Mark Dalton

After being Duty Manager last weekend I had Friday off as a day in Lieu and thought I would book Monday off and enjoy a long weekend. I dropped the car off for its annual service first thing Friday morning and then headed into town for a coffee and some window shopping. I sat in Costa Coffee for about two hours, chilling out with the laptop and looking at potential holiday destinations, but didn’t arrive at any conclusions. I then wandered around the town, only buying another 500 GB USB Hard Drive, before walking home.

It wasn’t particularly warm but I did enjoy the walk. One of the problems with commuting every day is that I don”t really have the energy or time to get any real exercise, and this time of year only really see daylight out of the office window. I had a couple of PodCasts to catch up on so wrapped up warm and plugged into my iPhone

After a spot of lunch Mum dropped by as I had agreed to go TV shopping with her. She had seen my new Samsung and set her heart on one. So we headed up to Curry”s only to find that they didn’t have any in stock but said they could order one for delivery, but there would be a delivery charge. I asked if they could order it in and we would collect it but they said they couldn’t, if it was ordered it had to be delivered. Mum had really set her heart on walking away with the TV, so we headed over to Comet. They also didn’t have any in stock, but said they could order one and have it delivered Sunday with no delivery charge. It wasn’t walking away with one, but at least she would get one before the weekend was out. Mum then dropped my back at the garage to pick up my car. I drove home not noticing the software update they had performed to the Engine Management System, as they said I probably wouldn’t.

Saturday I got on with the normal chores and started to make a list of the job”s that need doing around the house. This weekend was supposed to be the weekend I started getting people round to quote for some of the bigger jobs, but after a crappy couple of weeks, I just wasn’t in the mood, so settled on writing lists. Saturday evening I was sad and ironed while watching TV.

Sunday I headed round to Mum and Dad”s to setup the TV on the promise of a roast dinner. The TV was delivered around midday and I was set straight to work setting it up. Now I believed that it had a Free View receiver built in, but quickly found that it didn’t. I then spent several hours trying to get it to work with there existing Thomson Free View box. In the end I was pretty sure it was the ariel but Mum came up with the idea of trying the portable ariel that she uses in the dinning room. This quickly proved it was the ariel and once we had swapped out the ariel cable, the setup was a breeze. We tided up and I connected the TV to their home network and showed them the Internet interaction, and then connected up the DVD player and tested that out by watching the BBC”s Earth Series.

Today I enjoyed a nice long lay in and then popped round to Mum & Dad”s as Mum looks after Eleanor on Mondays, and I hadn”t seen her or Katrina for a couple of weeks. Returning home I did the last few chores before plonking myself on the sofa where I spent the rest of the day.

Back in October I wrote about a few issues I was having with my MacBook Air, well thankfully I managed to resolve them without spending any money! The main issue I was experiencing was a reduction in battery life, leaving work with a full charge I would use it on the train journey home and be left with a 20%-30% charge. Well, what I didn”t do was look at what I was doing during that journey.

The first thing I usually do, once comfortably seated, is plug in my 3G dongle and check my email, and try and catch up with the mess that is my inbox. Once we are moving however I would fire up the BBC iPlayer application and try to enter “unwind mode” by watching some of the programs the BBC shows that I actually like (few and far between these days).

Now it would seem that this combination is the perfect setup to drain the battery, at least on a MacBook Air. The BBC iPlayer content had been downloaded to the local drive, so I wasn”t streaming, but I still had the 3G Dongle plugged in and connected, and was checking my email while using iPlayer. So I tested the obvious combinations.

What I found wasn”t a real surprise, but both iPlayer and the 3G Dongle do make the machine work harder and therefore take their toll on the battery. I didn”t do any really scientific tests but simply using the 3G Dongle and working on email left me with 40%-50% battery life, and just watching iPlayer left me with 20%-30% charge. Now the MacBook Air hasn”t got the best battery but I have found I can get 2-2.5 hours out of it using it moderately, but if I am using BBC iPlayer or indeed watching any type of media, I can only expect 1-1.5 hours. This doesn”t really work for me!

My second issue was with the hard drive. Now this was initially triggered by an issue I was having with SuperDuper and errors during the backup routine, the support technician from ShirtPocket made it sound like the drive was going to fail at any minute, and he wasn”t to far out, as not long after I had a nasty “Will not boot” (I forget the exact error message) issue on the MacBook Air.

After doing some research I found a number of posts that all pointed to the same solution, format the hard disk drive and restore from backup. Now luckily I did have a SuperDuper backup that was 3-4 weeks old, and I don”t keep any data on the laptop (I use DropBox), so all I was missing was a few application updates. After doing this however the whole system picked up and was much more responsive, and I haven”t had any issues with the hard drive since.

So the question about what to do came up again. As I said back in October I love the MacBook Air in terms of its weight but after two years I am starting to find it somewhat limited. The more powerful, but slightly heavier, MacBook Pro is one option but we all knew there was a special event due and the much rumoured Apple Tablet device was what everyone was talking about. Every Mac fan know”s you don”t go and buy anything prior to a Steve Job”s Keynote!

When Steve stood up at the end of January and announced the iPad to the world, what I needed was clear. When I purchased the MacBook Air it was so I could browse the web, send the odd email, and look at my pictures while around the house or traveling. It however transpired that I did more on the move than I originally thought and the MacBook Air quickly became my main mobile computer. The iPad for me is what I really wanted when I brought the MacBook Air. What I then needed was a laptop that really is a laptop and capable of doing those more advanced and resource intensive tasks. This for me is the 13″ MacBook Pro. So decision made. I am going to replace the MacBook Air with a 13″ MacBook Pro, and when the iPad is available will be buying one of those.

For a long time now I have been slowly drawn into the field of Digital Photography and more recently Digital Video. I don”t have any great artistic leaning, or for that matter skill but I do like the idea of capturing memories. It wasn”t until I returned from India that I realised that looking at a picture only reminded me of the event but didn”t convey anything more to others. Take for example the day we stopped at traffic lights in New Delhi. A normal day, the normal sounds, and the normal chaos of horns beeping and young children running between the cars trying to sell there wares before the lights changed. When all of a sudden I look out of the car window to see an Elephant standing at the traffic lights next to the car. I smiled as my driver said “Elephant Sir!”, like I had never seen one. Well, he was half right, I have never seen one stopped at traffic lights. As the lights changed I saw the little man sat on his back. He had no cane, no whip, and no saddle. This fellow was just sat high up there on the elephants back, almost asleep. The elephant didn”t need any instruction when the lights changed, its like he knew!

The photo I took was out of the back side window and the elephant is clear to see. Now I remember what happened but anybody else looking at the picture would just see a photo of an elephant taken out of a car window. It was this that attracted me to the idea of digital video. On one of my trips back to the UK I purchased a Sony HandyCam (HDR-SR7).

This is a great camera but is still a little big to carry around every day just incase you see something interesting. All is not lost however as technology hasn”t stood still. In fact it has moved on in leaps and bounds. Now just before Christmas I was in Liverpool and Don McAllister had a new toy, the Kodak Zi8. He had brought it to play around with an idea he had for YouTube and was putting it through its paces. At the time we all had a look at it, discussed it strengths and weaknesses, and then forgot about it. Well, it wasn”t until a couple weeks ago when it snowed heavy I thought it would be great to get some video footage. I did this without any problem at all using the Sony HandyCam, but got me thinking about the Zi8, and in the end I ended up ordering one.

Well, I have been playing around with it for a couple of weeks now and I must say I am quite impressed. Some of the issues we had discussed in Liverpool have subsequently been fixed by way of a firmware update and it now goes everywhere with me. So watch this space for some hopefully interesting video footage in the near future.

Technical Specifications.

Sensor type: 1 / 2.5–type 5 MP CMOS
Lens: 6.3 mm, f/2.8, fixed focus lens. 35 mm equivalent: 61 mm (1080p), 46 mm (720p/60 fps, 720p, WVGA), 42 mm (still)
Zoom: 4X digital
Display: 2.5–type LCD
Storage: 128 MB internal memory*, SD/SDHC card expansion slot
Focus modes: normal, macro;Focus range: normal: 100 cm–infinity. macro: 15 cm
White balance: auto
File formats: video: H.264 (MOV), AAC LC, still: JPEG
Capture mode: 1080p (1920 × 1080, 30 fps),720p/60 fps (1280 × 720, 60 fps),720p (1280 × 720, 30 fps),WVGA (848 × 480, 30 fps),Still (5.3 MP, 16:9 widescreen, interpolated)
Microphone: yes (monaural)
Speaker: yes
I/O interface: USB 2.0 (high speed), AV out, HDMI, DC in, external microphone jack (support stereo)
Tripod mount: 1/4 in. standard
Power: KODAK Li-Ion Rechargeable Digital Camera Battery KLIC-7004, AC adapter;Dimensions: 62.0 × 113.2 × 21.5 mm (2.4 × 4.5 × 0.9 in.)
Weight: 110 g (3.9 oz) without batteries

Back in May 2009 Don McAllister who runs and hosts ScreenCastsOnline did an episode on using the New Mac Min as a Media server. Now I have owned a Mac Mini (G5) for a while and have been using it as a basic media server, and when I say basic, I mean I have Snow Leopard installed, but only use it connected to my iTunes Library via FrontRow. Well, after buying a new Samsung Series 7 LED HD TV I moved my Series 6 up to the bedroom and had it wired into Sky via a Sky Multiroom subscription, but this got me thinking again about the Mac Mini as a Media Server, so I decided to revisit the original shows (SCO198, SCO201, SCO204) and see what I had missed.

I did a clean install of Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini and then a Software Update whilst watching SCO198, and then set about installing Sapphire. Now Sapphire for me doubles the usefulness of the Mac Mini straight away as it gives me full access to my ripped DVD library that lives on my Drobo. Sapphire simply provides another option within the FrontRow interface, aptly named Sapphire that connects you to your media. This media can be on the Mac Mini itself, although Don didn’t recommend that, or on an external or network attached drive. Now at present I have my DVD’s located on a Drobo connected to the network via a DroboShare. This is functional but three is some lag. Once I have things as I want them I will once again look at the storage element as I don’t really want external drives all over the place but if its flakey I know I won’t use it.

Following Don’s instructions the installation was simple and was completed in less than 30 minutes. Importing the meta data and choosing the correct artwork did take a while, but given how many DVD’s I have on the Drobo that was to be expected.

The second show (SCO201) moved things up a notch and introduced Plex. Plex was just as simple to install and configure using Don’s walkthrough, but right from the outset it was obvious that Plex was a lot more powerful than Sapphire and there are many more options to explore / play with. Obviously Don could only cover the essential ones in the show, but this was enough to get me up and running. Importing the meta data and selecting the Album Artwork were easy and I know it’s sad, but quite good fun, especially with the added ability to use Fan Art which is top quality I must say from what I have seen so far. The interface is not as intuitive as it could be and some of the menu options are simply not named correctly as they do not actually do what they say they do. However once installed and configured this is certainly a small price to pay for the experience the application provides, and with luck the developers will quickly correct. Plex hooks directly into iTunes an iPhoto to provide you access to your music and photos, and better still Plex also supports “Applications”, which easily allow you to connect up to other services such as the ScreenCastsOnline feed.

In SCO204 Don takes a look at ways to remotely control the Media Server, but I must say I am perfectly happy with the Apple supplied remote. I did purchase the Aluminium remote for use with the Apple TV in the lounge, and may at some point buy another for use with the Media Server. I did explore using the iPhone and use the Apple Remote application to control my iTune library on the Apple TV as I do like to skip tracks and move between albums, but with the Media Server it is more select movie, click play, fall asleep. Why complicate perfection!