RSSTechnology
Nov 16
Surfing the web at 30,000 feet while heading back up to LA. Crappy to be leaving San Jose del Cabo, but at least the in-flight internet works!
MobileMe is sort of useless
Sep 14
I thought I might give MobileMe a try. For those that don’t know, MobileMe is a subscription service from Apple that allows you to push your calendar and contact information to a web-portal (at http://me.com), and from there you can sync multiple Windows and Mac OS X devices (and iPhones!), making sure you have consistent information across all of them. Sounds great.
The devices I want to keep in sync are:
- My work laptop – a Windows machine running Outlook and connected to our corporate Exchange server
- My personal laptop – a MacBook Pro
- My phone – an iPhone 3GS
So… I go to the web site and sign up for the 60-day trial. All good. I install the special “MobileMe Control Panel” on my Windows system. I open up the configuration. I then discover that it won’t sync my Outlook contacts or calendar information if you use Exchange.
USELESS! Failed experiment, trial cancelled. Apple, seriously, fix this up. I can’t believe you expect people to pay $119 a year for this.
New Windows Live Movie Maker
Aug 24
Didn’t notice this one – Windows Live Movie Maker has slipped out of beta. Even though I’m now doing most of my video stuff on a Mac, I figured I’d grab a copy for a look, and it’s not bad in an iMovie kind of way. Simple, easy to use, and most importantly – it just works with the AVCHD files from my hard disk based camera!
Will it replace Vegas Pro? No, but for free it seems pretty good!
Grab it from http://download.live.com and have a play.
WordPress for iPhone
Jul 25
Very cool. And just to confirm my status as a geek, yes, this was part of the motivation to change from Blogger.
Optus & DNS
Jul 25
This morning I decided to shift our family blog from Blogger to WordPress. No big deal, just a matter of changing some DNS entries. Or so I thought.
First of all I went through the motions, creating the account and getting it set up. Then I went to my registrar of choice and edited the DNS settings. So far, so good.
After leaving it a few hours I decided to check on the status of the propagation. I was more than a litte surprised to discover that the address coming back was neither the current or the new one!
Turns out that there is a fault with the primary name server at my ISP, OptusNet Cable. The secondary is fine. Yes, it’s a bit odd.
I just lost twenty minutes of my life trying to explain to the guy on the other end of the phone that there is an issue. I don’t really care about it as I now use OpenDNS anyway, but I figured it was polite to let them know that something on their network is broken. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the first level support guys neither understand nor care.
Bottom line: Use OpenDNS.
Loving the new web site tools!
Jan 03
A little while back I posted about a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery that adds support for uploading directly to SmugMug. Now, it gets even better – I’ve found a plug-in for Windows Live Writer to easily add photos from photos.stocksfamily.org into blog posts:
Grab it from the plug-in gallery on live.com.
SmugMug uploader for Windows Live Photo Gallery
Sep 24
Well, that didn’t take long. Omar Shahine has whipped up a very nice publishing plug-in to enable Windows Live Photo Gallery to publish directly to SmugMug. Just gave it a whirl, and it works flawlessly!
http://www.shahine.com/garage/content/PublishOnSmugMug.aspx.
New version of Windows Live Photo Gallery
Sep 18
Microsoft have rolled out the betas of the next release of the Windows Live applications, including a new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery. Cool new stuff includes people tagging (with automatic face detection) and (finally!) an API for developers. Now for a SmugMug upload plugin!
Grab a copy from http://download.live.com/photogallery.
Google Goodness
Sep 02
For those who haven’t heard, Google have released a couple of new applications today.
First, they have pushed Chrome out to the world. Chrome is Google’s take on the web browser, designed to be fast, lightweight and stable. I’ve been playing with it (and am writing this post using it!), and to be honest it actually seems quite good. Grab a copy and try it out.
Second, a new version of Picasa (and upgrades to Picasa Web Albums) was released. Picasa 3 offers a bunch of improvements, as well as much better uploading to the matching web album hosting service. Looks okay, although I still prefer the way Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery handles metadata by embedding it in the file rather than maintaining a database. Still, the Gmail and Picasa Web Albums integration is pretty good, so if that matches your requirements then go download.
Windows Vista and SATA hard drives
Aug 20
I just upgraded my work laptop from Windows XP to Windows Vista. As XP doesn’t support SATA hard drives natively I had changed the drive to “compatibility mode” in the BIOS – thus making it look like a “normal” IDE disk. This made it work, but with a slight performance penalty.
However… Before installing Vista I forgot to change the setting back.
“No problem!” I thought. “I’ll just change it now, Windows will see a new drive controller, and I’ll be back in business.”
Great thought. Only it didn’t work. The machine starts to boot, and then crashes out to the good ol’ Blue Screen of Death. It seems that at install time, Vista disables the drivers that it doesn’t actually need to boot the system up. This is great, unless you do something like this. It could also happen if, for example, you buy a new machine and use Ghost or True Image to clone the disk into the new machine. (Okay, so if you’re running Vista it’s most likely to be on a SATA disk already, but it could happen!)
Turns out there is an easy solution:
- Change the drive setting to compatibility mode.
- Boot up and log in.
- Run regedit.
- Look for HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci.
- Change the value of the “Start” entry to “0″ (zero).
- Close regedit and reboot.
- Change the BIOS setting back to native AHCI.
Of course, your milage may vary, and I recommend taking a backup of the registry key before making changes to it. While you’re at it, clone the entire disk, just in case. And if you break it, congratulations, you now own both pieces.