ToneCheck is an email plug-in that checks the content of your emails for tone and alerts you to language that may be misunderstood or interpreted as particularly negative.

Let’s face it: Sometimes you send an email that you fully intend to convey anger or annoyance. But text communication is rife with misunderstandings, and often an email with perfectly pleasant intentions can lead to a lot of upset coworkers. That’s what ToneCheck aims to address.

After installing the plug-in (available for Outlook only for now, but it looks like versions for Gmail, Thunderbird, and Mail.app are in the works), you’ll get a new Run ToneCheck button right next to Spellcheck in Outlook. Click it to see an analysis of the tone of your email (like the one in the screenshot above). From that point, you can edit out the offending language, or you may want to adjust your settings to change the tolerance threshold for both negative and positive language.

During its beta, ToneCheck is a free download that works for a year, and is currently available for Outlook only. In theory it’s a clever idea, but after testing it out a bit, I’m not sure it’s ready to provide any serious impact in the way we communicate. In fact, I found a lot of its results downright frustrating, and it’s mission, illustrated below as transforming emotional human beings into mildly contented automatons, is downright terrifying.

You can grab the program from HERE or head off to http://tonecheck.com

Its been a full week of my upgrade to the 50mbit and I thought I would write a post just updating people on how it is going and some lessons learnt. The important thing to note I suppose is that jumping around the speedtest sites and getting annoyed when it does not do what it says on the tin only serves to annoy you when in reality it could be the site your testing from that does not have enough bandwidth.

Do you need 50mbit?

The short answer is that unless you download every Movie, MP3 or game – then you can pretty much do everything with the speed before, in my case been 20mbit. Upload is only useful to people who stream, upload files to FTP sites or push YouTube video’s – of course they also help the Torrents if that is your kind of thing.

Does the connection live up to the hype?

For the first few days, it hit 50mbit and 1.5mbit no matter what time of day and I could grab files from various sources faster then I could find things to download. Once the novelty wore off with me either speed testing, downloading files or uploading to my website – normal service resumed to be honest and I would not know the difference between my previous connection and this new faster one. I still had web sites that buffered in fact – so not the speed I need but better streaming sites. A few days ago – my speed started to vary a lot and it was impossible to get above 768K uploading – what gives?

QoS (Quality of Service)

One of the options on the router was QoS – now this little function will make sure that one application will not consume. Th e best example is a torrent will not affect a Skype call – the router will slow down the torrent to make sure it has enough to make skype work. I was not aware though that this “tick in the box” would make speed testing or normal downloading swing from one extreme to another.

I called Tech Support and he said he had tweaked my modem and give it a couple of hours and all shall be well again. Three hours passed and still the same – but then I remembered about this QoS thing - could it be that it was restricting my connection and keeping some bandwidth for spare?

I removed the setting – did various speed tests and bingo – full speed once again. My understanding is wrong then of this function and it is easier for me to restrict a torrent say to 1/4 of my connection and manage it myself – at least I would have all the speed at hand instead of been restricted – lesson learned.

The wait was finally over and Virgin come and fitted today my brand spanking new 50mbit service complete with new modem, new router and even a USB Wireless Adaptor. This post goes over what equipment you get, what levels of speed you should expect to get and how my install went. It is to be noted this is of course UK Based ISP and on a cable connection provided by Virgin, I am sure USA people might get less down load but higher upload – depends on what you are looking for.

The previous service

I have a choice of 10mbit/512k (Cheapest by far), 20mbit/768K (what I was on) and finally 50mbit/1.5mbit which comes at a price of both the install, the activation and the extra money per month of course on your bill. Both the 10mbit and 20mbit comes with the wonderful world of bandwidth throttling – I wrote about this HERE but to put it in a nutshell:

Between the hours of 9am and 9pm (yes that’s 12 hours) if I use the internet too much to either download or upload, my bandwidth gets capped to 75% of my speed for FIVE Hours. This is 4mbit download and 100k upload – in other word it renders my connection pointless.

The Cost of going to 50Mbit

I have to pay £35 for installation and £20 activation fee and on top of my normal bill (About £48 a month for TV, Phone and Broadband) I have to add another £8. Now I thought this was a bit much but I needed a router anyhow – so £55 is not too bad right?

Installation day

I was worried the personally installing this might get it wrong and I was at work all day but they managed to install this just fine and had to use my laptop to test it out. he left my old router in place with the view that the new one would be wide open to all – he even left his number to call (mobile) should I have any problems.

What gear do we get?

First up is the new Modem – a very sexy black and silver affair indeed. On the back we have the cable connection, Ethernet port and power. The power cord had an in-line on/off switch, very handy indeed.

The front as you can see is a nice black number with Blue lights (they look green in that picture) and this device would not look out of place against any computer or even in the main living room for example.

Next Up is the router, this is a D-Link DIR-615 and is basically a Wireless N Router with 4 10/100 ports. I am not sure if the installation guy put in some details but I was un-able to log in with the default details.

Once I had reset the router (Holding in the rest button for 20 seconds) I could log in and set everything up. I had some issues with certain sites (such as google) but once everything was reset – everything worked as it should. The router has QOS and SPI firewall and the only downside (for me) was not having gigabit ports.

Left on the side still shrink wrapped was the D-Link DWA-140 USB Wireless N Adapter. It does not mention on the box if this is a true 300mbit version or the slower 150mbit but as I have wireless already in everything I need wireless in – this can serve as a handy spare.

It comes with a nice and heavy mouse looking extender if you wish to use it on your desktop. This is a nice touch and heavy then any usb extender I have got before.

The Speed test

You can see that it is close to 50mbit and in fact on the various tests I have done already today, it hit 50mbit with easy every single time. The upload is what I need and 1.6 is fine with me, there is talk of upgrading to 5mbit in the not to distant future.

Conclusion

With no throttling of my line no matter what time of day, an extra £8 a month and speed unheard of a few years ago – I am more than happy to pay the cost and upgrade.

We talked a while ago about one of the best free 3D tools available, Blender, a powerful software to create 3D designs and animations. There are other softwares out there, some complex and powerful, others really simple ones like Google Sketchup but in general all the 3D tools have in common that they are hard to use for non professionals and that it is much easier to create technical volumes with a lot of straight lines and and geometric shapes. The reason of that is because normally the 3D tools use vertices, angles and polygonal figures to create the shapes, and more complex forms mean a lot of work and and knowledge of how the program really works. In Blender, for example, there are some tools to make that part of the job easier, but in general the objects we create will be heavy and geometric. For this reason Sculptris is pretty amazing app. This is a working progress andy they just release the 1.0 version, we have to see what other things they will bring.
The difference between this tool and other existing ones is that Sculptris really gets closer to the experience of sculpting and because of that, it doesn’t work for more technical drawings but is perfect for organic figures.

Go HERE to read more and grab the program…

As per my other post abut NAS Drives – yesterday I took it upon myself to build a NAS box from parts I already had and thus save myself spending any money. The goal if you recall was to have a system that was able to be upgraded in space later such as adding 1TB or larger Harddrives as needs arose. This journey took a while to get everything ready and was the end result worth the effort involved?

The Acer Aspire E700 Desktop

The machine was a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz which had 5GIG RAM (2x512MB and 2x2GIG), NVidia GeForce 7600GT but also had an inbuilt graphics card along with 6 SATA COnnectors internal and a total of 10 USB Ports. A Point to mention was the internal 1Gbit LAN Card was not working. This presently had two SATA Drives fitted, 1x250GIG and 1x80GIG. I added a Intel Pro/1000 T Server NIC I had spare for the networking.

Prepaing the 1TB Harddrive

In my Dell desktop, I had fitted an extra 1TB Harddrive – this stored all my applications, Tunes, Backgrounds, games and so forth. The first (and long) task was to move everything across to my 750GIG Drives that came with the Dell.  A Point to note here was that my Tunes directory needed sorting out anyhow and once I deleted them from iTunes, all playlist + number of plays and so forth would be lost

Preparing the NAS Box

I booted from the FreeNAS CD I had made and went through the menu to install onto a Flash drive (USB) – this was to make sure then when the machine was re-started, it would retain it’s settings. I did a few tests to see how it worked but at this stage no drives were formatted on the Acer. I stripped out the Graphics card, 4GIG Ram (leaving 1GIG) and re-routed the wiring best I could. I did a few tests to see how much noise was present and seemed happy to go forward onto the next stage.

Networking

As my old router broke which had 1Gbit Networking and my present 5 port Gigabit Switch only has 4 ports working – I had two choices here. I could either plug in the NAS Box into the router and limit it to 100mbit or take on of my other machines off the Gigabit network and run it from there.  In the end I thought it was just easier to place the computer near the router and run it from 100mbit port.

Preparing the drives

IN the Acer machine we now had 80gig, 250gig and 1TB Harddrive – all of which could be formatted by the NAS Box. IN the USB ports we had 500gig and 1TB iomega drives which currently have files already on (NTFS). Setting up the drives was easy enough, a long drawn out process though:

• Adding the Drive to the Disks Management
• Formatting the Said Disks
• Setting up a mount point
• Adding a Share per drive

All I ended off with was the same number of shares that I had drives. No matter how hard I tried though, I could not get to add the 1TB iomega drive and I said to myself that I would plug it into a Laptop and make sure it had no errors and such.

Copying the Files across the network

I choose the 250gig drive as my ‘Applications’ Drive – I started to copy across the various directories and was shocked how slow it was going across. I could understand why – 100mbit network compared to 1Gbit is of course going to be a lot slower. I stopped the process as it was getting late and would re-evaluate this NAS Box the next day.

I wish to also make a point about noise, while most people have no issues with leaving a computer (or many) sitting there humming away – I need the device to be silent and also the power it needs is also important – I do not need 250Watts been drawn 24/7 just in case I need a file one day across the network. After powering down all the computers and equipment – the fact it was also very warm that night – I could hear the fan grinding away along with the 2 External Harddrives been hot enough to cook eegs on. I powered the whole lot down – time to re-evaluate my needs.

What do I really need?

The machine that is most of the time is my Dell Core i7, my other machines come on now and then as needed. The few things that need sharing would be:

• Backdrops – This is currently 5gigs
• Tunes – be nice to have them on all machines.
• Applications – On the odd time I need to get them across to other machines.

I had a look though at what machines I use and a loss of 5gigs would be a drop in the ocean for backdrops given how much space each of these machines have. iTunes can already share out the music and the rest was easy enough to copy across the network from machine to machine as needed. The Bottom line is while I would love the idea of a large storage pool with fast copy speeds, I would need to spend some money to achieve this goal and the current crop of Harddrives I own are not worth of making into a NAS box.

End result

While it was a good exercise in making a NAS Box, I am in the process of copying all the files back to my Dell (which is taking a long time) from the NAS Box. I will place the 1TB Drive back into the Dell and move the files back into there respective places. I shall re-built the Acer E700 back into a Desktop machine – maybe using the 250Drive in another machine.

If you own more than one computer, you may find that some items would just work better if they were held in one central location and each computer could access these files no matter which computer was on – such as your MP3 Collection for example. This can take the form of dedicating one computer as a server if you like and left on 24/7, you could build your own NAS box or buy one of the many off the shelf – all are good but have a downside normally. I plan on jotting down my thoughts to give each idea a good going over and seeing how it look at the end – join me on my journey into NAS.

Server based sharing

When I said server here, I mean a computer with FIle and Print Sharing enabled and various drives shared out, this can be Windows (any), Linux or Mac based OS. What happens here is we take a machine, put as many hard drives as you have around /  can afford and basically use the share option. One the other computers you browse the network and map a network drive which connects on start up and you have access to these files all the time. The good side of this is any computer can be used but for me at least, the bad side is that depending on how quiet the computer is – this can be a noisy solution to the problem and also eating up electricity 24/7 (250+ Watts). It does mean though you can plug in USB Drives (or even eSATA if the machine supports this) and add this to the shares without having to wipe the drives first.

Build your own NAS (Proper hardware)

The first item you are going to need is a nice case that is small, quiet and can hold more than one drive – we could get Fractal Design Array R2 Mini-ITX NAS Case

This bad boy holds SIX Harddrives, you need an Mini ITX Board and maybe even a sata raid card. The cost of this case is about £149 and looks nice and should be a lot quieter than a normal desktop case. next on our list would be of course the Mini ITX Board – Intel D410PT With Integrated Intel Atom Processor D410 and the Intel NM10 Express Chipset M-ITX Motherboard

This motherboard comes with the ATOM CPU which means it does not need a FAN – very quiet indeed then and the price look at that site is about £56. You need to buy some memory, this takes DDR2 and has two slots, for a NAS Box, you do not need a lot – so a single 512MB Stick will do you fine – so we can add another £10 to the price. The last thing you need of course would be some hard drives – after all what use is a NAS without such a thing right? At this point it comes down to cost vs. capacity.

One example here is 1.5TB sata drive this comes in at the bargain price of £57 or you can branch out and buy a 2TB Drive for about £88 but this has a lower spin speed of 5400RPM for example. What it comes down to is this – if you bought three 1.5TB Drives, you will be spending £171 and have 4.5TB of space (formatting means you loose some of that of course) compared to two 2TB Drives setting you back £176 but only giving you 4TB of space. The upshot is the end game, 6×1.5TB is 9TB and 6x2TB of course is 12TB – quite a difference one you fill the drive bays up over time.

Counting up the cost so far then – we would have spent close to £400 on a system that has a potential capacity of 12TB, looks nice and is quiet.

What software to use?

The Software I would suggest would be FeeNAS – this is very flexible and included various add-ons such as BitTorrent Server and an iTunes Server.

The Pre-built *Cheap* Solution

One example here is an Edimax NS-2502 NAS Box, this comes with NO Drives but has all the features such as BitTorrent Server, iTunes server and so forth as well as GigaBit Network port, USB for connecting extra drives and so forth.

The price of this is £99, add to this 2x2TB Drive (£80 each) and we have a 4TB NAS Box for a price of about £260 – this is a lot cheaper then the solution above but you are limited of course to only two drives.

The last option is to buy a single drive NAS Box – in this case a Western Digital My Book 2TB NAS Box. This device is listed as £150, cheaper once again and it has a USB Port so you can stick your existing USB Drive in there and share that out, no metion of iTunes server and such.

Thoughts

How much you spend on a NAS depends on many things such as how much capacity you need, how much redundancy it offers (Such as RAID 0, 1,5), other services it comes with such as Torrent and iTunes for example and finally how quite plus power consumption of the offending device. At the moment my main source of files would be Backdrops (I have a lot), my Tunes and maybe my movies. If I moved to a more central storage arrangements, I could give up the 1TB Drive and the 750GIG drive and replace that with something a lot smaller – remember if all your data is now central, why do you need such a big OS Drive?

My Pick of the day would be the Edimax box – lots of features, cheap and good reviews…

Ready for HD

• GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
• GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
• DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, for compatible embedded devices
• Improved support for MKV HD, including seeking fixes, and 7.1 channels codecs
• Support for new codecs, like Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8

Extensions

New add-ons and script framework so one can personalize its vlc.

• Written in lua
• 2 main types of scripts:
  • content add-ons, integrated in the playlist
  • functionnalities extensions, like metadata searching on the web, or subtitles look-ups
• Very Simple

Web improvements

• Support for WebM decoding and encoding
• Improved web plugins
• Better streaming capabilities

Better Audio experience

• Integrated playlist in the Qt4 interface
• Multiple views (like album art) in the playlist in the Qt4 interface
• Support for AMR-NB, Mpeg-4 ALS, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, FLAC 6.1/7.1 and WMAS
• CDDB and CD-Text works now on the Windows port when listening to CD-Audio
• Support for DVD-Audio files (.aob)
• Improved meta-data and album-art support

Faster, Lighter

• Faster decoding, with up to 40% speed-ups, in HD resolutions
• First part of the Video Output core rewrite
• Removal or rewrite of dozens of modules, code simplification and tens of thousands of lines of code removed
• Some functionalities that are less used are now moved to extensions
• More assembly optimizatinons, especially SSSE3/SSE4 and ARM Neon
• Fewer threads used

Better for developers

• Simplified and improved libVLC, removal of exceptions for better C integration
• New phonon-backend for Qt applications, on all platforms
• New C++ bindings

Grab it at VidoLan

I currently have various services from Virgin and one of them includes Broadband which is provided by cable. They offer a choice of 10Mbit / 512kbit, 20Mbit / 768kbit and finally 50Mbit / 1.5Mbit. On both the 10Mbit and 20Mbit connections, they have bandwidth throttling which comes into place between 9am and 9pm. I liked the idea of upgrading to 50mbit but personally I could not see the need for such a thing.

My Current connection and issues

As part of my pack, I have the telephone line which allows for mainly unlimited calls along with the base Cable TV package but I bolted on the extra’s pack to get Sky 1 and various other handy channels (which costs me an extra £5 a month) plus I have the 20Mbit / 768K Connection. As I am work all day, the throttling which comes into place between 9am and 5pm is of no interest to me but between 6pm and 9pm – this is a time when I actually do want to use the internet and there is times when I need to download a game, updates and so forth BUT if I am not careful – I can trip the 3.5GIG Download Cap or the 1.5GIG Upload cap (or both) and for the rest of that night my speed drops from 20Mbit to 5Mbit and Upload jumps from 768K to 100K – this my friends is the issue. I notice this throttling if I am on Skype, playing a game online or trying to view web pages, as it only has 100K left on the upload, it struggles badly.

Does it get worse? well yes – the throttling last for 5 Hours which means I can write the rest of the night in terms of using the internet for anything serious. No amount of me calling the support desk will make any difference, I am screwed until the next day and this is not good enough.

Upgrading to 50Mbits

I called today and it works like this – I pay £35 for Installation and £20 for Activation along with an Extra £8 per month on top of what I already pay. This sounded expensive to me (the install and such) but you get a Free Wireless N Router (netgear wnb2100  I heard) and due to my old Router dying on me and looking for a new one – that is the cost of the Install right there.

I am due to get this upgraded on the 16th July 2010 and from that point forth I can start downloading at 50Mbit, Uploading for now at 1,5Mbit (I heard they are upgrading this to 5Mbit soon) and the most important thing – NO Throttling. The Upload speed is very welcome, Uploading YouTube Video’s – Live Streaming and so on.

Record Skype Video Calls and Edit for Free with Vodburner

Need the ability to record Skype Video calls and save for later use such as uploading to youtube and such? Well VodBurner claims to do this and for free.

What does it cost?

• VodBurner is free to install.
• Recording Skype-to-Skype calls with other VodBurner users is completely free of charge. There are no time limits or other limitations.
• Recording calls with non-VodBurner users is also free, but recordings have a VodBurner watermark added to them.
• Basic video editing (add/remove transitions, skip segments, add basic captions) is completely free of charge.
• Advanced video editing (add text, pictures, audio) is free for calls with other VodBurner users.
• To produce videos without the watermark, or to use Advanced video editing for calls to non-VodBurner users, you can purchase a VodBurner subscription.  Click here for pricing details.

VodBurner Features

• Create complete video productions directly from Skype calls.
• Record both sides of any Skype video conversation, directly to your hard disk.
• Captures at full frame rate and maximum resolution for the best quality possible.
• Once the call is complete, generate a single complete video, incorporating both sides of the call, with just a couple of clicks.
• Edit the video prior to publishing, using the built in Post-Production Console.
• Alter which camera is used at any point (this side, other side or both sides).
• Trim portions of the call so they do not appear in the final production.
• Add text captions to the final production, with the ability to alter font, color and background.
• Add pictures to the final production.
• Add background audio to the final production, with professional fading options and volume control.
• Generate ASF/WMV files suitable for uploading directly to YouTube and other services.
• Upload directly to YouTube for public or private sharing.
• Generate video with your choice of aspect ratio and resolution.
• Anti-drift technology keeps both sides of the call in sync.
• Ideal for podcast interview recording.
• Ideal for recording shared desktop sessions.

Download VodBurner

Every once in a while it is good to make sure you have the latest software running and today was a good point in question in that there is a few programs that have been updated and worth posting about in case anybody missed them. If you are already way ahead of the game – then no worries, nothing lost here but the one’s that I have seen so far are WordPress Updating to V3 and ATI getting to 10.6 on the Drivers fron as well as NVidia if your sporting a GeForce Card.

WordPress 3.0

Normally I throw caution to the wind and press Update but this time I went into my FTP and grabbed the entire site as well as download the MySQL Databases. The update went without a hitch and the nice new light look along with telling me all the things that needed updating at once was nice. If you run WordPress then on your site, I Suggest you upgrade as soon as.

ATI Catalyst™ 10.6 Suite

Released on the 16th June (two days ago) it introduces some new feature and many fixes:

New in Version 257.21

• Adds support for Blu-ray 3D with NVIDIA 3D Vision technology. Learn more about the hardware and software requirements here .
• Increases performance for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs in several PC games. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured with GeForce GTX 480. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:

• • Up to 14% in Aliens vs. Predator (1920×1200 noAA/AF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 4% in Batman: Arkham Asylum (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF PhysX=High)
  • Up to 5% in BattleForge (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Very High settings)
  • Up to 5% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 4% in Crysis: Warhead (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Enthusiast setting)
  • Up to 24% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (1920×1200 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Far Cry 2 (2560×1600 8xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 25% in Just Cause 2 (2560×1600 no AA/AF – Concrete Jungle)
  • Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (1920×1200 no AA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 40% in Metro 2033 with SLI ((1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 8% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920×1200 no AA/AF – Day)
  • Up to 110% in Stone Giant with SLI (2650×1600 – Tessellation on, DoF on)
  • Up to 6% in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena (2560×1600 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Unigine: Tropics (2560×1600 no AA/AF – OpenGL)
  • Up to 5% in 3DMark Vantage (Performance and Extreme Presets)
  • Up to 19% with Transparency AA (1920×1200 4xTrSS – measured in Crysis)

• Upgrades PhysX System Software to version 9.10.0223.
• Adds support for OpenGL 4.0 for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs.
• Adds support for CUDA Toolkit 3.1 which includes significant performance increases for double precision math operations. See CUDA Zone for more details.
• Adds support for new extreme Antialiasing modes for 3-way SLI PCs, including up to SLI48x AA for GeForce 200 series GPUs and up to SLI96x AA for GeForce GTX 400 series GPUs.
• Adds support for a new ‘Quality’ mode for NVIDIA’s Ambient Occlusion control panel feature.
• Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel setup page for SLI and PhysX for ultimate control over multi-gpu configurations.
• Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel feature for ultimate control over CUDA GPUs, allowing the user to effectively choose which GPU will power each CUDA application.
• 3D Vision customers can download the v257.21 3D Vision drivers here.
• Includes numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release notes on the documentation tab for information about the key bug fixes in this release.