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Monthly Tech Diary 2008

December 31, 2008

Monthly Tech 2008

December

I’ve been a bit obsessive about backups for a while, as I have Time Machine working on my main Mac to an external Firewire drive, as well as monthly backups to my linux server, which itself keeps identical copies on the two external eSATA drives. Also I burn files to DVD-R and send to family in the UK every few months.

Yes, I am paranoid, and this is likely overkill, which is ironic given that (touches wood) I’ve only ever lost data from a drive failure once, and that was from a few Zip disks about 10 years ago with the click of death. Really, I should’ve ignored Macworld magazine, and followed my Japanese colleagues towards MO drives – they never got popular outside Japan, but as a format they proved to have a longer lifespan, and despite being a little slower were more reliable.

Back on topic. I was looking to move to USB Flash drives, so instead of 6 DVD-Rs, I could use a single 32GB flash drive. Cost was a bit higher, but the simplicity factor was there.

Then I started thinking about ‘internet based storage’ and how that would go. I needed to store around 30GB of data – all my photos and documents really. The benefit of the online backup would be that I could in theory get it back anytime; the negative being that when the cloud went down, not only not access what I had, I couldnt back up any more.

I played with the Jungledisk front end to Amazon S3, and with Mozy. Price wise it was much the same – 60USD a year for unlimited with Mozy, with Jungledisk costing 20USD up front, with whatever your monthly costs with Zmazon billed seperately. I ran the numbers, and essentially, the Jungledisk/S3 would cost a bit more per year, but not that much. I played with Mozy and a Jungledisk demo, and decided hat as a front end, I far preferred Jungledisk, and I liked the idea of using Amazon as storage, so I’ve gone with that combo and we’ll see how it goes.

I’m not saying Mozy is all bad – I set it up for my Dad, and it just runs in the background, doing a weekly backup for him. He’s on the increasingly hard to find link for the Mozy Home Free backup plan for 2GB.

Whilst we’re talking about comparisons, I’m seriously thinking I might move away from Yojimbo as my details/PDFs/password storage bin of choice and moving to Evernote. The latter has the benefit of internet sync, an iPhone application, and some other nice features. Yojimbo seems to have been left to languish by the author – Barebones – as they focus on their main product, BBEdit, though they also seem to be squandering development time on Weather to iPhone to iCal applets. The downside of Evernote is that it tends to roll everything into a single file, and that encryption is a bit clumsy, but the benefits of web browser and iPhone access is very, very tempting.

If I felt Evernote was suitable for all but my most important data, such as bank account numbers and so on, I would happily break that out into a KeepassX database, where it would be permanently encrypted.

A final note is that I’ve been playing a bit with Microsoft’s Live! offerings, especially Skydrive, which offers as of writing about 5GB of storage space, but with a 5MB individual file size limit.

November
After a few months of very little geekiness, November kind of came as a bit of a shock. First off, my 360 succumbed to the almost innevitable red ring of death; three happily glowing LEDs of hate, or misunderstood angst.

It died in the middle of a session of Undertow, a game which itself has a feeling of innevitable ending.

Still, a call to Microsoft Japan and packing things up had it in the system, and a few days later it came back all happy. I should explain though that it was returned in an unmarked brown box, and this my infinitely better half put in the back room, and sort-of forgot about, and even when I saw it sitting unloved in the corner, I just assumed it was something not my Xbox360. So there I was, waiting for it to come back, not knowing it already had.

To be fair, I did also receive a months free Live Gold as compensation. Although this console’s reliability is nigh on farcical, it is good to know it’s not compounded by shoddy maintenance times.

On a minor PC related note, I now have both my external backup harddries connected to my old linux box over eSATA rather than a combo of USB2 and eSATA. End result? Well it’s quicker really, which is nice for my über rsync back up sessions.

In a surprise move, I bought an iPhone 3G (16GB version). Actually the driver was my wife quite liking them, and since that would mean moving carriers, it would only make sense if I moved too. As it turned out, my wife’s mobile [keitai]’s batter had pretty much died and the same time mine was having weird mail sending and receiving issues, so we decided to bite a rather expensive bullet and get them. For me, the attraction is a decent SMS/email/voicemail system, Mac integration for contacts and well, all of that; basically all the goodness I used to enjoy on my Palm, but with a decent phone built in. We’ll see how that goes. As a few people know, I’m not much of a phone person.

On the gaming side, I’ve just started playing Little Big Planet on the PS3. You have to love any game with nice animation, colour, and Mr. Steven Fry as the tutorial narrator. Basically a glorified platformer, we’ll see how it goes.

Also this month I won an iPod nano at the office, in a rather impressive red colour. I quite like it, all curved and all, but I’ve already switched the shake to shuffle off, and a few other bits. Maybe this will become my jogging iPod {no laughing at the back).

October

Not much going on, but after a long while of having the possibility of using a Bluetooth device, I actually haven’t really used any. This month however, I bought two of them.

First off I got a new Microsoft Laser 7000 mouse; this was mainly for using with my Macs, and especially my laptop. Points to Microsoft for the decent charging sled which is nice, and overall I like it – the buttons work well, the bonus buttons work pretty well and can be programmed easily, and even the battery life is half decent.

The second Bluetooth device is rather speculative – a Plantronics 510 headset, basically for using with Skpe for calls back to the UK. I quite like the headset – great audio quality for making calls, and it’s far more comfortable to wear than some of the other ones, without breaking the bank. I’ve been using it from my laptop on a trip, which gets me away from the actual laptop as I was doing with some cheap wired headphones which made that thudding noise every time I adjusted the microphone, which is quite annoying for the person on the other end.

September 2008

Not too much going on this month, so let’s just swing through these as quickly as possible. I’m still working on some Drupal points on this site – like trying to fix search and such, and play with themes, but frankly I just haven’t had time. That said, it’s great to use Drupal – a more difficult and abstrcted system than Textpattern perhaps, but very nice, once everything is in there, and the native tagging is just simplicity itself, especially for all my legacy things, of which there are a lot.

I also decided that my MacBook’s 60GB was getting a wee bit small, so I yanked it out and replaced it with a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320GB drive. Not only is it now more capacious, but it’s a little faster also – XBench reckons up to 20% faster actually, but in my more oscure and vague hands – on touchy feely testing, I’d say it felt only a bit quicker, where we’ll call ‘a bit’, around ten percent.

On a gaming note, I polished off Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3. Somewhere in me, possibly near my spleen, there’s a rant about this game. It is not some epic, life defining, paradigm eviscerating game. It’s a decently made stealthy shooter with some amazingly long cutscenes, which commonly seem to overtake the game and leave you a bit lost at times. Suffice to say, you spend a lot of time in cut-scene, but don’t worry, it doesn’t seem to help or hinder the game.

Actually, as the game goes on it gets more bizarre – broadly the difficulty is quite easy, the end of level bosses fairly routine, and generally it’s not your prowess which is tried, but purely your willingness to tramp in around twenty hours of your life to a game, which like a giggling drunk, only happens to have brought about eight hours of gameplay to the party. The rest is cut scenes and loading times. It is a good game, but the repeated ‘no, really, this is the end’ gets tedious, and the HUDless ‘am I controlling this fight?’ part was just odd. Rating: Borrow it from a friend.

August 2008

August is hot, so that doesn’t really make me feel like doing much more than reading under the air conditioning. However, I did get a couple of things done this month.

Firstly, I finished Biohazard 4 on the Wii. It’s been something of a task of mine to play an installment of all the major franchises in this generation, which I’d never played before. Biohazard (Resident Evil outside Japan, for the most part) was one of them.

I picked it up for the Wii because that Wiimote just seems to be destined for this kind of thing. Apparently it’s pretty much a re-issue of the GameCube version, but with a few Wii bits stuck on top to allow for the controller but that doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing given the Gamecube version was rated as one of the best games ever for that platform.

Anyway, it really is as good as it was claimed, and whilst it took me a little while to get to grips with the game mechanics, once you do get into it, it’s a lot of fun, and pointing the Wiimote the way it was mean’t to be pointed. There’s lots of complete silliness in the plot, but it’s at least an understandable plot and there’s enough things to think about that you don’t get bored with what is a fairly linear game. The bosses are fun though, and whilst it’s not exactly difficult, overall it keeps you engrossed for most of the time. If like me you haven’t really played anything in the series, and you’ve got a Wii you just can’t find anything for, give this one a try.

On a non-gaming note, I’ve pretty much finished getting this website, brightblack.net, into the Drupal content management system, and cut over from textpattern. It’ll have to sit on the default theme for a while though, as my freetime on this right now just isnt that high. Sorry about that. However, the new tagging, structure, search and other features of Drupal more than make up for that.

July 2008

What on earth was I doing techie this month? Not a lot to be honest. In fact the only thing of note this month was that I was on the road for a business trip with a Thinkpad running Vista and Xubuntu.

I’m one of these people who actually think Vista is a nice step in the right direction, if you can forgive the beating your hardware takes in the process. Whilst I do forgive this somewhat, especially since I’m a Mac user who remembers the awful machine abusing mess which was Mac OS X 10.0 (a version many Mac fanatics tend to forget when berating Vista), the sheer hard drive grind with 1GB of RAM is nasty.

It feels like you’re ploughing the surface of the harddrive, and the battery indicator seems to go down as you watch. Due to this, I tended to run Xubuntu on the battery, and Vista when plugged in. There were no real functional issues to speak of since I shared the Vista partition to Xubuntu and have everything in application compatible file fomats. This is when you thank yourself for using Truecrypt and KeePassX for all those important bits of data, and not using Office 2007 native files, which the open source world hasn’t quite caught up with yet.

One thing, if you like Windows, or if you like Vista specifically, take a list to the Windows Weekly podcast, and the site of it’s anchorman, Paul Thurott.

June 2008
Sadly (and this seems to be the year for it!) I had to dump my Canon Ixy 500 point and click camera. There was a wake and a quite moving eulogy; after just over four years of abuse across three continents from typhoons, to snow to the north of England, it was a great camera and captured some wonderful moments for me. Thanks. After poking around DPReview a little bit, I replaced it with the smaller Canon Ixy 20 IS (aka SD1100), though there seems to be a much of a muchness factor developing in that segment.

My Ixy 20 IS is brown, a colour I chose because it seemed the least likely of all their cameras to be the colour a camera should be. I also outfitted it with a ridiculous 4GB SDHC card. I only say it’s ridiculous because my SLR has a 2GB card, and the Ixy shipped with 32MB, which frankly redefined inadequate. At the max 8 megapixel size, that would hold about 4 photos.

This month I also finished Call of Duty 4, [COD4] single player mode. I actually really liked this. For what is essentially a fairly generic plot FPS, this one stands out with decent voice acting, some nice cut scene work, and a few plot twists which you actually care about. The online portion is excellent, and that’s from someone who spent far too long playing Counter Strike. In many ways, it’s even better than that. Over Xbox Live, it really was a lot of fun going around with a group of friends, sticking together across maps and shouting injokes/abuse at each other.

May 2008

I switched to Xubuntu Linux. I like Zenwalk 5, but on the whole I was just having issues with it. It didn’t like booting with my eSATA drive attached, and yet it didn’t seem to want to ignore it either. That concept seems to hold true with quite a few things in life, doesn’t it.

That said, I like XFCE – it’s nice and fast, and what I want in a server. So with Xubuntu, I get that, 64bit packages (instead of the i486 32bit versions Zenwalk seems to be based on) and apt-get instead of netpkg. To sum up then: it’s Ubuntu, but with XFCE as a window manager. Also, the version I’ve installed, 8.04 is what’s known as an LTS, a long term support version, so it should be more stable, and receive security and other patches for 36 months instead of Ubuntu’s usual 18.

That was pretty much it; hey, nice weather means I’m out with the family.

April 2008

Alas the time has come to merge my Linux and Windows boxes once more. It doesn’t make sense to have the physical clutter of two desktops, one of which is really old, and especially when it’s that one I use the most, leaving the newer, albeit 2.5 year old box silent; that’s just wrong.

In my case, my Windows usage on it’s dedicated box, i.e. for gaming, has just dropped down to near zero, so my once ‘fast’ 3700+ AMD box is silent. Therefore, it has become time to put Linux and Windows back in the same box for the first time in about seven years. It’ll be cosy I promise you.

Just a note also that I decided to move back from Debian 4 to Zenwalk 5, partly because I wanted to consolidate a drive and Zenwalk is much, much lighter, but also because Debian out of the box doesn’t support newer versions of Truecrypt and Transmission; yes, I know I could make it, but right now, time is a precious resource and somehow I just like Zenwalk.

There were some hickups with the monitor detection though, and it’s something I replicated on a couple of distros, it seems something between XOrg, my old Iiyama panel and my nVidia 6800GS card, all ending up with with a blank screen and a note from the monitor that it doesn’t support that configuration. I managed to get around it by using Puppy linux, and trying the vesa driver instead of the nv driver in the xorg.conf and that fixed it, as vesa is a much simpler and locks the refresh rate down there, with the side effect that it’s relatively bullet proof. Following that then, I got Zenwalk 5 in with the vesa driver.

I’ve hooked up the Windows drive via eSATA and a new external drive enclosure , dual booted from the LILO menu, though I could also do that from a hardware boot menu option too.

March 2008

I think this month wasn’t so much what I did do, it’s what I’m not doing now, which is namely blogging, or at least that irrational feeling that I should be blogging, even though my hit counters and comments basically say that if I wasn’t doing it for myself then there’d be no reason to do it! I’m actually planning to test the idea that if I’m not blogging, I’d be working on the Novel Which Will Never Get Written. We shall see.

Also, I’ve been slowly moving some more bits to a Drupal database. I’m in no real hurry, so it’s just basically chugging along. Drupal seems fine, though, good active development and a lot more opportunities. Also, it does things I wnt to check out for myself like OpenID. Again, another work in progress.

On the gaming front, I finished Assassin’s Creed, and honestly I thought it was a great game. I know a few people weren’t too sure about it, but I thought it worked very well, both the action, exploration and even the storyline. Along with decent graphics and agreat soundtrack, it really set itself up well. The downside was the weapons were a bit clunky, and ultimately, you end up using one one or two moves, but it’s an engrossing game nonetheless.

February 2008

Well, after about three and a half years, I have cancelled the only MMORPG I’ve played – City of Heroes (and by extension, City of Villains). The reason itself was easy to track – I simply hadn’t played more than a few hours in eight months. For something like that, and despite the price of ~ 17USD it makes sense just to drop out. To their credit, they, NCSoft, had released several ‘free’ blocks of additional content, but ultimately it was just more grind. There were some novelties such as destructible instances of areas, but ultimately, I just never played much, so it’s always best to cut the ties, and thus CoH has gone from my PC.

It’s something of an ongoing gag that I want to write a full length novel, and have actually had one on the go for a couple of years. That sentence probably tells you how likely it is the I’m actually going to finish the damn thing. I really should have focussed on some of my ideas for short stories first. Anyway, that’s a whole other post, so probably not a good idea to start that now. Over time I’ve tried a lot of ways to make the novel happen on the software side, as if altering the tools would somehow make it happen, in much the same way as I should get fit just by having a gym membership card.

I digressed a bit there, for a year or so I was using the excellent Jer’s Novel Writer app, which is a great application in itself, and helped me get more structure, simply, into my work. That said, I wanted something a bit more polished, and so have been trialling Scrivener, and I think it’s a certainty I’ll pay for the app, as it has all JNW’s good bits, with more featuers, and is generally a bit more polished. OK, let’s see if I can at least get the first draft of this finished this year.

Finally, after the sad death of my old headphones last month, I finally plumped for a new pair of Sennheisers, this time the HD-555. As I listen to music, movies and play games on these headphones, I need that difficult to achieve sweet spot of decent sound quality, but something I can comfortably wear during a multi-hour gaming session. It always seems that when I test out headphones, in my price range, Sennheiser’s seems to drift to the top, against Audio-Technica, Sony and the rest. They have turned out to be fantastic, and are now quite modular – if the cable or plug is damaged, I can apparently replace it.

January 2008

A new year, and three years almost to the day after purchase, my Epson inkjet printer just died. Well to be fair, it started having banding problems on the print outs, which prompted me to foolishly squander about 3,000yen on new ink cartridges, but whatever ink or such was lodged in there stayed lodged, so I decided it was time part with it. My advice: if a couple of nozzle cleanings don’t fix a fairly bad banding issue, dump it. Sad but true. Epson print heads cant seem to be swapped out on many models.

As much as I’m not a printer fan, we do need a printer for photos of the offspring and for recipes. After a bit of looking around, we settled on the Canon Pixus i4500, and very nice it is too. One odd thing though: the Mac version of the CD/DVD label printing software refused to work, and apparently it’s a known issue. Not a huge problem as my Windows installation is now a virtual machine on my Mac, so I can access the functionality that way. But odd nonetheless. Also it has a replaceable print head. Let’s just hope I don’t need to swap it for a while.

Also, my beloved Sennheiser HD-495 headphones died. After almost seven years, the cable developed an issue and sound would randomly cut out, then it just seemed to get worse, and then nothing. Ah well, They served me well. With the printer buy I can’t afford to buy some new ones now, but maybe I’ll get some for my birthday next month.

I also picked up a cheap external 3.5inch hard drive enclosure, with the benefit of USB, eSATA and a built in USB hub. The attraction was also it’s a quick remove system, so I can swap out my Vista and backup disks on a PC which is mainly for Linux now.

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Error Messages v2

June 21, 2008

All I can say is that these are all real – none of them are Photoshopped. In fact, if you’re [un]lucky you may be able to repeat them. They’re just run of the mill examples of the fact that maybe sometimes UI designers, programmers, and who knows who else, maybe want to throw us something a little different.

2008

iTunes Loses Files; Can’t talk about it.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been bitten by a problem syncing my iPod to my Mac, in that I see the following error, and the sync stops wherever it was.

For me, after a bit of tinkering I found it seemed to not like one of my photos very much, towards the end of the sync, and if I get a few more minutes to take a look at it, I’ll figure it out, but really, what kind of an error message is that? It knows what files caused it to stop, so why won’t it tell me what it is? Tsk. Insecurity and fear of loss of job seem to strike again.

Vista File Copies
Whilst I’m on the topic of odd and fairly unhelpful dialog boxes, here’s one I got on my Vista box trying to copy a few files over the network:

Apparently, the right answer to copy is ‘Yes’, but honestly, where’s the logic on this one? I can only think they’re asking whether they see copy and move as a single activity, but since there’s no follow-up to this question, I can’t elaborate on it.

From 2003

Secrets in MS
I decided to do a search from the Microsoft press page, just looking for logos, press packs and such, I clicked on a link and…got something you don’t expect when looking for information on products.

Exchange
So there I am, minding my own business, so to speak, attempting simply to install the Exchange 5.5 Administration Tools on my Windows machine, when Outlook makes this complaint:

OK, it seems pretty confident in it’s own abilities right, and there’s not much more of a choice I can think of, so why not – lets trust Microsoft to fix their own problem – what could possibly happen?

Oh, hang on, this is a Microsoft [OK]? It’s not ‘OK’ really, no. Still, that little run in could have been a lot worse.

Yahoo Messenger
It’s not just Windows though, I went away from my Mac for a few minutes, only to return to see this message – my Mac seems to have some kind of warped, split personality, requiring it to have some kind of internal debate and disagreement:

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Gadgets – February 2008

February 28, 2008

Gadgets Summary – February 2008

Here we are again – I’m still a techie kind of guy. I still live in Tokyo. Nothing changed there.

If you stick those two things together it really does amounts to a person who used to live in fear when he gets his salary paid into his bank over whether the next weekend poring over disturbing amounts of readily available technology in the bowels of denki-ya, or the fearsome Akihabara. Though the latter seems to be swinging over to it’s alter-ego of otaku fetishist zone quite a lot of late.

Still, I’m not as bad as I used to be – having a child curtails that quite nicely! Still we are a fairly tech heavy family, though I’m not a gadget fan for the sake of having something, and I still have very stringent requirements for what a tool has to do for me before I’ll buy it <cough>. Also, over the last couple of years I’ve trying to scale back on things because frankly, I don’t have a lot of space at home.

Portable Game Systems

This is Japan, and as such by law you have to have a portable game system. I think.

My wife has a pink original design Nintendo DS which are great little portables, whilst I have an enamel blue DS Lite. We use them sporadically, again, because our little arrival means that we can’t just sit on trains and play, or while away Sunday afternoons. Unless the offspring is asleep, that time has gone!

Anyway, favourite games on those systems would be the [New] Super Mario World and Zelda:Phantom Hourglass for the wife, Phoenix Wright (any of them), Mario Kart and Puzzle Quest for me.

They’re great little systems, and despite the lack of real internet play, they’re ideal for for small games like Mario Kart and Bomberman on the peer-to-peer wireless. Despite my own best attempts, I haven’t managed to get a game going in a public space, on the bus, or in a coffee shop, despite seeing a lot of people with DSs. Come on, if I’m smiling and waving at you and flashing a piece of cardboard saying ‘Play Tetris DS with me!’, I’m not a complete nutter, I’m just a gamer, and a parent who has twenty minutes of game time available to him. Do the civilised thing.

We also have a PSP we received as a wedding gift. So far ‘Minna no Gorufu’, ‘Katamari’ and ‘Lumines’ are still the mainstays on there. Updates to the firmware which gave the PSP the ability to wirelessly browse the web and RSS which are very cool, but I don’t think it’s a killer app given the poor text entry system and slow page loading. I’ve took it to my local MOS burger whilst waiting , but I still can’t get enthused about it. Oddly, it’s the same feeling I get when I browse the web on the Wii. I must be an old stick in the mud.

Overall I think the PSP is nice though, but I just can’t get the enthusiasm to buy any new games as sadly many are PS2 ports, which isn’t a bad thing, just that maybe they don’t fit the portable format – GTA was an example of that – a lot of loading, burning the battery, compared to game time, which was a shame as the game wasn’t bad at all. One thing I haven’t tried yet though is remote play with the Playstation 3. Ive seen it on a friend’s PSP/PS3, watching movies over the net and such and it *seems* great. I’m somewhat tempted to buy Demolition Derby and play that on the PSP via a PS3 link.

TV Based Consoles

We have too many consoles. Seriously. How did this happen? [Looks around and whistles innocently]. Blame my wife. It seems that my PC gaming is all but dead, and I spend more time gaming on consoles. I think this is since we had our little girl, gaming time is limited, so I can’t afford several hours to while away on City of Heroes, which I’m in the process of unsubscribing from after over three years. Any games which aren’t easy to pick up and put down, with little grind, are pretty much off the playing field now. That doesn’t mean I’m not doing deep games, just no grinding.

OK. Plugged into the TV right now are: a Nintendo Wii, a Playstation 3 and a Microsoft XBox 360.

To delve into history, I have a Playstation 2 plugged into the old 20” CRT in the back room, buried under baby stuff which I keep handy for emergency SSX 3 games, as my PS3 is the model without PS2 compatibility (no big loss). I also have a Nintendo 64 in a box somewhere in the back room, which gets wheeled out for the odd Perfect Striker game and to muse on what the hell went wrong with that console.

So back to the now, yes, we have all three current gen consoles, and we like them all but for different reasons. As background, I have a lot of friends with 360s so I play a lot of co-op and online games with them, as it was Gears of War which finally tipped me to buy the noisy beast in February 2007. So far no red ring of death, but I’m most certainly in the minority. I think it’s a great games platform though – Gears of War was good, Prey was OK, though right now, at time of writing, I’m playing Assassin’s Creed which is very decent too. I just wish the hardware wasn’t so damned noisy! Going full tilt between the DVD and the fans it’s far noisier than my old PC.

The Wii is great, it just is, and despite reports there are good games outside of Sports and Zelda, but outside of first party it gets a little thin, though I really liked Elebits and Biohazard 4. The wife has loved it for the Fit, Sports, Zelda, Super Paper Mario and a few others. Well worth the cash when you put the prices side by side.

The PS I got on points at Bic in December and so far have only really played Ratchet and Clank, though I’ve sampled quite a few demos. The hardware is very, very nice though, and as an xvid player it’s great, supplanting the old Avel player, which I gave away in January, and easily passing the 360 on that concept too as it is so quiet (and no external PSU either!). Overall I think it’s better than the PS3 as a package, but it’s all about the games, and they’re finally trickling through.

Mobile Phone

I still have a black Toshiba W43T Au WIN phone which is quite impressive as it’s coming up to two years old which has made it something of a survivor for me and a keitai. Like most modern phones, you name a feature this thing probably has it – 3 megapixel camera with auto-focus, macro and flash, video, BREW, 2.4Mb internet access, GPS with ‘3D navi’, a full E-J/J-E dictionary, stereo speakers, infrared for beaming to and from PDA and miniSD slot. It’s got really good bilingual e-mail control, folder filtering, a full service system for call waiting. There’s also a rumour you can also call people from it.

Headphones

When it comes to Headphones, for years now, I’ve had Sennheiser’s. I don’t know why, but whenever I test and compare headphones, I seem to always like theirs against the competition. Right now I have 2 pairs: a pair of old, dusty PX-100 for my gaming, and some PX-200 for my iPod.

Portable Music

I’ve had an iPod since a I succumbed to a third generation 15GB model I bought in April 2003, and thoroughly enjoyed it so much that when in September 2007 and the battery was lasting an hour and not using it for a couple of days mean’t whatever charge I’d left it with had gone, I decided to go and get another of Apple’s mind control devices. I plumped for an 80GB classic, and have really enjoyed it – in the fact the strange thing is that I’ve watched far more video on it than I ever thought I would. I’ve watched the whole Long Way ROund, Down, Race to Dakar and a few other documentaries on it, as well as hundred of hours of music, podcasts and audio books.

It should be said that in March 2005 I did buy a 512Mb iPod shuffle for using whilst jogging and at the gym. I’m a huge fan of the iPods though I too would like a bit more battery life, but you can’t argue with the design or the interface which are simple and to the point. The shuffle though was a bit of a misfire though due to me not getting on with the crappy LED ‘interface’. In the future I’ll stick to things with screens.

Digital Cameras

Having only ever owned two small digital cameras and both had been from Canon – the IXY 500 I take on snowboard and biking tours, and the original IXY 2.1 MP camera from several years back. When the new family member arrived I decided to get a low end dSLR for family picks, and plumped for the Nikon D40 which has been an great purchase, a bit of an education, and has given us some memorable pictures of our daughter.

Miscellaneous items

Despite the introduction, I don’t really amass gadgets per se. There aren’t many curios in our apartment, no forgotten formats, old discs or anything, unless you count the Zip disks (what was I thinking??). I don’t possess a pile of non-functioning equipment either. I dumped my mini-disks after I imported them and I imported all my old CD backups to HDD and DVD when I needed. I like to keep these things clean. I do have some other bits which I somehow consider selections as much as the games machines; things like the Solio solar panel charger and battery which I’m a big fan of, or even the Tubtrug – a large plastic tub which stores many of our daughter’s bits. It’s a bit of plastic, essentially, just well designed.

h2. Gone but not forgotten:

h2. Palm. I loved you.

I still have a silver Palm Zire 72. Check out my old page for it here. sadly, over the past couple of years I used it less and less, using online services for somethings, encrypted files on USB sticks for others, and for the mainstay – addresses and contact details – my iPod and the company Blackberry for company data. The real quicksand was the complete lack of any new Mac software for Palm, and what I considered arratic replacement for that software like MissingSync.

My Sennheiser HD-495 headphones died in January 2008 after about seven years loyal service. I’ll likely replace them with a pair of HD-555’s when I get the cash, for the same role as headphones for music at home, and console gaming / night DVD watching.

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Linux Setup ~ 2007

December 31, 2007

Hardware Specifications

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Motherboard: Abit KV7
Memory: 1GB DDR 400
Sound: Via AC97
NIC: Corega CG-LAPCIGTR 1Gbps (Onboard: Via Rhine-II 100Mbps)
HDD: 120GB Seagate (ATA) and 160GB + 320GB Seagate (SATA)
Graphics: ELSA GeForce 2 MX400 64MB
Case: no idea, but cheap and heavy!
OS: Debian 4 ‘Etch’ (r1)

Main software

IceWeasel 2.0.0.10, Pidgin 2.x, Samba 3.0.24, Azureus 2.5, Gnome, TightVNC, OpenSSH 4.3.

About this GNU/Linux Box

My Linux boxes are hand-me-downs in my computer box empire. This linux box, in essence, has a single first hand part in it, and that’s the DVD burner because I finally got tired of the disturbing noise of the 50 speed CD drive I used to have, and the increasing piles and waste of CD-Rs needed for most distros. A little ironic I admit since my preferred distro nowadays – Zenwalk – easily fits on a single CD-R.

Anyway, back to the point.

My Linux box historically has been made from old parts of my more mainstream games Windows box, parts I’ve picked up from friends, or parts I’d got cheap in a bargain bin in Akihabara. The case is the old Windows one, so is the mobo, CPU and memory. The graphics card is from a generation before that, which I kept as it’s quiet with passive cooling and a low power requirement. The case I will remember well into the future, because during an air-dusting, I dropped one side panel on my toe, killing the toe nail and leaving me hobbling for a couple of weeks.

What this has meant then, is that sometimes things die, though thankfully, so far, touch wood, it’s never been a hard drive. Motherboards, memory and CPU generally. I went through a phase of losing three or four memory sticks in about six months. The system of replacement/swapout works as a push or pull. When something dies in the Linux box, I look to buy cheap, or replace from my Windows box and get something better for that, since as it was mainly my games box, that was where I needed the power. That’s not on a grunt file serving machine like my Linux box.

Life got much simpler when I admitted to myself the dark truth that I didn’t want or need Linux as a desktop environment – this was a server and backroom application machine. In that capacity, it’s been awesome. I can’t fault it on cost – it’s always been amazingly cheap. The next cycle I guess is retiring the split box concept – that is, a Windows box and a seperate Linux box – and have mainly a Linux Server with an eSATA Windows drive attached as a single machine. It means I might need a half decent graphics card in my server, but it means I’ll be one box less, which means electrical saving and space saving. All good. As you might have guessed, that means when something dies next, a new one wont me bought really, I’ll just collapse it all in, which I’m looking forward to, as the Windows LianLi case has a better cooling and drive system than the current Linux box. I could physically swap it over now, but I don’t really need that yet.

So that’s the Linux hardware. Old, cast off, forgotten. Working like a charm.

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A Week With Leopard

November 9, 2007

Caveat: This is not an all encompassing review of the new Apple OS – I’m not qualified to do that, this is purely relating to things I bumped into in the first week and a half of usage, and what I’m personally interested in and use. If you want a *real* review of leopard, check out Jon Siracusa’s awesome review over at Ars Tecnica. I agree with most of his thoughts anyway.

In a complete first, I bought a new OS a mere week after it’s launch. That’s something I’ve never done before as far as I remember. As I upload this, I’ve been running it for just over a week.

At first I put it on my MacBook: important, but not the most data critical of my two Macs. Of course, I still backed up what data I did want, and popped the Leopard DVD in.

First of all, I nuked all the old data. No problem. It then asked me if I wanted to check the install media; this is a pretty much given in the download and burn world of Linux, so I wasn’t phased. I can’t remember if this was the case in Tiger (?); anyway, it’s there and it may take some time. The install itself on the MacBook took about 45 minutes I think. That’s a bit longer than Tiger, but to be honest, I watched a couple of episodes of Bleach, so I’m not too bothered.

Apple claim there’s three hundred features and refinements here, so I’m curious to see how many I can find, and how many are useful!

After install, you get a very nice intro movie saying welcome, and then it’s into setup. One thing I did like is that it detected the wireless and asked for the SSID and password, yet didn’t mention that it’s a WPA2 network, or ask me to select the encryption type. That’s very friendly to the casual user.

OK, so away with the installer, and into the OS environment.

Apps and Desktop

First off, the less than rosy bits: generally, I like it, except the folder icons which look a little flat. As is also well known, the crisp menu bar is now a slightly translucent menu bar. It’s a bit odd, though I can live with it given my usual type of wallpapers but on some of those which shop with the OS – it looks a little dirty with some spots sticking through from the wallpaper. How about an option there Apple?

The main thing for me is that there is now a main window type, and it’s not brushed metal, you can change the grid spacing (a little), and there’s Quick Look which brings up a file or document preview in a HUD (semi transparent) dark window. This is great. Oh yeah, and there’s cover flow – something I didn’t care for on the iPod/iTunes, and I don’t here either. Quick Look is excellent though.

Network browsing is now far more reliable and straight forward to me, and seems more robust – I now have no issues seeing any of my other three machines (another Mac, a windows box and my Linux server), whereas in other 10.x releases the ‘Browser’ was always a bit hit and miss. The network window is now shown much more like a normal window, which is nice, and shows who you are connected as, which is informative.

As for the dock, I think it’s OK; it’s certainly not the deal-killer some made it out to be, though I do like the smoked glass flat view you get when it’s on the side of the screen. The thing I really don’t like though are the Stacks – not the idea you understand, in the grid view, I like that, but the ’stacked icons’ icon it gets in the dock is stupid and needs to be dropped.

A nice feature now is that Leopard is for more savvy it seems with screen sharing as it calls it, which is good as I regularly fire up a vncserver on my GNU/Linux file server via SSH, and view from my laptop wherever I am in the house. I can now trawl down to /System/Library/CoreServices and use Screen Sharing.app a libVNCserver based app, that sadly didn’t warrant inclusion in the Utility folder for some reason, but who for me is a great find (It would certainly beat out ‘DigitalColor Meter’!).

There is one caveat – it only seems to work on a ‘:0′ shared screen with vnc, that is, with a logged in user on another machine, at least with a linux box. To get a desktop otherwise, I need to put Chicken of the VNC or similar on the box, to go to session ‘:1′ or similar. However, for Mac to Mac, and especially the ‘Back to my Mac’ service, it’s a welcome advance.

Of the Apple apps, Mail.app is much better, ties into iCal and Address book to make an Outlook of the three apps, but in a much subtler and easier way. To Do lists and notes have also been added – if these were to sync with the iPod, that would be great, but so far they don’t.

Stickies are good. As ever.

Preview has had a bit of a revamp and now is even faster and can do a lot of editing type things such as rotation, imports and annotation which is quite nice, if not a feature I can see me using.

Spaces is very well done. Although I like it, I haven’t got as worked up as some Mac pundits, as anyone whose used a UNIX machine in the past has had access to virtual desktops. That said, it’s nice to see it, and works very well on the laptop which is where I really see myself using it.

Time Machine is a great idea in my opinion, and whilst I wont be suing it myself, I do think it was worthy of the front of the box.

Software Compatibility

As I mentioned, I really don’t get new OSs this fast usually, but I had been tracking the compatibility levels of most of my main apps. Most were either already working, or patches were imminent. Any lateness it seems can be squared at Apple, who didn’t seem to give a release copy to devs in advance.

Dragthing was already patched, and within a day or two (i.e. about a week after release) a lot of new versions were out or in beta. Of all the apps I use, the stand-out ‘not ready’ ones were:

Jers Novel Writer – It was completely broken. Many users, including myself, were sending the author logs of the different things we’ve tried and it seems he’s managed to get a fixed version out in the last couple of days.

Rogue Amoeba and Omni Group, who’s apps I really like, have most of their apps either in functioning beta versions, or have patched versions already out, or claim to be close which is nice – I wont lose any functionality.

Out with the old…

Whenever I install or re-install an OS, I always take some time to appraise what I have on the system and if there’s any way to improve my way of working, and if there’s anything I can remove in the name of general order, more diskspace and so forth. I don’t like having bits around which I don’t use or which fall short in comparison to another app (with tight budget rules applying!)

This time, I scratched two core itches.

The first is a bit sad. I decided not to install any of my Palm stuff. It’s not huge and it’s not a stability risk, but the fact is that I never sync it anymore, I never use it. Sad but true. The functionality has been absorbed into my MacBook, my company Blackberry and desktop based encrypted password keepers. The way Palm treated the Mac, and the way Apple (via iSync) didn’t take it anywhere (likely due of late to the iPhone) kind of crippled it, though I’ll still play Space Trader on it now or then.

The second is a bit odd. I’m basically not going to re-install Microsoft Office 2004. It’s performance under Rosetta is acceptable, but the fact is that it doesn’t fit with how I use my Mac, and I won’t be installing the 2008 variant as it is. My alternative? Well, I’m tempted not to have any Office app on there, but I need to for the sake of my significant other. The decision? I invested in iWork 08 , something closer to my software budget, which runs natively on Intel and is fast. My Office app can be easily handed off to my relative who craves MS Office on his Mac for work purposes but who balks at the price tag. It’s still served three years of loyal beating.

Overall

This is as you can see, just a whirlwind view of the new OS from the last week or so and overall I like it a lot. I don’t think I’ve had an X update which has fixed so many of the things niggling me, and not really adding anything new. A great benefit too is that is feels like it’s running quicker, and was a tiny percentage faster in the XBench marks too. It really does feel faster though, which is what I care about most.

Obviously the best OS X yet, and I would say the best since 10.2 which I thought was a great release – 10.3 and .4 I thought were OK, despite their much lauded feature-sets.

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Mac Setup ~ late 2007

October 31, 2007

I currently own 2 current Mac computers as below. However, if you were to pry in the dark corners of my apartment, you’d find an old Powerbook which only works from mains now, and a desktop G4 Mirror drive Door which is now retired. Before these, I owned a Powerbook 190, now sadly not functional.

MacBook Core Duo

CPU: Intel Core Duo 2GHz
Memory: 2GB DDR2 (667MHz)
OS: Mac OS 10.5.1
Video Card: Intel 950 64MB
Hard drives: 60GB internal
XBench 1.3 score: 94.47

Purchased: October 2006

Mac Mini Core Duo

CPU: Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz
Memory: 2GB DDR2 (667MHz)
OS: Mac OS 10.5.1
Video Card: Intel 950 64MB
Hard drives: 80GB internal + 250GB LaCie External
XBench 1.3 score: 96.14

Purchased: October 2006

Software being used:

Transmit 3.6.2 [FTP], BBEdit 8.7.1 [text editor], Audio Hijack Pro 2.7 [sound recording], GraphicConverter 6.0.1, QuickSilver launcher, Drathing 5.9, iTunes 7.4.2, iLife ‘08, Camino 1.5.3, NetNewsWire 2.1 [RSS], OmniGraffle Pro 4.1.2 [diagrams], Adium X1.3 [IM].

All of these are Intel or Universal binaries.

Old Macs

Desktop Dual G4 (MDD)

CPU: Dual 867MHz Motorola G4
Memory: 1.25Gb DDR (266)
OS: Mac OS 10.4.8
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB
Hard drives: 120GB + 60GB Seagate
XBench 1.3 score: 44.18

Purchased: September 2002

Wall Street Powerbook

CPU: 233MHz Motorola G3
Memory: 384MB SDRAM
OS: Mac OS 9.2.2
Video Card: ATI Rage ProLT 4Mb
Hard drive: 10Gb IBM Travelstar

Purchased: February 1999

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Computer Usage – September 2007

September 14, 2007

It’s only been about nine months since I last reviewed the software I use on each of my boxes, but it’s been a strong year of transition (babies will do that, it seems), and this seems to have altered the way, and frequency with which I’ve been using my computers, so I thought I’d write a few notes up, see if it resonates with anyone.

Macs

The return to having a Mac laptop (which I’m writing this) has driven me in some interesting directions, than from when I just had my G4 desktop, so some of my workflow changes have been due to that. Other changes have been to new apps, or change in interests. Anyway, let’s have a look at what actually changed.

For the first time in probably about eight years, I’ve stopped using Dragthing, and started using the keyboard based launcher Quicksilver in it’s place. Initially this was a real-estate question on my MacBook, as I liked Dragthing in that bottom left corner, and because it had been there for years. However, I’d moved my dock to the right side of my screen for more space to write, the MacBook being rather widescreen in ratio, so I ended up having to move all around the screen to open apps, check apps etc.. I tried putting the dock on the left, but that felt strange, so I decided that maybe the problem needed a different solution, so I switched to Quicksilver, and I have to say that for me it suits the laptop metaphor perfectly. I’ve since tried the same switch on my MacMini desktop with less success. At a desktop, I seem to want more info about the multitude of apps I have, so though I’ve tried Quicksilver, I think I’ll be back on Dragthing fairly soon, but we’ll see.

The way I discovered Quicksilver actually, is because I was using the same author’s LAME-iTunes app, to get decent MP3 files easily into iTunes. The only issue has been of late that the system somehow has broken, tags aren’t added, and the author no longer supports it (too busy with Quicksilver and working for Google I suspect). Due to this, I went looking for another app, and found the very useful Max, which is a ripper and encoder which will play with a huge number of formats, including the latest stable LAME MP3 encoder which is my preferred encoding system, as well as a good FLAC implementation. The only downside to the app is it uses the Musicbrainz tag look-up service, which is a bit hit and miss.

One thing I’ve let lapse is my G-Force payment (12months rolling). I did this basically because I don’t have the time to use a visualiser much anymore, and many of the updates haven’t really been beneficial for me to the point where I’ve thought that I really needed to pay for another upgrade. A side issue is that I no longer do the live shows with it, and though I did write an expanded ‘How To’ for a later version of it (3.6.x?), which I haven’t put on the site, I may do one day.

I’ve all but replaced Photoshop Elements 2 with GIMPshop, GraphicConverter (an old stalwart on my Macs), and “Inkscape”:http://www.inkscape.org/. This was something else that happened for a number of reasons. PE2 is a PowerPC app, and though it ran acceptably enough in Rosetta, I did find it would stop launching sometimes. In comparison, GIMPshop runs fast on the Intel Macs, and despite being an X11 app, isn’t too bad to use, though it can never hide the awful GIMP GUI underpinnings one hundred percent, such as the dire text tool, but it’s OK for the simple layer things I want to do. However, as GraphicConverter now has some good layer based options (new in version 6), that may in itself replace GIMPshop (I don’t require all the whacky filters, just basic tweaking, text overlay, resize etc.) so we’ll see how that develops over the next year. Inkscape is also an X11 app I’ve been pulling out quite a lot, though it’s more of an ‘Illustrator’ type drawing app. Again, it suffers from relatively poor GUI, but it’s a useful app in itself, and runs remarkably well on the Macbook, such as recently when I was putting an A3 poster together for a friend, and it had a fairly large bitmap in it, but the system seemed to work quite well with it.

On the graphical note, I still recommend OmniGraffle for belting out diagrams, but also for when you’re trying to do certain layouts such as a group of four passport photos for printing, and Omni’s other stalwart – OmniOutliner. They’re both great apps for when I need to get something down, but organised, quickly.

I very recently upgraded iLife from ‘06 to ‘08, and overall, I’m very happy with all the of the new apps – iPhoto is faster and the Events system works much better, as does skimming which is the big general ‘add’ to the suite it seems. I actually quite like the new iMovie, which seems an upopular notion right now. I do agree it should have had a different name, it does grind your hard drive, and it does have pretty useless audio controls, but it is quite easy. It does make banging a video out very quick – even quicker if you use YouTube. I’m also one for those people who three or four times a year uses iDVD, so it was nice to see that got a bit faster. Garageband, I’ll continue to have no use for… and iWeb. No, I don’t use that either, but it looks very nice. Why use iWeb when you have Textpattern!

The iLife update has been a big factor this year, as we recently bought a cheap camcorder, having borrowed a friend’s for a few months, and deciding that even though we used it, and it was great for sending bits and pieces of video of our offspring to grandparents, it wasn’t something we ever saw replacing our stills cameras, so we decided to go for something cheap, and ended up with a Sony HC-48. Yes, standard definition, and miniDV tape for the essential reasons of price, then that we don’t have the hardware and time to put into HD editing, and we thought that as it’s the last generation of the technology, and since it’s been around for a while, it should be pretty sturdy through all those revisions. Also, I prefer miniDV over MPEG2/DVD-R even if the files are huge.

Just quickly on the tangent of hardware, I also replaced my old Epson scanner with a cheap Canon LiDE70 model, which gives acceptable scans, seems reliable (my Epson was always flaky before finally falling off its own rails) and only needs a USB2’s worth of power – no mains PSU, so there’s a saved cable. It’s also very thin and can be mounted on its side which is very useful around my crowded desk.

BBEdit continues to be a mainstay of my text production; though my web output has dropped over the past couple of years, essentially, due to family matters, and though I don’t do much HTML generation anymore thanks to my content management systems, BBEdit remains one of my most used applications, because most of what I do generate, from web pages, to e-mail to other items, is generally text, so it tends to begin its life in BBEdit – yes, I do tend to write a lot of long e-mails in BBEdit! Although Textpattern has an acceptable text editor online, I write virtually nothing in it, doing it all in BBEdit and then uploading, and perhaps using the online editor for minor typo corrections. Current version is 8.7.x.

On the browser front, I find myself more and more using Camino – it’s fast, and whilst it doesn’t allow all the plug-ins that Firefox does, it scores in being much faster, less of a system hog and just that little more Mac like, such as tying in to the Keychain Manager. I used to use it a bit in Firefox’s early days, before I switched to that and now with the rather bloated Firefox 2 revision, I’m back on Camino. A barrier I used to have between browsers was the bookmarks I’d accrued, is the fact that I now (finally) have all my bookmarks in the del.icio.us system, I can easily switch between browsers – between systems even – and not lose a bookmark. For e-mail I’m on the fence between Thunderbird and Mail.app, with Mail slightly winning out at the moment, but to be honest, that could be a reflection upon how much more I use various webmails and IM over a machine client based system. I’m using gmail for the record, though I prefer the old school of folders to the gmail approach, so maybe I’ll shift back to Yahoo Mail.

It’s not often that I do any kind of torrent work on my Mac, but I do play with apps every now any then. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Azureus, it’s an enormous bloat beast, and I used to just like the plan vanilla BitTorrent client, but I have to say that Transmission isn’t too bad at all, having lots of practical controls in a small tidy, package.

One thing I’ve tried to do in the last year is work on a couple of novel short story ideas I have. I’m not a writer, and I never will be, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see these ideas completed – it’d be something of personal achievement for me. After a lot of different approaches and apps from Word, to Word + OmniOutliner, to BBEdit (better), to Mariner (worse), I realised what I needed was a writing tool, not a paper based processor like Word, but something with a built in outliner and character database. Eventually I stumbled on Jer’s Novel Writer which does pretty much what I just said. It went full version one a few months ago, and I have to say it’s a very well designed and implemented solution for writing – hardly surprising given the programmer is a budding (and relatively successful)writer himself!

Some apps haven’t changed though; for audio I’m still getting a lot out of Audio Hijack Pro and Fission – I just recently imported a few cassette tapes in I found in a drawer and after playing with low pass filters, managed to get a quite impressive MP3 made from my small tape deck into my MacBook. I’m still getting a lot out of DropDMG, mainly for backups to DVD and to my Linux box, Chicken of the VNC, FFMPEGX, Flickr! Uploader, Transmit, Excel, Yojimbo and a few others. It’s surprising when I look through my application folder at how many apps I use, as I tend not to keep ones I don’t use around for very long.

One app I really want to use, but cant seem to figure out a niche for it is Comic Life – it’s well made, and simple, but I just can’t seem to make the leap to producing my own comic. Shame that.

Windows machine

The windows machine still performs two very basic functions: games, and some tinkering with things. However, as I use Windows at work, certain things leach across.

For the apps, what has changes, or been added has perhaps represented the biggest shift in a few years, as it did on the Mac. First off, I’ve started using Launchy which is like a lighter, open source version of the Mac’s Quicksilver. I’ve never used launchers much on Windows, preferring desktop icons for the very few apps I used, but this makes it so much easier to use even the apps I often forget about.

I also dropped ZoneAlarm, for a another Firewall called Comodo. There’s nothing inherently wrong with ZoneAlarm, but I just wanted a more ports, instead of app, based solution, and this does that. Be careful uninstalling ZoneAlarm – it (rightly) protects itself pretty well against uninstallation. For anti virus I’m still using McAfee, but if I was forced to chose an alternative, I’d likely go for AVG free.

I’ve also replaced RSS Owl for FeedReader, though to be honest, I wouldn’t say it was a massive improvement, but may be a nice alternative if you don’t like Java based apps. Either way, they each have their own quirks, and right no, I’m minding FeedReaders less.

It’s also been nice not having iTunes on the PC. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, and it’s the core of my music collection on the Mac, but on Windows, I just want to listen to podcasts and a few tracks, so I wanted something light. I also wanted something which could rip and encode well. As a decent solution, I’ve been using Foobar2000 for this. As a player it’s light, simple but powerful, with great encoding options and sounds very good. I tried VLC as that’s my video player of choice, but the audio sound quality was surprisingly bad! If you just want an encoder, I used to use RazorLAME. For a stand alone ripper try CDEX which I like a lot.

Not so much a replacement, but I’m (still) using Pidgin as my Windows IM client, though many still may know it more as GAIM. Personally, I like the name change, and the style change. Although some ‘open source’ projects have those weird recursive acronyms, I find things like GAIM and GIMP to just be pointless. The new direction for Pidgin with version 2 then is a marked improvement in style.

As for what has stayed, I still rate Notepad++ as a fast, simple text editor – I dropped NoteTab for this just over a year ago and don’t really miss it. Filezilla is still my FTP client of choice, and version three looks like a worthy upgrade.

I’ve kept with 7-Zip for compression issues, and still have a stack of little apps like nMap on there for various bits and pieces. For secure file storage I use TrueCrypt, and for password storage KeePass.

If you’re into this kind of thing, FreeMind is a MindMapping app which works quite well.

Aside from that, there really isn’t much on there. I’ve had DVDecrypter on there, though that’s been long since discontinued; I’ve also occasionally run 3DMark05 as a benchmarker.

Games that interest me have been few and far between recently on the PC I can tell you – I haven’t really bought anything since Darwinia over a year ago! To digress a little, this is mostly due to having two games consoles (a 360 and a Wii) in the apartment, and the other is the heavy expectation of Vista and DX10. Yes, I know it came out over nine months ago as I write (almost a year since the business versions) and indeed I’ve had the 64bit version running happily on my rig, but there’s a penalty of about 15% for games as far as I can tell – your mileage may vary (it seems like some patches have come out to address this). However, some changes, like altering the audio system and leaving Creative, through their own fault, with no working hardware EAX on pre X-Fi cards in DX10 was a definite issue as I like the positional audio, but in truth, that boat has sailed I think, as if you look at the Steam hardware ratings, the vast majority are happy with in-built audio, and yes, despite how much I like my Audigy 2 in my DX9 games, I can’t see me updating to a new card (Creative or other) when most motherboards ship with ‘HD’ surround sound chips built in. Yes, I know there’s tradeoffs, but I really think now they’re tiny nowadays compared to a few years ago in both overhead and quality.

When to cut over to Vista? I might cut over soon (Q4 2007) as I don’t play many games, and City of Heroes, my most regular game is now meant to run OK on it, so I might move to the 64bit version. I’ve been using it at work, and it’s not too bad, and it seems that a lot of developers have finally got their acts together on it.

GNU/Linux Box

I can’t remember ever having a single distro this long – almost 18 months on Zenwalk so far. As I mentioned before though, this mainly hints at certain truths: I don’t have time to tinker with it, I focussed a lot on what I really used it for, and not for what I thought I would use it for (it’s a server), and I chose a light and simple distro.

Basically then, the box is essentially running Zenwalk 4.2 (an old version), XFCE desktop, TightVNC, OpenSSH, Samba, Java for Azureus and the AvelServer software, Firefox and Pidgin for internet side things. That’s pretty much it. I either map drives to it, mainly for backups, or I SSH in to start the VNC session and then run it remotely for torrents and the AvelServer. I am though looking at replacing the rather bloated Azureus, whose version three is attempting to become a huge platform in it’s own right, with Transmission as I have on my Mac.

This might not sound like I’m a ‘Linux fan’, but I really am, it’s a great concept, the whole free software concept is, and to me, this proves it – it runs and runs and runs even with updates, and I have no problems with it. In the eight months the current version has been on there, the only problem I’ve had was the BIOS having a few issues when I tried an update, which was resolved fairly easily. It’s getting to be a very old box now – perhaps five years old and with components, which have seen some hard usage, so we’ll see how long it can last.

In Summary

I think my home computer set up has never been tighter. I obviously have more gear than some people, and a lot less than others. I’ve not got too much in the way of dead old machines and spares lying around either which keeps things more acceptable domestically! It’s working well as a day to day setup, complete with multiple backups and just a general sense of ease.

Where to go in the next few months? Well, I’m planning a couple of minor upgrades, but nothing expensive or spectacular. Perhaps at the end of the month I’ll upgrade the RAM in the Macs to 2GB if I can find a buyer for the 512s I have now, and I might upgrade the Linux box to a gigabit NIC and get a cheap gigabit switching hub to speed up some of the video file and backup transfers – right now it’s the only machine I have in daily usage which doesn’t have a gig NIC.

In the more distant future, I honestly see me ditching Windows as a seperate machine, as my gaming will all be console based, and having a Windows install as a dual boot on the MacMini or the Linux box (which would physically be the old Windows box anyway). That will leave me with a Linux server, a MacMini and the MacBook, so quote me on this in twelve months time and see if I really did it!

~v1.1 – edited for clarity – sept19-07.~
~v1.0 – initial release – sept14-07~

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Brightblack in Textpattern v2.0

July 15, 2007

Today I’ve finally switched over to the ‘version two’ of my site in Textpattern, just under a year since I put this now over ten year old site into that content management system. Here’s a review of what’s changed.

* Altered the layout to have the menu options on the right. Also altered the colour scheme.

* Upgraded Textpattern to 4.0.5 (from 4.0.4, but this is Textpattern we’re talking about).

* Renamed ‘Japan’ as ‘day to day’ and re-organised a few articles around that.

* Updated all the category mastheads and standardised the font as Diavlo. All mastheads were remade in GIMPshop.

* Added comment boxes back onto certain pages – still needs testing!

* Added Pair referral logos.

* Should now work in IE7 correctly!

* Re-added Creative Commons license.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged sitenews | Leave a Comment »

2006 Reviewed

May 1, 2007

Tech Review of 2006

It’s always hard for me as a person to even approach this annual review of my online activities without referring to those event in my *real* life; that life when I don’t sit in front of a machine.

In 2006 then, it gets summed up in one word: *baby*. My wife and I were lucky enough to receive a wonderful bundle of energized, sleeping, shouting cuteness in November preceded by nine months of my wife’s pregnancy and all the effort, concerns, preparations and excitement that event entails. I’m actually impressed I did anything on my websites in 2006, and honestly I’m impressed not just by what I did do, but that it actually useful and progressive.

Hosting

To get a nice quick one in here; still with Pair Networks. It’s been well over three years now, and as much as I often look around on Netcraft to see what’s going on with other providers, I never see anything which would make me move away from a company who has almost never let me down, and who continues to improve the scheme I’m in. Right now my ‘Advanced Account’ gets me 1.5GB od space, 800 mailboxes (I use three), 10 FTP logins, 10 MySQL databases and a host of other goodies, which keeps me happy. Their support is very good too – on the odd occasion things seemed a bit odd, their e-mail response has been incredibly quick.

If there were a second place, I suspect it would be TextDrive, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. Either way, they’re by no means the cheapest solutions around, but I still think I get a very good deal with them. You get what you pay for.

Nanikore

Nanikore I think has done well in 2006 – and now almost four years old itself! It generated some interesting commentary threads and kept it’s role not so much as a public blog, but as a notes and diary of events around me, rather than of me, if that makes sense. It’s sometimes hard for me to see where Nanikore ends and Brightblack begins, but thus far, I’m keeping them separate, though I do see a day in the next couple of years where I merge them back together, if only because of the Content Management System [CMS] I put in place for Brightblack, and because my amount of free-time is just not enough to support putting worthwhile content on two separate site. I stuck with WordPress and now see virtually no reason to move from it; I went to version 2.x at the beginning of the year (January 3rd I think) and it still keeps adding functionality and simplicity. They’ve also integrated it nicely with the spam comment killer Akismet, which is essential I as I look at the sheer volume of spam it catches – way beyond anything I could humanly police. For a bout of terror, check out their spam stats page here. One thing I do know is that all of my sites need a make-over. I’ve neglected the graphics for far too long. Maybe 2007 will be that time.

Brightblack

2006 was a big year for Brightblack on the technical side. I’d decided I needed to get it into a CMS as even though I had a pretty tight workflow on my Mac between BBEdit and Transmit FTP, and I had the CSS pretty centralised for changes, I found myself increasingly writing from lots of different locations and machines, or at least wanting to.

I satiated some of this by writing to a USB Drive and then sending it from my home Mac as usual, but that in itself became a bit irksome, if only for the fact that I kept forgetting the USB drive. In the end then, I started looking for a CMS which was fairly simple to set up, and just as importantly had decent support and friendly devs. The story is here but essentially it meant that I put all of Brightblack into the TextPattern CMS. But it’s not all about the back-end, it’s mainly about content, and again in 2006 I think I wrote some useful things. I’m not sure who exactly they’re useful for , but I certainly wrote articles which kind of explained my own thoughts whilst I was working on my own mini-projects.

Some of my favourite articles from 2006 were my Software Updates, my Review of Zenwalk 2.4 Linux which got me a link on the revered Distrowatch, my over view of new hardware, an audio recording update and the Textpattern switch. Notably, there weren’t any Japan exclusive articles (though I do have some big ones coming for 2007).

One or two things have occurred to me in the months since I moved to a CSS.

Firstly, I’m not as tempted to play with the CSS ad infinitum. This stops me tinkering and keeps me focussed on the the content side, which is good, but it does mean I’m getting rusty at CSS when the site needs a facelift.

Secondly it means I no longer make as many graphics for titles. It’s easy enough to do this, but after putting the well over 100 pages of static content, and editing them a bit (spell checking etc.) I ran out of the time on the project. Again, the beautification of the sites may have to wait till next year.

That Backend Software

As noted above, two of my main apps remain: WordPress for the blog, and http://gallery.menalto.com/ for the photos, just in higher revisions! I also added a third in TextPattern as noted, and again, it works really well. Almost five months down the road as I write, I haven’t had any problems with it, and it’s given me all the flexibility I was hoping for in choice of places to write if only for the fact that I write so much on my laptop nowadays. As some longer term browsers may notice, I have some forums up though I confess I’ve pretty much given up on phpBB, and moved on to punBB. That’s no slight to the former, just that the latter is smaller, a bit quicker and generally is a bit more spam resistant in my configuration, and yet still offers the featureset I need.

Off-line Projects

In 2006 I was excited to be asked by SoundSpectrum to elaborate on my G-Force scripting page, which I did a few years back when I was using the app as part of a light show behind some bands at charity bar gigs here in Tokyo. The result was something I was quite proud of, the only downside being that so far it hasn’t been added to SoundSpectrum’s online documentation. That’s a bit of a shame, but still, it was really interesting writing it, and playing with the app, especially since in 2006 I didn’t get any live shows in.

This year was also The Great Mac Upgrade year. This comes around every four years, or at least it did this time. I tend to start saving for my next Mac after I buy the last one, so given the cheaper Macs available now, versus four years ago when I bought my Dual G4, I was able to get an Intel Mac Mini and a MacBook. They’re both great too - analysis here. In fact it was getting these two, along with Rogue Amoeba’s Fission that meant I could get all my MiniDiscs into ALAC, and forget that format, and save some space in the cupboard.

I also found one really interesting application in Jer’s Novel Writer. For a while (years) I’ve had a few story ideas bouncing around my head, and made notes in random apps from text editors to Word to outliners, but I never found a single app which seemed to work in the quirky way my writing head did, until I found JNW. Really download it and give it a try. The author has a decent blog too.

Local Tech Notes

What else to add? I’ve been playing with Quicksilver a lot, especially on my laptop, where i can still get to everything, but without any loss in real estate. I’ve moved to LAME MP3 for audio encoding (from AAC) too. Mainly because I abandoned having all my music on my aging 3G iPod, and started using playlists only and so was freed up to improve some of my rips from 128 AAC to ’standard’ in LAME, which means they come out at about 192 kbps VBR.

On the PC, I’m still with XP SP2. I have to say, the PC has seen dwindling amounts of usage, if only for the fact that I finished a lot of my games on it, and just didn’t replenish them. I bought a Nintendo DS for myself, and I bought a Wii for my wife. Sadly, I seem to have go out of the habit of playing City of Heroes which was the mainstay of the usage my PC was seeing. Maybe that’ll change. Deep down I do wish I had more game time for CoH. I’m at lvl 32, and I’d really like to hit 50 before I quit.

On the Linux side of things, I’ll have been with Zenwalk Linux for eight months by the end of the year, so by my standards, it’s a pretty enduring Linux distro! Basically, it’s small, it’s simple and it works. It makes a great little server, sat in the corner, only being touched by the gentle hand of my SSH connection.

Games

As mentioned above, things have shifted away from the PC onto handheld consoles it seems, but not entirely. I’m still wracked with Katamari obsession on my PSP, and still soldiering on through Phoenix Wright on my DS.

I did manage to finish a few games though: Devil May Cry 2, Katamari Damacy and Me and My Katamari and FEAR spring to mind, though that’s not as many in other years. It’s a reflection of a lack of time and focus I guess.

That said, the Wii has got some heavy rotation at the end of the year, and despite graphical limitation which will become more obvious over it’s lifetime, I can tell you it’s actually *fun*. To reiterate though, I really would like to get to lvl 50 or quit City of Heroes, just to know where I stand with it.

Reading

One thing I can say about 2006 – I read some awesome books, from ‘Snow Crash’ to ‘Maus’ to ‘Get In The Van’ to ‘The Martian Chronicles’. I also managed the epic ‘Cryptonomicon’. it could have been this list of great novels which maybe got me roused to start really writing my own short stories, which is something I do actually find worthwhile.

The Future

So where now? Always a good question. Every year I hope to write a real page in Japanese, but this seems to be becoming the nanikore/brightblack version of vapourware for this site, so in a nice change, I’m not going to promise that now. See? I feel better already. One thing, and the only thing I’m really interested in is putting content up I find interesting, or more likely, clarifying to write, and maybe someone else finds it useful, or maybe it saves them some time.

In 2007, though it might be slow to start, I expect to write some things about having a baby in Tokyo, with some tips we found, but with a little more hindsight. I’m also hoping to write more about writing if that makes sense, and maybe even put a short story or two up on the web. I also need to rework my categories a bit on both sites. More than ever it seems somewhat irrelevant to have a ‘Japan’ category, so I’ll try to break that down a bit whilst avoiding a huge ’stuff’ category section.

Posted in Personal | Tagged 2006, review | Leave a Comment »

Film Micro-Reviews 2007

March 9, 2007

This is just a collection of micro-reviews of films I’ve seen. They’re likely not new films (but some may be), and most likely B Movies I found cheap in the DVD rental shop…

March 2007

The Wicker Man (1973): A very tight and well made view of the clash of beliefs, and modern sexually charged paganism in a Christian society well played by Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. _Rating_: Worth looking for IMDB.

February 2007

DOA (Dead or Alive) : A game of the movie saved by savvy producers who know people want to see hot martial arts chicks, and a bit of beach volleyball rather than hammy acting – though there’s plenty of that too. Very ‘Enter the Dragon’ meets ‘Charlie’s Angels’. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. _Rating_: Better than a kick in the shins.

Alone in the Dark : If you wondered what happened to Christian Slater, this is it. An awful, slow, boring, pretentious piece of rubbish based on a not bad video game by the infamous Uwe Boll, whose talent seems to be in persuading usually half decent actors to star in his dire films, because it certainly isn’t making them. _Rating_: Raving rabid turkey.

Posted in Personal | Tagged films, review | Leave a Comment »