Tech Tuesday.. erm Wednesday: Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook

Natz has long needed a new computer of her own, as she's been using a combination of hand-me-downs and 'loaners' for ages now. She just needed something to do office work and web browsing on, with portability being a plus for presentations and a webcam for Skype use if possible. I've kept an eye out for a system that would meet our budget and get the job done, and that paid off last week when I saw Kalahari.net has the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 on sale for a very reasonable R3399. I did the obligatory geek research, and after reading a number of very positive reviews and trawling forums in vain for serious complaints we decided to order one.

The full specs of the machine are as follows (straight from the Kalahari product page, with a few additions ;) ):

• 8.9" Widescreen WSVGA
• Intel® Atom N270 (1.6GHz,533MHz,512KB)
• 1GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM
• 8GB SSD Hard Drive
• 802.11 (b/g) & BLUETOOTH
• 1.3MP Webcam
• Intel® Integrated GMA 950
• 4-cell 32WHr Battery
• 3 USB ports
• Built in SD Card reader
• VGA port

Setup

My only initial concern was the small amount of storage space, and I imagined myself trawling the web for heavily optimised versions of Windows XP and MS Office (I've tried Natz on Ubuntu and OpenOffice and she just prefers the MS alternatives). So with that worry hanging over me, I set about preparing the new arrival for Natz' use. The initial Windows XP setup was really slow for some reason, which got me worrying about the Atom's performance, but once that was done and Windows itself started up, my concerns began to fade.

Checking the available disk space, I found a little under half of the 8Gb to be available, and disabling hibernation (which I have had endless trouble with and consider a waste of space and energy) freed up another gig.

One big advantage of the limited space is that manufacturers can't clog the system up with bloatware, the only applications I had to remove were the preinstalled MacAfee Antivirus trial (which I replaced with Avast 4 Home Edition) and Adobe Acrobat Reader (replaced with Foxit Reader portable). I also installed VLC Portable as a snappier and more flexible alternative to Windows Media Player. My preference for portable applications was largely so that I could simply relocate as much as possible to an SD card should the need for extra storage arise, but I do find they have other advantages too, such as not cluttering up the registry.

After initial attempts to use the preinstalled IE6, and having concerns pop up again about performance due to it's sluggishness and stability issues, I looked into browser options. With Firefox becoming quite a resource hog of late, and Natz not needing any of the extensions I find essential, it quickly became clear that Portable Google Chrome would be the best choice. The difference was immense, Chrome started up almost instantly, made excellent use of the limited screen real estate and was solid as a rock. There is no portable alternative to Skype as far as I'm aware (at least not one that supports video) so I installed the default version.

To allow Natz to use her phone as a 3G modem when she's not at home, I installed the SonyEricsson PC suite (just installing the drivers and trying to set up a standard system PPoE connection didn't work out too well.. oh for standard Ubuntu tools). The final big install was Microsoft Office 2003, which I was concerned would chew up a huge amount of space. As it turns out, the default installs of Word, Excel and PowerPoint came in at around 350Mb, which I consider perfectly acceptable.

The only additional performance tweak I needed to make was bumping the virtual memory up from the default of 200 Megs to a more sensible (but still tight) 512 megs.

Performance

Once everything is set up, this little machine runs like an absolute dream. I didn't go as far as actually benchmarking anything, I was more concerned with perceived performance so I wouldn’t have to deal with "why's it taking so long" issues. Keep in mind this machine is not intended to play games or do heavy multimedia work (we have an Xbox 360 after all).

Boot time into Windows XP is around 20 seconds. As mentioned before Chrome startup is all but instant, and of course it's renderer is blisteringly fast. Word, Excel and PowerPoint all start up quickly and are completely responsive as expected at all times. Browsing files on the SSD or an inserted SD card or USB is fast and problem free. The only app which seemed slow to start up was Skype, but I'd put that down to their overblown interface. Running more than the browser and an office app or two simultaneously probably wouldn't be the best idea, but that wouldn't be expected of a machine like this. Even shutdown, which is notoriously sluggish on XP is pretty quick.

Battery life on the Mini has also impressed me. Not having to run disk based storage and a larger screen, the device manages to squeeze around 4 hours of WiFi-connected use out of a full charge. This combined with the Mini 9's under 2kg mass has led to an almost cellphone-like usage pattern for Natz. She typically charges it in the evening, and then uses it the morning and evening while at home, moving it to the kitchen, lounge or wherever she happens to be. In the past, using a full size notebook, she would have typically just used the notebook in her study rather than lug it around.

Comfort

One of the primary issues I looked out for in reviews and forums before buying the Mini 9 was keyboard comfort. I was concerned the squashed keyboard would make typing extremely uncomfortable. Fortunately Dell did a good job in this case, and while it's certainly not quite as comfortable and intuitive as a full size notebook keyboard, the Mini's keyboard is more than sufficient for online chatting and the odd bit of document work. The screen size is also great for web browsing and even reading documents.

For serious typing work, a USB or Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a monitor connected via the VGA port transform the mini into a standard desktop machine. The Mini can output to both it's own screen and an external monitor at it's default 1024x600 resolution, or just the external at more common resolutions. It performed just fine running at 1280x1024 on Natz' 19" CRT refreshing at 75hz.

One thing that struck me about this machine is it's noise level-there simply is none. I have never worked on any PC or notebook this quiet. With no disk based storage and no fans whatsoever, the Mini 9 is literally dead silent. This does come at a (negligible) cost, namely that the machine gets warm due to the lack of fans, but less so than my own P4 which I can't rest on my lap for fear of third degree burns!

Ubuntu

I couldn't not test Ubuntu on the Mini with all the discussion currently going on around the perfect netbook OS. Of course with 8Gb of storage dual booting wasn't an option, so I loaded up a USB Live installation created in my own 9.04 install. Load time was painfully slow, even worse than it usually is with a Live CD (though it should be quick with a full installation), but the wait was more than worth it! Ubuntu ran snappily, comfortably running multiple office applications, video player and firefox simultaneously without any sign of slowing down. To put it simply, if this was my machine, I'd be replacing XP with Ubuntu in a heartbeat, especially with the focus in the upcoming 9.10 release being on getting it performing even better on netbooks.

Summary

I have had my reservations about the whole netbook market, but the Dell Mini 9 has sold me on the smaller-than-notebooks form factor. This little machine is more than powerfull enough for office tasks and browsing, and paired with a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse fills both the portable and desktop roles beautifully. Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Natz is absolutely loving this device.

Podcasts I’m listening to

Thanks to our office move last week and my home ADSL only being fixed yesterday after almost two weeks of downtime (I’m looking at you, Telkom and WebAfrica, I’d better get a discount this month!), the Nokia Music Store and N96 Geocaching and Navigation articles have been somewhat delayed. As a (once again, poor) substitute, in answer to @Fengol’s query, I thought I’d list the podcasts I’m listening to on my new ~45km commute, these are in the (apparently random) order in which my N96’s podcasting application lists them.

Just Vocabulary

Suggested by @tianatweets, this podcast aims to increase your English vocabulary. This could be really helpful for writers and anyone who has to get creative with the English language, and of course an expanded vocab’ couldn’t hurt the average man either.

ChinesePod

Keeping with languages, but switching to Chinese, ChinesePod offers great resources for learning Mandarin. The lessons on their site range from the basics for newbies, to more advanced users. The radio-quality audio lessons are free, with a premium option making cd-quality lessons and supporting material such as dialog notes available. I have been working through the newbie lessons for a couple of weeks (with the goal of eventually being able to better communicate with my Tai Chi instructor), but only recently discovered the podcast, which offers a somewhat random mix of lessons from different levels. There are other language sites available in the “pod” network, including JapanesPod101.com which was the first I was exposed to and is also excellent.

Slashdot Review

Probably the first podcast I ever listened to, SDR started out as a podcast reviewing daily news on the geek site Slashdot. It has since evolved to include content from Digg and other sites. What I enjoy about SDR is that it doesn’t just cover tech, but also other (equally geeky) topics from these sites.

Talk Radio 702

It may seem redundant to listen to podcasts of a radio station in my car, when I could just tune into the station, but there are some specific 702 features which are on during the workday when it’s not practical for me to listen to them. In particular I enjoy the Green Tip, Naked Scientist and Week that Wasn’t on Redi Direko’s show.

TGN: Reflections

Another one I’ve yet to listen to, Reflections is a collection of daily bible readings.

The Joystiq Podcast

The Joystiq blog is a great place to keep up with all things gaming, and their podcast is a good way to keep tabs on the big news in the gaming industry. It’s also cool hearing an SA accent in amongst the others when @LudwigK pitches in ;)

The Naked Scientists

In my high school days, Bill Nye was desperately trying to make science cool-and failing miserably. These days we have the The Naked Scientists, and I believe they do a damned good job. Besides the short Q&A session on 702, The Naked Scientists do of course have their own show covering new discoveries in science and it’s well worth a listen.

We Your People, Ours the Journey

These are the sermons of Rebecca Clark, aka @pastorbecca, a Methodist pastor in the US. I really enjoy her sincere, sensible and common sense lessons which take cognisance of the world as it is today. If you’re looking for a decent spiritual podcast you can’t go wrong with this one.

The ZA Tech Show

There are a number of local tech focussed shows these days, and many of them are quite good, but I find the ZATS to be particularly entertaining and informative. This is due in no small part to the regular involvement of  Simon Dingle, Jon Tullet, Brett Haggard and Duncan McCleod, collectively some of the best informed individuals in the local ICT industry today-well they do a damned good job of pretending to be at least ;)

[Update 02/05/2009]

I got a call from WebAfrica yesterday, and it seems they keep an ear very close to the ground when it comes to people talking their service levels. They picked up on my mention of downtime in this post and decided to give me a discount on my bill for last month.

Nicely done WebAfrica, once again I’m reminded why I’ve enjoyed using your services for the last 3 years and recommended you to others on many occasions.

Email attachment netiquette 101

Email is a wonderful invention, it lets us easily, quickly and reliably communicate with others, and has the added bonus of allowing any kind of digital file imaginable to be attached to it. Of course some people have to go and misuse this awesome ability, and more often than not it’s the kind of people that we can’t really ask to change their ways without some kind of consequences (professional or personal). Some of the prime offences which drive me (and I’m sure others nuts), and which you can stop doing right now if you’re guilty of them are:

• Forwarding a mail by adding it as an attachment to another (blank) mail. You’re giving me an extra, completely unnecessary step to read your mail, which increases the likelihood it will be routed directly to the trash without ever being looked at.
• Attaching what should be the body of the email as a word, rtf or other document. What valid reason could you possibly have for doing this? It’s like moving a live cow by putting it on the back of a horse-stupid and completely nonsensical.
• Pasting images into a word document and then attaching the document instead of just attaching the images to the mail. You do realize that when you resize those images in word, it doesn’t actually make the filesize smaller, right? (ok so MS got smart in the latest version and changed that, probably especially for idiots like you that do this).
• Attaching absolutely anything other than an actual presentation as a powerpoint file. As above, if you have images to share, then attach them directly to the damned email. You want a bulleted list? Fancy formatting? Guess what, just about every email client today supports HTML or at very least rich text.. you can do that formatting directly in your email.
• Attaching anything, and I do mean ANYTHING, larger than 1 meg unless it is absolutely necessary. Not everyone uses a web client for their email and is protected from downloading your digital bloat. Upload that funny video to Youtube and send me the link. Upload the enormous photos of your cat to Flickr and send me that link. If all else fails, try one of the zillions of free file sharing sites that will accept just about anything you want to post on them.

Can you think of any other major attachment-related email snafus that make you want to take on the accounts department with a large blunt instrument..?

Nothing for today

The “Toy” I mentioned last week is not yet in my hands (I should have it this evening), so as a blog topic that pretty much fell through. Aside from that we dealt with a really rough tragedy in the family last week and over the weekend, so blogging was really the last thing on my mind. Next week I promise a proper Tech Tuesday post.

Ubuntu Desktop part 3: Hardware support and development

I’m going to make this my last post on Ubuntu on the desktop (read the previous ones here and here), as I’ll soon be getting a new ‘toy’ that I’ll be putting through it’s paces and blogging about. I’ll also be trying to keep future tech related posts to Tuesday, henceforth to be known as (drumroll..)  Tech Tuesday.

In this post I’ll discuss my experiences with Ubuntu’s hardware support, and touch on using it as a dev platform.

Hardware ups and downs

As mentioned in my first post, my home machine is a P4 notebook with 1Gig ram and an ATi 9700 mobility video card. It’s a Mecer branded machine which I’m assuming uses fairly standard components. With no built in WiFi, Bluetooth, Webcam or any such gadgets, Ubuntu really didn’t have much to deal with.

What it did have (and continues to have) problems with is my video card. Strangely enough when I tried an older Ubuntu version (6.x) on it many moons ago, I seem to remember the hardware acceleration working fine. Somewhere along the development path to 8.4 something went terribly wrong though. I have done a lot of research and fiddling, and what it seems to come down to is that ATi (now part of AMD) has not kept up with it’s Linux drivers and there are a large number of unhappy owners of older mobile ATi graphics cards who run into compatibility issues on Ubuntu. AMD have promised that updated drivers will be available soon, but for now I am without video acceleration in Ubuntu. 

On the other side of the coin is Ubuntu’s incredible printer support. I have wasted many hours getting a wide assortment of printers to play nicely in both home and business contexts, and I would have loved Ubuntu’s awesome printer support in those situations. We have a fairly obscure Brother printer/fax/scanner combo hooked up to our ADSL router and accessed by our PCs over the LAN. Setting this up in Windows XP is fairly tedious (though admittedly much easier in Vista) and Ubuntu detected everything pretty much automatically. No messing with driver downloads or custom ports, everything just worked.

Other than the video card issue I would have to say Ubuntu has hardware compatibility and ease of setup nailed.

Ubuntu as a development OS

I’m working on a web development project at home at the moment (sorry, no details just yet) using PHP and MySQL, and it’s the first such project I have done. I’ve been using the excellent XAMPP package to run my web and database servers, and NetBeans 6.5 for coding and debugging. Like much of the software I’ve ended up using in Ubuntu, getting it all set up was definitely not as simple as it could (or should) have been, with a number of strange issues between XAMPP’s MySQL server and the settings expected by the default tools. As with the video card issue, this is a third party problem, not so much a Linux problem, but it does illustrate that there seems to be a serious lack of consistency in the way things are done from developer to developer when implementing software. This can be an absolute nightmare for users.

That said, now that my environment is up and running, it’s a pleasure to develop in, with NetBeans running significantly faster in Ubuntu than it ever did (on the same hardware) in Windows XP. I could honestly recommend the Ubuntu/XAMPP/Netbeans combo to those who want to fiddle with web development at home.

 

That’s it for my musings on Ubuntu. Next week I’ll introduce my new toy :)

So much for the linux media center

After a fair amount of fiddling with different options last year I finally settled for a TwonkyMedia server running on Ubuntu on an old (and I do mean old) PC as a basic media server solution. The addition of Grip set to auto-rip inserted CDs made adding media fairly easy as well. This setup worked ok most of the time, though it had a tendency to fall apart at the seems at the precise moment I actually wanted to show guests how cool it was to have all my music served up to my '360 for easy use, and these hiccups seemed to become more and more frequent, to the point where we just started using CDs again instead.

Having recently taken the plunge and switched my home laptop entirely to the latest Ubuntu version (8.10) and tried the Xubuntu and Kubuntu flavours as well, I thought the much zippier Xubuntu would make a great choice for a reinstalled media server. The actual Xubuntu install off the Live CD went perfectly of course (if a bit slowly), but from there things pretty much went pear shaped. Xubuntu doesn't include samba sharing or a remote desktop server by default, the only two requirements I actually have for managing the server (and I don't have a decent connection at home to get these components). Twonky itself also refused to run for no apparently good reason, no matter how many times I uninstalled, reinstalled and tweaked it.

Seeing that XBMC (previously Xbox Media Center) was now available as a Live install (and as an install for Linux, Windows and Mac), I thought I'd give that a try instead. The Live CD ran, though very slowly, but once installed I ran into more problems.

I did start trying to track down solutions to some of these issues, but just can't be bothered to keep at it any more. This is why Linux still isn't ready for the average user. XBMC did really impress me though, and I decided that since Microsoft is no longer even selling games for the original Xbox (except as emulated downloads on the '360) I may as well mod my old Xbox and enjoy the swishy goodness of XBMC as it was intended to be used.

SA Medical 'care' has hit rock bottom

(My apologies for the long down time, between the hectic deadline at work recently and all Natz' medical woes, it was unavoidable)

As a chronic disorder sufferer I am something of a hospital and surgery veteran. I have 'fond' memories of these institutions reaching back to the days when our government hospitals were some of the best in the world and medical aid administrators wouldn't dream of paying for private hospital care. Of course it has been well over a decade since government medical care deteriorated to the point where those patients with medical aid would rather opt for private care.

As a fallback, for many years the private hospitals in South Africa offered those fortunate enough to afford their services excellent care. It seems though that the golden age of private medical care is over as well.

Over the last four months my wife, sister and law and nephew have each unfortunately had need of hospital care. Between them they spent time in hospitals belonging to both of the major private groups in SA (Life and Netcare) and had absolutely terrible experiences.

The horror starts with the admission process. In this age of online convenience and practically unlimited storage, the mind boggles at supposedly modern companies that require their clients to provide the same volumes of information (which are already maintained by their medical aid) every single time they visit. What is even worse is that in Life's case the patient must undergo preadmission. This means that a patient is expected to take additional time to get to the hospital before actually coming in for the procedure, just to fill out these forms to provide information the hospital already has from previous visits. One would think this preadmission process would mean on the day of the procedure itself, the patient would be able to walk in and be led to a hospital bed. Au countraire, it is still necessary to wait in reception for admin staff to approve the paperwork. On one occasion we waited in reception for 45 minutes until Natalie was finally allowed to continue to the ward.

Arriving at the ward, memories of friendly nurses eager to help are spoiled by the reality of nursing staff who insist on finishing whatever important private conversation they are engaged in before acknowledging the patient's existence. The nursing care itself leaves much to be desired as well. The nurses 'caring' for Natalie ignored her pleas for something to soothe a headache for well over five hours, Vanessa's were oblivious to her drip having missed the vein and causing swelling and those looking after baby Dayle missed the fact that he had become dehydrated while under their care.

The surgical success rate instills no more confidence. A routine wisdom teeth extraction resulted in months of pain and discomfort as well as three follow-up procedures for Natalie. To top it all off, she ended up coming out of the last procedure (which had nothing to do with her mouth) with a chipped tooth.

To add insult to injury, as a combined result of the miniscule dental limits imposed by medical aids and the need for those follow up procedures, we also sit with sizeable medical bills.

A quick visit to consumer feedback site HelloPeter.com shows that our experiences are by no means an exception to the rule, and the templated response to complaints on the site is yet another example of the shortcut approach which seems to be becoming the industry norm. To be fair, the administrative staff at the hospital I complained at has been helpful, but this is after the fact and doesn't help solve any of the problems.

I honestly don't know whether the sudden and massive decline in treatment of patients has to do with massive greed and cost cutting in the industry, lack of training or just staff apathy, but whatever it is needs to be sorted out. We are rapidly approaching a point where our expensive private hospitals are becoming little more than extremely expensive hotels with really big first aid cabinets.

Where have all the heroes gone?

There is no shortage of people and organizations prepared to pronounce the evils of movies and video games. I'm usually the voice of reason arguing why these naysayers are being paranoid and sensationalist. For once though, I'm the one concerned about the negative effect about entertainment media. I'm worried that they are doing far worse than desensitising us against violence, but rather against our own ambitions. While watching the excellent Lions for Lambs a couple of weeks ago it struck me how skilled hollywood has become at manipulating our feelings, easily leading us from a sense of terrible loss, to proud patriotism, to self-satisfying anger at injustices of all kinds. While this is great for story telling, I worry that it takes away the drive for us to fulfil the need for such emotional extremes in the real world.

What if by making easily available a quick fix of bold heroics in Saving Private Ryan, or activist achievement in Who Killed the Electric Car we are actually suppressing the need that would normally lead us to go out and really make a difference in our community by acting. Similar concerns were recently raised about Guitar Hero killing off real guitar heroes (though it was shown the game was actually increasing interest in making music). This may seem like a far fetched idea, until one considers how complacent we have become about everything. Sure, people will moan around the water cooler about the latest shocking revelation of refugee mistreatment on BBC's website, or government dawdling when it comes to climate change, but then they go home and turn on the TV, and all is forgotten in a blur of manufactured experiences.

The world's population now numbers in the billions, an order of magnitude greater than just a hundred years ago, yet do we have a proportionally greater number of heroes? There are certainly those that go out and make a difference, both in their communities and on the world stage, but they are far outnumbered by the zombified masses that would rather feed their need to 'make a difference' by watching someone do it on TV.

It also seems as if the dwindling number of heroes in the world are fighting an impossible army of villains who take advantage of this mass euthanasia of people's drive to make a difference. Corporate leaders and corrupt government officials are free to destroy the world as the people that should be rising up to challenge them rather watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica or lead a heroic raid in World of Warcraft.

I don't think it's any coincidence that as I have spent less time playing video games and watching TV I have become more and more aware and saddened by the state of our world, and also more driven to do something about it. And doing something feels good, it feels a lot better than watching someone else do something in HD widescreen. Perhaps if more people tried replacing some of their screen time with real activity time we could begin to solve some of the terrible problems our world is facing.

Hyperkiloing

While high oil prices undoubtedly have advantages for the environment and society in general, forcing many commuters to finally realize that public transport is the way to go, those of us that don't have that option are suffering somewhat. When you have no choice but to pile into your car every day and hit the highway to get to work, there's not a hell of a lot yo can do to escape the high price of petrol.. or is there?

Hypermiling is a growing movement worldwide which utilizes non-aggressive driving to improve vehicle fuel efficiency. By slowing down, anticipating traffic movement and not madly racing from robot to robot and stop to stop (where you'll have to waste energy braking anyway) the mileage achievable on a tank of fuel can be stretched quite significantly.
Interestingly enough while some extreme hypermiling tricks such as rolling through stops and drafting could potentially increase your accident risks, the simpler methods such of those mentioned above are actually likely to improve road safety. You'll be safer and saving money.
I started my own minor hyperkiloing (stupid imperial systems..) experiment a few weeks ago. I limited my speed to 100km/h on the highway and strictly sticking to the speed limit in other areas. I don't accelerate rapidly away from stops and pay attention to upcoming stops, coasting to slow down instead of rapidly breaking.
Yesterday was my first refuelling since I started made these changes and I was pleasantly surprised. While the R525 to fill my 50l tank was hardly cheap, I got some satisfaction out of the fact that instead of getting my usual ~650km to the tank, I had squeezed an extra ~90km out of it and reached ~740km! My daily commute is 18km one way, so with the current petrol price of R10.50/l here are a couple of ways to look at this improvement:

• That's an extra ~14% out of my tank, that's just over R70 worth of fuel.
• It's an extra 2.5 full days worth of extra work commuting per month.
• Annually this will save ~1.6 tanks of fuel, which is ~81l of petrol or ~R850 (probably much more as oil goes up).
  
• My mileage has improved from ~13km/l to ~15km/l or..
• In the popular alternate notation from ~7.6l/100km to ~6.7l/100km.

KNRA Cleanup and Snare hunt

Natz and I visited the Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve for the first time in May when they had one of their guided bird walks (they have one every month, check out their calendar). It's a surprisingly large reserve (the largest in the Joburg Metro) and besides being beautiful has an impressive array of fauna and flora and even an archaeological dig site! Not bad at all considering how close it is.

Well a reserve of that size obviously takes some maintenance, and part of that is occasional cleanups (stupid litterers) and snare removal excursions by volunteers. There will be one this Saturday July 5th, starting at the Silent Pool entrance (map here). Any extra hands would be welcome, and it's a great reason to get out in the open and away from overpopulated (and overrated) shopping malls. To quote Sue of the reserve association:

Suggest old clothes, comfy shoes, own water and lots of energy

For more info, there are contact details on the reserve's site.

[Update: 10/07/2008]

We went, we saw, we collected. Andrew joined Natz and I as we split from the main group to collect on the opposite bank. We quickly filled the three bags we had on us. We found a dodgy, stereotypical old boot too :)

Gone fishing

Well i wasn't exactly off fishing, but we did head down to the coast for a good week long break-hence the lack me posts. We mostly shut out the outside world too-no tv, radio or internet (other than email and facebook-nat is now safely a complete geek!). I'll dump more photos on flickr next week, we disconnected the adsl at home for now and i'm not paying 3g prices to upload all those pics ;)
Treasure hunt
One great new activity we did try out this week was geocaching. It's like a treasure hunt with a gps, and when you track down the 'cache' you log your find and possibly swap an item of your own for one in the cache. I suppose it qualifies as an augmented reality game on a huge scale (essentially a planetary scale, since there are caches hidden all over the world). We found our first 3 caches this holiday and were led to some great spots in the process. Check out geocaching.com for more info.

Revamped and rearing to go

I've installed a new template (as you've most likely noticed if you aren't reading this in a feed reader). This has taken quite some time, so I won't have anything 'useful' to post before next week-when I hope to post on the use of RSS feeds to control your browsing. I do have two short notes though:

I have been diligently practicing my Tai Chi since February and I'm really enjoying it, though I'd really like to start taking lessons again. As luck would have it, an actual Shaolin monk has taken up residence in Benoni and is offering martial arts lessons-including Tai Chi. How cool is that.

The other thing is less positive. I have been doing a lot of reflection and realized that I want to become an active environmentalist-a passion of mine when I was younger that I lost touch with. Do you think I can find an organization anywhere nearby that I can work with? Not a damn! So yeah, suggestions would be welcome.

 

Technorati Tags: tai chi,template,shaolin,environmentalism

And the Winner is..

I have decided to dish out an award this week: the "Big Pile o' Poo to match your crappy service" award. We have two finalists for the award today, let me describe their qualifications

The usual suspect

What would a bad service award be without Telkom. They earn their place in the race for the dubious BPOP badge for managing to break my ADSL every single time a technician comes out to our area and tinkers/bangs on whatever is in those exchange boxes. A callout fee is levied if you lodge a complaint and it turns out there's no fault though, so we wait a day or two to see if they accidentally fix the problem (yeah, it happens). The cherry on the cake though is actually trying to reach their support, my last (unsuccessful) attempt had me waiting for 40 minutes on the line. While their single, irritating call waiting music loops, they taunt you with the suggestion to report the fault on their website. Let's see, what could be wrong with the idea of reporting a DSL fault on a website.. hmmm.

Upon actually going to the website (at work of course, my home DSL is still down) it turns out that it's possible to report telephone faults, and TelkomInternet (ISP) faults, but screw you if you want to report a faulty DSL line.. call the helpline, suck it up and grow old in the queue.

Bank on stupidity

The second contender, First National Bank, stumbles it's way into the finals by having some of the most convoluted processes I have ever come across. Their staff are great, they really want to help, it's just a pity that whatever moron designs their processes seems to delight in torturing both them and their customers by overcomplicating everything.

Reactivating my administrative account on their internet banking service after losing the password (doh!) was the first hitch. It is physically impossible, thanks to their overcomplicated ideas, to even walk into a branch with all my ID documents AND the original documents issued with the account and sort this out in one sitting. You have to have a reactivation form which they can't print (WTF!?), but you're not allowed to insert a USB stick into any of their machines to allow you to access the site so you can't print the form out at all in the branch. Once you have this form, you have to get it to the bank-but they still can't do the activation, all they do is sign it and forward it to Internet Banking, who then do the activation (eventually). Completely, unnecessarily overcomplicated.

The next problem is that you then have to request the ability to make payments separately-as if anyone wants internet banking without that facility. This involves yet another form and the same idiotic process as above.

All of this is aggravated by the fact that none of the support staff could tell me any of this upfront. I had to discover it all by trial and error.

Drumroll..

So out of these two who get's the poo? I suppose FNB have to get some credit for eventually getting the job done, no matter how roundabout the route. Telkom, on the other hand, still haven't fixed my line. I am now switching to WebAfrica for my line access portion as well in the desperate hope that they can light some fires for me.

Congratulations Telkom, you get some poo! Come visit me at home and I'll take great delight in feeding it to you.. I just need to harvest it from the cats' litter box. 

Veggie patch

I may not have access to windows live writer, but at least with shozu i can make single image posts easily. Here is a shot me the vegetable patch that is has so far given we a good couple me hours me enjoyment-and some really good butter lettuce. We've got beans, onions, carrots, cauliflower, snap peas, cucumbers, mealies, pumpkin and watermelon in there as well but we planted quite late in the reason so only time will tell if we get anything decent from them.

New Year Resolution and stuff

Happy New Year all, and a belated Merry Christmas. I'm not usually big on resolutions, but I thought I'd try for one or two this year. The relevant one for this post is that I am resolving to write at least one blog post a week-even if it ends up being a quick three liner from my phone at 11:59 on a Sunday night :) That may actually be a very practical approach since my home network is once again sorted out. We get an excellent wireless signal throughout the house, and I got the wiring through the roof done over the holidays as well so we now have proper network points in both studies and the TV room.

Windows Live notWriter
As much as I wanted to do a decent post with a photo or two from the past couple of weeks (like one of our veggie patch which is coming along really well) I'm afraid Microsoft had other plans. As mentioned in a previous post, I enjoy using Windows Live Writer to write my posts, rather than Blogger's web based editor. When I fired it up the other day to write a post, I was greeted with a notification that it would soon expire and I should update. I promptly headed over to the website and downloaded (what I thought was) the installer.
It turns out this was nothing more than a fancy installshield mutation hooked into Windows Update with a list of Windows Live products that could be installed, including Writer. Upon choosing the required product(s), the installer then begins trying to actually download them-and that's where things fell apart. After patiently waiting for a pretty green progress bar to move across the screen, and then move across the screen a second time with the informational text informing me the install is taking a bit longer than expected, I was finally presented with a completely nondescript failure message and a "Try Again Later" button that just placed the installer on my desktop so I could waste my time again whenever I felt up to it. When will Microsoft stop over-complicating things by trying to make them simpler? Just give me the damned install file and let me install the damned program. Nice start to 2008 MS, trying to win over more fans I see? For now, I'll make do with email posting-and without embedded images, and for that reason I'll hold out on the more personal posts.

Google is noteworthy
On the other end of the sensibility and usability scale is (surprise, surprise) Google. They've taken another of my favorite tools, Google Notebook and made it better. Besides the labelling they snuck in under the radar at some stage, they have made a proper mobile version available-and as with the mobile version of Google Calendar, it's damned smart. Visiting http://www.google.com/notebook/m on your mobile browser, you'll see all your notebooks in trademark minimalist Google mobile style. These can be browsed to and notes can be added as expected. The really nifty and deceptively simple addition though is the Mobile Notes notebook. On the main notebook mobile page is a text entry box that allows you to simply go to the site, add an entry for later organization, and leave. The bookmark to this site has now replaced my Nokia notebook shortcut on my N95's standby screen and I'm happier for it :)

You can Tube on the go
Another wicked mobile app I ran into recently was the brilliant emTube YouTube client for S60 devices. Combined with our wireless setup at home this makes for a great way to view funny old 80s TV ads and other important cultural material like Robin Williams explaining the origin of golf. I've yet to combine this with the TV out on the N95, but I suppose that's worth considering too. We've found that the N95's screen is actually better for watching youtube-type stuff than the PC as the videos tend to be about native resolution for that device.

Stream powered PSP
With the latest PSP firmware Sony once again reinforced it's usefulness as a media device. This update saw the addition of internet radio to the handheld's massive list of functionality. The addition came in the form of a flash based client that appears to have been designed by drunken monkeys with a fetish for old electronics. Despite the utterly stupid user interface design, the client does the job and soon after applying the update we were enjoying StreamingSoundtracks anywhere in the house or in the garden. Awesome!

Justin kicked me in the ass..

Well, not physically, but he did remind me I need to start blogging a bit. I actually have a bunch to write about but I'll try not to go totally overboard.

Life, the universe and a veggie patch
In general, everyday life stuff I've been massively busy with our new house. I did post a couple of pics to Flickr when we moved in, and I have loads more I want to put up but that will have to wait until Telkom get their ass into gear and install our line. We've put up a palisade, tiled the kitchen and dining room and tidied up the front garden. My composter is coming along nicely and the veggie patch is turned and will be worked with compost soon. I have also dug a little herb garden for Natz next to the kitchen. This week we're having the carpets in the bedrooms pulled up so we can sand and polish the wood underneath, and then the major stuff is done for a good long while. I've got a seed feeder and fruit up for the birds, and just put up a temporary plastic bath, and so far we've been treated to visits by Robins, Myners, Muisvoels, Loeries, Bulbuls, Barbetts, Bishops and of course the obligatory Sparrows and Doves. We seem to have a couple of Bulbul nests in our trees, and it looks like the Loeries are scouting for a nesting spot too-not bad for our first month :)

Gamerrrr
Games wise, I've been playing Assasin's Creed, and it's a gorgeous game with an intriguing story. I can see where the criticism has come in with regards to it being monotonous though, the developers seemed to have a couple of really cool ideas, and then tried to stretch them too far. Surely it can't have been that difficult to think of more than a handful of things to do in ancient Jerusalem? The combat is also way to samey and gets old quickly. Despite these issues, I'm still enjoying it immensely. Hopefully I'll get my hands on Dancing Universe this week, I've been looking forward to this since the US DDR release last year, and it's about bloody time we get a PAL version.

Sneaky, sneaky Nokia
Nokia finally released a firmware update for the 'classic' N95 last week. This has tech heads (me included) excited to check out the new features, of which there are loads such as integrated search (so, sooo awesome), better camera software, better speed and memory use, to name a few. There have been zillions of posts about these features in the last week though, so I'm going to skip on these and focus on a particular 'upgrade' that left me with a VERY sour taste in my mouth this weekend.
One of my favorite features on the N95 is the integrated GPS. I would never have bought a standalone GPS, but now that I have one in my phone, I really can't believe how useful it is. I don't use it enough to justify shelling out for the voice prompted navigation service though, and instead always just used the option to plot a route between two points and then track my movement. This allowed me to see the route and keep a visual track on where I am on screen when I need to keep an eye out for a particularly tricky street. Nokia, in all their misplaced wisdom have removed this option from the new software, essentially rendering the GPS component as nothing more than a digital map archive unless you buy the voice prompts. I am very pissed about this and find it to be a really sneaky move on Nokia's part. Nice, another reason to get a Sony Ericsson instead next time I upgrade.

So much stuff..

What's up?
Once again I've had a post drought, and of course the reason is.. wait for it.. WORK! The difference is, it's  the new job and I'm loving every minute of it. I haven't felt I've needed some kind of break (be it blogging or whatever). After a discussion on the matter,  I confirmed that I can say  I'm working for Mi Digital, we're doing Xbox 360 development, and I'm the  tech lead on the project. Any more than that and the MiB's might take me away ;) The mix of work so far is great, even though the team so far is just the design and project lead (my old boss Dan from I-Imagine) the art lead (Dave, also of I-I fame) and I, so there's no team management in it for now. The other project management responsibilities are all there-selecting technology, setting standards and of course setting up a development framework and other key technical aspects of the project. In short, it's awesome. I am so chuffed to be back in game dev, out of wall-to-wall coding and on the Xbox dev platform. Obviously NDA limits what we can say, but I have always been vocal about how I feel the platform has the perfect blend of console and PC advantages, and the same holds for the 360.

Home at last
The one downside of the job (there had to be one) is the commute from Pretoria into Joburg, which takes about an hour. Thankfully that is a hole that will soon be plugged, because we really lucked out and found a great house reasonably close to work. I should say Natz found it, she did an awesome job of house-hunting, and her mom was a great help too (she actually saw the ad). We'll be moving in at the end of October, so I only have a few more weeks of nasty commuting left :) I'll post photos when I have them but for now I'll just say it's a great 3 bed 2 bath house with a big garden in a nice area. It's even really close to a lake so I'll be able to take up windsurfing again!

Game on!
Finally, on the game (playing) side, I got through Tomb Raider which turned out to be a pretty good game. It's nothing earth shattering, and lends heavily from many franchises but does so in a way that the title as a whole seems really polished and plays really well and at a good pace. It's like a really well produced action flick that you'll love for it's short duration but won't steal a second thought once it's over. The use of Lara's history in the story was really enjoyable and revisiting some of the core events that shaped her life really helped shape the character.
Last week I started on Bioshock, and while I was generally suspicious of all the hype surrounding the game I am thoroughly enjoying it. The visuals are really amazing in every technical regard, and the interesting choice of period (late 1950's with art and architectural influences reaching back a decade or so) along with strong and focused art direction have resulted in one of the best looking titles ever. The gameplay doesn't feel quite as revolutionary as the game's spiritual predecessor System Shock, but it is solid and feeds well off a level of atmosphere which far surpasses anything I have played to date. The incredible use of sound and dramatic timing lead to a brilliantly nerve wrecking experience that is more thriller than horror. So far the story is compelling as well, and the progressive introduction to the horrific deterioration of idyllic Rapture is completely engrossing, and helped along by top notch voice acting.
Yesterday was the local launch of Halo as well, and of course I had to give that a go. I had planned to dive into the campaign cooperatively online with a group of 5DT players, but when I got online I discovered they had been at it for a couple of hours already having taken time off work. Yes I was more than a bit peeved. Anyway Natz and I got started on it playing splitscreen, and she wasn't really bowled over. She jumped out about halfway into the first level and I found I had to restart the level in the solo campaign. Not cool. Graphically Halo is pretty, but certainly not up to the standards set by Gears of War or Bioshock. The difference of course is that Halo is handling huge open areas rather than the tight environments of those two titles, and has far more characters in battle at any given time. The character models I have seen so far are a bit disappointing, even taking the numbers into account. I have not progressed far enough into the campaign to comment on the story, but it seems to be typical Halo fare. The gameplay too is pure Halo, which is to be expected but perhaps disappointingly simple compared to the rich experiences offered in recent games. I can't comment on Live multiplayer yet, but we did play a LAN deathmatch session at work and that was great fun. Microsoft's hype machine has obviously outdone itself, even in the local market, because of the 30 or so of my friends list that were online last night, there were seldom more than 5 doing something other than Halo 3. The game also shattered all launch day records. With a stateside launch revenue of $170 million, it has stolen the top entertainment launch spot from the likes of Spider-Man 3 and Harry Potter.

And finally..
Jack Thompson is at it again. This time the fool has submitted gay porn as evidence to the judge who will ultimately decide whether he should be allowed to continue practicing law in the state of Florida. Not smart. Read it and laugh.

The final count down

As of today, I have a week left at 5DT. I'm really excited, but at the same time I'm pretty damned apprehensive as well.. there's always so much more stuff to finish up than time to do it in!

They're here!

Natz went off to the coast last week with her folks so that I could get some overtime in and not feel guilty about it, and she brought back an awesome present, DVDs of the great 80's monster comedy/horrors Gremlins and Gremlins 2. These two pull of cheeze like only an 80s flick can and have always been two of my favorite movies-right up there with Aliens and T2. I recently tried to find the two in a box set, but they are all a bit overpriced (before taking shipping into account) and I gave it up for the time being. Natz managed to pick up the two for 100 bucks, what a steal! :)

Raiding the gamerscore tomb

With Natz away, I finally managed to finish Command and Conquer 3 on the 360 (hey I can't work 24/7) as well as Prey. The latter was actually surprisingly easy thanks to the resurrection mechanic, so I finished it in two sittings. The ending is actually quite good, and overall I enjoyed the experience. I'm not typically a fan of mindless shooters though and this was definitely a big enough dose of that kind of gameplay to keep me satisfied for a while. Prey was also really generous on gamerscore, giving up over 650 points just for completing it!

I have now started on Tomb Raider Legend, which seems good so far, with some serious challenges right from the start and a nice variety of locations and gameplay.

Google sorry, Google pay

When Google canceled their video buy/rent feature earlier this month they mistakenly thought their customers would be satisfied with a pat on the back and a Google Checkout refund. Of course the masses weren't too happy with this arrangement, and Google have answered the flood of complaints by giving these customers not only the promised checkout refunds, but refunds to their credit cards as well, essentially a double refund (of course they are probably banking on a fair number of Checkout converts as a result). The videos will also remain available for another six months. Way to apologize for a screwup!

Continuing in the 'sorry we did evil, wont happen again and here's a cookie' vein, Google announced it's change in policy regarding street view privacy. Previously complainants would have to verify their identity before having images of themselves or their numberplates from street views on Google maps, this is no longer necessary and such images will be blurred out immediately on request and without question.

Technorati Tags: google, xbox 360, prey, command and conquer, tomb raider

Not so lazy long weekend

From the lack of traffic this morning, it would appear that half of South Africa took leave today to enjoy a long weekend (Yesterday was national Women's Day). I wish I was in the same boat, but obviously with an upcoming switch in jobs I need to take every opportunity to tie up any loose ends I can at 5DT, so I was in yesterday and am Packing Natz off on holiday with her folks so I can put in some serious overtime.

As far as interesting tech things this week, it's been a bit quiet this week. Games wise Xbox Live Arcade didn't even see it's now customary double release, and no retail games hit shelves either. Next week should be the beginning of the build up to the (US) holiday flood though. I am still working through Command and Conquer 3's single player campaigns, and dabbling in a bit of Spyglass boardgames as well (it's wonderful to finally have a chess game on the arcade, I just wish the achievements were not completely broken). The good news is I finally broke the 5k gamerscore mark. Woohoo!  :)

Nothing particularly interesting on the cell front either, other than Nokia starting it's limited Beta of MOSH, a community content sharing system that consists of a website (standard and .mobi version) and an optional application to upload and download content. It will be interesting to see what sort of copyright protection is in place in this system (YouTube, anyone) and also how mobile networks will take this, considering many of them have content portals that would more than likely suffer from the availability of a competing portal with free content. We have already seen removal from branded firmware of applications and links that offer services that might threaten network revenue, so I'm sure the MOSH application will see similar censorship.

Technorati Tags: nokia, 360, 5dt

The Secret

It's been a while since I made a decent post (and I was on such a roll). The fact is I have loads of stuff I want to post about, but I'm really busy due to a pretty major change in my life. I officially resigned at 5DT last week, and I'll end my time here at the end of July. As a result I've been hectically trying to finish off my outstanding stuff here.

I can't say much about my new job. I can say I wasn't job hunting but when the offer came up I knew I had to give it serious consideration. I lost lots of sleep, and in the end decided it's a chance I can't pass up. All I can say is, it'll bring me back to the industry I love :)

Right, so with that out of the way and with no real answers given, lets move on!

Another toy

Two weeks ago I was up for an upgrade on my phone contract (the N95 wasn't on my contract, it was a gift :)) and I went and picked up my new phone, a Sony Ericsson W850i. I have been eyeing the white model for some time, but it turns out it's not possible to get it on Vodacom except through Nashua Mobile in SA. So black it is. Obviously the W850 doesn't match up to the N95 on functionality, but it's no slacker either.

Being one of the SE Walkman range, a lot of emphasis is placed on it's music ability, so it obviously has a decent music player (though far from perfect) and FM radio. The bundled 1Gb memory stick duo holds a sizeable amount of music, in my case shuffled in with WinAmp's excellent portable player support. While the music player has support for internet radio as well, I'm not about to run my bill up streaming audio over 3G ;)

The included web browser is one of the better standard issue ones I have seen, with fullscreen support and the ability to view pages in landscape instead of portrait mode. I have installed Opera Min of course, but have found myself using the built in browser far more often. It does have an RSS client as well which is nice, but until the day I can get all my feeds from Google Reader as a single feed I will stick to a reader bookmark.

The calendar has support for OTA synchronization, and GooSync works perfectly on it. There is no support for contact synchronization though, which is a pity. Apparently this is a common gripe with the SE UIQ operating system. Speaking of the OS, Nokia could learn a lot from SE's operating system. It is far snappier and more stable than the Symbian OS running on Nokia's latest devices.

The 2 megapixel camera is a far cry from the N95's 5 megapixel one, and there is no autofocus, but one area where the W850 seems to be way better is in the brightness and colour quality of the pictures it takes.

At this stage I've taken to using the SE during the week when I don't need the Nokia's extra features, and the N95 on weekends when the extra bits come in handy being away from a PC. Yeah I know, I'm such a geek :p

Something Fishy

I was quite surprised at how tough it was to find fun, quality 3D games which take advantage of the 3D hardware in the N95. In the end what I did find was a group called Fishlabs that make 3D games for Java. Now this doesn't utilize the N95's acceleration hardware (there were demos available for both my phones) but they do have some really excellent games.

They use a combination of a decent engine (the Abyss engine, go figure :p ), good art direction to hide device rendering limitations and gameplay and controls designed to fit a mobile phone well to create some of the best mobile games I have seen in a while. I ended up buying a copy of their submarine shooter/trader Deep 3D. It feels a lot like X Beyond the Frontier and has a satisfying mix of action and strategy-just what is needed for a good mobile experience. It's east to start up the game, work through a quick mission, save and exit in a couple of minutes.

Block this!

Of course  I had to get a decent game for my SE as well, and ended up being pleasantly surprised by a game which I never really got into on other platforms: Lumines. When I bought the original PSP Lumines game when it first came out, I felt it was a terribly over-hyped and over-priced game. The Xbox Live Lumines fiasco left an even worse taste in my mouth, with the game being broken up and being sold piecemeal for what amounted to the price of a full retail title. I could just never swallow paying the price of a full blown arcade game for a block dropper.

Well Lumines mobile fixes all of that. For less than half the price of the cheapest XBLA game, you get a fun, polished block dropper with loads of gameplay. The only thing missing is a bluetooth multiplayer mode-which I would definitely have paid extra for, but as it stands Lumines mobile is a great buy.

Technorati Tags: nokia, N95, SonyEricsson, W850, Games