Mark Dalton

So i’m not quite sure how but I managed to pull a muscle in my lower back last weekend. Now I hurt my back years ago, but its never really done much more than ache, and then only when I had over done it. This time however I have been in total agony, and laid up most of the week. Coughing or sneezing brought tears to my eyes, and going up and down the stairs was a major excursion.

Thankfully by Thursday it was starting to ease up and by Friday morning it was back to just aching. So today I arranged to meet Katrina and take William and Eleanor to the park to feed the ducks. It was a beautiful day and the walk around the ponds really loosened up my back, and allowed me to get some fresh air for the first time in a week.

Near the end of our walk I remembered that I hadn’t tried recording any video on the iPhone 4, so I grabbed a few seconds of Eleanor singing a unique version of “Old MacDonald had a farm”. Far too cute not to post!

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

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.

This week has been the usual mix of busy but has been largely uneventful. It has been bitterly cold and standing on the train platform each morning I couldn”t help but think it”s about time I started looking at holidays. What I have done this week however is start sorting out some of those little job”s I have been meaning to do for a while and start commissioning some of the new toy”s I have brought over the last few months / years to improve my general home network performance.

Like most people these day”s I have a DSL Internet connection. My Internet connection comes into my home office upstairs and terminates on a NetGear ADSL Router and Wireless Access Point (DG834GT) , this worked well and provided about 98% coverage throughout the house. The problem was that the 2% it didn”t cover was mainly the seat I sit on in the lounge with the laptop. So I had two other NetGear Wireless Access Points (WG602 V3), one up stairs and one downstairs, that were bridged to provide the additional coverage required downstairs. Now this was great for checking email and casual web surfing but was slow when doing anything heavier, downloading movies to the Apple TV for example. Now with the Sky+ HD installation last weekend I decided to resolve this.

I purchased a dLAN 200 AVeasy Starter Kit and two NetGear 8 Port Gigabit Switches. I ran a cable from my DSL router to one of the Gigabit switches which I installed on my desk and then another cable to one of the Devolo devices which I plugged into a socket under the desk. I plugged the other Devolo device into a socket behind the TV and cabled that to the second Gigabit switch. I cabled the Mac”s in the office to the Gigabit switch on my desk, and the Apple TV, SlingBox Pro, Nintendo Wii, and Samsung HD TV, to the Gigabit switch behind the TV. Downloading to the Apple TV now takes only a couple of minutes and I have seen a drastic improvement especially when using SlingPlayer and the SlingBox Pro in the office.

Now while I was living in India I also acquired a number of Apple Networking devices, well all of them if I am honest. Since being home I have added these to my home network, but they have never really added any value to the setup, maybe with the exception of the Time Capsule. Up until now I have had the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule (Recently Replaced) installed in the upstairs office and the AirPort Express installed in the garage, connected to some cheap speakers. Now this setup provided 802.11n access throughout the house but wasn”t really the best utilisation of the equipment. After installing the Devolo units I decommissioned the two NetGear Access Points (WG602 V3), which resulted in my original Wireless coverage problem. So I moved the AirPort Extreme downstairs and cabled it into the Gigabit switch. Presto! 802.11a/b/g/n throughout the house!

An added bonus of doing this is I now have two spare Wireless Access Points. One of which is going to my parents as they already have Devolo units and I as I now know this solution works I will be implementing it for them as soon as possible. Happy days!

Well somewhat of a different start to the holiday season this year when I decided last minute to join a bunch of online friends in Liverpool for what is affectionally known as a TweetUp. I have been chatting to most of these people for a while now and when the chance came up to meet them face to face I thought it was a great idea and a brilliant way to start of the festive season.

I worked from home on the Friday as I didn””t fancy doing the commute in and out of London to then drive up to Liverpool and it was a good job I did as I woke Friday morning to a dusting of snow. I set off late afternoon and made good time only stopping a couple of quick comfort break””s and was checked in, unpacked, and in the bar by 19:30.

The weekend was spent chatting over beer, food, and the odd cup of coffee, about a variety of subjects from emerging technologies to Christmas plans. We did manage to get out and about a little bit and see a few of Liverpool””s landmarks but it was very cold and we did tend to break the touring up with beer breaks on a regular basis, so didn””t cover quite as much as we could of, but we did make it to the Apple store.

I also managed to meet up with Don McAllister the host of ScreenCastsOnline and The Mac ScreenCast Guy. Don was just as nice in the flesh as he is online and had some great insights and views on upcoming technologies. I also manage to meet up with three of my oversea””s contacts, Jane from Australia who was visiting family in the UK for Christmas, Paul Shadwell who flew in especially from Zurich who is very knowledgeable on Virtualisation and hosted services, and David Allen who also flew in especially from Barcelona, who run””s amongst other things the Mac 20 Questions website.

A great time was had by all and I think its fair to say that some good friendships were cemented in the process. Not to mention we all got a ScreenCastsOnline cap Most people left Sunday morning but I had arranged to stay another night, which in hindsight wasn””t such a good idea, although it did allow me to do a little extra Christmas shopping and see a little more of the city.

Monday morning I checked out and headed for home and made good time until I hit Newbury where it had been snowing and snowing pretty hard. As I came down the A339 it was bumper to bumper traffic and nothing was moving. It took me 7.5 hours to get from Newbury to my home in Basingstoke, 5.5 hours of that was spent crossing Basingstoke itself. I have personally never seen anything like it, and Basingstoke made the national news with 2000-3000 people affected. It took 3-4 to clear completely but luckily I didn””t have to go further than my parents around the corner, which was safer to reach on foot. I was lucky however as poor Paul Shadwell got to Manchester airport on Sunday to find it shut down, and finally made it back to Zurich on Wednesday after travelling down to London””s Heathrow airport.