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Hacking the Kingston Wi-Drive
- bySpode on12th May, 2012 inGeneral
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I found my way over at the Digital Summer event a couple of days ago where Kingston were showing off their latest wares. I had a Wi-Drive thrust into my hands to have a play. My curiousity got the best of me and I wasted a good working day playing around / hacking with it. (Invoice is in the post Maggie...)
The Device
Fairly pretty to look at, it's light and about the same size as a phone. I can't help but feel they would have been better off making it fatter and shorter, but its curved edges means it fits into pockets nicely.
So, plug it in by USB and it's a 32GB flash drive with middling performance. Unplug it and switch it on and it becomes a wireless hotspot for accessing your content. You can then connect to this using up to three devices. It's designed with phones/tablets in...
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Mobile World Congress 2012
- bySpode on27th February, 2012 inGeneral
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Day 2 - Ubuntu on Android, Twonky and FreeFlow
Another silly early start today - and the ThinkWall on the UKTI stand is working perfectly as expected. As well as showing the tweets and photos being submitted, it has a ticker at the bottom showing the schedule of seminars - and these pop up full-screen as a ten minute warning too. Nifty.
So right next door to where we are exhibiting, Twonky is showing off their stuff. Rather topical for me as I was researching into UPnP/DLNA for a video I was doing for TechInStyle (the first ones came out today BTW - apparently I'm fat and annoying according to one comment!).
Twonky is basically a really good implementation of UPnP across all platforms. They have a server you can run on Windows/Linux and this also communicates with their website, giving you a cloud service for seeing what content you have, and where...
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Mobile World Congress 2012
- bySpode on26th February, 2012 inGeneral
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Day 1 - Pre-show Thoughts
One of my biggest regrets as a technology journalist was not going out to MWC (Mobile World Congress). I figured at some point, I'd get the opportunity and this year was it.
ThinkWall has been growing from strength to strength, and thanks to the UKTI I'm going to be running ThinkWalls on their booth (you can see the bespoke design above), as well as at the UKTJPR party on Wednesday, showing relevant twitter streams to those events.
The whole ThinkWall system is configured to run through the cloud - so that in combination with LogMeIn, allows me to look after a whole host of walls from my Xoom tablet. So I won't be breaking my back lugging around a laptop!
It does feel strange having an exhibitors pass instead of press - but I am still intending on doing some coverage of anything unique I see (I...
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My Christmas Song - Snow Man
- bySpode on26th December, 2011 inGeneral
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So I had this amazing (!) idea of doing a Christmas Album this year, but thanks to excessive drinking, Skyrim and a cold this never really happened. I managed to record two Christmas classics (which were essentially Karaoke) and a reading of "The Owl and the Pussy Cat" in a stupid voice.
Possibly the best thing I managed to do (and that says a lot) is do a cover version of "Rocket Man" by Elton John, but using alternative lyrics to become "Snow Man". It's chilled out and done on acoustic guitar. My lovely house mate James Looney did the guitar work.
The lyrics, for those want to be spared of my ever diminishing vocal skills, are as follows:
Got packed from snow last night, pretty tight
A bunch of kids, maybe twelve or ten
And I came to life, thanks to them
A carrot for a nose and a bowler hat
A scarf not...
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Thank You Boris - Barclays Bikes Rock!
- bySpode on1st December, 2011 inGeneral
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Being single since May, I've been trying to get myself looking nice and trim as I parade myself back on the market (form an orderly queue please ladies!). Over the past 3 years I've slowly put a few pounds on (not excessive amounts - but enough that I notice) and I've realised part of that reason for that is that I now drive. I used to ride my bike for so many tiny journeys that I no longer do. Trials riding is good exercise but doesn't give as much of a cardio work out as you'd expect.
I've been lecturing part-time at Ravensbourne College and being on the O2 - you have to use their O2's car park facilities. At £10 a day, I've started parking a 10 minute cycle away and flinging a bike in the back of the car. I managed to build myself a fixie out of spare...
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When Will My Central Heating Go on?
- bySpode on5th November, 2011 inGeneral
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Living in Gravesend (for my sins) does have the benefit of being the warmest place in the UK - or so they say. Only living here since May I've not exactly taken full advantage of that. Although I have taken full advantage of the excellent trials riding, the pretty good wooden skate park and the lovely views of the Thames. We'll just ignore the 24 hour McDonalds and the night life.
It is now November and I still don't have my central heating turned on. This is the first time I've lived in a flat - and a poorly converted one at that (although very nice, and very big). Right now I'm getting enough heat from the flat below, and in some ways the flat above (think about it) that my flat is at a rather comfortable temperature. In fact - I'm actually getting a little too warm at night!
Granted -...
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Headphone Repair Using Sugru
- bySpode on1st November, 2011 inGeneral
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So I've had my Shure E4C headphones for nearly 6 years now - and I have no intention of buying a new set any time soon. The sound quality is still great and I just don't think I could go back to sub £200 headphones. Equally, I don't want to spend £200 on headphones.
So the right piece finally started cutting in and out often enough that I had to do something about it. Anyone with a keen memory will remember me repairing these previously by attacking them with a scalpel, resoldering and then gluing together. It really wasn't the neatest of mods and as it turns out - could have been avoided because the unit can actually be opened up.
I apologise now for taking these photos on my phone. They looked fine on screen, but...
For those who own a pair of E4Cs - don't do it this way - instead...
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Ubuntu 11.10 - to Unity and Beyond!
- bySpode on24th October, 2011 inGeneral
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The Upgrade
So Ubuntu 11.10 came out this month and figured I'd have a play as I'd heard that Unity was seriously improved.
I was previously running 11.04 and the upgrade wouldn't work for me. Not only that, but it gave me an error message that didn't help me at all - merely that it couldn't find an upgrade path. No "see this log" or "these packages are causing the issues", instead "E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks". Mats Lindh offered up a solution to his problem which didn't work for me.
So I decided I may as well do a reinstall. One of the nice things about keeping most of my important stuff on my file server, and the rest in the cloud is that doing a reinstall is usually pretty painless.
However, like all good boys I did make a backup. I booted up to the Ubuntu USB stick, mounted my file server and...
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Yet More Spodelling
- bySpode on6th April, 2011 inGeneral
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I'm filming a whole series of videos for Halfords at the moment as a Think Bikes project. I've been looking for an excuse to buy one of those XLR -> USB adapters for a while and this was it. Maplin has a ProSound unit for £20 - very reasonable if you ask me.
The sound quality is very good, but the biggest disappointment is the delay - I can't listen to myself through the headphones whilst I'm singing because there is around a 240ms delay - by my trial and error calculations.
Another project I've been working on, was talking about doing a viral song - using the Avenue Q "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" as a base for the parody. So, whilst slightly bored with doing voiceover and wanting to test out the adapter - I did the first verse of the song in a couple of takes. The hardest...
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Fixing a Laptop's GPU with a Heat Gun
- bySpode on24th January, 2011 inGeneral
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My good friend Karl's laptop broke a few years back - leaving a garbled mess on the screen. We pin-pointed it down to the GPU itself, but didn't have a clue how to fix it.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading about reflow soldering, and was putting an order into Farnell. I picked a 1500W heat gun up for around £11 thinking that at some point I'd get to use it. I mentioned this Karl and as it turned out - he still had his laptop, so bought it around.
In hind sight - I probably should have watched more YouTube videos in advance - but I knew the principle and just went at it alone. I had a spare graphics card that was broken and decided to use this to experiment on - after all - we had no idea how long it would take for the solder to...
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