Today I got this drive from Tesco, £69.99. Not bad for a hard drive, and the reviews I had been reading at Amazon were very impressive.

I was under the impression that it was going too be a Samsung drive, but Windows states the device name to be “WDC WD5000BEVT”, which for those who don’t know, means its a quite nice Western Digital drive. I haven’t opened the case yet to find out but will in the future and update this post.

Anyway, after plugging in its power supply and the USB port into my 4 port hub it was away. No issues, drive name formatted as “Iomega HDD” on the NTFS file system.

One great thing about this drive was that it came with a license key to some OK backup software, as the main role of the drive is to backup my laptop. EMC Retrospect Express is the name of the software, and its just finished backing up my 500GB internal drive (150Gb used so far!). This took about 6 hours, quite a long time but its done now.

I kind of like the software, but having actually looked through the settings it doesn’t run as a background process and i don’t think it can replace a file in situ from a backup copy. Which is a bit crap and I might have to buy some more bloody software!

Other than that, good HDD so far. It runs a little hot, but I’ve got it in its stand so it shouldn’t melt the desk. I will update this post if anything changes/when I bin the software.

Using twitterfeed I am now fully connected into twitter, with new tweets coming up when I make a post. Maybe I will get more exposure, maybe I wont! If I do get more clicks I hope my AdSense ads come up, I cant seem to get them working.

Hmmm, maybe another round of emailing and getting nowhere with the giant is needed. Bah.

I hate this! I got passed a call from an Indian fellow stating that my computer was running slow. Now as I know a thing or two about computers, I thought it would be good to toy with this person!

Firstly, he said we have Microsoft Certified Technicians to help me get my PC running faster again. Oh right? “I am one, what do I need you for?”. I’m not an MS Certified techie, but if I was I think it would have been courteous for the gentleman to say “have a nice day” and leave me alone! He now tells me to turn on my PC and he will show me why its running slow. Well, if he knows my PC is slow, why doesn’t he know its already running!

After a little bit of arguing about why I need to listen, he asked what my OS was and then he must have got out the sheet for Vista to guide me through the process. “Press the windows key, located on the bottom left of the keyboard.” Oh rly?? To him I’m a MCT, so surely I should know where the frecking windows key is! Next he gets me to load the run dialogue box. Then he said “type e.v.e.n.t.v.w.r” Getting that out of him took about  a minute, as he said every word with its phonetic, which were wrong but I couldn’t be bothered to correct him!

Once I’d done this, the UAC box opened (yes I still have it enabled, it doesn’t annoy me). Now the idea of the User Account Control baffles the man, he doesn’t understand that a normal user would get stuck by this because its asking for permission to run a program, some old people might be a bit baffled by this! If he had Microsoft techs writing this script then they should know some users will have this enabled by default.

Once we got past that bit, oh yeah your going to show me some log entries that show that something closed unexpectedly. Which he then did! He said keep scrolling, there will be something wrong. There was, according to him. Some warnings about things that didn’t run properly, this is what he wanted to hear!! Then I said that these warnings don’t affect a PC’s speed and to go away I know what I’m doing.

Then I pressed the nice red button and hung up.

Thinking back I really wish I had kept going with the call, to see what the person was selling. He must have been selling me something to ‘fix’ my issues, because there has to be some money in it somewhere! My worry is that a lot of people will get baffled by this, because a lot of PC’s do run slow over time, so its a safe bet that the fellow on the phone will find someone who is not tech savvy and will fall into the trap. The gullible and the elderly is who I’m worried about with this.

Also, I think its a little bit misleading, because someone lies to gain entry into your home via your phone and trying to tell you that your PC isn’t working in order to sell you something you don’t need. If only these people understood English…

Most blogs and tech review sites say that iPhone battery life is appalling and if you want to survive the day you need to charge at mid day.

My iPhone can last 2 days, just about. How do I do it?? Use SMS and don’t listen to the iPod too much. To be honest, don’t be a loner and sit and listen to music all day and surf the internet constantly on Wi-Fi.

If you don’t like how long the iPhone batter lasts, change your usage habits!

Some months ago, the BBC decided they would update their weather website to look more ‘modern’. I must say, the design was slightly dated but a user could access ALL information required very easily. 24 hour forecast, with temperature, wind, humidity, pollen etc at a click of a button. Users could even get a nice five day at a click of a button.

Now, we are presented with this. (Click to view larger)

I really wish I had a screen shot of the old layout, because I thought it was a lot better. Now, I don’t know if I’m being stupid, but I find it really annoying and un-intuitive navigating this website. So much so I’ve been sent elsewhere, namely “weather.co.uk”, the Weather Channels UK website.

Now, I have this…

Look at that! Type in postcode (which BBC didn’t recognise even though the code change has been in place for at least a year or more!) and its away. Click “tomorrow” and oh yeah, we have tomorrows weather and a very nice organised breakdown.

Its exactly what I want from a weather report, instantly I can see its going to be warm again!

If you want to see for yourself, go to:

BBC Weather

The Weather Channel UK

Please comment if you feel the same way! I have emailed feedback to the BBC about this design change and got no reply!

I’ve been using iPhone OS 3.0 since about 18:00 GMT! I was on the check update button right form the launch time and was the first among people I knew to actually be able to download it via iTunes!

There are many blogs covering the various features, but I think MobileMe gets a bad wrap. I haven’t really seen “Find My iPhone” talked about much, and it’s a great little feature. I’m guessing they took the idea from a jail broken app which did kind of the same thing but failed. The GPS locate gets it to within about 30m, which isn’t at all bad! The message alert and tone is very useful! Its quite loud and can be heard a decent distance away.

Another interesting upgrade which wasn’t really talked about is the ability for MobileMe subscribers to upload images to their  galleries with great ease. Before the 3.0 update, pressing “Send to MobileMe” brought up the Mail app with your photo attached in it with an email address that would sent it to your account. This was an ok way around it, but for something which Apple control, a bit ad hoc. However, now its much more flash!

When you press the “Sent to MobileMe” button now, you are presented with the above window. Which lets you select the gallery you want to put it in (as you can see, I don’t really use mine to its full potential!) and lets you add a description and title. Within seconds (Wi-Fi) the photo was online, and you are presented with a link to preview it from Mobile Safari (which I am VERY impressed with! My new web development fly’s in it!)

Very promising application there, and I hope that the iDisk application that is in the pipeline (http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3g-s/more-features.html, near the bottom) lives up to my expectations and blows the other apps out of the water. Apologies to them but I really don’t get on well with them.

In light of the changes to the Church of England proposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, which including praying for the CEO’s of Google and other popular figures, one friend came up with this as a suggestion!

“Our Google who art on servers, a verb be your name, your knowledge come, your googling be done, on earth as on the internet.

Give us today our daily searches.

Forgive us our typos, as we forgive those who typo against us.

Save us from the wrath of blogging

and deliver us from Microsoft.

For the internet, the knowledge, and the indexing are yours now and for ever.” Matthew Farmer, AKA Legend.

This is not what you want to see when you load up iTunes on both computers once the files have been synced.

Thank the lord for the plethora of backup files that WL Sync makes every time it syncs iTunes. I managed to load up the last one from earlier in the evening and it was all ok. But If I hadn’t have found that file, I would have to import every song I own again, manually.

So, as of this day, screw Windows Live Sync, hello Allway Sync. http://allwaysync.com/

It seems to work well, a traditional LAN based sync service. Very nice as I can plug in my work backup USB stick and it will auto sync to it. There is much more to it and will probably review it once I’ve got it set up.

I previously wrote about how Live Sync was very very good. I haven’t tried many applications for syncing, but the integration with Live ID and the background syncing worked well for my uses (backing up and copying files to and from laptop to pc).

All was good, until I got a message come up one day while editing a website. “The folder “blah” has more than 20,000 files in it, so we wont sync it anymore”. Now, the service allows 20 folders with 20,000 files to be synced. This sounds like a lot of files right?? Not to someone like me! Because the service looks at the amount of files, it doesn’t matter whether the file is 1kb or 1gb in size. As most html files don’t go above 15kb mark, this seems silly.

It sounds like they were thinking along the lines of most popular computer usage, storing music files and photos, which can be about 4-10mb in size (1000’s of times larger than my html/asp files). This is no use for more advanced computer users who want to backup their data as well as carry it around to where ever they want to go.

Adam’s solution: Use internal LAN while at home or on the same network as the computers which have the 20,000+ file folder to sync the files. This way the data doesn’t have to fly over the internet to get to the machine sitting by your feet. While at work or out of the LAN, queue up the files to sync when you get home.

Although, there may be 20,000 files to be synced over the internet, but each file isn’t changing at the exact same time! This means the bandwidth being used isn’t that great, its just a relatively small lookup table being queried every 10mins.

I think the method of using the wired/wireless local area networks that most homes/businesses have these days would be a great improvement on the technology. Microsoft already own a application that is solely built around this. “SyncToy”, which I talked about below. Combining these services would be of great use to a lot of people, and would make backing up locally and syncing files while on your home network much better as you wouldn’t be using up your allotted ISP bandwidth for that month.

Quite a long ramble, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out, and I don’t have a degree in computer science! (Yet!)