TooMuchGreen

It took a couple of weeks (I had to move house) but it looks like I’m at a happy stage with the 1.6GHZ Atom Silverthorne  Dell Mini 12, it’s sociably streaming the BBC iPlayer and running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala sharp, clear and snappy at 1280×800. Initial dabbling had me set with Jaunty 9.04 which although more than workable for server development wasn’t delivering the multi-use laptop  operating system interface I was after. The GMA workaround under Jaunty didn’t accommodate iPlayer too well and was giving jerky and disjointed playback, not what you want whilst chilling out to the ocean calm of Attenborough’s “Life”.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:09 mins)

Due to a change of circumstance I eBayed the Dell Mini 9 last week. Don’t get me wrong, it had been, and was still, superb as a cheap little Ubuntu dev box to SSH into however now I’m “on-site” at the Leeds office certain days of the week it just wasn’t a viable option to work on all day, cool as it was that mini keyboard was just too small for anyone larger than a woodland elf.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:60 mins)

Apple were slated by a few people post the September 9th event for not releasing anything innovative enough. All considered I feel this was a touch harsh but I do realise demand of the gadget hungry innovators from the world of media tech doesn’t get any easier to satisfy so I suppose it was only to be expected.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:34 mins)

My good friend and fellow tech head Adrian has been upgrading his home network (substantially) and dropped an open inquiry from his blogsite the other day for user comments about their own setups, as I’m what you may call globally mobile at the moment I thought it might be fun to give a quick breakdown of my travelling tech.

Two years ago I gave up the corporate shirt and tie, sold my house, eBayed all my possessions and now operate online from a suitcase and “carry on bag” from whatever Craigslist apartment I’ve rented in whichever country I happen to be in at the time, and it all works remarkably well (the tech travels in the carry on bag).  Read more... (estimated reading time 3:19 mins)

There’s a continuing storm of ever increasing paranoia circulating our beaten up world these days, who’s watching who, who’s controlling who, who’s doing what to whoever, where, how and with what and who’s being doing all the above for years….and why, as such we’re all pretty “right on” with regard to safeguarding our personal identities from each other and our personal freedom from big brother, or so we’d like to believe.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:52 mins)

There’s obviously quite a bit of recycled information on the internet and this review is in part just that, as well as also being part speculation and part *sum* of it’s parts, hopefully (or at least partly anyway)….err….yes….

The Apple Tablet then, hopeful geek myth or concept changing portable shortly to emerge from the reality defining vortex of Steve Jobs designer distortion field? Personally I’d like to think the latter and there’s plenty of evidence stacking up around development of such a product to reinforce an imminent release, including a reported suicide due to a lost prototype (or was it indeed industrial espionage gone wrong?), whatever the story things are getting quite serious about what seems to be just an overgrown iPod Touch….or is it?  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:27 mins)

In the absence of any more imminent Ubuntu releases for a while today I’ve moved back to my other source  of amusement, the iPod Touch, and in particular mobile ‘Document Management’.

Today I’ve discovered the Mobile Studio app from the guys at PixioTech, but what is it, why is it so useful, how does it work, what can you use it for, and how come I’ve only just discovered it?

What is it? Well, it’s an iPhone/iPod Touch app (obviously) and although it’s not free at £1.19 I don’t think it’ll break the bank.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:57 mins)

I know I rattle on about the advantages of using the cloud for application delivery and yes, I do believe it’s the future of computing as we know it (once the interweb catches up with our needs that is) however for complete integration as a storage repository for our larger bits and bobs of data cloud dumping is presently just too slow and too expensive.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:56 mins)

I’ve been totally getting into my TIDE project whilst in Costa Rica, really loving the craziness of having a waterproof camera and continually congratulating myself for buying the Pentax W60, that was until it broke last week.

Ironically (and annoyingly) it’s all still waterproof and functional, the problem is the screen has packed in so you can’t see what your taking or adjust the settings & modes, not ideal. I could get by (just) as it’s presently set to ‘AUTO’ which is *OK* for a selection of ocean shots as it’s a somewhat wild and random activity anyway (which is most of the fun..!), however it would be nice to be able to choose the underwater mode or make a movie.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:23 mins)

I set up a workgroup print pool for the surf camp office today, and of course being Mac based as they are now it was a breeze, mostly, until I tried to get the shitty old XP box to play too.

The camp has moved over to a predominant Mac base in the admin office (wisely) which makes everything not only more funky but inherently more stable and easy to work with (apart from the lone shitty PC and Rafas grotesque laptop) as such the print share from Joes 20″ iMac was shooting sheets of A4 out from Larrys Gmail in no time, all thanks to Bonjour.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:14 mins)