A little while ago I decided to buy thickey.tv, I was not sure what to do with it but decided to shove a whole bunch of youtube videos on there.
It is a Tumblr system, sort of like a simple blog. I could have posted the videos on here, but I didn’t so there.
So, at work we are slowly moving our server infrastructure away from its current platform. There are several reasons for this, cost, easer to maintain etc.
I have played with a few things and gotten the hang of it, but before I point anything important to it I thought it would be best to try moving a non money making site first. So this is that.
If you are reading this then its already moved over and working. If your not.. then something strange is going on.
We decided to go with rackspace to host our server needs. After getting the paperwork sorted out and everything I have to say that I am very very very impressed with the level of support that I have gotten with their support guys. I have opened a few support tickets asking trivial things but they all got actioned and answered quickly and correctly. So if your looking for someone to host a server or two (or 1000) then I would suggest you give rackspace a try!
Yesterday was the first day that Apple started to sell DRM free music on its iTunes store. I think this is a very very smart move by Apple and a leap of faith for EMI who are the first of the big music companies to go the DRM free route.
This is a smart move by Apple as it opens iTunes up to non-ipod owning people, quite a few music plays on the market now are able to play the AAC file format, which is superior to MP3. It lets people move music from one thing to another without any problems and yes.. will let you share the music if that is what you want to do.
I thought that it would be good to try iTunes plus out and downloaded an album by Badly drawn boy called Born in the UK. It seems to me that the sound is very good, as the quality has been increased to 256kbps the whole sound is just great.
A few weeks ago I read a blog post that said it was possible to get iTunes content from the US store even if you are not a resident of the United States, I have given this a go and it does work well. ages ago I blogged about the lack of content for people outside of the US and unfortunately this has not change yet.
I am sure the legal position of getting tracks from the US store if I am in the UK are not 100% correct, but I save about 25 pence per download track so it works out to a buy two get one free. I also think that my US$ is as good as someone in America and it is better me paying for the tracks then not paying for them at all.
One last thing, Apple remove DRM from their music but manage to call it iTunes Plus. It should be called iTunes Minus shouldn’t it?
I have decided that it is about time that I did a format and reinstall of my macbook pro.
Over the past year and a bit I have installed and uninstalled and installed once again lots and lots of applications etc. As with with windows I have noticed that my laptop seems to has lost some of its speed and a few things are a bit quirky.
As this is the first time I have done this I am a little bit worried I am going to forget to backup something important. I do however have a good recovery strategy which I will explain below.
There is a great application called Carbon copy cloner (or ccc). Using ccc I can make a full image of my mac, with this image I can pull off any files that I have forgotten to export. So this is my main strategy. If things go very wrong and I can’t recover my OS I have the option to put the image on an external disk and then I can boot my mac from that to recover anything.
If things go very very wrong then I can reload the image onto my mac hard drive and it should be as if I had not done anything at all. This sort of defeats the objective of the task but It could get me out of a spot.
So I will let you know how I get on once my image has been created and I am back up and running again.
I got a cool sun jar from Danetti and thought that I would put a little video up as a review.
It is a great product and works well as an ambient light source at night. You can get it from Danetti.com here, currently priced at £18.99
I have been using a great open source programme called TVShows the past few days, it enables me to catch up with shows that I have missed or are not being broadcast on UK TV.
I have previously been using a website called TVTorrents, This works on the same principle but gives you a custom RSS feed with your selected shows on it. The system is good but works on a ratio model so in the long run it can be a pain.
TVShows skips all the ratio stuff and even the RSS stuff. You just run the application, select the show that you want to watch, say which episode you want to start from and then nothing happens. I left it overnight to get a torrent file or two but nothing happened. Only once i closed it thinking it was rubbish did it start to work, a few seconds later i had new torrent files and Azureus had loaded and was downloading. There is a demon process that get launched once you quit that does all the work, the app is just a frontend.
Only after a few days does this thing work well, it will just download torrents in the background and start downloading when it is ready. It is very cleaver and wait for high quality versions before getting poor quality torrents.. it just works without any human intervention. its GREAT!
If you have a Mac and watch TV then I would recommend it.
I, like the rest of the western world, have been awaiting the announcement and then the release of that Apple iPhone for well over a year now, a few months ago when the product was announced I think it hit almost all the bullet points on people feature wish list. Perhaps the most appealing feature of this would be the interface using your fingers to touch the screen etc.
I was listening to MacBreak Weekly (Episode 37 here) On the way into work the other day and Leo was discussing the Nokia N95 phone. Perhaps because I have been awaiting the Apple phone I have been blind to other products from other companies, I think when I initially saw the phone I noticed the slide out media controls and came to the conclusion that it was an MP3 player phone and nothing much more.
Leo went through some of the features of the phone, things like the Wi-Fi integration, GPS and the 5MP camera all seemed to make the phone sound amazing… I got one the same day.
I have to say that the phone is every bit as good as Leo said it was, my previous phone was a Nokia N70. The N70 was a good phone, miles better than the Motorola Razor and is based on the same series60 platform. This means that the phones are in the same sort of league as each other and so moving from one to the other was quite easy.
I was very very impressed with the whole moving contacts over from one phone to the other. The N95 sent a program to my N70 via bluetooth and within about 2 minutes I was up and running. I then quickly setup iSync after downloading a profile for my N95 (which you can get here).
As a phone I can’t fault it, it works as advertised, the voice dialling is great (useful with my blueye iPod headset thing) one new feature that my N70 does not have is that it can say who a caller is when receiving a call this again is handy when you can’t see the screen.
The camera on the phone is again in a higher league than my N70, it is a 5 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lense. I don’t know that much about cameras but it seems that if the optics has a name on it then its better than one without a name on it. The quality of the images are good and the video recording is very good, I would still use my camera for decent “proper” photos I think.
The phone also has a built in GPS receiver, this gives the phone the ability to know where it is which is very useful in some situations. Bundled with the phone is a maps application which works well but does not offer directions for driving unless you feed it some money, I am still torn over this and not sure if using TomTom mobile would be a better program to use. The map app does have a great search feature, you can ask it for the nearest restaurant to your location or church or anything. This search is done using the internet to lookup on their servers, it works very well.
The Wi-Fi abilities of the phone are great, I perhaps didn’t put much weight into this beforehand but it is very handy to have, my subscription with T-Mobile has “unlimited” (1GB a month) data plan but no matter how you look at it a Wi-Fi connection is faster. One thing that used to bug me on my N70 is that it would ask me what connection to use for the internet, this seemed like a stupid thing to ask me as there was only one. But this idea now makes total sense to me as I can choose my home or work hotspot when available or my 3G connection when they are not.
Something that ties in with the Wi-Fi thing is that the phone has SIP capabilites, this is something that I am AMAZED that T-Mobile didn’t exclude from the phone, as this allows me to connect to services like Gizmo and make very cheap calls when a Wi-Fi connection is present. Good on you T-Mobile!
The gallery on the phone will let you upload videos and photos to some online services, services available to me were Flickr and Vox. I played about with this for a little bit, again its much faster to use when a Wi-Fi connection is present but works slowly on 3G. I sort of think that Nokia missed a trick here with the Flickr service at least, I played about with geotagging photos ages ago and it would be a logical step to add this data to photos if you had a camera/GPS/Internet type device.. but never mind there is still hope (see below).
There are two non Nokia applications that are both free and should come with the phone.
The first is a service and application called Shozu. This does everything and more that the Nokia media uploading tools leave out. The N95 is not listed as compatible on the Shozu you list (also its not listed as incompatible). I said my phone was a N73 and it all went well. This service lets you upload your media to almost every imaginable service out there, Flickr and Vox are there but so is youtube, the BBC and even Wordpress. It is easy to set up and works very well, it does advertise the fact that Shozu was used to upload the media to everything but that is fine I think. Geo data is added when it can be both the Flickr and Youtube tests I made this morning are geotagged, its fantastic. The wordpress integration is also great, it works with my own hosted version which you’re reading now. I made a new user for this service to use as I think its good/handy to see where I posted from and I didn’t particularly want to give my admin user details to a third party.
The second application that is fantastic is called MGMaps this is free and uses web mapping services such as Google maps, Yahoo maps, MSN maps etc through a Java interface. This is much better than a web interface as they tend to be “lite” mobile versions you end up getting. Again with the GPS working you can plot yourself onto Google maps switch to satellite view and then even see the Yahoo version. All good so far but its even better than that, you can use the Google searching and directions services as if you were on a desktop computer. I am not sure yet if this would be a good TomTom replacement or not. This app uses the 3G/Wi-Fi connection so probably not best for people with “unlimited” data plans while out and about.
There are two bad things about the phone that I have discovered, but they are not major ones. The first is that it is easy to press a button on the side of the phone when in use, this does not do anything apart from beep in your ear but it can be a little bit annoying. The second is that no matter how you put the phone in your pocket it is easy to slide the face forwards or backwards and taking it off keylock, again, it’s not a huge problem you just need to check it when you slide the phone in.
This is a great phone, lots and lots of features some like the browser which is great I haven’t even talked about. I think as a blogger this is a perfect device for capturing input and uploading and integrating media into various systems.
So for the sake of symmetry I started talking about the iPhone and I will finish the same way. I am not 100% confident that the first version iPhone will be the way to go, the first iPod was in retrospect not great looking/working. This is the first time that Apple has tried to make a phone and so I am guessing there will be the odd issue or two. The iPhone also lacks as both a phone and a digital audio player, only 8GB of storage for all your media, no GPS and no decent camera. The N95 on the other hand is a product that has gone through several versions and is a very polished and feature rich product. I also know that Apple will release sooner or later a 6th gen iPod with the nice interface of the iPhone and more storage, so for now I am happy to keep the two separate. Saying that I will probably get the iPhone on another contract and not tell my girlfriend.. so keep THAT to yourself please 
I have picked up a few more things in the past months that would be classed as gadgets and toys. I of course got myself a Wii (before Christmas as well!), an AppleTV is now hooked up to my TV and I have just got a new Nokia N95 phone.
I will probably post more about these at a later stage, first to come will be the phone I think.
I was asked by two people this week about my blog, so I guess that I should try and update it a little more regularly. About 50% of all blog posts go along these lines.. but this is the first one here in over 250 posts, so there you go.
The past few months I have been playing World of Warcraft, I knew that perhaps it was a mistake, but it was good fun and I managed to get all that I wanted to get from it, the reasons that I quit were the same as the reasons when I quit playing Star Wars Galaxies, you can read my post about that here.
So I am back on the MMORPG wagon for the moment, I don’t think there are any others on the horizon that interest me at all… Its just the grinding that gets to me the most I think.
I have decided today to remove the bootcamp partition on my MacBook pro. I set this up when I got my mac so that I could run in a windows environment if/when needed. Since then I have successfully used a combination of parallels and crossover to run any windows applications that I need. Hard drive space is getting a bit thin on the ground so its time to purge.
I can’t remember exactly the last time that I booted into windows but it was many many months ago.