tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
Well my (old) UFO shaped 802.11g Airport Extreme seems to be not working despite the three lights on the front flickering and flashing away.
Despite power cycling the base station, it would not broadcast a wireless signal and even when connected by ethernet it only appeared sometimes in the Airport Utility.
I may do a full reset, but in the meantime I have replaced it with my spare Airport Express which I usually take away with me when staying in hotels or need to use at conferences.
I often post about how slow my ADSL connection is, however today after power cycling my router, I saw a nearly 100% increase in the download speed going from 1700Kbps to in excess of 3100Kbps (according to my router).
I am certainly noticing the difference when browsing and downloading files.
Fast!
Despite my previous post only one feature (the Coverflow enhancement) for the new EyeTV 3 would require Leopard.
All the other new features will work on 10.4.11 according to Elgato.
After a period of reflection, I quite like the idea of the enhanced editing, the current tools are the best I have worked with on any TV recording system, so have them even better will be great.
Wi-Fi Access is one of my favourite features of the current version of EyeTV, the enhanced version with version 3 sounds useful if you have a new wifi phone.
Overall there are some really good features in version 3, however with the way I use EyeTV on my iMac I can’t see myself upgrading, if I upgrade the Mac mini under my television then I will get the new version.
In amongst all the hype about the MacBook Air at MacWorld a lot of other announcements got a bit lost.
Elgato have released EyeTV 3.
This new version has quite a few enhancements compared to version 2, though it looks like many of them look like they will only work on a Mac running Leopard.
At this time I don’t think I will be upgrading.
Find out more.
Amazon’s Kindle
Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is temporarily sold out. We are working hard to manufacture Kindles as quickly as possible and are prioritizing orders on a first come, first served basis. Please ORDER KINDLE NOW to reserve your place in line. We will keep you informed by email as we get more precise delivery dates. Note that Kindles cannot currently be sold or shipped to customers living outside of the U.S.
Some are going for silly money on eBay, but I guess it won’t be long before they are available once more.
Of course they aren’t available in the UK at all, I wonder if we will ever see a UK version of the Kindle?
BBC reports on how the Blu-ray supporters scent victory
The backers of the Blu-ray high definition DVD system are predicting victory in the format wars with HD DVD.
Blu-ray was certainly always my first choice, but I did wonder if HD-DVD was going to win because of the studios. It now looks like Blu-ray will win because of the studios!
Blu-ray was probably my HD of choice down to both Sony and Apple supporting the format, and I really like using their products. It was also mentioned in many reviews that Blu-ray was technically better and after the VHS and Betamax war, I was hoping that consumers would choose the higher quality option this time round.
Looks like they have.
Here in the UK it is (still) illegal to rip a CD to your computer (so when using iTunes or Windows Media Player you are technically breaking the law if you import a CD).
However the BBC reports that this may soon change…
Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government.
Millions of people already “rip” discs to their computers and move the files to MP3 players, although the process is technically against copyright law.
This is of course of those things that we do on a regular basis, but is in fact still illegal, I would suspect most people don’t even realise it is illegal.
It shouldn’t I know, but I always get surprised by how hot my PowerBook gets when I am using it and it is charging at the same time.
Take out the battery and it cools down pretty quick!
Just means that if I use the PowerBook on my lap I have to watch just in case it burns my legs.
I think that there should be a Hood 2.0 Workshop at ALT-C 2008.
What the workshop should be about and the goal, well it needs to be Web 2.0 as that how Hood 2.0 was originally came about.
More than that, I need to think more.
So there I was thinking which office suite I should put on my new Q1 Ultra UMPC. I did consider Office 2003, but of course the Q1 does not have a CD drive, and my external drive is Firewire only. I know I could copy the disk onto an ISO image and that mount that as a virtual drive, or I could share a drive on a network computer, but that sounds like hard work (or so I thought).
I then decided to download and install OpenOffice, okay so it’s an 120MB download, but that won’t take too long, or so I thought.
So I started the download…
Well this according to Firefox is going to take an hour, okay no worries, I’ll leave the Q1 on, the batteries fully charged shouldn’t be a problem.
Left it for a while, did some stuff on the Mac, went back to the Q1 and it was off.
What?
It must have thought, “ah nothing’s happening here, I’d better turn myself off to conserve battery life”.
I was downloading a file!
“nope, mouse hasn’t moved, no taps, no keyboard entry, time to turn off”
I am downloading a file, I don’t want to stare at the screen for an hour, I just want to download the file.
“okay, time to turn myself off”
NO!
“I’m off….”
What about my file? I was downloading a file.
Well that sucks, and of course restarting an interruped download with Firefox means downloading all over again from the beginning.
So here I am now with the power brick plugged in, you’re not very ultra-mobile now are you?