Got back from vacation today with a massive email overload. I wish Outlook did conversation threading — would have got through the process much quicker. I may push for Google Apps* at work soon…
(*…yes, Google is a client. But I still love Apps).
Category Archives: Technology
Kitted up for vacation
We’re off for a week, driving around the West Country. Thanks to a friend who shall remain nameless, I am equipped with a TomTom One XL with the voice of Patrick Stewart telling me to ‘engage docking procedures’ when I arrive at my destination, or telling me I’m “lost in the beta quadrant” when I make a wrong turn. It should get old, but I think I’m going to be giggling a lot. I’ve also managed to borrow Arvind’s Griffin iPod transmitter and have bought an adaptor for the cigarette lighter so we have double power.
Of course, most of the holiday will be low tech – hills, country, friends, and beer. Can’t wait.
How to get screen captures from videos in windows – Ask Armand
So, when you try to do a screen grab from Windows media player in Windows XP it goes all wonky. Not sure of the exact reason for this (some driver/acceleration issue), but if you:
1) Get your display settings up (right click on desktop / display settings)
2) Go to the “Display Settings” tab
3) Click ‘advanced’
4) Click the ‘troubleshoot’ tab
5) Drag the slider for graphics acceleration down to zero
6) Hit apply
7) Then run the video and hit ‘alt-print screen’ to capture the content of the media player window…
…and it should work! Don’t forget to drag the slider back up after you’re done or you may get some slowdown / display glitches.
Ask Armand
In the 4 weeks since I wrote the post ‘How to fix the cannot connect to Itunes store problem‘ post it has risen to the first page of Google* for the error code that comes up when Itunes has its little hiccup and I’ve had quite a few comments (loads, by this website’s standards) of people that have found it helpful.
So… I’m happy to make it a recurring feature. If people need help on how to beat Windows into submission and make it do the things you want it to, ask me, and I’ll oblige if I can. It’s not just Jack Schofield that is a font of knowledge of these things (I imagine even Jack has to look the odd thing up on the Web), so I’ll help out if I can, and if you get me interesting requests. I’ll imagine I get fewer emails than Jack on this, so if I get interesting questions from around the office they might provide secondary food for thought…
So what are you waiting for? Ask Armand. I’ll do one post a week minimum, assuming I get enough questions…
* I’m amongst other things, a digital PR consultant, so I know that the relative recency of this post helps with its height in the organic rankings. But I’ve seen the traffic and comments come in and seem to have helped a few people with this, so am buying that it’ll stay high for a while — especially as Apple still hasn’t posted the workaround on its own site.
Waiting to upgrade
I’m over 8 months into my latest mobile contract, which means an upgrade is less than a third of a year away, but, unusually for me, I have no idea what my next phone is going to be. Usually at this point in the year, I’m desperate to chuck the old thing in for virtually anything… but this time around, (1) my existing handset, the MDA Touch Plus / HTC Touch Dual has proved remarkably resilient against decay or technological out-innovation and (2) all the new devices I might consider have been stubbornly refusing to include keypads. My current phone has HSDPA, a 2MP camera, Windows Mobile 6, a touchscreen and a keypad. I’d like the successor to have most of the above (I’m more open on operating systems with the launch of Android) PLUS GPS (maybe, see earlier post…), Wifi, a higher resolution camera and maybe even a flash.
Front runners? The HTC HD (not announced on any UK networks yet AFAIK, no keyboard), the T-Mobile G1 (tempting, but can I cope after the pain that was the HTC Tytyn 2 – I need a keypad, not qwerty!) and maybe some variation on the HTC Diamond. Garrh – none are ideal – don’t people like physical keypads on smartphones anymore? I’m hoping that HTC comes out with a successor to the Touch Plus with the enhancements that I’m after. Maybe even one running Android… That would be ace, though sounds like they’ll be banking on the G1’s success for a while…
Any recommendations from anyone out there? How’s the new SE Experia X1? What about the Samsung Omnia? Or should I just stay with my existing phone, try to negotiate a discount on the tariff and hold out for the duration of the economic crises/credit crunch/soufflé deflation of the financial markets? Thoughts on a comment appreciated.
This post was inspired by my learning some new features on the HTC designed skin on Windows Mobile, ‘Touchflo’, that really makes me enjoy using it as a camera too.
Oh – T-Mobile is an agency client, but I don’t know anything you don’t and I couldn’t leak it on here if I did… Consider yourself disclaimed.
Learning to fly drive
I know how to drive, and have held a Malaysian license since 2002. Which means, of course, I’ve forgotten most of the things I need to do to pass a British driving test, and the learning process has begun again – unfortunately, despite being a member of the Commonwealth, someone from the DSA has probably met some Malaysian drivers in the past and so judged that the licenses are not interchangeable with British ones.
It’s been a slightly tedious experience, getting into the habit of doing things that instructors/examiners look for but no sensible driver does (tilt your neck so its obvious you’re checking all the mirrors, for example), but hopefully make me a better driver… if to the benefit of extortionately expensive driving schools. Thanks in no small part to Amanda’s patience, I’m improving quite quickly…
Of course, all this driving has me hankering for a new gadget. When we embark on our tour of the West Country in a few weeks time, I’d really like to have a SatNav product in the car so that Amanda can focus on telling me what I’m doing wrong with my driving, rather than where I’m going… I don’t suppose any of the great SatNav companies fancy loaning a product to a lonely blogger in exchange for a write up of the experience on the 618th most popular technology blog on the Interweb? If I like it, I’ll probably buy it, especially if it persuades Amanda, hater of GPS and lover of maps, that having a satellite navigation system doesn’t take the fun out of driving… There’s a challenge for you.
Ping me in the comments, or at armand [at] division6.co.uk.
Hi Fi Heaven
My birthday’s coming up and my Dad bought me a new hi-fi kit to replace my aging B&W speakers and relatively cheap Cambridge Audio amplifier as a present.
I’m now the proud and happy owner of a Roksan Kandy L3 Integrated Amp and some beautiful Rosenut B&W CM1 speakers. As someone who’s always enjoyed good music through hi-fi (thanks to a good induction as a child with my Dad, who used to take me around Singapore listening to speakers that cost tens of thousands of pounds, none of which we were ever going to buy, but y’know, it’s good to have a benchmark), it’s wonderful to have the system in place.
The only thing missing from my hi-def living room now is a Blu-Ray player… Hmm…
GPhone
They launched the T-Mobile G1 today (they being T-Mobile, Google, HTC and everyone else, but also the T-Mobile team across the office from me).
It looks pretty awesome, the screen is really responsive, the long touch thing is cool, the UI is lovely, the browser is nice, the screen is pretty.. it’s generally cool. Register your interest here.
I want:
– one handed texting
– pre-emptive dialling
– video messaging
…and I think it needs Exchange support (much as I think Google Apps is awesome — and yes, they’re a client too) for those business users. But maybe someone can write an ‘app’ for the phone to provide this functionality…
How to fix ‘cannot connect to Itunes store’ problem on a Mac
I originally posted a needless rant here, and decided in the interests of being constructive and not wanting to look like a ranty loon forever, to take down the post and instead write about how I addressed a recent frustration I had when troubleshooting my brother’s Macbook (much easier than editing my original, slightly inane, post). I’m a PC user so apologies if the following is unbelieavably obvious…
So the problem was: iTunes and Software update would not connect despite the fact the internet was otherwise working.
To fix the issue, change your location to the profile for your local wireless network instead of ‘automatic’.
It was incredibly simple but when I originally Googled whatever the exact error message was I couldn’t find an answer. So hoping this helps anyone who has experienced the same issue, and I’ll live with the embarrassment if the reason I needed help with this was that most Mac users find this as natural as uninstalling an application by dragging it to the recycle bin…
Thanks to Rich whose comment on my original rant was reasonable and helpful.
Advent 4211 / MSI Wind: UMPC me happy
I’ve spent a not insiginificant portion of the last six months or so debating with myself as to whether I should buy one of the emerging class of ‘Netbook’ PCs – subnotebook laptops in a 7-10inch casing powered by a low-energy Intel processor and running very minimal sofware and hardware. The bare minimum you need to be an effective Netizen.
Given how much of my day is spent advocating the move to the cloud for one client or another, and / or discussing the increasing mobility of the average man with various media, it seemed only appropriate that I found a way to be more online in more places,
And so, after much headwrangling, and after reading mediocre reviews of the Asus 1000H and the Lenovo Ideapad S10 (to be fair, only bad previews of the latter), I’ve finally bought the cheapo, rebadged MSI Wind that is the Advent 4211. Thank you PC World for saving me some cash.
The machine, needless to say, is pretty awesome. I’m typing this blog post on it and my usual touchtyping pace isn’t being noticeably diminished by the 85% keyboard, the screen is bright, crisp and clear, and the machine outperforms my (admittedly aging) old IBM Thinkpad T40 (vintage: 2004). There are, of course, a few niggles….
1) It shipped with a wireless driver that randomly disconnected from my Access Point. Finding one involved navigating the slightly confusing MSI website, as obviously Advent hasn’t set up a useful one of its own. The very useful MSIWind.net user forums proved invaluable in addressing this issue.
2) The trackpad is a bit small, and I haven’t worked out if its possible to disable tap-to-click (which I gather will be annoying in time) and it doesn’t do side scrolling — which is very annoying.
3) I’m still getting used to a 1024*600 screen. You lose so much real estate! Given that I’m normally working on twin displays this takes a little adjusting. Chrome is well suited to this little laptop, or Firefox with F11.
4) The battery life seems significantly less than the advertised 3 hours if you’re using Wifi. Or maybe Pokerstars just drains more juice than your average app. Or maybe I haevn’t figuried out the mediocre PC World software and power-management features…
Generally, however, its a story of so far so good. I’d recommend the MSI Wind over most of the current generation Netbooks I’ve seen (though both Samsung and Toshiba’s offerings looked interesting on Engadget…) and I just hope they take a while to move the dual core Atom processors into a new generation of Netbooks so I get a brief window in which I feel that I’ve got the best and shiniest tech.
Big picture? I think UMPCs are going to continue to be a big thing for the next couple of years. The combination of easy portability, battery life, compelling price point and general full featuredness of them is remarkable. We’ll see more given away with laptops, more sold in major retail chains, and more people sporting 3G models on the trains. We’ll see more manufacturers churning out carboncopies of each others Netbooks, we’ll see differentiation in some software layouts (especially for the Linux variants) and battery lives and design (and not much else). It’s a connected future, awwww yeah, and there’s no getting away from it.