Fast Glass 2!

Santa's out-of-season helper (Amazon...) brought me some more fast glass for February.

The Olympus m.Zuiko 45mm / f1.8

I Love it.

It's very probably the best lens I've ever owned, although it's a tie between this and the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 for my favourite. With all these primes, my zoom lens use has dropped to near zero...

Oh, and I'm quite pleased with Lightroom 4 as well.

Fast Glass

Anna got a Kindle Fire this year (well chuffed, she was), but Santa brought me fast glass! Very chuffed I am... (and I got a long zoom as well!!!)

Money Saving Expert

Woo hoo - I just saved myself 30 quid:

My old (ie. 18 month old, cost 50 quid, not impressed...) Zyxel wireless access point (used for getting network/internet access to the Humax PVR in the lounge) has died.

So I got an old Linksys wifi router off eBay for about 4 quid including postage, bunged dd-wrt on it, set it up in client bridge mode, and away we go! Freedom to tinker eh!?

RDP

Also this week discovered that I can remote-log-in to my Win 7 PCs using the built-in RDP server, and can even do so from my Android tablet using any number of free RDP clients. Magic!

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Downloaded this earlier in the week, and stuck it on a VirtualBox VM.

First impressions: Microsoft must be feeling very BRAVE...

Firmware

Amazing - Pure have updated the firmware on my Evoke Flow radio again! I suppose the fact they are still on sale has something to do with it, and implies it's still a good product. Anyway, it's pretty much three years old and still getting bug fixes and new features. That's a way to keep customer brand loyalty... Similary, my trusty old Nokia 5800 (which I no longer use) also recently got a significant upgrade, at a similar age point.

If future Windows Phone (8?) ever achieves anywhere near feature parity with circa 2009 Symbian (!!!) I might well go for another Nokia, they do outdo a lot of the generic Android crowd in many ways.

Has this blog fizzled out?

So, over a year with no posts...

Gadgets: I've abandoned Symbian (very sadly, I must say) for Android (very pleased with another HTC again after a few years away, AND got Swype - yay!), got a tablet (hacked software, natch!), hacked the firmware on my Hummy, and acquired numerous other smaller gadgets.

Social networking: I've got a Google+ account, and a Facebook account, and a Twitter account (mainly for competition entries and following stuff). I don't really use any of it much (like this blog...) - I don't really "do" social networks, although I can see that Google+ is more like something I might find useful.

Hey, it's sunny.

Tablets

Talking of Swype, I very much fancy one of these new Samsung Galaxy Tab things. Would be a great replacement for my old Archos 7 which died and went back to its maker after 6 months. But at the rumoured price, the Samsung might not be anywhere near my price bracket, unlike the new Archos 70 Android tablet that was also announced this week. Tempting, but my brief experience with Archos was very mixed good/bad, so maybe not a good idea. Will have to wait and see...

At least Amazon's customer service was mind-bogglingly brilliant in dealing with my busted tablet, in stark contrast to Archos's attitude...

Swype

Just added Swype to my Nokia 5800, from Nokia Beta Labs. Absolutely love it, gives the old phone a new lease of life, it's like magic!

Another Bored Friday Night Post

Got me one of these Archos video tablet thingies (kind've the zeitgeist what with the Apple iPad and all that.) Oh, but it was real cheap from Amazon.

Seems pretty cool thus far. Sort of like an electronic photo frame on steroids. And it runs linux (natch...)

And you can hack it (when the warranty runs out, obviously).

Seems like maybe more useful than a netbook in some ways. You can play games on it, surf the web over wifi, do email, whatever. And a 160GB hdd so it holds plenty of video for those long car journeys.

Statcounter tells me that occasionally someone out of the 6 billion actually reads this stuff. You can see from the number of posts per year that I'm losing the urge to blog, nevertheless... Other means of communicating with people have started to take over, although absolutely NOT Twitter or Facebook etc!

Woo.

New(-ish) Gadgets

I've been playing with new toys...

I got a Pure Evoke Flow Internet/DAB radio for Christmas...
It's great - lively user forum here and it can stream mp3s from my NAS, or PC, or whatever as well - love it!

Then I replaced my long lived and trusty HTC Magician with my first ever Nokia, and first ever Symbian phone, the 5800. It too has lots of user forums, such as here, and so far I am very very pleased with it!

I guess once an "early adopter", always...!

That's all for now - end of bored Friday night post...

coffeecat

:-)

Sharing Videos but not with the Whole World

Following on from the previous post, I've just discovered Vimeo, which is like Youtube ought to be. It is still free, but it allows you to password protect videos that you only want to share with family, say. And it saves your original video files so you can download them again (or other users can if you want). All very slick, and without a lot of the "crud" that seems to have grown on Youtube. It has a 500MB per week limit, and it allows you to do HD video too, and supports 16x9 videos (unlike Youtube...). All in all well worth a look. Sort've like a grown-up Youtube!

Sharing Photos but not with the Whole World

There are absolutely loads of photo hosting sites on the net - mainly free (Picasa, Flickr etc) or cheap (SmugMug etc). Or there's all the web hosting services as well (and lets not forget Amazon S3). And the actual photo sharing sites like Flickr give you nice galleries, printing options, and so on.

But if you want to share photos with, say, family, for free, using a nice gallery, but not share them with the rest of the World, your options are more limited. Most free sites that offer private galleries are effectively social networks, like Multiply, that require your photo recipients to have a userid and be logged in. And frankly, for most people that's just too much hassle to bother.

So I was well pleased recently to discover Photoshelter, which is kind've like Flickr but aimed more at "pros". It's mainly a pay site, but you can get a fully featured account for free, limited only by 50MB storage space. And its huge benefit in the current context is that you can password protect galleries, so that anyone can log in even if they're not a registered user, as long as you've sent them the URL and the password. This fits the bill exactly!

I know Picasa has "private" galleries, but they're not password protected, it's just the old discredited "security by obscurity" thing. I suspect SmugMug may do the feature properly, but then it's not free. So Photoshelter gets my vote.

There's a review of it here.

Sipgate Update

I've been using Sipgate for my VOIP telehone service for a few months now, and they are really very good. Good features, local phone number for free, no line rental, excellent call quality, have never had service unavailable, and still dirt cheap. Definitely a "recommend".

Voip Trouble

Oh dear, after about a year of good service, babble.net seems to have gone bust, taking nearly £2 of my credit with them...

So I've swapped voip provider to sipgate, who are only slightly more expensive (ie. still very cheap), and generally seem more professional, with better tech support etc. Also, I now get (for free on the PAYG deal) my own geographic UK phone number that accepts incoming calls, and works fine both ways with CLID etc. And free voice mail. Looks good so far, too early to report on audio quality, reliability etc.

Email Nirvana

I've now transferred all our email setups completely to gmail/google apps for your domain, and am using their IMAP services as well, rather than POP3. It is all totally brilliant (especially with Thunderbird) Now we can use multiple accounts easily via "traditional" email client software (but across multiple PCs) and webmail, and mobile mail from our phones/PDAs (using the Google Java mail apps) and the whole thing stays automagically synchronised. What's been received, read, sent, deleted, moved, filed, whatever. Brilliant. All mail stays on the server (6GB inbox limit and rising), so no worries with needing to back it up (although, I do still do it weekly, but that's another story, involving POP3 and Jungledisk...). Only thing is you've got to trust Google...

Still also using Bigfoot addresses for some incoming, but it gets routed to Gmail.

Oh, and the spam filtering is really, really good in my experience, too. So I no longer need to use popfile, very good though it was. And all communication with Google is encrypted both ways, which is a bit of a privacy/security bonus (again, you've gotta trust Google though). Obviously if you send unencrypted emails (who doesn't?) then they can still be read by ISPs (though obviously not my ISP!), three letter agencies, four letter agencies, all kinds of people en-route, but hey.

Long Silence Ended, Random Train of Thoughts

Oh dear - no new posts for ages. Well, really, really busy, kinda...

Anyway, I've sort've fallen out with Mozy online storage, but I'm even more hugely into JungleDisk, which really rocks! Now out of beta, but incredibly reasonable licensing terms, lively user forums, responsive developers, cross-platform (Mac and Linux as well as Windows), truly great product (as is Amazon S3 on which it is built, and which now has an SLA to boot! )

Oh, and I got me a 500GB Buffalo LinkStation Live too! Can't recommend it too highly, saved me once already... And it runs Linux - who needs WHS!?

Digital storage, I can't get enough...

Or enough digital gadgets: In the summer I bunged one of these Pioneer DEH-P7900UB USB MP3 player gizmos into my car. Sound quality is maybe not quite up the the old OEM kit, but with a 40GB hdd in the dash, I carry all my music everywhere, and I love it. Led Zep and Nursery Rhymes all in one convenient package.

The car is Nobuaki Katayama's copy of the classic E30, back in their old "Global 10" days. I Still love it. Shame I don't like the new one at all, cos the brand experience is something else. Can't imagine what on earth I'll replace it with.

Oh, and coffee... What I really need now is one of these Bialetti electric jobs, for taking on holiday.

Enough already.

Anna Visits the Farm

Anna makes friends with a lamb for the first time...

Easter Walk Photos

This Picasa web album has a short sequence of piccies I took on a walk this afternoon (one example show below).

From Queen Square

Fun with Online Storage, P2P etc

I've been playing with a few cool tools/services of late: foldershare (free) to sync files between computers over the net (sort've private p2p file sharing), mydatabus for free web-based online storage/backup (free up to 5GB!) - allows public file serving as well. And finally jungledisk, which uses Amazon's totally cool S3 service for online storage (pretty cheap at $0.15 per GB / mo) and appears like a mounted drive on all/any of your computers. And these all work on OSs other than Windows as well, which has gotta be good... Jungle disk is currently free but eventually going to cost a few dollars. All of this is great for saving off-site backups of those precious family photos, videos, documents etc. Oh, and you can encrypt them all for security with axcrypt, so nobody else can pry into your stuff! (Which is free, and open source!)

There are just tons of these kinds of services around, but these ones look like the cream of the crop to me. Although... I wonder if/when Google will come out with the much-rumoured "gdrive" (Project Platypus) which might do all this kind of thing in one package?

Update, April 07 - you can also interact more directly with S3 using free tools like jets3t or s3fox. Which can be very useful. And then with a bit of cunning with a new DNS CNAME you can use S3 to host public files for your website etc.