Tech

So, the family file storage server died a month ago or so.

This is a machine that I built for my family which lives in the loft as an always on file server and backup device. It’s main purpose is to provide spill off room for the media centre (as that chews through scary disk space). It’s a simple old machine with a CD drive, a small disk for the OS plus two large drives for the data in a RAID 1 setup. It runs FreeNAS as it’s OS.

So about a month ago my dad told me the machine wasn’t appearing on the network anymore, so I just told him to turn it off. Today I finally got round to working out what was up. At first I thought the primary disk had failed given the BIOS said that. Who would have though, an error message that made sense and was right… nah, don’t be silly. So I tried to put a Knoppix CD to check the data was still there. CD tray would not open. I then check the BIOS again, the CD drive wasn’t there. So, unplug the CD drive and the machine boots as per normal.

So, the lesson for today, a CD/DVD drive can actually break in such a way that even while being marked at the slave device on the channel and with other set as master, can still knock out the whole channel so the BIOS things primary disk fail.

Annoying but solved.

Well that was a lot of work!

OK, so they have changed the Facebook interface. I for one welcome it, its very nice and removes a lot of the clutter for me. However, one of the changes I don’t like is the removal of the friends statuses on the right. I used this as a quick way to see what my friends are upto and how their feeling etc.

So, Vista sidebar for the win. I downloaded an RSS feed reader sidebar gadget (this one in fact) and had a look. It is a nice gadget, lots of features. One thing that did bug me was it wanted to scroll all the time. This is a bit annoying, so, coding skills for the win, I took that feature out and while I was there added a pretty Facebook logo to each status to replace the RSS one that was there.

I love it when you can just change the applications to suit your own needs!

OK, so I have now got myself a new phone. It is the T-Mobile MDA Vario 3 (or as others would call it, the HTC TyTN 2 ).

I had the version before this and it was a very cool phone, but given what this offered and for how little they were offering this as an upgrade i just had to do it. Basically, its the same form factor, so chunky phone, slide out keyboard and more connectivity than many third world countries. The highlights of the new model for me are probably the tilting screen to make it easier to see the screen when you type, the new version of Windows mobile (so 6) and a built in GPS.

I have spent the last couple of days playing with it on and off as well as moving over all my settings, text messages, calendar and all the other stuff I love these phones for.

I think it would be safe to say I like my technology quite a bit and as such my main source of interest is the GPS. OK, so I know this technology is old hat, I know that, I’ve been using it for long enough. But that still doesn’t get me passed how cool it is to walk down the road with Google maps open, and active internet connection and the location dot in Google maps actually moving as I walk along. I mean, I notices I cross the road… how cool is that!

So just for a bit of fun, I have a screen-shot of my phone while running in my room. The blue dot is drawn by Google maps and is to show where I am. I have add the red dot to show where actually was. I would say its correct to about a meter and a half.

Yey technology, just yey!

As I dawdled back from the station seeing my girlfriend off I started to think where I see my life going. Of course I have always had dreams, ambitions and just plain ordinary things I want to achieve. For example, get a job I’m happy with that makes ends meet in the life I have become accustomed to, have enough spare time to take up some of the hobbies I want to, not to mention the money for half of them, settle down and have a family. Now I know that last one sounds like a slightly strange thing for 21 year old male to say, but it’s pretty high on my list all the same and is probably the most important to me by a long way. Now although I have always had this little list, some of the things on it seemed a bit further in the distance than others. I think I’ve finally got to the point where I can see how to do all this. I’m not even close to actually doing it, but at least I can see how I can which is very comforting. The less comforting side effect is that I can also see how little of what I need to do am I actually doing. This is made all the more complicated by missing someone very much.

One thing I do invite everyone to watch at some point is this video. I know it is long, in fact it’s very long (hence the stupid time I’m writing this) but it is very much worth it. It is basically a university lecturer in the US giving his final lecture knowing he is going to die. It is all about his reflections on life and the good and bad things from his life. It was made famous on the web a little while ago but I have only just found the time (*tries not to laugh*) to watch it. All I can say is it is very very worth the comparatively little time it needs.

Running time: 1hour 44mins

Why aren’t more people using Media centers in their homes? I really don’t understand this at all. (and yes, I know that’s the American spelling)

For those who don’t know what this is I will try to give a simple explanation. This is a computer that connects to your TV and receives TV signal. It then provides the interface you see when using your TV and gives you a remote to control it. It adds a huge number of features to your TV and provides a home for all of what you class as your media.

For example, you can pause live TV, because it records to the hard-drive constantly, you can record something just by selecting it in the programme guide and hitting the record button. You can set things up to record upto 2 weeks in advance. Also, for a TV series you can tell it to record the whole series and it will record it without fail. This is great for people like me who would love to watch top gear every week, but often forget or are out. That way you don’t even have to think about it, just go to the recorded TV part of the interface and select the newest one. One you have the whole series you can then archive it off to DVD if you have a DVD burner (and there is no excuse not to have one these days!).

Of course, being a media center, these things don’t just do TV, you can use them to watch DVD’s (hardly smart, but it’s still nice), record, browse and search your music collection and go through your photos. All of this with the remote and a nice easy to use interface (even my mum agrees the interface is very simple).

Of course, this is meant to be the center of all your media, so this really isn’t enough. It acts as a server to anything else in the house that can pick up other media. So you can watch recorded TV on another computer on your network and with the fairly low bandwidth requirements it has you should even be fine on a laptop with wireless.

Thanks to the rise in popularity of these things, (although not as much as I would expect) there are lots more devices springing up to communicate with them and serve media. For example, this little device connects through wireless and accesses your whole music collection and allows you to play anything using its remote. Set up a playlist, or just tell it to go on random through the lot.

To give you an idea of what you can do with this stuff, I will explain what we are going to be setting up in my family’s house.

A Sony VGX-XL302 media center, a separate amplifier as it will be taking the place of the Hi-Fi as it does CD’s, Radio and recorded music which is about all you need these days. The something like the Logitech that I showed a second ago is going to go in the kitchen with a pair of wall mounted speakers. This of course then has full access to all the music we have despite that the TV is in use, and maybe the same CD is being played on a computer upstairs on a different track.

The usefulness of such systems just can’t be underestimated. Maybe I get in 15mins after a TV programme I want to watch has started. Then I can go up to my room, connect in on my computer and start watching from the start, despite that it’s still being watched downstairs, a quarter of an hour advanced.

Now maybe a year ago I would have understood people not being as interested in this kind of technology, it was a bit too noisy, it wasn’t quite fast enough, it still cost a bit too much and to top it off, we were left with the considerable more clunky interface of Windows XP Media center. Oh, and there were almost no twin TV tuners around, so you had to watch whatever you were recording.

Things have changed a bit since then, not least you can get boxes that are under £500 that will do all this (although I will admit you will have to spend a bit more if you want something that looks a bit prettier). Yes, they still have a way to come yet, I would like to see a few more devices to plug into them and better support for some of the newer technologies coming out like HD, but they really are ready for the real world now.

And if you want to be a smart arse, do what I’m doing and convert an old PC into network storage and shove it in your loft out the way.

The internet has to be the greatest distraction that was ever created. I mean, computers are bad enough on their own, but no, it had to get taken another step further and be connected to everything else!

Take now for example, I currently have 72 web pages open on different tabs in 7 separate browser windows. I have spoken to 7 different people on MSN today, 3 of which I’m still speaking to, not to mention the 22 online right now that I could talk to. I have my phone plugged into my computer and has been getting text messages throughout the day (when MSN doesn’t seem to work!). Then there is Outlook constantly checking my emails and my RSS feeds .I think it has been about 20 emails today so far, although 3 were duplicates from the same person who for some reason known best only to themselves they thought they should send me the same email to 3 different accounts of mine.

Then there is Facebook! Now don’t get me started on that. As great a thing as it may be, and as much as I love it to bits, it doesn’t half eat up my time. Yes, I now know my friend who crashed his car the other day has not written it off as he suspected, I also know someone is going to bake a cake tomorrow, that it’s snowing in Colorado right now and that Crawley cinema has 7 tills with not enough staff… all of these from my friends statuses (or is it stati? That would fit with the iWorld we seem to live in (god I hate that!)) But is all of this information (relevant or not) really worth me refreshing the page every 10mins that I’m online. I can’t help it now, it has become an addiction!

Unfortunately I am left with a bit of a problem here. I can complain all I like about how I’m “too connected” with the world and how I’m becoming addicted to the instant source of information I have before me, but as soon as the power goes down I’m like a crack addict who can’t get a fix! I connect up on my phone instead, I use the mobile version of Facebook, and I check my emails almost as often.

There is of course a very simple reason for this. I now rely on this stuff. Of the people who I have talked to on MSN today, one is Cornwall, another is Brighton, one in London, 2 just outside London, another in the USA and I don’t even know where the final person is! I haven’t seen my girlfriend in almost 2 weeks (not that I’m counting) but I’ve talked to her in one form or another almost every day (and the ones I didn’t she was out of the country).

There is always a lot of talk about what we call “social networking sites” such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc and how people can’t get enough of them. I’m not sure people are addicted to these sites, nor are the so called “crack-berry’s” really addicted to their blackberry phones, I think we are addicted to other people and now that information is just getting quicker and quicker and so we are expecting it faster all the time.

Get a Mac?

Macs have been getting a lot of press over the last year or so and have been making some big gains in the computing world. What I am going to try and do is talk about my experiences with my Mac.

Firstly, to let you know where I’m coming from, I’m a Windows user no doubt about that. I have used pretty much every version since DOS 4 and know each system pretty well. I will admit I don’t know everything about Vista, but that’s because I haven’t got it yet. In terms of computing experience I’m 21 and have been playing with computers since I was pretty young really. I do everything from web browsing to video editing and most things in between. These days I mainly specialise in MSSQL, MySQL, PHP and C#.NET, although my biggest skills come from MSSQL. I have a fairly wide, although limited experience with Linux and I not a huge fan of getting into code on my OS, hence none of them have really ever sat very well with my. I’m sure one day I will find an rpm that just works, but we are a way of that me thinks.

Anyway, so about a year ago I decided I was going to get a Mac. Now I was looking into a Mac min as they are about as cheap as they come and let’s face it, Macs are not cheap. Given I was buying this to play with and to test I was not going to go the full whack and get a G5, much as I may have wanted to.

A friend at the time was selling his powerbook and offered it to me, so what I actually snapped up was a PowerBook G4. So its PPC and it has half a gig of RAM. I agree not top of the line, so I will let it off for being slow sometimes. It is running OS 10.4 fully patched. As for additional software, it currently has iLife, iWork 06, Office 2004, Firefox, Adium and Skype on top of the original install base. It also has Synergy installed in a GUI form, although this has stopped working for some reason.

First impressions of the system was it looked very impressive. I would probably call it quite quirky. Things like the password box shakes if you get the password wrong. Not that cool, but quite funny. Getting used to the look and feel is quite easy. As far as a lot of people will be concerned it works very much like windows. You have icons, you can doubt click on them, they open. Not hard.

At the bottom of the screen you have this shortcuts bar called a dock. This is in short a whole load of shortcuts to all your application. If you have something open it sits on the dock, even if you don’t keep it there, and when you minimise something it goes to another side of the dock. You get a little black arrow under any application that is open which I guess is one way of doing it.

At the top is the apple menu. Well, I guess that’s what its called, I don’t actually know. This has an apple in the left which you click on to get to system preferences and to shut down etc. It also works like the top bar of any application you have open. So it changes. It contains the file menu, the edit menu etc. So in other words, when you have word open, the file, edit, view, insert etc menus are not part of the window, but sit at the top of the screen all the time. Again, just a different way of doing it. I’m not that keen on it, I find it a bit annoying as if I’m working on two things side by side, I have to click the application window to then move back up to the top to get to the button that’s now there because the right window is selected.

The top also acts like a system tray, although this is unimportant.

System preferences are quite easy to use, works close enough to the control panel not to care really. Most things you would expect are in there. No way to remove programs from there, nor does there seem to be any firewall. If OSX does have a firewall built in, I don’t see any options for it.

The biggest issue I have with the desktop is there is no one place to get to all your programs. Either you have it in your dock, or you have to go off to your applications folder and find wherever the file is to open it.

The window manager is one of my biggest complaints, especially given its rather hard to get away from. For example, you can only resize a window from the bottom left and you can only drag it around from its top bar. So the other day when I changed my screen resolution to fit on a data projector I could not get to the bottom corner because it was off the screen, and I could not drag the window up because it would not let me take my mouse past the screen top. I had to change resolution back down, resize the window and then change back again. Also, of the tree buttons, close, maximise and minimise, maximise doesn’t actually take up the whole screen. Different, but I can live with it. I do find myself resizing windows quite a lot of the time and it has to be said this is not very impressive how hard it is.

Next, the most annoying thing the window manager does EVER is its so inconsistent. For example, look at a folder and what’s inside. If you are viewing with the tile view then you can use both The apple key and the shift key to multiple select icons. Now change into the list view and you will find the apple key still works as it did a second ago, but the shift key now does list selection. I have yet to work out how to do list selection in the tile view.

Ok, the right click. Possibly the single most annoying thing you have to get used to. You see, OSX has a right click. There is a whole right click menu for many many things. They have mice with right-click and for years you have been able to plug in pretty much any two buttoned PC mouse in and use the function. Yet for some reason they make their laptops with only one button. I thought the idea of making both the hardware and the software was so it all fitted together nicely and just worked. Seems like they missed something to me. Yes, you can control click, but trust me, its annoying as hell.

I think I will stop there for now, and actually I haven’t even got onto the bit I wanted to. I have my fair share of Mac horror stories, but I will write them later I think. Some of you know the issues I have been having, but I thought it might be fun to write a few of my impressions having been going with it for about a year.

I know I’ve said it before, but why do people hate Microsoft so much? I get the feeling they are thinking considerably ahead of most other people in the market. If anything I think they are some of the true market innovators. I know it sounds to many people like I’m getting into bed with the devil, but that’s the way it goes (for some reason I have yet to fathom).

When the Zune came out it was ridiculed for being late to the party (well, yes, fair point, it was) and for coming in brown (what the hell is wrong with that? (must be MS Brown….)) and last but not least, for coming with wireless. Everyone was going on about how pointless it was and why the hell you they ever need to move songs about over wireless. It was called a gimmick and a pointless feature amongst other things.

Then a short while ago out came the Surface. This is in short a big touch screen table that allows you to view photos and flick through music etc. It also contains wireless. So for example the idea is I put my windows smartphone (which I own) down on it and it connects and allows me to move my contacts, music, pictures etc around. So maybe I could put my smartphone and a friend’s down and drag a couple of contacts over. All neat stuff so far. Strikes me as another step towards intuitive computer interfaces. In fact having been using toutchscreens for almost a year on my phone and a few months on my mp3 player I have to say, they are without doubt the way forward. I often find myself poking the screen of a non-toutchscreen device and wondering why it doesn’t work.

If any of you are sad enough to watch diggnation (I get bored sometimes… it allowed) you may have seen the episode where the Surface was talked about, and the first thing Kevin Rose (Apple fanboy) did was talk about how it wasn’t needed and how it was so pointless and kept trying to poke holes in the idea and that the technology wasn’t very developed and it would never work etc. He even complained there were almost no digital cameras that had wireless… that strikes me as a chicken and egg situation… something has to come first. Well, great as he may think his comments were, I would rather fall on the side of innovation. If this sort of stuff was developed more and if more and more were supported it could become a real time saver and focal point of a lot of what I would consider consumer digital devices (so phones, cameras, mp3 players etc).

Oh, wait, what was that last one there… An mp3 player…. So like the Zune… and oh wait, it has wireless… Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all…

Oh, and while I remember… Apple look like they are going to make the iPod wireless soon… So Apple inovate do they?

OK, joke of the day. Adobe is releasing a new version of photoshop, CS3. If you go out and buy this in the states they will charge you the grand total of US$471.90 including local tax. If however you were to go onto that self same site from the UK, you would pay £546.38 including tax and shipping. Now that’s about US$1080. When Adobe were asked to justify the huge cost difference (130% mark-up) they said that it costs more money to do business in Europe because of the number of languages and the different currencies. WTF? The official language of the UK is English! And last I looked, currency conversion wasn’t at 130% costs.

Now it’s well known that Adobe has huge issues with piracy with many (if not all) of its products. They are very good products and they are well liked. They are also industry standards for many places of work and many people. Now perhaps there would be less of an issue with piracy if people could actually afford the software. I know I for one want to buy it… but I’m just never going to if they keep this up. I simply won’t be able to justify the cost. If it cost more like £250 (which is more on par with the exchange rate) then I would be tempted to go online right now and do it….

How can a company of this size not realise that if they stopped trying to make up their profits by pissing people off, they would probably make more money through higher sales.

Actually, perhaps I should hold on to this bombshell of marketing information and save it for the Adobe execs. Maybe they will give me a job… or at least a free copy of CS3.

In the last 7 days the data useage for my phone has reached over 40MB! And to think there are still phone contracts that charge several pounds per MB!