The Car Analogy

Libby and I hired a car over the Easter break; the hire company attempted to persuade us to take the extra insurance at £13.5/day to reduce the £650 excess to zero, in addition to having to pay for the day where we are unable to return the car due to the office being closed. We declined this fabulous offer and once we got back home Libby went on the interwebs and purchased CDW insurance for the princely sum of £18 for the five days – Big difference! And if you hire vehicles on a regular basis a years cover is only £49 per person.

Anyway this is a bit of topic, this being a geek type blog. The car we got given was a Fiat with Blue&Me system, powered by Windows CE. As soon as I saw the USB port with the Windows logo my heart sunk. Why can't they just provide a line-in for a MP3 player?! Anyway, this had the potential to be great. Plug one of my portable hard drives in and go! Or even the Archos.

Do you really think it was going to be that simple? Well I started off with my phone; The Nokia N95 plugged in, mounted up and played flawlessly. Except that the radio controls didn't do anything. No! You have to use the ones on the steering wheel or press the windows button and use voice commands. Here's a great bit of UI design; To skip to the next track hit the windows key and say "Skip track" OR just press the skip track button on the wheel - but the passenger can't really do either! It's pretty clear to me at this point that the stereo and media player are very loosely integrated.

Libby's Archos; with over 100 Gig of music on it mounts fine, starts playing and abruptly stops after only ten seconds. The same happens with a portable hard drive. An 8Gig pen drive works perfectly, so I would conclude that this has to do with the size of the media being mounted. I would look it up, but I'm writing this in deepest darkest Lincolnshire with no mobile broadband access, I feel totally disconnected and not in a good way!

I'm Linux!

Webkit based browsers like chrome are what all the cool kids are touting this year, Windows and Mac versions abound but Linux ones are a little thin on the ground. I've been playing with the alpha build of Chromium (a Linux port of Chrome) for the last couple of weeks and the results are impressive. Aptitude grabs the latest build for me every day* and it seems to be coming along nicely.

* Here's another reason to switch to Linux; A central software manager - Updates everything on the system as required. Just yesterday it gave me new nVidia drivers. It's like Windoze update on speed but with less b0rkage and it updates all software on the sytem.

P.S. I made it sound like Aptitude does this without asking, you do get the opportunity to veto any updates.

That's why I'm Linux :-)

Illegally Parked Seagull

I'm surprised he/she didn't get a parking ticket!

I've been looking around for a replacement laptop, ideally a second user dell latitude D630 or Lenovo IBM Thinkpad T61. They may not be pretty but they provide a durable computing experience for the size/weight. A little bit like me :-) It may take a while to get one on ebay, at a price I'm prepared to pay, but I'm patient and o-so parsimonious.

Six Months and Counting. . .

Since my company switched to Linux, and what a happy six months they've been! It wasn't that difficult for us, we didn't have a massive suite of legacy windows software to switch, but only because I switched years ago to alternatives like; Open Office and Gimp.

I do have one Vista box at home (the media center box) this acts as a constant reminder as to why I run Ubuntu elsewhere. Also, Nokia still haven't produced a native Linux PC suite, so software updates require windows. Although that will be less of a problem with the new Symbian phone, which can be updated O.T.A.

I've tried the public beta *cough* of Vista SP2 Wind'ohs! 7 in a virtual machine (of course) and yes it's OK, but does it play HD media right out the box? What do you think? I'm sorry Microsoft, but if you expect me to pay money for this, it has to play bluray without me having to install 3-rd party software. The same goes for anti-malware software!

Jog Dial

I decided to grab a music player for jogging - I don't need massive capacity; as I only need my jogging music on there, so 2GB is more than enough. After some deliberation I went with a Sansa Clip. Ipod would never be an option for me, and the latest furore over the five knuckle shuffle headphone/controller chip vindicated that point of view to some extent (I hate locked-down proprietary hardware).

The Good:

• Nice OLED Display
• Superb sound quality (with decent 'phones)
• Price (£23)
• Battery Life
• Radio
• Voice Recorder
  

The Bad

• No SD card slot
• Size (it's 7 times the cubic capacity than a new shuffle :-))

I just wish SanDisk would make a hard drive version of the Fuze - Until then it looks like a Archos 5. . .

Boot Time

There's nothing like playing with hardware - I've been getting back in to building/playing with electronic based things. I got one of these BIOS reader cards on the 'bay for next to nothing. Well handy for checking older mobos out. (the newer ones tend to have this built in) Like here on an old machine that I used to use as a file server....

Get a grip!

Got a pair of these from Argos about a month ago, don't even bother wasting your money :-) I was just lucky I didn't receive an injury!

The British Disease

I've been looking for a machine shop to make our new range of prince's wands - Finding prospective companies using Google I've fired off emails to them. And not one has responded yet. The thing that gets me is that some of these companies are using Google adwords to get leads and they don't even follow them up! Then they bitch and moan about how hard things are.

Oh well if we don't hear anything from these companies we'll have to look at getting them made abroad, not something I really want to do but there may be no other way.

Push It Baby!

Three have announced free* push email for everyone! If you have a supported device follow the instructions here to get your push email fix - *if you have one of the internet add-ons you get unlimited push email in addition to your data allowance.

Well Done Virgin Media

Well it's only taken a year or so, but I'm getting what I am paying for! You know that I'm a sucker for bandwidth and I'll be getting the 50Mb/s service as soon as it rolls in to town :)

Shonky Stuff!

I haven't had a rant about any products for a while. I must be getting old! Anyways, there is a good three-parter over at the inquirer about the current Nvidia chip fiasco - Makes the RRD look like small fry eh? I'm not a PC gamer so I'll stick with my old card, thanks very much.

There's also been further issues with the ithingy - Why would you do it to yourself? You will get burned :)

Talking of things going up in flames - Sony (producer of the very shonky vaio space heaters laptops) shares have hit an all time low, partly due to the latest recall no doubt.

Faster, faster!

I've been really busy over the last couple of weeks. The major task has been migrating servers for the shop and associated sites, moving from a php4/mySQL4 environment, to the next iteration of the open source stack (version 5 of both php and mySQL) This has now been completed and I am now optimising the LAMP stack to make things even faster!

Today I installed and configured Alternative PHP Cache on the shop server - this has given another welcome boost to the (already impressive) performance of the multi-core processor box. Its geographically diverse twin is also running APC - this server will be used for another site (launching soon) as well as a hot failover (replicated mySQL) for the shop.

Rats!

I found this video whilst setting up kino and my DV cam on the computer. We took the log away from them as they wouldn't/coundn't play nice and would fight over who got in first. We gave them a rat igloo, which was bigger, they still used to fight over it though. Rats make great pets - why not see if you can rescue/re-home some today?

You know you're a geek when. . .

Choosing a locker (at swimming) you only use ones with a binary number; 100, 101, 110, 111 etc. (4, 5, 6, 7 respectively - for you decimal types) - I like base 2! Today I swam 1100100 (64h - for you hexadecimalists*) lengths (11001 meter/length) in one hour!

* many years ago a friend at college said that hexadecimal sounds like some sort of sexual preference; I said; "Yeah I'm a hexadecimalist; I only sleep with people over sixteen". - Wild days! :)

Octalists - they can feck off :-)