain has on a machine and certainly nowhere near the crawl of Vista.

I've been using the machine on a domain for a couple of weeks now and have only had one BSOD which was caused by the Cisco VPN Client. I was a little disappointed that the Windows repair tool did not fix the problem which was easily rectified by the "Last known good configuration" option.

It's still early days yet but as with most things in Windows 7 - Microsoft have done a good job with the use of the system on a domain. I certainly feel that this is a way my organisation will move forward from XP.

Share your experiences with Windows 7 below.

I've been thinking a lot recently about Web 2.0, technological innovation and the UK. A lot of it is due to my sudden twitter fascination (follow me @ twitter.com/jwheelhouse), really getting into Revision3 shows such as Diggnation, Tekzilla and Systm, and not forgetting the first podcast that really got me hooked - GeekBrief.tv.

All of these Web 2.0 services originate from the US. That got me thinking and I thought I would do a little digging to see if I could find some UK originating web 2.0 services. Now it would appear that Last.fm is the biggest success followed by ShoZu. There of course be many more that I am missing or I am simply unaware of their origins - if you know of any please post a comment.

Don't get me wrong, its not that I don't enjoy using US based services - I wouldn't use them if I didn't! But I have to ask why Web 2.0 start-ups don't come from the UK, in fact can you imagine a company like Revision3 even making it off the ground? Is is our broadband infrastructure, our fear of trying something new or simply a case of being beaten to it?

Any thoughts? Do you run a UK Based Web 2.0 Service? Answers on a postcard, or failing that in the comments below

T-Mobile G1

The T-Mobile G1 has now gone on sale here in the UK. The platform itself has so much potential and I can see that the platform will really begin to develop now there is a device out there on the market. There was some speculation that due to the open source nature of the platform it wouldn't be possible to lock it to a particular provider like the networks would like -in fact it is reported that T-Mobile will allow you to unlock the device after 90 days provided your account is in good order.

Of course somebody has already found a way of unlocking the phone. What is of interest is that while the software platform is open source it appears that the hardware is not. The HTC handset will only accept signed firmware - giving T-Mobile/HTC control over the operating system of thiindos handset. Being a bit pessimistic I could see there being a program released allowing users to unlock the phone and then T-Mobile finding a way to block that via a firmware update - much in the same way that Apple does with the iPhone. I guess only time will tell on that.

Still I expect that in the next 6 months to a year there will be quite a few developments on the android front...

Windows 7
Microsoft have given us the first view of the new Windows 7 - many people are expecting the release date to be brought forward which would effectively send the signal that Microsoft are giving up on vista. Others are saying that it will be to Vista what Windows 98 was to Windows 95. They've taken some ideas from other sources - such as turning the task bar into a kind of OS X type doc and multi-touch functionality. But what I really want to know is does it perform better than Vista does in a domain environment?

Many people I know that have evaluated Vista for use in a domain have given up and gone back to XP, for some reason in our environments it seems to run incredibly slow which given the fact that we expect many users to be able to log on to any PC for a defined amount of time is a real deal breaker. Still if the performance improvements make it through to the final build we could be using Windows 7 in the future - after all somethings got to take over from XP!

Well that's the end of my first post, any thoughts, comments or suggestions please leave them below!

People may read it, people may not - if you would like to participate feel free to use the comments facility.