spodgod

I wonder if 2010 will be the year that mainstream marketing starts to understand the reach of online publishing. A recent exchange I had doesn’t bode well for it:

“Hi Kyle,” barked the PR guy on the other end of the line, “[COMPANY NAME] accidentally emailed us your request to try out a [GADGET NAME]”.

“Um, OK,” I said.

“We represent [DIFFERENT COMPANY NAME] and were wondering if you’d like to look at a [ANOTHER GADGET NAME] too”.

“Um, OK,” I said.

“You could probably do a round-up in Spiffy Widgets Magazine,” he said eagerly, completely misunderstanding how technology journalism actually works.

“Well, actually, I just write for the web site,”

“Oh,” he said, a little sadly, “Do you think you can get something into print?”

“Not in Spiffy Widgets Magazine,” I said.

“Do you write for anyone else?” he asked, a little desperately.

“Yes, I do. Web Thing Monthly, Shiny PC, Computer and Video Insides…”

“Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted. Then, sighing, said, “OK, we’ll get a handset out to you by the end of the week. Bye, Kevin”.

“Cool. Do you need my address?”

Click. Brrrrrrrrr.

Everyone has been Netbook mental this year – including me. As soon as I saw the first Eee PC advertised, I wanted one. A PC you can chuck in your bag! Ace! I even blogged about my desire for one…

That was before I actually saw an Eee PC. Admittedly, the range has diversified widely since the first models came out – but they’re actually pretty nasty looking. Flimsy, with tiny keyboards that my sausage fingers found unable to cope with, I couldn’t help feeling that I was using Barbie’s playhouse computer. My netbook fever cooled quickly.

Recently though, I was sent a Medion Akoya Mini E1210 to play around with for PC Plus magazine. Based on the MSI Wind, this little notebook is a more robust and chunky machine than the Asus minis. It has proper, clicky keys that feel like a laptop keyboard – only a bit smaller. The 10″ screen’s absolutely fine for browsing and word processing – and it’s crystal clear. I’m not keen on the trackpad – but I don’t like trackpads anyway. That’s the old graphic designer in me – it’s pixel perfect cursor control for me or death. Well, maybe not death. Perhaps a little random and meaningless violence. To be honest though, you’d be as daft as Daft McGee from Daft Town if you wanted to run Photoshop or Illustrator on one of these babies.

Not that it isn’t capable of doing that. In fact, one of the first things I did with this machine was flip it over and take it apart. Nine screws, a bit of manic tugging careful jiggling, and the E1210′s visceral insides were mine for the meddling. It was that easy. Adding a 2GB SODIMM gave the machine enough horsepower to juggle multiple apps – which I do. I habitually have several browser windows, Open Office, messenger and a media player running at once, because I’m THAT hard. Didn’t need to upgrade the hard drive – which is perfectly adequate at 160 GB in the model I was sent. The wireless card’s in a PCIe slot – so eminently and easily upgradable to hybrid 3G/WiFi when stuff like that becomes more available.

In fact, the only disappointment I had was on the software side. Aimed at Joe Consumer, and shipping for £279 through supermarkets (with an 80GB HD), the E1210 comes with Windows XP preinstalled.

Meh.

There’s nothing wrong with that, actually, but I really wanted a Linux based netbook to play with… Of course, I could have just stuck Ubuntu on there and stopped whining like an ickle baby.

Instead I settled for the lazy route; changing XP’s chunky blue interface back to Windows Classic (that’s the plain grey theme, sports fans), removing all traces of the intrusive and nagging Bulldog Security Suite that ships with the E1210 (AVG and ZoneAlarm do it for me) and replacing Corel Office (huh?) with OpenOffice.org 3.

So – now I’ve got it set-up like a real computer, will it do the job of one? Currently, I’m spending a lot of time on the road, commuting between Leeds and Manchester. If they let me keep it – I’ll update you on how me and the Medion get on. So far, it’s love.

I finally bought a Blu-Ray player.  I say “finally” as I’ve spent several months trying not to buy one… As an inveterate early adopter and fully diagnosed, unmedicated geek, I tried to build one.  Problem is, I’m the wrong kind of geek. 

To clarify – there are technical geeks and pop-culture geeks – right-brain and left brain geeks.  I’m something of anomaly in this classification, falling somewhere in between. I’m a technoculture geek – a little bit nerdy and a little bit rock and roll, as Donnie and Marie never sang.  So, while I can do the following:

Code in JavaScript
Build a computer from component parts
Design, customise and create dynamic web sites with off the shelf server side scripts
Tell you why Firefly should never have been cancelled

 I cannot:

Code in C++
Solder together a circuit board
Write my own CMS in PHP
Tell you why Star Wars is so popular

Despite this disability, I decided it might be a really clever and spiffing idea to build my own Blu-Ray player from an old computer… It already had an HD video card and was (is) connected to the 36″ Sony Bravia flatscreen HD TV in my living room.  How hard could it be?  I might even save money.

This is, clearly, why I don’t build computers for a living…  During the process I discovered the following:

* A five year old, kit built PC repurposed as a media centre probably isn’t the best choice as a base unit for a Blu-Ray player project because…

* Most internal Blu-Ray drives have SATA connectors rather than old school IDE.  Even the bottom of the range, barebones Pioneer model (c£90) that seemed such a bargain.

* An SATA board can be bought for about a tenner and plugged into a spare PCI slot. Problem solved, Blu-Ray drive installed.

* Once installed, however, none of my existing media player software would not play back my Blu-Ray disc.  Not even VLC

* There are currently no reliable open source players that support Blu-Ray either (see VLC).

* WinDVD 9 Plus is expensive for a software-based media player… (c£50)

* It’s not enough that a video card has a DVI-D out port to plug into your HD TV…  It also has to be HDCP compliant.

* HDCP (High Definition Copy Protocol) is hardware enabled protection built into commercial Blu-Ray discs.  If your video card, monitor and operating system don’t support it, your Blu-Ray discs simply will not play.

* Virtually all HDCP compliant video cards on the market fit into PCI-E (not PCI) slots.  If your motherboard is three or more years older, as mine was, chances are it doesn’t have any…

* There are some cards on the market which feature chipsets that are described online as “HDCP Ready”.  That doesn’t mean the card itself is actually equipped to decode HDCP.

* There are about a dozen video cards on the market that fit into an AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot that are listed online as being HDCP compliant.  Make absolutely certain it says that on the box before you buy one.  Like I should have.

* After you’ve got your Blu-Ray drive up and running on its brand new SATA board and you’ve installed your apparently HDCP ready but not actually HDCP compliant video card (c£70), don’t be surprised when the expensive media player software you bought still can’t run the one Blu-Ray disc you have in your collection…

* Using AnyDVD (c£60) is probably illegal – but the current version does quite effectively remove region coding and copy encryption from DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.  Perhaps that might be a solution to all that incompatible hardware.

* Until, that is, you realise that the old Pentium 4 CPU in the machine you’re installing all this stuff on isn’t up to the task of Blu-Ray playback after all - and what you finally get is a mess of stuttering and strobing that renders your copy of “Edward Scissorhands” unwatchable.

*  At this point you might, like I decided to do, head back to Amazon and pick up a bottom of the range Blu-Ray player instead.  For £250.

* Always keep the boxes your components came in.  You’ll need them when you have to put them all on eBay.

What would you do if your Mac refused to start Finder and dropped you into Darwin, it’s UNIX  command prompt? Panic? Scream?  Swear?  Or would you smugly take out your restore disk, slot it into your machine and restart, holding down “C” so that you could boot from the DVD and perform an Archive and Install?

That’s what I did today – except that the machine wouldn’t actually boot from the DVD.  Then I panicked, screamed and swore.  I tried bypassing the startup drive,  zapping the PRAM… all that startup shortcut good stuff.  I fixed permissions, repaired and rebuilt the drive – everything the Mac-heads on assorted forums told other folks in similar situations to do. Nothing worked.  I kept getting dumped back into Darwin.  I tried to mount the DVD manually.  No luck.  I could log in, see my files and see the system.  I just couldn’t start Finder – and the Internet didn’t want to tell me how…

I threw the Mac Mini into a satchel and got the bus to my brother’s house (because, ironically, the computer that governs my car’s immobiliser has crashed too).  First order of business was to recover files from the machine.  We did this by launching a second, working Mac Mini in FireWire target disk mode (holding down “T” at startup) and connecting it to my Mac.  I then started my machine and logged into Darwin.  We then looked at it.

“What do we do next?” I said.

“Maybe if we took a look at the logs we could see what went wrong,”

This, my friends, was an inspired idea.  It was this idea that lead to our solution.  But not in the way you might think…

I found a file, named “logfile.txt” and using the little UNIX I remember from setting up web servers and the old days of anonymous FTP I typed:

sudo open logfile.txt

I fully expected the file to open in vi… but it didn’t.  It booted the Finder and opened in TextEdit!  Nothing else was running – just the Finder and TextEdit – but it was enough for us to get the foothold we needed.  From there we were able to launch System Preferences from the Apple menu and select the Startup Disk pane.  The DVD drive was still invisible – but the FireWire target mode Mini we’d attached to back up my machine wasn’t.  We set the machine to boot from the fully intact OS on the second mini and rebooted.

Five minutes later we were looking at my brother’s OS running on my machine.  I slotted a full Mac OS restore CD in the DVD drive and executed the installer in the Finder.   At reboot I made sure to select the correct target drive and chose “Archive and Install” to replace the old system and back it up.  Then we went for lunch.  By the time we got home, full of cheese and bagels, my crocked Mini was running happily under it’s own steam.

Crisis over.  I hope this post might help others in a similar situation. 

Ho, ho, ho – those silly end users eh?  With their not-knowing-how-to-use-a-computer ways.  How we, the technology cognoscenti, laugh at them and their ill-fitting pants.  Latest in a long line of tech support blog fodder memes doing the rounds has been reported at the NY Times, where techno-hack David Pogue transcribes some of the hilarious howlers he picked up on a trip to a blue chip call centre some years ago.  When I say “hilarious howlers”, I of course mean predictable tales of computer illiteracy – but at least this one was quite funny:

—

On one call, the caller seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to complete each instruction she was given.

Agent: Ma’am, I can’t help noticing that every time I give you an instruction, it takes a really long time before you get back to me. Is your computer that slow?

Caller: Oh, no, it’s just the stupid, stupid design of this computer. Every time I want to click something, I have to unplug the keyboard to plug in the mouse. And then every time I want to use the keyboard again, I have to unplug the mouse. Because there’s only one jack.

Agent: Ma’am, you do realize that there’s a jack on the keyboard itself? You’re supposed to plug the mouse into the keyboard, and the keyboard into the computer.

Caller: Are YOU KIDDING ME!? Oh, wait a minute—yes, I see it now! Oh, holy cow. That’s going to be so much easier!

Agent: Just out of curiosity, how long have you been using your computer that way?

Caller: Six weeks!

—

Microsoft are beta testing a document sharing and viewing service that integrates directly with your desktop version of Office.  Office Live Workspace is sort of like Google Docs, except you have to buy £300 worth of desktop software to use it, because there are no online editing tools.  What you do get is some space where you can post Office documents and Outlook data and a handy plug-in that enables you to save files direct to your online repository.  There were blog mumblings before the launch that MS was about to birth a full version of Office online – competing comprehensively with Google’s growing roster of productivity offerings.  What we’ve actually got is a halfway house.  Office owners can effectively move much of their work online with this beta – especially if they’re already integrating Outlook with Live Hotmail.  If you’re looking for an alternative to the desktop suite though, you’re out of luck.  Better go and check out Zoho or ThinkFree instead.

Dudes, forget the fricking iPhone with it’s 12 zillion dollar price tag you have to pay in cash, updates that turn it into a plastic chunk o’nothing and two year contract that has to be co-signed by your mum. Who needs that crap-on-a-stick when for about £200 ($400) you could have an Eee PC instead?

The Eee PC is an ultra-small laptop – there’s just 7 inches of screen – but it packs in everything you need from a portable computer, including a proper QWERTY keyboard. For your paltry four hundred bucks you get a tiny Linux based notebook that’s pre-loaded with open source software. There’s Firefox for browsing, Open Office for all the boring stuff and Skype for chat. Built in WiFi ensures you can steal bandwidth wherever you roam.

The solid state, built in flash drive is only 4GB (at the moment) and there’s no CD or DVD – but who cares? It’ll network with your main computer if you need to load new software and there are ports to plug-in USB keys.

At just 1.2 lbs it’s small enough to chuck in your backpack – ready to whip out when you want to video conference using the built in web cam, watch movies, update your blog, email work, feed your Fluff Friends in Facebook, call your girlfriend, write some invoices, check your shopping list, write your novel, watch girls soaping themselves up on pornotube…

Did I mention that I really, really want one? I do. 

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHA!

Ha ha

ha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDNcoOjqIXA