April15th: Sparkly Sirius

I've mentioned before that I'm fascinated by space and the night sky. Inspired by a post on Twitter a few days ago, last night I made an attempt to photograph the star Sirius (also called Alpha Canis Majoris or the Dog Star). Its name is derived from Greek meaning glowing, sparkling or scorching". Easily visible in the night sky currently lowish to the south in early evening, it's very bright (though not as bright as Venus at the moment). Of particular note is that it's probably one of the "twinkliest" stars in the sky, and even with the naked eye you can see both the twinkling and as well as some apparent changes of colour as it twinkles.

The collage photo below is the result of my efforts last night. The change in colours from this star are literally over a period of a couple of seconds whilst I took a burst set of photos and are both amazing and stunning in equal measure and are largely due to the light from the star combined with the atmospheric conditions as the light hits the earth's atmosphere. I'm dead chuffed with the result of this as my first effort at this.

Sirius - changing colours captured 9pm 14 April 2020

I achieved result this by tripod mounting my binoculars (Olympus 10x50 DPS1 - excellent for star gazing), focussing on Sirius and then defocusing slightly (to get a more blurry and therefore deliberately fuzzy shot of the star) and then hand holding my iPhone XR camera lens to one of the binocular eye pieces and holding the shutter down for a couple of seconds to get multiple burst images. It's a bit hit and mis-using the phone hand held to actually get the shot, but after a couple of goes shooting nothing I managed it!

Once I got the shots, I needed to post-process them as the star was just a tiny coloured dot in each frame. I exported all the images from the iPhone, and then used software called "BatchPhoto"to import and crop all the images in one go so the crop ratio was 100% (doing them individually/manually would be a disaster). Then after exporting the cropped images, I used a Mac application (sorry - no Windows here), called CollageFactory Free from the Mac App Store to pull together the image above in a grid.

The night sky is truly a wondrous thing, and with the current clear skies and relatively mild evenings, it's a perfect time for getting out in the garden and having a look around. There are numerous people to follow on Twitter who provide all sorts of great info about the night sky, but if you only follow one I recommend @VirtualAstro (website at meteorwatch.org). One imminent thing to watch out for is the Lyrid meteor shower which occurs this year from tomorrow (16th) to 25th April peaking late 21st/early 22nd.

Back in the world of #isolation life and Covid-19, my son has somewhat expectedly been put on furlough. Daughter is still working from home, most of her IT issues seem to have been sorted, and my wife has a week off from work this week (well her normal 2 days anyway). She's been to see her Mum today and do some shopping for her - all ok there. After yesterday's nice walk over on the local golf course, the next highlight of my week will be a trip to the doctors surgery on Friday for my routine blood test.

I can assure everyone that the cat is fine, but living a pretty dull life currently. Sleeping most of the time, as evidenced by this shot of her underneath the rosemary bush next to the compost bin!

Spot the cat

Until tomorrow....

#isolationlife
#stayhomesavelives

March 30th: Silicone and Windows - but not that kind

So, starting with coronavirus/covid-19 because that's what prompted this renewed effort at blogging. Yesterday the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England said that it might be six months before life in the UK returns to normal. That's quite scary as that takes us to the end of September, although she did say that doesn't (necessarily) mean we'll be in complete lockdown for 6 months. And I was thinking today, that on the day that Boris (or whomever says it) says, "Ok folks, you can get out and about", where is everyone going to go first? I bet for a good many it'll be straight to the local pub (if it's still open). Those first few days post lockdown are going to be really weird I think, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
It's evident that some people still don't appreciate the seriousness of this pandemic. However, when it starts affecting those they know and love, perhaps that'll hit home. A couple of those nudged me today. First, a post on Facebook from someone I don't know, but who lives relatively locally said they had someone in there family that had "had" the virus. True or not, when it's just around the corner, it rams it home a bit. Secondly, as people that are famous (or at least well know) are reported to have been diagnosed, it also becomes a bit more scary. Obviously we've had a few politicians who have been diagnosed including the Prime Minister. Today I found out that one of my favourite musicians, American country/folk singer John Prine has not only been diagnosed, but it currently on a ventilator. That's not to say that I didn't appreciate what a terrible situation we are in before today, but this brings it home even more. As an aside, one of John Prime's songs "Ain't Hurtin Nobody" has got one of the best lines of any song ever:

There's roosters layin' chickens
And chickens layin' eggs
Farm machinery eating people's arms and legs

On the basis of that single line about farm machinery I bought his album "Lost Dogs And Mixed Blessings" which is absolutely splendid.

In #isolationlife today I've meandered between redoing the silicon sealant inside the conservatory and upgrading a laptop. You'll recall my sone was clearing out his bedroom the other day. Well he dug out his old laptop. I can't recall just how old it is (it's the one before the one he's got now), but he was going to chuck it. Ever the gadget hoarder, I dusted it down (literally), booted it up and found that it ran (almost) perfectly. I did a completer restore of the operating system (Windows 8) and today I upgraded that to Windows 10. Can't see anything wrong with the device, and it runs really well and quite fast for an machine a few years old. Bonus win as a spare machine (although I'm a Mac man).

Old laptop with W10 installed

As for the silicone..... Well I'm not the best DIY-er by a long way. But how hard can siliconing be? The professionals make it look easy. I look like I've done 10 rounds with a silicone gun and lost badly, and whilst the sealing will do a job, it ain't going to win any prizes for neatness. It's terrible stuff! And I only managed to slice my finger once getting the old stuff off. I've got a few tales about my DIY failures which I'll save for another day.

Hardly seen the cat all day.

An Apple a day

OK I admit it. I'm an Apple fan.

Not a "fanboi" in the sense that I don't believe in any tech other than that coming out of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, but over the last 5-6 years I've slowly moved to an entirely Apple setup.

As the photo shows, I now have the complete set. An iPhone 5s, an iPad Mini, a 13" Macbook Pro, and the latest addition, a 21" iMac desktop.

I don't hate Windows as an operating system - I use it every day in work, and there's at least 3 Windows boxes/laptops loitering around the house. My Apple kit though offers everything I need, in every form factor I need (for the moment). And I'm very happy with it. It works, it synchronises together seamleslsy, and combined that many of my "go to" applications are now cloud based (Dropbox, Evernote, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc) it means I always have access to what I need.

I've been fortunate enough that circumstances have allowed me to migrate to Apple devices on a "want" basis - I want it, I don't "need" it. And I'm grateful for that.

The latest piece of kit is that gorgeous 21" iMac. It's the "base" model - but that still comes in at a hefty price. In part you're paying for the Apple brand, but you do get what you pay for. All my Apple devices are stunningly designed, they work pretty flawlessly, and they last a long time.  My Macbook Pro is over 4 years old now, and but for a swap out of the original hard drive for a bigger SSD a couple of months ago, and a RAM boost a couple of years ago, works as well now as it did when I first got it. And it still looks as good as new. The iMac though is the pick of the bunch. It wouldn't look out of place anywhere. It's amazingly thin considering that monitor house all the gubbins. There's only 1 lead - the power lead. It's a work of art. the mouse and keyboard are wireless - the keyboard itself is stunningly engineered - how can you say that about something as mundane as a keyboard?

It's kit that wants to be used. And it's a pleasure to use it.

Four of the best

I've posted something similar to this before, but it was a while ago, and may be useful to rehash for those of you who are newer to smartphones, or have not come across these before (unlikely.

In no particular order - well that's not strictly true - I'm going by the order they appear on my phone.....

Evernote

 Evernote is the ideal app for storing your snippets of stuff. It's cross platform, so there are variants for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android etc and it has an online app too - by default you sync your stuff to the cloud, but if you run it off several devices it's available everywhere. You can store notes, audio, photos, files etc etc. Basic comes free - if you have lots you start to pay, but it's worth it. There are also browser plug ins so you can snip info straight from web pages - or even whole web pages if you want. If you store loads of "stuff", it's a no brainer.

Dropbox

One of the earliest modern "cloud" repositories and arguably still one of the best. Download the app (again it's cross platform), and anything you save in your dropbox folder gets synced to the cloud - where you can also access it online. It's got versioning, sharing and loads more. Again, there's a rather stingy 2GB limit on the free version, but you can pay for more space. Again, where-ever you are whatever device you're using, you can access your Dropbox stuff.

WeekCal

I use the calendar on my iPhone a lot. The bog standard Apple calendar however is fairly sparse in functionality. I've long used WeekCal in it's place. It's brilliant. Loads of options, loads of views, great support. It syncs to the inbuilt calendar so if like me you use your iPhone hooked via iCloud to a Macbook (or Mac desktop) everything is there, all the time. A highly polished calendar app and highly recommended.

1Password

There are a myriad of password managers out there. You really need one. No you really do. Really. If you're using the same password, or simple passwords for multiple sites, frankly you're an idiot (sorry, but it's true). You're just asking to get hacked, and probably, sooner or later you will be.

1Password allows you to create and manage complicated paswords that look like "gGt6%_43@£449+qEsW3" (and no, that's not one of mine). But the beauty of it is, you don't need to know this, and you certainly don't need to remember it. 1Password does the creation, storing and retrieval from a browser plug in. All you need to do is have one (1) secure master password. Password does the rest. There are as I said, lots of these password managers/vaults out there. 1Password is pricy. But in my view it's the best. Also cross platform, so I have it on my PC, my Macbook and my iPhone and it all stays nicely in sync without me worrying about it. 

Keeping it all together

Regular readers will know that I've got a pretty eclectic approach to computing. I have no real affinity for any one OS, and have desktop devices running Windows 7, a Macbook Pro on Mac OSX and a netbook running Ubuntu netbook edition. Chuck in my ever to hand iPhone, and the challenge for me is keeping everything together and in sync.

In all honesty, it's made a bit simpler in that the Ubuntu netbook rarely sees the light of day. It's an old Asus Eee with virtually no memory or storage, and I put Ubuntu netbook on it more as an experiment than anything else (it works fine though).

What is happening therefore, is a slow and gradual transition to cloud computing. Applications I tend to prefer are cross platform, and with an ability to sync seamlessly with whichever device I'm using . I'm not a complicated, or power user, which makes life simpler still, and what follows is a brief description of my key picks.


Dropbox
If you work in different locations on different computers and haven't used or come across Dropbox yet, you're missing out. You install the Dropbox client on all the devices you use and it creates a Dropbox folder - so it's installed on all my PC's, laptop, netbook and I have the iPhone app. Whenever you are connected to the Internet, whatever you have saved to this folder is synced to Dropbox. Then, whenever you connect using one of your other devices, all the changes are automatically synced back to that device. Simple. Add in versioning, so you know which is the latest version, and the fact that it's free for up to 2GB storage, and you not only have a way of keeping everything in sync across multiple computers, but some free online storage too.

If you are going to check it out - drop me a line first. I can refer you, and that helps me boost my storage space!
Highly recommended.


Evernote
One of the things that many people require from their computing devices is a good way of collating all those snippet of information, notes, screenshots etc. There are literally hundreds of thousands of solutions out there, but one of the best is Evernote.
Evernote, like Dropbox is cross platform, and you can sync to all your platforms. Like Dropbox it's also accessible online, and like Dropbox free at the basic level.It also has browser extensions so you can clip all, or bits of web pages directly to your Evernote account.
You can record text notes, voice notes, photo notes, documents - pretty much anything. It's fully searchable, you can have multiple "notebooks" within your account, and use tags on notes. A Premium version (which I use) brings added benefits, but for most people, the free version is just fine. If you need to store "stuff", then this is the way to do it.
Brilliant!


Email/Contacts/Calendar
Gmail is my preferred email route, because everything is available on any Internet connected device. It's got a a lot of functionality too - more than most people realise, you've just got to dig a bit to find some of the optionsd and settings.


My calendar and contacts are all handled by Apple's "MobileMe" service. You have to pay for it, but it keeps my calendar and contacts beautifully in sync on my Macbook and iPhone (I tend not to do anything that needs calendar and contact access on the PC, although I could always access Mobile Me through the browser if I wanted to.

I've tried a few times to manage contacts via Google Contacts, but I find there's always some corruption/duplication though the sync process back to the iPhone/Macbook. I know some manage this perfectly fine, but I've never managed to do so to my satisfaction.

So there you have it. Core functions of email, contacts, calendar, notes and document sync/storage handled through some first class online/cross platform applications, that are free.

It's a no brainer.

Ubuntu Linux

I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself.

I've got an old Asus Eee 701 netbook, which has been gathering dust for a while. Originally it had Xandros Linux as an operating system (OS), which was OK, but not great. I eventually took the plunge and after much tweaking managed to install a very cut down version of Windows XP on it. That gave me the comfortable Windows interface, but to be honest it wasn't much fun on a 7" screen. Additionally the arrival of a 13" Macbook Pro consigned the Eee to the furthest corners of the study.

Recently, I got it out and was fiddling around, and decided to have a crack at installing Ubuntu's netbook Linux edition on it. Ubuntu is now one of, if not the Linux distro of choice for many, and has come a long way from the old command line only interfaces of Linux variations of yore.

So armed with a USB flash disk to download the distribution and act as the install disk, I duly cracked on. In the end, it was pretty painless - I consider myself an experienced rather than advanced user, and I can follow instructions, and it was straightforward. The Ubuntu interface was a revelation after my previous (albeit limited) experience of Linux. It's far more "Windows" like, and the Ubuntu software centre in particular does away with all that synaptic and repository stuff for installing software. which had previously put me right off. It's there hidden away if you want it, as is the terminal console - but I don't particularly.

It hooked up to my network like a dream, and I installed OpenOffice with no hassles - all this on a netbook with only a 4GB SSD mind you.

So, I've got a working Ubuntu netbook. Next up, though I wanted to connect my printer. This works over a wireless network, and the Ubuntu software centre didn't find the relevant printer drivers (it's a multi-function Canon MP560. So I downloaded the drivers after a quick google. I hadn't a clue what I was supposed to do, so double clicked a bunch of files, seemed to extract from the archive, tried to open/run some files that looked like executables and got a few errors. Another google suggested I had to edit an install executable. So I found a text editor, edited the offending line as instructed, and via a quick trip to the terminal window (really, this is gobbledy gook to me too) and a comand line instruction - bingo! Installed. Not only working, but I can print and scan - first time. Brilliant (considering I'm flying by the seat of my pants).

I've also just installed the brilliant Dropbox that allows you to store files "in the cloud" and then sync them and make them available to any device you install Dropbox on.

That just about does it for the moment. I've now got everything I need. A small, robust device, running a tidy OS that's Internet connected, I can print from and has all my key documents available to me via Dropbox.

If you're a real tech-head, this probably doesn't sound like very much of an achievement. Believe me, installing ANY OS is often fraught, one you are unfamiliar with is often treacherous. To get everything up and working, almost first time is an achievement, especially when you have to go digging in executables and editing files.

So all in all I'm very pleased with myself. I can now truly say that I am diversity personified when it comes to computing. I've got a Windows 7 desktop PC, a Macbook Pro laptop running Snow Leopard, an Ubuntu Linux driven netbook and an iPhone running iOS4.2. A tool (and OS) for every occasion!

Neat

Christmas goodies: Flip Ultra HD

I must have been a good lad this year, as once again, Santa left some techno goodness under the tree for me.

I'm now the lucky owner of a Flip Ultra HD 8GB pocket video recorder. It's a marvellous, and very simple piece of video recorder gadgetry. Smaller (but about twice as thick) as my iPhone 4 - bearing in mind the iPhone is the "world's thinnest smartphone", there's really not much to this recorder. You turn it on, press the big red button and it records. To stop, press the big red button again!

To upload video, just "flip" out in-built USB adapter, whereupon on first connection you get the chance to install the Flip software (to Mac or PC), and off you go.

The only other two buttons on the device (other than the on/off and big red button) are a review and delete button. The settings are basic - language, whether you want sound on button press, the red recording light to show etc).

It runs on the inbuilt battery, which is removable, and replaceable by 3x AAA's. The 8GB holds about 2 hours worth of the HD video it records. Note that it doesn't take stills.

You wouldn't want to record an epic on it - or even anything overly lengthy. It's ideal for short clips which you might want to email, upload to YouTube of embed on a site.

The Flip software is pretty basic, but does allow you to do some pretty limited editing and movie creation. You van of course import it into any video editing suite that you may have that supports it's native MP4 file format.

It complements my Samsung FD30 perfectly. If I want longer scenes, with bigger zoom (the Flip has a pretty limited and digital only zoom) and fancy effects (which I never use), then the Sammy gets the nod. If it's quick clips and I don't want to lug my Samsung around (which is slightly smaller than a can of coke anyway) then the Flip will do the business.

Why have this and the iPhone that records HD video as well? The iPhone's definitely a good backup and is with me all the time, but for longer clips the Flip is easier to hold, is easy to upload, holds 2 hours without me worrying about either space or battery life on the iPhone.

It's beauty is it's pocket-ability and the high quality of the video you get. It's a far, far cry from the cumbersome handled recorders of some time ago.

I love it!

Data, data everywhere.....

So the good news is I've got my shiny new network hard drive set up and whirring quietly away. The next job is to consider how best to use the darn thing.

Here's the current situation.

I've got two desktop PC's running Windows 7, a Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard, a 7" Asus Eee running Ubuntu (to be fair hardly ever wheeled out) and an iPhone. Two iPhones if you count my son's 3G. Oh, and an iPod Touch belonging to my daughter.

I have a wireless network which includes a Canon multi-function printer not connected to anything except the power outlet (how clever is that - never ceases to maze me when it churns out paper without being connected to a PC).

There's also a 500GB external HDD attached to the main W7 PC, but available on the network to all other PC's and the MBP.

One of the problems I have is that I tended to keep the MBP/my iphone separate, so I have music on the MBP, and a bunch of music on the Windows network HDD> Same for photos. A bunch on the MBP and a (mostly duplicated) bunch on the Windows network HDD.

Oh, and this is discounting a bunch of "personal files" stored on Dropbox, but the beuaty of Dropbox is that it syncs to any computer it's installed on - in my case, both Windows boxes, the Eee, the MBP and my iPhone.

So what's my strategy going forward?

Well, I'm going to use my new wireless network HDD/NAS as the "master". My plan is to consolidate my music and photos and videos/movies onto this drive, back them up routinely to the standard external drive.

I can then free up space, especially on my MBP (not that it's tight for hard disk space, but I'm a bit paranoid when I get below half the drive full). My iTunes on whichever box I'm using will be accessing the network storage source, not individual local sources, and it will be the same for photos via Picasa.

Hopefully this will all work.

Of course, I've got to set up the back-up strategy too, but I use the highly effective and configurable Acronis True Image for this.

Fingers crossed!

Shiny happy people

Wooho! It's my birthday, and as is so often the case that means shiny gadgets!

This year I unwrapped a lovely 1 terabyte network hard drive - the Western Digital MyBook World Edition (bit of a mouthful for a bit of electronics).

It looks marvelous in its white casing, though rather clashed with my 500MB black MyBook external drive.

And it's so simple to set up. I unpacked it, plugged in the ethernet cable to my router, turned on the power and let it configure itself.

A couple of minutes later, and there on my Windows 7 PC home network, sits the drive with it's public, download and backup shares.

I turned on my Macbook Pro, and bingo, it's sitting there in Finder just waiting to have lots of lovely data copied to it.

It comes with a set up disk, but I didn't need it. Brilliant. Now, where can I find a terabyte of data?

Wireless woes

My daughter's nagging finally got the better of me over the weekend, and I relented and agreed to move our second, older desktop from the "study" into her bedroom. This leaves the newer desktop for me/my son, though it's mostly him as I spend most of my time on the Macbook Pro now.

So between us we undid all the connections and took it into her bedroom and set it up again, only for me to realise it had been hooked directly to the router via a cable and I didn't have a wireless card/adapter around. Ah, should have seen her little face when she realised she'd have to wait a day until she could hook up to MSN Messenger and all her chums again....even though she'd see them all at school today! (she's 13 this year by the way).

So today I popped into PC World on my way home and bought a Belkin N150 Enhanced Wireless USB Network Adapter (model F6D4050). The box didn't mention Win 7 compatibility (in fact none of the various makes/models did), so assuming everything would work (why sell kit that wouldn't eh?) I stumped up the cash.

When I tried to install it however, it refused point blank to play citing an error message about a missing *.msi file path. I hunted the install CD, and Belkin's support site to no avail, and even downloaded the latest drivers (which I think are the same as those on the install CD. Google suggested very quickly that Win 7 was a bit of an issue unless you installed in XP compatibility mode - not available on my version of Win 7. Somewhat miffed I returned post haste to PCW (which is rather conveniently or dangerously depending on your point of view, only about 5 mins away in the car). Despite my protestations that I knew what I was talking about the chap frowned, muttered and said he's be back in a minute -actually it was nearer 10. He said he'd found a forum where someone had built their own Windows 7 driver (I kid you not) for this device. I suggested to him that that's not really what I should have to do. To be fair though, he went and got all the other flavours of USB wireless adapters and did a quick search and came back to tell me that two of them had Win 7 drivers available as downloads from the manufacturer support site, and the other one from a support forum.

In the end I took the Linksys Rangeplus WUSB100, one he said needed a download from the Linksys site, and which cost £4 more than the Belkin (and looked smarter too - D'oh).

Once I got home, I just installed the thing from CD - first time. No download necessary. Up and running in 2 minutes. Good on you Linksys.

I've had some problems with Belkin kit before, so I think I'll steer clear of it for good now.

One final moan. Why do you need a box the size of a small house to sell what in effect is a thumb size wireless adapter with 1 CD and a couple of bits of paper is beyond me.

Web site changes - Google to the rescue

As regular readers of this blog will know I manage a couple of web sites. One is the Chepstow Male Voice Choir site (my Dad sings in that choir), and the other is the site for my cricket club, Dinas Powys CC.

Over time I've used - and still do, different software for creating and maintaining these sites. Currently, the choir site is done in an old version of Dreamweaver, and the cricket site in Serif's WebPlus X2 program. Both have their pro's and cons.

Dreamweaver is a far more technical program, although my knowledge of HTML is very sparse, and I use very little of the power of the program remaining pretty much within the wysiwyg part, although I have been known to get my hands dirty with code occasionally.

WebPlus touts itself as a much more user friendly program, hiding most technical stuff right away from the user - it can still be a very powerful program if you put the time and effort in, but as you generally go no-where near code (or need to have any grasp of code) the results can be somewhat crude if you don't take care. To be fair, I've been using Serif products for years - their desktop publishing program PagePlus, WebPlus, DrawPlus and PhotoPlus and always found them to be very good both value wise and capability wise.

Either program though leaves me with some dilemmas.

If I'm not at my desktop I can't edit, update or maintain the sites. Even if I'm using my Macbook I'm stuffed as these are both Windows programs and I haven't installed Windows on the Mac - yet.

The other main problem is that only I can update the sites - they're hosted on my personal web space and I'm the one with the programs and files on my PC.

I need a solution that will allow me to edit the sites from anywhere, on any machine, and ideally allow others to contribute. The solution? Google Sites.

I've been fiddling with the idea of this for a while, but am now taking the plunge and am moving the cricket site over to Google Sites.

There are issues - it's not as flexible as Dreamweaver - or even WebPlus, but what it does, it does well, and more easily in many ways than either of my two current solutions. And of course it's free. I get more space than my personal web space gives me (which might ultimately be a blessing in disguise as hosting these sites has ultimately kept me from moving from Pipex/Tiscali/Carphone Warhouse as an ISP and the service from them is frankly getting more dire by the day).

I can (when I'm ready) move my domain name over so people are still pointing at dinaspowyscc.co.uk. I can allow other people access to edit and maintain (use with caution!!)

Have a look and see what you think.

The current site is at www.dinaspowyscc.co.uk

The new site will be at http://sites.google.com/site/dinaspowyscc

Sky on demand - on my PC!

One of the things that came as a surprise in Windows 7 was the announcement that it would include a Sky player as part of Media Center - and more excitingly Sky subscribers - such as myself, would be able to access content for free.

Disappointingly, the Sky Player wasn't initially available, but it is now!

This evening, after reading about it in my PC Pro RSS feed, I opened up Media Center and got the update. The player requires you it install Microsoft's Silverlight, a web application framework (no I don't understand it either).

After the update and Silverlight install which took all of about 3 minutes, I logged in to Sky (I already had a registration), and bingo! Live Sky TV on my PC.

I was expecting a few random crappy channels, but no - Sky News, Sky Sports News, Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Sports Extra, ESPN, British Eurosprt, Gold, MTV, some kids channels including Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel (please God don't tell my daughter).

Amazing. I tested it out on Sky Sports 1 which is showing the Preston v Newcastle game. Full screen I got some initial buffering messages. The picture quality wasn't bad, but you can choose from High, Medium and Low. I eventually settled for low, and re-sized the pic to about a 5 inch x 3 inch box, and it was highly watchable. The High quality setting suffers from very occasional buffering but the quality is superb, although the buffering did settle after a while. Here you can see it running top right of my screen, with Blogger and Tweetdeck also running.

For info, my broadband connection isn't very fast - I'm supposed to get up to 8meg, but in all the time I've had this I scratch around just over 2meg.

I'm well chuffed with this - especially as it ain't going to cost me any more than my normal Sky sub. If you're not a Sky subscriber, you can still access this, but it'll cost you - £15 a month I think, but better check.

Once I whack this on my other W7 PC, We'll be able to watch Sky on 4 different device in the house. Overkill? Maybe, but very cool.....

More W7

Seems I'm a bit out of touch with RAM prices. Yesterday I posted that having found my old XP box was manfully struggling along on 512mb of RAM, that it would be a sinmple and cheap issue to resolve.

Well, simple yes. Installing a RAM module is a piece of cake. Cheap? Well I suppose it's all relative. Last time I bought any memory it was dirt cheap - a gigabyte cost me next to nothing. Hunting around though, I've struggled to find a gig of the type I need for less than about £25 plus P&P. Still, it's a price worth paying. It's always said the first and easiest way way to speed up anythrow more RAM at it. This old HP Pavilion will only take 2 gig max, so I'm going for another 1 gig stick to start with which should make it run a bit more slickly.

Elsewhere on the W7 front, there are mixed things to report. W7 is supposed to make it easier for PC's on the same network to talk to each other and share files. Well, it is easier than it was trying to connect an XP PC and a Vista PC together, but it's still not entirely straightforward. At various times today I've had my network flagged as "unidentified", a duplication of my external drive in the network explorer screen and a message saying my old XP box could find my printer (which is connected to the old Vista box) and then promptly saying "do I want to print a test page!"

Elswehere, Windows Live Messenger (which I don't use but the kids flog to death) has got both machines in a tiz. It installs fine, but you can't login - the system suggests a network problem, but everything else that's connecting to the 'net does so faultlessly. The in-built firewall clearly is allowing the programe to send and receive traffic, so I've no idea waht's going on there.

Also, I've had a hard time installing my Microsoft Lifecam (web cam). That's now sorted, but it's intersesting that these latter two problems are with Microsft programs/hardware......

On the messeneger front, I think I might ditch Live Messenger and give Trillian a go

XP to Windows 7 latest

OK - Hurrah! Got a working XP box again.

Now to install W7.

Have to download Win XP Service Pack 2 before the upgrade will run. :-(

Running, but the upgrade adviser has to download (8mb) followed by .Net framework (another 22mb download (thank God for broadband).

I should have just skipped the Adviser, but I thought I'd see what it has to say about my aging XP box.

The computer says......"Yes"!!!!!, although it did point out that I've only go 512mb RAM and it needs 1GB to run "optimally". Bugger. I though it wasn't running very fast LOL!!! I though ti had more than that in there - older than I thought!

No worries, that's easily rectified, and hopefully pretty cheaply too.

Windows 7 - the story so far

Well, there's good news, and there's bad news.

The good news is that I performed a clean install of Windows 7 on my main (previously Vista) desktop yesterday, and everything went as sweet as a nut (what does that mean?). The actual install took around 20-25 minutes, very impressive, and the new OS recognised everything attached to my PC, including the router and network settings - brilliant.

The backing up of my stuff prior to the upgrade, and the re-nstalling of all programs afterwards is a bit tedious, but I'll take that for the benefit of starting from scratch with a completely virgin OS. It also allows me to ditch a pile of accumulated software that I never use.

Boot up is sprightly as you'd expect, and so far I'm very impressed.

Now the bad news.

I also have an XP box, and I bought another W7 licence to upgrade that system. However, things started to go wrong almost immediately - and mostly because a) I didn't read the instructions and b) I rushed.

On the Vista machine I did a completely clean install - booting from the W7 DVD and allowing the process to wipe my drive (after checking with me).

On the XP box, I planned to do the same - it definitely needed a good wipe. The problem was my W7 version was the "upgrade" for Vista, or "clean install" for XP - but what a clean install apparently means is that you run the DVD from XP and allow the process to take you through a clean install.

Because I'd done a wipe on my Vista box, that's what I did on my XP box - and everything appeared to be going ticketyboo until I got to "Enter your product key". I did, and it told me it was invalid. I checked and entered it again. Smae result. I tried about 6 more times. Same result. I got my son to do it. Same result. Bugger.

Range Amazon, who were very pleasant, but basically said "ring Microsoft". So I did. Eventually, the guy worked out from my muttering what was going on and told me I had to reinstall XP and then run the W7 disk. Ok.

So, I started to re-install XP, but here's where it all went VERY pear shaped. I was now rushing, and when the setup got to the bit where it shows the partitions I deleted everything. Yup - everything. Including the primary partition where you store an OS. Ooops.

You see This drive had several partitions and I wanted to get back to a single partition, so it seemed sensible to do that. But it wasn't.

Anyway, to cut a very long story short and miss out the profanities I was by now muttering, I've managed to swap disks around and get the darn thing installing XP again. I've got bits of computer strewn around as I've switched hard disks, and I'm half way through the XP install.

So far it's taken me about 4 hours and I'm not even back to where I started!

I'll let you know if it works later!

Decision time: Mac or Windows?

If you've been on the Lentil before, you'll know I'm in a laptop dilemma, but I can't dally for much longer. My birthday approaches and my good lady is ready to spend far too much money on me, so I need to make a decision.

Do I stick with the tried and tested Windows running on a Samsung Q320 (recently A-Listed by PC Pro) or do I have a rush of blood to my middle aged brain and go with (for me) a completely new OS in Mac Snow Leopard running on the devilishly handsome sleek Apple Macbook Pro?

Do you know what? It's getting so hard to choose it's stopping me sleeping at night. I'm swaying back and forth between the two faster than a very fast thing going very fast (as Baldrick of Blackadder fame might have said).

Logic has all but gone out of the window (if you'll forgive the pun). If I'd stuck with logic I'd have bought a dowdy netbook, but you're only (cough) 50 once. Today I'm swaying Macwards, having found that I could overcome my need to access an NTFS formatted external hard drive using an app called Paragon NTFS for Mac, and also of course that using Bootcamp I could boot into Windows for kay apps that I have in the Windows environment.

Tomorrow I'll be back on the 320. Pretty soon I'm going to have to decide for real - I fear it may come down to a coin...

Picasa 3.5

Google's Picasa photo program has been updated to v3.5. PC pro's resident graphics guru Tom Arah is pleasantly surprised by this latest version which offers stunning facial recognition capabilities.

I too, though far less well renowned that Tom Arah can vouch for this as I downloaded it and started the processing of scanning through my rather large photo archive to allow facial recognition and tagging by "people".

It does take a long time. It's been running since early afternoon, and has so far scanned only about 60% of my archive (but it does run to 10GB). Once you've marked a couple of faces, the program basically decides what else looks like that and groups it - but does allow you to confirm it first. It's amazingly accurate and has correctly identified photos of me that are very poor (I don't get ri of much), with various hats on, even ones where I've warped images with special effects!

And of course, it's got all the usual Picasa goodies in it too - and best of all - it's free! Get it here for PC or Mac

What's "Almost free"?

Just seen this on a website relating to if you buy a laptopn now with Vista and want to upgrade to W7 when it comes out. "Upgrade to Windows 7 for almost FREE"

Read the small print and it says cost £0.00.

But then it says a small charge of £17 to cover shipping and handing costs will be charged. Now £17 isn't free whichever way you look at it.

What a rip off.

If they said upgrade to Windows 7 for £17 I'd be OK, but this is just wrong.