Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

I finally got round to replacing my MP3 player on Saturday getting an 80GB iPod video. As I have previously mentioned, I installed Rockbox on the device so I didn’t have to use iTunes and spent most of Saturday loading as much of my music collection onto it as I could fit.

So far it’s pretty good. It’s easy enough to use once I get used to it although I end up struggling to decide what to listen to :D. The interface is a bit small given the size of the screen and I haven’t worked out how to make it bigger yet (if indeed it is possible). Battery life is awful as expected, I have to charge it up every few days (or every day if in heavy yse) but I wasn’t expecting anything better from a rechargeable battery.

I got out of work (well, on my break) yesterday to find a text from Maths Chris informing me the internet was now working! Looks like whatever UK Online got BT to do at the exchange has solved the problem.

The battle is far from over though. It’s still causing problems due to it all being in testing mode at the moment and therefore having multiple DHCP servers. Also UK Online were limiting us due to the testing so I may need to get that sorted out if they haven’t done it automatically.

I tried pinging the modem from home today and that didn’t work, nor did my remote administration attempts so I need to sort that. Also working out how the port forwards flow through the network to make sure the modem doesn’t get in the way of the router doing it’s job which is probably going to take quite a bit of testing.

Continuing my research into what MP3 player to get, I am considering going with an iPod. The latest generation all seem to be video for which you can pick up a 30GB one for £150 or an 80GB for £215. I’m toying with the idea of going for the more expensive option as I would be able to fit lots more of my music collection on it though I only budgeted for £150 (ha, not that my budget even balances, it’s in a bad state as it is).

As I said in my previous post I can’t deal with iTunes or DRM or any of that crap. To get round that I would need to clear off the crap you get with the iPod and replace the firmware with Rockbox (as good as the site is, especially with the comparison and feature list, the Wikipedia article is perhaps a better read).

It’s an open source firmware ported to most of the popular MP3 players and plays Vorbis, FLAC, WAV and they are working on WMA as well as a tonne of cool features.

As for an in-car solution, my car doesn’t have any inputs (or outputs for that matter) which leaves me with the solutions of either radio transmission or stand-alone speakers (which I really don’t want to go with as it’s no way near the same) so I’m going to have to keep searching for a solution there.

Yesterday my motherboard arrived back for my new server (which I ordered like two months ago). No information what they had done with it. They had closed by the time I got it yesterday so I phoned first thing this morning to find out if they had actually fixed it or not. They had tested it and found it to be faulty and so replaced it I was informed when speaking to them on the phone.

So I have just come to assemble it all back together. But something was missing. What you may ask? The CPU and the memory I left attached to the board (and clearly marked in my covering letter with the returns package I had left on for convenience of testing). They were not on the board nor had they been sent back with the rest of the packaging. Back to the phone.

I eventually find out that they are being shipping in a seperate delivery. I go online to track the order and find out they attempted to deliver it this morning but nobody was there so they left a card. I don’t have a card. Where did they try to deliver it to? Back on the phone to customer services. I spent 30 minutes on hold before being transfered to voice mail.

I ring back an hour later and finally get through to Alan. Yes, I’m now recognising names of the customer services team. He informs me it will be re-delivered tomorrow.

Networking is always fun. Yesterday we wired up the house ready for media sharing, LAN gaming and internet surfing. All the gear having arrived on Friday and the cables having been put in already it was now just a case of unpacking, plugging in, configuring and troubleshooting.

We now have a switch on every floor, a pair of routers for the house network and my sub-network, a gigabit network to link my computers, we’re pretty much plugged in ready to go in terms of internet and last night we got some testing done on getting LAN games working. We struggled to get anything going due to problems with the games themselves but the network works fine – myself and Norm were kicking Si’s ass for a good 30 minutes on Unreal Tournament 2004.

Science I love deliveries! (Lol, guess which episode of South Park I finally got round to seeing recently). I got two today. First of all, my long awaited pair of 320gb external hard drives. They are the Western Digital MyBook Essential ones which had a fair amount of critics but no more than any other manufacturer and model including my own LaCie hard drive which I haven’t had any problems with in the 3-4 years I have had it.

So far they seem to be doing alright, I plugged in one of them at about 11ish this morning and began copying all my music over to it. It is up to P at the moment (after 4 hours) which isn’t too bad. It’s still going to take a while to finish and come in with a slower time than the last external hard drive I did this with but building in time for the fact my music collection has increased in size since then it’s not going to come in with a much slower time.

The second delivery I got was the networking gear for my new house. We’re wiring it all in which means a switch for every floor including my upgrade to gigabit networking plus a pair of routers, a modem for our soon (touch wood) to be connected broadband and a few other bits and pieces. I haven’t played around with my routers’ config options yet as I want to save some of the excitement for tomorrow (lol, that is probably really sad but I feel I’m perhaps loosing my edge as the ultimate nerd). I can’t wait though as it’s going to be pretty sorted because I picked up some rather good ones.

I really miss having a portable music device since my 3rd one broke. So it’s time I got myself a new one. At the moment I have one of these.

The iRiver iFP-795. It’s a flash based one with 512mb memory, light as hell, about the size of an AA battery in length, and I love it because the battery lasts for about a month without me needing to replace it.

I’m toying with going hard drive based though. I’ve laid out the case for why flash memory based players are superior which I still fully stand behind it. But I won’t discount the hassle of having a limited amount of storage – not that this is solved by getting a hard drive based player, I still can’t sync my entire collection which is very annoying (unless I get a really, really big MP3 player) but it would reduce the problem at least.

I’ve not really done much product research into MP3 players recently though. So with that in mind, if anyone has, yell out you’re suggestions now. My specification is fairly open, hard drive or flash will be considered, battery life is important, I have quite a decent budget, my only one must have requirement is that it must be UMS – I’m not using any software and it needs to work on Windows and Linux so I need it UMS. It also needs to be able to take a bit of a beating as I put my electronics through their paces. Finally if anyone has suggestions as to how I can huck them up to my car stereo (the radio transmitters look quite a good option) those are also welcome too.

Yesterday saw me begin my hospital management summer internship.

It all started when I was wandering through Game Station to look at retro consoles when I saw Theme Hospital for £4. I had no real option but to buy it. Especially as it’s multi-player so we can do some LAN parties with it. Having been discussing this several days earlier it would have been a missed opportunity not to buy it.

I started playing in the late afternoon evening time and soon found myself engrossed in the game. Next thing I know it’s 2am and I’m all but screaming at my computer screen. Machine after machine blowing up, 2-3 epidemics per minute – what am I doing wrong? Why are my handmen useless? There are 30 of them on staff for smeg’s sake.

The last thing I need at this time of year is more stress. But all I want to do is start playing again.

My laptop arrived back yesterday. I actually seem to be able to touch it without it breaking once again though I couldn’t get the wireless working last night. Haven’t tried it again yet though. I’m really hoping it doesn’t have to go back again.

Still haven’t sorted my server out either as I’m not entirely sure what route I want to go with it now.

On the plus side my fan is working perfectly. You can’t beat the good old fashioned reliable technology of a desk fan.

I arrived home to check up on the backing up process of my laptop to find everything in my room (save my laptop) dead. The power was off. Not to the rest of the hall. Or my lights. Just my power sockets (and wall lights) apparently. All my computer equipment was dead, my UPS was drained and that five hour backup process that was running – cancelled half way through. Awesome.

They finally got the power back on about 30 minutes ago Everything seems ok though I’ve lost everything I had open on my desktop (which is always a lot because I have stuff like web browsers with a dozen tabs open as well as notes in text documents (most of those are saved though).

I don’t know what went wrong really. I didn’t have that much running and it’s not like I suddenly turned something on and that tripped it as it happened when I was out. I had a really small load running at the time as well, it can only have been a few hundred watts at most.

It has propper messed up my schedule though. I need to get my laptop backups completed today and I’m supposed to be going to Kieran’s garden party this afternoon.