The BigLig Thinks

How to install software from a CD onto a Macbook Air

2011-04-14T12:34:00.001+01:00

I had a user ask me how to install some old software on their Air that they only had on CD.

I thought I'd post my reply up here to remind myself that I actually write quite a lot for my work. (And IMHO this is rather good.)

First thing to do is to see if the software is available for download from the hardware manufacturerís web site.

You should do this anyway even if you have a Mac with an optical drive, because the CD that comes in the box is inevitably going to be out of date.

If not, then you need another machine with a CD/DVD drive. On that machine you can do one of three things:

1) Share the optical drive over the network.
Go to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1777and follow their very good instructions.

2) Make a disk image and copy it a USB stick.
Takes a little longer, but this is really useful for any optical you might need to use more than once, or when you might need to access the disk on the Air when away from the other machine.
I have a portable USB drive with all my CDís stored on it as images.
On a Mac, this is super easy.
Start Disk Utility.
Select the CD in the left hand list.
Press the New Image button.
Say where to put the image and what to call it.
Once the image is made, copy to a USB stick, then move the stick to the Air.
Double-click the image file on the Air (you can leave it on the USB stick or copy to the Air's disk) and it will mount just as if youíd put a CD in.
On Windows, there isnít a built in tool to make a disk image, but if you have CD-burning software installed it often has this as a feature. It's usually called something "Make ISO image" or "Create Image".
If not, there is a lovely little piece of free software you can use at http://alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm.
Download the appropriate version for your Windows, install it, then right-click the CD in My Computer and choose "Create Image from CD".

3) Copy the files from the CD to a USB stick
Quick and dirty.
Open My Computer or the Finder, select the files on the CD, Edit Copy, go to the USB stick, Edit Paste.
I left this method to last because sometimes software expects to be on a CD, and sometimes a Windows PC doesn't read a Mac disk very well, and so on, and so forth so it might not always work.

Hope this helps someone.

BTW, while we're on the subject, isn't the Snow Leopard reinstall tool that comes with an Air beautiful?

Week Eleven, Twenty Eleven

2011-03-20T22:38:00.001Z

This week ended with frustration and delight, so at least it wasn’t boring.

The frustration: my new watch arrived early (yay!) but on Friday, when I wasn’t at work, so it’s been locked away and I can’t get it until Monday morning. (Boo!)

The delight: checked my weight this morning and since I started my diet on Feb 3rd I have lost a stone. As I tweeted, I don’t know how much that is - never understood imperial measures - but it sounds blinkin’ impressive. A stone sounds like something serious. Even better, my target is to lose 5 stone, so I’m 20% of the way already.

I’m on Tim Ferriss’ “Slow-Carb” Diet, and it’s working well. It’s a bit dull but do-able. Sundays are the worst: you have to have one “binge day” a week where, in the words of Mr. F, you “eat total crap” all day. It stops your body thinking that you’re never going to eat again (at which point it starts hoarding fat for the long term) and helps psychologically, as every time you think “I’d kill for a Cadbury’s Creme Egg” you know that you can have one on Sunday. Sounds good right? Well, not so much. When you eat crap every day, you get used to it. When you eat crap once a week, your body does not enjoy it one little bit.

Today I ate: 2 eggs (my usual breakfast), 2 slices hot buttered toast, pineapple juice, cinnamon skinny latte with an extra shot, raspberry and almond slice, raspberry and white chocolate muffin, Cadbury’s Caramel bar, 2 slices cheese on toast, can of expensively imported American root beer, quarter of liquorice creams, two helpings of Toad in the Hole with onion gravy, can of Fanta Twist (less unpleasant than the can makes out) and a knickerbocker glory. Achieved the aim of making myself feel a little sick all right. Maybe that’s a psychological trick in itself… Certainly tomorrow I will go back to my usual boring combinations of salmon, beef, turkey, water, beans and veggies with great relish.

OK, what else this week? Spent a pleasant Saturday evening installing a new monitor in my home computer set-up, then reorganising the icons on my iPhone. Yes, I did give up drink as part of my diet. How is that relevant, exactly?

Lastly, my geek cred went up several hundred points this week when I attended a high-level meeting at Tesla’s European headquarters. Sure, it was about toilets, but it still counts. Slightly worried at how non-plussed people were to see me in a suit for those high-powered meetings. Wait until I’m thin enough to start wearing loud waistcoats again.

Next week I am on contractually obligated vacation and who knows what jinks I may get up to. High ones, I hope.

You know you've got too many apps on your iPad when...

2011-03-08T16:44:00.001Z

... you're reading an interesting article about Warren Ellis's toolkit (http://warren.ellis.usesthis.com/),and he mentions an app he likes, and you think "I could use an app like that", but iTunes won't let you buy it, because you've had it for four months, and have never opened it.

Heh...

2011-03-08T16:41:00.001Z

Nothing like telling a few people that "Oh, just google Biglig, you'll find me" to make you realise that:

a) your blog is inedible muck, and there isn't enough of it.
b) your tumblr is just reposting photos other people find. (and is the source of the majority of your Facebook and twitter posts via a robot)
c) your picassa is full of photos of you looking fat.

That should be Flickr, rather than Picassa, of course, but I'm stuck with biglig.geo (yes, I'm very old, I used to have a Geocities account) and so the curse of Yahoo strikes again.

The cleverest piece of cinema ever made, IMHO.

2011-03-05T00:34:00.001Z

SPOILERS AHEAD. Don't read this until you've seen Playtime. Don't do anything until you've seen Playtime.

Done? OK.

At the beginning of Jacqueline Tati's 1967 masterpiece, Playtime, we, the audience, are a little guilty. We know that Tati doesn't really want to make another Hulot film, but we really do want him to, and so his backers (swines that they are) have forced Playtime to be a Hulot film.

Playtime begins in a large building, and we move through it, meeting the wonderful characters who are in it, but not really paying attention because we are looking for Hulot. Of course, Hulot is not seen until quite late in Vacance or Oncle, but we are impatient. We demand Hulot! Tati knows this, so...

...very soon we are in a very wide shot of a very large room, full of people, full of characters, and then, in the back of the shot, we see the tiny figure of Hulot cross the scene. Of course, we can't see him very well, he is dwarfed in this huge space, but it is obviously Hulot: the gait, the costume, the umbrella. Hulot doesn't do anything; but we have seen him. It is a Hulot film. We relax, and now pay full attention to the other characters. Now we are no longer searching for Hulot, we really get into things. Tati knows this, so...

...very soon another wide shot in a long room, but this time we are looking at the characters, who we are enjoying, especially as we now suspect that the ninth American is the heroine, when there is a loud noise. Hulot has walked into the back of the scene again, but we didn't see him, because this time we weren't looking for him; we don't notice him until he drops his umbrella and we all look at him. The characters do too. Then he walks away, agin without doing anything. We realise with a start that we were enjoying the film without Hulot: that Tati was right all along. Tati knows this, so...

... We finally leave the building, along with the heroine, and she gets on a bus. The scene empties out, and there is Hulot again, walking past the camera and away from us. Someone sees him, chases after him and cries "Mr Hulot, hello!". We realise that Hulot's adventures are about to begin. Tati knows this so...

...Hulot turns round and it is not Hulot. It is an Englishman, Smith, who happens to be dressed like Hulot, to walk like Hulot, we have been fooled the whole time. "i think you've made a mistake" says Smith. It wasn't Hulot before, just someone dressed like him: we are right back at the beginning. We want it to be a film about Hulot but it isn't and indeed, we are fools to think that it has to be. Tati knows this so...

...soon we see the faux-Hulot get on a bus, but this time we are not fooled.we know it's not Hulot. His name is Smith. The bus makes its journey, a crowd gets off, the faux-Hulot, however, has caught his umbrella handle on someone else's umbrella, that of a tall man in a tweed coat. That's the kind of thing Hulot might do, we think, except he would be funnier, and we sigh a little, and feel a little foolish that Tati has effortlessly fooled us half a dozen times already. Tati knows this so...

...the tall man, in the tweed coat, turns round and unhooks his umbrella and gives a little bow to the faux-Hulot, and of course, how utterly perfect, it is Hulot.

What I made yesterday...

2011-01-02T13:04:00.002Z

I really need to look at the photos Instagram takes at full size more often. This one's rather good, even though I say so myself. I'm biglig on Instagram, as you'd expect. This was taken at Marsh Lock in Henley, just below the fish ladder. A lovely spot.

Lost a weekend there.

2010-12-14T01:23:00.001Z

So, what happened over the weekend I didn't post? A couple of things I don't fancy talking about here, for a start. But I did have my work Xmas party, which I enjoyed very much this year. I felt a lot more comfortable than I usually do at these things for some reason. Of course, as I age I do find this sort of social interaction gets easier and easier. Youth is wasted on the young, isn't it?

One thing I am prepared to talk about is that I have been in a bit of a slump for quite a while. This writing every day is an attempt to pull myself out of that slump. I'm trying rather a lot of anti slump methods to see what works best.

One thing I'm trying, for example, is that today I didn't have an alcoholic drink. Two weeks before christmas is the best time to cut back on the booze, don't you think?

Another is to try and be more productive at work. Today I applied my old GTD principles, and swept away a huge backlog of stuff. I slumped back a bit after lunch, but it was tremendously refreshing to zero my inboxes once again.

A third is to exercise a little more. Half an hours walk at lunch time wasn't quite enough to shake away the blahs but a lot of that was a stodgy lunch. Looks like another method suggests itself - improve my diet. I have to anyhow, because loosing some weight is another priority.

But I don't want to make the old mistake of trying to change too many habits all at once. I'm pleased with what I achieved today, little that it is: and what I want is to be so pleased most days, if I can.

Woe is me

2010-12-11T23:44:00.001Z

Missed a day, and the odd thing is I don't have a clue why - I think it just slipped my mind. And I'm going to miss today now, because i have already started this one five times now and deleted the lot immediately every single time.

Sesquipedalian, moi?

2010-12-10T00:11:00.001Z

Well, by most measures today has been an abject failure, but I did buy my Secret Santa gift for work much easier than I thought I would, and I did genuinely and correctly use the word "sesquipedalian" in an email, so it wasn't a failure by all measures. Sometimes that's all you can hope for.

Most of my failures are of no interest to anyone, although I was interested to find that I am no longer excited by the blackberry flapjacks at my favourite cafe. I thought that was too powerful and exciting a love to fade. It was the yogurt topping that got me in the end. While you're looking up sesquipedalian on Wikipedia, can you find out what yogurt topping is made out of as well? You'd think with a name like that it would be made of, well, you know, but that doesn't seem very plausible....

My blogging software ate my post!

2010-12-09T02:13:00.001Z

I intend to blame facebook, and you should too.

What had I typed... Smething about Instagram... A bit about coffee, that I cut out... Some moaning about a backlog of errands... A hardware upgrade for my mac... Well, it's late, fill the rest in yourself.

There's no such time!

2010-12-07T21:08:00.001Z

The alarm went off at seven this morning, as usual, but, fed up with running late every morning, I refused to do my usual trick of turning the Today program off and going back to sleep for "five minutes". I quite like slowly coming awake while John Humpries et al drone on in the background: the risk is always that some story will come on that sends me into a rage.
Nothing too bad today, although the usual raft of stories of people saying "I know there's no money left, but that can't possibly apply to me, because I need the money." fair enough: many of the things today sound quite good and the sort of thing my tax should reasonably be for, but I think before complaining you have to find something that costs as much as what you want to do, and campaign to have their money taken away and given to you instead.
After an hour of lying in bed pondering these deep concepts the Today program is cut off suddenly, a signal that I really need to get out of bed. At the same time my MacBook wakes up. I've never figured out why: I suspect it's Time Machine or something like that.

Bad pizza, my old nemesis...

2010-12-06T22:19:00.002Z

I shall have to be extra attentive to todays post, in order to avoid the scatological. Basically, I have spent the entire day in terror of what we affectionately refer to as "a incident". Unfortunately it turns out that low quality pepperoni is capable of great patience, and it was not until I sat down to write these very words that the horrors began.

Ahem.

Anyhow, I am increasingly worried about the snow in Maidenhead - or rather the lack of it. We had a centimetre or two last week, and since then nothing. It didn't even lie for more than a day or so - a heavy overnight downpour washed it all away.

This is a good thing, of course, but with the TV news each night filled with wall to wall "Britain in snow chaos" stories I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Last year I woke up one morning to see the (upstairs) bedroom windows covered in snow, and concluded that the house was buried and we were doomed. As it turned out it was just some energetic wind blowing snow onto the windows: but it still seems like it could be a possibility.

An early night, now, to rest and recover my strength for tomorrow. I have a week coming up of appointments that can come to no good for me, and need to be at my full powers. Alas, these days my full powers barely last the 24 hours of Green Lantern, and are getting closer to those of Hourman. (Whose powers last an hour. Obviously. I mean, I know the comic book references I favour are pretty obscure, but that one is kinda easy.)

Freezing Fog

2010-12-06T02:12:00.002Z

Boy, that's not fun to drive in on it's own, but when you've got some %$#* behind you not giving you a safe distance...

A day of sleep, work, bad pizza, new sexy gloves, and more Left 4 Dead. I'll hopefully write more tomorrow, although since I'm posting this in the early hours, I'm not sure that counts properly.

A question to leave you with: is it just men who, when alone in a building and needing a pee, are inexorably drawn to the other sex's toilets? Or is it universal? Or is it just me? Or is it just you?

Bleargh

2010-12-04T22:23:00.003Z

A completely uninspiring day, spent eating cheese or bacon sandwiches and playing Left 4 Dead (finding that is now available for Macs is my Christmas present to myself). Which means a wasted weekend, since I haven't bought any christmas presents for anyone else.

At least the snow is gone, washed away by last nights downpour. But it's still cold, and I think I should have an early night, while there's still plenty of heat in the house.

00Sole

2010-12-03T19:45:00.001Z

I don´t carry no pistol
I don´t wear a false mustache
And you´ll never see me carrying
Around a little black bag.

Yes, Edwin Starr's "Double-Oh-Soul" is the soundtrack to this post. I came across it, as well as many astonishing tracks, by discovering that John Lennon was the worlds first iPod owner. OK, technically not an iPod. It was a Kloster-Brandes Diplomatic portable jukebox. He bought it in 1965, loaded it with forty vinyl singles and took it on tour.

You can buy a CD that is close to what he filled it with, although I've had a lot of fun trying to replicate it in an Spotify playlist.

Ah, though, my relationship with the Beatles is a tricky one. You see, I am a firm believer in the Kirk/Picard theory of art. You either like Kirk better, or Picard better, and there is no-one IN THE WORLD who likes them equally. I am a Kirk man, and will be to my dying days: you might say "Graham, would you prefer to come to my dinner party where I've invited William Shatner, or my party where I've invited Patrick Stewart@, and of course I'd chose to come to the one with Sir Patrick, (after first checking that there were no third parties on offer with James Doohan or Wil Wheaton, of course) but I still remain a Kirk man, not a Picard man.

But this is where I went wrong. I am, and always have been (steady!) a Roy Orbison fan. The sort of fan who has actually listened to Laminar Flow all the way through, for goodness sake. (It's not as bad as you think, you know.) Now, given that as a premise, the obvious conclusion is that in the Elvis/Beatles pairing, I'd be a Elvis fan. Obvious.

And I spent years assuming this must be true until I finally got around to actually listening to both of them, when, to my chagrin, I discovered that I am a Beatles fan. What are the odds?

Even better, it fits in with my "second/third album with creative control" theory, which is that the second album where a pop artist gains creative control is the real masterpiece, not the third one that everyone else thinks is a masterpiece. I mean, the Dreaming is better than Hounds of Love, and Revolver is better than Sargeant Pepper.

(It suddenly occurs to me that this theory implies that Listen Without Prejudice is better than Older. I think I'd better think it out again...)

P.S. The typo in this post's title is, of course, a call out to that great American writer, Mr. Bob Burden. Yes, you'll have to read his entire back catalog to get the reference, but you'll be a better human being for it, so it is allowed.

Insanity defined

2010-12-03T05:35:00.001Z

If insanity is doing the same thing again and again, while all the time expecting different results, then why do I keep trying to Install Linux?

I don't want this blog to be as techie as it has been before, but seriously, why do I keep trying it?

I have a 5 year ThinkPad running the latest CentOS ( i.e. rebadged RHEL) and the wireless doesn't work. I won't go into the boring details of why, and for gods sake don't send me three pages of terminal commands that will make it work. Just keep an eye out for any signs I'm thinking of trying Linux again, and slap me with linuxhaters.blogspot.comuntil I stop.

Sorry if I'm grumpy, I did my old trick of not eating lunch at the proper time and only then remembering I have a 4:30 meeting. That's a habit I've got to replace, for sure. As is only having cough sweets in my emergency food drawer at work.

P.S. I wrote this yesterday but forgot to actually publish it, so it still counts as writing something every day, honest.

Normal Service being disrupted

2010-12-01T15:04:00.003Z

The blog is going to be all over the place today. First, I'm retooling the theme again: I wanted something plainer.

However, the biggest disruption to normal service is that I am PUBLICLY COMITTING to writing on my blog every day in December.
The reason is that I have decided there are seven important new habits I'd like to acquire, and one of them is writing every day. Acquiring this is a solved problem. The others will not be so easy.

I suppose this is a reaction to the spectacular failure of this years NaNoWriMo attempt - even worse than last years this time. I have some ideas about how to do better next year and one of those is writing every day. I also need to work on writing longer form pieces. Thats really the problem, I burn through my ideas at short story length, and when I try longer works it falls apart.

I also shut down my two other blogs - the material I was posting there can easily be rolled into here. One more bit of administrivia: just found a hideous bug in my new iOS blogging software, hurrah! When you save an online draft it fires off the Twitter and Facebook notification process.

That was all very meta: we can only hope and pray that I get less boring as the days of December pass by.

Lastly, this week's "Oh dear god, how can I be this old?" moment. James Darren, who played Jim Corrigan in TJ Hooker, is Seventy Four years old. You remember him, his character was Heather Lockyear's partner. The one who was obviously older than Adrian Zmed, but not so much that he can be Seventy-Four without the inevitable conclusion that I am a very old man.

Of course, the fact that i'm talking about TJ Hooker in the first place is all the clue anyone needs to conclude that.

I may quite possibly be a genius..

2010-03-29T16:19:00.002+01:00

Decided to make some Sultana Muffins today, to distract myself from something, and, exasperated by the things I didn't have in the store cupboard, made up my own recipie.

I wasn't expecting much, but these are without doubt the best muffins I have ever tasted.

Preheat an oven to 200°C

Cut 75g of butter into dice and put in a Microwaveable container. Nuke for about 30 seconds to melt. (Once most of it is melted just swirl it round to melt the rest. Set to one side.

In a large bowl mix together 250g self-raising flour, 75g caster sugar, 3 teaspoons baking powder, one 27g sachet of microwave porridge oats, and about 250g of sultanas.

In a large jug whisk together 200ml of semi-skimmed milk, 1 egg, and the melted butter.

Now pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and combine with a spoon. Stir enough to get rid of any pockets of dry ingredients, but no more. It is supposed to look that lumpy.

Spoon the batter into a 6-muffin silicone baking tray.

Bake for 20 minutes.

iPhone apps midi-review – Birdhouse and TweetDeck

2009-10-02T15:47:00.003+01:00

I’m in the middle of preparing a huge post that lists all the apps I have on my new iPhone after the first month, but there’s a few I wanted to talk about with a little more detail than I’ll have room for. I’ve got sixty-eight apps on there at the moment, so they’re going to be lucky if they get two sentences each in the big review!

The first two are my Twitter apps, TweetDeck and Birdhouse.

Now, everyone loves Twitter, but isn’t two apps for it a bit over the top? Well, not really, because they’re both specialist apps that focus on different things.

Tweetdeck specialises in reading Twitter, especially for those (like me) who follow too many people.

In regular use, it looks like an ordinary Twitter client – a list of the latest tweets from all the people you follow. But if you swipe sideways, or push the columns button at the bottom, you get a different list of tweets that meet some rule you have defined.

For example, you could have a column with just the tweets from the celebrities you follow, or a column of the real people. You could have a column of all the tweets containing a particular phrase or word. (I have a column of tweets including the words “Exchange Server Down” which is really just pure schadenfreude on my part).

Essentially it lets you have a two-tier system. I still want to follow everyone that I do, but there are some groups of tweets I’m particularly interested in, and want to be able to quickly filter the list to just those. Tweetdeck lets me do that.

One particularly nice feature, by the way, is that it syncs my columns with the cloud, so I can see the same columns with Tweetdeck on my Mac as I do on my iPhone. Unfortunately the iPhone version, unlike the desktop versions, only does Twitter, and not Facebook. However, the iPhone Facebook client is pretty good, so I can wait for them to add this.

Birdhouse specialises in writing Twitter, especially for those (like me) who want to write more carefully.

While the traditional criticism of Twitter is that it’s just people writing about what they had for lunch, some people put more effort in. They write things that they hope are funny, or interesting, and to do this properly you need to be able to write drafts and edit them. Birdhouse does this. You type in a potential tweet, and it saves it. You can come back to it later, and revise it. You can rate it with marks out of five, and when you’re happy with it, you can send it out to the world.

That’s all Birdhouse does, and many people find this confusing. “A Twitter client that you can’t read Twitter with?” they cry. But, silly as it sounds to agonize over 140 characters, if you want

to improve the quality of your tweets, you need a place to keep them while you work on them.

Besides, if I really want to tell the world what I had with lunch, with photos, then Tweetdeck can handle that.

I just can't stop watching this...

2009-09-29T22:58:00.002+01:00

I mean, it's just... I think it... oh for goodness sake, just watch the bloomin' thing, will you?

They didn't rehearse the bit near the end where they jump over each other down the staircase: they just knew what they wanted, and did it.

Why modern life is fantastic.

2009-09-27T23:27:00.004+01:00

While I'm very proud to be a geek, there is one minor issue.

You see, I happen to be a - mostly lapsed - member of the special category known as the "Math Geek". Now, it's irritating enough that this uses outrageously American spelling, but the worst of it is that we are all supposed to like Bach. Yes, yes, he used numerical sequences in his work. Heard of rhythm? It's maths, and they all bloomin' well used it, but as part of their art.

And you know what takes the biscuit in all this? I do like Bach.

So, why modern life is fantastic: Herbert von Karjaran. Conducting Bach's Mass in B Minor. With the Vienna Philharmonic - who had to use the beautiful assumed name "Orchester der Gesellshaft der Musikfreunde in Wien" because of office politics! Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the Soprano. It's even recorded in Abbey Road!

Surely such an exquisite recording costs a King's ransom? Or could it be just £3.16 on Amazon MP3? I paid the money before starting this post, and the music will be on my iPod before I finish it.

Fantastic.

Celebrity

2009-09-25T18:25:00.003+01:00

I thought it might be interesting to share a list of ten "famous" people I've seen over the years, and what they were up to at the time.

I think it only fair not to include people who I saw just because they were working, so Her Majesty the Queen, Mayor Boris Johnson, Elvira, and Baron Bingham of Cornhill, KG, PC, QC, FBA are sadly missing from this list.

Jo Brand, who was ordering a curry.
Paul Daniels, who was trying to run me over in his car.
Geoffrey Howe, who was eating dinner.
Michael Jackson, who was behind me in the queue in WH Smiths. I have long since become accustomed to the fact that no-one will ever believe this, or even consider it plausible.
Ben Kingsley, who was going to Venice on the train.
Michael Portillo, who was trying to run me over in his official ministerial car. Actually, as a taxpayer, technically he was trying to run me over in MY car.
Phillip Schofeld, who was trying to run me over in his car. It says much about his qualities that he alone, upon realising he had missed, took the time to reverse and try again.
Shaun Scott, who was having a pint. He was in the Bill! Yes, I know everyone's been in the Bill, but he was an Inspector and everything.
Antony Worrall-Thompson, who was evaluating carrots in Waitrose.
Paula Yates, who was buying shoes.

I also saw an incredibly famous footballer once, having a jewellery store closed, but despite who he was being explained to me for at least 20 minutes I still haven't the faintest idea which one it was.

Rebuilding my Asus eeePC

2009-09-23T16:36:00.004+01:00

My tiny blue Asus eeePc has been sadly neglected lately, but I recently decided to start making better use of it, because my 17" Macbook Pro is rather bulky to keep carrying from the kitchen table, to my office, to bed.

However, the copy of Ubuntu NBR I'd installed before was a bit out of date, and using a bit too much disk space to update itself, and having a networking issue that my Linux skills aren't up to solving, so I thought I'd switch to XP.

First, I replaced the 512Mb memory with 1Gb, so as to be sure the machine wouldn't be sluggish.

Next, I copied a Windows XP CD to my Windows 7 laptop, and ran nLite over it. This impressive software takes the XP install media and alters it in many ways. In this case, I was stripping everything I don't need out. There's only a 4Gb SSD in the eeePC, so no room to leave the Hungarian keyboard settings file around "just in case".

nLite did an impressive job - even after adding in all the Asus drivers (another cool feature of nLite), the resulting XP installer was about half the regular size. I burnt this to a CD-R, popped it into a USB CD-ROM drive, went into the eeePC BIOS and told it to install an OS, and boot from the CD) and started it going.

After a couple of false starts (which turned out to be a bad USB CD-ROM drive!!) I was able to install XP. Very plain looking (I have all the eye candy either removed or turned off) but perfectly functional, fast, and with plenty of space left on the SSD hard drive for some software. The main use of this device will be Web Browsing, and I decided to install Chrome on it. Google are eyeing up the Netbook market for Chrome OS, so the Chrome browser is heavily optimised for these devices, and indeed it runs a treat. Very fast, and the maximised and full screen settings make good use of the tiny 800x480 screen on the EEEPC.

What else? Rocketdock and Launchy put a little bit of eye candy back, mostly to make it easier to launch applications with the Start menu hidden to save space. As usual, Evernote, Spotify, and DropBox clients give me access to (and local copies of) my data from the cloud. Picassa so I can upload photos when travelling using the built-in card reader.

A new thing I'm trying is a copy of AbiWord in case I want to write some blog posts etc. while offline. My local Starbucks doesn't have WiFi, darn it. I don't need a full office suite, and I remember I liked AbiWord back in the early days of dabbling in Linux, so I thought I'd give it a go. I might put VPN software and Office communicator on so I can make work calls from it in an emergency. And I suppose a couple of games might end up on there too.

On the whole, I'm pretty pleased so far with how this rebuild has turned out. Now to stress test it and see how useful I find it.

Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 2

2009-09-19T09:02:00.002+01:00

Well, that was simple enough, although the Erase and Install option was a little obscure. (Boot rom the DVD, Utilities menu, start Disk Utility, Erase, then install as usual.)

I have Safari, Mail, Textedit, Evernote, Tweetdeck, and iPhoto working. (The other app I use a lot, calibre, is not updated for Snow Leopard quite yet, but I can live without it for a while.)

The rest I'll put back slowly as I need it - that way I make sure I don't have a lot of stuff I don't really use.

Moving to Snow Leopard Part 1 - Backup

2009-09-18T13:27:00.004+01:00

So, I got my shiny new Snow Leopard DVD last weekend, and now it's time to upgrade.
First Cardinal Virtue of the sysadmin being Paranoia, I begin with some backups.

Backup #1
I already have Time Machine backing me up to one half of my 512Gb External USB hard disk, so I make sure that is up to date.
Backup #2
I use the essential Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Mac's Hard drive to the other half of my 512Gb USB disk. This has the advantage of being bootable, so in the event of any trouble I can just boot my Mac with the apple key held down and I'm back to Leopard with everything in place.
Backup #3
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a second clone of my Mac to a Disk Image saved on my other external USB hard disk, the mostly empty 1Tb I'm planning to use to store Media backups on.
Backup #4
I copy my User folder to the 1Tb disk as well. Since I plan to build a new clean Snow Leopard install, rather than upgrade in place, this will be where I go and get my data from to copy it back.
Backup #5
More a theoretical backup than an actual action, but all my really critical data (apart from media) has copies in the cloud, via Google, Evernote, and DropBox.

I'm pausing now to think if there's any way I can make a sixth backup. What can I say - I'm very virtuous.

First impressions of the iPhone 3G

2009-08-30T22:18:00.002+01:00

These were never going to be earth shattering, of course, since I already have a first-gen iPod Touch, so my new 3gs is basically that, with a phone, a microphone, a camera, a GPS, a compass, mobile internet, a fatter bum, a grease-resistant screen, and a faster processor.

Actually when I write it like that it sounds like a lot. Anyhoo, let's begin.

Very easy to set up. I charged it for 3 hours, plugged it into iTunes, answered a few questions, and it started syncing. I immediately stopped it so I could tweak what it was syncing (a while back my music library grew to the point where I have to use a series of interlocked playlists to decide what to sync to the iPod), then started again. 20Gb of data later, and half a dozen text messages from O2 later, it was ready.

Physical impressions: bigger, but this actually makes it more comfortable to hold. It still (just!) fits into an official apple iPod sock, which will be acting as a case until I can find one I like in the shops. I'm not yet decided if I want a slipcase or one with a belt clip. I miss the old Blackberry belt clip cases, but my last two only had a slipcase, and I wonder if I've gotten too used to that way of working.

The screen looks richer, and it does pick up grease less than the Touch did.

The weirdest thing about it, coming from a touch, is that it has a speaker. It keeps giving me unexpected audio feedback. For example, it makes a Wolverine-style "snickt" sound whenever I lock or unlock it.

The second weirdest thing, is the extra buttons for the volume control and ringer switch; followed closely by the headphone jack being at the top.

The headphone controls, and voice command, are cool and work well so far.

Also: the UK charger is impossibly small. I thought the international charger I had for the touch was small, but the iPhone is just a regular plug head with a USB socket in it.

All my apps run well, and the speed increase is noticeable, although I didn't really have any that were too slow on the Touch .

The camera seems to work well, based on a few test shots - I'll take some more and send them to my computer tomorrow and take a good look. I think the fact that I can use applications to process them after taking is going to be significant.

I like how it handles data. It was showing an E when I first turned it on, which is worrying as I should be in good range of a HSPDA/3G signal, but as soon as I configured my WiFi, it stopped that and routes all data thru the WiFi. It turns out that this actually saves battery, as WiFi data needs less juice than 3G data; if the device is going to be out of range of WiFi for a while it;s worth turning off, but otherwise I should have it connected to a LAN as much as possible.

Last thought: I think I'm going to need *another* dock. That will bring me to:

Charging Dock in the bedroom.

Charging Dock in the work office.

Charger + cable in my bag.

Sync cable attached to my Mac.

We'll see: the charger in my bag might do for work, but a dock is so much simpler.

My history with pocket computers

2009-08-30T17:58:00.002+01:00

I thought it might be an opportune moment, as my latest toy gets it’s first charge, to recount my history with that strange, now forgotten, genre of electronic device, the PDA.

The first PDA I spent any time with was a borrowed Palm III. A work colleague had one - having just came to us from 3COM, who owned Palm at the time - so I borrowed it for a week to see if I liked it. Alas for my wallet, I loved it, and pretty soon I had bought my own.

That must have been about 20 years ago... Strangely enough, it wasn't my first mobile device. While I was still at school, my incredibly cool parents had bough me a Casio fx-702p. It had 2K of RAM, a single line display, and ran BASIC programs. I've still got it in a drawer somewhere.

Over time I rapidly progressed thru a series of devices. The Psion 5mx was an astounding machine, still the best keyboard in a mobile device, but just too darn big - I needed something that would fit in a shirt pocket.

The best was probably the Palm m500, my last monochrome device until, not long ago, I bought a Sony eBook reader. When I read my first book on the Sony, I suddenly realized why I had stopped reading eBooks at the same time as I stopped using the m500 - color screens were never as pleasant on the eyes as they were with a non-backlit mono screen. Tempted as Amazon no doubt are to make a color Kindle, they should bear this fact in mind.

It was the Sony Ericsson P900 that made me realize the PDA was doomed to be replaced by the smartphone. The P900 had enormous flaws, but I could take (awful!) photos, and post them to flickr (slowly and expensively!) all with a single device. And it made phone calls too.

My last true PDA was a Dell Axim X50. Like every Windows Mobile, it made me nostalgic for the days when Windows Mobiles had crappy hardware, because now they have great hardware, you realize how truly crappy the software is.

And then it was an endless series of Blackberries for mobile data, and an endless series of iPods for media playback. As soon as the iPhone came out, I knew I would end up with one. My brief time with the P900 had made me realize that carrying two devices about was only worth doing if you couldn’t get one device that did everything you needed.

Following Stephen Fry’s advice (as all geeks should), I exerted all my will power and waited until the third iteration, and in a couple of hours it will be charged enough for me to turn it on for the first time.

Someone tried to make a Palm III emulator for iPhone a while back, but it never came to anything. It ran at 450% of normal speed, you see, so it wasn’t the same.

How Spotify has changed how I listen to music

2009-05-21T21:08:00.003+01:00

Not to long ago I found out about Spotify, the online music steaming service. It's ad-driven, or you can pay £10 a month to have it ad-free, and you can listen to what you want.

The thing is, that so far, I haven't been able to not find something on Spotify. I know they don't have everything, but I have never thought "Oooh, I should listen to that on Spotify" and not had it playing within 20 seconds.

To the delight of copyfighters everywhere, this source of endless free music has, of course, meant that I buy more music. Let me explain with an example:

Recently I heard a song on the radio I really liked. Stupid DJ didn't name it, but I remembered enough of the lyrics for Google to be able to find it. "It Happens" from "Love on the Inside" by Sugarland, if you care.

Of course, it's on Spotify, so I could spend a week listening to the whole album as much as I liked, on my Mac at home or my PC at work (roll on the iPhone version!).

I eventually decided that I like it a lot: a few clicks on iTunes (after checking if it was cheaper on Amazon, of course) and it was bought.

Evernote for Blackberry Review

2009-05-12T10:41:00.005+01:00

First off, if you're not familiar with Evernote, it's a software notebook, allowing you to keep all the little scraps of information you collect in one computerised (and hence searchable) place. Evernote stores your data in the cloud, so you can access it from any web browser, or by using client software on your PC or Mac. You can get a free account with discrete advertising, or pay a little every month to get more storage and no adverts. I got into Evernote after both the Microsoft solutions I'd been using to keep notes in failed me miserably. (OneNote destroying all my data was the last straw!) With a cloud based product, I have copies of my data not just in the cloud but also cached locally in the client software. You can also do neat things like sending an email to your notebook.
Evernote have had an iPhone client for some time now, and we Blackberry users have been eyeing it with longing.
Although using the Evernote web client on the Blackberry works well, one of the most interesting features in Evernote is that it can store pictures as notes, and will transcribe any text in them. You can upoload photos you've taken with the BB using the web client, but it requires quite a few steps. In the iPhone client, you start Evernote, press a button, and take a photo. Hence the longing from the Crackberry addicts.
So, how does the Blackberry client shape up? They've made some unexpected design choices, and it suffers from RIM's hideous process for installing software, but it does exactly what I need it to, and I'm really glad to have it.
When Evernote announced the BB version yesterday, they provided a link, but just a link to install RIM's new app store, the Blackberry App World. Since I already have App World, it took me a minute to figure out that I was going to have to search for it myself, especially since such a search failed to find it. A search on the messageboards found that some people could find it and others couldn't - new software seems to comes onto App World slowly. (Which is deeply wierd from a technical perspective. Maybe they push it to one server and it takes time to replicate to the others?)
After an overnight wait the software appeared in my instance of App World, and I hit the download button. Evernote downloaded, asked me a technical question about trusting the app. I ran the app, and it asked me if it could use the network. Then it said there was a newer version, and took me to Evernotes web site to downlaod it OTA. So I downloaded it again. It asked me an even more technical question about overwriting the old app. Once it was downloaded, I ran it again. It asked me if it could use the network. I said yes. Then it asked me again. Then again. Then, for variety, it asked me if it could use Location services. As I said, hideous.
I suspect that RIM, like almost everyone else, thinks that the iPhone sells so well because of the big screen, without realising the real reason: if the Apple App Store had a user experience like the Blackberry App World, Steve Jobs would have fired everyone involved, and indeed anyone else who passed his office that day.
Once the client is installed, though, it works well. Interestingly, it is not a full client like the Mac, PC, or even the iPhone version, but a sort of intelligent front-end to the web interface. Capturing a new note happens in the client, but reading an existing note takes you seamlessly to the web client. If you're blackberry is offline you can't read existing notes, but you can capture new ones, which will sync up to the cloud once you reconenct to the network. This might be a deal-breaker for some, although in my case I also have the iPhone client running on my iPod Touch, so if I'm offline but desperately need some info from my notebook, I have a cached copy.
Apart from that, it just works. It suffers a little from that common problem with Blackberry software, in that parts of the user interface are hidden until you press the menu button. I spent a while when creating my first note baffled because I couldn't see the button to say "I'm finished, save this note" until I remembered it was a Blackberry, pressed the Menu Key, and saw the Save option there.
As I mentioned above, my main reason for wanting the Blackberry client was to make it easy to create photo notes. This is certainly the case - taking and uploading a photo couldn't be easier.
I hadn't realised - because I run the iPhone version on my 1st generation Touch which doesn't have microphone support - that Evernote on phones supports Audio notes as well, which could be very useful. The BB client can even upload PDF or other documents, a feature present in the regular client. I'm not sure how useful that is in a mobile device though.
Overall, then, I'm very pleased. My various complaints above are minor inconveniences compared to how much more useful Evernote now is for me.
Evernote is at evernote.com

On America

2009-03-24T20:48:00.002Z

When I grew up in Britain, America seemed like an impossibly magical far-away place that you could only see on TV.

I suppose kids nowadays with cheap holidays in Florida don't feel the same, but to me, something as simple as a Dairy Queen is exotic and fascinating.

(While I'm sure that a British McDonalds Creme Egg McFlurry could - just! - hold it's own against an American Dairy Queen Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard, there's a glamour there still.

On my last trip to the US, my American colleagues were astounded at my reaction to a normal American School Bus.

My trip to London (see point 9 for why it looks wierd)

2009-03-02T11:55:00.004Z

http://twitpic.com/1rs68 - I'm forever passing Slough railway statio, but have never gotten off the train here.10:49 AM Mar 1st from TwitPic
Eurostar sheds look like giant greyhound traps. Wonder why they need so many? I count at least 21,and you'd expect both ends to be the same.11:18 AM Mar 1st from TwitterBerry
@sniffyjenkins I have beat your friend who reads a book while walking - a guy walking in front of me is watching a DVD on a portable player!11:25 AM Mar 1st from TwitterBerry
http://twitpic.com/1rsoo - I always take the bus in London, not the tube; the view is better. On a Sunday sometimes you get a bus to you ...11:38 AM Mar 1st from TwitPic
& more questions. Why the queue outside the Applestore? How can phone shops in Oxford Circus survive? Why is only 1 of those 6 girls a goth?about 24 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Everytime @zoecello posts a tweet, I happen to be listening to her music. Sweeping my iPod for sophistcated Soviet listening devices.about 24 hours ago from TwitterBerry
In the offices at the back of the Adelphi, everyone has a little cardboard sign on their PC monitor with their name. Baffling.about 24 hours ago from TwitterBerry
http://twitpic.com/1rtp6 - When I win the lottery, I have the flat I'll buy picked out, and the Stamford Arms will then be my local.about 23 hours ago from TwitPic
Apologies to any followers alarmed by my sudden locquacity. I'm using Twitter to write a blog post about my day, 140 characters at a time.about 23 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Sitting under the stairs in the Stamford Arms (a favorite spot) wishing the sausages the bloke next to me is eating didn't smell that good.about 23 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Just had a startling idea about self portraiture, a way to use a mirror without having the camera in the photo. Testing in the pub loo, erk.about 23 hours ago from TwitterBerry
http://twitpic.com/1ruix - Since I saw that documentary about how illegal hotdog vendors pee in an old oil bottle, it's not the same.about 22 hours ago from TwitPic
Two men just walked past, each carrying an exactly to scale Morph. Nothing but questions and mysteries today. Next up: where to (for lunch)?about 22 hours ago from TwitterBerry
More questions: a helicopter flys past, towing a giant advertising kite. How is that a) legal and b) not fatal? Would twitpic but it'd suck.about 22 hours ago from TwitterBerry
@knellr (Who had just tweeted me that the Morphs were for a Tony Hart Memorial Flash Mob at the Tate modern) How glorious! The culture secretary could easily make up for recent faux pas by ordering a "Tony Hart Room" at the National Gallery.about 21 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Tired, so heading home in time to miss dinner. One last question occurs: why doesn't Paddington Station have more chairs?about 19 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Happy hunting in Amerind, Kickaha.

2009-02-25T22:07:00.003Z

You know you have those idle daydreams about which character you'd play if you found a billion dollars and used it to made a movie of your favorite book? Well, in World of Tiers I'd play Wolff, because even in my daydreams I'm not cool enough to play Paul Janus Finnegan.

To write one series of books that moves and inspires a grumpy old bugger like me is something.

He wrote at least half a dozen.

Why the Internet is awesome, part 147

2009-02-22T14:38:00.003Z

So, for ages now, I've loved an astounding version of "Puttin' on the Ritz", performed by Fred Astaire and a terrific Jazz band, more modern . (I now know it's from the 1952 sessions he did with Oscar Peterson and the best contract musicians of Verve.) Wanted to a) buy it and b) buy more of the same, but how to work out what album it is on?
Then in the car today, "Top Hat and Tails", obviously from the same sessions, was on, and as I arrived at work I was very cross. How to solve this problem?
Then a thought. I've recently signed up for the UK version of Spotify. It's a service that let's you stream music: very good selection, ad supported unless you subscribe. My iPod goes everywhere I do, so I don't have much use for it; I mainly use it when I'm considering buying an album - I just pop it onto Spotify and I can have a good listen, decide if I want it or not.
What if I listen to every version of "Puttin' on the Ritz" on Spotify until I find the one I want?
And low and behold. Fred Astaire's Finest hour, a highlight of the 18 best tracks from the session: which is enough information to give me the session information, which is enough information to find The Astaire Story, which is the whole 38 tracks.
Now I just need to figure out which one I want to buy!
I suppose that if I'd thought of this method sooner, I could have probably done something similar to this with an iTunes search. But the Internet is still awesome.

How I'm Getting Things Done - Feb 09 version

2009-02-20T19:05:00.002Z

I keep trying to use GTD in my daily life, but I do find it hard - perhaps because I'm too overloaded, although more likely I'm just not doing it right. But here's my current implementation. It's half electronic, half paper - every time I try using software to keep my lists I eventually give up and get back to index cards.
Capture
I have a cheap Buxton index card holder (like a Levenger pocket briefcase, only 10% of the price!) that carries blue index cards (blue cards=capture), and a Pilot G-2 (violet ink, of course!) that goes in my pocket or bag. I got the card holder in a supermarket in New Jersey - I've never seen a UK stationary supplier stock anything like it. A pity, since I'd really like to get something bigger that held index cards in the same way, but also had a pen loop and credit card slots so I could use it as a wallet. Then I'd be sure to always have it with me. Levenger do one, of course, but not cheap, especially when you factor in shipping.
A stack of blue cards and pens sits on my desk for customer walk-ins, phone calls, or random ideas.
I also have a Blackberry Bold that I can use for capture if I need to capture a photo or if I run out of cards, by emailing myself.
Inboxes
I have three. A physical tray on my desk, my work inbox, and all the items in my work ticketing system that are in "assigned" state.
There are some other places that I check occasionally and move what I find there into the physical tray.
Lists
I have an standard plastic index card box with section dividers for Next Actions, Projects, waiting on/agenda, and someday/maybe. I also have a smaller box for travelling.
I use color coded cards here too. Red is next actions; yellow is projects and someday maybe (things fluidly move between the two categories) and green is waiting on/agenda. The yellow cards get ticket numbers written on them when they represent a ticket in "working on" state. The green cards get the name of the person or meeting. If I have multiple items against a person they share a card so it's easier to cover everything, but red and yellow cards get one idea per card.
You'll notice I don't use contexts - turns out all my work is in the same context, so really it's just one big context (@working, I suppose).
I hit upon a neat way to associate a next action with the project it's part of - I use a paperclip to pin the yellow behind the red. Sometimes multiple yellows, as often I need to do one action to move forward on several projects. Sometimes I clip the yellow behind a green because the project is stalled waiting on someone. On the occasions where I have multiple actions on a project, I just pin all the reds in front of the yellow.
Calendar
I use Outlook's calendar, synced to my blackberry
Other stuff
Project support materials - if there's paper (rare), it goes in a manilla file in a holder on my desk. If it's electronic, it goes on my desktop (I use stardock's fences to group by project - great little bit of software) Old material goes in a file drawer, or in a zip file on the server.
Reference material is kept in evernote, synced to the cloud and hence my blackberry (roll on the proper evernote client for blackberry, but the web client is adequate)
My "to read" pile goes on the holder for the manilla files, since it's always empty.
I have a stack of out of date plain pads I use for scratch paper. Anything I need to keep goes into the inbox
Lastly, I keep two plastic folders; the a4 one is used for that old David Allen trick of dealing with interruptions by sweeping everything on your desk into a folder, and the a5 one is used to collect receipts etc. when travelling.

I thought these were just in cartoons

2009-01-16T14:13:00.000Z

An actual one ton weight, used to counterbalance the lock gates at St Catherine's dock.

What's worse than overcharging?

2009-01-11T14:17:00.002Z

Not letting me buy it either.

After the iTunes Music Store DRM changes my copy of iTunes popped up and said "do you want to upgrade this stuff you already bought to iTunes plus". I looked at what it was listing, figured that it was pretty much all stuff I really liked and so pulled the trigger on the upgrade. All very seamless. I subsequently learned that if I'd only wanted to upgrade some of it I'd be totally out of luck - it's an all or nothing deal.

But then I noticed that it didn't include one album I've bought not on iTunes but on my iPod Touch. They've got it in iTunes Plus format, in fact it's on special offer for £3.95 at the moment. But there doesn't seem to be a way to upgrade it.

Unless I buy it again. But not only is that a rip-off, it's on the Amazon MP3 store for £3. Including four bonus tracks.

So that's the obvious way to upgrade. But I resent buying stuff twice. Sigh, my own stupid fault. I know how incredibly bad DRM is, but bought it anyway.

By the way, now the Amazon MP3 store is working in the UK, I gotta say wow. It's cheap, it is only very slightly less easy to use than iTunes, no DRM. The only reason iTunes is selling anything is that only the geeks know about Amazon MP3.

Except iTunes does have slightly more stuff, so I just bought something off there that I've been searching for in vain for years. Sigh again. But this one at lease I made sure was DRM-free before I started.

But... It's freezing!

2008-12-10T12:54:00.000Z

It's so cold it hurts my fingers to type this post outside, but leaving the house this morning there was a bumble bee nonchalantly buzzing in the garden.

Mind you, my Canadian boss reports that this morning he can't see out of his office windows because they are covered in sheets of ice.

Another rant!

2008-12-05T12:31:00.002Z

I'm not an ogre; design is hard. But when people aren;t even trying... I have a shiny new wireless telephone headset, a Jabra GN9350. Lovely sound quality, and it's super cool that I can use it with my landline and with my VoIP software. As you can see here, the charging stand has two buttons on either side. Press the left to use VoIP, press the right to use POTS. Easy.

Each button has a blue LED under it that lights up to show which mode the headset is in. This is useful to know. One of the phones rings, you glance at the stand to see if you have to change mode, and away you go. Except for one thing. You can only see the LED if you're at an angle of less than about 65 degrees to it. And if you put it flat on a desk, and then sit at it, you're at an angle of 70 degrees.

30 seconds of being used by someone over 5'8" is all it takes to spot this flaw. Sigh.

I may have to review my "one strike and your out" rule for coffee shops.

2008-11-29T11:46:00.001Z

Sorry, bit of a rant today.
I'm not an ogre, I don't mind if a coffee shop makes a mistake or has a bad day. It's just when they are stupid.
Walking into work this morning I went past the new Costa which has opened on the route - taking over the whole first floor of the local cinema. Their first day, so you expect it might be a little crowded but I thought I'd give them a try.
They weren't crowded in front of the counter, which was good. Almost as many staff as customers, in fact. However, one difference: while most of the customers had probably been in a coffee shop before, none of the staff had.
They didn't have Cinnamon syrup, they took 10 minutes to make my coffee, and they did it with whole, not skim milk, and by then I was already late, so I got a refund.
Now I know what you're thinking, first day opening, give em a break. And I would, except that the above was not down to first day, it was down to them being *idiots*.
Take the syrup. Not only did they not have any, none of the staff KNEW they had any. Which tells us that either they didn't do a stock take before the first day of opening, or possibly worse, that they did so but didn't tell the team that they were out of Cinnamon.
It took them so long becuase they were very disorganized - it didn't occur to them, for example, that if you have a bad backlog then you need to put the barista in front of the machine and have everyone else keep the hell out of his way. No-one taking charge, although the "store manager" and the "barista" and someone who looked like they were from head office were there.
As the last straw, none of those three people were authorized to open the till for my refund, so I had to wait another 5 minutes for them to get the cinema manager down. I mean, if you've ever opened a new store before, you'd realise that things are going to go wrong and you probably need someone with the codes for the till there!
I mean, obviously, they've just using retrained cinema staff to save money, but for gods sake, don't Costa have the brains to send an experienced Store manager in for the first day to help out? How much would that cost, a couple of hundered quid?
And if they're so dumb they never had anyone write a page of A4 with "things to watch out for on the first day you open" then you gotta wonder how good their procedures for not confusing the rat poison with the icing sugar are.
So, that's Costsa out, Starbucks out (went there every day for a month, they screwed my order up, and it never even occured to anyone ot apologse once. If they hate their regulars that much why should I go back?) and coffee Republic out (I cannot concieve how you can accidentally serve a cup of luke-warm coffee in a coffee shop).
I'm not sure there's anywhere left...

Back to the grind

2008-11-26T09:38:00.001Z

Back at work, and pretty swamped. Not even really had time to get some photos uploaded yet. (but don't get me started on the latest woes regarding my broken camera)
Still, one bit of good news: while I still can't get TubeTV fixed (I used it use all the time to get YouTube videos onto my iPod but for a month now it has refused to convert the downloaded FLV files) the new version of Handbrake will convert those FLVs to M4V effortlessly. It's a kludge, but it works.

Last day in Whitby

2008-11-20T20:52:00.001Z

Had a lazy lie-in this morning, felt a little guilty wasting the daylight, but made up with it by taking a long walk round the back of town. There's an ugly road bridge that let's heavy traffic cross the Esk, that has fascinated me - it's very high. Got some nice pictures of the whole town.
By which point I was starving, so a hearty lunch of fish - you're meant to eat the local kippers with bread and jam (the sweet clears the palate of the smokiness). Yum.
A climb up to the abbey helped burn off the jam. I don't like heights, but perversely this makes them fascinating to me. Got a photo of my terror that should look good.
Then home and a coffee in front of the telly. Again, in a sense that's a waste of the day, but I'm learning how to take a holiday, and veging out is an important part.
After the telly got boring, took a walk down to listen to the sea in the dark. I think that's been my favorite - walking along the pier with the waves smashing against it below me. There are fishermen who go out onto a second pier that extends beyond the harbor, with dry suits and headlamps.
And of course I find a nice pub on the last night. Oh well. I need a break from the boozing after this holiday to loose some weight before I come back, so it's good that my final pint is a good one.
I have an hour now before the supermerkets close, so I'll grab something for supper, head back to the flat and pack my bags.

Too tired to think of a snappy title.

2008-11-19T15:21:00.000Z

Looong walk today, west along Whitby sands. Beautiful but tiring. Had a “Graham” moment – scrambled up a brambly hill to see what was on top of it, found a golf course so tried to head back the way I came, and fell down the hill. Twice.
Second time I stepped into an unseen rabbit hole and two thoughts were clear in my mind: “My hat just came off” and “I should probably try and fall in such a way that I don't break my leg”.
I'm battered but unharmed and back home now with a medicinal Gin and Tonic. I think I'll sit vert quiet and still for a while until my body forgives me for this unusually violent exercise, then gingerly stroll into town for Fish and Chips. I deserve it today!

I have a burning question

2008-11-19T11:42:00.001Z

I was a bit weary last night after all that walking, so instead of going to the pub I popped my frozen dinner in the microwave, opened a half bottle of wine, rummaged thru the collection of CDs provided with the flat (the sort that come free with newspapers) and had a bath.
That all sounds a bit girly, doesn't it? But I put extra pepper sauce on the frozen dinner! Manly! And I was reading Alan Clark's diary, not some glossy magazine! Extra manly!
Curious discovery – the free CDs that come with newspapers fill out the space after the advertised tracks with strange stuff I've never heard of. Do new bands pay them to put stuff on the Cd in the hope of inspiring record sales? But it's all got nothing to do with the headlining band – different styles completely. Wish my EEE had a CD-ROM drive so I could rip them to my iPod.
Unsure what to do today. I have on my list of things to possibly do a long walk over the cliffs to the next bay, but it looks very long on the crude maps I have, and I don't have a proper map. I also planned a trip to Scarborough but I like Whitby so much I'd sooner sit here and look at the sea from the cliff tops. Maybe that's the best thing to do.
Looked at my photos from yesterday. A few good ones. A few surprises. Quite a few that I'd love to try HDR on. I wonder how you do that? Lock the camera down with a tripod and snap at a range of exposures, I guess, then feed them into the Mac. I wonder how locked down it has to be? I do actually have a little tripod with me – that might be enough. But you have to press quite a few buttons to change the Exposure compensation on the Fuji... If I can find somewhere with free wifi tomorrow I'll take the Eee out for a pint/coffee and google it.
Remind me again how I was alive before you could “just google it”?
[Next Day]
Went for a walk to the chemists this morning (allergy medicine – I'm sneezing for about an hour after I get up!) and noticed a lovely looking path heading North up the coast (not South, which is where the walk I mentioned yesterday went) so back home to get my walking shoes, a water bottle, and an emergency mars bar and then I'm off. Not used my day sack once, because it turns out I'm too unfit to get far enough to need it. I'm enjoying my holiday but it's bringing home how hopelessly out of shape I am.
Lastly, that question. Why do so many shops here sell ukuleles?

Lawdy!

2008-11-18T17:55:00.001Z

Just popped to the loo in this tiny old fashioned pub (with a childrens license) and next to the condom machine is a machine that sells pheremone wipes to rub over yourself!
And next to that is a machine that sells something so rude I can't describe it here for fear of some kind of explicit tag. Let's just say it's battery powered.
And the family that came in are comparing gold lame knickers they've bought as presents.
Is this some sort of Yorkshire swingers pub?

This post is out-of-order

2008-11-18T17:44:00.001Z

It's out of order since I have an earlier post half-written on the laptop - and also it's sent from my blackberry. Don't worry, I turned off the mail alerts, I'm not back on the grid just yet. I thought I might like to make a post while enjoying a quick pint in town, so had to reactivate the smartphone. Only 300 unread emails, they're slipping at work.
I'd include a photo of my pint but the camera's gone funny again. You'll have to wait until I get home for a picassa gallery of all my boozing!
A beautiful sunny day today, spent wandering around Whitby. The sea is stunning - the views incredible. Very glad I came. Got some good photos I think, even with the substitute camera. See now why it's a good thing to have Exposure Compensation on an easy to reach dial.
Found the place I was originally considering staying - it turns out to be a basement with not so much a view of the river but a view of the carpark by the river. Seems to be much better staying on the west side and crossing to visit the abbey and the grape (alleys full of tiny shops, so called because before street lighting they were a popular place to go for a grope.)
I was particularly amazed at how many Goth shops there are. I guess they must come here in huge numbers for the windswept Gothic romance of standing where Dracula took Lucy. I've only seen one Goth the whole time though, which is surprising since you'd think Autumn would be the time they'd come. Summer's not very Gothic, after all.
Pubs are all open but deserted - although maybe I'm visiting them at the wrong time like the Goths do. It seems that the more locals there are in a pub the rougher it looks. I'm treading the fine line between "rough" and "tourist trap".
So I think I'll pop home via the co-op, cook some dinner, and head out again to try for a pint in a pub with customers.

Safe and sound

2008-11-17T17:33:00.002Z

Safe in my holiday flat with plentiful supplies of toast and whisky. The motorway part of the journey was boring: crossing the moors was the opposite. The fog came down and I couldn't see a thing. That was bad enough, but then I noticed that on the left hand side the fog was below the car... doubtless it was some spectacular cliff.
Luckily the fog lifted as I reached the Esk valley; just in time for the terrifying 20% incline on the road down to cross the river.
By the time I'd caught my breath I'd climbed the other side of the valley and got my first distant glimpse of the Abbey – pretty amazing even from that distance.
After a bit of palaver (I've never been good at parling under pressure) I got the keys and found the flat.
It's lovely, and I'm very glad I went for this one in the end. Small, but with a decent kitchen and living room, a nice big telly, and all sorts of lovely touches, like a bottle of wine and a pint of milk in the fridge, an umbrella in the corner, some ice already made for my whisky,
Clocks everywhere though – nine is the latest count and I may find more as the evening progresses.
Now I'm refreshed (well, there are a lot of stairs up to the flat and I had a heavy suitcase) I'll go for an explore, I think. I have a 2 mile walk around Whitby printed out but I think I'll wait until tomorrow morning to try that as it's already very dark. A good pint of Yorkshire beer and something simple to eat is what I'm after.

Safe and sound

2008-11-17T17:33:00.001Z

The glamour of Newport Pagnell Services

2008-11-17T11:46:00.001Z

First stop on the holiday is at Newport Pagnell services for a loo break and an over-priced fry-up. When I was growing up in Northern Ireland places in England like Newport Pagnell were exotic and unimaginably far away. Perhaps less interesting when you're actually here, although of course I'm sure the actual town is nicer than the services.

The nice lady who served my breakfast (gave me extra toast to make up for my usual refusal of the included beans and grilled tomatoes) asked if I was a traveller. Since I'm in a cafe you can only reach by driving 26 miles down a motorway, that threw me for a moment. I think maybe she meant traveller in the hippy meaning. Must be this darn hat and coat, although I'm in preppy jeans and polo shirt underneath it!

I'm running about half an hour late but since I'm done with lunch now (wolfed it down – should have had dinner yesterday I guess) I should make it up in shorter meal breaks.

Also need to remember to unload the camera from my bag. I doubt I'll get any decent shots from a moving car but I would have liked to snap amazon's huge warehouse that I passed 20 miles ago. Apart from that, and a convoy of army land rovers heading North like me, so far this trip has just been boring motorway slogging. Which is of course the plan: going I want to get there ASAP, but coming back I have time to take the more scenic routes.

What have I done to deserve this?

2008-11-15T22:00:00.004Z

My second loaner (Fujitsu Finepix J70) won't charge either - slot the battery in the charger and nothing happens. No light, no charging, nothing. Inconceivable!

Since I refuse to go on my holiday without a camera, my options are:

Go to Basingstoke AGAIN tomorrow. AGAIN!
Crudely jam the battery into my Optio A40 charger and watch as the extra 150 milliamps both shorten it's lifespan considerably and fill it up double quick.

Of course, option 2 is totally immoral, and I would never do that. One could argue that I'm morally justified as a) Two days of going to basingstoke mean I've not had time for the trip into London I usually like to have on a holiday and b) I'll be punished by having a crappy Finepix camera while I'm away. But as a founder member of the Belfast Royal Academy Philosophical Society, these sort of moral dilemmas are all part of a days work.

Although some things can slow me down.

2008-11-15T13:06:00.002Z

Yay: Camera will be fixed free of charge.

Boo: Won't be back until...er...2009.

Yay: They lent me a Fujitsu until then.

Boo: I have two days to learn how it works.

Yay: Manuals online and operations are pretty straightforward.

Boo: They bloody battery won't charge!

Looking in the aforementioned battery, the red flashing LED means the battery is bad. Oh gawd, why did I buy the Optio in Basingstoke? It's 45 minutes drive every time I have to take it back.

But a pox on the house of holiday stress, I say!

Nothing can stop me now!

2008-11-08T12:41:00.002Z

Accommodation booked: GPS firmware updated: Camera tested: Blackberry dismantled.

Off now to buy a coat suitable for staring at the North Sea and a map of the yorkshire coast.

I really am going on holiday.

By the way, seaside flats can be rented for crazy cheap money this time of year.

What is this thing you earth-people call...Holiday

2008-11-07T21:36:00.002Z

My god, I finally did it. I'm on holiday. 2 weeks of not thinking about work. Damn, did that count?

Let me express how serious I am about this - the blackberry is off. The SIM card is tucked into my ancient Motorola V525 (one of the best non-smart phones I ever had), whose battery is charging as I type.

This vacation has to be about totally de-stressing.

Later I plan to spend a few whole days near the sea. Yes, it's November, but I've found the sea de-stresses me about as well as anything else.

Holiday...

Camera woes

2008-10-26T13:38:00.002Z

So, I need a new camera to replace my Pentax Optio A20, which I lost, because I'm an idiot. I've put off doing anything about it for a while now - too busy kicking myself about the camera-loosing-idiot thing - but I my long threatened holiday is coming up and I'd like a camera.
The trouble is I'm having a terrible time deciding which one to choose. Now, this is of course pretty normal, since there are several jillion different digital cameras out there, but I'm actually in a different dilemma - I've narrowed it down to two but just can't choose. I'm sure you're thinking "Well, OK, but why bore us with the details? Isn't the endless twitter whining enough?" Because of one of my great insights that came with age (there's a blog post series worth working on!) is as follows:

The best way to understand anything is to explain it to someone else.

First option is a straightforward one - replace the A20 with another A20. Well, actually replace the A20 with an A40, since they've upgraded it a few times since I bought mine. However the A40 is essentially the same camera. It's black instead of silver (which is an improvement I think), and of course has more needless megapixels, but it's got the same feature set and so on. Controls are the same. It appeals to me because I liked the A20.

Second option though is to get serious. I don't mean DSLR serious - I'd love a DSLR but they are expensive and, more importantly, I want something compact that I can carry around. But I could get one of the "serious compacts". The main contenders for this these days are the Canon G10 and the Panasonic LX3, although I rather like the thought of the Canon G9, which has gotten cheaper now the G10 is out. I would like having an optical viewfinder (although most reviews say it's not very good on the G9) and I tended to use the zoom a lot on my A20, so having a wide angle is less interesting. (Although of course maybe because it's been so long since I HAD a wide angle choice...)

And I keep bouncing back and forwards. Sure, the Canon is dramatically better, but would I find myself just using it in automatic mode? Which is also better but And it has to be said, it's at the "not-so-compact" end of compact cameras. If anything the A40 looks smaller than the A20 - I should check that. My life is littered with creative tools that I've wasted money on and not gotten good use out of. I love gadgets too much to be safe. But I do enjoy photography, and always wish I did more of it.

My latest trick was to go back and look at the photos I've taken with the A20. I figured that if they all sucked, then I would know to get the A40, becuase an extra £120 spent on the camera isn't going to turn a bad photographer into a good one.

But it backfired, because a few of them were quite good, in my humble opinion. Not good in the sense that a proper photographer would like them, but I liked them. And that's worth a lot.

So, surely that means I should get the G9? Well, no, because if I can take good photographs - as good as I'm liable to be capable of - with the A20, then why do I need something better?

What I did see from looking back is that:

I'm very bad at geting the horizon straight, so I need to turn the grid on in whatever camera I get!
I get a lot of noise in low light - which the G9 can't help much with - you need to go DSLR to help with that.
I need to work on lighting and composition, duh.
My favorite photograph was taken while just messing about in a pub garden with no consideration of anything technical. I just made her laugh and took a photo, and I love it.

Ah, you see? Last point makes it. I wouldn't have brought a G9 to the pub, would I? I'd have brought the tiny thing that goes into my shirt pocket.

Thank you once again, internet. It's the A40. I'll just nip out an buy one, and then go crazy posting photos.

Bloody Microsoft

2008-08-19T09:14:00.002+01:00

Arrgghhhh, leaving aside how ridiculously involved it is to install a dot Net framework - I mean when an app needs the framework I shouldn't have to go to a web page and figure out which of the half dozen versions I need and download it and find what I downloaded and run it and all that crap. Do it as a background process for flips sake.

Leaving all that aside, I'm installing a SERVER, guys. Over REMOTE CONTROL because it's not in the same office as me. This is the sort of thing admins do. We get responsibility for more than one site and have to do things over a WAN.

SO DON'T PUT FANCY GRAPHICS ON THE INSTALLER!

Sitting there, waiting while you fade out the web page to put up an advert for Silverlight... I spent the 20 minutes this took to do over an RDP over WAN link uninstalling Silverlight from my notebook because I had nothing better to do. Is that what you wanted?

In fact, MS do this everywhere. Do you know what sort of person installs stuff like Exchange? SYSADMINS! Have you met any of us? We aren't going to think your product is better because the installer is pretty!

Why not spend the time making a folder of pre-canned powershell scripts? Those would help, not hinder me.javascript:void(0)

Lastly, ARRRRGGGHHHH.

Vanity, all is vanity

2008-08-15T18:02:00.002+01:00

I look pretty good in my hard hat, I reckon. But I'll still be glad when my office isn't a building site.

Cool website

2008-08-07T15:12:00.002+01:00

Working from home, as I have been for a month, I take a lot of pleasure in watching the birds at the feeders in the garden...

I went to the RSPB's web site to try and identify one of them. I thought it had a nice banner area at the top showing random pictures of birds, but then realised that they aren't random; if you're looking at information on swans, for example, then the pictures (all very high quality) are of swans, etc.

Subtle but impressive.

URL for the bird identifier is http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdidentifier

Who is this man trying to kid?

2008-08-02T13:19:00.002+01:00

Having spent a few weeks now with the Samsung, I finally got fed up for almost no reason at all. Just snapped this morning, swapped my sim card back into the BB Curve, waited the month it takes for a BB to cold boot, waited another month for the mail to catch up, and now I'm back on a Blackberry.

Since the iPhone now has an adequate ebook reader in the App Store, I suppose that theoretically that is a better choice for me than the Curve, but the BB does everything I need in a smartphone.

It's a better use of my brain figuring out how to keep my BB working when my mailbox moves to our new Exchange server before our BES does, than figuring out how to use a WinMob.

I will say, though, that the Samsung is probably the least awful WinMob I've ever used. Is that me praising it? Well, it's the closest you're going to get...

I keep forgetting that this thing has a webcam...

2008-07-26T15:15:00.001+01:00

I always seem to use the eeePC in starbucks

2008-07-26T15:06:00.002+01:00

I upgraded my ancient PCMCIA 3G data card frm Vodafone to the latest USB version: turns out it works in the eee out of the box. So, no need to have a different wiFi account for every coffee shop: 3G speeds are all you need for browsing or blogging or checking your email.
I'm surprised that so far I've kept the eee very close to stock. I put a couple of bits of software on it (I love apt-get!) but otherwise, firefox and openoffice are all I need. I'm surprised how useable I'm finding Evolution now: never got on with it before.
The keyboard is plenty useable, especially with my two finger style, I was finding it awkward in the last paragraph but figured out it was because I
m squeezed into a tiny corner table and while it has room for the eee, it doesn't have room for my elbows.
At some point I suppose I'll get a 4Gb SDHC card and puit Windows XP on it, but for the moment it seems to do everything I need. Every disadvantage of the small size is totally overwhelmed by the fact that I can carry it in my bag and literally not notice the weight.

Biglig's Computers

2008-07-17T22:30:00.003+01:00

With my home office now built and running well, I thought a moment to detail my current collection of computers. My first computer - and possibly the first machine I ever saw, unless I got at school's BBC micro first, was a ZX81. Of course, every device I possess now is smaller, better, faster, stronger.

Work computer

Dell Latitude D630 running Windows Vista and Office 2007

Not a bad little machine: we've adopted it as out standard issue so I've switched to one to make sure I'm working with the same sort of machine I can expect one of my customers to have.

Home Computer

Apple Macbook Pro 17" running OSX Leopard and iLife

I've found splitting off work and personal into two different machines has turned out to be a great idea. My home office has a KVM fitted, so I hit a switch and change mode from "at work" to "at home". For anyone not needing to run mountains of Windows software then a Mac is the best possible choice.

Mobile Computer

Asus eeePC 701 running Xandros and OpenOffice

Well, I bought this out of curiosity really but it's constantly impressing me. I did a whole day working offsite with it and found it more than up to the task. It does web, email, text documents, instant messaging, and even skype phone calls, and is so tiny I can carry it anywhere.

Media Player

Apple iPod Touch 16Gb

Perfect for music; acceptable for video (and being able to watch iPlayer streams on it over WiFi is fabulous). The new apps I mostly use for Games so far: when a ebook reader I can load with -free texts is available it will take another step to perfection.

Smartphone

Samsung i600 running Windows Mobile 5

Now, this is usually a Blackberry curve, but for dull technical reasons to do with work I need to use something that supports Microsoft ActiveSync for a while. I have an HTC TyTN II that I normally use for this sort of thing, and it's a nice device, but it's the size of a house brick. So, finding a tiny Belgian smartphone in my spares cupboard I thought "why not?".

As usual, an absolute pig to get the certificates working for OWA and CWA, but once I got it going, it turns out not to be so bad. It's very small, it does push email, it has bluetooth so I can sync it. belgian keyboard though, but between the Mac and the PC I'm confused enough.

Probably a bad sign that they ship it with a spare battery and external charger?

How could this be improved? I'm very tempted to switch the D630 out. I'd replace it with a huge, noisy, and insanely powerful PowerEdge server, that would sit in my comms room, that I would connect to using a terminal services client running on any old crappy hardware in my office, the Mac when at home, and the eeePC when traveling.

And of course constantly hanging over me is the specter of consolidating the iPod and smartphone into one device. Although consolidation is exactly what I want, more important to me is that my music player to be an iPod, because all my workflow is set up for that. Oh, if only there was some sort of smartphone, supporting push email, that had an iPod in it...

Summer

2008-07-13T17:13:00.000+01:00

Greenall's ready-mixed G+T with grapefruit for the win.

Another burst of tech-blogging coming up

2008-07-05T13:31:00.002+01:00

I broke down and got a new toy; An Asus eeePC.
Celeron 900MHz, 512Mb RAM, 4Gb hard disk, 7" screen. Lowest spec computer on the high street. Why buy it? It's about an inch bigger than my old Psion, it costs less than it did at the time (£200!) but it's a full laptop.
So far just very early playing; I've found out how to get a shell (CTRL+ALT+T), gotten hold of a menu editor so I can rearrange the files, tested the browser (works great; BBC iPlayer is fine, all the google apps of course - I'm writing this on the device, I tried a flash game on kongregate and it was a little slow but could be
I picked a heavy game) and tried apt-get, my old favorite.

Selfportrait for Whitechapel

2008-06-15T19:40:00.001+01:00

Wandering home from a pint down the pub, I realised I had a good backdrop for a self-portrait; and with the whitechapel self-portrait thread beckoning, why not?

Darn it, back to work

2008-05-21T22:06:00.002+01:00

Sooo, my big project that I'm running and will absorb the rest of the year launched today. (The big project that I'm not running but am being forced to participate in, and will also absorb the rest of the year launched last week.)

I'll be interested to see if that increases or decreases the frequency of my posting.

I'm impressed that while I've done nothing of any use in the month I've been waiting for the official start, now I'm wearing the metaphorical project t-shirt I'm thinking like crazy.

Oh, and found out in the announcement that my team for this project has been halved. Yay!

Why ad agencies are useless part 107

2008-05-10T18:21:00.001+01:00

Spotted this advert for the Samsung Soul on Vodafone while waiting for the bus.

Their pitch is that it can read hotmail - ho hum - but I was amused to notice that the third item in the inbox is from "unknown" - isn't that likely to be spam?

40 times round the sun...

2008-04-26T10:44:00.001+01:00

39 years old today - as usual I'd forgotten it was my birthday.
You see me here in my lovely new rugby shirt - been wanting one for a while - on my way (via bus, since the car is still b0rked) to Windsor for a lovely lunch.

Time Piece

2008-04-21T09:58:00.002+01:00

So, ever since I got the Macbook Pro I've felt uncomfortable enough wearing a wrist watch that I've stopped doing it.
I've been a little uncomfortable with it for a while, although I love my wristwatch: perhaps my wrists are getting fatter. It was never quite the same since I fell on it awkwardly (the watch, not so much the wrist.) But with the Macbook, it was Ti scratching on Al every time I typed and I did not like it.
Of course I still need to know the time and I'm too old to get into the modern style of using your phone as your watch. The answer, then, seems obvious: a pocket watch. By the way, Steve Jobs, that's what that little pocket in your jeans is for.
What I'm looking for: a new watch (old is beautiful but I also need reliable), attractive, not insanely expensive, a full hunter (never quite liked half hunters), mechanical, stem wound, a way to see the movement running (although seeing the mechanism thru the front often seems to make the face too busy. Oh, and I want it to play the tune from "Per qualche dollaro in più", but I'm not holding out much hope for that.
So, obviously, like any geek, I know all the words, but where can I source such a thing? You can get them in High Street jewelery stores but there's not much of a selection and they're pretty obviously sold as either retirement gifts or as decorations for wedding suits. Google can find me plenty of beautiful and expensive hundred year old examples. But apart from that - not much luck.
Then, yesterday, as mentioned below I got my idea to follow people on Twitter based on finding interesting tweets on the public timeline and, if their history and blogs are also interesting, adding them.
Almost immediately @RhiRhi mentions she has some new stuff on Etsy - so I go over to take a look, since I've never heard of Etsy. It turns out to be a sort of eBay for hand-made crafts. RhiRhi has some very nice knitware on there - love the worm scarves in particular.
But then I have a brainstorm. Hand-made craft stuff - might someone be making watches on there? Well, turns out there is: check out this beauty for a start.
And what's more, I also had a second brainstorm, because a lot of the more ornate watches on Etsy are being marketed to the steampunks. And I know where they hang out - so if Etsy doesn't have what I want, then I bet someone on Whitechapel will.
After two brainstorms I really ought to go lie down, but work beckons.

Walking into work

2008-04-21T09:41:00.000+01:00

So, from my new house I can walk into the office, or bike; and although I've been eyeing up a new bike I must say that walking in does seem to encourage my brain to come up with ideas.
The photo (one of my ideas was remembering that I can photoblog) is of Castle Street in Maidenhead - it looks like a country road, but about 3 feet below that hedge is the A4.
My idea of pulling people from the Public timeline has born fruit. .More later when I'm at my PC.

Twitter thoughts

2008-04-21T01:24:00.002+01:00

I seem to be getting into Twitter a lot lately. Think I'm starting to get my head round it: as I tweeted recently, when someone explains Twitter to you it sounds utterly pointless.

But... if I think about how I handle blogs. I have my blogs in Google Reader and I go in a few times a day and page thru them, in the Scoble style, seeing what catches my eye. And of course I have my own blog, and occasionally I post something myself when I think of something interesting (at least to me!) to say.

Twitter is similar except that the 140 character limit means it's small enough to keep in an open window on one of my screens and glance over to it. I've always found those RSS readers that live in the Vista sidebar or similar to be pointless, because all you have room for is a title and a few words, and I hate clicking through. But Twitter is small enough to take the whole thing in at a glance. It's like speed blog reading...

The secret then, will be in following interesting people. I follow some of the usual suspects, but I just had an idea to go look at the public timeline and see who looks interesting. http://twitter.com/heroinepretend and http://twitter.com/RhiRhi do: and a look at their linked blogs agrees that they might well be, so I'm following them to see what they have to say. If I do this say once a week I'll probably overload twitter before long, but it seems worth the experiment.

Of course all this theorising is slightly moot when Twitter keeps going wrong, but hey - any excuse to use the word "moot" in a sentence cant be all bad.

Seen on a fence from the train

2008-04-03T19:25:00.002+01:00

"CCTV in operation, so f**k off!"

UPDATE: Huzzah for Flickr, and for Kully, because here's a photo of it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkully/2326978631/

Results of the Mac Eval

2008-03-19T21:51:00.002Z

Well, it's the best computer I've ever used: both the hardware, the software, and the interaction between the two.

But I work in a Microsoft shop, and am at the start of a huge project to deploy Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007, and I need to be running Outlook: proper Outlook, natively. And I need OCS. And that means I have to run Windows.

So, for the time being at least, I'm back to a Dell.

But the Mac is still my favorite, and until anyone notices it'll stay at home, as a media player and place for creative stuff. Like this blog, so this new entry is a justification.

Horrid day today feeling sorry for myself, so cheese on toast and an early night is called for.

More waiting

2008-02-18T23:54:00.000Z

No seats on the earlier plane. I've been in this airport 7 hours now; spent the time wandering, sitting, writing a complex tech document, pricing the wifi (expensive!), pricing the whisky (cheap!), sitting outside looking at manhattan, finding a power outlet, reading a bad book, and now having a beer.
Tempted to buy a plate of nachos and another beer and just sleep thru the flight...

Wait wait

2008-02-18T18:56:00.001Z

Ticket desk reopens at 3:30, so outside fopr a breath of fresh air. Today's pleasantly mild outdoors, and I think people's heating systems aren't expecting it because it's been far too hot everywhere indoors today.
I guess I'll go have that lunch.

9 hours wait, then 8 hours flight, and I'll be home!!

2008-02-18T16:51:00.000Z

Switching to small photos, since I just realised how huge the one's I have been sending are.
The New York photoblog worked fine as a test but I didn't generate much content. Story of my artificial life, really.
Thanks to my miscalculation today is President's day and of course the office is closed, so I'm spending the day at the airport.
I'm going to try and get switched to an earlier flight, although I haven't much hope and as you can see the BA desk is deserted for some reason. I guess the next flight isn't for 6 hours so not much reason to man the desks.
I should go get some lunch while I wait - bit of a pain lugging my bags around.
Wait though, isn't that a trolley in that picture?

"I'm On The Train!"

2008-02-16T16:22:00.000Z

Only $20 for the return (should say round trip in american I think). NJ Transit trains are clean, comfortable, and for some reason very noisy, so I shall pass the time listening to Melvin BraggKs In Our Time (which is worth the entire BBC License fee on it's own).

The latest episode turns out to be about the Statue of Liberty.

Photoblogging Trial: Denville Station

2008-02-16T16:00:00.000Z

I thought that since I'm sneaking off for a day in New York, it might make a good test of using the Blackberry camera to photoblog.

Of course, all the cool kids these days are into streaming vidoe blogs, but I'm a corporate IT drone, we aspire to paranoic conservatism.

Slightly regretting giving the shuttle bus driver a tip, since he took me to Denville station, ensuring I miss my train since I was assuming Morris Plains. Been hiding in a CVS pharmacy for 45 minutes to keep warm!

As you can see, Denville is very beautiful; everyone assumes New Jersey is Jersey City, but they call it the Garden state for a reason.

Local kids sleighing down the hill leading to the railway line - can that be entirely safe?

A long week is over

2008-02-15T23:36:00.000Z

I figured out how to walk to TGI Fridays, where I am having a special health drink called a "Margarita".

I'm a ramblin' man

2008-02-12T13:07:00.000Z

Off to New Jersey for work. I quite like it over here, very cold at the moment, but the bare trees have a stark look about them that I enjoy.

Hotel sucks but that's what you get when you book last minute. I'll be back in a month - and I'll try and get a spot in my favorite hotel for then. It's my favorite because it has a kitchen and a mall you can walk to, so instead of having to go to the hotel retaurant (if you even have one - my current flop house only has a fridge filled with $12 plates of out-of-date salad) you can have a beer and a microwaved pizza in front of the tv, which is essentially all I want when my body clock is this confused.

Experimenting this trip with going to bed early and getting up early, to see if I can not fully reset the clock, and so not have to work so hard on my return to get back to normal.

Entourage 2008 mini-review

2008-02-11T23:56:00.000Z

So, just upgraded to 2008 and thought I'd take a look at the new Entourage.

It doesn't sync tasks or notes to Exchange. Let me repeat that. It has a Project collation centre, and a new dashboard widget you can't put into dashboard, but it doesn't sync tasks and notes to exchange. And hence it doesn't back them up, and hence it doesn't sync them to my Windows machine or my Blackberry or my Windows Mobile Device.

Are they deranged? Someone tell me, are Microsoft deranged? What possible freakin' use is this product if it don't sync with Exchange? It's an EXCHANGE CLIENT! SYNC THE THING WITH EXCHANGE! ALL OF IT!

Where's the gin?

Pint missing, but still:

2008-02-09T13:02:00.001Z

This is that river I was talking about in my previous post..

Crisp summers morning

2008-02-09T12:52:00.000Z

Pretty winter mornings like these, as well as memories of a pint by the river, are I suppose what I'll miss when we've moved. That and living two doors down from a pub!
The new place is modern, and hence warm, with a garage, and I can walk or bike to work, and in the current economy it's the best we can afford, but it still feels like a step backwards, somehow.
Mind you, I will have a view of some hills - something I've always wanted - and woods I can walk in nearby. So I suppose I'll be posting in a few years about how much I'll miss there.

2 Blackberry surprises

2008-02-08T21:19:00.001Z

First, posting from the BB worked very well - and the attached photo was embedded nicely.

It added my automatic signature, though - I'll have to work on that.

Also: I noticed GPS written on the top of the handset, and looking in the settings, I seem to have a GPS receiver as well! So this is my 8800, only smaller with a camera. Nice!

New Blackberry

2008-02-08T15:52:00.001Z

I just got my handheld upgraded - to a RIM Blackberry Curve. Nice unit, much smaller than my 8800 but the keyboard and screen are just as usable.
I decided that GPS, while cool, was not as useful to me as a camera in my phone would be, so when I had an unexpected chance to upgrade I decided to switch.
This post doubles of a test of moblogging with the curve; I attach a photo to see what happens - quite possibly nothing, but I believe there's a mobile version of Picassa also available.

Once again, I bite my tongue.

2008-01-30T22:58:00.001Z

No body post I can write without giving too much away... but if one more person at works acts on the assumption that I'm an idiot (despite considerable evidence to the contrary) then I'm going to take all the time off they owe me and spend a month in bed.

Exhausting day

2008-01-25T00:02:00.000Z

Such a long time since my last entry - I was never any good at keeping a diary, so that shouldn't be a surprise. Spent to day ripping out the comms room of the old Bracknel office we got when we bought Cantata. Horrible filthy job: at lunch time I had to run round to Morrissons and buy a bottle of water so at least I could wash my hands. Morissons cheapest, 42p a bottle. But I made up for this by buying Halford's most expensive wire cutters. I have simple ones in my tool kit, but today I had to cut about 100 ethernet cables to get the Bracknell PBX out intact so that CSG could have it for their lab.

Enjoyable fight at lunch: elderly couple waking through the own centre (one of the worst in England, you know) with their dog, another dog, not on a lead, starts a fight; man in wheelchair comes out of Italian cafe and calls the dog back to him; elderly couple shout "it should be on a lead"; which leads to a torrent of violent, foul mouthed abuse from the wheelchair man.

Reading Michael Palin's diaries, which rather explains my chatty nonsense above.

Some key presses to learn

2007-11-19T15:12:00.000Z

Arrow keys are the ones that are giving me the most gyp:

Left, Right move one character

Up, down move one line

CTRL+ Arrow Invokes Spaces and switch to a different desktop (this is the one that bites me!!)

ALT+Left, Right Move one word at a time (what I am trying to do with CTRL+Left, Right)

Alt+Up, Down Move to beginning/end of the current paragraph.

Apple+Left, Right Move to beginning/end of the current line.

Apple+Up, Down Move to the top/bottom of the document.

Apple+X, C, V Cut, Copy, Paste

Apple+O open selected file (also bites me because...)

Enter rename selected file

Apple+Delete Delete File

Coolest keypress so far: Ctrl+Apple+D when you have a word selected looks that word up in the dictionary!!

UNIX underpinnings

2007-11-19T13:54:00.000Z

Well, one great thing about the Mac that became apparent today - it's got all the powerful Unix tools under the hood.

I was trying to diagnose an SMTP problem today and needed to watch live SMTP connections. First I found a Perl script that sends an SMTP message with a Verbose option. Perl is already installed on the Macbook, so it worked straight away. The problem seemed to be timing related, so instead of writing ./smtp-client.pl I wrote time ./smtp-client.pl and I could get a measurement of how long the message transaction took. Then I needed to send a really big text file as another test; so I just typed uuencode bigfile.ppt to generate a 1Mb text file.

Small things

2007-11-17T15:45:00.000Z

It's rather strange, transitioning to the Mac... so many learned behaviours (CTRL+Left Arrow to jump back a word is the wort) to undo. Whups, just did it again!

I'm getting much more used to Safari, I think the trick to it may be to get into the habit of not using tabs quite as much - still use them but also use opening in a new window.

I just found a link to a brilliant idea. Stacks, the new way of putting folders into the Dock in Leopard, are cute, but they have a problem - all you see in the dock is the contents of the folder (actually you see the first icon with the second icon peeping out from behind it. It's ugly and doesn't tell you what's in the folder very well - especially the downloads folder since that changes all the time.

The fix? Go here and download the two zip files full of icons of labeled plastic boxes; drop the appropriate ones into each folder. Their names begin with spaces so they are first in alphabetical order, and you can type

touch -mt 202001010101.01 " Downloads "

or whatever in each folder to set the modify date so far in the future that they are always first in "most recent file" order.

It looks really good.

LDAP goodness

2007-11-15T13:19:00.000Z

I'm working up a note on Bootcamp and Parallels, which I spent most of yesterday installing (and will spend most of today reinstalling, but it's a good reinstall).

But first I wanted to share some info I found on LDAP queries. I've always had trouble getting these to work - I need them in Apple Mail to do lookups against our Exchange GAL.

Imeldesign over at TekTips posted some settings that worked perfectly the instant I used them. I shall take the liberty of quoting them in full:

1. Name: Enter whatever you want here.
2. Server: Your domain controller's FQDN.
3. Search Base: leave this blank.
4. Port : 3268
5. DO NOT USE SSL
6. Scope: Select "Subtree"
7. For authentication select "Simple"
8. User Name: "domain\username_in_caps" fill in your username in caps where directed.
9. Password: fill in your login password.

Issue with PPTP networking

2007-11-13T21:03:00.001Z

Been so busy this evening, little time to do anything of much interest with the Macbook.

PPTP is a mixed bag so far. First, it's a little obscure to find - you have to go into system preference, networking, and click the plus sign to add a new connection. Second, although it connects very quickly, there's some issue with DNS name resolution, it's not resolving with the DNS server it gets from the VPN connection, which is silly default behavior. I'll have to google a solution from somewhere. However, it looks like once it is working it will be very neat and easy to use.

Also, I need a cheat sheet for the keyboard commands. I keep getting the modifier keys wrong! I know I can reprogram them to copy Windows, but that isn't the way I want to go - I want to learn OSX on it's own terms.

Interesting factoid

2007-11-13T15:46:00.000Z

I haven't right-clicked anything yet.

First Post!

2007-11-13T15:23:00.000Z

Well, first from the Macbook, anyhow. ;-)

Leopard installed very simply, and now I'm moving slowly along the Dock checking stuff out.

Dashboard was a good place to start, in fact, since it reassured me to poke about to figure out how things work.

First main application to configure was Mail.app. I expect to end up in Entourage soon enough, but I was interested in checking out the built-in tool set first. It took me a minute or two to configure, because despite being the mail admin I wasn't quite sure how my internal SMTP server is set up for authentication, etc. However, it now works fine, sending and receiving mail happily.

Safari I'm familiar with from the Windows version. It's fast, and it does the basic job of showing web pages well. I'd like more tab features - a way to have tabs show all the time, for example. I can of course just go get Firefox, but again, I'd like to give the built-in tools a chance.

I've not really got anyone to iChat with, so that's gone back into the Applications folder.

iWork and iLife are for another post!

iCal is going to be a possible issue, since there is no built-in way to connect it to Exchange. This will need some thought, but of course I have my Blackberry for calendar, so there is no urgency.

Photo Booth is as silly as anyone could hope for.

I'm going to hold off on Time Machine until I have all my data transfered from my Dell.

First power-up

2007-11-13T11:09:00.000Z

One last physical thing before booting it up, my external mouse is filthy! So I've cleaned it before using it on the new Mac. Hmm, that's quite sad.
Powering it on... A nervous few seconds before the "Bong". Tradition is nice.
Apple logo, spinning sunflower wait cursor, blue screen (on both monitors), mouse cursor, external mouse is already working, beachball, display is gorgeous, Use English as the main language, shit, it's got Tiger on it!
A desperate lunge for the CD box, and phew, there's a copy of Leopard in there.
Oooh, and a Tiger DVD, I wonder if I could get the old G3 running with that? I'd need a DVD drive for it, of course... Anyhow, never mind that rubbish.
Oh, the delight as it turns on the iSight camera and asks me to take a photo of myself for the logon page..
Hmmm, a lot of updates needed, I suppose it's safest to install those, then do the Tiger install. 130Mb for aperture is a lot... Wait, I have Aperture installed?
Spend the time waiting for the upgrade wiping my Firewire hard disk ready for Time Machine, and downloading a few of the FOSS packages I've found while waiting.
That doesn't take all that long so I start working on moving my iTunes music over from my Dell.
Another post when I have something to tell!

Physical Impressions before turning it on.

2007-11-13T11:01:00.000Z

There's a guy, in cupertino somewhere, who spent a month designing the polystyrene inserts inside the Macbook box
The whole thing is like that. There are little hooks that pop out of the power supply so you can werap the cord round it.
It's very slim, very minimalist. Surprisingly heavy, which I guess is because it is made out of metal instead of plastic.
I have taken my watch and ID badge off because I'm scared I'll scrape it. Ahem.
Business observation: no docking station. I have just plugged in the following: Gigabit Ethernet, USB hub with my external mouse (Microsoft, why do you ask?) on it, External monitor, Power, and my Firewire drive. That could get tedious if I have to do it every day. Of course, I might find I don't need the external monitor, and I have WiFi everywhere I go. I could get the wireless mighty mouse and apple keyboard. There's rumours that people have figured out a way to make Time Machine talk to a NAS device. So, there are workarounds.
Keyboard is nice. there's only one mouse button, heh!
Screen is more reflective than my (also turned off) external LCD panels, but let's see what it's like when it's turned on.
Say, turning it on, that sounds like it could be fun!

Hoo Haa Heee Haaa Hooo!

2007-11-13T10:38:00.001Z

As you can tell from the post title, I came in this morning to find a brown cardboard box waiting for me. With a Macboo Pro in it.
The unboxing was exactly like all the other unboxing videos on the net; but of course what a video cannot communicate is the new Mac smell.

This was perfect timing as overnight I threw my HTC TyTN 2 in the cupboard of failed PDAs. I had spent one too many calls desperately trying to find out where to hold it in order for the person at the other end to be able to hear me. Surgical implantation in my larnyx seemed to give the best results.

Back on my Blackberry and already feeling the benefit - this post, for example, would not have been fun to type on the Tytn despite it's bigger keyboard.

So, you ask, why am I posting this rubbish and not turning the Mac on for the first time? Because it's been in a warehouse in china for 2 weeks, and the heating is out in my office, so if I turn it on now I'll get condensation inside and it will explode.

But it won't be long, if only because I have abot 20 minutes of patience left and then sod dignity, I'll stick it down my trousers to warm up.

Boooooooring!

2007-11-12T14:03:00.000Z

Boy, this waiting for the Macbook to show up is tedious. Reading the horror stories on apecode.com/appletrack turns out not to be a very good way to pass the time.

Currently mine is assigned to a carrier called "UK DISTRIBUTION CENTER", which gives me hope that it's in the country at least. Unfortunately it also has the estimated delivery date set to last Friday, so I'm taking all info with a pinch of salt.

Hope you like our new direction.

2007-11-07T14:25:00.000Z

I'm finally flipping my production machine to UNIX, but not the way I thought I would - I'm getting a Mac!

I'll be logging my switcher experience here as usual, but I noticed that while there are a lot of good pages for switchers, there doesn't seem to be a page for the windows sysadmin. I found an itch: time to scratch.

I already have my unused Google Pages space, and I'm going to put a clean version of my experiences there.

It's at http://biglig.googlepages.com/

Warming up for the main event

2007-10-27T20:30:00.000+01:00

My company recently made another acquisition - cue much frantic tearing around on my part as we connect the two infrastructures together with sticky tape to last us long enough to get our breath back.
But one thing I wasn't expecting was that the new company is, amongst other things, a Mac shop. So I have to learn Mac. So I have to get a Mac.
And just in time for Leopard too. So, a 15" Macbook Pro is being ordered on Monday, and this time next week I'll be a proper Mac user for the first time since University.
So, in the mean time, and with time to kill, I thought one last try at Linux, not just for old times sake but in case the Mac doesn't work out. Because I'm not going to Vista. Tried it and didn't like anything except UAC, which is perverse but true. UAC is incredibly annoying, but it lets you run in a non-elevated mode, which is enough for me.
I wasted most of today trying to get some kind of Ubuntu onto my old D505, with no success, until eventually I said stuff this and dug into the spare machine pile at work. The best thing they had was a D400 in pretty good nick. That's the tiny portable Latitude, by the way. Feisty went on easy as pie, and then I upgraded to Gutsy, and now I have a tiny little Linux machine.
Some thoughts:

All the hardware works; it even allows me to download some non-free stuff to make the modem work.
A tiny machine is not something I've ever used, but it suggests all sorts of interesting possibilities. A small machine to carry about the house with Internet and a text editor could be useful.
However 1024x768 is small (and to think I remember when I had a 640x480 screen!), in particular Google Reader under FireFox needs to be F11ed to hide all the toolbars to make it useable.
All the eye candy works even though this machine has a crappy old Intel on board graphics card. I have cube (although using it with only 2 desktops for a sort of flip instead), wobbly windows, all the toys.

More as I find it, and then next week my big Mac Switcher series starts. I'll be writing it on this machine, FOSS fans, so don't throw tomatoes just yet.

Testing mail to blog

2007-07-03T12:42:00.001+01:00

Just a quick test, an attempt yesterday to "moblog" seems not to have worked.

EDIT:: Mind you, posting my whole damn mail signature with my email address all ready to be spammed seems ot be working fine. Crappity crap!

Virtualization is the way

2007-06-27T11:22:00.000+01:00

All that time spent trying to get WINE to work... The left hand monitor is showing a Linux desktop, the right hand, XP. Everything works. The mouse moves from one to the other withut locking. Office 2007 running a treat, no performance hit I can see.

I can even use the Beryl cube to spin away from XP onto something else.

This was done with VirtualBox, then Host+F then Host+G.