Hi,
Just to say I’ve just installed and started playing with the WPtouch WordPress plug-in for better mobile access to my site.
Feel free to try it from your iPhone/iPod or other mobile device and let me know how you get on.
Thanks
Posted from: Enfield, Greater London, UK
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Well, the iPad is finally here in the UK having arrived Friday (if not the day before for some).
So, yesterday I happened to pass an Apple store at the Thurrock Lakeside shopping centre. It was, as expected, buzzing with lots of people playing with the iPads and having a play with them. Some, annoyingly were monopolizing far too many – yes, I’m talking to you, the family, where the dad and daughter were on one, the mum boredly hogging another and the son on a 3rd! Yeah, that really helps the queues! Thanks!
Anyway, after several minutes wait I managed to grab hold of one to look at.
My first reactions are that yes, it’s quite snappy, portable and pretty. It does what it does very well. And yet, for some reason I just can’t get excited about it.
I tried the book reader, I tried the games, I tried Safari and still, nothing is jumping out and saying “buy me” other than the alleged kudos of having the latest geek fashion item (and even this, I think, is somewhat frowned upon by the hard-core crowd).
Having played with the iPad it seems to me that, basically, it is as I first imagined – a “big-ass” iPod. I can’t even really say it’s a big-ass iPhone since you can’t make a phone call with it. No, I’m not an Apple-hater, but nor am I an Apple fan-boy.
I have a desktop PC, I have a laptop for work and a NetBook for personal use. I have an iPhone as well as an iPod Touch for the kids. I even have a Sony eBook reader. Where, oh where does the iPad fit into all of this?
It’s no good for everyday use as a replacement for my iPhone or iPod Touch – it’s just too big and would I really want to carry around something so expensive and valuable with me everywhere?
It’s not bad as a book reader, but it’s too heavy for prolonged reading, too reflective for reading outdoors, and while the battery life is good, it’s not great. Again – would I want to take this and sit on the beach with it – I think not.
So, how about as a laptop/netbook replacement. Well, it is good as a web browser, but how would I cope with writing this blog using it? Well, I’d have to get a keyboard, probably a stand, etc – so I’d be paying about £800 all-in to replace a device that cost me about £250?
So, what about as a games device? Again, I can see some potential here, but I can’t see it replacing an X-box, PS3 or Wii. Again, it’s also too big for many games so replacing the more portable DS or iPod Touch, etc, is also a no-no.
I’m sure that there are many things the iPad is good for. It is indeed a great piece of hardware.
The biggest problem I have with it I suppose is the price. Why, oh why would I want to spend up to £700 (excluding data plan) for a device that can’t make a phone call, and does the same as the other devices I have – often not as well, yet costs significantly more than the devices it ousts?
Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe it will has some compelling new use-case that I haven’t thought of yet? I guess only time will tell. Until then, I think I shall save my hard earned pennies until the next geek trend comes along…
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This week I managed to get hold of an HTC Desire running Android 2.1 and thought I’d give this a go instead of my iPhone 3G.
I’m very familiar with the iPhone range now as I’ve had an iPhone, an iPhone 3G and my fiancée has an iPhone 3GS.
The HTC Desire and Android are all new to me though.
Having become frustrated with Apples locking-down of the OS and their strict control over background applications and what applications and functionality are and aren’t allowed, I was really looking forward to trying Android, and was thinking that I would actually go and get myself an HTC Desire anyway when the chance to borrow one came up.
First off I should mention the devices. I won’t go into too much detail as this has all been covered many times before.
The iPhone 3G and 3GS are both quite similar in terms of form factor. Both sit comfortably in your hand, both have a single button underneath the fairly substantial screen, both have a slightly sub-standard camera on the back.
The biggest differences with the HTC Desire are that it has a group of physical buttons underneath the screen, including one optical trackpad for scrolling and selecting. Another big difference is that it has a removable battery and slot for SIM and MicroSD card, enabling the storage to be expanded. It also has a much faster processor than the current iPhone range, but it would appear that may no longer be the case after WWDC in June!
So, in terms of the hardware, I would say that the HTC Desire is a lovely piece of kit and is quite superior to the iPhone in many ways. It has a better camera, better screen, expandable memory, replaceable battery and seems slightly smaller to hold despite the great screen.
If it were down to the hardware alone, I would definitely be buying the HTC Desire right now, but sadly the story doesn’t end there.
Apple has long stuck by it’s decision to be really strict about what applications it will allow onto the iPhone, and what functionality those applications can, or rather, can’t, provide. Background tasks are a no-no, as is anything that replaces or, in many cases, echoes the built-in functionality provided by Apple. They also restrict your ability to customise the GUI considerably.
Of course you can, as I have, Jailbreak your iPhone which allows much greater freedom, but there are still some limits even then.
Over on the Android you have many more options. Background tasks are commonplace, customisation is everywhere, and there’s very little that you cannot do.
Strangely enough, the flexibility inherent in Android also seems to be it’s weakness.
On the iPhone, applications all have a similar look and feel in general. It’s quick and easy to figure-out how to do things as most applications work in a similar way.
On Android, the picture is the complete reverse. The lack of a locked-down system and the open platform means that developers have been much more free to do things their own way. The lack of core central functionality also means that different applications can have overlaps and duplications or gaps. A good example is email. The Google email application is separate from the MS Exchange email application. Both look and act differently and work independently of each other. The same is true for other applications too.
The user interface for these applications differs significantly from application to application. Some use the touch-screen for all functions, while others make extensive use of the Menu and Back physical buttons. None seem to be consistent. It appears that the flexibility of having an open platform and multiple physical buttons complicates the user experience because of a lack of standardisation. With the iPhone, simplicity is definitely key.
The next thing to consider is also the end-to-end user experience of getting data,music, video and applications onto the devices.
Again, the iPhone has a fully enclosed and integrated solution – iTunes. While it’s not pretty, and often quite clumsy and cumbersome, it is an all-in-one solution for everything your typical user needs. One app to rule them all, one app to find them. Apple seems to be well and truly in the lead here, despite the seemingly old fashioned software product. With Android, there is no iTunes equivalent that comes as standard – no simple easy way, provided with the device, of getting all your media onto it. The Google Market place is also separate – again this makes the whole experience more complicated and less user-friendly.
So, where does this leave us.
Well, for the average typical consumer, the iPhone, iTunes and App Store are a great combination – they offer most things that any normal user could want in a relatively seamless integrated end-to-end solution.
Android on the other hand seems much more of a bolted-together solution. Technically it may be more advanced than Apples, but technology alone doesn’t count for much when it comes to user acceptance and uptake. For us geeks, Android has a lot to offer in terms of flexibility and expandability, but this does come at a price.
For me, personally, I think I’d rather continue using the iPhone instead of Android as it does do 98% of the things I’d like it to, and Jailbreaking takes that up another 1% at least – the seemingly small advantages of using the more open Android OS are definitely outweighed at present by the uniformity and usability of the iPhone.
Of course, all of this is written at a time when the next version of Android (v2.2, Froyo) is imminent as is, everyone suspects, the iPhone 4G with v4 of the iPhone OS. It will be interesting to see if this levels the playing field, or further extends Apple’s dominance in the usability stakes. One thing is for sure, Apple has a continuing struggle ahead as most, if not all, of the world’s mobile phone manufacturers look to increase their usage and marketing of Android and Windows Phone devices to compete with Apple…
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Today it seems that everywhere you turn and everyone you talk to is extolling the virtues of Cloud computing and the benefits it can bring to your organisation. Is it just the latest buzz-word and fad, or is it really a paradigm shift in how we deploy and utilise IT systems?
Before we can talk about that, it’s important to understand what Cloud computing is, and equally important, what it isn’t.
Back in the early pioneering days of I.T., when I was a (very) young lad, and when computers were first really starting to make an impact in business there existed a thing called a Bureau. The Bureau was a service that allowed its business customers to purchase time on their computer system (often, a mini-computer) for processing payments and transactions in batches – i.e. batch processing. The data to be processed was sent to the bureau, processed on the computer, and the results then sent back. The customer would normally have been charged for the amount of computer resource or time used to perform their processing. Many people argue that this was in fact the first instance of cloud computing.
Moving on, we have IT hosting companies who will allow you to host a computer in their data centres with their connectivity, or more commonly rent or buy a computer from them and have them host it for you.
Then there’s the typical IT department who maintain and run their own IT infrastructure. Shared compute resource has been around since the dawn of IT – mainframes, resource-sharing, time-sharing, symmetric multi-processing – all of these, it could be argued, are forms of cloud computing – computer resources that are available and accessible for different applications by different users.
Going on further, we have the Application Service Providers (ASPs) who offer applications via the internet or private wire networks so you can use applications without having to buy and run the infrastructure yourself.
So what really makes a cloud a cloud?
To help uncover this it’s a good idea to understand the various types of cloud and then to see what elements they all have in common.
I, personally, like to distinguish cloud infrastructure from applications, such as Yammer, Twitter, Facebook, etc, that are hosted on cloud infrastructure. To me, these applications sit fairly and squarely in the ASP camp and while they utilise cloud computing they are not, in themselves, cloud computing.
So, back to the types of cloud. I think that there are several different types:
In addition to the types of cloud, there are various aspects and attributes of cloud computing that are common:
So, a Cloud is in its simplest form the agile provisioning of scalable compute resource to a pool of users.
This is, of course, a considerable simplification of the intricacies of cloud computing, but will suffice for the purposes of this discussion.
So, we now have a definition of what makes a Cloud, but what are the benefits. Well, the benefits really depend on who the customer is, and what they’re trying to achieve.
Let’s take, for example, a young internet entrepreneur who is trying to establish a new service on the Internet. It’s highly unlikely that in this scenario the person would have access to a computer room, servers, storage, support staff, power/cooling, massive connectivity, etc. Nor would they have the funds to purchase a system for hosting at a 3rd party data centre. Add to this the lack of predictability of new internet start-ups – should the solution be scaled for 50 users, or 50,000?
In this scenario, Cloud computing has very substantial benefits. It is really quite simple to purchase some compute resource on a cloud, provision your service, release it to the public and then monitor how it’s adopted – enabling you to scale the service up or down as required to meet demand, and all for a fraction of the cost of buying your own server hardware.
At the other end of the scale is the major corporation who has an established IT department, with many servers, support staff, data centres, etc. You would be excused for asking why such an entity would even entertain cloud computing, but there are still some distinct advantages.
Firstly, many major corporations tend not to be the most agile and dynamic of places, encumbered by processes and paperwork it can take days, weeks or even months to procure and install new servers. In the Internet age, this can cripple a company or at the very least put them on the back-foot compared to their competitors and the marketplace.
Secondly, there is substantial overhead in hosting and managing your own computer environment. Major corporations typically have infrastructure strategists and architects (like me), designers, delivery staff, operational acceptance teams, monitoring teams, service-desks, support teams, incident and problem managers, change managers, configuration and asset managers, financial accountants, procurement and supplier management, project management, service level management, and many many more other roles. Putting solutions into the cloud can reduce the requirement for many of these as these functions can effectively be out-tasked to the cloud provider.
Thirdly, the scalability of cloud services can offer substantial benefits in terms of reducing the risk of the unknown. For example, when launching a new product to market, much like the internet entrepreneur, the uptake can be very unpredictable and the clouds ability to scale rapidly and dynamically can be absolutely vital and can reduce the need to massively over-spec the hardware requirements.
Finally, the ad-hoc need for development and test environments can be readily satisfied by cloud computing without the need for a permanent investment in IT hardware.
Of course, such a flexible, dynamic solution doesn’t come without it’s own challenges.
In an effort to cut costs, the cloud service providers will streamline their operations as much as possible, offering a very limited number of variations of hardware and service levels. They make their money through volume, selling hundreds of thousands of server instances to customers across the globe.
The likes of Google, Amazon, Dell and Microsoft all use bespoke server designs that have been highly optimised for cloud computing environments. These are not your typical servers that would be installed in a small business or in a corporate data centre. They are optimised for maximum efficiency, reducing unnecessary components, designing for optimal cooling and power efficiency, ease of management and support, etc. In many cases they aren’t even fixed when broken – merely ripped-out and replaced as this is the most efficient way to support such a large number of servers.
For service levels, a very small number of levels will be on offer, and often these will be very restrictive with no real guarantee of performance or availability. It is therefore essential that firstly, the lack of guaranteed service availability or performance are considered and that secondly the solution is designed to accommodate and anticipate any potential outages.
Another significant consideration is your own ability to get at your data. What happens if you are ordered by a court to provide access to your data, or if you need to recall all your data for reporting, audit or recovery purposes – how does the cloud provider support you on this, and what ability will you have to get at your own data.
Coupled with this goes the absolutely vital aspect of security. Of course, the major cloud vendors will all insist that they have the utmost levels of security in place, but will this satisfy your IT security personnel? Will they be satisfied and allow you to run your applications on shared infrastructure in the cloud? Also, do you really want to place one of your most valuable assets – your data – in a place where it could potentially be open to access from the internet and where you yourself have little control? Often, major corporates will host the presentation and application layers of their solution stack in the cloud, but keep the data local for exactly these reasons.
Along with security, availability needs to be a key consideration. Applications in the cloud typically have to be designed to operate in a cloud environment, and to handle failures in a certain way. In addition to this, consider what happens if the cloud providers data centre suffers a disaster – what steps do they and you need to take to ensure your systems are protected and recoverable? Does the cloud provider offer backups? Remote site duplication and replication? What are the service levels and charges for this?
Yet further challenges await those that have to comply with various government, financial or legal regulation. If you handle credit card payments, then you may need to be PCI DSS compliant. If you’re listed on the US stock exchange, then Sarbanes Oxley will apply. Each of these have requirements for your IT infrastructure – are you sure that your cloud provider can meet these requirements and have the appropriate accreditations? You may be hosting information for government agencies, or subject to a contact that prevents you from hosting data or applications off-shore – do you know where the cloud provider is hosting your environment? Many use off-shore locations, such as Ireland, in a further effort to reduce costs.
The final challenge with cloud computing is that of vendor lock-in. Once you have put critical applications and data into the cloud, are you then stuck with that cloud provider forever more? It’s important to consider how you can get your data and service back, and up-and-running elsewhere should the cloud provider go under, or one or other of you decides to terminate your contract or go into dispute.
So, we come to what is often the crunch point of any IT investment decision – the price. In reality, when considering the cost of cloud computing, we need to consider much more than the price.
The headline price of a server instance at a cloud provider may cost as little as $230 per year, and on the face of it this seems extremely good value, especially when compared to the cost of internal hosting, staffing, power, cooling, etc.
However, with cloud computing there is a lot more to the overall cost than just the headline price.
Cloud providers will generally want to charge not only for the server instance, but also for I/O – data sent both to and from the server. If you have a web-site that is quite small, but the amount of data being served expands radically, you may find yourself with a very expensive and unexpected bill for data, whereas in a corporate environment these costs are normally fixed and absorbed, to a point, by the entire IT estate.
Storage is another cost factor: again the cloud providers will want to charge – typically a cost per GB per month, or per ‘n’ I/O requests, or both. Again, unpredicted increases in I/O rates or storage volumes will dramatically increase your costs.
Of course, the other different is that internal IT is often procured on a Capital purchase (CAPEX) basis,whereas Cloud computing is normally an Operational (OPEX) expense, and as such the difference can have a direct impact on your companies bottom line – assets vs. profit.
If you do the calculations carefully you’re very likely to find that at the outset Cloud computing is indeed less expensive than internally hosted servers. However, given the incremental usage-based charging for CPU, I/O and storage an increase in any of these can make a substantial difference to the price – by far a greater percentage increase than the equivalent for an internally hosted solution. One recent example I worked on indicated a 10% increase in requirements led to a 6% rise in internal IT costs. The same rise in a cloud environment led to a 25% increate in annual cloud costs, so there very quickly comes a point where internal systems can be significantly more cost effective than cloud.
So, when should and shouldn’t cloud be used?
Use cloud when:
Do not use cloud if:
Cloud computing seems to be far more than a passing fad. The advent of low-cost low-latency high-bandwidth connectivity, coupled with massive increases in processing power and storage capability have come together to make cloud computing a very real and viable mechanism for delivering IT.
As the market evolves, the offerings will become more comprehensive, and any deficiencies and weaknesses will be ironed out, making cloud computing not only more financially attractive, but also more technically viable and less risky.
Increasingly, major corporations as well as small businesses will take to cloud computing – initially for niche areas such as development, testing and initial product launches, and then as the cloud matures, becomes more cost effective to scale, and security concerns are addressed, it will be used for other areas too, including core business IT functions. This will both support and be supported by the business moving to more flexible ways of working which require more ubiquitous access to applications, regardless of location or terminal type.
Eventually, we may see the majority of IT being hosted in a cloud of one form or another – initially on a combination of external and internal (hybrid) clouds, and potentially moving more and more over time to robust external clouds. There could even come a time when everything moves to cloud computing, with only the most sensitive requirements being hosted internally, but this is still some way off.
There is a definite place in most organisations for one form of cloud computing or another. The key is to carefully assess when cloud is appropriate and when it’s not. Is it cost-effective? Does it deliver enhanced agility and scalability? Can it provide the appropriate levels of security and availability?
Any organisation today should be looking at how cloud computing fits into their organisation today, and starting to ask the pertinent questions to assess it’s suitability and viability. This should be seen as a starting point and setting the ground-work for the longer-term when cloud computing will inevitably be the logical approach to delivery for much of IT.
Caution, however, should be exercised – cloud computing is real and useful, but the full implications need to be carefully analysed and assessed and cloud entered into with a full awareness of not only the potential benefits, but also the risks and implications that accompany them.
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It’s a simple question – what’s in a name? Or, let’s put it even simpler – What is YOUR name?
In the normal, real-life world in which we live in, this seems to be quite a simple answer. My name is Derek O’Harrow. Amongst my circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, this is me – they know who I am, where I’m from, and anything else I’ve shared with them on very-much a one-to-one basis (or anything that Facebook has chosen to share with them without my knowledge).
In the virtual, world-wide, ever expanding world of the internet it’s not such a simple question.
Let’s take the rather extreme example of John Smith. Not a specific John Smith, but your average John Smith (apologies to all John Smiths for calling you average!).
If I declare on the internet that I’m John Smith, then who am I? Or rather, how do you know which of the potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of John Smiths around the world am I? Am I John D. Smith from Coventry, UK, or John B. Smith from Connecticut, USA, or J Smith from Australia, or John Smith from Jamaica? If you Google John Smith, do you find your friend, long-lost relative, or work colleague or, more likely, do you find a host of companies based on said name?
To add to the confusion and turmoil, I, Derek O’Harrow, have multiple personalities and identities. No, I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder. Like most I have multiple roles in life – my home life, my work life (past, present and future) and my internet life. All of these are me, or elements of me, but each has it’s own identity and with each identity typically comes a set of resources, applications, and services to which we need access.
Our presence and our identity on the internet is becoming ever more important. If you are applying for a job, the chances are that your potential employer will Google your name, or look you up on Facebook – are they finding the correct person? And even if they happen too (which is often unlikely), do you want them to know that information about you?
The internet is very much like a public diary – there is a very real chance that everything you do on the internet will be visible at some point in the future, and information rarely goes away. Those Facebook pictures of your 18th birthday party involving far too many beers and a goat will come back to haunt you one day – believe me!
Our identity is going to be absolutely key going forward – far more so than today, and on a scale that most of us cannot even comprehend. And our ability to manage and protect that identity will be equally important. The convergence of home, internet, Cloud and business computing will, over time, necessitate identity convergence.
So, back to who am I?
On twitter, I’m @derekoharrow. On Facebook I’m facebook.com/derekoharrow. On the world-wide web, I’m www.derekoharrow.com. Fortunately for me, I have quite an uncommon name (just Google me), so I’m lucky and tend to have my pick of usernames and domain names, but what about our friend John?
John may be @jsmith31 on Twitter. On Facebook he may be stuck with facebook.com/smittyj, and as for domain names – I doubt there’s any reasonable combination of John and Smith that can be used to create a sensible domain name –let’s face it – all sensible domain names are already taken anyway!
And this is the situation with only 3 different sources of identity – what happens when more and more services appear and take hold world-wide (or should that be web-wide)? What will be the next Twitter? The next Facebook? How many different usernames and formats will we have to each fight for, own, and protect going forward?
We’ve already reached the point when any geek worth their salt will not even consider naming a child until they’ve checked that the domain name is available, and the appropriate Twitter name reserved. It’s also very common nowadays for popular stars and celebrities to be impersonated online, with often no real way of telling if they are who they claim to be.
Just how many different logins do we have for different services? Why do I need a different login to each and every bank, building society, social network site, web application, entertainment, travel and insurance site? How do we secure all of these identities, while at the same time making them easier to manage and control and avoid using the same password everywhere, or writing them all down on a piece of paper? Password managers are now commonplace among the tech-savvy as our use of online services and different identities expand exponentially.
To further complicate the matter, the internet super-powers are staging a war over our identities. Google have Google Connect; Twitter have just announced @anywhere and OAuth, and Facebook have Facebook Connect. There’s also OpenID, which is about as useful and meaningful to the average John Smith as a cuttle-fish in custard. All of these are designed to make our lives better, simpler and improve our online experience by offering a form of single-sign-on. They are also a means of grabbing and controlling our online identities – a very very valuable commodity for the internet super-powers!
So, what are we to do?
Well, we could all resort to the Web 2.0 band-wagon and give-up on standard names and identities. We can start using Web 2.0 names and brands as our identity. I could change my name from Derek O’Harrow to wobb.ly and John Smith could change his to qwer.ty? Even then, there will only be so many possible combinations. And, to be perfectly honest, I rather like my name as it is!
We could create a new global format and mechanism for identity that is commonly adopted, easy to use, secure, federated, with open API’s that can integrate with the Facebooks and Googles of the world. An OpenID on steroids, but without the quirky nomenclature. The challenge with this is how to make every individuals identity unique and yet personal to them?
We could also look to our governments to help, by providing a means of validating our identities – an “Internet Passport” so to speak – to prove that I am indeed Derek O’Harrow, a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island, and not to be confused with any other Derek O’Harrow either in the UK or abroad. Whether the governments of the world are ready for this responsibility remains to be seen – no doubt this would, of course, be privatised and responsibility given to private businesses to implement.
One thing for sure – we cannot just stand still and let the situation continue to expand into chaos. Innovation, standardisation and possibly even regulation on a world-wide basis will be required to stem the identity flow.
Of course, this is all a very tall ask, so if anyone has any ideas???
EDIT: Lifehacker have just published a related article worth reading – Establish and Maintain your Identity Online.
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Some of you may recall a brief series of articles I wrote about my experiences in choosing and building a new replacement Home Theatre PC (HTPC).
I then had a bit of a break from the blog due to lack of time – sorry about that!
Well, the HTPC I put together is still very much in everyday use, but I thought it worth a brief update.
The experience hasn’t been totally without fault. While in general the HTPC works fine, there are a couple of “niggles”. Firstly, for some still unknown reason, the IR remote control seems to take about 5-10 seconds to register a command on the HTPC if it hasn’t been used for a while. For example, if I press the Pause button, I then have to sit and wait for it to take effect. Once it has, then subsequent presses are instant as expected. I’m still trying to track-down the problem – maybe it’s something to do with devices powering-down, or maybe it’s delays in Windows 7 – suggestions welcome!
The 2nd problem I’m experiencing is stuttering of the video on occasion. The seems to happen in the evenings at varying times, but generally around either side of 9pm. Other computers in the household continue to work fine, as does general internet access, and the video is being shared (via Windows CIFS shares) from a central PC. Everything looks fine on all of these, and yet the problem remains. Upgrading the Revo R3600L by adding a D-Link DWA-140 802.11n Wireless LAN dongle has helped, but hasn’t totally solved the problem.
So, where to go from here?
Well, during my blog-break I decided that I also wanted to watch video from my central PC in the bedroom. Unfortunately, the TV in the bedroom isn’t as new as the one in my living room, so it’s lacking a PC/RGB input, and no DVI/HDMI either – ruling out another Revo-based HTPC. It does, however, have standard Composite inputs (video and left/right audio). After a bit of searching I came across the WD TV Live. This is a great little (and I do mean little) box that simply plugs into your TV using either HDMI, Component or, in my case, Composite connections. It has an Ethernet port and a USB port. Using the USB port you can connect an external USB thumb-drive or even a USB hard disk, or you can do as I do and connect a USB Wireless LAN dongle, such as the DWA-140.
You can find them on eBay, and Play.com sell them for around £99 (make sure you get the WD TV Live – the one with the Ethernet port – as they also sell one without for video playback from a USB HDD).
Now, with this setup, I have a very simple and easy to use way of watching video in my bedroom.
Thinking forward to my family holiday in July, I am going to take the WD TV Live together with my WD Passport 320GB USB hard drive (loaded with most of my video collection) with me – which is a god-send if you have little kids as I do!
The only real down-sides I can see with the WD TV Live is that the user interface isn’t fantastic, and it really would be good if you could disable unwanted options, or add short-cuts to your favourite places such as Network Shares. Also, it would be really good if it showed you which video’s you had already watched (like ZoomPlayer on my HTPC does).
All in all though, for about £120 (including the DWA-140), this is a great little media player and so much simpler to use and manage than a full-blown HTPC.
So what’s in store for my Revo R3600 HTPC? Well, nothing right now – I can’t justify replacing it just yet (at least, not if I’m to have any hope of buying that HTC Desire) – but be sure – it’s days are numbered…
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Every time Apply release a new iDevice (iPod, iPhone, iPad, iThingy) a game of cat-and-mouse ensues. Apple tries to release devices that are closed-source and restricted, all in the name of protecting us, the consumers, and our user-experience. This sounds all very noble and magnanimous until you also remember that Apple makes a good deal of money from their App Store for each application sold through their closed-source shop.
The open-source guru geek-types of the Internet have a different view (which I share). That this is locking-down and hampering the device – preventing us, the owners of said devices, from being able to do the things that we want to do, with hardware that we have spent our (sometimes) well-earned money on.
Jailbreaking is the process of taking a closed-source iGadget, hacking it, and opening it up to allow you to run unauthorised (by Apple), and generally free, 3rd party applications that can bypass the restrictions of the closed system. Most Jailbreaking tools install an application called Cydia which provides a simple way to find and install these 3rd party applications.
So what are the benefits of these applications? Well, for example, some allow you to run applications (even some of the built-in Apps, or those from the Apps store, such as TomTom) to run in the background. In TomTom’s case, this means I can switch to other applications without pausing or interrupting the turn-by-turn navigation. Another example is the Longitude app, which runs in the background and updates your Google Latitude location – something that can’t normally be done on the iPhone, but can be easily done on Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and most other mobile phone systems.
There have been several programs that have managed to Jailbreak iPod’s and iPhones, but each has had it’s limitations, or has been blocked by upgrades to the devices firmware by Apple.
These include favourites such as sn0wbreeze by dev-team and blackra1n, but even these most popular of jailbreak tools are unable to completely jailbreak the latest devices and firmware versions. Some allow you to Jailbreak, but use a method called a “Tethered Jailbreak”, which means that every time you reboot your iPod/iPhone you need to connect it to your PC. For me, this isn’t an acceptable solution, especially given the less than brilliant battery life of the iPhone under normal usage.
Fortunately, the mouse is out of the house once again, and a new player has entered the market with a new and simple Jailbreak tool that can, at present, Jailbreak the latest firmware on iPod Touch’s, iPhones and even the new iPad. The tool in question is Spirit!
The guys of Redmond Pie have a series of great little articles that clearly explain how to use Spirit to Jailbreak your iDevice of choice:
A word of caution though – if you do Jailbreak your device, it will be more susceptible to hacking, and indeed there is at least one known trojan floating around that targets iPhones. To reduce the risk of this, make sure that you change the built-in default passwords. My favourite article on how to do this can be found here.
Of course, the rumours are rife that the next generation of iPhone will be announced by Apple at the upcoming WDC conference, so let the game of Cat-and-Mouse continue…
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Sorry for the lack of posts lately – it’s been a bit manic here, both with work and home-life. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to update my series on the compact home theatre PC soon…
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In my previous article Compact HTPC Part 3 – Unboxing the Revo, I posted the unboxing pictures of the Acer Aspire Revo R3600L that forms the basis of my new HTPC.
The first thing that you need on your HTPC hardware is an operating system of some kind. There are lots of options available including the pre-installed LINUX, but in my case I’ve decided to opt for Windows 7 Home Premium partially because I got it for only £45 on a pre-order from Amazon, but also because I like to have the full functionality of Windows on my HTPC, and it integrates well with the rest of my setup. I also like the new Windows 7 Home Group functionality that makes it much simpler to share documents, media and printers between your home PC’s.
So, having purchased a Revo R3600L running LINUX, my challenge was to get Windows 7 installed and working on it.
The version of Windows 7 I purchased came, of course, on a DVD, but the Revo has no DVD drive, and I don’t have a USB DVD-ROM that I can use, so I had to install Windows 7 via a USB memory stick.
Fortunately, I’m not the first person to have done this – Paul Thurrot’s excellent Supersite for Windows has an article that explains exactly how to copy your Windows 7 install DVD onto a USB key:
Windows 7 Upgrade Scenarios: Scenario 3 – Upgrade a Netbook from Windows XP to Windows 7
[NOTE: I tried other methods, such as using xcopy to copy the install media from the DVD to the USB key, but found that the Revo would not boot from the USB with this approach.]
Having followed these instructions, I now have a USB key ready for Windows 7 installation.
The steps to install Windows 7 now are quite straightforward:-
For my setup I decided to erase all the partitions from the Revo hard disk before installing. This is a personal preference and removes the pre-installed LINUX and RevoBoot configuration, so I suggest using this option with care.
On a normal Windows installation I would normally split the hard drive into a C: and D: drive, C: for the operating system and program files, and D: for data. As the hard disk is “only” 160GB on the Revo, and all my media files are stored on my NAS box I’ve chosen not to do so on this occasion.
After about 20 minutes Windows 7 is installed and the Revo can reboot and come-up normally.
Once installed and booted, the next steps were to:-
Once all of this is done you should have a fully functional and safe Windows 7 installation on which to continue your HTPC installation.
In the next installment I shall talk about installation and configuration of my chosen HTPC software.
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In my previous post I talked about my decision to buy an Acer Aspire Revo R3600L to form the basis of my new HTPC.
Well, my new toy has now arrived, the next working day after ordering from eBuyer.com – excellent!
Below are some Flickr photos of the grand unveiling for your perusal (I apologise in advance for the quality of some of the pictures – I only had my iPhone to hand at the time!).
Next time I shall talk about how I installed Windows 7 in place of LINUX on this box.
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