June 2007 Archives

The people from Virgin came and went (in just over half an hour, as it happens, and they turned up early) and so Hari and I now finally have internet, a phone line and more than 5 TV channels. The phone and internet seem to be okay, but some of the channels (namely BBC1, 2, News 24 and ITV) are a bit flaky so I'll be ringing Virgin up about them on Monday - the sound and picture breaks every few seconds, a bit like Freeview does when you don't have a very strong signal.

Hari is now spending a couple of weeks at her parents' house down south, and I popped over last night to see them. Since Virgin Trains haven't followed GNER's lead and put Wifi on their trains, I decided to experiment with using Google Reader offline, using Google Gears. It works quite well, although you can only view the contents of feeds and not anything peripheral to them, so you don't get to see any of the embedded images or videos. It's also only possible to read those feeds which provide full text (like this one) - you can't click through to read the rest of the article if the author has chosen to merely provide excerpts. Nor can you add new feeds or unsubscribe from existing ones.

While I can see offline storage being useful in a few cases like this, with mobile internet becoming ever more pervasive it's likely to be largely unnecessary in a few years time. I could, for example, have used the internet via my phone using Bluetooth (though I've no idea of the settings I need so I've never tried), and other train operators like GNER already offer Wifi on their trains.

Since I last posted:

• My asthma is all better - I don't even have the cold symptoms anymore.
• Our gas card arrived (a day after I called up for it) so we now have hot water, central heating and a working cooker.
• Virgin confirmed that they're coming to install cable this Saturday afternoon.
• I bought a new router to share the internet between the computers - a Netgear WGR614, the same model my dad has (but we paid considerably less)
• We bought a double mattress, for our currently matress-less double bed, though no date for delivery yet.
• I went hiking around Grassington on Sunday - was nice to get out after all the moving last week.
• And I completely forgot about Fathers' Day.

This week I'm working as much as I can to make up for last week, although I'm taking long lunch breaks so that I can use the internet. So if you send me any emails in the afternoon you'll know why you won't get a response until the following lunchtime.

What do you get if you cross an asthamtic, with lots of dust, residual pet hairs, a cold and some damp weather?

The answer: An emergency trip to the doctor, 2g of oral steroids and one very weasy Neil. Thankfully the steroids are doing their job, and I'm feeling quite a bit better, but I still have a very low peak flow and my chest is tighter than it should be. But it should get better very soon.

The good news is that Hari and I have (seemingly) passed the background checks for the new house and we've signed the contract and picked up the keys. We're moving Hari in tomorrow, and some of my stuff will go too; however as we're well behind on packing we won't have time to move all of my stuff tomorrow. We were waiting for some storage bags to come from Tesco, which we were expecting on Saturday but didn't come until yesterday lunchtime, so packing was mostly on hold until then.

While the stress of getting a house is over, it now means I have the stress of changing all the bills and utilities. I live with two other people in my current house who are both staying on, so I have to transfer control of the gas, electric, phone and internet bills to them, and then set up new accounts in the new house. I also need to get things like the TV license transferred and the insurance changed and renewed. Fun, fun, fun.

For phone and internet we're going with Virgin Media, rather than BT and PlusNet. It's mostly an economical decision as we can get TV, internet and phone for £21/month for the first year, whereas internet alone from PlusNet will cost us £22/month - we need their premier package for the extra data transfer allowance. Though we're only going for Virgin's basic TV package, which is essentially what is already available on Freeview, it does mean we avoid the lousy DVB-T reception that Bradford currently suffers from.

As for other geeky stuff - because that's what you're interested in, isn't it? - the smaller of the two bedrooms will become the study and will house Hari's XCcube and my MacBook. The Mac Mini will probably make its way into the main bedroom as a compact media centre, and the living room will have the big TV, standalone DVD player, VCR (yes, we still have one, even though it's almost 20 years old) and cable set-top box. I'll also need to invest in a new router, since the one I currently own only works with ADSL connections, but it means we can take a look at some of the draft-N Wifi systems if they're affordable.

Safari? On Windows? Didn't see that one coming.

While I'm still sticking firmly with my beloved Firefox, I welcome the extra competition for browsers. It now means that Windows users have choices beyond Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer (and their derivatives like Flock, Maxthon, Seamonkey and so on).

If you use Safari on OS X already then there are some goodies in store. Safari 3 uses a new build of WebKit, which means you get niceties like:

• Resizable text areas
• Rich text edit on sites like Gmail
• Inline browsing of PDF files

It doesn't, at least for now, support things like Extended Validation SSL certificates or 256-bit SSL, and still offers the insecure SSL version 2 which has been phased out in Firefox and Internet Explorer. It also insists on calling feeds 'RSS' - while it does support Atom, it still uses the blue 'RSS' icon when one is available. And, at least on 10.4 Tiger, it still has the brushed metal appearance and not the new look that applications like iTunes have adopted recently. Though the screenshots of Safari 3 on 10.5 Leopard suggest that the Leopard version will have the new look.

Those of you who read up on Mac software may well know that Parallels Desktop has been updated to version 3.0. It's not a free upgrade but those with version 2.x can buy the new version for a reduced price - I paid around £20 but the price has gone up since.

While it introduces some nice stuff for Windows users - ability to right-click on any file in OS X or Windows and have it open in an application on the other operating system, and hugely improved 3D performance - there's also some improvements for those of us running Linux as guest OS in OS X.

Firstly Ubuntu is now on the list of supported distributions. This isn't huge - you've always been able to run Ubuntu as 'Other 2.6 kernel' - but it's nice to see it recognised. But Parallels also now provide Parallels Tools for Linux (like the tools that exist for Windows) which makes the experience of running Linux in OS X much nicer.

You don't get the fancy coherence mode, like in Windows, but you'll find that the Linux desktop now fits the window without scrolling in windowed mode, and should appear as proper full screen in full screen mode without the need to configure it - a welcome feature for those of us with widescreen computers as you don't get the thick black borders around the desktop. Also, you can move the mouse in and out of the window without needing to capture and release the keyboard and mouse, so it feels much more natural.

Since running Windows is what Parallels is most used for, it's understandable that most of the improvements are there, but it's also nice to see some improvements for Linux too. Let's hope for Coherence in future release.

With a bit of luck, Hari and I will be picking up the keys for our new place today - we're well into packing stuff although there's still lots to do. One of Hari's current housemates is donating his old computer, which he no longer needs and doesn't want to sell, mainly because it's rather old and wouldn't sell for much and hasn't got a monitor or keyboard (and isn't able to take it for recycling). So we're taking it.

Except I don't actually know what to do with it.

The computer has an 800Mhz processor, 30 GB hard drive and 32 MB graphics. It's recent enough to have 2 USB ports and an internal modem, but not recent enough to have a network socket. It also comes with not one, not two, but three optical drives - a CD-ROM drive, a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM drive. I have no idea what operating system it has but I'd imagine it'll be Windows 98.

The lack of a network socket means its usefulness is somewhat limited, but adding one isn't going to be difficult. Even then, I'm unsure what it can be used for. Its hard drive is a bit too small for a network server, and to make it into a router would require adding 2 network cards and a Wifi card if we wanted that as well. Furthermore, if it was a router it would probably have to go in the living room and I'd prefer not to have a big beige box there if possible - I'd rather have my Mac Mini, given the choice, or preferably a dedicated router which we'll probably need to buy. A dedicated router would also use up less electricity, seeing as it'll be on 24/7 essentially.

I can get an old CRT monitor for it and I'm sure I can pick up a cheap keyboard from somewhere so it won't cost much to make it into a decent computer system, but I can't imagine there'd be much demand for a computer of that vintage if I were to sell it. Hari and I between us already have 3 computers - my MacBook and Mac Mini, and her XCcube - so we don't need another system really. So what would you lot do?

Some life news for you - me and Hari have just put a deposit down on a flat to rent from next week. This means that we'll move from the 'dating' phase to the 'co-habitation' phase.

We're still yet to sign the contracts and may be subject to credit checks/references etc. but hopefully we'll pick the keys up in a few days time.

Here's a meme by the way of NRT, whereby you gleam a list of the top 10 most-played artists from iTunes (or similar), and then answer various questions about them.

WeirdConverter is a fun little site to waste time on. As well as letting you convert from feet to inches, and metres to yards, it lets you use units such as 'height of Empire State Building' and 'Giraffe's Neck'.

For example, my house in Bradford, and my parents' house in York, are around 10830 small intestines apart, and I weigh about the same as 166 cans of coke. I'm also about as tall as 17 human tongues.

[Via BoingBoing]

Okay, now I'm not only on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Last.fm, but I'm now on Twitter too. I should really stop being a sucker for these things.

....Oh go on then, add me as a friend, you know you want to.