March 2007 Archives

Here's a little trick I found in Boot Camp - you can save the Windows drivers to disk without the need to burn a CD for them.

Run the Boot Camp Assistant in OS X (it's in Applications/Utilities) and then click on the Utility menu. Select 'Save Mac Windows Drivers to a folder...' and put them somewhere which you can access from Windows - I chose my iPod, for example - and then click OK. Wait a minute or so, then reboot into Windows and install away :) .

Note that you'll want to grab the latest Boot Camp 1.2 beta before doing this, especially if you're running Windows Vista like I am (albeit still the beta version). But by doing this you won't have to waste a blank CD.

I've just ordered this book about April Fool's Day by Martin Wainwright. It covers both the history of the day itself, as well as some of the most well-known April Fool's jokes, such as the island of San Seriffe and the Spaghetti Harvest. With a bit of luck, it'll be here in time for this weekend as I imagine I may be spending at least part of Saturday sat around waiting for people.

In a similar vein, Wikipedia is bracing itself for April 1st. It's apparently one of the worst days for wiki vandalism.

Hari's new graphics card has arrived, and so I fitted it earlier today. We went with an Inno3D card based around an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS chipset, since it seemed to represent the best value for money for our budget and was compatible with Hari's computer - it doesn't have PCI Express so we needed an AGP card.

As performance goes, the card is an immense improvement. Using World of Warcraft as a benchmark, before, she was getting an average of between 10 and 12 frames per second with all the settings turned down for maximum performance (but low detail). With the new card, she gets a constant 50fps, with many of the enhancements enabled, such as texture detail, terrain distance and spell effects. It looks fantastic, and is very smooth.

This now means that Hari finally has the gaming performance that she's been wanting for so long, and ends an upgrade process that has seen a new external hard drive, new memory and now a new graphics card. All in all, we've spent £220 on new hardware, but seeing as it'll add value to the computer, and make it less obsolete in future, it should be worth it.

Or, at least, it ends for now. She now wants a new power supply so that her graphics card can run at maximum performance. I think we can pass on that.

Actually, I didn't realise that the card needs to have a direct connection to the power supply as well as being connected to the motherboard through the AGP socket. I'll get it sorted soon.

To cut a long story short, I've had to buy a new mobile phone. My decision about what to buy was based on what decent unlocked phones were available on eBay at the time for a reasonable price, which ended up being a Samsung E370.

This is the first Samsung phone I've owned, and is the first time in a while that I've owned a phone not made by Nokia. It's a slider phone which looks a lot like most of the other Samsung phones out there, but despite being on the cheaper end of their range it still packs a 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, media player and support for GPRS/EDGE. It's not a 3G phone but that's really not something I find important at the moment, since I never use the internet on it nor do I ever feel the need to make video calls.

Compared with my previous phone, a Nokia 6230i, the E370 is far smaller and lighter. It also has a bigger screen, and as it's a slider phone unlocking the keypad is as easy as sliding the keypad open; you can even have it make a noise when you do this but the novelty quickly wears off and after a while it'll just annoy you. The menus are quite easy to navigate, although they take a little getting used to when compared with Nokia's system. The camera is about average for a cameraphone - not horrible but still worse than a proper digital camera.

Things I miss? Unlike the 6230i, there's no FM radio, and no slot for an expansion card - the 6230i had a MMC card slot to add extra storage so that you could fit more clips of chavs happy slapping innocent pensioners on it. Also, the E370 isn't supported by Apple's iSync, so while getting my numbers off my old phone was easy, I had to enter them manually into the new one. Smart alecs will probably want to say that I could copy the numbers to the SIM card but many of my contacts have more than 1 number and there's over 100 of them so it's not really an option for me. Still, gave me a chance to prune those people I no longer speak to, such as old landlords.

As for battery life, I've only had the phone since Monday so I can't really say how good it is. My 6230i could do a week on a full charge with light usage, and the phone I had before that (Nokia 7250i) could do 10 days, so we'll see how this fares.

Overall I'm really happy with the E370. It doesn't do everything I want, but until someone invents a phone that is able to write your dissertation for you while making it look like your own work I don't think I will be totally satisfied. It certainly is good value for money and easy to use, and has a good range of features.

By the way, if someone wants an unlocked Nokia 6230i that works but needs a new screen, cover and battery, drop me a line with an offer.

The photos from last weekend's hiking trip are up on Flickr. There's some quite nice ones there - in all, I took over 30 photos and 20 have been uploaded. If you're a friend of mine on Facebook you should also see some more appear there at some point soon.

On Friday I went to the student union's Athletic Association Colours Ball, where the university hiking club won Club of the Year (2006/7). We were pretty chuffed about it, as it's a remarkable achievement for a club that only a few years ago had been hit hard by the foot and mouth disease outbreak and had dwindling membership.

I should be out hiking today, but it's currently snowing outside so I'm somewhat glad that I'm not.

• I spent the weekend away from Bradford, hiking in the Peak District with the hiking club. The weather was pretty good (if a little windy) and we managed to do plenty of walking, including up Mam Tor, the local famous hill. There's about 100 MB of photos sat on my laptop awaiting sorting and uploading to Flickr, which should happen sometime this week.
• On the computing front, I have been playing around with CrossOver Mac which is now available as a final version (as opposed to the beta versions). I'm now able to run Shareaza reliably, which was something I couldn't do before. I'm also becoming increasingly impressed at Songbird - the new version 0.2.5 is pretty good and it's showing a lot of potential.
• Over on FaceBook I've amassed 88 friends in less than a week, and they're all people I know. That beats the 60 or so I have on MySpace, even after several months.
• Thursday is the student union elections here at Bradford; this year I'm neither standing nor part of anyone's campaign team so I'm helping out on the ballot boxes and with the count. If you're a student at Bradford, please go and vote in it :) .
• I'm still waiting to get a date for my driving test, but we're now concentrating on pure practice sessions ahead of it. I managed to go through 3 hours of lessons without stalling last week and for the most part I'm quite confident about passing the test; I just wish I had a date to work to.

Since I'm usually fashionably late to these sorts of things, it's taken me until today to get myself a profile on Facebook. I've been on Myspace for a while but it seems to be stagnating; Facebook now seems to be 'where it's at', assuming people still use that phrase.

3 hours after joining and I have 23 friends (all people I know either from university, college or just on the internet generally), with many more requests. At this rate I'll easily beat the 60 or so friends I have on Myspace.

Also, this blog is now syndicated over there in my notes, so hello Facebook people. Please don't be scared by the overly technical stuff.

I'm using a cluster machine in the university library, and for some reason the computer's clock only seems to go between 00:00 and 00:10 before going back to 00:00 again. It's as if it's stuck in a post-midnight timewarp.

What's more bizarre is that the date is almost correct (it says 3rd March 2007). Can't think why the clock is stuck like that, but it's a bit annoying.

This might not be popular, as I know some people didn't like it last time, but I'm now including posts from my much-neglected sideblog in the main feed of this site. Unlike last time, they won't appear as a daily digest; instead, each entry will appear as its own item. I can't imagine this being much of a problem based on the amount of posts the sideblog receives now anyway.

Let me know what you think; I've managed to post twice there this week...

It now looks like Hari needs a new graphics card. The extra memory arrived yesterday, as expected, and has made something of a difference to the computer; switching between Warcraft and any other program is instantaneous, whereas it used to take several seconds and result in considerable hard disk noise (presumably Windows swapping data between physical and virtual memory) and aspects of Warcraft, such as navigating around cities and instances is noticeably smoother. But there's no real improvement to the number of frames per second it can manage during general play, which was one of the main aims of the upgrade (the other being preparation for the eventual installation of Windows Vista).