Author Archives: Andy

New BlackBerry PlayBook & Tablet OS

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New BlackBerry PlayBook & Tablet OS at BlackBerry.com.

Visually this looks really good, although I think it would be much more useful to someone who actually uses a Blackberry.

In other news, I’ve been taking the iPad to every meeting I’ve been to over the last few weeks, and have actually found I’m getting a lot of use out of it. Somehow it seems rude to pull out a laptop to demonstrate something quickly, but the iPad seems totally permissible in these circumstances. Yes, there are things I’d change, but it is certainly an enjoyable mobile computing experience.

Instapaper

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Instapaper is something I think I’d use a lot if I had an ebook reader. Basically, it takes web pages and turns then into ebooks for offline reading. At present it’s not a great deal of use to me, but for anyone with an ebook reader or an iPad it might prove very handy.

15 albums in 15 minutes

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15 albums in 15 minutes is what I’m aiming for here. I think the idea is to pick the 15 albums that define me and have stayed with me through the years, but I have a feeling this is going to concentrate on my late teens/early 20s more than it probably should.

So here goes…

  1. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Mainstream
  2. Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation
  3. The Cure – Disintegration
  4. Pixies – Surfer Rosa
  5. Pixies – Doolittle
  6. Joy Division – Closer
  7. The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses
  8. Rage Against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine
  9. R.E.M – Automatic for the People
  10. Manic Street Preachers – Gold Against the Soul
  11. Manic Street Preachers – The Holy Bible
  12. Jim O’Rourke – Bad Timing
  13. The Beta Band – The Three EPs
  14. Radiohead – Kid A
  15. The Arcade Fire – Funeral

I could easily name another 15, and may very well change my mind on a lot of these by tomorrow.

Concentration and distraction

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It’s good to take a week off work when I’m actually not too tired or stressed to enjoy it.

This weekend I’ve largely caught up on washing, shopping and other dull household tasks. I’ve also watched the whole of season 1 of Twin Peaks, in readiness of season 2 arriving on Tuesday. What with that and with my current aim of watching every season of X Files as fast as Love Films can send them to me, it seems like I’m going through a bit of an early 90′s phase as far as TV watching goes.

I’m hoping I might soon be at the level where I can concentrate enough to watch a whole film, and eventually to read a book. The fact that I used to do these things all the time makes me realise how far my concentration has lapsed over the last few years, and I’d really like to watch a few films in the near future without my mind wandering off somewhere.

I’ve also been checking out my extensive collection of archived MP3s, and copied a few GB of stuff I’ve not heard for years to my computer and iPod. I think I’m at a point where having all my electronic media in one place would make me happy, and I’m in the process of sourcing out a solution to this issue.

This makes me sound busy, although it is all largely an illusion. Despite all this apparent activity, I have still found plenty of time for doing what I can only really describe as absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of inactivity that is only really possible when there are no distractions, and I think this weekend has probably been my longest consecutive distractionless period for years.

Talking of distraction, and of music, I was having a quite interesting out-loud-thought on Thursday about listening to music when I’m working. I’m probably the only person I know who doesn’t find music in some way useful when working, and I think it’s largely because I listen intently to music, and find it very hard to concentrate on anything else because I tend to give it my full attention. I’m generally ok with instrumental music that I know really well (like Jim O’Rourke’s “Bad Timing”), but anything new, or anything with vocals is going to draw me away from what I’m doing. I’m also very bad at doing (or thinking about) anything else when I’m listening to music through headphones. It makes me feel closer to the music, and the thought of putting headphones on to “get into the zone” for coding or other development work just seems alien to me.

It’s taken me far too long to write this, for this very reason. But I think I’m done now.

A few thoughts about music

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For a couple of years in the late 90′s, I couldn’t really afford to buy new music, and lived a fair distance away from any decent record stores. I think it’s probably the only time in my life when I’ve felt totally disconnected from the world.‏

These days, thanks to the wonders of the internet, it’s possible to listen to new music every day without spending a penny, although thankfully I’m now in a position where I can justify a 50 song a month emusic subscription and can buy a few other bits and pieces of music each month without it really impacting on my standard of living.

I’m not sure if this makes me feel more connected, but it certainly makes me happier.

This week I’m listening to a lot of music released on the Captured Tracks label. They don’t release music on CDs, only on vinyl, cassette and digitally, and they remind me a lot of how Creation and Cherry Red were in the 80′s. They also are home to Wild Nothing and Veronica Falls, who are two of the groups I’m listening to a lot at present.

I’ve also recently discovered The Love Language, and am also very much enjoying the new albums by The Arcade Fire and Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan. I am also not yet anywhere near bored of the Indelicates album, and there is another one on the way soon as well.

2010 has been a good year for music, and promises a few more interesting releases in the autumn.

Backup solutions

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Since I started working exclusively on laptops, I’ve been backing everything up to a 500gb external hard drive. This is working well, but I do sometimes miss having an “always on” desktop computer that acts as a repository for everything I’ve ever owned.

I keep toying with either buying or building something to fulfil this purpose, but I’m not sure what is actually required. I could go for some sort of NAS solution but that would take away the joy of actually building something myself, and I think for £260 I’d want something I could occasionally use for tasks other than storage. I was also looking at the Zotak Z-Box, which would be quiet and energy efficient, but which only takes 2.5″ hard drives (and thus would be more expensive per Gb of storage than a desktop solution).

I suppose what I really need is a couple of 1Tb hard drives in some sort of shuttle setup. I’d also (at some point in time) like to experiment with pairing a Zotak Z-Box with a decent sized SSD drive which should result in a low-consumption (fairly) fast PC that would make a good long term successor to the ageing Mac we use as a media centre.

Of course, this is not a good time for me to be thinking about buying computers, and I should probably think about how best to utilise the ones I have to solve this problem.

More adventures in new technology

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It’s been a week for exploring new technology. After my iPad adventure, I also got to spend a bit of time with Ubuntu Netbook Edition this week. Now, I’m a big Ubuntu fan, but I have never been particularly interested in running anything but full-fat Ubuntu on my netbook. I still feel like this, but after doing a couple of wireless setups at work I have gone as far as creating a USB version that I can play around with when the mood takes me. On first impressions it seems very fast, and while the interface is slightly alien, it does make sense on a smaller screen, in the same way that the new ambience/radiance themes only make sense on a big screen.

I also spent a couple of hours working on one of the new Macbooks today, testing how mail.app and iCal integrate with exchange. I’ve not explored this side of Mac OS X for a couple of years, and was very surprised as to how far things have come. I think we’re getting to the point where the default calendaring and email software are finally ready for the business desktop, and I feel I could easily do 95% of my job on this Mac.

First thoughts on the iPad

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I finally got to spend an hour or so with an iPad on Friday.

I think that the iPad is a great piece of tech, although it is a little overpriced for my tastes. It handles web browsing and email very well, it looks great, and it seems fairly responsive. The on screen keyboard is totally instinctive, and this is coming from someone who is quite picky about keyboards. I found it easy enough to type in a few web addresses, send an email, and scribble a few lines of text. And this makes it perfect for at least half of what I do on the web.

I’m less sure it could replace my netbook as something I could write on though. And If I did get one then it would probably have to end up replacing my netbook because I wouldn’t want to carry two computers around all day. That said, I’m not sure the iPad counts as a computer anyway, despite being quite capable of doing most of what most people use their computers for.

I think my overwhelming feeling about the iPad is that I like it a lot more than I thought I would. But that I probably won’t get one…yet.

My first stab at self-interview

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In my last post I mentioned The Setup. This is my attempt to answer the questions.

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Andy, and I work for IT Services at the University of Birmingham in a Service Desk management/development role. In my spare time I listen to and write about music, dabble in free and open source software (mainly Ubuntu), and am sporadically involved in the Isles of Darkness live action roleplay society.

What hardware are you using?

At work everything is largely generic. I have a Dell desktop that is coming to the end of its life, but that is still more than capable of dealing with most of my emailing and calendaring needs. It is plugged into a 17″ Sony monitor that has been with me for about 4 years now, and which I keep holding on to as it is one of the few desktop monitors I’ve used that doesn’t give me a headache after hours of staring at it (yes, I know a new monitor and more breaks might be a more sensible plan).

Most of my actual work is done on an (again) fairly generic Fujitsu Siemens laptop, which I started using a couple of years ago, and which allows me to type for hours without my wrists hurting. I wouldn’t recommend this laptop above any other, but it does the job.

At home I have pretty much left desktop computers behind. My main workstation is a Sony Vaio VGN-NS10l (dual core, 4Gb ram), which I bought a couple of years ago and deals with anything I throw at it. I’ve also got a 10″ Dell Inspiron Mini, which goes everywhere with me, and is increasingly becoming the computer I do most of my web browsing, email and writing on. My backup machines are a G4 iBook and a EeePC 701, and we’ve also got another Mac and a Wii plugged into the TV downstairs. My wife has several other computers which I’ll not mention here except to say that we have more computers than there are rooms in our house (by quite a lot). And that’s not counting the ones that are propping open doors or otherwise not really being used for anything productive any longer.

And what software?

Work is a mix of Windows XP (desktop) and Ubuntu 10.04 (laptop). In Windows I largely use Outlook for email and calendaring, office communicator for collaboration, and very little else. In Linux I use Firefox for browsing (with Chrome and Epiphany for testing), Evolution for email, Empathy and Dropbox for collaboration, OpenOffice.org for creating documents and spreadsheets, and (generally) Bluefish for coding. Recently I’ve been using GIMP a lot too, and have also been dabbling with a few command-line image conversion tools. I also maintain several instances of Mediawiki, as well as a full LAMP environment for development, and use google calendar to plan and maintain my work-life balance.

At home both of my laptops are running the latest version of Ubuntu, which I’ve used as my primary OS since 2005. I use largely the same software as I use at work, although I’ve recently reverted to using gedit for writing blog posts and other bits of text, and only venturing into OpenOffice when I want to make something available to other people. Home is also where I spend a lot of time playing with WordPress and Virtualbox, and where I use Rhythmbox to listen to music (and Last.fm to catalogue what I’m listening to). I’ve also recently started using Google Reader, and I now don’t know how I coped without it.

My Macs run a very stripped down version of Leopard, and really only get used for iTunes and other media related things now (although I’d still use my iBook as my main portable computer if it weighed a little less). They also run Dropbox (as does every computer I own), and I’ve been syncing all my important files between all my machines for a couple of years now. I still can’t understand why more people don’t do this, and I’ve lost count of the number of times this one piece of software has got me out of a hole.

What would be your dream setup?

I change my mind about my ideal working environment a lot, but what I basically want is a laptop that is thin, light and stylish, and that can perform at the level where I could use it as my only computer (including storing 100gb of music). The nearest thing I’ve come across is the 13″ Macbook Pro, although I’d be happier with something the size and weight of my 10″ Dell Mini with all the power and stylishness of the Macbook Pro. Being able to run OS X and Ubuntu at the same time would also be great.

Of course, having used an iPad for the first time recently, I’d probably have to add that to my wish list, just because it’s a really stylish and functional piece of kit.

I also wonder if having a desktop computer with two large monitors would make me more productive. I have a feeling that most of what I do can be achieved on a single small screen, but it would be nice to have the opportunity to experiment with these things.

Question format borrowed from The Setup under the Attribution-Share Alike license.