SC::UK TechBlog

Dragon Dictation

2010-08-16T16:39:00.000+01:00

Nice little app for the iPhone called Dragon Dictation. Seems to be the best voice recognition system that I've used to date. It does require an Internet connection to work but it is fast and accurate and deals with the UK accent, which makes a change. Once a dictation is complete, it can be sent to email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook and to the clipboard for general use. Very nice.

To get hold of the app, search for it on the iTunes App Store.

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Posted from my iPhone

iPhone headphones and a Blackberry Curve

2009-08-26T06:54:00.000+01:00

It seems that the white Apple iPhone headphones, with the integrated microphone and switch, work with the Blackberry Curve. The switch will toggle mute, unlike on the iPhone where it will pickup and hang up calls. Mute might be more useful for business users who are using their Blackberries to dial into conference calls.

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Posted from my iPhone

iPhone, O2 and 3G

2009-08-14T14:24:00.000+01:00

Something has not been quite right with O2's 3G network of late. There have been very public national outages but I've also been experencing general reliability problems with the network.

Only yesterday I was not able to connect to servers on the internet, despite the fact that I had a full 3G signal. However, when I moved to a slightly different location the problem went away. This was odd and pointed to a communication problem at cell level.

Things appear to be OK today, but I have now lost all confidence in O2's network. Each time I go to check my email or look at Twitter I am expecting it not to work.

Apple + O2 = it doesn't "just work".

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Posted from my iPhone

Beejive

2009-07-27T17:55:00.000+01:00

I'm using an IM client on my iPhone called BeeJive. It was a choice between Beejive and IM+. Beejive was a bit cheaper and seems to have a loyal fanbase.

It dies MSNMessenger and Facebook, amongst others. Unlike IM+ it won't do Skype. However it does do iPhone OS3 push, so I alwas appear to be online and I get a notification when someone sends a message.

Overall I'm well impressed. This is now the third push app I have on my iPhone and it's an excellent use of the technology. Have I mentioned Prowl yet?

With 3G and OS3 things are really looking good on the iPhone!

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Posted from my iPhone

iPhone 3Gs

2009-07-24T14:57:00.000+01:00

I've had an iPhone 3Gs for almost two weeks now. It replaces my original iPhone - I skipped the 3G last year. The biggest gains for me have been the 3G network connectivity, the 32GB of RAM and the GPS. It is a faster iPhone but I can't say that I notice that very much.

There was talk of the 3Gs getting hot. I've noticed that it gets warm when using maps with GPS tracking and the compass enabled, but even then it does not get hot.

Battery seems to be about the same as the original iPhone, although it might be slightly better. I certainly have to charge it at least once a day - that is with two hours of video, a couple of hours of music and no more than an hour in total of surfing/email. I do have MobileMe push for contacts and calenders as well as push for Beejive and Prowl turned on. Wifi use is minimal with most Internet access over 3G.

All in all though, it's fantastic! I'm very pleased that I upgraded and it is without a doubt the best phone that I have ever owned.

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Posted from my iPhone

Blogging on an iPhone

2009-07-24T12:09:00.001+01:00

I now have BlogPress for my iPhone so hopefully I can get back into writing on this blog - not that was ever very good at posting things. Let's see if I can do better now!

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Posted from my iPhone

iPhone - One Month on

2008-04-08T21:58:00.001+01:00

I've now had the Apple iPhone for over a month on O2. I originally
bought it and unlocked it to use with my Orange SIM, but after being
shafted by Orange on data, I decided to go with O2 for the full
experience. As an aside, I also moved my wife Sammy onto O2's
SIMplicity. So that's £50 a month that Orange have lost due to their
inability to keep with with their competitors. Not that they seem to
care. May they go under.

Once on O2, the iPhone comes into its own. I can browse the web and
do my email as much as I like, without worrying about cost or using up
my data allowance - with O2 and iPhone it is not capped. Another
advantage of the iPhone is the larger screen. I now watch lots of
video on the train in to work. The main drawback here is the limited
(8GB) storage on the device. Battery life seems OK though. In fact
it seems to be better for video that GPRS/EDGE browsing.

I still miss the power and flexibility of Windows Mobile, with the
iPhone lacking such basic functionality as cut and paste, amongst
others. However, the iPhone is easier and more enjoyable to use than
Windows Mobile and the free internet, including access to the Cloud
WiFi hot spots, makes the iPhone a great device to use.

The iPhone, O2 and The Cloud

2008-03-17T12:46:00.003Z

My iPhone form O2 comes with free access to The Cloud WiFi network here in the UK. This is great if you are in a popular urban area, such as here in the City of London, where there are plenty of Cloud hotspots.

The theory is that when you first use a cloud hotspot from your iPhone, it will ask you for your mobile phone number, and then if you are a valid O2 customer it will remember your iPhone (or the iPhone's WiFi MAC address to be precise). You should only have to key in your number once and then you will be able to seamlessly connect to The Cloud whenever a hotspot is available.

Unfortunately, my iPhone did not seem to want to work that way. I would type in my number and get access to The Cloud, but the following day it would ask me for my number again. I called O2 to confirm that I should not have to key in my number all the time, and then asked them to help me sort it out.

After trying a couple of things, the solution was t0 go to the Settings then select General and the Reset (right at the bottom). From the Reset screen I chose to Reset Network Settings. That seems to have fixed it, for now.

PicLens

2008-02-21T13:05:00.003Z

My friend Peter recently showed me a clever little plug-in for my browser. It's called PicLens and can be found at http://www.piclens.com/. This clever little plug-in allows you to quickly scan through photos on a wall like "thing", where there is support on the site. Google images has support for PicLens, as does Flickr.

PicLens is available for Firefox (both on Windows and Mac), as well as Internet Explorer. Once you've installed it, go Google, do a search for images and then when you get the thumbnails, simply click the small blue button with the white arrow in it, which will probably be in the top right of the browser tool bar. When you are bored of Google, try it on http://www.flickr.com/photos/swc-uk. How's that for a shameless plug?

BBC iPlayer on the iPhone

2008-02-21T12:30:00.000Z

There has been a recent story out on the interweb, that the BBC are planning to make their iPlayer available on the iPhone and iPod touch. This comes shortly after they released some of their programmes on iTunes for purchase. Now, to recap, the iPlayer is the BBCs software that allows us (here in the UK) to watch programmes that we missed within seven days of their original broadcast, over the internet on our PCs. The PC version allows the programmes to be downloaded and then watched within the seven days. The Mac version only supports streaming the programmes live from the BBC, so require a network connection when watching.

Obviously the PC version wins, in that you can download programmes and then watch them when you have no network connection, such as on the train on a laptop. What you can't do is transfer the TV shows onto another media device like an iPod. So now there is this story about the iPlayer in the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I have a suspicion that this will be a streaming version only. Please no! What would be the point? An iPod goes in your pocket and you use it on the move. When you walk, you listen to music or podcasts, but when you're on the train or bus or even an aircraft you can watch video. But chances are that you won't have WiFi in those place so how can you stream video???

What we need is iTunes video rentals, which are free to UK residents (and license fee payers), and last the seven days or whatever the BBC choose. We could then download these onto our iPods and iPhones and watch when we're on the move. I do appreciate that not everyone has an iPod Touch or iPhone and ideally we'd be able to watch BBC material on any media player, but the rumour out there is about BBC iPlayer on the iPod Touch/iPhone so that is what my argument is centred around.

I will be interested to see where this goes...

Handbrake to the Rescue

2008-02-21T07:12:00.000Z

I acquired an Elgato EyeTV device for capturing analogue video from my V+ box some time ago, so that I can watch recorded TV on my iPod, on the train. However, I have ended up using my digital video (DV) camera to do that. The reason is that the EyeTV device (and its software) can't deal with anamorphic wide screen, which is what our terrestrial TV stations here in the UK use. No matter what I do, I can't get widescreen iPod files out of EyeTV when the signal going in is in anamorphic widescreen. Quite useless.

For those who don't know, anamorphic widescreen is broadcast like standard TV, so the picture is squashed horizontally - everyone in the picture would look tall and thin on an old non-widescreen TV. A widescreen TV, on seeing an anamorphic signal, will stretch the picture horizontally and it will then be right. An alternative to anamorphic widescreen is to use letter-boxing, where black bars are added to the top and bottom of the picture for widescreen programmes. This looks much better on non-widescreen TVs, but to make that fit a widescreen TV, the TV has to zoom in and the picture does not look at good as the vertical resolution is reduced. Anamorphic widescreen produces a better quality picture on widescreen TVs. Many broadcasters in Europe tend to use letter-boxing, but in the UK we use anamorphic widescreen. Incidentally, most widescreen (16:9) DVDs will use anamorphic widescreen as opposed to letter-boxing as it produces a better quality image on a widescreen TV.

Playing the anamorphic signal into my DV camera and then using that to digitise the video, then sending it to the Mac and iMovie works perfectly. The DV camera and iMovie recognise anamorphic widescreen signals, and iMovie will use that to make a widescreen iPod video. Perfect. But it means having the DV camera out and it's a bit of a faff using iMovie. I'd love to use EyeTV but I can't.

Yesterday I read a blog, which mentioned that a new version of the DVD ripping and conversion software called Handbrake is available. I use Handbrake to rip my DVDs to iPod video so that I can watch them on the train. It works very well, and I can set any aspect ratio I want - i.e. widescreen or the old fashioned format. Well, the new version of Handbrake apparently supports EyeTV files, which are MP2 files anyway, the same compression system used for DVD video.

I downloaded the new Handbrake last night and did a test with some anamorphic video from the V+, and it does indeed work. Fantastic! It's more of a faff than simply exporting to the iPod from EyeTV but it will do for now. If anyone is interested, the trick is to force Handbrake to change the aspect ratio of the video as it converts. So for non-widescreen video I would use 640x480 resolution (width x height), which is a ratio of 4:3. When converting to widescreen video, iMovie would keep the width (640), but reduce the height to about 360, which is a ratio of 16:9 - widescreen TV. So all I do in Handbrake is to stick with 640 pixels of width, but reduce the height to about 360. Perfect.

iPhone - Good, Bad and Ugly

2008-02-20T07:18:00.001Z

I now have an iPhone. It's not on O2, yet, but it works as it should and as I've had it for about a week now I thought I'd write a few words about it. I'll try and keep this objective, but it's hard not to draw comparisons with other phones that I've owned, most notably Nokia and Windows Mobile devices. My last two phones have been a Nokia N95 and before that an Orange SPV M600 (HTC Windows Mobile 5 device). So, without further a do, let's crack on.

The Good

User Interface - this is a total winner. It's the best I've used on any phone. It's fast, accurate and even throws in some clever animations, never at the cost of functionality and usability.
Touch - well, my WM (Windows Mobile) devices had this, using a stylus. However, the iPhone requires the touch of a finger and does not appear to be pressure sensitive unlike the WM devices I had. The iPhone UI tries to make controls (buttons, edit fields, etc.) on the screen big enough to use a finger to control, but ultimately I would say that the WM stylus based input is probably more accurate, if not as convenient or even fast.
Keyboard - the on-screen keyboard actually works quite well. Much of that is due to the intelligent word correction that the iPhone uses to fix your typos. I would say that it's probably the best input system that I've used on a phone recently. The N95 is clunky and I never liked it. Windows Mobile offers a number of options for entering text, including handwriting recognition. It's all very clever, but in practice it's a bit fiddley.
Size - the iPhone is a nice size and weight. It is tall and wide, but needs to be in order to accommodate the large screen, larger than any other device that I have owned. The iPhone is thin though and it amazes me that they can fit all the bits (especially the battery) into it.
Screen - the quality of the picture on the screen is amazing when using the UI. The whole UI is designed to pop out of the screen with clear vivid colours, and not garish in any way. However, when watching video or viewing photos I'd say that although the iPhone wins on screen size, the N95 wins on picture quality. There is one other area where the iPhone's screen wins hands down though, and that is the fact that it's glass. On one hand it may be more fragile that plastic competitors but the key point is that it is far less likely to scratch, something that cannot be said for my SPV M600 or my N95.
Calendar - the calendar application is very close to iCal on OS X for functionality, although it does not completely support multiple calendars. It is certainly better than the N95 but perhaps not quite as good as WM Pocket Outlook in this respect.
Mail - the mail application on the iPhone is good. It will display full HTML email, which is something that the Pocket Outlook on WM will not. Mail on the iPhone is simple to use and does all it needs to. However, it needs to be more configurable, as it can hammer the internet connection if you have too many email accounts set up on it. I would say that overall it is on par with Pocket Outlook, but far better than the pathetic mail support on Nokia phones (like the N95).
Phone - this is the key part of the iPhone as it is, after all, a phone. The phone is easy to use and integrates really well with the contacts. The most important thing to me is that, unlike my SPV M600, when someone rings me the iPhone wakes up immediately and starts ringing. WM is truly awful in this respect and really relegates WM devices to very good PDAs with a very poor phone built in.
Contacts - as mentioned above, contacts are well integrated with the phone part of the iPhone and it is very easy to find contacts. I have about 500 contacts on my phones and I would say that I could probably do a quicker look-up on my N95, but it's not as easy. The contacts stored on the iPhone are fully featured and contain all the information from OS X Address Book, even the photo.
Browsing - the iPhone has the Apple Safari browser built in. The implementation is excellent and it is very easy to use. It is better than IE on Windows Mobile, and far, far better than the browser on the Nokia N95. However, as iPhone Safari is effectively the full browser, it does appear to download full-featured pages from sites which is an issue when not on WiFi. Pocket IE (on Windows Mobile) appears to do a better job of bringing in mobile versions of sites. There is no Flash support on the iPhone, but there is none on WM or the N95 either, as far as I know.
Photos - showing photos on the iPhone is a real pleasure. Photos from iPhoto on the Mac are synchronised and then appear in Albums on the iPhone. Viewing, either one at a time or as a slideshow, is easy and there is limited zoom functionality as well. The N95, by comparison, was not as easy to use nor as fast. WM devices do support photo viewing, but I would say they lag behind the iPhone in ability to navigate through the photos - this is especially true if like me you have many hundreds if not thousands of photos.
YouTube - the iPhone has a YouTube application that integrates well with the YouTube web site. This means that you can search for and view YouTube videos through a simplified user interface. To be honest, I would say that this is far better than using the YouTube website itself.
Google Maps - these work very well on the iPhone and are well integrated with the contacts stored on the iPhone, allowing you to use addressed of your contacts to find them on the Google Maps. I should say though, that I had all of this over a year ago on my WM phone, as Google had released a version for Windows Mobile some time ago. The WM version had more or less all of the features that the iPhone version has, but perhaps with a slightly less flashy UI. The N95, on the other hand, has its own maps application to go with the built in GPS. It is a crippled version though, and requires a payment to Nokia to unlock the full version - a right rip-off. Even so, Google Maps is far nicer to use on either the iPhone or Windows Mobile. All it lacks is full GPS.
Weather and Stocks - there are a couple of OS X like widgets for showing weather and share prices (and indexes) on the iPhone. In fact, they are clearly iPhone versions of the widgets in OS X. The weather application supports showing several locations in one go and the Stocks application can be scrolled and will therefore show as many prices as you need. Both will update from the internet when they are activated from the main screen. There were no equivalents of these two applications on either my N95 or my WM PDA/Phones.
Unlocking and Hacking - there is a vibrant hacking community out on the internet. It's a long and interesting story, but they have basically managed to open up the iPhone and allow third party applications to be installed on the phone. Apple don't like this, but many users do. Of course, once third party applications can be installed, it is possible to then unlock the phone to be used with any network. There are many applications out there to do many, many things and without them I would not be able to use my iPhone.

Bad

Notes - there is a very good note taking application on the iPhone, but there appears to be no way to synchronise this back to the Mac (or PC). That's not really very clever. Windows Mobile was able to do this back in 2002!!! So far I have not even used the notes on my iPhone because I don't see the point. I need to be able to see them on my Mac, and I would particularly like to create notes on my Mac and then have them appear on my iPhone. Both WM phones and the N95 have some sort of notes synchronisation.
Call Quality - although better than my SPV M600, the call quality of the iPhone is not as good as the N95. Recipients of my calls have noticed a drop in quality since switching to the iPhone from the N95, and I have noticed the same my end. One complaint is that, like the M600, the iPhone seems to pick up a lot of background noise when in a call.
Notification Sounds - this one is a real puzzle to me. Although the ring tone and SMS sound can be changed, it is not possible to assign any other sounds to notifications. What is even worse, is that changing the volume level on these is a real faff. There are also no profiles, which is a big advantage of the Nokia in this respect, and I even had an application on my last WM phone to set up to five profiles. On top of all of this, I find it hard to hear the notifications and often miss them. There is a vibrate function, but it does not seem as noticeable as on the N95 or the SPV M600.
Visual Notifications - one thing I miss from the SPV M600 is the little LED telling me that I have missed calls, voicemail, SMS or Mail waiting for me., without having to turn on the phone to check. It's a simple but very effective system. There is nothing like this on the iPhone. There wasn't on the N95 either, but I could glance at the screen as it was always active. Apple could have fitted a subtle blue/white light (like on my MacBook Pro) that pulsed when there were waiting notifications. I think that would have look great.
iPod - compared to my 5G iPod, the iPhone is not as easy to use. A large touch screen it may have, but it's just not as good as the click wheel on the classic iPod. Besides, with 8GB of memory the iPhone is pretty useless as an iPod for me as I have about 55GB of music, not to mention video and photos.
Office Applications - there are none. Massive win for Windows Mobile on this front. I had used Pocket Excel quite a bit on my WM phones and now I have nothing. In fact, a simple task such as getting a train timetable on to my iPhone is just a nightmare.
PDF Viewer - this is a strange one, as OS X uses PDF throughout. As mentioned above, there is no way to get any form of data onto the iPhone. No train timetable, not even the iPhone manual itself can be viewed from the iPhone. Most odd. Windows Mobile wins hands down here. Even the N95 had a PDF viewer.
Camera - the camera on the iPhone is very similar to the one in my last WM phone, the SPV M600. Quality wise it's pretty poor and needs plenty of light. The iPhone cannot record video, unlike the M600. However, neither can come even close to the camera in the N95. That is the main thing that I miss, now that I don't use the N95 anymore. It is a real loss for me, and the iPhone really is very poor in this respect, especially as it's two years newer than the M600.
GPS - there is no GPS on the iPhone. There was none on my WM phones, but there was on my N95. However the maps on the N95, which was the only application that could use the GPS, are crippled and require extra payment to Nokia, so I never really used them. I still think TomTom is the ultimate GPS application and I've not found anything better. TomTom on the iPhone would be amazing!
MMS - there is no MMS on the iPhone. This is betrays the fact that the iPhone is mainly aimed at the US market, which is several years behind the rest of the planet and probably explains the hysteria over the iPhone in general. I've not had a phone without MM for over half a decade now!

Ugly

Applications - the selection of applications available on the iPhone are pretty meagre compared to the competition. As mentioned above, there are no office type applications, and no PDF reader. There is a calculator. That's something I suppose. Windows Mobile wins hands down in this respect, an the N95 was not far behind. I should mention that ever since the iPhone was released then has been a concerted effort on the interweb to open up the phone, which has succeeded. I have installer.app on my iPhone, which allows me to install a number of useful thrid-party applications. There is also an API coming out soon, from Apple, to support official iPhone (and iPhone Touch) development but it's unclear at the moment how exactly that will work.
Lock-in - the is a very bad point. Apple, for some bizarre reason, decided to lock the iPhone into one carrier per country, and there are only four of them so far. I'm not sure if this is greed or arrogance (or both), but it will have severe limitations on the take-up of the phone. Maybe it's stupidity and ignorance. In fact, I have read statistics on the interweb that there may be as many as 1.4 million iPhone out there that have been unlocked - including mine! If Apple had simply sold the phone as a generic GSM phone in their shops and online, then I suspect they would have sold many more by now. They could still do deals with carriers, to support things such as visual voicemail only on those carriers. Nokia and HTC have been doing this for ages. I got my N95 from Orange, for free, with lock-in. I can only use Orange SIMs on that phone. However, I could have gone out and bought the N95 for full retail price and then used it with any network, anywhere. A simple and flexible solution, but apparently one that Jobs decided would not give him a big enough slice of the cash pie.
Battery - this is a big issue for me. All phones that I have had in the past have had removable batteries. This means that, as with the N95, I can carry a spare and swap them over if I run out of power and can't charge. It also means that if the battery dies due to reaching it's end of life, I can buy a new one and pop it in. N95 batteries can be had on Amazon for £10! The iPhone is sealed. If the battery drains it needs a charge and that takes long enough. Then when the battery comes to the end of its life, the iPhone needs to go back to Apple to have a new one fitted - and not for £10 either!
Headphone Socket - this is an odd one, but the headphone socket on the iPhone, although a 2.5mm jack, is recessed and won't allow most plugs to fit as the moulding around their plugs are too big to fit. There are adapters available but why Apple could not ship one with the iPhone is beyond me. After all, the supplied Apple earbuds are probably the worst I've ever listened to. The solution that I found was to take a Stanley knife to the plug on the headphones and cut back the casing so that it will fit the socket.
3G - there is none, and this is a big omission. I hear all the excuses trotted out about battery life, but I don't buy it. Again, I suspect that this is a US thing as they probably don't have much in the way of UTMS or HSDPA, which we do have here in the UK and Europe. The Apple answer to not having 3G is EDGE. Orange have had EDGE here in the UK for a couple of years, and I have used it, but I'm not convinced. It's also not that widespread as 3G has become a higher priority, understandably.
Copy and Paste - this is a most bizarre one. There is no copy and paste on the iPhone. I had taken it for granted that there would be. I often used to copy the contents of emails into appointments or notes on my WM devices. This really is a very poor effort from Apple and again it proves their amateur status in the mobile and smart phone market. Shame on Apple.

There are the points then. I do like my iPhone, but I think it's a very simple device and falls far short of the hype and the competition. I'm hoping that the next iPhone will be a massive improvement. One thing is for sure, and that is that firmware updates do not seem to be providing any significant upgrades at the moment. A small tweak here or there does not really make up for the fundamental shortcomings of the phone.

Master File Table Corrupt

2008-01-29T07:16:00.000Z

Major problem! My Windows server has lost the data volume (which is striped RAID with parity). It seems that the Master File Table is badly corrupt, and I suspect it can't be recovered. I'm not sure why this has happened. It's not likely to be hardware failure given I have three hard drives in a RAID set, and there is parity, so it would need to be a failure of more than one device if it was hardware.

CHKDSK cannot recover from the problem, and a quick Google Search reveals that it's probably a format and restore. That's a real shame, because so far I've found Windows computers with NTFS to be very reliable. I'm not sure I want to re-build the volume and I suspect the machine will now be replaced with a Mac Mini as a small networked server. So does anyone want Pentium III-450 with 650GB of storage?

Apple iDVD... and some iMovie

2008-01-15T07:10:00.000Z

I recently wanted to create a DVD with some photos on it and some video too. It was my first opportunity to use the iDVD application that is part of the Apple iLife (in my case, iLife 08) suite for Apple Macs. iDVD is supposed to make it easy to create DVDs, and that is what it does. When you start iDVD you have to option of creating a quick DVD from video, a wizard for guiding you through the steps of creating a rich DVD, or there is free form creation, which is what I use.

Once in iDVD, you can select from a number of themes for the DVD. These will provide the title and menu screens and can be customised to a degree, in that photos can be added to animations and screen areas. After that, still photos slideshows and video can be added to the main menu, and sub-menus can also be added. Music can be added to slideshows and the timings for how long each photo appears can be configured - in fact, the slide show can be set to last as long as the music selected to accompany it.

Once the DVD has been set up, it can be previewed in iDVD, which is good as creating the DVD to test it can take a while. When you are ready to create the DVD, there are three options available. The most obvious option is to burn the new DVD - you insert a blank one and it writes the resulting DVD image to that. However, if you are planning to create a number of DVDs it makes more sense to use one of the other two DVD creation options, which are either to create an OS X disk image or a VIDEO_TS folder. These can then be written to multiple discs using either OS X Disk Utility or Burn.

So having made a DVD with iDVD, there are a couple of little tips I have. The first is to do with the slide shows. If you drag photos into the slide show from a Finder window, or even from iPhoto (via the Media Browser), they will then appear in a random order in the slide show. That's all very well if that's not a problem or if there are a few photos that you can re-arrange, but there is no bulk sort option so it can be a pain. What I did find is that if you create an Album in iPhoto, order the photos in the album and then drag the album into the slide show, then the order will be preserved. I had read that this is also the case for folders in Finder. Don't drag selected photos in, but drag the folder in.

On the subject of slide shows, there are other options for creating slide shows, such as creating one in iPhoto or iMovie. Doing this will actually create a video. There are two disadvantages that I can think of with this method. The first is that you won't be able to use the DVD skip buttons to step through the photos manually, and the second is a quality issue. It seems, from what I have read, that the best quality slide shows come from those built by iDVD from the original photos.

The other tip I have concerns video. When you have put your DVD content together using iDVD, you then build the DVD itself. This process involves rendering the video from the media you have added. DVDs use MPEG-2, which is a lossy compression standard - and it an old standard at that, not as efficient as the latest available. If you prepare video to add to your DVD, and save it in a compressed format before adding it to iDVD, then the final disc may contain video that looks worse that it has to. This is because iDVD will convert your lossy video to another lossy format and doing that is not the ideal thing to do if you are after quality. Therefore careful selection of a good video codec for your source video is important. I use DV, although a lossy format, it is one of the better ones that I have found (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DV#Video_compression).

Nokia Maps - Nokia Crap?

2007-12-19T17:50:00.000Z

Having updated the firmware in my Nokia N95, I also got the latest Nokia maps using the map loader Windows software. I started Nokia Maps, which uses the built-in GPS receiver and started to play around. The first thing I noticed is that despite the fact that the new firmware was supposed to have A-GPS (Assisted GPS, where the GPS uses the internet to get a faster fix) it still took an age to get a lock. I also noticed that the one decent feature of the Maps application has been removed - and that's tracking. Tracking would show a rout on the phone and allow you to manually follow it. Full navigation has always been an extra that you need to pay Nokia for. Now they've removed tracking. Looks like I'll not be using Nokia Maps much. If anyone from Nokia ever reads this, then I have a very simple question. Given that Nokia Maps is pretty poor all round (have you people actually tested the route finding algorithms??), why would I pay you for you software when I could go to someone like TomTom who will do the job properly? Oh, and I have TomTom running under Windows Mobile on an old Orange SPV M2000, and it knocks Nokia Maps into next week.

How to turn a Nokia N95 into a Paperweight

2007-12-19T17:25:00.000Z

When I got my new Nokia N95 from Orange, it came with the usual garbage that Orange insist on installing on their phones. It also came with an old version of the Nokia firmware. I know this as I downloaded the Nokia firmware upgrade software, and although there are newer versions of the N95 firmware out there, the updater software told me that I had the "latest version". In fact, I had the latest Orange version, which is far from the latest version. A bit of Googling told me that there was a code in the phone, which determines which set of firmware the phone should run. In my case, as the phone was supplied by Orange, it had the Orange code, and therefore would only look for Orange's crippled and outdated firmware.

This is where de-branding comes in. There is a good post on it here. By setting the product code in the phone to a generic Nokia code, the firmware updater will load the latest Nokia firmware into the phone. This was the way to go. I downloaded the NSS software to change the code and already had all the Nokia software in place. However, at this point I should point out that all the software in question runs under Windows. I have a Mac. However, this shouldn't be a problem. I also have Parallels on my Mac along with Windows XP. I have to admit that it's an old version of Parallels and I'm not entirely sure what sort of support there is for it on OS X (10.5) Leopard but it appeared to be working.

I ran NSS and changed the N95's product code to the generic one without a problem. On restarting the phone and running the Nokia firmware updater it then told me that there was a newer version of the firmware available. Progress! The updater downloaded the firmware, which was about 115MB and proceeded to install it. That's when it started to go wrong. The progress bar on the Nokia updater moved a bit, and the screen on the Nokia N95 changed a few times until it simply said "NOKIA" without any backlighting. That was it. The firmware updater had frozen, as had the whole Windows XP OS that was running in the Parallels VM. The phone had also frozen. I decided to leave it for half an hour as OS X was still reporting the Parallels was using one core at 100%, so it must have been doing something.

In the end I had to kill the VM running XP, disconnect the phone from the USB cable and remove the battery. I restarted Windows, but the phone would not get past the "NOKIA" message. It was now a very expensive paperweight (although I didn't pay for it, and it's a bit light to hold down any paper, but I digress...). I reconnected the phone to the USB and started the firmware updater again. Fortunately the updater saw the phone. It also saw that it needed some firmware. That was lucky. I decided to try the firmware update again, and this time it worked. This time I had also plugged the phone into the charger before doing the flashing, which I had not done the last time. This time Windows XP did not freeze. This time it was all good!!

I now have a generic Nokia N95. Very good. A little faster, a couple of missing applications are now there and a lot of awful Orange software and plug-ins are gone. Good stuff.

Not so SMART?

2007-12-19T07:54:00.000Z

I had to re-partition and format a USB memory flash memory device and decided to do it using OS X's Disk Utility. When I started that up I noticed that my main hard drive in my MacBook Pro was labelled red. Odd, I thought - never seen that before. On closer examination it told me that there had been a S.M.A.R.T. failure on the disk. S.M.A.R.T. is a system used on most hard drives today, where the controller electronics and the firmware on the drive look for abnormal behaviour and use it to predict upcoming drive failure. I have some nifty software on my Windows server that will even give me a date when it thinks the drive might fail - that'll be a wild stab in the dark, of course, but it's quite interesting.

Given that Disk Utility on OS X would only tell me that the hard drive was at death's door and that I need to back-up data and replace the drive, I was keen to know more. Disk Utility gives little away, so thanks to Mr. Google, I found a S.M.A.R.T. utility under the Darwin Ports packages, smartmontools, and installed it. I ran up smartmontools and found that the problem was a bad spin-up time on the disc some time recently. Now, given what I know about controller electronics, and given my experience, I know that this could be due to a glitch in the firmware, say on a resume from sleep, or perhaps even a sensor problem. Either way, I decided not to take any chances and order a replacement.

This morning I started Disk Utility, and wasn't surprised to see that the error had cleared itself and Disk Utility declared the drive healthy. Smartmontools still has the original problem logged, and I have a new drive on the way. What to do? I can't send the old drive back (it's only six months old) as the vendor would probably say there is nothing the matter with the drive. For now I will leave it in place, as a drive swap is a bit of a faff on this MacBook Pro but I'll keep the new drive just in case. Perhaps I will pop the new drive into an external enclosure and clone the internal drive to it from time to time. That way a failure will be quite easy to recover from, aside from the physical agro of replacing the drive.

T-Mobile Web'n'Walk

2007-12-08T09:05:00.000Z

I've had the T-Mobile Web'n'Walk modem for almost a month now. So far it's been really good. I get the high speed connection (HSDPA) in most places that I connect, and at the minimum I get UTMS (the slower and original 3G). Right now I'm sitting in a BMW dealership writing this and working with a full Internet connection. I use my T-Mobile modem most week days (Monday to Friday) and generally connect at 08:00 in the morning and have been connected until well after 17:00. I have never been disconnected and get full broadband speeds and response. I'm very impressed. Top marks to T-Mobile, and shame on Orange, with whom I've been a customer for over 10 years, for not providing a similar package.

Almost Got a Bargain

2007-11-19T07:15:00.000Z

Having signed up with 3 for mobile broadband, I was looking forward to some proper mobile internet - not the poor excuse for data that I'd experienced with Orange. The USB modem that they sent me worked at home, although only on UTMS, so not at the top speed available. I then took it in to work in London (the City), which would be the main place I'd be using it. The first problem was that there was no 3G signal in the office. Not a sausage. I move my notebook around, even right up to the window, but nothing. The best it could find was GPRS. So I decided to try the GPRS service but had no luck at all.

After faffing around for a while, I decided to call 3. The first person I spoke to at some off-shore call centre wasn't really much help but did give me a number to call for their help-line, saying that they would probably be able to do something for me. When I got hold of someone on the help-line, it became clear that there would be nothing that they could do about the lack of a 3G signal, which is pretty much what I expected. I was also told that the reason the GPRS service was not working, was that for GSM, 3 use the Orange network and that because of compatibility problems, they had blocked http over GPRS. That leaves me wondering, what exactly is that point of supporting GPRS if you block http??? In the end I decided that although £10 a month seemed like a good deal, it was not worth paying if it didn't work in the one place I really wanted it... obviously! I called 3 and arranged to send back the modem and cancel the contract as I was within the 14 day money back period. I have sent the modem back.

After all of that, I was back at square one. I knew that I could get an Orange 3G signal in the office but that was not good to me as they are in the customer fleecing business. My other options were potentially a business package from Vodafone or T-Mobile's mobile broadband. I went to the local T-Mobile shop and after a chat with the guy there decided to take up the T-Mobile package. The main advantage was that I could take the modem back to the office straight away, try it out, and if it didn't work I could return it. The modem was also free, unlike with 3. The contract I ended up with was over twice as expensive, but it had three advantages over the £10 package with 3. First of all, it was for 3GB not 1GB. It also had a fair use policy, meaning that going over the 3GB did not cost anything, although doing so repeatedly might result in a warning letter. Finally, of course, it worked in the office.

So, I'm now with T-Mobile and quite happy. I've been using it for a week now and it works as advertised. It also gives me HSDPA 3G almost everywhere, unlike my 3 modem did, which means higher speeds. I can use it in the office and also on the train going to and from work. It will cost me more money, but that's life. So far I've been impressed and if it works well over the next few months then I may choose T-Mobile as my next mobile phone provider - it's a given that I'll be dumping Orange when my contract runs out.

What is the point of Orange?

2007-11-12T07:28:00.000Z

When I decided to get myself a mobile phone, about 10 years ago, I looked around and found that Orange did the best deals. It did not quite have the coverage of Vodafone or Cellnet (now O2), but it was better than One2One (now T-Mobile). Prices were competitive and I was given a nice Nokia phone. The first time I wanted to upgrade my phone, Orange gave me a new phone for free and a better tariff. However, the good times were not to last. The company were sold to Mannesmann and then on to France Telecom.

Over the years it appears as if things have been getting worse at Orange. The contracts have lengthened, the cost of phones have gone up and coverage has not really improved. I have now reached the end of my patience. As a loyal customer of 10 years, I feel like I'm missing out on progress in the mobile communications world, and that I'm paying over the odds. Let me explain...

Until recently, I had an Orange SPV M600. I took that phone as I was told by Orange that I would be able to use Exchange based push mail, using Microsoft DirecPush. Well, it turns out that I can't. This feature, although available on the phone and clear to see in the menus, is not supported by the Orange network. It appears that other networks do support this, but not Orange.

I upgraded to a Nokia N95 recently. That's an Orange Nokia N95. Orange Nokia, because Orange insist on shipping some nasty Orange firmware with the phone. Not only does the firmware have some odd features to say the least, but it's several versions out of date. Whilst other N95 users have faster, more reliable firmware, I have a phone that has next to useless sat nav and a camera that takes about 30 seconds to start up - very useful for a quick snap!

One advantage of the N95, and the reason I chose it, was that it has 3G and can be used as a Bluetooth modem. I tried it and it works well. There is, however, one snag. Orange, greedy and so 20th Century that they are, want lots of money for accessing the internet over their network. I was paying £8 or 30MB a month. Well, that does not last very long when connecting a laptop to the internet. The other option appeared to be "unlimited" access for £1 a day. Well, according to Orange, "unlimited" is actually 25MB. So for about £31 a month I can get 25MB a day. Bargain. And what happens if you go over the allotted bandwidth? Well, you get stung for £3 a megabyte! That's obscene.

As Orange are rubbish at mobile broadband, I thought I'd see what else was out there. T-Mobile are certainly competitive with their Web and Walk packages, but the best out there at the moment is 3. Therefore I decided to sign up for 12 months with 3. They have provided me with a USB modem for my Mac (at £99) and then I pay £10 a month for 1GB of data. Now that's better. And what if I go over my allowance? Well, it's 10p a MB but that's still a thirtieth of the cost of Orange. I can choose to pay £15 a month for 3GB if I need it, and there is also a 7GB package.

In the end I'd rather have been able to have that sort of internet package on my Orange phone with Orange, so that I could use it from the phone and via Bluetooth from my Mac. Orange can't even come close, and don't seem to want to either. So as Orange are no longer viable, I've cancelled my £8 internet package with Orange, and when my contract is up I will be moving elsewhere. Orange have let me down and are not at all competitive and to be honest, I don't see the point of them anymore.
.

Apple OS X 10.5 - Leopard

2007-10-30T22:33:00.000Z

I've always been an early adopter of new versions of operating systems (OS), and had pre-ordered my copy of the new Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) for my MacBook Pro. It arrived the day it was officially released, a Friday, so I had the weekend to install it on my Mac. In preparation I sorted out my external drives so that I had enough space to back up my 200GB worth of data on the laptop. After the backup, using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner, I was ready for the installation of OS X Leopard.

Having been essentially a Windows person until a last year, I had done a few Windows upgrades in the past and one thing that I learned was that upgrading Windows was not a good idea, and a fresh install was always the way to go. I had tried Windows upgrades (installing over the top of existing Windows installations) a couple of times, but each time had resulted in an unstable system and I ended up reinstalling the OS. Given the hype with OS X and how much better it is supposed to be than Windows, I decided to try an upgrade install.

The installation process is simple enough, although there are some options hidden away and accessible via some buttons - it is easy to launch headlong into an install using whatever settings the installer has decided to use. Once started, the installation does not need any further input from the user until it re-boots. It took about an hour to install (including checking the DVD integrity), and after the re-boot I saw my user account was available for logging in to, so I logged in. The first log-in took about five to ten minutes. I assume it was finishing off some installation tasks, which is pretty much to be expected.

Once logged in, I was faced with the new look, including two things in particular that made my hair stand on end. The first was the desktop background, which is hideous, but at least that can be replaced. However, the translucent menu bar can't be removed and I suspect it is really going to annoy me. Right now, as I have a blue background, it has a blue tinge. Yuk! The new dock is OK, although other blogs out there don't always agree with that. After initial-log in the system seemed a little slower than usual, but that was due to Spotlight indexing the hard drive, which is a one off operation. After that hit will quickly index changes to data on the discs as they happen.

So overall, the new Mac OS X is good. However, I did have a major problem with access to Windows shares, for both file volumes and printers. It seems that there is a general problem and lots of chat going on about it on the Apple discussion forums. As I was not having much luck connecting to my Windows server, I decided to install OS X again on an external drive to see whether it was the fact that I upgraded that was causing the problems. The clean install on my external drive worked with my Windows computers, so I decided that I should do an Archive and Install on my main hard disc. Upgrading was clearly a bad idea - so Windows.

After the Archive and Install I did manage to get Windows networking to function. However, the guest account would not work. When trying to log in as a guest, using the super-duper new guest account functionality in Leopard, I got the shaking log-in dialog box and no more. So far I have not been able to work out what the problem is. I have tried resetting the password by booting into the console (single user) mode, as the Apple support site suggests, but still no luck. This is starting to annoy me, as I'd like a guest account to demonstrate the Mac and let other use it freely.

Finally, after using my Mac using my Nokia N95 as a modem and also trying to connect to other WiFi networks, the Windows networking functionality on the Mac is broken again. Great. I now can't print to my server, and I suppose I'll have to connect to the printer directly, which is a right-royal pain.

I now have two immediate problems to solve. One is the Windows networking, and the other is the Guest account. I wonder whether I'll be able to fix either...

Photofest

2007-09-25T23:22:00.000+01:00

So I've been spending a lot of time sorting out all my photos. I have a few thousand of the things so I thought I'd start with my latest pictures and work my way back.

To start with, everything is in Aperture and I store all photos based on where they came from (the camera and even the person) and then by date. Many of the photos need to have a little processing applied, as they come from one of my Digital SLRs.

So the basic drill is to go through all photos for a given month and then process those that are acceptable, ignoring bad ones like those that are out of focus. The processing involves tweaking the curves, colour, contrast, sharpness and also cropping, removing blemishes and straightening.

Once photos have been processed I add them to iPhoto, where they are then grouped by events (i.e. days). An important point here is not to import the photo, but to have iPhoto reference the JPEG previews in the Aperture library. In iPhoto I add tags any labels such as descriptions to the photos. So, by this point I have final copies of my good photos in a place where I can easily search them and where I can have them copied onto my iPod and used by the screen saver and FrontRow. Fantastic.

One of the advantages of using iPhoto is that there are plug-ins available for uploading photos to photo sharing sites such as Flickr and also for sites like FaceBook. I use both of these so it all works well for me, without having to use browser upload pages. I can also get my photos out of iPhoto when I build my website in RapidWeaver. So it's all integrated and quick. Very nice.

I now have an area on Flickr, at www.flickr.com/photos/swc-uk/. I have started to upload my photos, and will add more to the site as I go through them. I will also post more on this blog as I progress with my ambitious project.

Stephen Fry's Blog

2007-09-22T00:42:00.000+01:00

Somehow I came across Stephen Fry's blog today. You can find it at www.stephenfry.com. It appears that Mr. Fry is a bit of a gadget junky. He's written his first entry, and it's a long piece on the current state of Smart Phones. Well written and very informative. I like it.

The iPhone hits the UK

2007-09-21T22:31:00.000+01:00

So the iPhone is now officially available in the UK. For those who want one, O2 are the only company to get it from. The cost? About £270 for the phone and then at least £35 a month for at least 18 months. Now, perhaps in the USA they might be happy to pay for phones when on contract, but over here in Europe we are not. My current phone, on a £25 a month, 18 month contract, cost me... oh yes, nothing. It's an HTC phone, with Windows Mobile (not so good), but it does come with a good browser, WiFi, full MS Exchange support, EDGE and GPRS and a host of other features that the iPhone does not come with.

To be honest, if the iPhone was free on a £25 a month tariff, then I think it would be a reasonable deal. However, there are phones out there that do a better job as phones. I don't buy the argument that it's also an iPod. It's not a very useful one with only 8GB and the fact that you need to be careful not to drain the battery or else you can't make or receive phone calls.

I would like an iPhone, and I have been looking around at the UK phone companies to see what's on offer, and to be honest, the more I look, the more I realise how bad the O2 deal is. Ultimately, I am very, very disappointed that Apple did not decide to market the iPhone as an iPod with a SIM slot, allowing the owner to choose which network provider to go with.

No DirectPush with Orange

2006-11-25T21:29:00.000Z

Finally, after what seemed like forever, Fast Hosts have installed SP2 on their Exchange servers. I've been using my Orange SPV M600 PDA/Phone with my Exchange account, and it works well. However, without SP2 I have not been able to take advantage of push mail - where email that arrives in my inbox appear on the phone almost immediately. This meant my phone was set to check for changes on my Exchange server ever half an hour or so.

With SP2 in place I turned on DirectPush on my phone. I then sent myself and email and waited... nothing. Not a sausage. So what went wrong? Well, it looks like it's a problem either with the phone or with Orange.

In summary, the way in which DirectPush (or AUTD as it's also known) works is to make a connection to the internet from the phone (using GPRS in my case), do a full sync to the server, and then issue an HTTP request to the server. This request is then pending and when there is a change on the Exchange server it will send the phone a response. There is an eight minute time-out, which means that if nothing has happened within eight minutes, then the phone sends a new request. If the phone should drop the GPRS connection to the internet, such as if a phone call is made or received or if the signal drops, then the phone will wait for the eight minute time-out and then re-start the process with a full sync.

What seems to be happening with my set up is that after connecting to the internet with GPRS, synchronising and then sending the HTTP request, shortly after that the phone will drop the GPRS connection and the whole thing falls apart. What ends up happening is that the phone will just poll the server every eight minutes which is more expensive than the 30 minute polling that I had set up originally.

I have sent an email to Orange to find out what is going on, but I don't hold out much hope. Oh well.

Invalid inode Structure on OS X

2006-09-15T23:42:00.000+01:00

My MacBook Pro decided to throw me another little challenge. To cut a long story short, after not responding during a secure empty of the trash, my Mac failed to respond, so I had to do a hard reset (holding down the power button for a few seconds). On restart, I used Disk Utility to check in internal hard drive, and it came up with an error saying, "Invalid inode Structure".

I tried to fix the problem, in any way I could. I used fsck in single user mode (i.e. booted with command-S), but all attempts to fix ended in errors. A quick Google showed that other's had seen this, and that there was no real solution. In fact, Apple recommended re-formatting the hard drive and re-installing OS X - all a bit Windows really.

I was particularly miffed by this, as I've been using NTFS for over ten years, at home and at work, and never ever have I seen NTFS get itself into such a mess. To be honest, I was quite staggered that OS X could not fix the disk system - I would fully understand that doing so could lead to loss of files or folders.

So I had two options really. Either I re-install, or a live with the problem. Option two was not very appealing, as my experience with file system corruption has shown that it can lead to unexpected problems (which, ironically, are totally expected if you have a currupt file system). Re-installing OS X, however, would bring its own headaches. I have been lucky enough with my Windows PCs not to have to re-install, with one exception, and to have to do this on the Mac after only three months is a bit out of order.

I gave the whole matter some further thought. I did have backups, and I would have to make another backup before I formatted the hard drive and re-installed OS X. And that is when I realised that I had already used a tool that might just do it.

Carbon Copy Cloner allows an OS X volume to be cloned, either to another partition/disc or to a .img file. I had already used this great little tool to make backups and after reading more about it and reading the help file I decided to try and use it.

One nice thing about the Mac is that it can boot from external FireWire drives, which means you can have separate installations of OS X. I cleared down one of my external FireWire drive in preparation for cloning my main hard drive to the external drive. I also ensured that the external drive was not being scanned by spotlight (I added it to the Privacy list in Spotlight, under System Preferences) and I also made sure that nothing but the bare essentials were running.

I set Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) up to use the internal hard drive as the source and the external drive as the destination. In the CCC preferences I ensured that the Target Disk Options had the Make Bootable option set and I was ready to go.

The cloning of my 80GB of data took a couple of hours. Once complete I used the System Preferences to select the external FireWire drive as the startup disk and I rebooted. My Mac booted off the external drive without any problems, and a quick verification of the disk using Disk Utility showed that the cloned image had no problems, and certainly not the inode problem.

I the used my Mac for a couple of hours from the external drive. Once I started up most of the applications that I use and checked that everything was in order. Once I was happy that the clone was good, and that the external drive was similar to the internal drive, sans indode corruption, I erased (formatted) the internal drive and used Disk Utility to verify that there was no longer a problem with the internal drive. I then used CCC with the same settings as before to clone the external drive to the internal one.

A couple of hours later and my internal hard drive was back to its original state. I used System Preferences to set it as my boot drive and restarted. A few checks later and I was back to normal.

After all of that, it seems that I was able to recover from the problem. I was lucky enough to have a FireWire external drive with enough space to hold a cloned version of my main drive. However, I still find it unacceptable that HFS+ cannot be fixed. I still think NTFS does a better job of recovery. However, all's well that ends well.

Apple iWeb

2006-09-06T14:06:00.000+01:00

I've been playing around with Apple iWeb. You can see the fruits of this effort here. On one hand, I can see how it would be quite easy for anyone with a Mac and a .mac account to create something fairly basic in a short space of time. But a FrontPage replacement it ain't. I will probably use it to quickly post albums from iPhoto onto the web so that I can let others see my snapshots without too much delay.

So what's the deal? Well, with iWeb you can create a web site. But you have to choose one of the templates available for the style of each page you create. There are different types of page under each style, like for photos, blogs, etc. But that's it - there are no options to customise styles. Creating the content on the pages is more like using Microsoft PowerPoint, rather than Word. The layout is all pixel based and not really in the spirit of HTML.

Publishing an iWeb created site to a .mac account should be easy - just click the Publish button. I have not tried as I have no .mac account, and I won't be getting one either. To publish the results of iWeb on any other web server is more complicated than a push of a button. The process for this is to save the site to a folder on the Mac and then use an FTP tool (I use Cyberduck from FreeMacWare) to push the files onto the web server of choice. A bit fiddly.

Overall, I still wish that there was a good version of Microsoft FrontPage for the Mac. Although FrontPage has its own idiosyncrasies, it's still powerful whilst not being totally unfathomable, unlike say, DreamWeaver. On the subject of DreamWeaver, is it too much to ask for a simple hierarchical menu structure tool with auto menu generation like FrontPage has? It really can't be that difficult and surely I can't be the only person who would use such a tool.

So, in summary, iWeb is OK. I'll be interested to see what version 2.0 contains if it ever turns up, but I don't hold out much hope. In the mean time, I'll continue to use FrontPage for Windows in Parallels and hope that I stumble across a good web authoring application for the Mac one day.

SPV M600 - Call Quality?

2006-08-24T22:45:00.000+01:00

I'm really struggling to hear certain callers on my new Orange SPV M600. It seems that I can hear deeper voices OK, i.e. other blokes, but when speaking to, say, Mrs. SC::UK, I really struggle to hear what she's saying (although apparently I've had this problem for a while, because I never do as I'm told and don't listen to what she tells me).

Anyway, not that impressed with the speaker in the M600 during a call, but the rest of the phone of not too shabby.

Orange SPV M600

2006-08-22T13:51:00.000+01:00

I've had my Orange SPV M2000 (HTC Blue Angel) for well over a year now. It has Windows Mobile 2003 SE on it, and I've used it as my PDA, mobile phone and Sat Nav in the car, with TomTom 5. However, out of those three things, it does not do a good job as a phone at all. It's always felt like a very good PDA. But the mobile phone part just seemed an afterthought with very little integration in the software. Using the phone was cumbersome - certainly not like using a traditional mobile, like a Nokia 6310, which was good at what it did.

There were many annoyances with the M2000, some of which were bugs and some of which were just bad design, but most of them did centre around the phone part. To list just a few:

The PDA would go into standby in a call, which meant it had to be powered up again to end a call.
After making a call and turning the PDA off, it would switch itself on again and not go back to sleep. If left it would run the battery down.
The receiver buttons did not always respond and calls were missed.
Looking up a contact was a pain, and needed the stylus. One handed use was near impossible.
Auto-polling for mail would turn the PDA on, and if in my pocket it would then start apps up and change settings as the screen was knocked.
If a call came in after the PIN time out (i.e. a PIN was needed to get into the PDA), then there was no way out of the phone screen, and the PIN could not be entered - a reset was required.
Muting the ringer using the speaker icon could kill the speaker totally until a reset, so no calls could be taken or made.
BlueTooth was not that good - audio quality was bad.

With all of this in mind, and the fact that I am now using a Mac (and that's a different story for another time), I was considering going back to a more traditional style of phone. After all, as long as I can read my mail, have contacts and a calendar then I'm happy. I did use Excel on my M2000, but that was something I was willing to loose for the right phone. I had seen a steady stream of Windows Mobile 5 devices appearing, but I was not convinced that they would be that much better than the M2000, and they were still a bit too big, again like the M2000.

Now, last week, a colleague of mine upgraded to the Orange SPV M600 (HTC Prophet), and I had a look at it. What I saw was good. It was very good. So, I popped off to Carphone Warehouse on Cannon Street to see about an upgrade. Well I should have known they would be a waste of time. They used to be good, but they've gone downhill of late. I used to go to them all the time and must have has about four or five phones from them, but my last three upgrades have been through Orange shops or direct with Orange. So I gave up with Carphone Warehouse and went off to the Orange Shop on Cheapside and did the business. The chap who helped me there was good. He knew his phones, and didn't try and stitch me up. I got the SPV M600 for £30 and he threw in a free Pay As You Go SIM for the old M2000 - that will now be a dedicated Sat Nave device for the car.

So, here are my first impressions of the M600. In summary, it's good. It's very good. The first thing of note is the physical size. It's smaller than the M2000, and lighter. It's not that much larger than a Nokia 6230 - it's as thick and tall, and about 25% wider. The Orange SPV M600 is also matt black, and improvement over the silver finish PDA phones, in my opinion. It does not have a keyboard, but that would add to its bulk and having had one in the M2000 I really don't feel that I used it that much. It's a trade off that I'm happy with.

Windows Mobile 5 on the M600 is a massive improvement on WM2003 SE on the M2000. A few improved features are:

Two configurable soft-keys at the bottom of the screen, as with traditional phones. This makes one-handed use fairly easy.
At the call screen, I can now search for contacts using the number key-pad, as with Nokia phones.
The phone does not switch off in call.
When polling for mail/Exchange changes, the screen does not turn on - it does it silently in the background.
It has voice activated dial.
Transcriber handwriting recognition seems to be greatly improved.
Improved BlueTooth (over the M2000).

One feature that the phone has is Microsoft DirectPush push mail. With SP2 installed on an Exchange server, it is now possible to enable this on the phone and have updates (mail, contacts and calendar) appear on the phone in near real-time. Unfortunately, my Exchange provider, FastHosts, does not have SP2 installed at the moment. They have told me that this is coming in the near future, but I won't hold my breath. I will change provider when my next renewal comes up if that have not done the upgrade by then - I know that 1and1 support DirectPush so I may take my account to them. In the mean time the phone connects to my Exchange account every 15 minutes or so (configurable) to update and get any new mail. It does this over GPRS, and the M600 also supports EDGE, which I believe Orange are rolling out in the UK as I write this.

Battery time is hard to judge, as I have got into the habit of topping the battery up every day (as is the recommendation for Li-ions). My Nokia 6210 and 6310 had fantastic standby times, but the 6230 I later had and the M2000 were not so good. However, under normal use I reckon I'd be luck to get a couple of days out of the M600 on a charge.

The M600 does not seem to suffer from any of the problem I listed above with the M2000. The one thing missing though, is MS(N) Messenger. I have no idea why Orange have not installed this, but it would have been nice to have it. The M600 also has half the memory of the M2000, but it does support SD cards as added memory.

As I have a Mac, I do not synchronise the M600 with a PC on a regular basis. I have installed ActiveSync 4 under Windows on the Mac (in Parallels) and done a sync, which works well. One thing to note is that unlike the M2000, the M600 does not come with a cradle. However, it does not come with a proprietary data cable either. The M600 has a mini-USB socked on the underside and I can use any USB to mini-USB cable (and I've got a few of them) to sync it. It also charges through the mini-USB socket, and the supplied charger has a mini-USB plug on the end. The headphone jack, like on the M2000, is a 2.5mm type, which is a pain. Apple managed to get a 3.5mm socket into their iPod Nano and Shuffles, so I'm not sure why HTC can't. The M600 comes with a headset for listening to audio and making calls. However, I won't be using that as the two BlueTooth audio devices that I've tested with it work just fine.

A couple of other minor problems that I should mention are that power button is directly opposite the camera button and I seem to end up pressing that when trying to put the device into standby. Also, the audio quality in call is a but tinny and I find it quite hard to hear the other person when I'm in a noisy place.

Overall I'm very happy with the M600. If I come across any odd problems I will post them here on the blog.

Apple Aperture

2006-07-03T14:21:00.000+01:00

The two applications that I have bought for my new Mac are Microsoft Office 2004 and Apple Aperture. Of these, Aperture was a bit of a gamble, as I didn't really know much about it. I do quite a bit of digital photo processing as I take my digital photos in RAW format on my Canon EOS 20D and they need processing before I can publish them. So far, on Windows XP, I've been using BreezeBrowser (which gets a five out of five in my book), RawShooter Essentials and some PaintShop Pro X.

To be honest, I try to get my photos right at exposure time so any corrections later of the PC tend to be minimal. I might need to tweak the exposure, crop, straighten and perhaps remove the odd artefact. All said, I find that is easily done with BreezeBrowser or RawShooter and I can process about 80% of my photos and publish from that point. I might end up tweaking the rest in PaintShop Pro - mainly cropping, straightening and removing small blemishes.

Of course there is no PaintShop Pro on the Mac, which is a pity, and no BreezeBrowser. I did look at iPhoto for RAW processing but that was not really feature-rich enough for my needs. I then went to the Apple Shop at Brent Cross and had a quick look at Aperture. I'd investigated on the Apple web site too, of course. Although the chap in the Apple Shop did not give me a particularly detailed run down of Aperture, he assured me that it had cropping, straightening and blemish removal. I was not totally convinced, but I handed over the readies and took the software home.

On installation Aperture immediately updated itself from the web and I had a quick play. To be honest, I found the whole thing rather confusing at first and sort of gave up. I did some more reading, both of the manual and of some web articles and gave it another go. Again, I gave up due to having too many other things to do.

This weekend I finally got down to it with Aperture. The verdict? Well, I'm very impressed. It does indeed have all the features I need. In fact the blemish removal is impressive to say the least. I've now processed a number of images that are up on my web site. I think the most impressive aspect of Aperture is the RAW processing. The highlight and shadow contrast adjustments are the best I've seen. RawShooter left images looking a bit plastic (if that's the right term), but Aperture is just in another league. I processed about 15 images in just over an hour and I'm very happy indeed with the results.

I've now got a better idea of how Aperture stores images using projects and albums, although I'm still learning on this front. It's still not quite as obvious as I think it could be and not really intuitive to me, but it does work. Full screen mode is very good, and once I picked up the key-shortcuts I made good progress through my images. I like the idea of the vault, which handles backing up the Aperture work space (I have a vault on an external disc now).

There are a couple of small complaints that I have. The first is to do with the way in which Aperture stores files and data. I like to see my image files on the hard disc. That's probably to do with my Windows background. On OS X, Aperture appears to store everything in one big file! It's all hidden. Well, it's an object and once in the OS X terminal it turns out that it's a directory. However, the image files under that directory are not easily identifiable, unlike under Windows where the .CR2 and .JPG files can be easily seen (and copied/moved). However, Aperture does allow images to be exported and that's what I do to ensure I have backups on my server.

The other issue that I have appears to be a small one but it really, really bugs me! On Windows I've been using Breeze System's Downloader Pro. It's very good. I connect the camera and it does the rest. One of the things I like about it is that I can get it to auto generate folders and file names from the exposure date. Put simply, I configured it to put images into a folder with the date as the name (e.g. 20060703) and give the images names based on the date and time (e.g. 060703_140425.CR2). Simple. I can easily sort by file name and see at a glance when the photo was taken. I'd like to do the same with Aperture. I have to manually create projects and folders for storing the images, and manually move images in to the folder with the correct date. However, I can't manually rename images or else I'd be there all day. Aperture does have a batch rename feature and it does date and time. But.... and here's the idiotic thing: the time used in the name is in 12 hour clock format, and I can't change it to 24 hour clock!! Who ever designed and/or coded that clearly has never used a time in a file name for any useful purpose. Why on earth, when I sort by name, would I want to see a picture taken at 09:22 preceded by one taken at 21:20?? Do these people not think about their software?

Anyway, I would give Aperture 8/10 so far. As I use it more I suspect I could revise that opinion. Keep an eye on this Blog for updates. Incidentally, for comparison purposes I'd give BreezeBrowser a 9/10 easily. Check out my web site for the latest photos, some of which (taken in South Africa) have been through Aperture.

Freeware on Tap

2006-07-02T16:51:00.000+01:00

One of the pleasant surprises that I have found, switching to the Mac, has been the amount of freeware available. I'm sure that there is plenty of freeware available for the Windows XP world, but I always found it such a chore finding any. There was just too much noise during my searches and I was never sure whether I was going to be installing anything dodgy.

The site that has really made it very easy for me to find good Mac freeware is FreeMacWare.com. Anything I need appears to be there. I do plan to use the iLife software that cam with my MacBook Pro, and I have also got Apple Aperture, but along with Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac, these are probably the only commercial applications I'll be using in the short term.

Two applications that I will mention here are Mac the Ripper and iSquint. These two apps allow me to take some of my DVDs and put them onto my iPod, so that I can watch them on the way to and from work. I never did find a simple way to do that under Windows, although I'm sure that there are apps available, but I never did find any.

Logitech Headset Crash

2006-07-02T16:17:00.000+01:00

I have been using Skype for a while now. It's good for voice calls to the other side of the world and if the other end of the call is also logged into Skype then it is, of course, free. I've even started to make VOIP calls to landlines as it can be cheaper. For example, Mr. SC::UK is over in Thailand at the moment, and using Skype is far cheaper than using my NTL landline.

Given my increased use of Skype, and the fact that Mrs. SC::UK now uses Skype a lot to talk to her family over in Queensland, I thought I'd get a headset. It makes the call more private and the sound quality of the call is also much better. I bought a Logitech USB 250 headset and it appeared to work straight out of the box on both Windows XP and OS X.

Now recently, I've had a couple of odd system crashes on the Mac, where the machine would just hang - screen and mouse freeze and a full power off is needed to recover. I have finally traced it to plugging in the USB headset. It doesn't happen every time, and I will need to play around a bit, but it certainly does happen. The last time I tried it I used a different USB socket on the MacBook Pro, and I also shut down Skype before plugging in. There was no crash, but as I said it is intermittent. I have done a quick Google to see if anyone else has reported this problem but I can't find anything at the moment. More news here as I have it....

The Mac is Settling In

2006-06-22T00:51:00.000+01:00

I have had my MacBook Pro for almost two weeks now, and I'm starting to get things in order. It thought that this would be a good time to go through where I've got to with my (partial) switch to Apple Macintosh from PCs and Windows.

As I've already mentioned in previous entries to this Blog, getting Windows working on this MacBook and having good Personal Information Manager (PIM) software running were my top priority. So we'll start with them.

I decided to use Parallels to run Windows under OS X as opposed to using Apple's BootCamp, which would mean re-booting when I want to switch between OS X and Windows. I never liked the idea of having to do that anyway, so I downloaded and installed Parallels Desktop for the Mac, which was still in Beta. Having installed that I created a Virtual Machine (VM) and installed Windows XP. That all went swimmingly, until I needed more than the 20GB of disk space that I had assigned to the VM. As it's not possible to increase the space on the fly in XP, I had to junk the VM and start again with 60GB. I should point out that a 60GB disc for the VM does not take up any more space on the Mac's hard drive than is used in the VM. If only 5GB of the VM disc is in use, then the space required on the Mac will be that, if not less (due to compression). So, having created a new VM, installed some important Windows software in it, I was up and running.

The matter of a PIM was sorted with Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and an Exchange account at FastHosts. That all worked straight away, and I now can see the same email, calendar and contacts on my Mac, my PCs, my PDA and even in a Web based client from any PC that is connected to the web. Great. The only down side is that Microsoft Entourage is
a little rough around the edges, compared to Outlook for Windows, and I now have high hopes for the next release of Office for the Mac. I may yet, of course, be disappointed.

The other piece of software that I should mention is Firefox. I use this browser for all my web browsing on the Mac. I also have it installed at work and on my desktop PC here at home. With the Google Sync plugin for both Mac and PC I can have my bookmarks and cookies synchronised across all my PCs, even my one at work. That's great, and something I've been missing for a while.

I've installed Apple Aperture so that I can start serious work on my photos, but I've only played around with it. It does look powerful, but perhaps a little confusing at first. I also insists on storing all the photos away in some proprietary file, as opposed to in a directory/folder structure as my Windows software would. However, I will keep exported copies of all files so that I don't have to rely on Aperture to get at my photos.

I also started to look at iWeb today. I have installed Microsoft FrontPage under Windows XP in Parallels to continue working on some web sites. I was hoping that iWeb might be of use, and have played with it a little today. The main sticking point seems to be its tight integration with .mac. Well, I don't want to use .mac and therefore would like to publish my web sites somewhere else, possibly using FTP or WebDAV. Well, iWeb supports neither. It does however allow a website to be exported to a folder, which can then be uploaded to a web host using FTP. For this I downloaded and installed Cyberduck, which is free and works well.

I have been installing lots of widgets and playing around with them. Perhaps more on these in another post, but for anyone looking for OS X widgets, the Apple web site (in the OS X section) has plenty on offer. There is also FreeMacWare, which also has plenty of free software for the Mac of all kinds. It is definitely worth a visit.

Staying Organised

2006-06-15T12:21:00.000+01:00

When I think about it, I spend much of my time at PCs using a PIM (Personal Information Manager). Of late it's been Microsoft Outlook for Windows, but I've been through a few in the past. I use Outlook for email and have a good decade's worth of the stuff organised in various folders and archive files. I also have contact and calendar entries numbering thousands and going back years. I actually think that Outlook is probably one of the best apps out there, and I know it's the one I will miss the most now that I have switched to the Apple Mac.

I addition to using a PC based PIM I have also been using a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) for a good eight years now. I've been through a few of them too and am currently on an Orange SPV M2000 (basically a Pocket PC device with mobile phone circuitry built in and a half hearted attempt to integrate the two).

Given how important my PIM software and my PDA appear to be to me, I was keen to get this all working on the Apple MacBook Pro as soon as possible. In the past I've not had any problems switching PIMs or PDAs. I had been able to transfer data from Palm Desktop to Outlook and from my old Palm Vx to an iPaq Pocket PC. I did some research before buying the Mac and came to the conclusion that it shouldn't be too difficult this time around. After all, there was Entourage from Microsoft and synchronisation tools like PocketMac for the Windows Mobile PDA. No worries...

Well, how wrong was I? I have wasted so much time trying to get my PIM data from Windows over to the Mac. And as for the PDA, well that was even more frustrating.

Given that Entourage for the Mac, part of Office 2004, was written by Microsoft, and Outlook for Windows was also written by Microsoft, one would think that an Outlook PST file containing all my data would simply import into Entourage. Oh no. That would be too simple. The solution to this little problem would appear to be spending money on any number of apps and scripts out there, none of which will do all of the job and many of which look rather convoluted and error prone.

One way to overcome this might have been to simply sync my PDA with Windows Outlook and then the Mac and transfer PIM data that way. It would not do the mail, but my calendar and contacts should work. I've done that many times in the past, such as when I switched from Palm Desktop to Outlook. However, this all assumes that a Windows Mobile (a.k.a. Pocket PC) device will be able to talk to a Mac. In the Windows world there is a Microsoft app called ActiveSync, which comes with the PDA and integrates well with Windows and Outlook. In fact, I now realise how spoilt I've been in this regard.

To get Windows Mobile devices to sync with a Mac requires costly third party software. There are two apps on the market. Out of the two, PocketMac appeared to be the solution. The alternative product, The Missing Sync, only provides a fraction of the functionality of PocketMac. I did my research and the only potential problem I could find was that PocketMac would not work with USB devices on OS X Tiger on Intel. Not to worry though, according to their website, you can use Bluetooth. Well, I paid my money (and it wasn't cheap) and well.... it doesn't work using Bluetooth. No. So I want my money back.

After much messing around then, I had made absolutely zero progress. It would have been nice to find out about all of this in advance, but there was no mention of this on the internet... until now - I'm writing this to warn unsuspecting switchers.

There is, however, some good news. I now have access to my PIM data on my Mac, and I can keep my PDA/Phone in sync with it. It doesn't involve running Outlook and ActiveSync under Windows XP in Parallels either! The irony here is that it was Microsoft who finally came good. What I did was to use a Microsoft Exchange account. As I don't run Exchange (who does, other than organisations?) and it was not likely that I could use an account here at work, I had to rent an account.

I already have web hosting and POP mailboxes for my domain with FastHosts here in the UK. In general they have been very good, and it happens that they will provide Exchange accounts for a fee. I'd rather not have had to do this, but desparation drove me into handing over some money and converting my main POP account into an Exchange account. From the minute I did that, it all just clicked into place.

With my new Exchange account in place, all I had to do was connect my Windows copy of Outlook to the new account and then transfer all my mail, contact, diary, etc. to Exchange. That went off without a hitch. I then connected Entourage on the Mac and all my PIM data simply came down the line. Both Outlook and Entourage cache the data on the local hard disc meaning that I don't need to be connected to the Net to get my data.

The PDA syncing was just as simple. Windows Mobile allows synchronisation with an Exchange server. So I set it up and it just worked. Perfect. So now I have a central, backed up location for my PIM data and my Mac, PDA/Phone and old Windows Outlook can all share the data. I even set up Outlook running on XP in Parallels on the Mac to synchronise with the Exchange account. The final icing on the cake is that there is a very nice web version of Outlook which I can use anywhere that has internet access, and I can manage my data using that. Cool.

So I'm now sorted and up and running on the Mac with my new PIM. There was the cost of the Exchange account, of course, but I get 1GB of space and it's cheaper than a .mac account from Apple. I can also connect from far more clients than I could if I went for .mac, not to mention the cost of the tools and scripts that I would need to buy to get my data over to .mac. Entourage also syncs to the iCal and Address Book apps on the Mac, keeping them up to date with my Exchange account, and I have mail.app on the Mac reading my mail using IMAP. Perfect. I'm a happy bunny now, but as I said before, it's Microsoft who made this possible!

Over the First Hurdle

2006-06-13T23:16:00.000+01:00

I've now had my Apple Mac for a few days. Aside from a switching it on and having a play with the software and OS, the first thing I did was to work out what I would need to move from my old Windows Laptop and how. For each application that I use on Windows I need to find an alternative and I also need to be able to use my existing data files.

Given that I had been using Windows for ages and all my apps and data were under Windows, I decided to get cracking and install the Parallels Virtual Machine. Parallels installation was smooth and I soon created a Windows XP type virtual machine (VM) under which I installed my Windows XP. That all worked perfectly, and once up and running XP started to update itself with various patches.

The only small mistake I made with Parallels was to assign a 20GB virtual drive to the XP VM. Once I had installed a number of apps and I started to transfer my data from my Dell using the Windows Files and Settings Transfer Wizard I realised that 20GB would not be enough in the short term. I decided to cut my losses. Even so, I re-created the VM (this time with 60GB of disc) and started the installation again. One thing to point out at this time is that Parallels does not allocate 60GB of Mac disc space, even though it shows the Windows VM that much. On the Mac the file holding the VM's disc is small (about 7.5MB) and grows as Windows allocates more data to it. It reminds me a bit of the old DOS disc compression applications, one of which I think was called DoubleSpace.

So I now have a good Windows Environment. I have installed most apps that I need and can now get put my data into it too. It allows me to see my Mac using Windows sharing, although that requires a little configuration.

I have to say then, that I am very impressed by Parallels. It was relatively cheap, easy to install and runs smoothly. Apart from the disc size mistake, which was mine, everything has worked well.

My next task is to get my PIM data working with Office 2004's Entourage, and to be able to synchronise my Orange SPV M2000 Windows Mobile based phone.

A New Beginning

2006-06-10T10:22:00.000+01:00

Last night I took delivery of a new Laptop. That would be my third one in the last ten years. However, unlike the other two, this one is not a Dell. It's not even a standard PC. It's an Apple!!

Those people who know me may be will be wondering where they can go and see the flying pigs, and whether they need to buy some ice skates for when they go down to hell (not that I'm saying that any of them will, but you never know...).

I personally never had a very good relationship with Apple Macs. When I tried to use them in anger at university they gave me nothing but trouble. However, with the advent of Apple OS X and owning an iPod, I had been starting to take more interest.

The final straws, so to speak, in putting this new laptop here in front of me was down to Microsoft and Apple's decision to go with Intel. On the first point, as much as I've been very happy with Windows and actually think it gets far more bad press than it deserves (most people don't know just how clever it can be), there have been a couple of incidents and issues that have recently made me think carefully about the future.

Whilst my PCs at home running Windows have been doing some strange things recently, and my Dell laptop has been getting slower and slower, I was impressed with my mother-in-law's three year old PowerBook with 256MB of RAM flying along with OS X and Photoshop. My Dell desktop has suddenly decided to stop working properly when I go into standby mode, and that was after I had to re-install Windows late last year when the networking on it just stopped working.

But of course, it was the Apple/Intel tie up that did it in the end. After all, what do I have to loose (famous last words). I can always run Windows on a new Mac now, and with the help of a Virtual Machine like Parallels, I can run Windows under OS X, which is even better.

So all that said and done, I am now the owner of a shiny new MacBook Pro 17". Stay tuned for more posts as I try to adapt to a new and hopefully better way of working!

Sennheiser PX100 Review

2006-05-26T13:04:00.000+01:00

When I used my iPod out and about, I use a pair of Sony MDR-EX71 in-ear phones. I bought them mainly to block out the sound of the streets and the train on my way to and from work. They are great, and to me the sound is just right. They are punchy without being boomy and they are clear and bright without boosting treble too much.

When I am at my desk I prefer to use on-ear headphones. I like them because I can still hear the sound of the office, such as people talking and my phone ringing. Over the last four to five years I have been using a pair of Sony MDR-G52 phones. They were cheap and originally bought to listen to audio files on my PC at work. However, like the Sony in-ear phones that I use, the on-ear phones sound just right. Not tinny, yet not boomy. The treble is also just right in that it's not too harsh and there is plenty of clear top-end without being overpowering.

Recently the on-ear phones have been showing signs of wear and tear. The foam pads on them have disintegrated and the little clips for behind the ears broke ages ago. Unfortunately Sony no longer make these headphones, because I would gladly buy another pair - £25 is not too shabby for what you get. I did contact Sony about new foams but to be honest it was going to cost about £15 and that's just not worth it. Chances are I'd buy the foams only to have the cable break or something similar.

It was as a result of all of this that I decided to buy a new pair of on-ear phones. Sony did not appear to make anything that could replace my old ones to I ended up doing some research and buying a pair of Sennheiser PX100 phones, following a 5-star rating in a Hi-Fi magazine.

I tried the PX100s in the shop, connected to my iPod, and they sounded fine, although it was a little noisy to really be able to judge. I bought the PX100s and now use them in the office. However, I really don't think that they sound as good as either of my two pairs of Sony phones.
At the bottom end, the bass is fine as with the Sony MDR-G5s but it's the top end that is bad, in my opinion. There seems to be too much low top-end (around 12kHz, I would say) making them sound quite mushy. Right at the top end there is little clarity and they lack the crispness and sparkle of the two Sonys. From a comfort point of view, the Sennheisers match the Sonys and feel OK on my ears after an hour or so. They also fold up nicely, should I want to carry them around (for which they come with a plastic case). Build quality is also good, on casual inspection.

All in all, tt's a shame about the sound really, and I can only assume that the alternatives are no better given that the Sennheisers won best in test. There appears to be very little to choose from when it comes to small on-ear headphones. I will now use the Sennheisers full time when I'm at my desk but I can't help feeling that I've lost out and taken a step backward as far as sound quality goes.

The Failed Linux Experiment

2006-05-22T12:48:00.000+01:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm seriously considering switching over to using Apple Macs. At the same time, I decided to investigate Linux as an alternative to Windows on one of my PCs. I had tried Linux about a year or more ago, but gave up as it was just taking too long to configure and get the PC running as wanted it.

Yesterday I decided to give it another go. With the Mandriva 2006 DVD (downloaded) I got cracking and installed it onto my second hard drive on my desktop PC (Dell Dimension D8200). The installation worked well enough apart from when I tried to re-partition my drive by shrinking the existing NTFS partition using the Mandriva installation program. That failed dismally so I simple wiped the disk and got the installer to set it up as it saw fit to.

Once installation was complete, I logged in to the KDE shell and started to play around. The first problem was that it could not get any updates from Mandriva. The error messages were not that clear, but I checked Internet connectivity and Firefox appeared to see web sites (like the BBC) so I can only assume it was something else.

Undetered I surged ahead and decided to try and get both displays working on my twin-head NVidia GeForce 4. Mandriva Linux itself does not appear to support my graphics card, or at least the second monitor. Windows XP does - out of the box. I went to the NVidia site and downloaded the Linux package and followed the instructions.

The first time I tried to run the install it complained that I had the X-Server running. Well yes, that's how it starts up and logs me in doesn't it? I'm no (Mandriva) Linux expert, but I guessed I'd needed to log into the system using the standard text shell. How to do that was a mystery, short of re-booting and starting the failsafe version. That did indeed take me to the text ksh shell. Good.

I re-ran the NVidia package, only to be told this time that I was at the wrong run-level, or words to that effect. I needed to be in level 3 not 1. Great. It hinted that there was a way to change this using the telint 3 command. Cool. Did that and... now it was really confused as there appeared to be two terminal sessions sharing the console and my keyboard input was going randomly to one or the other. Sometimes it was echoing back my keystrokes in a most bizarre way.

After 30 minutes of fun, because I really do not have anything better to do with my life than to fight the trivialities of a totally unintuitive OS, I decided to can the lot. Removing LiLo was a bit of a puzzle, but a quick Google sorted that. I'm sure that last time I had to do that the install CD gave me the option to remove LiLo. Oh well, perhaps it's their way of countering all the people like me who try (Mandriva) Linux, and finding it too much like hard work (a PC is supposed to be a tool not a six month project to counter by boredom!!), want to remove it again. Suffice it to say that the documented way to remove LiLo, which required a root login without X-Server (it's a good job I know about the su command, millions wouldn't), did not work. However, I sorted it, removed LiLo and formatted the hard drive. Back to Windows XP - what a relief.

So in conclusion, my experience so far has shown that Linux is not a replacement for Windows, for the average user. Mac OS X, however is. So I will probably go down that route and put up with Windows XP in the mean time.

Windows XP - Dying in your Sleep

2006-05-22T12:47:00.000+01:00

Up until recently, I have been happily putting my Dell Dimension 8200 to sleep when running Windows XP. I have an MS Explorer keyboard and can simply hit the little sleep button and the PC will go into a low power state without shutting Windows down. However, recently things are not quite working as they should.

Without any warning, explanation or obvious reason, when I now put the PC to sleep it still goes into sleep mode (power button light flashes slowly) but when I hit a key on the keyboard to bring it back to life it switches on but boots up from scratch.

I have no idea why this is happening. I have seen a couple of posts on the Internet about similar problems (oddly enough, also with Dell Dimension 8200s) but no solutions. I now have changed to behaviour of the sleep button to hibernate the PC, which is slower but does work. It's also better for the state of our environment.

Why I'm suddenly having these problems is a mystery to me. I have changed nothing. It's the second time in a couple of weeks that Windows XP has just done things without any logical reason behind it. I shall point out at this stage that the PC in question, and the OS in question, have already caused me much agro. Just over a year ago, a two year old installation of XP on that PC suddenly stopped appearing on my home network. I tried everything but to no avail. In the end I simply re-installed. It was a right royal pain but could have been worse if that PC was my primary machine.

All of this is just another reason for me to switch to an Apple Mac. I'm now looking into what it would involve. The main issues are Software and related cost. But each time I have one of these little Windows XP Incidents I move a step closer to chucking the lot in a skip and funding Mr. Jobs instead of Messrs Gates and Dell.

iTunes Music Sharing

2006-05-09T14:28:00.000+01:00

If you have more than one computer on a network, and they all run iTunes, then you may want to see your music located on one computer, from another. iTunes lets you do this, and it will work regardless as to whether the computers are PCs, Macs or a mixture of both.

There is a Sharing section in the iTunes preferences, and this is where you can enable the sharing. You can select how much of your music you would like to share, and once configured, other computers on your network will be able to see the music.

Well... sort of. You will certainly be able to see your sharing computer in iTunes on another computer, but you might not be able to connect, especially if you are running a firewall on either machine. This is because you will nee to open TCP and UDP (on a PC) ports to enable full sharing. The ports in question are:

TCP: 3689
UDP: 5353

More details of this and how to open the ports on your firewall are here (this will concentrate on the Windows XP firewall).

So that's easy. Well in most cases, but I have discovered a little snag in all of this. It seems that if you have two network cards in your PC (in my case a notebook with XP Pro) there could be further problems. In my case, I have a WiFi connection to my main router, but also a wired Ethernet connection to a separate switch, which in turn connects to a port on the main router. This seems to cause problems when another computer on the network tries to get the music from iTunes running on my notebook.

So far the only solution that I have found is to temporarily disable the WiFi network adaptor, which allows the other PC to see my iTunes music. Once to connection is established, I can re-enable the WiFi without any problems. All this seems to indicate that there might a problem with general routing - each of the two Ethernet adaptors on my notebook are effectively handled by a different LAN switch on the same LAN. I have not found anything on the Net about this particular problem, but if I do find out more, or find a solution to the problem then I will post more here.

One XPerience I Could Have Done Without

2006-05-08T19:31:00.000+01:00

Last week, I noticed that my Notebook (with Windows XP Pro - SP2 installed on it) was running a lot slower than usual. I was particularly slow at starting up, and whenever I tried to listen to or play a Podcast in iTunes the sound and video would stutter. Clearly, something was not right.

My first thoughts were that there were problems with the hard disk. The HD activity light was on for much of the time and often it would just be a solid for several seconds. I was certainly starting to think that it was encountering read errors, and I decided to install some disk monitoring software. The utility that I chose was HDD Health from Panterasoft.com, but this didn't uncover anything sinister.

However, when I used the Windows Device Manager to check all the various devices in the link from the drive to the motherboard, I discovered the Advanced Settings tab when looking at the properties for primary IDE Channel. The IDE Channel driver was running the disc in PIO mode, which was slowing everything down and hitting the CPU with extra load. This was despite the fact that DMA was the preferred transfer mode. Something was clearly not right, so I got onto Google to see what I could find.

Here is a page by Microsoft explaining what was going on and why. However, no solution is offered, short of reinstalling Windows. This page explains how to alter the registry to fix the problem. I have modified the registry and re-booted and I am now back to DMA 5 mode on the primary IDE channel for the hard disc. I'm still not sure what sort of problems caused my IDE controller driver to step down to PIO but I will be keeping a close eye on things for now.

Sting in the iPod

2006-04-12T22:51:00.000+01:00

Not sure why this is, but there appears to be a song that just won't play on my iPod. It was ripped, along with all other songs, using iTunes (Windows), as a 192kbps AAC file. All other files from the CD in question play. The troublesome file also plays on my laptop under iTunes. I've removed it from the iPod and had iTunes copy it back, but still there is a problem. Each time I play it, I get about one second before the iPod jumps to the next track and the play count for the dodgy song goes up. The song is If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free by Sting from his Dream of Blue Turtles album.

I suppose I should re-rip the track from the CD but I've not got the time right now.

I wonder if there are any other tracks on my iPod that have this problem. I will now go off and ask Mr. Google whether this is a known problem.

Fun with FrontPage and FastHosts

2006-03-30T23:10:00.000+01:00

Well, what a pain. I have just spent two days trying to get my web site working again. I'm not sure why it broke, and I'm not sure what fixed it, but it looks like FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) on my FastHosts account are behind it all.

When I got back from Aus, I decided to update my site with some new photo sections. Each time I tried to publish, I could not get past the authentication in FrontPage. I did some research that led me to believe it was a problem with NTL and their use of proxy-servers. In the end I used dial-up to FastHosts and was surprised to find that there was still a problem. So it was nothing to do with NTL and proxies after all.

I then decided to re-install FPSE on my FastHosts site. This fixed the problem of not being able to connect from FrontPage, but now all the dynamic link bars failed to work as they should. I tried to recalculate hyperlinks on the FastHosts site, but that did nothing. I tried on the FrontPage side and re-published, but still no change. I then deleted all on FastHosts and spent hours re-publishing, but still to no avail.

I even un-installed FPSE on my FastHosts account, and then installed - incurring a charge that had better not be applied to my account. Finally, having re-published all I tried again to re-calculate hyperlinks on the FastHosts side. This time it seems to have worked. Why this did not work the first time, I have no idea. It was not helped by the fact that the control panel (i.e. web page) for my FastHosts account would time out when I chose to re-calculate the hyperlinks.

Anyway, all is back to normal, and my new photos are on the site. So now I can get back to concentrating on the site content, and not on the infrastructure behind. That will be nice....

It's the Wrong Power Supply

2006-02-27T11:41:00.000Z

OK, so I said I had something to write about. More like something to complain about.

I have a Dell Latitude D800 Notebook. I like it as a laptop even though it is quite big to carry about the place all day long. I also have a Dell Dimension PC and an old Latitude too. As a rule I've been quite happy with Dell, and given I like my D800, I decided around the middle of last year to look at what I could do to upgrade it. Really all I needed was a faster wireless card (54Mbps) and a DVD+RW to replace the CD-RW. All good. I also thought I might get myself a second power supply.

So I called Dell, as I have done in the past, expecting to be put through to Ireland. But no, it was India. And there the problems begun, as usual. The first of these was one of language. The lady that I spoke to and myself were struggling a bit to communicate. That's an under statement. In fact, it was made worse by the fact that she did not really seem to know too much about the products that she was selling. None the less, I placed the order for the new wireless min-PCI 802.11g card and the DVD+RW drive. I also asked about a power supply and was told that the one I needed was a travel adapter and it came with a connector for the car and aircraft seats (not that I travel in a class when I would have one to use!). So I confirmed that all was correct for my D800 and the order went through.

The kit arrived and all appeared to be well. However, about nine months later I'm out and about with the travel power supply kit. I started to notice that the laptop was not really performing as I thought it should be. Further investigation showed that I was not getting more than 600MHz out of my 1.7GHz Pentium-M and some research showed that the problem was the power supply. It, as sold to me by Dell, was only 65W. I needed 90W, like the power supply that came with the D800 that is sitting at home. Great! Of course, there is a 90W version and why I was not told this is a mystery to me.

Well, when I get back to the UK I will try to find the order details and contact Dell to question why I was sold the wrong part. I don't hold out much hope, but we shall see.....