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.

Bought a Parker Profile 3-in-1 pen which includes:

• blue ballpoint
• 0.7mm pencil
• PDA stylus

As a pda stylus it is very nice: much more comfortable in the hand than the skinny little stylus that comes with the ipaq.

It works by magic: you turn the pen around until you see the label for what you want, then press the top button down and out it pops. At first I thought it was random as there is no obvious way to select what you want. I had to read the instructions There is some kind of gravity mechanism that senses the rotation of the pen, i.e. it won't work if you are standing on your head.

My normal method of ruining pens is to repeatedly dismantle and reassemble them, particularly in meetings. Must try not to do it with this: the bottom screw part undoes very easily and it will be mighty tempting.

I was passing a shop selling watches and spotted a 'closing down, everything half price' sign. Needless to say, I have a new watch.

I haven't worn a watch regularly for years and the last one I had was a basic analogue hands plus day-of-month thing that served me well until I got out of the habit of wearing it. Since then I have been content to get the time from my mobile phone.

New watch has:

• continuous display of date, including month, year and weekday, should I need reminding.
• world time
• stopwatch with lap times and graphic of a little man running
• three alarms
• countdown timer
• backlight (indiglo but not timex)
• can go beep on every hour.

The beeper is very quiet: while the hourly chime won't get me thrown out of cinema's, the alarm is unlikely to wake me up.

It's huge and heavy but I'm very happy with it. Online I have found it for $85, I got it for £19.

I had to repair the vacuum cleaner, a Dyson DC04. It stopped working, switch it on and nothing. I guessed this was down to a break in the electricity supply, the fuse was ok so I had to take it to bits to trace the mains cable.

It is not an easy thing to work on. It does come to bits: unlike a hoover that I once had to scrap when I accidently sucked up a handkerchief: the thing was glued together. The Dyson uses torx screws but I have a torx screwdriver. The plastic parts interconnect quite closely and you have to get a bit medieval to yank them apart. I got the motor out (which is surprisingly small, about the volume of a baked bean tin) but the power was not reaching it.

I prised out the top of the switch (not easy, I had to abandon the prospect of not marking it) and power wasn't there either. I chopped 4" off the mains cable at the plug end and indeed the break was there, either where the cable comes out of the plug or under the little plastic clip that you can use to stop the cable flapping about in storage. The fix was simply to fit a new plug.

As a side note, I gave the decapitated plug to 15 month old baby daughter to play with as she was interested in what I was doing. I thought it wasn't sharp so she shouldn't hurt herself with it. She proceeded to try plugging it into the wall socket. No major panic, the wall socket did have a child cover, but still there is a moral: don't underestimate babies.

I got around to cancelling my old carphone warehouse contract and they offered me a free Sony-Ericsson w800 (like k750i but with 500M memory card), a £9 a month tarriff with 400 minutes/month off-peak and £90 cash back so it all ends up costing me £12 in a year. They said it was cheaper for them than disconnecting my number(?)

They offerred me nothing when my contract was due for renewal.

The tip is to ring customer services and ask to be disconnected, don't ask for an upgrade. That way you get through to the loyalty team who are more generous.

Phone is orange and white, not really me, so I've offerred it to my wife. Might forget to install the 500M memory card...

Nero Recode, path of Nero Premium 7 can convert AVI files into .mp4 files. This is interesting because it means I can play them on my k750i phone. Just plonk them in the D:\MSSEMC\Media files\video\camera directory on the phone via USB. I recoded them to 100k/s so an eight second video used 800k. At this rate an hour long program would need 360M and hence a 512M or 1G memory stick. It plays in a window within the screen that is about 1 inch diagonal so it's not good for immersive home theatre. Also have to wonder what it does for battery life.

The player has no fast forward button so it's no use for watching Lost.

If anyone out there is wondering what to buy me for christmas, one of these would be nice (if I can resist buying one myself).

Wife was trying to do the washing on our Hotpoint WD860 but all it would do is display the word 'TEST'. Switch it off and on, press cancel, swear a lot, nothing would stop it.

Quick google and it seems that if you press the On/Off and Start/Cancel buttons together for a while it will display 'DOFF' and go out of it's persistant test mode.

We have a likely culprit for putting it into test mode, I've shown my wife how to use the child lock...

Wanted to copy a photo to my k750i to use as wallpaper. I used the USB drive feature to copy the photo to d:\DCIM\100MSDCF where the other camera photos are but it refused to show up in the 'Pictures' explorer.

I eventually got it to list by renaming it in the same pattern as the existing files, DSC00025.JPG. Then I could copy it into the phone memory.

Some more tips for the k750i camera-phone:

• In camera mode, press * to turn the light on and off
• Also in camera mode, press 7 to turn 'night mode' on and off. 'Night mode' seems to slow the 'shutter speed', giving less digital noise on indoor pictures at the expense of blurriness if the subject is moving.
• The joystick can be used to switch from still camera to video mode
• When filming videos, don't be tempted to hold the phone in 'portrait' mode unless you have some way of rotating the videos when you play them (maybe put your tv on it's side).

More on the wonder that is the Sony Ericsson k750i phone:

• Looking through the usb drive properties I found this:
  
  which implies that for some USB memory devices you don't have to mess around 'stopping' the drive before you unplug it. This is nice to know.
• this page gives a taste of what can be done with the bluetooth remote control feature. Essentially the phone becomes a bluetooth mouse and keyboard so you can drive your pc from it. Nice idea but only really useful to control an mp3 player or powerpoint. Apparently Sony Ericsson do software to configure it for different applications.

Things I don't like about the phone:

• the vibrate is too weedy, I cannot feel it. I could stick the phone somewhere sensitive but that would make it more awkward to answer.
• the 'go back' key (don't know what else to call it and cannot draw the icon) that you press and hold to go back to the desktop does not hang up on calls.
• the actions of the left and right function keys sometimes swap around unintuitively.
• browsing through pictures is too slow

I had been idly wondering whether it was possible to store html pages on the memory stick of the k750i mobile phone and view them on the go. I figure this would be great for carrying information around in my pocket. Well today I was playing with the web browser and found a 'save page' option which stored the page I was viewing on the memory stick.

So it turns out that you can use the USB connection to store html or even simple .txt files in the directory \MSSEMC\Media Files\webpage and view them on the phone by opening My Items/Web Pages. You can create subdirectories in the directory to organise the files as you like. Just plug the phone in, allow Windows to mount an external USB drive, then copy the files with windows explorer. You have to 'stop' the USB drive and unplug the phone before the files appear in the phone's browser.

With html files it is possible to use the <small> tag to make the text smaller and see more on the screen (I haven't found an option in the phone's settings to control font size).

I tried setting a bookmark for my test page but got 'currently unavailable' when I tried to save it. Don't know why this could be. Battery is flat and I have to go out so I'll investigate this later.

I feel a raft of cool ideas coming on from this.

Great case mod:

link

The more I use the K750i Phone/camera/mp3 player the more I like it. Some tips:

• when viewing photo's you can press the 'horizontal' button to view the pictures with the camera on it's side. This is good because the screen is taller than it is wide so you get a better view of landscape pictures.
• when in horizontal viewing mode you can use the + and - 'volume' keys to zoom in and out of the picture. You can also use the 1 and 3 keys to zoom. Not sure why it cannot zoom in the default view mode. With pictures taken at highest resolution it is a bit sluggish in responding to changes in zoom size, 2 seconds or so, similar to the sluggishness when stepping to a different picture.
• when you take a photo it is displayed so you can admire it. If you want to take another photo, press the photo trigger button again and it goes back into viewfinder mode.
• rather than fiddle with the four way cursor thing, you can press the number keys to go straight where you want. I think this is standard nokia behaviour of yore but the cursor thing on the k750i is rather fiddly.

Just discovered I can turn silent mode on and off just by pressing and holding the # key.

With my mum's new camera we got a photodock in an attempt to make it dead easy for her to copy photos to her computer.

Bullet point review:

• photodock conforms to 'pictbridge' standard which appears to support multiple camera and dock makers.
• the camera drops onto the top of the dock. It plugs in but with zero resistance.
• the photodock includes a printer that can print 6x4 inch pictures of good quality. When you put the camera in the dock it's screen comes on and you just pick a picture to print using the left and right arrow buttons and then press another button to print it.
• the paper and ink cartridges cost about £28 for 80 prints (I think it was) which is expensive: 35p a print. I can get them printed online for 7p each.
• the dock makes it very easy to copy pictures to a pc. Install the kodak software, plug in usb and it is a simple matter of putting the camera in the dock, the Kodak software fires up and copys the pictures. The kodak software is ok in a dumbed-down kind of way.
• the dock comes with rechargable batteries for the camera and will charge it. They were Ni-mh, which are not as good as lithium ion (memory effects and rapid ageing).

Conclusion: the dock is ok, it makes things easy if you find plugging USB cable too fiddly but the printer is an expensive way to print.

The more I use the Sony Ericsson K750i, the more I like it. The camera may not be brilliant but it is good enough, if combined with Paintshop Pro to run digital camera noise removal and One-step photo fix. What is good about it is that to take a photo you just open the lens cover and press the shutter button: this works even if the keypad was locked. Hence I was able to get this photo because the phone happened to be in my pocket when the baby did something cute:

Got Motorola V547 back from 'repair' but it still keeps disconnecting during calls or fails to dial with a 'call failure'. As the problem is intermittent there is little hope in convincing O2 or their repairers that the phone has a problem so we have given up and she has gone back to a Nokia 6610. No camera!

The v547 isn't totally useless: it still reminds her to take her pill every day.

My mum wanted a cheap DVD player so I bought her a Technika DVD104 from Tesco. For £24.97 it has the following:

• Scart output and cable (my £50 philips DVD didn't come with a cable.
• SVideo output
• Composite video output
• Phono audio output
• Optical Digital Output (!) for Dolby Digital and DTS
• Remote and batteries
• Composite + audio phono leads

The only thing is was really lacking was a modulated aerial output which was a surprise. I would have though a cheapo DVD would work with cheapo TV's. I was lucky that her Freeview box had a spare Scart socket for the video. I plugged into this and it worked instantly, down to the Scart switch line.

It played a free DVD of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (Chick Flick) from the Daily Wail ok, the only problem being that the DVD played anamorphic on a 4/3 TV and the setup option to switch to letter box was greyed out. I didn't stick around long enough to find out why.

Interesting idea. Add a contact to the phone list in your mobile phone called 'ICE'. This is the number of someone you would like contacted in an emergency. If your phone is found at an accident then people can get in touch with your significant other.

More about it here.

Wife's Motorola V547 has been sent off for repair. It keeps giving 'call failures' or dropping calls. They tried resetting something in firmware at the O2 shop but this didn't fix the problem. Should take a week or two for them to fix it, which isn't bad as we have an old phone to put the SIM in.

My contract expires next month. The Samsung D500 is tempting me:

• MP3 player
• 88M memory (not great but ok for an hour or two's music)
• bluetooth (hate to think how long it would take to transfer 88M over bluetooth at 100kbps or so).
• 1M pixel camera with flash
• not a boring Nokia.