If you have been following my blog of late, it has a Tablet slant and the reason for the sudden need for me to buy a tablet is the various companies dropping prices of the said items. I had already written about the Motorola Xoom dropping in price to £249 and how I struggled to actually buy one from a bricks and mortar store. I was out and about yesterday and thought I would try my luck at buying a tablet, any issues and I was happy to walk away – I just do not need a tablet that urgent.

PC World

My First port of call was PCWorld/ Curry’s based in Grimsby, quote a large store and in theory should have stock of ‘things’ right? While I was there I had another look of the Logitech Mice (I need a new one) and sure enough the items they had on offer they had zero stock of- how handy was that (my local store also carried zero stock). I looked at the Motorola Xoom and sure enough the price was £329. I asked a local sales person about this pricing and they have either been briefed on what to say already or have many people asking. What did the person say? Well first that they had zero stock (this is without checking any computer – straight from the top of their head). The next piece of propaganda was that the price of £249 was ONLINE price online and not in store. Once again I stated that you cannot buy it (when I checked) for home delivery and you can collect form store BUT no local store (within 45 miles of me) had any in stock. I seriously think PCWorld need to change their attitude towards the customer or they will go the same way as Comet.

Carphone Warhouse

I spotted a Carphone Warehouse a short walk away and as I knew these also offered the Xoom at £249, I thought I would have a quick check. The person who greeted me was polite and was happy to tell me that the Xoom was indeed £249 in-store and while they had none in stock, the one located in the town centre had 3 in stock last time he checked. While I was there I noticed they had an Archos Tablet for £150, this was a 10.1” device running Android 2.3 with 8GIG Storage. It did cross my mind that this might be enough of a tablet to suit my needs and been £100 cheaper than the Xoom, would it be as well to buy this instead? I knew from experience that if you pay cheap, you get cheap and it will never been as good as the better Xoom Tablet.

Stay Tuned for the full review of the Motorola Xoom.

For the record

My Browser has a spell checker built right in, as I type words, I tells me when it spots a word that is wrong. Quite often the default spell checker is USA and as I am based in the UK, it flags words that are in fact correct. When I am writing a new blog post, it means something has come to my head and I want to get this down onto a post, in other words I rush writing it.

What I normally do at this point is read it through a couple of times. I look for any obvious spelling mistakes or when I use the wrong word (which is technically spelt correctly). The human brain is a strange thing, it can skip over things, which are wrong, and you will not see it until someone has pointed it out.

When I read anything written down, unless what I am reading makes little sense, then even if the thing is riddled with spelling mistakes and the wrong use of words, this does not matter to me at all. Do I really care if I read THERE instead of THEIR? The story remains the same. Here is something to think about, I do not get paid for anything that I have written and my style is not that bad that you struggle to read it without been physically sick.

I have a great idea that will help, I will start using a word processor (MS Word) and this can not only trap the bad spelling but also the bad grammar. I shall re-read it 5 times and then publish the work. The side effect of this is time, instead of having something great to read today, you will have a wait until I am happy it is correct.

As 2011 draws to a close, thought it fitting to write a short piece recapping on a few major points and of course looking forward to what 2012 may bring. A lot of people I have talked to seem to think that 2011 was a bad year for them, while I cannot offer any thoughts on how they felt for 2011, I look at 2011 as a time for chance. So what happened in 2011 and how do I see the next year progressing?

The dawn of the Mac

It was in 2011 that I put my hand in my pocket and bought a iMac, yet again refurbished and I agree a Lot of money for a machine. If I could go back in time, would I have bought it or would I have chosen something else? Not a clear answer here, I could have bought a top of the range 3,4Ghz Intel i7 but another PC a bit faster than the PC I already have?

The advent of training

It was march this year that I finally stopped trying to train in my garage and joined a proper gym. This was the best step ever made and I saw gains much quicker and trained properly. I was hoping to also do some sort of martial art but nothing major happening in my area it seems.

The end of google adsense

Google adsense started very slowly and only brought in a small amount but at least it was something and in fact it helped pay for half of my iMac. Greed of course got the better of us and we tried to work the system but the system is not stupid and soon it logged the same IP every single day and then it killed the account. I Still say that it is google loosing out (though they are so large, they would not care) as there is now no adverts anywhere on my site with no way ever to get the adsense back.

Google Plus

Who can forget that Google rolled out G+ and soon many people were video chatting to each other. Old Friends, new friends, friends I had forgotten about all come back t the front. It was sort of short lived in a sense though and as quick as it had started, it was over and no longer people had a hangout.

Streaming

At the tail end of the year, I noticed there was less and less Tech Streams, is the ride over and people have grown bored with either making them or watching them? We shall see what 2012 brings.

This Blog

I do try and write as much as I can and of course keep it interesting but with lack of funding from Google, it’s hard along with trying to think of half decent things to write. People clicking the link for siteground and signing up for one years hosting for $10 bags me a free month and keeps the site going well into 2012.

Google plus has been open a while now, the initial wave of people were mostly the Geeks who were only to happy to jump on a newfangled social media ‘thing’ and to further there so called circle of friends. What is missing is ‘normal’ people, here is a comment someone posted:

Now, if I filter out Internet Friends, Following and Acquaintances from my main Google+ stream… I SEE NO UPDATES.

Why have the masses not jumped ship from Facebook or Twitter yet? What use does G+ actually have and how about the future?

What Does G+ Give you?

The first ability is to add people to Circles, this means you can group people as you see fit and the latter part allows you to only send a message out to a certain group for example. Facebook had this for a while in a sense, I used to use this all the time on facebook so that only people at work for example seen certain posts.

The next is the posts themselves, these can include pictures, videos, links and your location. What happened here was people used this function to post cat pictures by the bucketload, this function reminds me of Tumblr in fact.

The Hangout is the ONLY feature that allowed G+ to live beyond the experimental stage and if marketed right, is a killer application on it’s own. I saw a drop in the number of people prepared to start or be in a hangout as time has gone on though, maybe the novelty has worn off?

Why are people still on Facebook?

Facebook & Twitter have clients right on my phone, on my iPad and computer, I do not need to keep visiting a web page to see what has been written. If you are already on a site or service, unless the new place offers something new and exciting – they why would people move? I have people on my G+ from work but they never post anything, it was just something they joined as it was new but once they saw nobody they knew was either on it or posting anything, they quickly forgot about it.

What needs to be done?

Like I mentioned above, there needs to be application on everything so that at any given notice I can see if there is a Hangout happening, a new post and so forth. What about better ways to filter the information? For example do I really need to stop following somebody just because they post a constant stream of junk? Why not allow me to hide this info but keep them on my books so I can hangout with them if needed?

At the end of the day though, it is up to you  to make your friends and family come across and use it, we cannot sit and wait for Google to sugar coat it. At the moment I see it as two things:

1. A Glorified Twitter
2. Skype on Steroids

I have never really been a great fan of Social Media, I just fail to see the bigger picture on what it is meant to do for you and in my eyes just lets everybody know your business. When Google plus came about, it was exciting at first but as time moved on, it just became the very same as the rest, people spamming stuff on there and touting there business. What caused me to pull back once again from my chosen social sites? What made me drop contact with people I respected and treated as friends? What made me jump right back to Skype?

 Twitter

I recall having about 3 Accounts in my time with Twitter and I dumped them all a long time back, I did come back to Twitter with the name of LiquidTV and used it to tweet out every-time I posted a new blog post. There was two things I noticed though, some people used it only to tweet about there business and of course they did this frequently and the other was an almost constant stream of links to blog posts. I am not interested in either of them subjects and you may say “Well you tweeted about your blog posts” – you need to understand I write one every now and then and I have even took this plug-in off now.

It all ended with me removing a handful of people, blocking all the bots that were following me and locking my account down.  I have noticed Bots tend not to try and follow accounts locked down and only those who I allow can see what I am writing.

Facebook

Still to this day my account remains disabled, my wife still uses it and I can understand now why I got rid of this thing, it is almost like waiting for some gossip to come along rather then some great family photo’s. I do not miss people walking up to me at work and asking about what I wrote about on facebook, if people need to get in contact with me, they email me (which they do).

Google plus

This was the most exciting of the media sharing things out there and at the start the Hangout Feature with max of ten people was brilliant. A Friday night was the venue for Beer and a good laugh with a circle of people but as time moved on, people started to drop off, either by choice or if we happen to upset them.

The problem started with the same people spamming the same crap on G+ as well as twitter, no point in seeing it twice right. Some people just posted that much that by the time I come to have a look what was going on – the important stuff probably dropped off the front page. I first got rid of all the people that I never knew, I then turned to the people who were not following me back and finally removing the people who spend there life it seems posting on G+

IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

I have a problem with text based chat such as MSN, IRC and others – not only do I have to read what is been typed but I have to type my response back. In other words it takes me away from what I am doing at that time. I can understand if the room I am in has loads of people in there and it relates to a live show but when you have like 3 active people, I fail to see the point. I kept one server on my list for the odd time I may jump on there but the rest have all but gone.

Conclusion

Technology comes and goes as do people, remember that the people you meet and speak to on-line – you do not really know them. The difference between on-line and reality is that it is very easy to just stop using the services or remove the people from the list and you no longer have anything to do with them.

I have removed tweet deck from my mac, the windows 7 gadget is also gone, removed it from my phone and at the moment just check it using the website. I still look now and that at Google+ but rarely see any hangouts these days, if at all. I am back to running Skype when I am around and fancy a chat with people as I can carry on working while chatting and if needed, put myself on Do not disturb.

The bottom line is I want a service that lets me communicate with people, If I wanted to know the news there is a lot of sites that provide this, gadgets and widgets galore. It like reading about somebody giving away money in Peru for the next 30 minutes, pointless for me to read about that right.

Just the other day I decided to go out and replace my current Hoover to a shiny new Dyson DC24 and after doing some research on-line, I work out that the prices should be £200 for the Yellow model (called All floor) and about £240 for the DC24 Animal. I drove to my local retail park and first headed off to PCWorld / Currys (its a combined store). The prices looked rather high and as there was not a single sales person about – I ventured off across the road to the local Comet store. It was at this point it was clear how these stores work – let me explain.

Comet

Remember that on-line they had the DC24 Multifloor for £199.99, I asked first if they had any in stock, they checked the computer and told me they had -1 in stock, this of course makes no sense, did someone steal one? I then asked about the DC24 Animal – they had it for £279.99. It was easy then to do a price comparison and for them to offer me this product (which they at least had stock of) for the price the store across the road had for £234, all stores do this right? Wrong - they told me a few lies, first that the product offered by comet is in fact a different DC24 to the one they have in curry’s and before they can price match anyhow, they have to be in stock at the other store. I proceeded to read out the contents from the box and low and behold – its the very same as the one sold everywhere else. At this point she got annoyed and basically told me to go across the road and buy it there.

What made it even worse for this store – a couple had in there hands a cardboard cut-out for a special offer only to be told the offer is no longer on and when they once again compared curry’s – they got told to go there also, we both headed out of the door laughing at how the store had just lost £340 in sales with just two customers.

Currys

I went across the road to Curry’s and the DC24 Yellow model was back up to full price (£299), between me checking in the morning and now getting to the store, they had finished the offer and raised the price. The DC24 Animal was still on offer though but upon checking the computer, they had 1 in stock and it was nowhere to be found. What they did offer me was the ability to buy it now and they would let me know when some came in.

In the end I drove to another store and they had 18 of these things sitting on a floor, ready to buy – why could the person not have got one sent through?

On-line versus Stores

In my own view, the bricks and mortar stores need to go on a few courses in stock management, I cannot see 18 DC24 Hoovers shifting in one day and there should always be some stock in the back but they prefer to let the stock run down which in turn means the customer will venture off to another store the buy the products.

Shopping on-line means I can cross compare prices across the board and have the the thing delivered to me the next working day most of the time, for free. The reason I did not do this was I was sure the local stores would have such things in stock and at the prices they are quoting online. If people stop shopping in physical stores, the local stores get closed down, the staff end off with no jobs.

Google gave a fantastic tool not so long back to the chosen few called Google+ and unlike Buzz before it, this one actually could look like it will work. While the rest of the product is some fluff that on it’s own would be no different to twitter and such, it’s the hangout’s that are the cream of the crop. At the moment in Beta, there is limited control in who does what and it is pup to the people in the hangout to keep control somehow. I have started to see cracks though forming as people revert to more traditional methods (such as Skype).

The Early Days

I remember when almost everybody was having hangouts as part of there live show, a means to overcome running Skype on each machine to get a panel of 4 and generally everybody talking. There was the odd time when a person came in and caused problems and the only solution to this would be to block that person or just remove them from your circles or even create select groups for hangouts.

Lack of control

If we look at say Skype, if there was 5 people in there and one person was a problem, it is easy just to drop that person out and refuse them back in, problem solved. The problem in Hangouts was, just like real life when a group of people talk, if one person is talking over the others all the time, this presents a problem. Google have given us the Mute button but the person can just un-mute and carry on talking.

Streams and Multi posting

Sometimes you follow the same people on Twitter, the websites they run and Google+ and when I have found is they post the same stuff right across all of these formats, which I find annoying to say the least. I find that Google+ is used to post pictures, videos and stories from other sites, not very often do I see a person actual typing a story out, maybe people have grown used to twitter short format?

The case of blocking people

If you block somebody or they block you, when you try and get into a hangout, it lets you know you cannot enter. This is fine when everybody agree’s they want to ignore the same person but is a problem as groups grow bigger and such.

Falling back to the old ways

Once people see less and less hangouts – I feel they will revert to the old ways of Skype, the good thing about this is that you do not need a camera and can have a quick chat then drop off. What are people feeling towards Google+ Hangouts? I still think they are great of course as I chat to people all the time, maybe it depends on how wide your social circle is?

I have seen my fair share of shows on the streaming side of life but when I came across a show going by the name of the Mentalist, this is when you have to wonder what it is all about. This person is from Ireland and his name is Tom Williams, his blurb claims he is also a psychic medium and one of his party tricks is to give you a ‘reading’ – he does private video sessions (£60 per day) – go figure. Let me tell you about the one night that I happen to catch him live on air.

First I get Banned

If you come in and give any sort of bad karma, he will get rid of you, the claim here is that he does not want ‘negative’ energy in the room. The reality is he only wants people who are gullible to take in what he is preaching about – makes sense right.

In comes the first taker

A Person enters the room and asks for a reading, at this point Tom starts waving his hand over his keyboard while his eyes are closed, to simulate feeling the energy I guess. He finally says he is in contacts with the spirits and says the word Goat. He keeps going over and over about the word goat, maybe it is a toy, a real goat, something that looks like a goat, a badge – the viewers finally types he knows nothing about a goat. More moving the hand over the keyboard and he states maybe the goat was in fact a deer? Maybe the goat is in the desert, the person might have been a soldier which is why he is seeing desert (sand) and yet more stabbing in the dark – here he is hoping the person might feed some info back, the person finally says he knows nothing of any of them.

Moving the person along

As none of his words have triggered this person into revealing some info he moves onto the fact that if the viewer is not helping, the spirit will in fact move on and all will be lost, how convenient is this? He explins the spirit is maybe a lost soul while he was on this earth and is trying to get a message back to this person? maybe this person (the viewer) is lost and is in need of direction? He then states he sees that the viewer may have a problem with drugs, he knows someone with drug problems or drugs might feature later on in life.

Wait one minute here, how sweeping a statement is that, that about covers most people I know but the viewer states he is not on drugs and knows nobody who is on them. The Spirit at this point has grown tired and has moved on – how very convenient right? He finally said he can read the viewers energy via the internet and states he has a problem with his chest or knows someone with a chest problem – thats like saying have you see rain or know of someone who has seen it – your going to get a result right?

How these people work

I remember from my younger says on how these so called spiritualist work, the goal is always to start with a key word and work from there, at some point the person will start to fill in the blanks and the rest is easy right?

Example: I ask you if you had a dog once, I see a little dog, I got it wrong thugh and you had a big dog, I can see your eye light up when I said dog but loose interest when I mentioned it was little. I quickly change my story so the dog is now larger (the fog is thick to see and all that) and away we go.

I won’t post a link to this fake but it was funny to watch all the same

Google run a thing called Adsense, the publishers pay Google money to have there adverts displayed and people can apply for an account which allows adverts to be placed on pages, such as this blog for example. This works on Trust in that Google do not want you or anyone else to just click the adverts to make money and the publishers hope google keep an eye on people trying to do this. It is Very easy indeed for google to suddenly one day ban your account and once it is banned, there is no way to find out why and no way to get Adsense back.

How Adsense can work

You have a site such as a Blog for example (can be any type of site though) and you place on your page the google code for adverts – google specify max 3 per page. When people are looking through your websites and providing google is placing the right advert, people *may* click the advert to see what the product is and even buy it. Best example of this would be me writing about Synology NAS Drives and the advert been about NAS right?

As your site picks up, so does the numbers that can click the adverts and slowly you get a trickle of money coming through, google check your account at the end of each month and once it is over £60 or $100, they prepare a cheque for the end of that month.

When adsense can go bad

There is nothing stopping me going to a website and clicking the adverts hundreds of times a day, what this will do is alert google illegal activity is going on and they will close down the adsense account. The advice I got when I did look into this was to install Statcounter and watch out for people doing such a thing, at which point you should ban the IP and hope you don’t get banned.

The suggestion is that if an account is found to be doing this, why do google not deduct the money that the person was supposed to have made them and send you (the owner) a warning? I cannot understand why Google are so quick to ban account, the honest clicks surely help them make money right?

For the record, I am not banned from Adsense, I have switched for now to another provider (BidVertiser) until I am happy to place Google Adverts back n the page.

We have seen that the new Mac Mini is now void of any drive to insert DVD’s into and f you look at any of the latest tablet / laptop type computers – they too have no drive to insert any DVD’s into. You may ask yourself what if you wanted to install the operating system, what about playing DVD movies and god forbid you wanted to sabre some data to cd to send off right?

I wanted to use this post to look at ways to show that in fact CD/DVD as a medium is in fact dying out and there is always a way around doing things better using other media, namely memory sticks.

Installing operating systems

The first thing that comes to mind is how on earth do you install the operating system using something other than CD/DVD? Writing an ISO Image to a DVD is very easy compared to trying to pull of the same trick on a memory stick but armed with a large enough memory stick you can install Windows or Mac  via that memory stick and it is MUCH faster than DVD.

Movies 

Back in the day you went along to a store and rent out DVD movies, you may also have bought some movies for the one’s you wanted to keep and it was such a simple task – you slotted that disk into the drive under your TV and watched the movie in high quality (compared to VHS Tapes anyhow). The problem came when you had to return the movies back to the store and run the risk of late fee’s or scratched media and so forth.

In this day and age you have the choice of renting movies online and devices that stream the movies across the network to your TV. To take a good example, I store all my movies on a NAS box and then I use a WDTV box modded up with wireless which is connected to my TV and I can get access to any movie in my collection at the flick of a switch, no more having a tower of DVD’s taking up space in my living room. I can then also view them same movies on the my iPad using a program that comes from my NAS maker (Synology) and finally I can watch them on any PC in my collection.

Media in General

I bought some time back 100 CD-R, 100 DVD-R and 50 DVD-R (DL), all of these were printable on my canon ip4200 printer. CD is hardly used and I must have 80+ still in the caddy. DVD-R is maybe a lot more popular for install media and the like whilst DVD-R (DL) is again hardly used, maybe in my Hackintosh days I used them but this day and age, hardly ever.

I was put off my DVD in general for storage of files as I recall years ago writing all of my MP3 collection to lots of DVD-R, I placed them into a holder and filed them away think my collection was safe. It was not until I came to use them only to find some of them had errors – how can a disc untouched by a human hand have such errors? I did verify them before putting them away as well.

They have a place but for how long?

Old machines cannot boot from USB Drives, so these will continue to need media on DVD and if people struggle with the concept of making a thumb drive OS install then again, these people will need media. Even Apple have released OSX Lion only via download – the sign of the times and we need to think about moving forward. What about you? do you feel we should leave CD/DVD behind or would you rather carry on using this?