11.25.07
Posted in PC Pain at 9:44 pm by emerym
I wish my daughters iPod had been as easy to get working as ICS with WM5. The Nano may have been returned to the shop if they were still open. We bought it for her birthday the evening before. The small print on the back of the pack was way too small and printed in grey on white. Too small to see the system requirements of XP or Vista.
The Win2K version of iTunes was downloaded and installed. On plugging in the iPod I’m greated by a message saying that a newer version is needed, which of course doesn’t support Win2k. Bother. I eventually get it working on the one XP desktop we have in the office. I gave up trying it on her XP laptop with its USB 1.0. Time to buy a load of RAM and plan some more XP upgrades.
My daughter had an iTunes gift voucher. Easy to turn into music, a video or game, right? Wrong. To create an account to redeem a voucher you need to enter credit card details! Children should be able to create an account without one. It would also help prevent them from accessing any age restricted material. I think I’ll be getting a Pre-pay Mastercard for her iTunes use. I guess there aren’t enough children with iPods or too many are Americans with trusting parents handing over credit cards.
With everything working the 3rd gen iPod Nano is a very impressive piece of equipment. The sound is great, GUI well thought out and responsive. The 320×240 video playback is very good despite the small screen size. My daughter thinks it’s great, shame about the Windows issues. Maybe it’s time to introduce the Apple Mac to the family? That would give us “LAW”. Linux, Apple and Windows 
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Posted in PC Gain, WM PDA Phone at 9:39 pm by emerym
Thanks to Vodafone’s minor OS upgrade and repair of my HTC TyTN I find it’s now got Internet Connection Sharing (“ICS”) installed. I’ve got a USB cable in the rucksack. I plugged it in, told ICS to connect, and wonder what to do next. ipconfig on the PC reports a new IP address and default gateway so I pinged Google and got a reply. Sweet!
I logged into the office remote access portal just to see how well it works over ICS with a 3G connection. The ~6MB Citrix ICA Client for Windows downloaded in a few minutes and I was soon logged in looking at a lab server. I was very surprised at how well it all worked. There was far less latency than I’d expected. It’s no wonder so many carriers are now doing 3G USB Wireless Broadband. They’ve got to recover their 3G license costs somehow, nobody’s doing video calls.
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Posted in Health at 9:36 pm by emerym
“Time to Kill” as the saying goes. Four hours of it.
My daughter is appearing in Panto this year at the Hazlett theater in Maidstone. Today is one of the few remaining rehearsals. With only hourly trains and a 70 minute journey door to door there’s no way I can get home and back in time to do anything useful at home, so I’ve no option but to wait it out.
I walked around the shops for a bit until my fatigue started. It’s not been too bad tolday, but I don’t like being out in busy crowds feeling like the brains under-clocked. Some things work on auto-pilot, but my reactions are a lot slower. I got myself back to the theater, but as parents are not allowed in during rehearsals I have to sit in the ticket lobby of the Exchange
I brought along my old laptop to tinker with, and my daughters old MP3 player now that she’s the happy owner of a 3rd Gen iPod Nano. I’d rather run down a AAA cell than the phone. I should have packed a good book, boy does the time drag by!
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