Mostly lemon based

Category: Computing

Computer problems

  • Fixin’ to kludge, again. (Geekery)

    Dunno why I post the ‘geekery’ warning, I mean, it’s on here. It’s going to be house, car, computing or NHS. Music is relegated to DBJ, on the rare occasions I get enough time to do that. Well, honestly, if I did better with my time management there’d be plenty of time, I suppose. But anyhow.

    So, a few days back, the post arrived containing the very, very cheap drive I picked up to commence moving stuff to the media server. See, the pain of the number of CD-Roms and CD-R/Ws and DVD drives I’ve killed ripping media to the media server means that ripping media stays happily away from my laptop’s superdrive. No, this ‘Sony’ (Blu-Ray) external drive is as close as the disks are coming.

    And I set to, ripping. First up was a few Blu-Rays. Only teensy problem? They’re 32Gigs… which may tax the network, although I’ve not tested that yet. Going to, though. Did try and downconvert them using Handbrake to smaller files (say, 5 or 6 gig). Not so much of the happening, there. The laptop reported it was going to take 28 hours. So I ditched that idea and transferred the file to the media server, thinking, it can take as long as it likes, I’ll just queue the buggers up. Nope, because after reserving a bit over a gig of memory (the machine only has half a gig) and using….errr…all of it…and asking for more, Linux says ‘No way asshole’ and [Killed] it.

    Just fed the athlon xp a 32gig mkv blu-ray rip, not sure it's impressed.

    Still, it was only managing 0.4fps by that stage, which might take a while.

    Anyhow, ignoring that problem I ripped one of the newer DVDs… and then discovered a little bugget. The VMP74 says it’s playing the subtitles, but there’s a distinct lack of subtitley goodness kicking around. I’ve checked – the file plays fine on VLC, so the subtitles are there. I’ve tried ripping the subtitles to a separate (VobSub) file, which isn’t working either. I’m just trying converting the subtitles to .srt format, which I know has worked before (but is somewhat untidy, solution wise), but should actually be working (which is what I’m going to do now) so won’t know until later if that’s worked.

    One day I shall have a beautiful technological solution to these many little problems that shall not consist of sticking more duct tape over a number of other kludges. But not, it would seem, today.

  • More techery geekery

    So, I have so far failed in my quest to lay my hands on a Slim Devices slimp3 (or any of the later Squeezebox with a VFD display). And so it has come to pass that I have spent a few (literally £3) on a new microSD card with which will allow me (hopefully) to put new firmware on the crappy Superpad 2. My initial impressions of the Superpad were that it was limited by Android. It is. Android 2.2 (I thought it ran 2.0, but it’s 2.2) is just not very exciting. Also, Android has the irritation of applications that are installable only on specific devices (despite not apparently using specific features of those devices). It’s also limited because it can only install free, not paid applications. All of this makes it a bit crap.

    The touch screen (resistive, not capacitive) is somewhat vague, meaning that misclicks are a bit of a common occurrence (believe me, I’ve recalibrated the ass of it, trying to coax it to work more reliably). And the screen, whilst an adequate resolution, is not the nicest display. It’s got a bit of a light streak in one corner, and is not hugely bright.

    Despite all this, the audio decoder hardware is actually somewhat better than that on the Viewsonic box.

    And it means you don’t have to have the telly on to listen to music, although it will require more finicking with the setup of mediatomb (the slimp3 would have used squeezebox server, which I was playing with, with some success). Which is nice.

    And so, a bit of googlefu (not really very much fu, to be honest. More like a teensy bit of googling) lead me to discover that there is a community created update for the firmware (the update firmware option on the device brings up ‘err 301’ before failing), but you have to have a microSD to achieve such a thing. So a microSD’s been ordered, and will hopefully arrive shortly.

    And then shall begin the removal of audio and video media (with the exception of vinyl and shellac, which is special) from the lounge. Of course, this does make us more reliant on the media server, so perhaps I should take steps to back that up too. Thankfully, it runs linux and is thus relatively easy.

  • Post nights geek

    …I started this post while I was on nights, so…err… yeah, make of that what you will. Now I’m sleep deprived (or depraved) instead.

    So, whilst I’m starting to poke at my audit with sticks whilst I’m still on nights, I’m also having a toy with the concept of ceasing to have CDs and DVDs around the house. I’m not quite at the stage where I trust digital media in the way that, well, I trust little bits of plastic in which audio data is stored. But I’m quite honestly very done with DVDs. Or more accurately with unskippable, tedious PSAs about how I’m the spawn of satan if I were to have illegally downloaded a film.

    Whatever my personal opinions on that, sticking an irritating unskippable PSA on the matter in my face when I’ve just PAID FOR THE DAMN DISK, well, it annoys me.

    And then there’s the award winner, one of the millenium trilogy disks that won’t let you even skip the trailers. The fracking trailers are unskippable.

    So, I finally ordered a cheap Blu-Ray/DVD/CD-Rom with which to extract the data from these disks. I didn’t want to use my laptop’s drive because last time I did extensive data ripping I upset several CD-Writers / CD-Rom drives. By upset I mean they died spectacularly.

    So, cheap external reader it is.

    As a component of this I’ve been looking at solving the audio playing problem somewhat, well, better. At the moment the little Viewsonic box does an adequate if unstellar job of playing music. It lacks depth* and feels a bit feeble. Also, to use it requires the telly to be on, which, frankly is an unsatisfactory solution.

    So I’ve been looking for a audio-only, self contained media player.

    My ideal is the rather ancient, but also rather nice slimp3 from Slim Devices. These, however, are rather uncommon. Irritatingly, one went on ebay for not-much-more than I’d bid, then someone listed one for more than twice the sale price of the one I didn’t win.

    I’ve also considered later versions – the various early Squeezeboxes, and a Squeezebox classic.

    I’ve also considered an O2 Joggler – which is quite a nice looking bit of kit. No VFD display on that though, so less pretty points.

    Then it occured to me that I’ve still got some other bits of kit kicking around. There’s the illustrious iPaq 3660, circa 2001. That’s probably the nicest bit of kit, but it does lack WiFi. I’m thinking that I’ve got a PCMCIA sleeve for it though. So there’s that. The only problem is it runs PocketPC 2002. That’s the latest update it’ll run, it can’t run any later versions, which is a bit sad. It will run Familiar Linux. Except Familiar Linux is not available ’til October, for some obscure reason.

    So I decided that I don’t want to spend money for no good reason, and I thought it would be good to use the SuperPad III. Off I went to find a decent UPnP client that’s free and in the android store. Whilst I’d happily pay for it, the Superpad III doesn’t do paid apps. Unfortunately, the free app looks to be somewhat shonky, and the paid-ad-supported-limited-free version of another app which does appear to work and is *way* faster, and is quite pleasant to use has some really irritating limitations in the free version.

    However, conceptually it does work. Indeed, even the sluggish free version after a bit of fiddling worked reasonably well. Which means that this can be done for no cost**. The Viewsonic box plays HiDef media rather well, and the Android tablet plays audio adequately. Which means that when the drive arrives it will be time to sell the region free DVD player and the dead Blu-Ray. Which means no more disk hunting and a much better solution for audio and video. Yay :)

    * in a wholly pretentious faux audiophile way.
    ** although just to wind me up the overpriced Slimp3 is back on ebay at the price I suggested I’d buy it for. However, the guy wants £15 quid for shipping a small metal box. I presume it will be hand delivered by a unicorn.

  • That special hell (caution, moderate geekery ahead)

    There’s a moment as you’re hodging together archaic, or at least well obsolete technology that you think ‘oh ah, maybe using new stuff would be nice’. So, the garage security (and music) system is to be made from bits that if someone half-inches them will not cause me too much distress. Thus, the 8 year old PC (which for some reason takes several attempts to POST, but does it all by itself and has done it the same for at least several years), the freecycle 1280×1024 LCD monitor*, the keyboard sporting a handy XT/AT switch (no, not a nice IBM clicky keyboard, a Tandon knockoff)*, a PS/2 mouse*, some of those dinky little plastic speakers you used to get and connect to your ‘puter* and a WiFi dongle that was designed to work with a G3 Mac. There’s also a £3 night-vision camera, a webcam**, and soon a second somewhat better webcam. It runs Linux on a 200gig hard disk.

    Getting it running using this shonky heap of hardware has actually proven to be very easy, if a little slow. Ubuntu went on in a hitchless fashion. Motion and the handy graphical config utility kMotion went on smoothly. kMotion has some rather irritating quirks that limit Motion’s function with it***, but the handyness of the instantly viewable webpage showing multiple cameras makes for niceness. In the end, a back up utility that basically writes a CRON job which runs every 3 minutes and updates a permanently stored backup of images on a remote machine kinda made up for the bit that I couldn’t do with Motion.

    So all that works. The cheap camera can’t be used for motion detection because it sends corrupt images every few seconds and they trigger the motion detection, and it was essentially permanently recording video.

    But it’s handy for seeing what’s going on in there, so it can stay.

    And then we get to the network.

    The G3 dongle? That works fine. Drivers picked it up no problem.

    Then we get to extending the network down to the garage. I have an aged PCI 102.11b802.11b (‘scuse the thinko) network card in the media server, it’s not used because it has a nice wired connection. I would use it, but the drivers struggle to make the benighted thing work at all. It’s never been reliable. So I asked John if his venerable collection of stuff included any spare wifi kit. Didn’t have to be new, or shiny.

    He pulled out a router and a WAP box. John rocks.

    It turned out that contrary to initial thoughts, the router does not include a WiFi component. It’s just a router. But that’s handy, because the little dinky 4 port 100baseT hub that I swear is hiding in the house, is doing a damn good job of hiding. Really damn good.

    I have been through a lot of boxes today, and it’s stayed well hidden.

    So I set up the router to behave and play well with the Be Internet Wifi router. All is good.

    Then I come to the Belkin WAP box. And there’s a special hell reserved for the designer of this box.

    Yes, I’m sure you made it really very cheap. Well done. But a Windows only configuration utility? On a network device? How could you? Your mother would be ashamed.. I see her now, weeping, asking what’s become of you. How you could sell out your soul like that. A network device that can’t work without windows. For shame.

    So now I’ve updated VMWare. Hopefully, after this reboot I can download and install the software required to make the device work, and set it so it’ll only allow devices with specific MAC addresses to connect (‘cos it has WEP “security” only *sigh*).

    And *then* I can mount the computer down in the garage. And we can have our lounge back.

    * Thanks John!
    ** Thanks Nikki, I think
    *** You should be able to add any command for it to run after saving a movie or image, but you can’t add any commands that kMotion doesn’t automatically generate when it’s running as it overwrites the config files each time it’s run.

  • More tin-foil hats.

    So. Plastic, right. I’ve never been terribly fond of plastic packaging. Particularly because it’s often not sporting the appropriate recycle logo, which means that it ends up in the bin if we can’t find another use for it. And eventually you end up with hundreds of the buggers, and have to start chucking them away. But anyway, ignoring that, we’ve known for a very long time that plastic leaches chemicals into the food it surrounds. It’s a problem that’s worse when the food is hot. I’ve been vaguely aware of this for more than 10 years, but it’s slowly beginning to bother me. In that way that, well, we try to eat healthily. In years when our garden produces more than a bumper crop of slugs, we try to eat organically produced, home-grown food. This year is not turning out so well, what with it having rained pretty much continuously since March – we’ve had some soft fruit (those few strawbs that we saved from the slugbeasts) but not much else is growing.

    Anyhow, so. And then that niggling thing about plastic leaching into foods sits there, and whenever I open a packet I now think about eating plastic. I have a packet of chewing gum at work… for when I eat something very strong on my break… apparently, chewing gum is made of plastic too. Feh. And then you think about tins, I never thought of tins as being plastic, but they are – apparently – coated in plastic internally. And tetrapac cartons – I knew they had plastic in, but I think about the quantity of fruit-juice I drink… and oh dear.

    Now I know there are arguments about what’s better – the shipping cost of a lightweight plastic packet vs the shipping + recycling energy from a glass or ‘other’ container. Which obviously makes my brain hurt trying to decide which is the least-bad option. It all ends up being horribly, horribly complex, like most trying-to-work-out-what’s-eco-friendly things. It does make me feel like I’m going to turn into one of those tin-foil hat people. Otoh, as my beloved pointed out, I don’t think it’s all one vast conspiracy. So yay for that :)

    In other news, my mum now has a new linux box which is, apparently, working well for her. Yay for Ubuntu. Also, Yay for Ubuntu which is now on the last of the hackintoshes. My other 8 year old PC (I can’t quite remember why I ended up with two. Something to do with a dud power-supply, I vaguely recall) is now running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It’s surprisingly responsive, if not actually very good when you get to doing real work. Unfortunately, during the installation process, I dropped the nice trackball that Alex sent me. Not far, you understand. Less than a foot, I think, onto a rug. And it stopped working…instantly.

    I took it apart, and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong…

    No obvious physical damage from being dropped, more's the pity. Could've fixed that.

    But thankfully, John applied his superior fixing skills to it – one of the pins on the sensor had corroded through to the point that dropping it was sufficient to break the pin. Replacing the pin with wire (using his nice temperature controlled iron) brought it back to life. Which has made me very happy :)

    He also gave me an old keyboard and mouse, so that the garage security camera / music player can go live. Only slight problem is getting Motion to work. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu installed version doesn’t seem to have installed the default config file, and also the camera I’m using at the moment – one of those old Logitech golfball quickcams, that’s a bit finnicky about working in Linux. The night-vision camera which claimed to be supported by linux is, but the night vision bit of it, not so much. Having got both cameras working…trying to get Motion to use them is proving to not be as ‘off-you-go’ as I’d hoped. While I’ve alloted the 5 minutes ‘while the bath is running’ period for having a quick dink, I don’t hold out a great deal of hope for it working this morning.

    John also gave me a wifi bridge, so hopefully I can get the network extended down to the garage without having to have the router in the larder. Which will be good :)

    All I need to do is find by 100BaseT hub, which is kicking around….somewhere. Because there’s only the one network point in the larder. Of course, the 10baseT hub has now hidden itself, along with the amp which I was *also* going to take down to John’s yesterday. Bah.

    Right, so Bath. 2000 words. Fun.

  • Dear Scan

    I started using your site 13 years ago, or there abouts. And whilst I’ve made odd purchases elsewhere, I’ve always returned to your company. I’d been very impressed with your customer service, and unlike a certain other company who declined to believe their delivery driver had stolen the goods he was meant to deliver (I’m informed by the credit card company that had to beat them into submission and refund the price, that that’s where my new PC went) you were always helpful. So I kept buying from you. Your prices were good, not insane, but reliably reasonable. The Today Only offers were occasionally really good. And when I had to return some kit which turned out not to be faulty (my PC’s power supply was dying) again, impressed. Lots of thorough fault finding and checking and eventually helpful suggestions as to what else might be causing the problem.

    All good.

    Then we meet my last experience.
    – Refusal to meet your requirements under UK Law (not just according to me, also according to the Consumer Advice Bureau).
    – Unhelpful and obstructive staff
    – Claiming that Viewsonic kit should only last one year*

    Ironically, the viewsonic box turned out to…have an inherent fault. The publicly available firmware has a bug which means that in some circumstances it doesn’t work properly. Thankfully, despite your recalcitrant and unhelpful attitude, and despite the fact it was all of a month out of warranty (meaning I’d got 8 months use from it), someone provided me with a password to get some not-yet-fully-released firmware.

    That means the box now works again.

    I am unclear why it stopped working, but the fact that they fixed it despite the fact it was a month out of warranty – that means I’ll keep buying stuff from them. I won’t be buying from you again. Ever again. I may not work in IT anymore, but I’m still a geek. I still buy a reasonable amount of kit. Not necessarily expensive stuff, because I’m no gamer. But several hundred quid a year. That will now go to any of your competitors. Enjoy.

    Oh and next time I have a complaint about any of your kit, I’ll be sending it recorded delivery, CCing the CAB, prepping the small claims court claim and praying I bought it on a credit card, because they can get my money back from you.

    Your lousy customer service lost you a customer.

    Tara.

    * Technically stating that you’ll only replace goods for the duration of the warranty because that is their lifespan. You best stop trading in the UK, because that is *not* what the law here says.

  • The Infamous Drelf

    So, I wanted a solution to putting my laptop somewhere when I’m using the big-and-grotty 19″ LCD*. It’s good enough for while I’m recording podcasts, and it’s nice to have the extra real-estate of a 1440×900 display, but it’s also streaky and not very impressive colour rendition. Anyhow. I wanted somewhere for the laptop to live, so I can use the desk space for my many papers when I find the inspiration (tomorrow) for working on my course.

    Kind of a shelf-come drawer. And thus the drelf was born.

    The drelf is basically a plinth on runners with a slot cut in it to hold the cables (so they don’t escape and run amok):

    I have made a shrawer, or possibly a drelf. Yay for me.

    It’s made from the same wood as the desk (I had a few offcuts), and for the sake of nicety also has a little channel cut just behind the front of the metal strip, so that you can pull the drelf out by a ‘handle’.

    I then mounted kitchen drawer runners on the side of the hunk of wood, and this was then mounted on L-brackets under the desk:

    Drelf details

    I need to trim the ends off those screws, by the way. I expect that should happen some time around 2015.

    The cables were fed through that slot in the first shot (it’s larger at the top than the bottom, so the cables can pass through easily, but the connectors on the ends of the cables won’t pass through). I popped some stick on rubber feet on the top surface of the desk to make the laptop sit above the hunk of metal reinforcing from the wood’s days as scaffold plank. And that’s basically it. The laptop’s supply is a knock-off apple magsafe adaptor that lives permanently attached to the drawer (since the original one’s died, and given my luck getting things repaired or replaced recently I’m not optimistic for apple replacing it).

    And this is what it looks like in action:

    The Drelf in action

    Fear the drelf

    I’m very pleased with it :)

    * I’m trying to decide if I want to whinge about the LCD. There were no faults mentioned on the advert on ebay, and the photo hit the crappyness of the screen. On the other hand, it was only 30 quid. Feh. Unfortunately, I’ve left it a while now, so should probably just suck it up.

  • Overreaction

    So, I made a shopping list this morning. Our lists are things of great beauty. Well, okay, not that. But our lists are carefully thought out. We (or one of us, if the other is at work, as today) sit down, look at shift patterns, work out when we’ll be in / out, flick through our (numerous) cookery books, select recipes. Having done so each item is popped onto the list so we don’t buy stuff we don’t need, and do buy what’s required. The list also has the recipe / day list on it. Last time we went (I think it was last time) we got to the shop with only just enough time to shop and discovered I’d left the list at home. There was a fair bit of swearing at myself.

    Today, having checked and discovered that the fishmonger is shut on Sundays, the whole foods store is closed on Sundays, the bakers is closed on Sundays, indeed the only thing reliably open on Sundays is the Awesome “Gardener’s Patch”. So guiltily I decided to do the shop at Sainsbury’s. I hate shopping at supermarkets now.

    I feel really guilty anyhow, then everything’s wrapped in plastic, the range is crap compared to the stores we normally shop in (where’s the fresh chard? why are there 800 varieties of frozen peas but no interesting frozen veg*). Ethical foods are stuck in the miniature ethical food ghetto, and environmentally friendly detergents are, well… it’s Ecover, Method or nothing.

    Anyhow, I carefully (given the last attempt) put the list with my phone, because I knew I’d not leave without my phone. I picked up the phone, the list, money, shopping bags. Got in the car. Drove to the shop. I arrive perfectly at opening time. There are maybe 10 people in the supermarket – relative bliss. I fish in my pocket. No list. No list in the car, not in my hoodie pocket. Not on the floor between the car and the shop. I swear, a lot. I drive home. I look around the house, upstairs, everywhere I’ve been since well before making the list. It’s gone. I fish through the bin *and* the recycling. No list.

    So then I swear a lot at myself, re-make the list and head back to the now packed supermarket where I find that as usual Sainsbury’s have their usual “never knowingly fully stocked” approach to things. So that sucked.

    Also, by this point I was hungry (bad) and kept picking up ‘oh, we should stock up on this’ items because I’m in Sainsburys, and we don’t often go to Sainsburys and there are “stock” things that we buy in pseudo bulk from there.

    It was not a cheap shopping trip.

    It also sucked because I must admit I’m a wee bit stressed about the essay I’m rewriting, and my dissertation. And to top it off the dinky little Viewsonic VMP74 media player that has been serving us very well decided today to die. It powers up, passes it’s little self-test, sits for a few minutes working and then dies. Splut. So I’ve ‘mailed Scan about it, let’s wait and see how their warranty department deals. It’s just over 1 year old, but honestly? Even a crappy cheap piece of consumer electronics should last a year. Especially since it spent until November in a box.

    Anyhow, I’ve regained my sanity now, and am winding down and chilling out. Essay later, that’s the plan.

    * Seriously, local Sainsburys, 2 cabinets *full* of frozen peas.

  • Smug was foolish then.

    So, last night I finally got around to getting mediatomb to transcode FLAC files into WAV and throw that at the media box in the lounge, rather than FLAC which – I thought it could play – but it can’t. This was awesome. I also got it to transcode the video from FLV files into MPEG. Again, the awesome.

    Then I tried to coax it into playing MOVs by the same trickery. Unfortunately, as I quit mediatomb, I restarted it. A foolish error, which appears to have done something hideous somewhere inexplicable. I say hideous, and I say inexplicable, because having erased every reference I can find to the bastard software from the linux box. Having uninstalled it, and trawled the disk removing every trace I can find of the database, when I fired up a fresh install it still complained about database permission error. Another attempt, more fiddling and tweaking the permissions of the newly installed version – that led to a ‘creating new database message’ which I’d’ve had more faith in if the disk access was high (‘cos it should be scanning disks). But it wasn’t.

    I am now on my final attempt at fixing it before I resort to the nuke-the-site-from-orbit approach. The machine *only* runs Ubuntu and Mediatomb. That is its entire purpose in life. I can, if I have to, take the machine and put a fresh install of Linux on it, because somewhere, hidden somewhere obscure without any obvious filename reference is some sodding mediatomb file that I can’t find and that is causing me grief. Either that, or something odd’s happened to sqlite, equally beyond the level at which I’m functioning, and also the amount of time I’m willing to spend on it. Seriously? I thought an hour or so I’d have this fixed. 3 hours later I’m no further on than I was when I started, really.

    ETA: I seem to have managed to beat it into submission without the aforementioned reinstall. It’s currently rebuilding the database. It appears there were several problems. I’d broken the config file (in a nebulous way I’ve not worked out yet), and there was a database problem. My CLI skills haven’t had such a workout in a long time, and are sorely lacking now. I can’t remember half the commands, and vi defeated me :(

  • the perils of early adoption

    It’s fairly rare that I’m an early adopter. Not for want of trying, but instead because for the most part I can’t afford to get new toys. When I switched from Acorn computers to PCs I was well behind the tech curve not because I wanted a scabby old AMD processor, but because the new Athlon & board was so far out of my price range it was laughable. I have occasionally been an early adopter. DVD springs to mind, I was quite quick off the mark with that (my 1st Gen DVD drive for the computer was region free because region coding post-dated the drive)*.

    Generally, not so much though. I run a Mac that’s now a couple of years old and am generally pretty happy with it**. The change to an LCD tv came about purely because we didn’t want to fill a big chunk of this room up with a pointless big box. But, digitised music? That I did early on.

    Whilst I love my vinyl collection, the simple availability of all my music on one box, and the ability to throw it from there onto (now) my iPhone (but back then stacks of ‘mix CD-Rs’ was instantly appealing to me. My first MP3s were ripped using the original port of a command line program to the Risc PC. The Risc PC literally spent more than a day encoding one track. When later versions came around (versions which didn’t take a day to encode a track) I ripped the odd CD (but it was always painfully slow on my Risc PC).

    As soon as I had a PC I started ripping tracks more effectively, and when I started working from home brought the sheer might of ‘time at home’ to bear on the problem. I ripped every track on every CD. I killed at least 2 CD Burners in the process just because there were so many disks. I spent hours typing track names in because the few music databases that existed were small and inadequate, or didn’t have any of the UK versions of disks in.

    It was slow and generally a bit painful.

    It lives in my memory as a slow torment.

    And now I might have to repeat it. Not because I’ve failed to transfer data successfully, but simply because TuneUp has singularly failed to fix the many and manifold problems that exist in my music collection. See, there are tracks ripped at hideously low bit rate. That I accept is purely an unfixable. But the lack of album artwork, the somewhat variable naming policy, the failure to fully complete some of the tags… some of that’s down to me. Some of it’s because I have vinyl of some albums and thus downloaded digital versions, and the person who ripped them made an arse of naming the files.

    @pinkemma suggested that I should re-rip them all, anyway, as FLAC. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t support FLAC (obviously) and the VMP74 doesn’t support Apple’s lossless format. So, uh, yeah. Seems to be a lose-lose situation there. Feh, is generally my feeling on this at the moment.

    And don’t tell me about Cloud computing. Given that the computer won’t even sync my calendar across to iCloud you think I’m going to trust you with music, one of the most important things in my life?

    Bah. And possibly humbug.

    Still, Ug made fire today, so that’s cool :)

    Ug make fire. Ug happy. ;)

    * Although I did take great pleasure in watching my DVDs on my first generation colour TV (A Mark 1 Ferguson Colourstar).
    ** Issues with iCal and the fact it desperately wants more memory notwithstanding.