If you like modern classic music and/or Sigur Ros, then you’ll probably like these guys too.

Check out the YouTube video of one of my favourite songs from the album.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Absolutely beautiful.

Last night’s episode of The Secret Millionaire focused its cameras squarely on my home town of Peterborough.

Peterborough rapidly expanded in the 70s and 80s by adding ‘townships’. Some of these townships have fallen into disrepair and there are some very unsavoury parts of our city. However, on balance, I’d say that generally Peterborough is a prosperous place to live with many green areas and good local amenities. There has been a rejuvenation of the city centre areas and there’s been quite a substantial investment in developing industrial areas. Indeed, in this past few years Peterborough has attracted flagship gardening centre Van Hage (and in the same shopping complex an Edinburgh Woollen Mill and a Le Creuset), several chain restaurants such as Nandos and Chiquitos. Not to mention a Dobbies gardening centre and an ambitious extension to Queensgate, our shopping centre.

I moved here several years ago and I’ve always been impressed with how Peterborough manages to balance green space with good road systems and the availability of restaurants and shops.

The Secret Millionaire’s agenda is to make sure the setting looks suitably deprived and ‘urban’ as possible to underline the drama. This was achieved by cutting from different shots taken from around the city: overgrown garden; rusty fence with broken sign; rough looking pub; a bus; a walk through Bretton ‘spine’. These vignettes formed an impressive montage of misery. Anyone that lives here though knows these shots were collected from several locations within a 12 mile radius of the city.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The best the team could do to highlight the youth crisis was to briefly interview four work shy lay abouts knocking around a kid’s park on a summer’s day. These late-teens wearing their designer t-shirts and expensive hair cuts sported the iconic iPod headphones and declared everything as “shit”. One bespectacled youth sensibly attired looked about as street as a luxury Range Rover.

Some of these so-called destitute areas are a stone’s throw from where I live. Indeed, one lingering shot of a rough pub set the scene nicely. Though if the camera did a 360 pan it would have taken in Sainsbury’s, Next, Boots and a Laura Ashley.

Of course, I’m not denying that Peterborough has some troubled areas. Government funding cuts have left several charities facing closure and the millionaire Mike Greene – originally from Peterborough – embraced his experience and did some real good with his cheques.

Shame then that most will write Peterborough off as a hell-hole when it has so much more going for it. I really hope that outside investors looking to move into the city won’t be put off by such inspired editing.

Look what I found, a photo by mattmecham on Flickr.

The device that started it all. Amazing how clunky it feels now.

Mobile phones in the 80s, a photo by mattmecham on Flickr.

As modelled by Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon. I remember them being like this too. Love the battery pack.

I remember designing game graphics like this, a photo by mattmecham on Flickr.

Anyone else?

When I was a child, I always wanted to stick a pin into a map of all the places I’d been.

Happily, all I have to do is take a photo with my iPhone and a digital pin is stuck in a map for me.

How cool is that?

Unless you’ve been walking around with your fingers in your ears while humming “nah-nah-nah” you’ll be aware that Facebook recently announced a major new change to how profiles are viewed and managed.

Thanks to a tip off from Tom Ford, I was able to enable a preview of this feature on my own Facebook account .

My initial impression is that it’s technically very clever and it’s an impressive and immersive way of displaying your life and “fixes” many issues with social media in general. Social media is currently quite disposable. Twitter only keeps your last few thousand tweets as searchable and until recently it was almost impossible to view old Facebook updates.

The new timeline neatly overcomes this problem. I was able to go back to the 15th December 2006 when I joined Facebook and read all my updates. As an aside, it’s funny how things have changed. A lot of my updates were simple phrases “is enjoying Christmas”, “is working”. Ah, the heady days before lengthy COPY AND PASTE status updates.

A quick scan down the timeline reveals that Facebook has automatically added some events, such as my sister and sister-in-laws birth. It didn’t mention Luke’s birth even though he has a Facebook account and I’m down as his father. I assume this is because Facebook won’t add details of anyone under thirteen automatically.

Fortunately, you can add as many new events as you want. You can add the births of your children, anniversaries and you can even tell the world when you passed your driving test if so desired. There’s a neat little interface that allows you to do this near the top of the screen.

 I figured the 90s were looking a bit bare apart from leaving school and college so I decided to add my driving license which was simple enough. And yes, that antiquated motor vehicle was actually my first car.