webcoding.co.uk

WESC Headphones

First impressions of the WESC headphones are good.  They are light weight with a nice quality feel to them.  The extenders are smooth and easily operated with a nice sheathed lead which will really reduce the tangle problems you usually get.  For extended distances you are given a 3.5mm female to male extender.   The colour choice are great, funky and fun and definitely got my attention when “browsing”.

When playing music the sound is loud and clear with reasonable to good bass definition.  The tight fit around the head keeps outside sound to a minimum and whilst at high volume there is some sound “leak” it’s pretty good and wouldn’t annoy anyone in an office environment.

Overall they are good.  There are options ranging from £40 to £100 and obviously sound improvment grows with price.  I’d love to test out the “Alp Horn” model but given the price and the inability to test these in the shop I wasn’t going to put out the money for them.  Anything over £60 for a pair of head phones requires on site testing and without I’m not going to bother.  I made that mistake with a £300 pair of sennheiser headphones a number of years ago.

You can see more of their products at: http://www.wesc.com/stuff/986

Jim.

Zune HD

Boy do I want to get my hands on one of these (the new Zune HD)!  I can’t really justify the cost considering I have an iPhone but the HD device with music and good compatibility to things like Napster (which I still somehow subscribe too) make it a really desirable device.

It’s looking like they are not available in the UK as of yet and with a price tag of $219 in the USA you can bet that a similar number, in £ will be the price.  Probably a nice £199.  Still, it looks stunning and if ONLY it contained a phone!

Find out more about the Zune here: http://www.zune.net/en-us/products/zunehd/default.htm

Apple’s rumoured iTablet at $999?

Engadget posted a story about Apples rumoured tablet which will ship in February 2010 for a eye watering $999.

I have an iPhone and indeed a Macbook Pro (old generation) and whilst I do appreciate the Mac hardware I also run Windows on my Mac  I just can’t understand how Apple are going to charge an almost identical amount for a tablet as they would for the macbook..  Personally I’m waiting on the TechCrunch CrunchPad and although it’s going to be a fairly limited device in terms of horse power it’s built on Linux and thus will become an utterly hackable and at a $400 price tag it’s much cheaper.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/15/apple-tablet-rumors-strike-back-9-6-inch-with-hsdpa-coming-feb/

XMI X-mini II Mini Speaker

Some time ago I bought this little GEM.  The X-Mini speaker is about the size of a slightly over-sized golf ball.  You can unscrew the central part to create a slightly taller version which allows the base to ring through much more clearly.  It’s an EXCELLENT little speaker and put with an iPhone or a laptop on holiday it’s brilliant.  The sound is loud, clear and whilst not perfect it takes the usual laptop sound and seriously improves upon it.

The internal battery life for this speaker is big - I’ve charged it once or twice in a few months of ownership with a reasonable use between each charge.  Charging is done via a small 5V USB connection.

I picked mine up for £20 but I noticed Amazon is now making these available for £13.99.  If you’re looking for a decent smaller portable speaker then this is good.

Max Value USB 2.0 to Widescreen SVGA Adapter (MV42431)

USB2 to SVGA

This week I bought the “Max Value USB 2.0 to Widescreen SVGA Adapter” from Amazon.  £31 for a additional monitor extension is not bad value and allowed me to have three monitors working together, one for code, one for email and firebug and the other for a browser.  So far the product is doing fairly well though it basically kills Windows 7 Aero feature but I suspect this is more a driver issue than hardware.

Overall the device is good.. It’s small, easy to install and does the job. It’s not fast, it doesn’t have the best picture but I didn’t buy it for this reason. Overall I’m pleased and it increased my productivity - but not as much as the transition of one to two monitors.

Google Chrome OS

So Google is in the process of developing it’s Chrome O/S.  It’s an interesting development and I’ll be intrigued to see where it goes but I think it needs some more thought.

If you think about the actual end product, Google will essentially use a Linux based kernel and then use new windowing kit.  On top of that will be a browser (Chrome), which we all know about and probably use and then a series of “desktop” links to on-line applications which will focus on Google’s existing docs, spreadsheets, mail and so on.  At the end of the day it’s a version of Linux with Chrome - end of story really.

Maybe I’m missing a trick but this just looks like a netbook edition of Ubuntu (which already exists) with a few Google bells and whistles, most notably the “Chrome” browser.  It doesn’t even sound that ground breaking and only the Google name is giving this the air-time.

When Google say “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel” this leaves me distinctly cold.  A lot of people really like the graphical nature of operating systems and indeed the new Windows 7 and Mac OSX are well received in part because of the advances here. Unfortunately Google has always left me completely cold in the design arena, in fact I can’t recall a product which I ever thought was sexy.  Yes, they follow the simplicity route and indeed it’s been good for them but would I really want my daily experience within the OS to feel like a bland moment.  It’d be like going back in time.

The statement “redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates” reeks of arrogance.  Where you have an OS you no doubt have a hacking community and indeed it’s generally very hard to really protect against everything.  If you consider the number of updates, security or otherwise that happens on most Linux, Mac and Windows installs then you should know that this is rubbish.

Personally I’m enjoying running Mac OSX at home and the new version of Windows 7 runs brilliantly at work and although I’ll test what they push out I’m not convinced it will stay for any length of time on my machines.

Shred’s attackers will be caught..

So they’re reporting that the guys who attacked Fred the Shred’s house have contacted news agencies to confirm who they are.  The daily mail reports this here. 

I don’t think these guys are going to last too long.  They used a public mail provider called “mail.com”.  Seems like a fairly trivial task to contact mail.com, get the IP access records for the account “bankbossesarecriminals@mail.com”.  Next step, contact the ISP which holds the IP range and request customer details for the IP leased at that time.  

If it’s a home address then you’re screwed.  If you’ve gone to an internet cafe then you’re probably on camera or some sort of CCTV but less screwed.  Mobile phone connection won’t be any better, in fact, they’re probably more easily traced and if you’re doing it on an iPhone expect to get a visit thanks to your GPS device.

If you’re hijacking on an unsecured wireless connection then you stand a better chance but again that means you’ve probably used a laptop and in which case a lot of routers record host names of connections and almost certainly MAC addresses.

Everything on the t’internet is logged. end.

Slow streaming from wireless to Media Center (Vista / Windows 7)

So you’ve arrived here because your current Media Center is taking EONS to load/stream a video file over wireless from a laptop or other wireless device to your media center.

I had this too and it’s a pain up the arse to fix, but for me I managed to get it working so much so it was delivering files over wireless at almost full wireless speed, in my case, 48Mbps.

First, Windows Vista (and maybe Windows 7) uses a few things to try and improve network speed and file access which ironically is the cause of the problem.  I’m not sure the developers really ever tried this in real life but it sucks and causes more problems than I can think of.

So, to the solution.  I did the following steps and some may not be required at all but in doing all of these it worked and I’m not going to change them back to see what happens

Remember to do this to BOTH/ALL machines.  I did it to Windows 7 to be sure. None of the features below were required by me so it’s no loss to see them go.

1. Remove IPv6

This is the IP address version 6 which changes the usual 192.168.129.111 to a long and complex HEX based address. On your standard internal network (which you are more than likely running) you simply don’t need the address space it offers.

Launch control panel, find the current network controller and click properties and disable IPv6 (Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network and Sharing Center –> Click Local Area Network –> Properties –> Uncheck IPv6 and confirm.)

2.  Duplex and TX settings

If the options are there, keep the above properties open and Click “Configure –> Advanced”. Select “Flow Control” and select to “TX Enabled”.  In the same window look for “Link Speed and Duplex” and set to “100Mbps Full Duplex”.

3. Removal of “Remote Differential Compression”

Go to “Control Panel\Programs\Programs and Features” and select the option on the left “Turn Windows Features on or off”.  Uncheck “Remote Differential Compression”. Press OK – this may take AGES.

4. Turn off “offline files”

Go to the start button and in search type “Offline files”. Click the first item and select “Disable Offline files”.

5. Reboot the machine

Reboot is vital here.  Once your rebooted give it a try and you should be surprised with the speed now coming down.

Monitoring Javascript failure with users.

I run a very big system of javascript powering the hotelmap.  As a result it’s hard to see all the problems which can happen to users, especially as far as JavaScript is concerned.  You have so many things to consider.  Browser choice, operating system, connection speed, cookie preferences, local firewall software, filtering on the company firewall etc etc.  In effect there are 101 different things which can affect a users expierience without you realising or every knowing.  So today i added in the “try/catch/response” sequence for the program.

In effect you can try/catch around any routine or big code block and catch any errors coming off.  In the catch you simply bung the error back (via AJAX) to the server and log it to the DB to browse over!  Now, one of the better sides to this is to run this method on specific areas but also put a general try/catch around everthing or even the original parsing routine. 

try {
  doSomethingHere();
} catch (e) {
MyAjaxSystem.Post( “errorscript.php”, “type=SomethingHereError&message=”+e.getMessage+”&etc=foobar”);
}

I’ve sorted A LOT of issues today.

DELL’s Mini 9 Pricing

DELL’s little mini 9 is an attractive offer at £199.99 but include the VAT and postage, oh and the VAT on the postage you end up paying £251.83, almost one quarter more than they horrible carrot dangling price on the laptops page.  Also “Vostro” is a sucky name to replace the “mini 9″.