Arts IT Savvy

Over 10 years ago I bought one of these. It’s held me in very good stead over this time (very handy for theatre and av/pc patching work) but it finally packed up last week. From memory (I imported it from the US) it cost me around $A35 — it was real small and the batteries were easily replaceable. I just replaced it with a LED2BU1 which is a bit bigger but was only around $A10 from Coles/New World/Dickens. So far so good. Broader beam but more modern technology. Your lumens may vary.

Recently Apple released their In-Ear Headphones and I was looking forward to getting a pair. Whilst it is true they sound much better than what ship as standard with their iPod offerings, and have a really cool UI featuring FF, RW, Volume and microphone — I reckon they’re rubbish!

There you go, not a patch on my existing Sennheiser MX 560 for bass response. At my age, bass response is important.

FWIW my benchmark was run using the standard Tim audio test suite: Pet Sounds, Graceland, a random podcast and a random movie (in retrospect, poor choice of movie I suspect but I felt like watching it).

Price comparisom (approximate RRP):

Apple Standard = $A50; Apple IEH = $A110; Sennheiser MX560= $A50

Your mileage may vary.

A number of DVD Burners these days are coming with a “Lightscribe” option.  The principle is: if you have DVD media designed for Lightscribe, after burning your data (or whatever) on to the data side of the DVD, you then remove the DVD, flip it over, and put it back into the burner.

Then, by running the Lightscribe editing software, you design a logo / image etc to be ‘printed’ on the other side.  The printing is actually a laser that burns the laser-sensitive material on the reverse side of the disk, which is why you need disks designed to be “Lightscribe”

Some initial impressions, after trying it out for the first time (actually the second time, but the first time was a couple of years ago, and I gave up because it was too slow to be practical).

1.  It is still slow – for the image I made, it took 16 minutes to burn

2. The image I chose probably wasn’t very suitable, and the results looked rather ordinary.  High contrast is definitely required.

3. If the image is not high contrast, the result looks very muddy.

4. Even with a high contrast image, the result is rather pale and dare I say, unimpressive. (And very low contrast)

I’ll try some other images and experiments, but at this stage, I still don’t see that there is much to recommend the Lightscribe process.

Apple have released their new laptops, with a new MacBook, and Macbook Pro (with various optional configs as per normal).

New Apple MacBook

Not sure when they will be available here – around Xmas based on previous experiences.

I’ve been spending some of the day trialing the HP 2133 mini-notebook, and so far have been quite impressed.

It is not designed to be a performance machine – I’m certainly not trying to do any digital video editing or the like on it, but for running Word, Email, surfing the web, it seems to perform well.

Weighing in a bit under 1.5kg, it is surprisingly heavy for its small size, but if ultra-portability is your primary requirement, there are other products out there that are more powerful lighter, but also a lot more expensive.  The 2133 is sub $1000, which is one of its standout points.

The screen is pretty small which is a shame – the resolution is fine, but there is a lot of wasted space around it that could have been better utilised to increase the screen’s overall dimensions, rather than simply a black shiny plastic border (with speakers built in).

The keyboard on the other hand is pretty usable, and is close to being full sized, and is pretty easy to type on even for dyslexic fingered individuals (such as myself – always getting ahead of myself and getting letters around the worng way.)

There is no optical drive, but these days there are some pretty compact, USB powered external drives that can fill that requirement.

So all in all, an interesting machine, perhaps well suited to students, or someone who needs a basic computer with a very small footprint.

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the repackaging of modern tech into alternate forms.

One that caught my attention a couple of years ago was the ‘depetrification’ of the iPod as part of “Project RedWood” It may not be to everyone’s taste, but ZapWood does some amazing work.

Some other places documenting retro-modding of technology includes:

The Steampunk Workshop

ElectriClerk

Bit Tech

Slipperyskip

A range of drives that is catching our attention are the Quadras from LaCie

They range in size (both physical and capacity), with the 500GB being a very tidy small(ish) unit, through to the 2TB (and beyond) which are very large physically, but also with an obvious massive capacity.

The interface is USB, Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and my current favourite – eSATA.

In very rough terms, USB2 operates around 35 MB/sec transfer, which is similar to Firewire 400.  Firewire 800 doubles that, and eSATA runs at a quiet 165MB / sec (if you are transferring onto a RAID 0 configured drive, such as the 2TB).

Not everyone requires that sort of power / speed / capacity, but good to know they exist.

Letting go of old technology.

It’s not that I don’t know where to dispose of the old tech, but bringing oneself to actually let go of it, especially when it cost so much to acquire it in the first place.

Heading back chronologically, (including the current platform(s)) I have:

Apple McBook Pro running Leopard (OSX 10.5.5) and Windows XP (and Vista, and Apple ][e)

HP Desktop Pentium 4 running Windows Vista

Toshiba Tecra Pentium 4 running Windows XP

Pentium 3 733 running Windows XP

486 DX4 100 running DOS 6.22a and Windows 3.11

386 SX running DOS 5

Apple ][e running DOS 3.3

Sinclair ZX81 running CP-M

I think I have a problem!

Apple are releasing a new iPod Touch and iPod Nano.

The Touch now includes a built-in speaker and increased battery capacity (and up to 32GB storage), while the Nano has increased capacity (up to 16GB), and an increased range of colours for those who care about the fashion.

Strangely, in my opinion, the Touch still does not appear to have Bluetooth capabilities, which I would have expected given it’s ever converging role with PDAs (and its ability to have contacts, calendar, email etc), and the increasing range of bluetooth headsets.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve advised people about backing up – it’s like the property market “location location location”.  My catch-cry should be “backup backup backup”!

I have a reasonable backup regime in place, but obviously it is not perfect, and once again I’ve lost data, so let me just say this again for everyone’s sake, including my own:

Make sure that you ALWAYS have more than one copy of any file that is important to you.

Last night, I was cleaning up a number of files, and transferred about 12GB worth onto one of my main harddrives.  Unfortunately (stupidly), I moved the files rather than just copying them.  So that meant that I still only had a single copy of the file.

The drive that I moved the files to failed sometime between then and now, and has become unreadable, and so all the files that I moved have been lost.  The drive itself is rather large (1.5TB), and fortunately I have a backup of it, so the majority of the files are safe (but now at risk, seeing as they have become the only copy, and that is bad news.)So all that I have lost are the files that I moved (and 12GB is a pretty significant chunk even so).

So stop for a second and think – are there any files that are important to you that you only have a single copy of?  If the answer is “yes” then before doing anything else today, stop putting the problem into the “too hard” basket, and find out what you need to do to back them up, and do it!