Recently in Hardware Category

Waiting now for my iPhone to be updated to 3.0.1. I've had the little thing for a few weeks now, and I just love it. It has that magic that the iPod used to have, of a device that feels good to use.

My friend Lee has an Android phone, and there's a part of me that knows that it's technically better, and morally it makes more sense because the apps are open and the source is available. And yet... And yet... I just don't care. Apple have done a wonderful job, in their own stylish, overpriced, and slightly overbearing way.

I have a really gorgeous new laptop, an HP X16-1280EA. It's very fast, and its screen is just wonderful. I was saving up my happiness for a truly, simply positive and glowing blog entry, just for a change

I've spent days trying to be a good boy, and not nuking the preinstalled Vista 64 Home Premium install. Of course, I had to make a few changes - Norton Internet Security was causing startup to take minutes longer than it should, so that's history. I have AVG Internet Security instead, which I like, but the AVG firewall is off because, despite what they say, VMware is broken with it on. The Windows firewall works fine. I've had to patch almost everything up to date, of course.

Still, I haven't reinstalled, or changed to Ubuntu, or downgraded to XP, or any of the usual stuff. I want to be able to use the fingerprint scanner to login. I want Bluetooth and the Blu Ray player to work. I want the array of touch controls above the keyboard to do what they're supposed to do. I want a laptop for dev and games, not a 'project'.

And now the fucking battery has failed. There goes the neighbourhood. Yes, HP are going to replace it - good. It may take 10-15 working days to arrive - very bad. In any case, shipping a dodgy battery on a top-end laptop is poor.

What a shame. I love the machine, I really do.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/video/2240924/bruce-schneier-cloud-security

 

I have a replacement PS3, my venerable launch-day PS3 expired. The extended warranty worked rather well, to be honest. I have a shiny new console, some new games, and some money left over. Can't complain about that.

However...

I had put a 320GB hard drive in the old PS3, and (naively) thought I would be able to slap it into the replacement model and go. Nuh-uh. Complete epic fail on boot. After waiting for something, anything to happen, I had to reformat and reinstall the OS image from a USB stick, then start the tedious reinstall process.

The last backup I had was from 21 January. Restoring it took about two minutes, which is easily explained: It only restored a fraction of my files. At least my game saves were there. None of my stored games were there, nor any of the updates, nor any of my Singstore purchases.

I can redownload the games. That's just a matter of time. Lots and lots of time. The Singstore stuff was harder, I had to call Sony and ask them pretty please if they would sort it out for me. Crap.

I think that it will take me a few days to get fully working again. Until then, every time I put a bloody disk in I get asked to wait for a hundreds-of-megabytes download. Then, when the update's downloaded and installed, more often than not I have to wait ages for the installation. What a royal pain in the arse.

Whilst ranting about installations: If a game as hench as Killzone 2 doesn't need to be installed to the hard drive, then neither should anything else. It's time PS3 developers stopped being lazy just because every PS3 has a hard drive. It sucks to have to upgrade the drive or ration your games due to lack of space on a 60GB disk.

And finally: What the hell is up with the installation time for Bioshock? It takes about 20 minutes, even on my superfast 320GB drive. Why? There's no excuse for that.

If Grace or good Karma allows, the space shuttle Atlantis will fly STS-125, the final servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, on 12 May. I can't think of a better way to remember the shuttles than as the means by which Hubble showed us all the beautiful cosmos.

It's not something I know very much about, but I love the romance of the Apollo era and I have never been a big fan of the shuttles - I've always thought of them as unambitious and uninspiring. I was brought up short, though, by Gene Kranz, who said in a recent TV documentary that the shuttle was the best spacecraft America had built. If Kranz says it, I'm inclined to believe it.

The shuttles will forever be associated with the tragedies. It's easy to forget how brave these people really are; easy to forget that all the cleanrooms and careful inspection and safety procedures in the world aren't going to save you every time. These people know that the remains of two ships just like theirs have had to be reassembled piece-by-piece on a hangar floor, yet they still strap themselves to a tower of high explosives and go exploring. Brave, brave men and women.

So God speed, STS-125, and thank you.

I got my T-Mobile web n' walk dongle today. Installed it first in Windows, which worked fine. Then installed it in Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid'. To my utter astonishment, a wizard guided me through the completely flawless installation process.

Some background: My friend Lee, a very competent chap indeed, had a miserable time getting his T-Mobile dongle working in Ubuntu. A couple of releases later, it's all automated. Gotta love that open source zeal.

Better yet, when it first started up on Linux I was underwhelmed with the speed. Obviously, it hadn't found its 3G legs yet. After a few minutes, though, the little light on the dongle went from green to blue, and whoosh! Instantly fast. Suddenly, remote terminal sessions were quite usable. Web browsing was slick.

I'm absolutely loving it. Suddenly, my laptop is useful. Without 'net access it's just a paperweight.

Just back from Rome, good and tired.

My new Blackberry was amazing. It did exactly what I needed it to do, pretty much whenever I needed it. It also did a load of other stuff too.

I got my email all the time, really quickly. My calendar was spot on, and Google Apps got updated from the handset changes. Opera Mini worked like a charm. The Notes app was useful for keeping a diary. I could navigate around the city using GPS and Google Maps, and this was accurate enough that I could use it whilst running to find my way around the massive Villa Borghese.

I love phones again. My Nokia N73 was an unmitigated disaster, but my Blackberry Curve is a thing of beauty.

I've been having a great time setting up my new Blackberry Curve 8310, and I'm so impressed with it. The push email is just fabulous, and now that I've moved my email stuff to Google Apps, delivery to the handheld typically occurs within five seconds of arrival at Google.

I use it for more than email, though. Google Calendar Sync works great most of the time, lots of other Google apps work really well (although not all of them work with Google Apps yet), and I even have an English-Italian dictionary on there.

Or at least I had.

I set a password, since we're going on holiday soon. I thought I was typing it in right, but I obviously wasn't. I got it wrong too many times and now the bloody thing is wiping itself. I have to start again.

Except I don't. I'm just going to restore from backup. Yay me! I only have to go back a few days, which isn't quite such a fucking disaster as it would have been to go from nothing again.

Moral: Make sure the password is right.

The Linksys NSLU2 is a remarkable little device. When freed from the limited software it ships with, it can become an almost unbelievably useful addition to a home network.

I put Debian GNU/Linux on my slug, following the excellent instructions on the NSLU2-Linux site. After trying it with a solid-state disk for swap and root, I gave up and stuck a laptop 160GB drive on it, in addition to a 500GB 'swappable' disk for backups etc.

The only thing I've really had to change is to patch apt to make it run in the slug's tiny amount of memory. Notwithstanding the lack of RAM, it's a fully functional Debian server with all the power that entails. As long as I do nothing to force it to swap heavily, it works like a dream

Mine runs as slave for NIS, Kerberos, LDAP and DHCP. It could easily do more, though I see memory being tight with much more. It's brilliant for backing up my (flaky) main server without slurping up too much power and space, and without making server-sized amounts of noise. They're wonderful.

After numerous recommendations, I tried out Synergy on my desktop Vista machine and newly-installed Ubuntu setup on my Playstation 3. I was doing the whole multiple keyboard dance while installing Ubuntu, going slowly but surely insane using the wrong keyboard and/or mouse all the time.

Not any more. Synergy installed without incident, ran first time, and just works. One keyboard, one mouse, one shared clipboard, two machines across two operating systems and two hardware architectures. Awesome.