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The best and worst Christmas Presents

Monday, January 2nd, 2012

This year, because we are all grown ups and have got most of the toys we want already, we decided to have a white elephant. This meant we had presents to put under the ‘tree’ and open after Santa had passed our house. To be honest, we did wonder how he was going to get through the door of our wood burning stove.

Our tree this year was a work of art. After considering £60 too high for something we would use for less than a week, we made our own by weaving ivy around a conical plant support from the garden. With rosemary branches poking out to look and smell like the real thing, it was remarkably effective, especially after a large pile of Christmas presents surrounded it. (more…)

Posted in: Hardware, Off Duty, apple

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Box shifting causes Migration

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

A courier arrived at our door yesterday, carrying a large brown box on his shoulder. He had tried to deliver it to next door where the address label said it should go to, but they didn’t want it. There was no addressee and the name of the building was as incorrect as the number. What we and our neighbours didn’t know was that the box contained a brand new 27″ iMac, graphics tablet, extended keyboard and trackpad. Plus QuarkXPress 9 and Microsoft Office.

Nice! Shame it wasn’t for me but my wife. Meanwhile I am struggling to convince my employers that as my job is 100% computer and telephone based and I have full access to their Citrix servers, I can do my job successfully from home just as I have done many times in the past when it suited them. Now that I need to, due to large wounds on my arm and leg which are redressed every day, they are getting sniffy about it. Blimey! I was better off when I was self-employed.

But that was a digression and this is more to do with setting up a new Mac. The iMac is the umpteenth Mac swap we have done over the years, from way back in the era of Mac Plus, and Mac IIci in the late 1980s. We know it takes time and as ever, relies as much on the speed of the connection between the two Macs and their hard drives. In the early days it was painfully slow, using the serial network, we could do it via external hard drives which were never quite large enough to do the switch-over in one go. As an average we used to reckon on two or three days, often running all night.

This time we can create a Firewire 800 network and while the old G5 Mac Pro is long in the tooth, it’s still no slouch. We have given up supporting anything older than a fast G4 nowadays. Apple’s Migration Assistant was the chosen tool and being Mac users we didn’t bother to read any instructions. Three hours later the new Mac is up and running. Not quite as we would like but as it was so quick, we will probably erase it’s drive, reinstall the System and re-do the Migration, this time starting the source mac in Firewire disk mode as we, hum hum, should have done.

It’s all good fun, isn’t it? And that 23″ Studio monitor is going to look very cool next to the one already on my desk.

Posted in: Off Duty, Random, Software

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The best thing about the iPhone 4S and how to cope in clink

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Another two weeks in clink, or hospital whichever way you look at things. All to dig a vein out of my arm to fix the twice repaired artery in my leg. Bloody stuff and still very painful. However, it does give the armoury of entertainment a good run out and here are some recommendations.

First up is the iPod which proved essential when stuffed to the diodes with radio shows and plays downloaded in advance. They even left enough space for a movie or two and some TV shows. All courtesy of BBC iPlayer and home recordings.

Next is the iPad. Its small form factor, with an STM cover for propping it upright, made all night viewing a breeze. Movies and TV shows recorded and compressed kept me going for days, meanwhile my lifeline, or more accurately wifeline, was busy preparing new ones for me.

We did try a MacBook but its weight and large size made it vulnerable in a situation where every surface is cleaned several times a day. A MacBook Air would have been a better choice but I don’t know how safe it would be on open wards with no secure locker. Get whisked off for a scan and return to find it had also been whisked off. Whereas the iPad is small enough to keep with you.

Finally the iPhone rounds off gadgets for the gammy. At first my old iPhone 3GS but the lure of a 4S waiting at home proved too great and what a good thing too. A quick switch of contracts was all that was needed to stream TV and radio to my hospital bed-bound misery.

Obviously the above are all Apple products but there is a good reason for this: they all take the same charger. One tiny white plug and lead powered them all up, rather than the large box of transformer-rectifiers used by other manufacturers.

The best thing about the new iPhone is the aerials. Apple spent extensive research time on them and it has really paid off. This is the first cellphone I can get a signal on in my own home, which being near the seafront, is surrounded by buildings rising higher as the land slopes gently away from the coast. A cellphone signal has been all but impossible to pick up from any supplier on any of the dozens of handsets we have tried.

With the iPhone 4S I get a solid three or four signal bars anywhere in my home. Brilliant!

Posted in: Hardware, Off Duty, apple

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Go West… err East…no, is it North?

Monday, July 25th, 2011

If you haven’t got a satellite navigation system or smartphone app, don’t bother reading any more than this paragraph. Buy CoPilot Live Premium and you won’t be disappointed. It does everything you need and a lot more besides, running on Android and iOS phones. If you have CoPilot Live 8 already and are wondering if it’s worth upgrading perhaps our experience will help you decide.

CoPilot Live Premium is a brand new app based on CoPilot 9 and not just an update to CoPilot Love 8. This means it will cost the same as you have already paid. Even so, the two prices added together are still cheaper than a dedicated sat-nav and arguably a lot better. In two weeks of testing, CoPilot Live Premium hasn’t let us down and there are still many new features to be explored. As before, maps, POI’s and speed camera updates are free. Try that with your Garmin or Tom Tom.

From initial start-up, CoPilot Live Premium is very different from previous versions. The screen display is less cluttered with emphasis on showing the next turn and the name of the road to turn into, as a large icon and text running along the bottom of the screen. After turning on the text to speech option, CoPilot Live Premium informs you “in 500 yards, turn left into Bayswater Road”. Unfortunately, Emily, who has lived in our CoPilot across Europe, isn’t up to this task and her colleague Eleanor speaks instead.

She sounds a bit like Katharine Hepburn in her ‘On Golden Pond’ voice, all juddery as if she is sitting on a one-cylinder diesel engine. Most of the time we leave her switched off and especially in Europe. After all, Place de Gaulle could be almost anywhere in France and who would know the Rue de Cholet as such when you are looking for the D960. However, once you get into city centres this changes especially if you are following a tourist map and know the road you are looking for.
Text to speech is especially good when you are walking and following Eleanor’s directions. Then you have time to search for the street names hidden behind a boulangerie’s awning or high up on a wall still pitted with bullet holes from WWII.

Getting ‘there’ is another new experience and a lot better than the previous CoPilot Live. From the start you are offered three different route options, based on your personal preferences or motorways or not and whether to allow toll roads or ferries. It is easy to adjust the routes by ‘clicking’ on the road marked on the map in one of three colours. Then dragging the line to the road you prefer to use. As before, CoPilot doesn’t get into a hissy fit if you miss the turning and rapidly recalculates back to the old or a brand new route.

ALK, publishers of CoPilot, ask you to send your automatically recorded routes to them so they can gather real-time data or correct errors. This is done easily from your cellphone as an option in one of the settings. At the same time you can grab some of their live updates such as traffic information. Live traffic data needs a data connection so it limited to the UK or the very wealthy. At only £7.99 per year it is still an upgrade worth buying.

We proved that the route selections are darned good too. Driving from Le Havre into France, CoPilot kept trying to get is to avoid the Pont de Normandie, which costs about a fiver to cross, and instead routing us to the nearby and free crossing of the Pont de Tancarville which would also take us onto our chosen route for very little extra time. En-route CoPilot continued to argue with the Nissan’s sat-nav we were following in the car in front and the route it chose to Saumur cost us about £30 more than CoPilot’s route.

There are still one or two glitches with the maps. For example: CoPilot wants to route me by way of Dover and Calais to get to Dieppe, rather than using the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry just down the road. It recognises the route but thinks the 4 hour crossing will take over 15 hours. It could just as easily route me from Portsmouth to Le Havre or Ouistreham in quicker time than the three hour drive to Dover.

As any sat-nav user will tell you, there are times when motorways meet in a spaghetti of options where getting on the wrong one may mean a round trip of 100 miles to get back to where you needed to choose the correct route. CoPilot Live Premium has tackled this with clearer route markings showing the correct route to take. I need to test it around Paris or Rouen before I will believe it. Where three or more roads combine then depart from each other, while you are driving at 130kph, on the wrong side of the road. Behind is a crazy trucker in a 40 tonne articulated monster, indifferent if he runs you over or not. Remembering Dennis Weaver in Spielberg’s Duel is not a good thing at such times.

The menus for settings and accessing other features of the app, are easier to get at with one tap on the map taking to the most immediate needs with a further button to get to the rest of the options such as POIs, PhotoNav and My Places. Along the bottom of the screen is a horizontal bar with icons for the remainder of the settings. Compared with the previous version of CoPilot it is far easier to use but has advanced options we haven’t tried yet and to be honest probably never will. We have no real wish to broadcast where we are to Facebook or Twitter, one of the new features for those who want it.

One thing we found a little irritating is that on tapping on the Points of Information to find the closest, you are presented by three options for the nearest: Restaurant, Hotel and Petrol Station. Not our chosen three which would probably be: Carrefour, vineyard and Public Toilet. Nevertheless, underneath is are two large buttons saying Search All which brings up a text entry screen, and More Categories, listing all POI types in alphabetical order as well as having a broader selection than earlier CoPilots. These work without a data connection and are downloaded to your cellphone regularly when data is available.

I note that according to CoPilot, my local Co-Op is called a Co-Opreative which just about sums up CoPilot Live Premium. For anyone about to buy a navigation app, it is pretty hard to beat and the price is very reasonable. We are glad we have the new version and going back to the previous one makes us realise all the new tricks you appreciate. With only a short time playing with the options and learning the menus, you’ll co-opreate with CoPilot Live Premium and trust it to get you to your destination. But do take a map with you as well, just in case…

Posted in: Misc, Off Duty, Software

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Désolé monsieur

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

We were driving along the Loire Valley trying to find somewhere to buy local wine on Sunday afternoon. Go into one of the few stores open and it is all but impossible to buy a bottle of wine from the grapes growing within a metre or two from the door. ‘Désolé monsieur’ say the shop keepers, offering instead various plonks from the Languedoc, four hundred hundred miles further south. We are in an area of France where they plant vines everywhere, even in the middle of roundabouts, the lead content from traffic adding that essential mineral aftertaste.

Then we passed a vineyard shop where the sign said it was ouvert. As we took the next right to turn around we noticed a little vineyard immediately next to us. Nothing of the grandure of the Chateau des Rochette back up the road, Domaine de Pinoreau looked more like ‘our’ type of vineyard.

We entered through the gateway and into the small cobblestone courtyard, flanked one side by an open barn full of old tractors and machinery. Opposite, neat sandstone longueur buildings are where the owners live and conduct business. The ubiquitous dog lazily stood up and walked slowly towards us, his tail wagging in greeting. On the house walls, lizards ran up and down while doves looked down from the edge of the roof and coo-ed at us.

Some parts of rural France seem little changed since the last century. The Citroën 2CV deux chevaux has been swapped for a small white diesel van but village life and environment has hardly altered since WWII. Shops still close Saturday noon to reopen on Tuesday. Lunch is a two-hour long session. Evenings see the village elders sitting in the shade of a stone-built bus shelter, legs wide open to keep cool while tut-tutting about life today. This vineyard looked part of this scenario.

An old lady met us at the door, her face as gnarled as the twisted trunks of her vines. She walked us to a barn door and through to the unlit space. Inside, small stainless steel tanks lined one wall. A pallet stood in the middle of the floor, full of large and small wine boxes. We were ushered to the ‘bar’ where she showed us the wine list, prices ranging from a couple of euros to five for a bottle of sparkling Saumur made by the same method as champagne. Definitely ‘our’ type of vineyard.

Everything in the barn was covered by a layer of dust and while cleared of rubbish it was far from clean. We wondered how they make wine in such a dirty atmosphere but after tasting the delicious, fruity product we made our selection. A couple of ‘cubis’ containing 5 litres at two Euros per litre, some Saumur and a half case of rosé. The little old lady blew the dust off the ancient calculator and totted up the damage.

There is a problem, she cleared some empty boxes, tapped her finger on a small flourescent tube until it flickered into life, each tap sending a cloud of dust into the air. Finally she found a telephone covered in a thick dirty film. She was summoning her husband.

As we waited we took the advantage to degust the sweet dessert wines which, if anything, are better than the dry, brut and demi-sec. Our eyes had adjusted to the semi-gloom of the barn to see winemaking equipment that must be older than some of the gear we’ve viewed in the local museums.

In entered a man of as diminutive stature as his wife, we tower above them both. They muttered between each other in French beyond the scope of our Franglais, pointed at the stack of wine boxes then gave the bad news.

With a shrug he explained: ‘Désolé monsieur, these wine boxes are all ordered and we have none we can sell to you. If monsieur had emailed us or used our website we would have had them ready for you.’

Posted in: Misc, Off Duty, Random

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The biggest tossers in Europe

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

That’s us Brits. We throw away more than any other EC country and much of it still usable. The bulk of our ‘stuff’ ends up in giant landfill sites even if we recycle it, all because the market is flooded with dead plastic, paper and CRT TVs.

We had to make a decision whether to give up something perfectly adequate. Our home and studio is in an area where we are offered a broadband choice from the best of the UK’s leading suppliers. Speeds available vary between pathetic to incredible but at what point does all the speed become a waste of money?

The best our telephone line could manage was a miserly 5Mbps download and 0.8 upload. Thos was after numerous modem upgrades, changing wholesalers and switching between various flavours of ADSL, We could also guarantee that at half past five, ADSL would go down. Exactly the same time we wanted to upload files of the day’s work to servers around the world. Obviously people were getting home from work and hitting their connections. But we paid a premium price for business lines and contention ratios meant to make sure we had priority access.

The move to cable was inevitable and immediately our upload speed was better than the best download speed ADSL ever supplied. It is more than adequate for our needs and even faster than we are supposed to be paying for. Then Virgin told us we can have double that and shortly double that again. All for an additional £22 per month.

What will all that bandwidth get us?

At the moment our 50Mb cable link means we can do everything we need, rapidly and without the disconnects which plague ADSL. Up and downloads of gigabytes of data are a matter of minutes. The server we are connecting with is the limiting factor rather than our cable connection. BBC aside that is, which has been consistently the best in our experience.

We are a household where at times, we have four or more smart phones, one iPad, two Samsung Tabs, seven laptops and two or three desktop computers running ftp servers and the like. Plus our own little Cloud upstairs serving videos to whoever we give the password to. In addition, we might be streaming to an AppleTV or the iPad from Crackle. Perhaps one or two of us are having a video chat to girl/boyfriend left behind in London/Chicago.

If we fancy a movie download, usually about 1.5GB from the iTunes Store, between clicking on the link and sitting to watch is about the same time it takes to get the foil and wire off a bottle of Prosecco With enough time left over to pop the cork through the open French doors into the garden to see if we can beat the current distance record. An achievement I lost recently when my partner uncorked a particularly fizzy specimen. The cork shot up three metres, sailed past the greenhouse by a gnat’s crotchet to land in the garden pond some 15 metres away. Personally I think the wind was behind it.

Should we move to 100Mb link and then to 200mb?

Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame would undoubtedly declaim of course we should, speed is essential. It didn’t do The Stig much good when he won the court case to reveal his identity. He lost his job, had a brief appearance in BTCC racing and seems to have sunk into history.

But he did give driving lessons to Cameron Diaz. And Tom Cruise if you are into short, Scientologist actors.

Posted in: Off Duty, Random

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Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

It is an interesting coincidence that I was enthusing about doing it for free
random-hacks-of-kindness/
as IT Pro is pulling this blog. Do I carry on elsewhere or do I give up? The coincidence is that I am paid by IT Pro, if I set up my own blog site obviously I’ll be doing for free.

Whilst I’m enthusing about volunteering I’m not sure about just blogging for the sake of it – it smacks too much of vanity publishing. How will I know if it’s read or even if it’s worth reading? If someone pays me I know someone values what I’m doing, if not…

Anyway this is pretty much the end here for me as the mystery blogger. So I’ll say farewell and finally reveal my true identity…

I am not an IT bod at all – in fact I am a Gay Girl in Damascus
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13744980

or am I?

Posted in: About the Bloggers, Misc, Off Duty, Random

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Vodafone gets heavy… metal!

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

We all know how a good sponsorship deal can boost your business. Associating your company with an exclusive event can get your name out there to people whose opinion you want to change, making them more positive about your firm’s reputation.

On the professional side you have HP’s attachment to CERN or Virgin Media’s ongoing Government networks.

When it comes to fun you have Trend Micro last year buying up space at Royal Ascot, SAP plumping for Wimbledon and PC Tools going down the F1 route.

But, heavy metal music in a muddy field? Would this be your first choice? For Vodafone it seems to have been a smart one.

Last weekend was Download Festival at Donnington Park. I’m a regular attendee to the event which was born out of Monsters of Rock and this year dragged along a colleague from Expert Reviews to show him what all the fuss was about.

I wasn’t sure how it was going to work with a mobile firm sponsoring a music festival but it didn’t take long to see they had some smart ideas.

First off was charging. Since we have all become surgically attached to our mobiles, being at a festival for five days can give us panic attacks at the prospect of our phones running out. Plenty of stalls have popped up over the years, offering a basic charge from £5 upwards and this is what I expected of Vodafone.

Instead, it offered all of its customers free charging at the festival in a well organised truck with little queues and knowledgeable staff. This seemingly simple idea actually made people I know buy a pay as you go Vodafone SIM card just to use the facility. Nicely done.

Next there was the “Vodafone VIP Viewing Platform.” Vodafone is using the VIP tag for all its customers, again a clever move to make them feel special. The viewing platform had seats – hard plastic but more comfortable than the soggy ground – with an excellent view of the stage, again exclusively for Vodafone customers.

But, it was behind the scenes that was the best for me personally. The company’s communications team told me they had gone to town on building up connectivity across the festival site, something that stumps any mobile user in a field, and I could really notice the difference from previous years.

The thing with metal, as I wrote last year, is it attracts geeks. These can be a mobile app developer or can go up to the CIO of a company – trust me, I have met them at festivals. Vodafone getting onboard with something like this will undoubtedly raise their reputation in consumer circles but I have a feeling there were a few impressed business customers there as well.

Now, can I convince my big bosses to sponsor Sonisphere? We will see…

Tags: Download Festival, Heavy Metal, sponsorship, Vodafone

Posted in: About the Bloggers, Off Duty

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How to become a remarkable asset for the iTunes Store Family

Monday, June 6th, 2011

The problem was simple. For the first time ever I tried to download a movie rental from iTunes. Previously we have bought the films and downloaded them as MP4s to my Mac. This time I didn’t think we would watch the film more than once and tried to download it straight tom my AppleTV. (more…)

Posted in: Off Duty, apple

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