Peter's Blog

My wife bought me a Senseo coffee machine for christmas. She knows I have been vacillating about buying one. I did some googling and coffee purists were saying that you should be lovingly roasting and grinding your own coffee, not buying stale coffee pre-ground in little bags. Senseo was a little better than instant.

I like the Senseo coffee. It tastes more like percolated coffee than instant, very full flavour. I don't use a percolator because it takes a long time and it makes too much coffee for me, guaranteeing a headache as I cannot resist drinking it all.

I bought three shades, dark, mild and decaf. All are good depending on mood:

dark: makes hairs on head stand on end. Oh yeah.

mild: good breakfast time coffee, jumper leads.

decaf: good for evening, doesn't taste of chemicals, still has full coffee flavour.

Bullet points:

• it takes about two minutes to make a coffee, 90 seconds for the machine to warm up and half a minute to make it.
• Senseo pods are about £2 for 18 in Sainsburys. Not cheap.
• To make a decent size mug you need to use two pods. This does means that you can mix a dark roast and a decaf (did I mention that I'm not a coffee connoisseur) but using two pods at a time we're in 25p a mug territory (ignoring milk). Cheaper than Starbucks though.
• A mug will fit under the double spout.
• There was no coffee in the box. Had to wait two days for Sainsburys to open.

Update: back to work and my usual coffee now has no taste. I miss Senseo. Do I buy a machine for work or do I learn to relish my breakfast mug from the Senseo?

Double dark roast (dark + dark) tastes nice but gives me terrible caffeine hangover, mood swings etc. Had a problem with a printer while high and went medieval on it which didn't solve the problem. Ran out of mild but dark + decaf is acceptable substitute.

Went to Tesco for more pods and they have new 'Columbian' and 'Kenyan' bags. In my ignorance I am not sure how strong these are, bought Columbian and will see how many feet off the ground it takes me. Got more decaf to tone it down if necessary.

My nano occasionally locks up. I start it up and it freezes. The work-around is to blip the hold switch on and off, then press the menu and centre areas of the dial for a few seconds. This reboots the thing.

Have to review all the comments I've made about Windows hardware needing reset buttons.

My new monitor has a built in USB hub and Flash Memory Card Reader. These both seem to be very fast:

• My iPod Nano synced a 30M podcast this morning in seconds. It used to be a go-away-and-do-something-else-for-a-minute kind of task.
• I import pictures from my camera by plugging the SD card in. Picasa then sucks 60M or so of pictures (20 x 3M) again in a second or two, including deleting the photos from the card after. This is much nicer than fiddling with USB cables.

Recently taking photos with my Canon Powershot S1 IS I had become frustrated at how long it took to focus on fast moving toddler daughter. I felt I was missing lots of good pictures. Also there is an imminent arrival that I want to take pictures of.

Latest overindulgence: Nikon D80 camera with 18-135mm lens. This is a DSLR, a cut above the powershot.

I spent a while torn between this and the cheaper Canon EOS400D. My research told me:

• Canon was cheaper
• the Nikon had more things to fiddle with
• it came with better lenses in the kit
• Nikon has better build quality
• the canon had better windows software but since I can just plug the SD card into my monitor and get the photos with Picasa I'm not sure I need it anyway.

Final clincher for me was looking at the two in the shop: the canon reminded me of the powershot, the Nikon was more sexy.

Good things:

• Very fast: focuses and takes photo so fast you wonder what has happened
• Very easy to use: wife took photo of me and daughter with no assistance. It focuses and takes the photo before your fake smile has time to harden (NOT uploading it here: makes me look old). End up taking endless photo's, all very good.
• 10 Megapixels: fine quality jpegs come out at about 3Mb. High resolution, crisp photos. Can see every hair.
• something I never appreciated about DSLR's: because they have real lenses, you zoom and focus manually by twisting the rings on the lens. This is MUCH better than fiddling with +/- buttons. Your left hand is holding it by the zoom ring. UPDATE: clarification, it does have auto focus but you can set it to manual and adjust it with a ring on the lens. The 'in-focus' status light even comes on when you have it right.

Bad things:

• big
• didn't buy a camera bag, now feel it needs something soft to carry it around in as it is so precious.
• it has a light to help auto-focus in the dark but it is obscured by the lens which sticks out about six inches most of the time
• no video: DSLR's don't do this. It was handy on the powershot.
• When I say easy to use, that's in the default auto mode. Everything can be overridden. The manual is not very explicit, it doesn't explain things very well. Still this makes it interesting, it's a challenge and a learning curve.
• Lens when zoomed is too phallic. Ok when set to wide angle.
• To my eye the flash shots seem a bit dark. Easily fixed in Picasa, in camera I think it can only be fixed in manual mode but not sure. UPDATE: in manual mode you can adjust the brightness, you can even set it to bracket, e.g. take three pictures at three different flash levels (it doesn't take the three automatically, bang-bang-bang, you have to trigger it three times and it alters the level each time).

See following examples for:

• dull flash
• capturing toddler in mid-cuteness.

Conclusion: very good camera.

Ripped Stadium Arcadium with the Beast and iTunes (CD Sainsburys £9, iTunes store £15). It ripped it at 20x where the old celeron 2G managed about 6x. It only took a couple of minutes, I was impressed. Ripping definitely still cpu limited or it would manage 52x (like the CD drive) but I'm happy.

Should I keep using the term 'ripped'? Should I be saying 'imported into iTunes for my own private use'?

Beast only has a DVD-ROM. I have a DVD writer to fit but unfortunately it is beige and would spoil the Dell Black colour scheme. Must get some black paint.

UPDATE: Stadium Arcadium: very good. Great bass riffs. Can't understand the lyrics, either the enunciation or the semantics.

Forgive the vague and slightly contrived Mork and Mindy reference, but here's an iPod Nano update:

• Still using it every day
• Using it to listen to Podcasts: I listen to music, chat or nothing depending on my mood. Syncing with pc every day is a bit of a chore, it takes a long time and I find myself waiting for it to finish so I can turn the pc off. Maybe The Beast will be faster?
• With a spare 15 minutes to listen to something, shuffle mode is good for raking out odd tunes I didn't remember I had.
• I still have some more CD's somewhere to rip. How could I lose 'Dark Side of the Moon'? Currently have about 7G on the nano, it varies with the number of podcasts (which are automatically deleted once listened to: cool). I set up a playlist of 'my' music so wife's hip hop and daughter's cbeebies theme tunes don't take up space (although the Balamory theme is a classic, bordering on anthemic).
• Tinictus is starting to bother me, must cut the volume.
• Can't get Korn riffs out of my head. Twisted Transistor!

The Beast arrived five days early. Only an hour or so to play with it what with life and all. First impressions:

• Heavy. Solidly built case. Nice quality, nicest desktop case I've ever laid hands on.
• Side panel comes off really easily. Disk drives unclip, can tell I have a pair of Maxtor Atlas 140G 10,000rpm drives.
• Microphone and Heaphone jacks on the front: very thoughtful. Also a couple of USB holes. No sign of a reset button! Big dropoff for a Windows box.
• Takes 30 seconds to boot, most of this seems to be the serial scsi controller looking for the drives.
• Fairly quiet, not silent it does make a low hum. There's a huge fan inside with vents about 6 inches square. Big fan = slower rotation = quieter. Could live with it running all the time.
• When it booted it was infected with McAfee Security stuff. Had to spend a few minutes figuring out how to disable it enough for the uninstall to work.
• It is fast: it installed firefox virtually instantly. Silly things that shouldn't have ever been slow like the control panel pop up immediately.
• The programs menu includes the 'Dell SAS Raid Storage Manager' which asks for a username and password. Beast came with no manuals so I'm going to have to google for those at some point. Doesn't seem to be configured for Raid, have to think about that one. Do I care?
• Came with keyboard and mouse and a couple of Install CD's but no mains cable or manual. Keyboard is a black Dell one with a useless windows button but I'm keeping the Cherry one I was using as it has a nicer feel.

Happy thus far. Using it to type this. Can you tell the difference?

Have to find something taxing for it to do.

Got new water softener fitted. Water still looks milky but my skin feels oh so silky smooth. Cup of tea is nicer but cannot tell much difference in coffee.

Was looking for a new computer. Had a windfall and decided to treat myself to something awesome.

Found this:

• Dell Precision 390
• Intel Core Duo E6600 2.4GHz, 4M cache
• 4G 667MHz Ram
• 2x146G 10,000rpm Serial SCSI disks (SAS Raid 2).
• XP Pro, Vista Capable
• 3 year on site warranty.

Which I think should do the trick. The good part? I found it on the Dell Outlet site and it's about £1000 cheaper than ordering one with similar spec through the usual Dell order form. Yes ONE THOUSAND POUNDS. And the order form didn't have the option of 2x146G 10,000 rpm disks (I do find those forms quite a pain: why can some systems be bought with no monitor and not others???).

My research told me the Core Duo E6600 is superior to the ok sounding 2.14GHz E6400 not just because of the increased clock speed (12% faster which would probably be subjectively barely noticable) but also because of the subtle doubling of the internal cache to 4M.

I am slightly cynical about the advantages of a Core Duo: two CPUs is all very well if you are using well-written multi-threaded software. Most multi-threaded software I come across is only multi-threaded because the author thought it was cool and the threads spend most of their time either waiting for the other threads or for the cancel button in the UI. When iTunes is ripping, playing music, syncing my Nano and downloading podcasts at the same time is it using multiple threads? Must put procexplorer on it. Ripping does slow down noticably but this is on a 2G Celeron with 1/8th the memory of The Beast.

Got to wait a week for it

For a long time I resisted the temptation to buy a cordless drill for the simple reason that I would only use it twice a year and could live with my corded. This is an old black-and-decker hammer drill which has served me well for many years. It's main drawback is that the flex is only about 3ft long and it almost always needs an extension lead (adding insult to injury wrt cordless).

I was in Tesco a while back and they were having a 20% off all power tools day. The only power tool I could find was a cordless drill which was about £10. A drill for £8? Irresistable bargain.

This drill taught me the delight that is a cordless drill, particularly using it as a screwdriver. My corded drill can be used as a screwdriver but it was always too much hassle. The way you can back screws in like nails in a Norm Abram fashion was much faster and easier than a normal screwdriver. The cordless was only 9.6v but it was powerful enough.

Since moving house I have been doing a lot of DIY and there is much more to do. Previous owner unscrewed just about every fitting possible and there is a lot to put up. The battery in my cheapo drill stopped holding charge in pretty short time.

I decided to treat myself to a decent drill, not cheap stuff. I decided against Black and Decker (cheap stuff) and set my sights on low-end professional gear, blue Bosche, Makita, something like that. I headed off to B&Q where they have a little pile of 'bargain' power tools and saw there a Makita 6270D. This is a 12v drill but I was thinking of getting a 14.4v so I was a little disappointed. Also it looked small, not macho enough, almost like a little hobbyist thing for drilling balsa wood. There were no other drills there I fancied so I thought about it:

• It was a Makita, it was on my list
• According to the box it came with two batterys
• It was within my budget
• I would be using it mainly for wood and plasterboard, 12v is enough to start my car, if sometimes I need more power I use the corded drill.
• Only 10mm chuck but again 95% of holes I drill are within this.
• Who really cares whether it is macho enough. I don't work on a building site and rarely expose my bum crack. If it's small I can drill holes in the ceiling without needing someone else's help to hold it up.

So I bought it. When I took it home I found:

• It is lovely, really precision make.
• The trigger control is very good, you have fine control over screwdriving speed
• There were three batteries in the box (!)
• Keyless chuck which works nicely, I've only had a drill slip once.

The first job I did with it involved drilling tiles with a tile drilling bit and it coped with this faultlessly. I've used it for a few jobs now and am very happy with it. It easily managed drilling 10mm holes when I was putting up a large heavy bathroom cabinet on a tiled plasterboard wall using the beefiest fittings I could find. I haven't needed the corded drill so far.

What don't I like about it? Nothing springs to mind.