Kilburnlad in retirement

RapidWeaver, Lockdown, Sitelok & php

2012-02-20T22:19:00.000Z

I've recently embarked on a new web site design for my daughter who's considering starting a small business. In addition to the usual public pages on the site she would like private 'client only' areas. The requirement is for a common client area where they can access resource material and individual private client pages where people can view information specific to them.

Now this set me a challenge as I had never done anything like this before. I started in the usual place, Google, to see what others had done. From a RapidWeaver forum I was introduced to Lockdown by Loghound. It wasn't very expensive and on the face of it seemed a possible solution. However, limitations soon became apparent. It's a RapidWeaver plug-in that provides a new page type. The page is secured, as are any sub-pages relative to that page. I built a trial setup based on a couple of clients.

Having set up a couple of users and passwords I re-published the site. The first time you try to access a locked page a message appears telling you to refresh. This initiates the passwords. Thereafter an attempted page access produces a drop-down log-in dialogue that allows the user to access the page, or be redirected to a page of your choice as set up in the original username/password configuration. So far so good, although I didn't think that the drop-down dialogue was particularly aesthetic.

Problems arose when I tried to change the existing username/password details. Unless I was doing something wrong, it seems that once you've set up the initial details, and these have been initiated by the page refresh, then to edit anything requires a complete restart of the process. For example I changed a username and this didn't actually generate a "Publish' option within RapidWeaver, suggesting that as far as RapidWeaver was concerned nothing had changed. I fudged it by changing something else on the page, and un-changing it, which permitted a Publish action. However, as might have been expected, when I went to the live site I had to use the old user name to log in. My revision had not been updated.

Another issue was that to ensure that individual client's data was totally secure they needed to log in twice. Basically you set up a 'clients' secure page, requiring a log in, and then individual 'client' secure pages as sub-pages, each requiring the respective clients to log in again. This seemed a bit of a chore and not very 'professional'.

At this point I decided this solution wasn't viable. The thought of regenerating the password process every time a new client needed to be added carried the risk of locking everybody out and the re-testing to ensure everything was still functional would have been unacceptable. It seems the solution is more suitable for a situation where you have a pre-defined list of users that's unlikely to change. This, and the double log-in requirement, were unacceptable.

So I went looking for something else and eventually came across Sitelok by Vibralogix. This product is a much more refined solution and, consequently, somewhat more expensive. It isn't a specific RapidWeaver programme but they do provide RapidWeaver support, including a supplementary manual, a folder of code snippets and a sample RapidWeaver project file. All of these can be downloaded before purchase.

It was a more technically challenging solution, for me at least, as it is based on php and MySQL, neither of which had I any experience of. It requires you to set up a MySQL database on your hosted web space, which as it turned out wasn't that hard to do, but prior to investigating I didn't even know if my hosting company supported MySQL. Sitelok is server side software so setting it up involves uploading two folders of files to the root of the domain. This requires an FTP application (FireFTP in Firefox is brilliant) and is nothing to do with RapidWeaver. Before uploading it is necessary to edit one configuration file to reflect the details of the MySQL database that you have created on your web space. You then launch the setup file simply by addressing it through your browser and, all being well, a confirmation will be received that the installation has been successful. You're now ready to go.

The functionality offered by Sitelok is comprehensive. I suggest a look at their site is better than me trying to explain. Suffice it to say it does everything that I need, plus an awful lot more. There is a control panel that is accessed through the browser (it's part of the domain you're controlling) and this allows you to set up user profiles. Users can be placed into groups and pages of your site can be configured to allow access for certain groups or individual users. Those in the Admin group have access to all pages. Just what I required.

Page access configuration within RapidWeaver is all achieved with php code snippets, which is where I needed to do a bit of reading as I had no prior knowledge of php. Pages must also be saved with a php subscript rather than html for things to work.

I have reached the point where I have secured a number of pages and produced a log-in dialogue on the Home page, using a snippet provided. I had to add a bit of code to match the text on the log-in dialogue with my page body text, which involved a little bit of head scratching, but so far so good.

I downloaded a 77p kindle book from Amazon that provides a quick overview of php and MySQL. It's a self-published book written in a very informal manner, and it's very short, but for 77p it was a useful introduction.

Drought

2012-02-20T20:46:00.001Z

So, we're on drought alert in the Anglian Water region. It was pretty obvious that after last year's dry summer, and the preceding dry winter, that things weren't looking that clever. It was also pretty obvious to me that Anglian Water (and the others) should have done more then to conserve water, as the probability of another dry winter was quite high given the recent climatic conditions. But, as we know, these private water companies are so concerned with what their shareholders may think, and do, that they presumably didn't want to upset shareholder confidence by imposing restrictions before they absolutely had to.

The trouble is that it is now probably too little too late. The region's rivers have already suffered because of excessive extraction and I fear that with a dry summer, or perhaps even without, serious damage is going to be done to the riparian ecology. This is nothing short of a crime. Across the country rivers are already suffering and in some cases smaller ones are actually drying up. Why can't we plan for the future in this country? Rhetorical question, of course, because we all know that short-termism is the order of the day. Governments concentrate no further ahead than the next election. Corporations are only interested in the next dividend payment or the year-end bonus pot. Whatever happened to the Victorian spirit of investing for the long term? These days investment is like a game of hyperspeed Monopoly, where shares are bought and resold in seconds, and companies survive or fall at the whim of the 'Market'. It's hard to believe that much of the historic infrastructure (canals, railways, electricity networks) was built with private money. It wouldn't happen now.

We had a mailshot last week from Anglian Water informing us that from 22 February our water will be delivered through the Wisbech Zone rather than through March as it is now. This is part of their 'plan' for managing the drought - shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic? As a consequence our water quality will change from being 'hard' to 'very hard'. So even more scale in the system.

Interesting golf day

2012-02-16T16:13:00.002Z

We played golf yesterday for the first time in a week because snow had suspended play. I wouldn't normally post about golf as I'm not much good. However, although the course was playable yesterday we were restricted to temporary tees (off mats) and temporary greens, that were in fact just marked areas of fairway near to the proper greens. As such they were not very predictable and I was introduced to the quaint practice of giving you the putt if your penultimate shot was within a putter's length of the hole. This was greatly beneficial to my score.

It was what happened at the 6th hole that prompted me to post today. John, a chap playing with us, and I were both inside the 150 yard marker and were playing for the green. I misjudged the distance, not allowing for the fact that the green was in front of the normal green. I can't normally hit long irons so I took my 9 wood. Bob, whom I play with regularly, said I had taken too much club. I should have listened to him. I took my shot and made unusually good contact. It was immediately clear that the shot was long, but to everybody's surprise the ball hit the pin, quite high up, and knocked it out of the hole. Amazing! What was equally amazing was that John then took his shot, more sensibly using an iron, and from about 120 yards put the ball in the hole, which was of course nice and clear as I had removed the pin.

What chance that one player should take out the pin and another, with the next shot, sink the ball from over 100 yards? Golf is certainly a game full of surprises.

Qashqai DPF

2012-02-12T17:37:00.000Z

I posted about the Qashqai DPF problem back in 2009, when I had to get the engine management warning indicator reset at the garage after the DPF warning light failed to extinguish. I had more page visits on that posting than any other on this blog: 1033 in all. It's obviously a popular, or should I say unpopular subject.

I'm pleased to say that while the DPF light has come on two or three times since, I've always managed to get it to reset before the engine management warning appeared. Once bitten, twice shy. The recent cold snap has reduced my mileage and sure enough the DPF light came on again on Friday, when I was doing what was probably a round trip of about ten miles. This caused me to 'extend' my trip by another ten or so miles, driving out and back along the A142, and fortunately the light went out about half a mile from home.

This is truly a daft system. While I applaud the fact that the particulate filter collects all that diesel crap that comes out of cars without such filters, it is absurd that you are obliged to regularly do sustained mileage at 50mph to burn off the detritus so collected. There are probably a number of people who just don't do long trips, and I assume that they have this problem regularly. Even when the system is not causing you any problems, you still have to pay for the privilege of burning off the soot. If you set the drive computer to show real time miles per gallon, when the 'burn off' cuts in the figure drops to less than 20 mpg at a steady 50mph, which should be the most economically efficient cruising speed. I monitor my average mpg over each fill-up, and when a 'burn off' occurs the final average is significantly down. You can also detect a fall-off in engine performance when the burn-off is occurring.

I believe that the trend is for all diesel vehicles ultimately to be fitted with this type of system. Let's hope that they make it a bit more user-friendly. As for me, the Qashqai was my first diesel, and it will be my last. Modern petrol engines aren't far off achieving the same fuel economy, especially with technology such as stop-start. This, combined with the ridiculous surcharge on diesel fuel compared with petrol, to my mind makes diesel quite unattractive. You can add to that the fact that I won't have to search for plastic gloves every time I fill up and the engine won't sound like a can of loose nuts on a cold start.

Blogger: formatting images

2012-02-11T16:44:00.000Z

In the last post I had a few images to display. With Blogger one can either compose a new post using the WYSIWYG editor or in basic HTML. The WYSIWYG editor is very good but I find it dumps a lot of unnecessary code snippets in the final HTML, especially if you go back and edit something you've already written. The resulting code is often a mess, although it is of course functional. I tend, therefore, to jump to the HTML editor once I 've defined the font.

With respect to images, however, it is certainly easier to format these in the WYSIWYG editor as this allows you to size and position them (left/centre/right) without needing to worry about the HTML.

However, I got in a bit of a mess trying to position the images in the last post. I wanted to display them in two columns but this proved impossible in the WYSIWYG editor. First of all the three size options (small/medium/large) are not really flexible enough to get a reasonable page layout. This is fairly easily resolved in the HTML by changing to a custom width and height. What was more of a problem was working out why I couldn't position images next to each other. Interestingly two of the images did appear side by side but I couldn't work out how to achieve this with the rest, so as to end up with two columns.

By comparing the HTML between the images that had appeared side by side with the others, I found that the culprit was the CSS 'clear' property. It seems that Blogger by default clears the floating elements property when creating the default code for each image.

This is the code snippet:

div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"

Removing the 'clear: both;' from this code allows the images to float and thus be displayed besides each other.

div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"

No doubt obvious for those on top of their CSS coding but not so obvious for us mere mortals.

Hoar frost

2012-02-11T16:00:00.000Z

According to a neighbour the temperature dropped to -11 centigrade last night. We awoke to a land of hoar frost. Beautiful but incredibly cold. Amazingly the aerators in the pond still managed to keep two patches clear of ice, although the holes are getting smaller and with another cold night forecast for tonight it will be interesting to see if they are still there in the morning.

The conditions were ripe for some interesting photography so I went out in the garden to see what I could capture. It was indeed raw. My hands were quite painful with the cold after what must have been no more than ten minutes.

Note the bird tracks to the water holes. I also put out dishes for them but these freeze very quickly. The other shots are a 'frosty'selection. The final picture shows some tracks. I couldn't work out what could have made an imprint such as this. Any ideas?

Improvements to Blog

2012-02-10T21:32:00.001Z

Although I changed the template for this blog recently, I haven't changed much else since I started it back in 2008.

Over that time Google has been gradually introducing new features and this week, being at home with a cold and some spare time on my hands, I started looking at some of the available features.

The 'Search my Blog' feature, which I've now added, is quite impressive. Give it a try if you are unfamiliar with it. It lists, in a frame, all the posts that include the keyword. Very neat.

The other thing I wanted to do was provide a category listing. Unfortunately the labels I had been adding to each post were extremely diverse, reflecting the eclectic nature of my ramblings. There were over 400 labels, which was far too many upon which to base a category list. So, I've laboriously re-labelled all the posts into a more generic listing and this has also been added as a new categories section.

The next thing I'm going to investigate is the additional page facility. I'm still thinking about how I could put it to good use.

DigitalColor Meter

2012-02-10T21:16:00.000Z

I've just started designing another web site for my daughter and I was trying to match colours between work prepared in Photoshop Elements and colours selected within my RapidWeaver web design application.

The problem was that while Photoshop provides digital and hexadecimal RGB values for any colour picked, RapidWeaver doesn't. In trying to get around this I went to the RapidWeaver forum, which seemed to confirm that RapidWeaver doesn't offer this functionality, although I can't think why not. One contributor pointed readers to the DigitalColor Meter application that is provided within the standard OSX utilities.

I must confess that I didn't know it existed. It's a nifty little application that provides either a digital or hexadecimal readout of the colour at the cursor position. I could, therefore, hover it over the colour picker in RapidWeaver and, by carefully adjusting the cursor position, select a colour to match the RGB values that I had been using in Photoshop Elements.

It would, of course, have been much better if I could just have selected the colour directly in RapidWeaver by entering the RGB values but, as I've said, this functionality appears not to exist.

A useful tip for anybody experiencing the same problem.

Time Capsule - again

2012-02-09T17:38:00.000Z

The conversion of my Time capsule into an AirPort Extreme plus an external drive worked well, as previously reported.

However, the original Time Capsule disk was always a bit noisy and this was more evident in the external enclosure, which is simply an aluminium shell. Also, I started to think that the original disk was now over three years old and had spent it's life in the Capsule, which recently expired almost certainly because of excessive internal heat build up.

I decided, therefore, that it might be prudent to replace the disk. I bought a Western Digital 'Blue' 500Gb drive at a reasonable price on Amazon and set about transferring the backups.

A bit of research revealed that this might not be quite as straightforward as it seemed, and certainly involved more than simply cutting and pasting the files. The most reassuring article that I found proposed using the Restore feature in the OSX Disk Utility. I USB-connected both the new an old drives to my MacBook Pro and followed the steps, which were quite straightforward. However, when the old drive mounted it actually showed three partitions; the data partition and two others: APswap and APconfig. The former was empty.

This was a bit perplexing and I couldn't find any substantive advice as to what to do about them. In the end I used the Disk Utility Restore to transfer just the data partition to the new disk. I had partitioned the new disk as a single partition.

Around four hours later the Restore operation completed. I ejected the old backup drive and switched it off, then selected the new drive as the Time Machine; still on my MacBook Pro. The backup update started but seemed to hang. In fact the computer hung. With some trepidation I did a hard reboot (using the power button). On restarting the Time Machine preferences showed no disk selected. I reselected the new drive and tried again. This time the backup was successful. Phew!

I next reconnected the new drive to the network, via my Iomega MiniMax's USB hub and the AirPort Extreme. Before attempting a backup on the iMac I rebooted, conscious of what had happened with the MacBook. After the restart I selected the new drive, which was now network-connected, and I'm pleased to say the backup update proceeded without a hitch.

The new drive is considerably quieter and should present a lower standby power drain. I'll check what the residual standby power is when I switch off the computers later this evening.

So a few panics but in the end a successful outcome.

Nissan Juke-R

2012-02-09T12:06:00.000Z

The Nissan Juke goes for street cred, and gets it in spades.

Four-wheel drive probably helped but let's not diminish the achievement.

The 485bhp Juke-R is racing against a Lamborghini Gallardo, Mercedes SLS AMG and Ferrari 458 Italia around a make-shift 0.58km race course at the Dubai International Marine Club.

Banner picture

2012-02-08T20:28:00.001Z

You may have noticed that I've smartened up the blog with a banner picture.

It was taken by me at Wicken Fen a few years ago.

The swan is magnificent but I also rather like the ripples.

Cold, Flu or what?

2012-02-06T19:42:00.000Z

I mentioned over a week ago that I had stopped running because of a cold. Well I've still got it and am beginning to think it's a bit more than a cold.

Having had 'real' flu when I was younger I'm always reluctant to use this diagnosis for anything that doesn't absolutely floor you. However, after my walk in the snow yesterday I was totally beat and felt truly awful. So whatever I've got it's certainly sapping my strength.

I suppose I'll just have to opt for the fact I have a virus and wait until my body finally gets on top of it. Until then running is certainly on hold.

Pond

2012-02-06T11:05:00.000Z

Last year the pond froze over for weeks on end and I fished out a dead frog in the spring. It probably expired because of lack of oxygen.

I had installed aerator blocks when I built the pond but hadn't actually switched them on. In the summer I put a few minnows in the pond, which I haven't actually seen since, but at that point I switched on the aerators. I had also hoped that the water movement thus created may help to stop the pond freezing over. With the onset of this latest cold snap this has proved to be the case. Even though most of the pond is now fairly thick ice there are two 'holes' where the aerator bubbles are surfacing.

This photograph taken after Sunday night's snow shows the bubble holes.

Snow

2012-02-05T17:38:00.000Z

Like many others we had snow today in Chatteris.

We abandoned our usual Sunday morning trip into Peterborough and instead I went for a walk armed with a camera and hoping to get some good 'snow' shots.

Unfortunately the light was very bland with the sky having that heavy snow-filled look. The scenic shots were therefore not that impressive. It was a matter of looking for something 'different'.

I came across a travellers' pony that kindly obliged.

I then tried working at the macro level and was very successful with a wild rose bush. The first shot is a rose hip, one of only a few that remained on the skeletal bush. The second is a thaw droplet on the same bush. I was fortunate that the reflection off the droplet mirrored the branches of a nearby tree, providing a very interesting effect to the macro photograph [click to see larger version]. Other attempts to capture this effect were less successful.

This frozen drain that provided an interesting if bleak picture.

A view across the snow covered fields. As I've said, the light wasn't friendly, the sky and the snow-covered ground looking decidedly 'grey'. The grasses in the foreground help to give the pisture a bit of interest.

And to finish a novel use of one of BT's new Infinity cabinets. I spotted a chap building the snowman on my way to the fen, so came back the same way to capture the finished product.

Tesco Store for Chatteris

2012-02-02T18:39:00.002Z

Good news or bad news depending on your point of view.

Personally I think it's a disaster.

We already have Tesco stores in all the surrounding towns and there is a perfectly acceptable Coop here in Chatteris.

We have known for a while that a new superstore was coming but the council wouldn't say which company was involved, although we now find out that they have known throughout the planning application. Tesco is obviously such a toxic name for some people that the council decided to keep it quiet. Until, that is, the decision was wrapped up. That's local democracy at work.

There are justifiable concerns for the High Street, which like many has already suffered the ravages of the recession. When we moved here early in 2004 a large part of the attraction for me was the High Street, which wasn't the usual clone of national chain outlets. I was reading an article the other week where the town of Hart in Hampshire had been voted the most desirable place to live. Mention was made of the hardware store where one could still buy a single screw. We had one of those here in Chatteris when we arrived, but it has gone; victim of unaffordable business rates. The butcher also closed and there is no longer a greengrocer. I fear also for the little market that visits on a Friday.

It seems that when questioned on the impact on the High Street, our Mayor said we will have to wait and see! That speaks volumes for what sort of impact assessment was prepared before this decision was made.

Theres' going to be a new roundabout on the bypass, which will have to be negotiated by all the heavy lorries (and there are plenty of them around here), and a pedestrian underpass. A letter to the local paper suggested that the construction of said underpass will involve temporarily routing the bypass back through the town. That doesn't bear thinking about and will make a nonsense of the weight restriction currently in place. To add insult to injury no doubt they will put parking restrictions in place along the High Street while this is happening, thus adversely affecting custom in the already beleaguered and soon to be extinguished High Street.

When are we going to stop acceding to the never-ending march of the superstores and start appreciating the community benefits of local shops owned by local people, which generate income for the local economy, not some corporate behemoth that couldn't care a tinker's cuss what happens to the people of Chatteris? Perhaps we should ask our Mayor.

Time Capsule reconfigured

2012-02-02T17:59:00.000Z

Today I finished configuring the Airport Extreme and external 'Time Capsule' disk.

At the last post I had reconnected the iMac and today I re-established connection with my MacBook Pro and Helen's MacBook. So all three machines are now backing up to the original Time Capsule disk that I've refitted into an external disk enclosure.

I've also checked that my Windows 7 installation on the Boot Camp partition of my MacBook Pro can still access the networks drives.

One other benefit is that I've noticed that the standby power is now 32W whereas with the original Time Capsule and network drives it was around 45W. All in all, therefore, the solution to the expired Time Capsule has worked out quite well.

Time 'Capsule' restored

2012-02-01T22:03:00.000Z

Having got Airport Extreme up and running yesterday, today I installed the Time Capsule disk into a SATA external disk enclosure and connected it via USB to the Airport Extreme unit.

The disk was immediately recognised and thankfully the original backup for my iMac was also recognised. The iMac has been backing up as normal this evening so it seems that I have now functionally recreated my former Time Capsule using an Airport Extreme and an external USB disk. I had no reason to believe that this wouldn't work, but it is nice when it does.

I've still to check that the MacBooks both resume their backups but assume there shouldn't be any problems.Although the failure of the original Time Capsule was a bit of a blow, I must say that I think I prefer the arrangement I now have. Airport Extreme is unlikely to suffer the heat-related problems of the Time Capsule and having the Time Machine as a discrete disk has its advantages. It's also quieter than the Time Capsule unit as there is no fan.

AirPort Extreme installed

2012-01-31T13:57:00.000Z

Following the expiration of my Time Capsule, this morning I completed the first stage of the restoration process.

I bought an Airport Extreme from John Lewis yesterday and it's now up and running. Basically a Time Capsule without the hard disk. It has an external power pack so is, I assume, not subject to the temperature problem that saw off the Time Capsule's power supply. Also, the form factor is smaller and it sits neatly on top of my Iomega MiniMax.

Set up was to the usual Apple standards. Ten minutes to get back to where I was before the Time Capsule died in terms of access to my two network-connected data drives. The printer set up was a little more complicated as I had to remember how to configure the PrintFab driver, PrintFab having been bought a while ago when Snow Leopard (or more correctly HP) ditched my printer and Apple provided a generic driver that removed important functionality.

Next step is to dismantle the Time Capsule and recover the hard disk. An external disk casing is due to arrive today, courtesy of Amazon, and the next report will tell you how I get on reconfiguring the Time Machine backups as an external drive connected to the Airport Extreme.

Chrome

2012-01-31T12:09:00.000Z

I've started using Chrome.

I had already moved Helen onto it as she was always complaining about the speed of Safari, although probably unjustifiably.

For my part I have been a Firefox man for a long time now, but of late things seem to have slowed down a bit. Chrome certainly feels fast, but again this may be subjective.

I haven't deserted Firefox as the add-ins are useful, particularly Fire-FTP, which I find a very efficient FTP file manager. Of course, it's probably the add-ins that have slugged the browser.

So, for quick and efficient browsing it's Chrome, and for special jobs it's Firefox. Horses for Courses.

Cold = no running

2012-01-29T22:42:00.000Z

Just as I thought I was making some headway in my effort to get back into running I got a cold. So, for the last week I've been sniffling and generally feeling wretched: and not running.

Things are a bit better today so I hope that in a couple of days or so I will be able to start training again. I bet I've already lost the little bit of fitness I had gained and it will be like starting all over again.

C'est la vie!

New Template

2012-01-29T18:22:00.002Z

Time for a change. Gone for a cleaner, less fussy template.

Hope you agree.

Time Capsule died!

2012-01-29T17:48:00.000Z

Normally I'm praising Apple but last night my Time Capsule died.

It not only backs up my iMac and MacBook Pro, and Helen's MacBook, but also acts as a hub for connection (via USB) of my network storage. So I've lost access to most of my data although I can, if necessary, connect either the main network drive or the backup network drive direct to the computer. I've temporarily reconfigured the network-connected printer as a direct USB connection to my iMac, but of course it is no longer available to the two MacBooks.

The real shock came when I started investigating this sort of problem on the web. It seems that TC failures are epidemic and many people with the first generation device lost it within 18 months. By that measure I've been quite lucky.

The problem apparently is failure of the internal power supply as a result of the heat generated within the unit. I must say that it always worried me how hot the top became after extended Time Machine activity, especially as the unit is effectively a sealed box. It appears that there is an internal fan but it only recirculates the air. The electrolytic capacitors in the power supply can't cope with this heat.

It seems that Apple has 'acknowledged' the problem and there is a suggestion that it may even consider an 'out of warranty' replacement of affected units. However, it seems that you would probably receive a refurbished unit, rather than a second generation device, so the heat build-up problem would still threaten to take out the power supply again. In fact, the second generation devices are similarly designed, so presumably not immune from the problem, although they use higher efficiency 'green' drives that should not generate as much heat.

The other problem, of course, is that I have three machines backed up on my existing unit, so there is the problem of rescuing those backups, which means dismantling the existing device. Perhaps Apple will do this, although with the amount of data involved, it would not be a quick exercise.

Having mulled over my options, and worried about using a backup device that is apparently prone to failure in this way, I've decided instead to buy a new Airport Extreme, which will give me the wireless and network connections, as well as re-enabling my network USB connection for my network storage and network-connected printer. This is £100 cheaper than a new 2TB Time Capsule.

I'll then dismantle the existing TC and recover the SATA drive, put it in a USB case (£27.59), and connect it to the Airport Extreme along with my two network storage drives. One of my network storage devices is an Iomega Mini-Max that conveniently incorporates a USB hub.

Fingers crossed I will then be able to access the remounted disk as the original Time Machine storage drive and everything will be back to normal.

If this works, and I don't see why it shouldn't, I will recover all the functionality for much less than a new Time Capsule with the advantage that the Airport Extreme will not be vulnerable to the heating problem caused by the internal disk in the Time Capsule. Also, having the Time Machine drive as an external device gives much easier access should the need arise to replace the drive or upgrade it.

In summary, not quite as neat as the integrated Time Capsule unit, but seemingly more reliable and cheaper.

Setting it all up could, however, be fun!

Super bunker shot

2012-01-20T20:03:00.000Z

As a rule I make a complete mess of bunker shots. However, having practised chipping earlier in the week, I applied the same principal to a couple of bunker shots on Thursday. On both occasions I got out of the bunker, which is always a good start, but the first one exceeded all expectations and ended up a very puttable distance from the hole.

And I putted it.

RunKeeper / Runmeter

2012-01-19T20:10:00.001Z

Having previously mentioned the large variation in measured distance when using RunKeeper on my iPhone, I have now loaded an alternative app: Runmeter. This is a paid for app (£2.99) so I was interested to see how it performed.

First outing it recorded 3.54 miles over a route that I've measured on Google Maps as 3.12 miles. However, today it actually recorded 3.12 miles, matching the measured distance.

It seems that both these apps are subject to the vagaries of the GPS in the iPhone. I'll give it a few more outings and see how things pan out.

Distance measurement aside, both apps are easy to use although RunKeeper has the advantage of saving the results to a pre-registered web user account on the web.

Running is tough

2012-01-19T20:01:00.001Z

Completed my tenth run today and it doesn't seem to get any easier. I'm still alternating running and walking and had hoped that the running duration would gradually increase until I was completing the route without walking. I can't remember how long it took me to run three miles back in 1981 when I first took up running, so I don't know if what I'm currently experiencing is more arduous or not. I suppose at 64 things are likely to be somewhat different to when I was 33.

The chief problem is maintaining my heart rate within what is quite a narrow bandwidth. My maximum is 160 so I start to walk at about 155. I run again when it's dropped to about 130. This only allows an increase of 25 beats/minute before I need to stop again, so it's hardly surprising that I can't run for long periods at a time.

I shall persevere and hope that after a while my heart rate will not increase as rapidly, once the training effect has kicked in. With luck my resting rate should also drop giving me more margin. That's the theory anyway.

RunKeeper/iPhone

2012-01-13T20:12:00.000Z

Whether it's the app or the phone's GPS, I don't know, but my latest run over the same course clocked up 4.24 miles, which is the highest figure to date, the lowest being 2.86 miles. Measurement on Google Maps is 3.12 miles.

Inspection of the recorded route on RunKeeper would tend to indicate that in the case of the longer measurements there are instances of the location position moving 'backwards', thus resulting in that part of the route being covered again. I assume that the GPS signal is in these cases imprecise, so I guess it's the iPhone that's introducing the errors rather than the app.

BT Infinity - Watch the installation requirements!

2012-01-12T12:49:00.001Z

I ordered BT Infinity last week as the deal seemed reasonable, especially as I am now consistently exceeding my Option 1, 10GB monthly limit. The letter came today setting out full details of the order and included a description of the installation requirements.

The default arrangement is that the modem and router will be installed by your BT master socket. Failing this they offer to run an Ethernet cable to another location within 30m cable length. None of this was explained when I placed the order, although perhaps I should have guessed there would be a problem extending Infinity through internal telephony cabling.

Now in my case all the existing kit is in my study and while it wouldn't be impossible to run an Ethernet cable from the master socket, it would be difficult and involve quite a lot of disruption. Note that they will only run the cable along walls; no hiding under carpets etc., although in our case the wooden floor would have precluded that approach.

So, the Infinity order has been cancelled. Back to the 'slow' lane. To be honest the ordinary broadband in town received an uplift when they brought in the Infinity fibre optics, and I was only going for Infinity as the deal was reasonable and I needed a higher data allowance.

Oh, and another thing, they don't provide technical support for Macs!

More RunKeeper

2012-01-03T18:56:00.000Z

I walked my little running route today to try to establish the respective pace for running and walking. On this occasion RunKeeper gave a distance of only 2.86 miles despite the route being identical. I don't know what's going on but I now have a fairly wide range of distances for the same route, the greatest being a mile more than the shortest. This doesn't inspire confidence so I'll stick with the distance I measured off Google Maps.

New Year Resolutions

2012-01-02T19:26:00.000Z

Time to set some objectives for the coming year, or should I say make some resolutions as this sounds less like corporate-speak.

I had already decided to try to start running again and you will see from recent posts that I have made a tentative start. Running is a tough exercise at the best of times but as I approach my 64th birthday I do get the feeling that nature isn't actually fully on my side in this endeavour. I'm committed to give it my best shot but need to steer a course that will not overly aggravate my back while also accepting that a return to strenuous exercise at this age is not without risks.

I've adopted a walk-run approach to start with and using a heart rate monitor am restricting myself to a maximum rate of 160. At this stage of the proceedings this is easily reached, thus requiring a lot of walking breaks until the rate falls, but as I get fitter I'm hoping that I shall be able to run my 3 mile starter route without having to walk.

My next resolution is to overhaul my reading time. My mission statement at the head of this blog states that I would endeavour to read some of the classic books in literature. Well, I'm afraid to say that apart from not reading the classics I've actually not managed to read many books at all. This must change. To this end I've already cancelled my subscription to PC Pro, a first class magazine that unfortunately took up too much of my reading time. I will this week also be cancelling my monthly fishing magazine. This will remove all periodicals from my current reading commitments. I have also decided to be more selective in my reading of the Saturday Guardian, the only newspaper we take, which seems to keep me reading for the best part of the week!

To complement the effects of reduced reading material I must also endeavour to commit more time to reading and am planning to try to read for a while before putting my head down at night. This will be a challenge as I'm usually well and truly ready to go to sleep when I go to bed, but an attempt must be made.

Finally I am going to try hard to visit people more this year. I'm always saying we must visit people but never seem to get around to it.

RunKeeper - some limitations

2012-01-01T18:16:00.001Z

My second outing using the RunKeeper app produced an unexpected result. I ran exactly the same route but whereas the first time it returned 3.23 miles, the next time it recorded 3.83 miles: quite a difference. Whether this is the app at fault or the limitations of the iPhone GPS system I'm not sure.

To check the actual distance I found a useful web site called gmap-pedometer. This Google maps based site allows you to plot a route by double-clicking point markers and, when finished, it gives the distance; which was in this case 3.12 miles.

I was also interested in the calorie calculation and found another useful site that allowed me to check RunKeeper's calculation. RunKeeper credited me with 509/673 calories whereas my calculation produced a more conservative 300 calories, which sounds more plausible relative to the effort. To be fair I allowed for the fact I was alternating walking and running, whereas RunKeeper assumed continuous running. Also, by over-stating the distance, RunKeeper artificially upped the pace, thus increasing the calorie usage.

An interesting little investigation.

Back to running

2011-12-30T18:20:00.000Z

When I was 33, 30 years ago, I started running. It was partly inspired by the first London Marathon in 1981, and partly because I was conscious that I was terribly unfit for a 33 year old. It became a bit of a passion and I ran in the London Marathon in 1983 and 1986. Unfortunately in 1983 I suffered a rather serious back problem that I have lived with ever since, and the running didn't help. Eventually, about ten years ago, I called it a day and stopped running.

Wind forward to now and, like when I was 33 (now nearly 64), I am very unfit. As the running bug never really left me I decided to start again in 2012. To test the water I've tried a couple of sessions this week where I walk and run, the idea being to keep my heart rate (HR) within the recommended maximum, which is 220 minus my age; i.e 156. Now that's actually not that easy, as 156 is a pretty moderate HR and is easily reached by an unfit 63 year old. The outcome is that I run for about 80 - 100 metres then walk until my HR drops to about 125, and then run again.

Technology wise things have moved on somewhat since 1983. I've added the RunKeeper app to my iPhone and it's brilliant. My route was about 3¼ miles and I used RunKeeper on my second outing. It gave me elapsed time, average minutes/mile, minutes/mile for each mile split and estimated calories used. Plus a Google map showing the route. When I think of the way I used to manage my training back in the early eighties, using a map comprising stuck together sheets from a Greater London A to Z, and a measuring wheel. Things like minutes/mile could of course be calculated mentally if one remembered the mile points on the route and I'm sure there was information somewhere that would have allowed me to calculate calorie usage, but I never bothered.

RunKeeper will also link with a Bluetooth enabled heart monitor but I have a Polar device that unfortunately doesn't use Bluetooth. With a compatible device, heart rate information would also be added to the activity summary. All the information is uploaded to a user page on their site and you can share information on Facebook and Twitter.

After my first outing the muscles at the front of my thighs were in nothing short of agony, especially when walking downstairs. They were also painful during the second outing, but have now eased somewhat so I hope that I'm starting to acclimatise to the exercise. At first my knees seemed almost locked but these have started to settle in and I'm hopeful things will now improve with the running periods increasing and the walking becoming the lesser part of each circuit.

I'm stretching well before and after each run so fingers crossed that the back holds out.

Bird update

2011-12-23T21:56:00.001Z

After the stalking cat episode some three weeks ago the smaller birds have gradually returned to the garden, albeit in a less ebullient manner. The doves, however, have stayed away. Hardly surprising, as it appeared that one had been taken by the cat, judging by the feathers that were scattered around at the time.

Meanwhile, I've littered the ground with old flower pots and planting trays in the area where the cat was hiding from the birds, and this seems to have dissuaded it for the time being at least. I realise, however, that this is probably only a temporary victory as the cat concerned, or another of the tribe that prowls our yard, will no doubt be back once it gets bored with annoying somebody else.

Having written that last paragraph I thought perhaps I should use the proper collective noun for a group of cats, as tribe is certainly not the right word. On researching collective nouns I find that cats enjoy a range of descriptions, and appropriately "a nuisance of cats" is one of them. Wild cats, interestingly, only appear to have one collective noun: "a destruction."

Enough said!

Ubuntu 11.10 - Oneiric Ocelot

2011-12-23T18:15:00.000Z

I've updated my Ubuntu machine to Oneiric Ocelot. Absolutely painless. All my settings were maintained, wireless re-connected seamlessly after restarting, and my network-connected Time Capsule was readily accessible. All my data resides on two mirrored (manually synchronised) hard drives that are USB-connected to the Time Capsule.

For anybody not wanting to pay for an operating system Ubuntu must be a prime choice.

I only use the Ubuntu machine as a learning tool but the comprehensive suite of software that comes with it is amazing.

In case you're wondering, as I was, what oneiric means, it's "relating to dreams or dreaming".

iPhone education

2011-12-21T13:54:00.000Z

I went out to dinner yesterday evening with friends from my former work and being seasoned iPhone users they acquainted me with a useful bit of information - how to close apps!

Now this is probably blindingly obvious to the masses out there but due to the limited instruction one receives with a new iPhone it had completely passed me by. Consequently I had a large number of apps running in the background. In fact probably every app I have on the phone!

Now this may well be the cause of the reboot that I experienced during a call the other day. However, I will reserve judgement, as I can't believe all the forum postings that I read concerning reboots were from people who didn't know how to close apps.

Blog analytics

2011-12-17T21:56:00.002Z

I use Google Analytics to monitor visits to websites I've built and to this blog. Oddly, over the last few weeks I've seen absolutely no visits to this blog, which was surprising as I used to receive quite a few. It then dawned on me that I had changed my template and obviously in so doing had lost the the html tracking code that feeds Google Analytics.

I've just placed the tracking code in the html for the new template and hope to start getting some statistics again.

iPhone spurious reboots

2011-12-15T20:29:00.000Z

I am very happy with my iPhone and it is a pleasure to use after my admittedly early-version Android. The way iCloud synchronises my contacts and calender across my iMac, MacBook and iPhone is just brilliant.

However, I did have a little bit of moan soon after I got it, when I upgraded to IOS 5, part of which was directed at the fact that the phone hung while trying to set up my voice mail message. Yesterday I had a recurrence of this while speaking to my bank, the phone cutting out just after I had completed the annoying lengthy security check, meaning I had to phone back (on a land line) and start over again.

On this latest occasion I realised that the phone didn't cut the call, but actually rebooted, which, thinking back, is what I believe it did the last time. I Googled "iPhone rebooting during call" and was astonished at the number of hits this returned. There was a thread that went to 149 pages on the Apple Support Forum. Of course, in true Apple form they had offered no comment. Meanwhile the forum posts suggested a number of 'fixes' ranging from full restores, through battery replacements to turning off the WiFi.

It seems this has been going on since IOS 4 was released, one theory being it is linked to the introduction of multi-tasking. Who knows? If Apple does it's not telling us.

Sad really that a brilliant piece of engineering is let down by what is clearly a common fault and nobody seems to be worried about fixing it.

Still no birds

2011-12-10T16:56:00.001Z

Five days now since the cat stalked the birds and they haven't returned to the garden since. It's freezing out there and we had attracted quite a collection of birds, which are now having to find food elsewhere. My current feelings regarding cats are really not printable.

Barn owl

2011-12-05T21:09:00.001Z

Driving back from Peterborough on Sunday afternoon we were privileged to see a barn owl hovering over a ditch just a few yards from the road. Fantastic sight.

What use are cats?

2011-12-05T21:00:00.001Z

I've ranted about cats before but things don't improve. Latest headache is a tabby that has decided to stalk the bird table. I've chased it off numerous times but they're thick as well as being a bloody nuisance. A pile of feathers suggest it got a dove the other day.

The sad thing is that the weather has just turned cold and the birds have now stopped coming down for the food, putting them under even more stress.

Why do people have cats only to let them roam semi wild all day and night aggravating everybody else. Rhetorical question.

DVDs with French subtitles (update)

2011-11-27T20:38:00.001Z

Further inspection of our DVD library produced a number top-selling films that had both dubbed French and French sub-titles.

I gave 'A Perfect Murder' a go. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Douglas and Viggo Mortensen, it was worth another viewing.

Now, I won't pretend for a moment that I understood all of what was being said, but I got some of it. What was surprising was that the French subtitles often didn't correlate with the French dubbing. The sense was the same but the phraseology was different.

My only explanation for this phenomenon is that two teams of translators were employed, one to dub the speech and one to produce the subtitles, and that they didn't compare notes. It seems in fact that they probably both worked from the original English and produced their own interpretations.

I suppose that as the intended audience for French subtitles on a film with French dubbing would be those with hearing difficulties, the distributors saw no incongruence in the fact that the words didn't match. Not much good for me though. It's bad enough trying to understand the spoken French while trying simultaneously to check the written equivalent, without having to adjust for one version being different to the other.

Next step is to get hold of a native French language film with French sub titles to see if there is better agreement.

DVDs with French sub-titles

2011-11-13T17:55:00.001Z

I have a number of French films with English subtitles. However, as a learning aid to French this is not that great, since it is often difficult to catch what is being said, so knowing what it means in English doesn't help a great deal.

I decided that French films with French subtitles would perhaps be a better approach. These are not easily bought in the UK and unfortunately while I can source them from Amazon France the postage is a bit steep.

I had a brainwave that perhaps some of my existing English DVDs may have both French language and subtitles. I had heard that many Disney DVDs support multiple languages.
Having checked through our fairly extensive catalogue I was amazed that none of the Disney titles provide the French option. If you want Hindi, Norwegian, Spanish and numerous other languages, fine, but French - no way.

Widening my search I found that my box set of The Wire does in fact offer the French/French option (for Canada?), but I somehow think that dubbed French may detract from the colloquial impact of something like The Wire. I can also watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in French, probably because it's an old film.

So, is this lack of Frenchness a commercial ploy, or just a snub to our near neighbours?

Fenland Jam

2011-11-08T20:26:00.000Z

I've recently finished a web site for Fenland Jam.

This was my most challenging site to date as I needed to accommodate music and video.

It was again built in RapidWeaver but this time I purchased a third-party template from Elixir Graphics, and few add-ins, including those for the music and video players, in this case from SymfoniP.

I'm quite pleased with the result.

BT Infinity

2011-11-07T20:57:00.002Z

A while ago I checked out the BT Infinity site and it indicated that Chatteris was to receive the service in September. Well, in fact, it seems that it arrived on 4 November. See my earlier blog for the background to this.

I did a speed test yesterday morning and recorded a download speed of 12.6 Mbps, with a maximum DSL connection rate of 16.7 Mbps. Good for a free upgrade.

The upload speed is still however abysmal at only 716 kbps with a maximum of 883 kbps.

New template

2011-11-07T15:38:00.000Z

Just applied a new dynamic template. I've had the original template since I started the blog in 2008 so I suppose it was due for a change.

I haven't yet explored the customisation features etc. that these new templates offer.

Migrating Thunderbird to Apple Mail

2011-11-05T16:31:00.000Z

I suppose the first question may be "Why do you want to change from TB to Mail." To be honest TB is a good email program and, being cross-platform, it was extremely useful when I moved from Windows to the Mac. Also, having lived with Outlook and Outlook Express for years, the TB format was very familiar.

So why? Well, it was really the result of a misunderstanding. Having recently got an iPhone and marvelled at how Contacts/Address Book and iCal are kept synchronised by way of iCloud, I thought it would be good to use Mac Mail and achieve similar synchronisation. Of course I didn't read the small (in fact not so small) print associated with iCloud. In fact, the only mail it will synchronise is that associated with your me.com email address that is offered as part of signing up to iCloud. It doesn't in any way synchronise the Mac's Mail program.

I didn't realise this when I embarked on the migration, which is as well, as I may never have started. So, how did it go?

I have an extensive archive of old emails in TB; 3000 plus. The first challenge was to see if I could get these across. In fact Mail offers an import facility and this appeared to bring them all in. I needed to tidy up the folder structure by moving them from the 'Imported' folder into something more meaningful but the process was really quite painless. So far so good.

However, when I was tidying things up I noticed some of the folders contained far fewer emails than I expected. A bit of Internet research revealed that the import command is in fact prone to missing emails because of a formatting issue in TB. It seems earlier versions of TB used a different End of Line (EOL) character. A very useful thread on the MacWorld web site explained all.

The article included a script to change all end of line characters to the required value. I ran this using Apple Script (my first dip into this application) and sure enough when the mailboxes were re-imported everything was there.

Setting up the accounts was fairly painless once I had become familiar with the application's foibles. It seems, however, that my BT Yahoo accounts result in the creation of additional folders for Sent, Drafts, Trash and Bulk, which make the left hand column look extremely cluttered. Using the "Mailbox/Use this Mailbox for.." menu bar option allows these extra folders to be assigned to Sent, Drafts and Trash respectively, which has the effect of grouping them under a single Sent etc. aggregated mailbox. Much neater, although it took me a while to find how to do this. The Bulk folders, however, cannot, it appears, be so reassigned, so remain as separate entities, which leaves a bit of clutter.

I had achieved all this before realising that my intended synchronisation ploy wouldn't work. Having devoted quite a few hours to get to this point I wasn't inclined to revert to TB, so how do the applications compare.

I was very comfortable with TB, the format being something I've lived with for many years, as already mentioned. However, it must be said that Mail is more polished in its presentation. I like the way it groups email threads, and once I became familiar with the different layout, I must say that I preferred it.

It's also possible that future enhancements to iCloud, as surely there will be, may actually reward me with the ability to synchronise my numerous email accounts across my Mac, MacBook and iPhone. In the meantime as all the accounts are IMAP there really isn't a problem of viewing them on different devices. The problem is that emails that are moved to archive folders on one device will remain in active mailboxes on other devices, and it was the possibility of carrying this housekeeping across devices that attracted me to the "iCloud' solution (that wasn't).

Pending the dream solution I'm using my Mac as the master client and I hard synchronise it with my MacBook using SuperFlexibleSynchroniser. I have been using this application on both Windows and the Mac for a number of years and find it very reliable.

One other nice touch is that Mail auto senses the language so I no longer need to change dictionaries when alternating between English and French.

iPhone update

2011-11-01T12:55:00.001Z

Well things have settled down nicely with the iPhone after the scare during the IOS 5 update. I can't get over how easy it is to use. And there haven't been any more problems since I updated it.

Twitter is a delight and I particularly like the way web sites can be zoomed using simple finger gestures. Battery life is also a bit of a surprise as I had been led to believe it wasn't that great on the iPhone. I'm a light user, admittedly, but I get three days compared with not much more than a day on my HTC Android Tattoo. And that's with everything enabled, whereas I disabled GPS and data most of the time on the Tattoo.

A very satisfied customer.

Broadband upgrade

2011-10-27T14:13:00.000+01:00

I'm on BT Option 1, which gives me a 10 Gb monthly limit.The terms and conditions state that if you exceed the limit a charge of £5 will be applied for the next 5 Gb, although you need only exceed the limit by a few Mb to get caught. However, this charge does not apply for the first time the limit is exceeded.

I had generally managed to keep within the limit but had wrongly assumed that one had to exceed the limit for two consecutive months. This is not so. Once exceeded, every subsequent occurrence attracts the £5 charge. I picked up this charge in July and now am heading for another this month. As Option 1 and Option 2 only differ by £5/month, with the latter offering 40 Gb, Option 2 seemed the way to go.

I eschewed the on-line upgrade path as none of the packages quite matched my current telephone/broadband mix. Taking the telephone approach, the agent had difficulty applying the upgrade, and after a while he advised me that there was an outstanding order on my account because the line was due a speed upgrade from 8 Mb to 17 Mb as part of a no-cost improvement.

I guess this is because BT Infinity is coming to Chatteris. I've noticed the new street cubicles springing up around town.So it seems that the Infinity infrastructure upgrade is going to bring with it a beneficial improvement for existing broadband customers. Can't be bad.As for my upgrade to Option 2, I must wait until after 3 November, the completion date for the infrastructure upgrade.

So it looks like I'm going to have to pay another £5 excess for October. Drat!

iCloud initial reactions

2011-10-19T22:02:00.000+01:00

Having got through the trauma of the IOS 5 upgrade I must say that I'm impressed so far with iCloud.Additional apps just appear on the phone after buying them in the iTunes store.

More importantly, any changes to iCal or Address Book/Contacts, either on the Mac or the phone, are automatically synchronised. Exactly what I wanted after months of frustration trying to keep my Android phone in line with my Mac.

iPhone IOS 5 headache

2011-10-16T17:55:00.002+01:00

It seems that I had only just finished piling accolades on Apple when everything went pear-shaped with my new 3GS iPhone.

Having received nearly a Gig of downloads to my iMac yesterday, including an updated iTunes, I was presented with a message to update to IOS 5 when I connected the iPhone. I had already registered with iCloud. I accepted the update and everything seemed to go well. However, when it came to restoring the phone an error message appeared. I've since found out that I'm far from alone.

Basically iTunes then hung and the phone displayed the apple logo screen, while making the occasional bleep. Much Internet searching didn't help, other than to appraise me of the fact that this was a widespread problem.

It seems on reflection that I probably should have just left the thing alone, but instead I tried reboots of the iMac, force closing iTunes at least twice, trying a 'Restore' from within iTunes and resets with the Home and Sleep buttons. I'm not sure if any of this actually helped (or hindered) but after a couple of hours the phone came back to life and took me through the IOS 5 set-up process. However, all apps had gone and iTunes was still displaying a message about waiting to restore the phone.

I really thought that the phone was bricked at one point and my confidence in Apple took a big dent. Anyway, after more hours waiting I decided that iTunes was confused, and that the phone had already restored, so I again force-closed the application. When I restarted it, the phone connected and all the apps downloaded from my iTunes library. It seems that many people lost contacts but fortunately my contact list and diary were simply a synchronisation from iCal and Address Book on the iMac.

So, everything sort of came right in the end. My customised ring tone had gone and re-syncing it from iTunes didn't work. A bit more research advised deselecting the ring tone, syncing, then reselecting it and re-syncing. Fortunately this worked.

I thought I was home and dry but this afternoon I tried setting up my voice-mail message on my new Tesco account. I had a few attempts at the recording, as one does, and part way through the third attempt the call dropped and the phone reverted to the Apple logo screen (was this in fact a dropped call or a crash?). The normal locked screen reappeared after some button pressing (again I'm not sure if it was the buttons that achieved this, or if it was a natural re-set). More research revealed a number of people complaining of dropped calls and poor call quality since upgrading to IOS 5, although it must be said some were saying that it had improved their dropped calls problem. Who knows? Perhaps we need IOS 5.1 before things settle down. I would mention, however, that the replay of my voice-mail message did break up on the iPhone but was fine when I later checked it on a land line.

Not a glorious day for Apple. I don't know what Steve would have made of it.

HTC Tattoo out - iPhone 3GS in

2011-10-15T17:16:00.000+01:00

Back in February 2010 I took my first dip into the smart phone market with an HTC Tattoo. This model had received a good review in PC World magazine.

Being an Android-based device I started off by synchronising contacts and diary with the Google web-based products, while trying to maintain my iCal and Address Book on the Mac. It must be said that this rather convoluted approach never worked well and a later attempt to use the third party SyncMate program was also beset with problems.

Of course Android version 1.6 on the Tattoo was quickly superseded with 2.0 et al and I was disappointed to find that HTC offered no upgrade path, despite false rumours that percolated the web. I also soon found out that the screen was hardly readable in sunlight, even on the brightest setting. Another problem was that the Weather display that is a trademark of the Android home screen never did work on my phone, and it seems that I wasn't alone.

None the less, I soldiered on with the Tattoo and added a few apps, some trivial for the fun of it, and some useful, such as a French dictionary and verb conjugation utility. However, more recently other things have started to go a bit awry. The WiFi kept forgetting my home setting, requiring re-entering of the 'strong' password. My Twitter app (TweetCaster) refused to open from the screen icon after an update and the BBC News service kept closing. I guess these apps have been optimised for the latest versions of Android.

I was also less than impressed with the fact that when on a call the screen quickly went into power-save mode, and you needed to re-initiate it by hitting a button if you needed to navigate a number-based answering facility. Very frustrating.

So, as I'm now virtually 100% Apple, last week I took the plunge and ordered an iPhone 3GS from the Apple on-line Store. It was delivered the next day and having sorted out a reasonable tariff with Tesco, it was up and running on Tuesday.

Well, I know it's now a cliche, but the Apple experience compared to an admittedly old version of Android was a revelation. The packaging and presentation were, as usual, superb. Connected to iTunes the phone was quickly synchronised with my Mac's iCal and Address Book. What had taken hours to achieve with the Tattoo, and then not very successfully, was accomplished in seconds on the iPhone.

In use it was also a revelation. Scrolling is smooth and responsive to finger movement whereas my Tattoo experience was jumpy with the display often mimicking a fruit machine when vertically scrolled.

I then set out to obtain some apps to replace those I had on the Tattoo. Again, simplicity itself. No mucking about on the phone. Just purchase through iTunes and synchronise across. Brilliant.

Admittedly it's still early days, but initial impressions are very good. For example, reading the Guardian's Technology feed on Twitter has been a much more enjoyable experience. WiFi seems solid and Bluetooth paired with the car with no problems. And the thing is intelligent enough to switch the screen on and off as you put the phone up to your ear and bring it away again. Perhaps more recent Androids also do this, but it came as a pleasant surprise.

A well thought out and extremely functional bit of kit.

Hedgehog Houdini

2011-10-03T19:29:00.001+01:00

I've managed to entice a hedgehog family into the garden by offering them food and a little 'house'. They also raid the ground-mounted bird trays every night. Nothing unusual you might think. However, both trays have mesh covers to discourage the larger birds; i.e. wood pigeons!

One such cover has quite small mesh and if it wasn't for the hedgehog droppings that regularly adorn it in the morning, I would never have believed they could actually get through the mesh. Well, last night one was 'in residence' when I went out to put their food out. I dashed in to get a camera and just caught a couple of shots of him/her leaving. A classic Houdini trick of apparently doing the impossible.

They must have very small bodies under all those spines.

Final Cut Express - iDVD - Various headaches

2011-09-10T21:59:00.002+01:00

This is a long post, but if you're struggling with Final Cut Express and iDVD you may find it useful.

My last post introduced you to my introduction to Final Cut Express. Since then I have finished my first project; Helen's golf lesson. This in itself was not without incident, the most challenging problem being how to introduce transitions between the nested sequences that I had placed in my final composite sequence. My quick start guide was less than clear and it was only after some Internet research that I managed to achieve this effect.

The real problems, however, were still to come. FCE by default exports a QuickTime movie for use in iDVD. If one chooses the 'Export/QuickTime Movie option and removes the tick from the 'Make Movie Self-Contained box then FCE exports a 'Reference Movie', which is a clever device that means that iDVD only receives information as to where the various media components reside rather than a complete (and large) movie file. This obviously only works if FCE and iDVD are on the same machine.

This worked well, and having designed the front page in iDVD and customised scene titles etc., I was ready to burn my DVD. However, when the final product was viewed on the TV instead of being 16:9 wide screen it was 4:3 standard screen. I had specifically selected 'Anamorphic' in FCE so the output should have been 16:9.

After a lot of digging around on the Internet I found that the whole issue of export from FCE for use in iDVD is not as seamless as I first thought. First off, there is a knowledge base article on Apple's support site that explains that when using the 'clever' Export/QuickTime Movie option it does not include the widescreen aspect ratio information. Great! It goes on to explain that one needs to use the more complicated Export/Using QuickTime Conversion option. It describes how to set up the parameters in the subsequent dialogue to get 16:9. I dutifully followed this procedure. As the export completed a 'Not Found' error message appeared in the FCE Viewer and the sequence I was exporting disappeared from the Canvas, to be replaced by a message saying close window and reopen. Unfortunately the output sequence would not reopen and I had to restore the project from an earlier version (FCE includes a very useful Autosave feature with restoration facilities).

After an awful lot of messing around and numerous attempts to export a sequence without incident I think that I discovered the problem. I say think, because by this stage I was thoroughly fed up and was not being terribly scientific with my trial and error methodology. Apple's instructions for using the Using QuickTime Conversion option were clear enough but what wasn't mentioned was the audio settings. Now FCE defaults to 48kHz 16 bit but my camcorder (like many older DV cameras) was set to 32kHz 12 bit. I had adjusted the Easy Setup in FCE to match my lower audio quality but unfortunately the Using QuickTime Conversion dialogue also defaulted to 48kHz 16 bit, and I didn't change it, so I inadvertently introduced a mismatch when exporting the movie. I suffered a lot of heartache before I realised this mistake.

Unfortunately my woes were far from over. To enable scene selection in iDVD one needs to set chapters in the FCE project. Fair enough, although these must be Sequence markers and not Clip markers, but I avoided that little trap. Anyway, having finally exported a 16:9 movie using QuickTime Conversion and loaded it into iDVD, I found there was no screen/chapter selection, only a play option. I went back to FCE and deleted and re-set the chapter markers and laboriously re-exported the movie but it made no difference. At this stage I had lost count of the number of times I had exported the movie.

Another lengthy Internet search revealed that the Using QuickTime Conversion option doesn't actually export chapter markers. So basically you're stuffed. If you want 16:9 you can't have chapter markers. Hardly in keeping with Apple's usually tight integration between it's programs. It seems that there may be a solution if you happen to have QuickTime Pro, which I don't, but having read the procedure (pp 39-41 of user guide) I think I would rather give it a miss in any case.

Reading an interesting short piece on anamorphic material in iDVD led me to a little application called myDVDedit. This allows you to edit files in the VIDEO_TS folder if you export the movie as VIDEO_TS from iDVD. This means that you can build the DVD in iDVD using the simpler Export QuickTime Movie option, generate the VIDEO_TS folder, edit it in myDVDedit and then burn it to a DVD using something like Toast. Leaving aside the irony of using a little free program written by a guy in France (I donated 5€) to enable you to get two programs from the mighty Apple to do what you want them to, this proved to be a neat little fix. Don't, however, try to edit VIDEO_TS if you downloaded it as part of a disk image (dmg) as the files will be read-only. I fell into this trap because a forum answer at myDVDedit said to download a disc image to get at the VIDEO_TS folder, whereas in iDVD you can create this folder directly and it will be editable.

So, I think I'm there. I did a complete run-through today by saving my FCE project to a new name; exporting it using the simple Export QuickTime Movie option; opening it in iDVD and building my iDVD project; exporting the VIDEO_TS folder from iDVD; editing the VTS file in myDVDedit (which subsequently updates other files in VIDEO_TS); and burning the resulting VIDEO_TS files to DVD using Toast. And it all works. But it took far too many hours to get to this stage and, quite frankly, this lack of integration between FCE and iDVD is unacceptable.

Final Cut Express

2011-09-05T21:39:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned before that I've gradually been reducing my dependence on Windows in favour of OS X on the Mac. In fact, Windows hardly gets a look in these days and I've removed both XP and Vista from my virtual machine library, leaving VMware with nothing to do at the moment.

I have Windows 7 Home Premium on a BootCamp partition on my laptop to where I have migrated those programs that I might possibly need, although, to be honest, all I tend to do is install security updates every few weeks.

Some time ago I purchased Final Cut Express, the idea being that this would replace my Windows Pinnacle Studio program that I had used previously for video editing. I have moved Studio from the now defunct VMware Vista installation on to Windows 7, but the small screen on the MacBook is not an ideal environment for this type of work, and I saw Studio purely as a fall-back should I want to open old video projects.

It transpired, however, that FCE is an entirely different kettle of fish to Studio and my early attempts to get to grips with it failed miserably. I bought a visual quick start guide, but rather than reassure me it made me more tentative. At that point video editing was temporarily put on the back burner.

Last week I videoed Helen on a golf lesson and as she wants to share the result I have been obliged to try again with FCE. I know I could have opted for iMovie but that seemed a bit of a cop out. So today I sat down with my quick start guide and tried to get my head around it.

It's clear that FCE is more inclined to professional editing than Studio, which, while having advanced features, was basically a consumer product. Just capturing the raw DV was a more involved task. Whereas Studio just loaded everything off the tape, automatically subdividing it into clips at points where there were natural cuts in the recording, with FCE the process involves pre-selecting clips from the raw footage prior to uploading them. I guess this allows for pre-edits based on the fact that professionals will only expect to use a fraction of the video shot. There is an option in FCE to capture the whole thing in one go, but it would not sub-divide the footage into clips. As a compromise I pre-edited my footage into three logical 'clips', which when uploaded were displayed in the 'browser' pane.

Having loaded the clips there is a viewer and a canvas. A raw clip is dragged into the viewer, where it's possible to refine it into sub-clips. Each such sub-clip is then added sequentially to the canvas, which basically acts as a second viewer linked to the time-line. Transitions and other effects can be dragged direct to the time-line from the 'Effects' tab of the browser pane.

That's about as far as I've got. It's clear that there are a wide range of tools and facilities within this program that I've not even come close to understanding, let alone using. But at least I can now load footage and start to develop a time-line. A bit more reading of the guide is now needed so that I can progress to developing my 'final cut' prior to publishing to DVD.

Wish me luck.

OS X LIon & Time Machine

2011-08-27T19:07:00.000+01:00

No, I'm not repeating myself - just having another moan.

I've already posted about Lion's apparent deleterious effect on Time Machine, but after so doing it seemed to settle down. I thought perhaps that the Spotlight indexing, which seemed to be causing the problem, had done what it needed to and everything was back to 'normal'.

Well, I was wrong. The other evening having endured about two hours of 'indexing' I went to bed and left the thing cooking. It seems that it finally finished around 2.30 am; i.e. about five hours worth in all.

It happened again yesterday, although probably only about three hours this time. Interposed between the continuous Spotlight indexing are the normal backup operations, which are relatively small and complete in no time at all.

I hope that Apple sort this out soon. Time machine chuntering away for hours on end can't be any good for the Time Capsule disk (it gets very hot) and it certainly doesn't do much for the iMac's performance.

Another fantastic Fenland sky

2011-08-26T16:01:00.000+01:00

Taken on my way back from a fishing trip yesterday.

I'm sure the Fens must rival anywhere in the world for sky scenes.

Pond delights

2011-08-18T13:31:00.000+01:00

We had frog's spawn in the pond earlier in the year, and there were tadpoles, but subsequently there has a been a distinct lack of froglets or frogs. However, yesterday I actually spotted what I think was a young frog, although it could have been a toad. It was only a fleeting glimpse.

Earlier in the week we also had a dragonfly visit. They appear occasionally and on this occasion it remained long enough for me to grab the camera. It was flitting from place to place but fortunately landed on the stem of a marsh marigold close to the edge. This allowed me to get a close up shot. Just one, after which it departed. Still, as luck would have it the shot came out rather well. Full marks to the macro mode on my Lumix camera.

Starlings in the pond

2011-08-11T18:50:00.000+01:00

For better or worse we have attracted a fairly large flock of starlings into the garden. Like many birds, it's a species in decline, so it's good that we're helping them. On the downside, however, they have voracious appetites and the smaller birds do tend to lose out. I'm putting food out at least twice and sometimes three times a day, so hope that they're all getting their share.

One spectacle that the starlings do provide is their communal bathing activity. While the pond has proved a success with all the birds, a massed starling visitation is something to behold. When the light is right all one can see is a shower of water in the sunlight.

Today I managed to film a minute or so of this feverish activity.

Bee house installed

2011-08-11T18:29:00.000+01:00

Having had the experience of needing to evict a bee colony from our chimney I thought I would redress the balance by placing a bee house in the garden. This one should attract non-swarming bees so isn't actually a one-for-one replacement for the honey bee colony, but here's hoping we get some visitors.

The queen, if we get one, should start looking for a winter home in the autumn. I've fitted a piece of tubing that enters the bottom of the house and emerges under a few stones. I've tried to make it look like a natural 'tunnel'.

It's now just a matter of wait and see.

OS X Lion & Time Machine

2011-08-06T22:22:00.001+01:00

More problems - well, inconvenience at least.

I expected Time Machine to have a bit of catching up to do after the Lion upgrade, and sure enough I left it going one night after it had been churning away for over two hours. However, each hourly backup seems to be taking an eternity, the feeling being that my Time Capsule is continuously processing backups.

The Apple Support Forum has a lengthy thread on this subject and it appears to be a problem for many people. The only 'solution' seems to be to scrap the existing backup and start afresh. Hardly a solution.

Snow Leopard was such an easy upgrade that seemed to provide a lot and, with the exception of a printer driver issue, take away very little. Lion is proving to be a much less comforting experience.

Is OS X Lion causing my problems?

2011-08-04T20:50:00.001+01:00

After my posting on Thunderbird and Lion, I now have a few more issues. Whether they're Lion related or coincidental I really don't know.

It was raining today so I decided on a 'computer day'. First I altered my Thunderbird set up by reverting to a local profile on my Mac and MacBook, ditching the network drive common profile that seems to have been nobled by the Lion upgrade. I will now synchronise the local profiles if I want to roam with the MacBook.

I then decided to update my family web site; a long overdue job. Well, there were a number of problems. First, Preview seemed to be reacting at a snails pace when previewing photos from my network drive. I don't remember it ever being this slow. Then Photoshop Elements 9 locked spectacularly, requiring a power switch reset; only the second or third time I have had to do this since I got the Mac three and half years ago. Then RapidWeaver crashed and, after relaunching, the application had lost its 'where are we now' status, causing the next publish operation to upload nearly a thousand files when I had only added one page to the site.

I can honestly say this was the worst few hours of computing I have experienced since I got the Mac and reminded me of a bad Windows day. After the crash I performed a file permissions check and verified the drive, just in case. I upgraded Photoshop Elements although the upgrade note made no reference to it being a Lion-related upgrade. Purely an updated RAW camera list and a Wavecom tablet bug-fix.

So I really don't know what's happening. I've disabled the new Resume option that was driving me crackers by opening photographs in Preview that I had long since finished with, and am hoping this will calm things down a bit.

Latest problem is that Thunderbird is refusing to sign-in to the server of one of my email providers. Coincidence, or another issue? It's all getting a bit boring, and my plans for the day were severly curtailed by all the faffing around.

Is OS X Lion locking my Thunderbird profile

2011-08-03T18:15:00.001+01:00

My Thunderbird active profile is on a network drive as this enables me to acquire the same profile from both my iMac desktop and my MacBook: not simultaneously, of course!

On the MacBook I've configured the Profile Manager to open when the application is launched, thus allowing me to choose either the network drive profile, or a roaming profile (which I pre-synchronise when roaming with the MacBook). An unsophisticated but effective solution.

This all worked fine but my first attempt at launching Thunderbird on the MacBook since updating to Lion produced a message saying that the 'network' profile was already in use, and to please choose another profile. This is with the iMac switched off.

I am speculating that this is because of Lion's new feature that allows applications to restart from where you left them at shut-down, and that this is in some way locking the profile. Highly inconvenient in this case as it has undermined my neat little trick of sharing the profile between two computers.

Any thoughts out there?

OS X Lion: Auto-correct

2011-07-30T19:19:00.001+01:00

Another little discovery in Lion: Auto-correct.

I was adding a post to my fishing diary and couldn't work out why I had a number of incorrect words. It seems auto-correct was helping me!

Well I can do without such help as it will almost certainly result in a daft word being left in the text. I would rather see the spelling mistake and sort it out myself.

Fortunately in System Preferences, under 'Language and Text', you can disable this 'helpful' feature.

OS X Lion - AirDrop / No 'Save As'

2011-07-25T22:00:00.001+01:00

Bit of a disappointment: my 2008 iMac doesn't support AirDrop. My MacBook Pro and Helen's MacBook are fine, but my hope of using AirDrop to send Helen files from my iMac, which would have been useful, has been thwarted.

The absence of 'Save As' is also a bit of a pain. I first noticed this when using Preview. I often reduce the size of a photo in Preview and then 'Save As' to preserve the original. I now have to create a duplicate and save that. I know it's not too much of a problem, but it's made things harder rather than easier.

Be frugal with water

2011-07-23T19:51:00.000+01:00

Something to think about the next time you leave the tap running!

Garden wildlife

2011-07-21T17:43:00.000+01:00

A couple of garden visitors were spotted today.

We have a young hedgehog that is occupying the hedgehog house I bought some time ago. The plastic waterproof lining under the roof of the house had collapsed, so I re-fixed it a couple of weeks ago and put some fresh hay inside. The hedgehog clearly approves. he (or she) has become somewhat diurnal, and although he moves away when approached, he doesn't adopt the defensive 'rolled-up' position. I snapped him today as he was about to re-enter the hedgehog house.

The second visitor was a toad. Our neighbours did away with their fish pond a couple of weeks ago and found some toads resident. They transferred them to my garden, so I guess today's visitor was one of them.

He (or she) was much more skittish than the hedgehog. I moved him off the granite chippings into the bog garden, which seemed more suitable.

OS X Lion - Epson Copy utility problem solved

2011-07-21T15:25:00.001+01:00

Despite what the UK help desk told me I persevered with the Epson Scan issue. I went to epson.com and found the latest version of the program, which had been said to be compatible elsewhere on the site. I installed it and, bingo, Epson Copy is back.

I advised the agent at the UK Help Desk.

OS X Lion

2011-07-21T14:39:00.001+01:00

I took the plunge today and installed Lion on my desktop Mac. Other than a nigh on 4GB download the whole process was completely trouble free. I had checked that my copy of Snow Leopard was fully up to date before proceeding and repaired all file permissions just to be on the safe side.

Once downloaded it took just over 30 minutes to install. The only casualty I've found so far is the copy utility for my Epson scanner. A chat exchange with the Epson help desk suggests that they won't be producing a Lion compatible version. The scan utility still works fine, although I updated to the latest version just to be sure.

I couldn't get on with the inverted scrolling so reset it back to the more conventional arrangement.

Time machine is currently churning away updating the backup, which must involve almost a rewrite of the previous image.

At £20.99 it's really a steal. The only install option is by download from the App Store but I copied the disk image and hope to be able to update the other Macs without further 4GB downloads. My monthly limit is only 10GB. The licensing allows installation on all Macs in the household (although there is mention of 5 in the reviews) plus two copies on virtual machines that are already running Mac OS.

Compared with the arm and a leg cost of Windows and the annoying activation procedure it's so so easy. But, of course, Microsoft make their money from licences, whereas Apple concentrate on hardware and seem to be happy to provide cheap upgrades to their operating systems to ensure that their customers get the best experience.

If I do encounter any further issues I will post details.

Good day on the Par 3

2011-07-21T13:26:00.000+01:00

Golf is very frustrating, especially when one has just watched the professionals at the Open.

On the 9-hole Par 3 course yesterday I managed to up my game a bit. A round of 34 is my best to date, although I had previously made a 35 so the improvement, on the face of it, was small. However, the way I got to 34 was more encouraging. With one exception my tee shots were much better than has previously been the case, and if I hadn't squandered a couple of chances with my putting I could easily have made 32 or perhaps 31.

Best shot was on Hole 4, which I birdied. Mine's the ball nearer the hole!

Greenpeace 'Dark Side' video

2011-07-08T19:01:00.001+01:00

Greenpeace has VW in its sights. I really like the original VW ad, but must say Greenpeace have excelled themselves with this parody. Make sure you watch episode II.

To quote Greenpeace:

"Despite its green image, Volkswagen is spending millions of Euros every year funding lobby groups who are trying to stop Europe increasing its commitment to greenhouse gas reductions from 20% to 30% by 2020. Progressive companies – from Google to Ikea, Sony, Unilever and Philips – support the target. Volkswagen can’t afford to be left behind."

"More efficient cars are cheaper to run, use less oil and emit less CO2. Volkswagen has a history of lobbying against the strong European standards that we need to kick our oil addiction. As the biggest car company in Europe, with the biggest responsibility, VW must change and support strong standards from now on."

"Volkswagen says it wants to be “the most eco-friendly automaker in the world”, but only 6% of the cars it sold in 2010 were its most efficient models. It has the technology to do better. VW must set out its plan to make its entire fleet oil-free by 2040."

Being on Greenpeace's 'bad boy' list is really not a good place to be. Let's see what happens now.

Robin's nest

2011-07-07T17:54:00.000+01:00

No, not the old TV comedy with the one-armed Irish dishwasher.

A robin of the bird variety has built a nest in the ivy that's growing on our fence just outside the kitchen window. We can watch the parent bird(s) flitting in and out as we sit at the table. I cautiously peeked in without touching or disturbing anything and think I could see a chick but I didn't want to do any more than that.

News of the World debacle

2011-07-06T20:17:00.000+01:00

This news of the World thing is unbelievable. I wasn't a fan of the Murdoch empire to start with and the fact that they're pitching to be the predominant media player in this country is, to say the very least, worrying.

Meanwhile the BBC is being hammered by the new government, who thankfully seem to have made a last minute U-turn in respect of the World Service cuts. The Murdoch empire itself has, of course, also been trying to put the knife in the BBC.

The way the last government and this one have cosied up to Murdoch is very ungratifying. Labour were obviously scared of News International's media power while the present lot seem more inclined to cronyism.

They say power corrupts and the evidence of this truism is all around us.

OS X vrs Windows

2011-07-06T12:44:00.001+01:00

I have mentioned on a number of occasions my migration to the Apple Mac and the fact that I retained Windows for those occasions where I didn't have an OS X equivalent. About this time last year I posted at length about relegating my previous BootCamp Vista to a virtual machine environment using VMware Fusion.

More recently my use of Windows has reduced to almost nothing, and yesterday I thought I would power up Vista to catch up on security updates. There were 20 essential updates plus one from Adobe. Now I accept that running a virtual machine hits performance but it literally took me a couple of hours to get my copy of Vista fully up to date. Multiple restarts, which on Windows is a painfully slow process, plus some of the individual updates taking an absolute eternity to complete. It was a frustrating experience. By comparison Apple updates seem far less frequent and seem to complete in no time at all.

I was also running a copy of XP in VMware but yesterday's experience sealed its fate. Straight into the Trash Bin.

I confess also to having a copy of Windows 7 as a BootCamp partition on my MacBook. Admittedly patching this was a less painful experience as it is running in hardware and not virtually, plus I keep this copy of Windows very 'clean' so restarts are somewhat quicker. Even so it was an unwelcome chore.

Golf

2011-07-04T17:12:00.000+01:00

Last May I mentioned that I had accompanied Helen to golf but that I would not let it become all absorbing. Well, I continued to play the pitch and putt last year, but this year I've been tempted onto the 'grown up' courses. At Lakeside Lodge in Pidley there are six hole, nine hole and eighteen hole courses, but I can't play the eighteen until I get regulation golf shoes.

I've played the six and nine holes and, although I struggle, I'm managing to get around without too much embarrassment. We did two rounds of the six hole today and I got an 81, against Helen's 80 and a par of 44. Quite a lot of improvement needed, therefore, but as I've only been on these full courses a handful of times I can't expect miracles.

So, although I said I wouldn't get absorbed, I seem to be doing so. To be honest, I really enjoy being out in the splendid countryside tranquillity and if I do well at the golf it's a bonus. A bit like my attitude to fishing really.

Ubuntu Waterloo!

2011-07-04T16:50:00.000+01:00

I have previously praised Ubuntu and have successfully installed it on Helen's old Acer laptop and a low spec desktop. I have, however, met my Waterloo in trying to to get it to work on my daughter's old laptop. It is again an Acer, and although the software installation went fine, I cannot get the wireless working.

Her Acer has hot keys to enable Bluetooth and Wireless, and Ubuntu doesn't by default provide a driver to allow these keys to work. No key, no wireless!

Normally the Linux bloggersphere provides answers to any Ubuntu problem, and this was indeed the case this time. A driver named acerhk is available. The problem lies with installing it. There's also a little utility available (acerhkgui) that provides a dialogue box to switch the wireless on and off, but it won't work of course without the driver.

I tried plugging in my Belkin USB wireless key, which is currently working fine on my desktop installation of Ubuntu 11.04, but this didn't work either. I think another clean install might be called for.

I downloaded the acerhk driver and installed the source package but despite following a couple of different solutions could not get the driver to compile. I've spent quite a few hours on this now but feel that I may have hit the buffers. Lots of stuff about kernel headers and the like. My surface-scratching knowledge of Linux is, I fear, not up to this.

Wildlife pond

2011-07-01T20:41:00.000+01:00

My 'wildlife' pond is at last starting to look a bit wild. The plants have taken off and the marginals are starting to make an impression. Unfortunately the tadpoles either haven't made it to frogs, or the froglets moved on while we were away on holiday. There are, however, plenty of little critters swimming around. Water boatmen predominate and there are quite a few pond skaters, as well as manifold little beasts that I can't identify. Yesterday I brought back a few minnows from a fishing trip, so we now have fish, albeit diddy ones.

By far the biggest beneficiaries of the pond are the birds. Drinking and bathing, from little sparrows to wood pigeons, the activity is continuous.

It would be nice to attract more amphibians but I suppose it's still early days.

Imaginative HP advert

2011-06-22T19:16:00.001+01:00

We saw X Men First Class at the cinema today. Good film.

The pre-film adverts included this one for HP computers. Sound quality in the cinema was fantastic. There's so much advertising dross around these days it's nice to see and hear something that grabs your attention.

Mobile optimisation hiccup

2011-06-19T11:02:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I reported that I had optimised the blog for mobile viewing using Blogger's settings. This seems to have caused a hiccup when trying to access the postings from Twitter (I've previously configured things such that each blog is shown on my Twitter account).

I've therefore reversed the mobile setting for the time being so you may or may not see the mobile version.

The problem may be with the Twitter app on my HTC Tattoo phone. This phone runs Android 1.6, which is rapidly becoming non-compatible with various services, but unfortunately HTC hasn't offered an upgrade path.

Energy prices

2011-06-18T20:54:00.002+01:00

I'm with E.ON and am currently on a tariff with a very good discount, but it ends at the end of this month.

I think E.ON had a rush of blood to the head when British Gas cut their prices a while ago (yes, believe it or not, prices did reduce at one point) by offering a tariff with 6% direct debit discount, 2% dual fuel direct debit discount and a massive 18.7% on-line discount.

With this plan due to end, I reviewed my options for switching (within E.ON) a couple of weeks ago. At that point their SaveOnline 7 plan was the cheapest (8% overall discount). It also came out second from top on a price comparison site. In comparison their two-year Price Protection Plan came out at 17% more expensive, but we all knew that an increase in charges was looming. On the basis that 17% was a big hike I had decided to opt for the SaveOnline 7 plan. Since then another supplier has imposed a 19% increase on gas charges.

Today I revisited E.ON's site and, sure enough, the two-year Price Protection Plan had been replaced by Fixed Price 5. And, guess what, the mark up on this plan is 19.2% compared to the SaveOnline 7. And they say there is competition in this market. I don't think so.

The above calculations are based on my energy usage over the last year: Electricity 2781kWh: Gas 22,933kWh.

Bees in the chimney

2011-06-18T20:02:00.001+01:00

Our house has a proper chimney and a fireplace designed for a wood-burner. We don't have a wood-burner so this leaves us with an unused chimney.

The first problem with this was bird droppings, mainly attributable to doves and pigeons perched on the chimney pot. Some newspaper scrunched into the hole in the fireplace provided a solution to this. Next problem was squirrel visitations. A couple managed to get themselves to the bottom of the chimney stack and I had to get them out. To solve this problem I placed a slab over the rectangular chimney pot. To allow some air flow I left small gaps under the slab.

This has proved to be a mistake. The latest visitation is a bee colony. We found a few dead bees in the living room just before we went away for a couple of weeks. On returning I contacted a pest control company and the chap came today. We had hoped that the nest was just above the paper plug in the chimney, but it turned out to be at the top. He used a smoke cannister that made the bees drowsy. This resulted in a considerable number of bees falling into his waiting bucket, including the queen. These will be taken to a hive keeper.

Unfortunately a number of stubborn worker bees remained at the top of the chimney. A second smoke cannister caused quite a few to leave but, regrettably, he had to use a pesticide to kill those remaining. Only around a dozen have since fallen into the fireplace so I hope that the losses weren't too great.

He reckoned that there were possibly 50 to 60 thousand bees up there, which I find astonishing. He showed me the bucket containing the rescued bees. The queen was clearly visible on the surface of the seething mass.

I've been trying to establish a wildlife garden but it seems that the wildlife is becoming a bit too friendly. It's a great pity that all those bees will not now be around to visit my flowers, especially as we seem to have a good show of clover in the grass and a number of lavender bushes that are about to bloom.

Blog optimised for mobile

2011-06-18T19:40:00.000+01:00

I've opted for Blogger's new mobile optimisation setting. This provides a less decorative but more easily read version of the blog when viewed on a mobile.

Feedback welcomed.

Martha & Vincent - Ilkley

2011-06-16T20:33:00.000+01:00

If you happen to be in Ilkley, Yorkshire, you must visit Martha & Vincent.

We had lunch there today. The food was superb, the menu choice incredible, the service first class without being too formal, and the atmosphere relaxed. An added bonus for me was the French waitress who was kind enough to indulge my far from perfect French.

My choice today was lobster ravioli on a bed of spinach for a starter, followed by Beef Wellington with wild mushrooms and an interesting potato preparation. Vanilla brûlé with raspberries and apple consommé provided a light dessert. A glass of house Merlot accompanied the meal with coffee and their own chocolates to finish.

As for the name, St Martha is the patron saint of cooks and St Vincent the patron saint of wine makers. Clever.

I'm a granddad again

2011-06-16T17:18:00.001+01:00

My son's wife gave birth to a beautiful little girl at 2 o'clock this morning.

Congratulations to Sam and Richard and a big welcome to little Isla May.

Born on the first day of the coarse fishing season so I should never forget the date. That's man-thinking for you!

More Kindle

2011-06-04T17:19:00.001+01:00

I'm starting to learn my way around the Kindle. Having discovered how to change the default dictionary, to UK English, I then discovered that by placing the cursor at the beginning of any word, a dictionary definition appears at the bottom of the page. Nifty.

As I'm hoping to use the Kindle for reading French, I therefore investigated a French-English dictionary that could be similarly set as the default. There were only two on offer, and neither had received totally positive reviews, but the Merriam Webster came out best. At £4.55 it seemed hardly a risk. It's now installed as my default.

My limited number of eBooks have been sorted into collections, which has de-cluttered the Home page.

I've also discovered that I can download an eBook to my PC and transfer the file to the KIndle by USB in lieu of the usual WiFi link-up.

I'm finding it quite a well thought-out bit of kit.

Kindle

2011-06-02T12:02:00.000+01:00

I've taken the plunge and bought a Kindle. Difficult to justify, I know, but I had been browsing elementary French readers and French/English parallel texts, and some of these are remarkably cheap as eBooks. There's also the fact that my small study is at capacity in terms of book storage.

I ordered it yesterday at around 6.00 pm and courtesy of Amazon Prime it arrived at 09.30 am today. Amazing really. Ordering it from Amazon meant it was already configured to my Amazon Kindle account. I had previously opened an account and downloaded some free books onto my Android phone, but reading them on a phone is not very satisfying.

Set up was easy and having added the device to my router's WiFi access list and entered the password on the Kindle, everything was ready to go. The two archived free books were downloaded with the touch of a button.

To try out the purchasing system I bought a copy 'Un drame au Mexique' by Jules Verne, a parallel text reader for 69p. I ordered it through Amazon on my computer and it was seamlessly ported across to the Kindle. Very impressive.

The Kindle packaging is reminiscent of Apple. Perhaps not quite as elegant but certainly aimed at creating a good impression even before you open the box. I also bought the official leather cover, which also looks classy.

This won't be the end of real books though. Although I'm fairly technically and gadget-minded there is something about a real book that, for my money, will never be replaced. The Kindle approach meets a particular need for obtaining cheap copies of things I want to read but not necessarily retain for posterity.

For example, it will never replace my 1912 copy of 'Coarse Fishing' by H T Sheringham.

Blog visits

2011-06-01T16:44:00.000+01:00

I run Google Analytics on the web sites that I've built and must say it's a useful tool for checking a range of statistics. Up to now I hadn't added it to this Blog, but I did so a couple of days ago. I get very few comments here, and was even considering abandoning the blog.

It seems that I had six hits on Monday and four yesterday, so there appears to be some interest, which is reassuring.

Once you've signed in to the service it's simply a matter of embedding a few lines of JavaScript into the header section of each page you want to monitor. I only monitor the index page (Home) on each of my sites at the moment.

Dead dove

2011-05-24T18:40:00.000+01:00

When we got back in today there was a dead dove on the patio. No signs of injury were apparent but the mystery was quickly resolved when I noticed the classic oily mark on one of the window panes in the back door. The unfortunate bird had obviously collided with some force with the glass.

I only cleaned the windows last week, a not too frequent occurrence, but one that did for this poor bird.

Sad.

The pond's a bird magnet

2011-05-21T19:28:00.001+01:00

Probably because of the lack of rain, our pond has recently been attracting a wide range of birds.

In addition to our regular doves, blackbirds and sparrows, we are now seeing quite a lot of finches, including chaffinch, greenfinch and goldfinch, thrushes, starlings, robins and the occasional fleeting visit from a jay.

They stop off for drinks and we get a bathing frenzy in the mornings.

This is exactly what I wanted from the pond. Meanwhile I catch sight of the occasional tadpole, so hopefully we shall soon have some frogs.

The lack of rain remains a serious problem and I'm afraid I've had to top up the pond with tap water. So far so good in that there hasn't been an explosion of algae.

Still no rain!

2011-05-15T17:50:00.001+01:00

I think it was Thursday when the weather forecast on the Beeb said everybody would get some rain over Friday and Saturday. Everyone. that is, except us and a fair proportion of East Anglia and the SE.

Things are really getting quite desperate and I wouldn't mind betting there will be talk of a drought before we even get into summer proper. The pond level is now threatening some of the marginal plants so, against perceived wisdom, I'm afraid I'm going to have to top it up with tap water. I've filled one of the butts and shall leave it for a couple of days for any chlorine to dissipate and hope that any nutrient chemicals will be used by the plants, thus avoiding excessive algae growth.

A sad state of affairs really. Whatever is happening to our climate? A rhetorical question really as anyone with half an eye on the science already knows.

SyncMate

2011-05-15T17:19:00.000+01:00

Despite being a bit of a gadget and technology enthusiast, mobile phones don't really do it for me. However, just over a year ago I bought an HTC Tattoo running Android 1.6.

A year of smart phone ownership hasn't really endeared me to the technology. Perhaps I need an iPhone, but I find touch control on what is a relatively small screen somewhat tiresome. Also, Android is now at version 2.2/2.3, but there is no upgrade path from my V 1.6 firmware, so many of the latest apps and features don't work.

One major bugbear was diary synchronisation. I like iCal on the Mac but when I got the phone there was no apparent way of synchronising the Android system with iCal. I compromised by syncing to a Google Apps diary, which is fine in that it's 'cloud' based and accessible from any machine; but I prefer iCal.

Yesterday I did a bit of browsing to see if there was a way to keep my phone in step with iCal and I found SyncMate by Eltima. Reviews were mixed but I thought I'd give it a go.

I installed the software (free version) on my iMac and MacBook and at that stage it gave me the ability to synchronise a host of things between the two machines. Sticking with diaries I synchronised iCal on each machine and this worked well.

To sync the phone I assumed that I needed also to install SyncMate on my HTC. The SyncMate app is in the Android Marketplace but searching for it from the phone returned a not found message. Browsing the Marketplace showed the app to be there. My dislike of mobile phones was coming to the surface. I went to the Eltima site and used their live chat facility to pose my problem. An immediate response informed me that I didn't need the mobile app. All I needed to do was enable 'USB debugging' on the handset.

I did this and after a bit of faffing about my Tattoo was recognised. However, I must have done something wrong as there wasn't an option to back up calendars. As a work around I used my Google Apps diary as an intermediary as both the Mac and the phone could synchronise with it. However, this was just too much hassle and another message to the live chat produced a response that direct synchronisation between the phone and iCal is possible.

I therefore disconnected the phone from the computer and reconnected it. This resulted in a 'proper' connection and, sure enough, the iCal option was available. I think part of the problem was that the software was identifying the SD card in the phone as a separate device and I had become confused as to what was what when I first set up the connection.

The next problem was that using the Google diary as an intermediary had resulted in two 'new' diaries being added to iCal on the Mac; one for UK holidays sourced from Google and the other being the entries from the Google diary. The result was that many entries were duplicated or in some cases triplicated. Not the intended result.

Fortunately my MacBook had a clean copy of the original diary thanks to my first sync operation. So I removed all entries from my iCal diary on the iMac, which can be done with SyncMate, then I re-synced my MacBook to my iMac, creating a clean copy.

I then removed all diary entries from my phone, again using SyncMate, and did a clean sync from my iMac. At this stage I had taken the Google diary out of the loop.

I believe I now have a working synchronisation link between my phone and iCal on my iMac, with the ability to update my MacBook. The secret is, I think, to make sure only two devices are synced at the same time even though the program allows for multiple syncing between devices.

In conclusion I would say that the software seems quite powerful but it requires a bit of diligence in use. There isn't much in the way of instructions. It also has a host of other synchronisation options, such as iPhoto, iTunes, Contacts and individual folders. Contacts might be worth investigating after I've assured myself that I won't end up with masses of duplications again. It may certainly be worthwhile between the two Macs, but syncing to the phone may screw up my telephone number list. Something for another day; perhaps.

Soil drying out - official

2011-05-09T21:35:00.001+01:00

Following my recent posts bemoaning the lack of rain I came across this report that shows clearly how the soil in parts of the UK and Europe is drying.

Mind you, it didn't really need a satellite to tell us. Just kick the garden and watch the dust fly.

Here's the rainfall map from the same article. Enough said.

Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

2011-05-09T21:24:00.001+01:00

I've mentioned before that I run Ubuntu Linux on a spare computer. Yesterday I upgraded my version 10.04 to 11.04. I upgraded rather than install clean and was totally impressed with how smoothly things went.

It was necessary first to upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 as you can't, it seems, jump direct from 10.04 to 11.04 without doing a clean install. That said, both steps, 10.04 to 10.10 and 10.10 to 11.04, went without a hitch. All hardware detected and configured, including WiFi and access to my network-connected disks via my Apple Time Capsule.

The latest version has the Unity screen that replaces the classic Gnome, although one can download Gnome. Unity was a bit of a learning experience but once I got used to it things clicked into place. However, at this stage I'm not sure that I prefer it to Gnome.

Ubuntu is impressive and if Mac OS X didn't exist I think I would be tempted to leave Windows for Ubuntu. OK, it's still not quite as swish and user-friendly as Windows, but it's free, it doesn't need high specification hardware, and it boots up in seconds not minutes. And it's secure.

The new Unity interface is obviously aimed at making it more user-friendly by employing an icon driven launcher at the side of the screen (left-click to launch and right-click for options) and icon-based menus (it was first introduced with the version 10.10 Netbook edition). In keeping I suppose with the shift that was introduced with the interface for the iPod Touch and iPhone, and now the iPad. There is, apparently, support for multi-touch interfaces, but as I haven't a touch screen I couldn't try this.

It comes with installed software for most tasks including LibreOffice, which is, in effect, Open Office. Perfectly adequate for anybody wanting to produce office documents that are largely compatible with MS Office.

And all this for nothing. Quite amazing.

So much for weekend rain

2011-05-08T20:48:00.000+01:00

Towards the end of last week the forecast for the weekend was significant rain.

Well we did have some rain but it was hardly significant. The pond level increased about half an inch, which will evaporate again in no time. This doesn't bode well with the summer proper approaching. I'm diverting all the roof catchment that feeds the water butts direct into the pond so I only need one decent downpour. The forecast for the coming week is mainly sunny with occasional showers.

Helen remarked that I should have created a desert garden with sand and cacti rather than going for a country wildlife garden. She may have a point. I had read that East Anglia was classified as semi-arid and based on the last couple of years I'm inclined to agree. While driving to Peterborough today we noticed that the farmers are setting up irrigation hoses. And, as I've said previously, it's only May.

It looks like we're forever Blue

2011-05-07T13:27:00.000+01:00

I usually stay clear of politics here but it seems we're heading for hell in a handcart.

Cameron is a wizard. The bankers carry on regardless while our economic woes have been laid fairly and squarely at the feet of the benefit cheats and the profligate (sic) local authorities. The Lib Dems have fronted the worst of the cuts and been annihilated as a consequence. But they can't do anything. If they were to desert the coalition now they would be decimated in a general election. Manifesto promises have been blatantly ignored and every time somebody points this out they are given the same old mantra that it's all Labour's fault. And we're now stuck with our antiquated voting system that is biased fairly and squarely towards the Tories. Where's the critical press? If this were Labour it would be enduring a blitzkrieg of criticism. Oh, I forgot, most of the press is owned by you know who.

As I say, Cameron's a bloody wizard. If he were a stage act people would start musing about mass hypnotism!

So, as the title suggests, I think we're going to be Blue for a long time. The only savour might be that when things get intolerably bad we might have some form of revolution. Or perhaps some of those people who never seem to vote will get off their backsides.

Depressed of Chatteris.

Rain please!

2011-05-05T21:13:00.003+01:00

I know you should be careful what you wish for, but I really do wish it would rain. I've just compared a photograph taken in the garden in June 2009 with the condition of the garden now. In 2009 our less than perfect grass had the appearance at least of a lawn (photo). This year it looks like desert scrub land.

The grass has gone in places, having been decimated by the long dry spell last summer, and so has the moss, which at least adds green to the equation even if it is not grass. Now some of the weeds are starting to throw in the towel.

The pond I built last year is down about five inches (sorry 12.5 cm) allowing the blackbirds to start exploring the normally submerged planting baskets. Can't blame them really, as unwatered ground must be like concrete at the moment.

The forecasters promise rain this weekend, but earlier promises over the past few weeks have fizzled out. The longer term forecast is for more unsettled weather so perhaps this time we shall see water.

I estimate I need about 6 - 8 butt-fulls to refill the pond and leave me with two full butts. We'll see.

Bog Garden

2011-05-01T17:26:00.000+01:00

I've created a small bog garden in the space between the back of the pond and the garden wall. Because of the levels in the garden it was difficult to form a bog garden integral with the pond, so this is a compromise.

The problem at the moment is that we have had about six or seven weeks without rain so the pond level is well down and it doesn't bode well for keeping the bog garden wet. Both water butts are almost empty but at least I can use tap water in the bog without worrying about algae blooms!

I'm going to try to rig up a drip feed from one of the butts to keep the bog damp when we are away.

Sky.com update

2011-04-30T17:24:00.001+01:00

I went to my daughter's on Thursday and the third router had turned up (see previous post)

We connected it and, surprise surprise, the broadband light went green. Eureka! However, after about 30 seconds it turned to amber, so we were back to where we started. After a couple of re-sets and some fiddling around, I removed the telephone connection (leaving just the broadband connected) and the green light returned. Now before you ask, I had already tried changing the micro-filter, so it wasn't that.

A bit more trial and error and I managed to keep the broadband active with the telephone connected, but with the connection to the Sky Plus box removed.

The ultimate irony really. Sky router won't connect while Sky box is connected to the telephone system.

Having said this my daughter had previously tried connecting the first two routers direct to the BT master socket (as part of the help desk standard routine!) and this didn't solve the issue on those occasions.

So, she has broadband (just), but to my mind the set-up is still very flaky.

Media Library Lite

2011-04-26T21:17:00.000+01:00

I've downloaded Media Library Lite from the Apple App Store. It's a free app for cataloguing your DVD (or VHS) collection.

We have a considerable number of DVDs and I have considered cataloguing them for a while now. The limited reviews for Media Library Lite were mixed, but having played with it this evening I must say I'm quite impressed.

It searches the Amazon database. I started entering the titles manually, but in most cases it found multiple editions. I then tried scanning the DVD bar codes. Just hold them up to the iSite camera and bingo, the DVD is listed. It was necessary to restrict the search to English (and French for my few French DVDs) but the success rate was astonishing. On a few titles I had to have a second or third attempt, but compared with typing in details this is absolutely brilliant.

At this rate the whole collection could be listed in a few hours. However, boredom will almost certainly require that the task is undertaken in smallish bites.

The data can be exported as PDF but other than that the program doesn't seem to offer much in the way of data management. There are very basic filters (seen / not seen) and the facility to record if the DVD has been lent to somebody. It's also possible to display the actors, directors and the year of release in a side panel, and thus select films associated with a particular actor, director or year.

All pretty basic but it is free.

Sky.com nightmare

2011-04-23T20:10:00.000+01:00

I'll lay my prejudices on the table at the start. I don't like Sky. I think it's a rip off. And News Corporation is too big, to the extent that it almost certainly wields unhealthy political influence.

Having got that off my chest here's a little saga concerning my daughter's broadband.

A couple of moths ago she told me she was leaving BT broadband for Sky. She already has Sky Plus and Sky phone accounts and, as I understood it, adding broadband wasn't going to cost her any more. Despite the sound economics, I advised her not to change. But she did, just over four weeks ago.

She still doesn't have broadband! She's had two routers, both of which have shown the broadband unconnected. A third router is on its way. Either their routers are total crap or someone has fouled up somewhere else.

It's the usual story of repeated calls to try to sort things out. Every time it's a different agent and they insist on going through all the checks that have been carried out countless times before. After one call of about an hour, the agent gave her his ID, saying he had taken personal charge of the problem. The next call was met with the comment that Sky have call centres all over the country so there was no way that a particular agent could be contacted. So it was start from scratch again.

I was with her last Thursday and tried connecting her old Netgear router to the line. This router actually showed a green light for a broadband connection. I tried logging on by putting her user name and password in the router's settings page, but to no avail. A call to Sky to ask what log in we should be using was met with the response that it is not possible to connect the Sky broadband through a third party router.

I was told that the 'log in' is effected by virtue of the router's Mac address, which is linked to the customer's details. This I find absolutely amazing. So you're stuck with their device, ruling out an upgrade to provide, for example, better wireless connectivity. Although this may of course explain why she has a problem, if the customer details and router mac address details have been confused.

I was spun a story about third party routers possibly being damaged when Sky updates the firmware. Sounds a bit far fetched to me, as my Netgear router, for example, doesn't accept firmware updates other than through the browser-based control panel.

So we are at an impasse. We await yet another router, although I personally doubt that will make any difference. At that point who knows what will happen. The call centre agents insist that everything is showing fine at their end. So that's all right then. I don't think so.

The moral of this story? If you've got working broadband hang on to it.

Frog corpse

2011-04-19T17:00:00.000+01:00

I've been monotonously removing blanket weed from the pond that has attached itself to the other plants. With the brighter weather I can now see the deeper parts and while clearing the weed from there I found a dead frog.

It seems that frog mortality can be a problem but on the other hand this may just be a result of the poor thing hibernating in the pond during the winter, when the water froze over for many weeks.

A bit of a disappointment as the whole point of the pond is to encourage live fauna.

Impressive biking video

2011-04-19T12:38:00.000+01:00

This was recommended by a friend on Facebook.

Truly impressive.

FRAMED-Andi Wittmann Rider profile from Felix Urbauer on Vimeo.