The on-going training into Martial Arts continued with the local club having a full day out at a  Seminar in Hull. The way this worked is each person paid £10 and made there own way to the event which started at 10am on a cold Sunday morning. This woud last all the way to 4pm with various Martial arts been demonstrated along with awards and such.

Breaking down into Groups

I expected a lot more different clubs attending this event but the number that did turn up was low enough to not make the place too full. We were broken into 3 groups and an instructor took us through through a different martial art or technique. We began in my section with some Jujitsu and this is were my arms, wrists and shoulder got a good bashing. Half of the issue of course was my fault as I was not fully relaxing which in turn can only lead to more pain. One of the taekwondo students felt the need to both question the instructors and make full on contact while practicing the moves.

Other Martial Arts

We did various Karate moves of course which I felt more at home with along with a handful of other martial arts, each session only lasting about 10-15 moves before moving onto the next. We got taught some knife drills which seemed very effective but I was un-sure if in a real situation I would remember anything but the most basic and that is not something you can get wrong in the real world of course. We moved onto baseball bats and this all made sense, the key of course was to move fast enough to deflect the blow and then follow up with something that would stop the person.

Best Kata

At 2pm – we then moved onto the Best Kata section, each person had to perform a Kata (one they knew of course) and they were graded via a point system. The winners would get a cup which they can keep. The adult section was everything from myself who had not been doing this that long all the way up to a 5th dan Black Belt. This seemed a bit unfair in that the Black Belts would know the routines inside out but at the end of the day, it was just a trophy, so no biggie.

Finishing off

Once the winners got the trophy, they handed out certificates to everyone that attended which took some time of course and we finally could all drive off into the sunset and go home. I will add that it was a long day, I had cramp in my calves for some reason at the start and I had to put a wrist strap on with the amount of bending that my wrist took through the whole day. I understand these people need to demonstrate the moves but is it needed to cause some of us injuries?

Overall

I was not forced to attend and I felt it was a very productive day with a lot of knowledge in the hall, all the way up to 10th Dan. It also give people a chance to see how the other Martial Arts stacked up against what they already knew. I feel that the more you do the sport, the more you learn and retain and this can become second nature in a real life problem (such as getting attacked on the street).  

Yo must of heard the expression “back up your data” and I should know better than anyone given I work in I.C.T. but I shall tell you a story that could happen to anyone in regards loosing everything in one single hit. We use Macrium Reflect at work, this is installed on a Dell P4 desktop and inside this desktop we have the 80GIG OS drive (standard it comes with), a 1TB SATA Drive and a eSATA Dock to allow us to stick drives in there to image to/from. I got the extra tool (disk restore) as mention in that other post to write the chosen image back to the harddrive. I have been using this system for quiet some time now, when it comes to restoring, you choose the image file (from the D: Drive) and drop down the hard drive in the list, there is normally 3 listed.

Back it up

We only just mentioned that should anything happen to the drive – we would loose all the images and th ehard work we have put into this solution, it was agreed we should order another 1TB drive to Sync the images in case of issues. I *almost* ordered one on the thursday but we said it can wait till Monday due to time constraints and such.

250gig sata drives

One of the issues I found with this software is it cannot go down in size for the image, by this I mean if I make a snapshot of a 250gig drive, I cannot restore it onto a 160GIG drive even if there is not that much data on there. Two of the laptops had small drives (120gig and 160gig), we orded two 250gig to replace this.

The dreaded day

On Friday I slotted a 250gig drive in the dock, went through the motions of restoring the image and within seconds it stopped and said drive D: was corrupted. I had a look at disk manager and it seems that I had somehow (lack of thought) managed to try and restore a image onto the image drive. I find it amazing that the software (it is free though) would allow this to happen in the first place. Every single image was gone, I now set about trying to get this back.

Un-Format

I tried to find a utility that would go back in time on the format and select the previous MBR, I know I used to use a program like this years back but no amount of looking could find me anything like that. I found a freeware recovery program (PC Inspector Recovery) which looked promising but this failed over and over on the search and then on the recovery part and it took HOURS to run, like 6 or something.

Recuva

Another Free tool is Recuva and to make this work what I did was delete all the partitions on the drive using disk manager, create a new 1TB partition and did a quick format, this was to allow the drive to be shown and searched. It ran for 3-4 hours and found a whole bunch of files, I types in the search the format for Reflect (Mrimg) and restored these with the option to re-create the folders (otherwise I would have no idea what image was which). This ranf for another 4 hours and finally all the data looked to be back.

What I plan to do going forward

I think the most obvious answer is the obtain another 1TB drive and put this in place of the 80gig model, I would then use Microsoft Sync Toy to mirror anything on the image directory. The next part would be to name every single image with the correct name as well and not rely on folder names for that purpose. Never put off stuff off as they say, it was that easy to loose the lot.

At the moment everybody seems to be talking about Cloud storage due to Google bringing out Drive which offers 5gig Free Storage. When I see an offer for a new service with some space to store files online, I tend to sign up anyhow to get that space, to use for sharing files amongst friends. At the last count I have Dropbox, The Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive and CX. Each of these has a use and I shall explain why they might be good for certain tasks.

Dropbox – 2.75gig

I started with this service and now have 2.75gig to use. The way dropbox works is you install a client on each machine / tablet / phone and on the computer side of things automatically sync’s everything across, this can be both a blessing and a curse. Any photograph I take on the iPhone 4S gets uploaded, as does any photo on the Android Tablet. I used to use it to share files but gave that up and now use it as a means to easily gets files onto any device I own. It does copy everything from the dropbox server to each computer along with any files people have shred with you which can get annoying to keep seeing that files have been added and such.

CX – 10gig

I signed up for this service as people were sharing links on Twitter, If I signed up, they get an extra 300MB and so forth if somebody clicks my links to sign up. It Offers 10gig space and I currently have 10.6gig. I tried this out but found it buggy (its a new service) and slow – which means finally I stopped using this service.

The Box – 50gig

This worked by first getting it on the android and then signing up on the PC. As I was there at the start, they offered 50gig worth of space. If you need client side stuff, that will cost you extra, for now everything I do is web based or on the android. You can share a folder and invite people to co-manage the files on there. Another good feature is the ability to get a link were you can post on say Twitter and everybody has access to the files. There is limits on the file sizes such as 100mb max file and you have 10gig bandwidth as well. They have a max of 100 files for drag and drop and you can drop folders on there, but using the Java Applet (Bulk Uploader) you can pretty much drag and drop anything (within the limits). I noticed the upload speed was slower than my max speed but I can live with this.

Google Drive – 5gig

This is a new (sort of) service that gives you 5gig space and as it ties in with my android, might as well have it as well. The client was causing issues on the mac, so I removed all traces of it. It works a lot like dropbox, syncing everything to your computer and such.

Skydrive – 25gig

Skydrive started life as 25gig and recently cut people down to 7gig. I have checked my account and so far still have the 25gig. The reason it works so well for me is ties in with my Windows 7 phone. They now have a client on the Mac + PC and this again sync’s everything up dropbox style but I choose to ignore that side and use it web based.

The uses for all these so called free drives?

If I took a look at each of the services and what files I have on there, I ‘sort of’ found a use for them. Skydrive for example stores all my photo’s and some songs so that my windows phone can get at them quickly. The Box for example has my android apps and my Wallpaper collection on there. I could easy remove all of these services and set up my NAS box to be one (very) large cloud box with zero uploading on my behalf and no chance to suddenly find my space cut back (aka Skydrive). The most important aspect of course is that all forms of personal storage sites are blocked at my work place, so of no use to me in that respect.

The schedule

I did the normal warming up which lasted about 15 minutes, at this point we were separated out between the class members who are not taking the test and the chosen few (along with a taekwondo black belt going for his 2nd dan). We went through various moves (almost like a normal class but much harder and a lot more moves at one time) – I must be honest and struggled on some of them considering I was a white belt. We had a 10 minute rest at 7pm and we were right back into the training, we had to act out one of our kata using the people to do the various kicks and punches as needed, this made you think about what you were doing rather than just going through the moves.

Finally at 8pm (the normal finishing time) the rest of the students went home, we carried on practicing kata’s for another 20 minutes and finally got ready to do the test. From what I understand, the moves we had just done accounted for 30% of the grade and the kata would account for the other 70%. As I was the lowest rank (and the least to do), I started first. It was explained that you are allowed two mistakes, any more and you fail. If you know you have done it wrong and start from the beginning, this is not a mistake though. As had a single kata to do (pinan nidan) – I went right into it and pulled it off without too much issue, I then sat back down. The other belts were given random kata to perform and also had to tell which ones were missed out at the end.

Nerves

I have to say a couple of the higher grades had to start again a few times on the kata as well as just plain no remembering what to do, this was down to nerves and the fact we had just trained solid for 2.5 hours. Most of us were dripping with sweat and exhausted. I got my orange belt, my certificate to say I had passed and I was now happy that I had moved from the white belt to a nice orange one – the journey had begun as they say.

They say the Internet is killing retail shopping and over the last year I have seen various companies close the stores in the town centre to be replaced by cheaper type of shops such Poundland and the such. Some of the larger stores to close included Marks & Spencer, Woolworths, TG Hughes, BHS, Curry’s, Game & Gamestation. BHS for example replaced Primark who are a much cheaper. Is this a sign of people not having money to spend, moving to the larger retail parks or does it mean people have shifted to buying from the Internet. The trouble with town

When I drive to town to do some shopping, I firth have to find a parking space and then I have to feed a machine money for the duration I might be staying, this been 2 hours, 4 hours and so forth. Due to the limit type of shops I might want (even less now), I can check the prices, whip out my mobile phone and compare that against the Internet and walk away. The shops are getting the customers but they are not getting the sales. Even if we took out the Internet for one second, I know how much certain games are for the PS3 in the supermarkets, why would I pay £12 for a second hand game when I can get the new one for £10 from the local supermarket?

Chicken & Egg

As prices go up and the cost of living starts to get higher, people cut back. If people are not spending as much money in the stores and saving money by buying the much cheaper prices online, the shops become not very cost effective. Eventually the company choose to shut down some stores and the very people who had a job, now have no money to be buying stuff – thus more people not spending, the cycle continues. They used to cry that large retail parks were the death of the local town centre shops and now they are saying the Internet is the main problem.

Touch & Feel

One of the greatest assets of a bricks and mortar store is that you can go in, look at the products, have a touch and feel for the product. This is important I think in the world of Mice, Keyboards, monitors, TV and so forth. What I think people are doing as I mentioned is going to the said places, looking at what they can buy and then walking off and buying online. My only bad side about buying anything online is it takes time for the product to arrive (especially if you are working and cannot be in for the courier) and if the product goes wrong, it is a pain to be sending back.

Knock on effect

Like the domino effect, one the process starts it continues, picking up speed. Look at the recent fuel issues were people were panic buying, this caused a shortage and yet more panic. As more stores close, the less reason people have to go to town to shop, the less business there is and more stores close.

Do we see this picking back up? Will companies change the model in which we shop and embrace the Internet and by this I mean the ability to buy online at that price and pick up in store that day? Would like to hear your views.

Created by MBAonline.com

Karate vs Taekwondo

It turned out that these two are in fact very similar (to a degree), the reality was I needed to learn how to fight and inflict damage and not learn a sequence of moves that are of little use in real life. The format of the lesson went along these lines:

• 15 minute warm-up
• Do a sequence of moves in a line (punches, kicks, blocks)
• Work in pairs to practice moves (all above is 1 hour long)
• 10 Minute rest
• Work in pairs again to perform moves, practice kata etc
• Do a group activity 10 minutes at end.

The handy thing was the instructors are more than happy to show you not only how to do the move properly but also demonstrate why you are doing it and when you would use such a move (in real life).

So this is better than taekwondo?

I think the problem lies not with the skill but the instructors and like learning anything, if you are shown properly how to do something and the reason why, it makes learning all the more relevant. In taekwondo for example I was doing blocks wrong for most of the lesson until finally an instructor took the time to show me why it was wrong. Had somebody at the start told me what I was blocking against and how to do it correctly, I could have been practicing the right move from the word go.

The problem with training large groups.

I can understand that if you have a mixed group of people, starting with the person who has zero knowledge all the way up to to a 5th Dan black belt, you need to do something that all of them can get something out of. I seem to think it works by sheer repetition and as time moves on, the pupil slowly learns by means of copying the others. If you split the class up into groups though and had enough instructors, people could learn that much faster. I have a feeling that this is why most people may start learning a martial art but never least the full course as they might feel they are getting nowhere.

Am I enjoying it?

I feel I am lucky in that there is one instructor there who is a 5th Dan Black belt in just about every martial art and turns most stuff around to street fighting. This means I am taking a lot more interest in what is been shown and what I have picked up so far can be used outside the gym (not that I plan to do so of course). I have added a few twists of my own when sparing with my partner so that it is a bit more real and not simply just falling to the mat if he performs his move wrong plus feedback as to how well that move went.

Throwing myself at this.

They have expanded the sessions to three times a week, I plan on going twice a week at most, this been Tuesday & Thursday (both times 6pm-8pm, two hour sessions). I still need to train in my gym 4 days a week, at the moment I miss out Tuesday and not sure how I may pull off Thursday. I might have to start going to the gym on a Sunday instead maybe?

Power Steering explained

On the Punto the power steering is driven by an electric motor and what happens is the computer thinks there is a problem, so disabled the power steering, this means the car can still be driven (aka old school style) and should you switch off the engine, it sorts itself out. I took the car to a garage and asked how much it was to fix, they quoted in the region of £700. The reason for the cost is they replace the entire steering column, which to me seems very excessive for such a minor fault. Now I tried and bought a refurbished part online, this cost me £110 and the end result was it was still broken as ever.

Keeping the car?

I called the local Fiat Dealer (Stoneacre) and this is how they work – for £36.50, I book my car in, they do a full test and then tell me what is broken and how much it will cost to fix. I estimated that I would have to then pay another £700 and in April the cost of an MOT, so we are looking at about £800 to get this car fully working in on the road.

Trading it up.

I needed to know how much I can get for the car and this alone will tell me if I should get rid or fix. The car dealers know what to look for and they went straight to test the power steering. They estimated that the car would be worth between £1200 and £1800 book price. They took the fact the MOT was due very soon and the power steering and offered me £800. The two cars I looked at were the Kia Rio 2005 (1.4 Diesel) in Red for £3490 and Mazda 3 2006 (1.6 Petrol) for £3990.

How much can I spend?

I had about £2200 in the bank and I had guessed I would get £1500 for the car but given the low trade in price, this only leaves me with a spending limit fo £3000, so £500-£1000 too short. I could have maybe haggled with them to bump the price to say £1000 for the car and been closer to my actual figure but there is more than one garage.

Another choice

I went along the road to “saveonusedcars” who deal in cheaper cars with higher milage. After much looking around, I settled on the Toyota Corolla 1.6 VVT-i T3, this been a 2004 Model having 1 previous owner with full service history but 94,000 on the clock. I shall be honest and say the 94,000 miles put me off but I took it for a test drive none the less. The garage allows you to jump in the car and drive around on your own, to fully test drive it the way you want. The first thing I had to get used to was the manual gears, I got so used to Automatic it took me a few minutes to adjust. The clutch seemed high though again, something I can used to very easy.

Testing the car

I took it around the town and some open roads to test various aspects. The feel of the car while driving, the breaking, the accelerator, the level of noise with the radio off and so forth. The car is rated as 110bhp and it seemed quite fast climbing to 60. The cabin noise was low indeed and the comfort of the car seemed very nice to drive in. The boot was easily large enough for what I needed and 5 doors means I can load stuff easy as well as people getting in and out of the car. The steering felt really light but then again I have been driving with no power steering for so long, I am not surprised. I heard Toyota was a good car to buy and should last.

Signing the deal

They offered me £750 for my car (less than the last garage) but after some talking, we finally settled on the fact that they would give me £995 for my car and for me to pay £2000 to settle the deal. The money left over paid for the difference in insurance and I get to pick the car up on Tuesday.

While I have a real 27” iMac Sitting here and it does the job well, it crossed my mind to try out OSX Lion on the Dell Studio XPS 435MT. After some brief searching, I came across a simple enough guide and as it seems with a lot of guides these days, you need a mac of some sort to prepare the images onto USB, be it a real Mac or a Hackintosh. I already had OSX Lion 10.7.0 application I had grabbed from the App store some time back and set off to find the rest of the tools. Preparing the USB

First we needed UniBeast and I found this  on tonymacx blog  (which entailed me to register a forum account). I followed the guide pretty much through and it took a while to write the image to USB. I booted up the Dell and I had the install screen but there was no drives listed to format or install to.

• Processor: Core i7 920
• Audio: Onboard HD Audio (Realtek 888), Voodoo HDA (5.1)
• LAN: Intel Gigabit Ethernet, Works Out Of Box
• SATA & IDE: Using IDE mode with IOATAFamily.kext
• using ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
• How to install:
  1. Put 10.7.2 onto a USB drive using Unibeast
  2. Inject IOATAFamily.kext into /System/Library/Extentions on the USB drive and update the permissions using a kext utility.
  3. Run the installer
  4. Boot from now on with the USB drive (I still have yet to find out why bootloaders don’t work on the HDD).
  5. Run MultiBeast and install support for ATI 48×0 Series.
  6. Download Voodoo HDA 5.1 and ATY_INIT.kext and place them in /System/Library/Extentions, then run kext utility to update the permissions.
  7. You should be good to go with dual monitor capabilities and working sound (5.1 surround does not work, front jack does).

 

Injecting the Kext

On the Wiki it made mention of injecting IOATAFamily.kext and spent ages trying to work this part out, I finally did I think just by copying via Terminal and setting the permissions. This time I was met with all the drives listed and once again I was stuck, as it would not let me install to the partition I just made. I had to make the partition GUID Boot type or something (on the top). Once it went through installing, it rebooted and I was confused why I could not select the HD to boot from but once again listed in the Wiki it said, “I still have yet to find out why bootloaders don’t work on the HDD”

Getting it all running

I was surprised that at this stage everything looked like it was working, the screen were the wrong way around but the resolution was just fine on both. I checked a few things, Networking was fine but sound was missing, as was my Logitech C910 Camera. I threw caution to the wind and went for a system update, 10.7.3 in fact. Once it rebooted the Mouse + Keyboard stopped working and I had to plug the USB dongle in the front USB and re-connect them both.

Shutdown and Rebooting

I noticed when I powered down the Hackintosh, sometimes it would power down, other times it would not, much the same with reboots. I have not installed a bootloader as yet, simple case of pressing F12 and selecting USB and away we go. I did try and fix the sound but as of yet, nothing. It does come out of my headset (USB) so not all is lost.

A Worthy alternative to a Real Mac?

Having a 27” iMac to compare against with the apple keyboard and mouse, this is just not as good. Maybe if I had added the mouse and keyboard from the Mac (£59 each), it might have been more fluid but the boot times are long indeed and the fact some of the stuff does not work, as it should just nails it for me. My verdict would be try this out, load as much software as you can and try OSX for what it is and if you like the experience, then maybe put the money up front for a 27” iMac for example.

After some deliberation on whether an SSD is something I should buy or not, I finally took the plunge and bout from Ebuyer OCZ 120GB Agility 3 SSD. They had this on offer for £114.99 (saving £45) and if you placed a code in checkout, I got a further £4.99 off the price. I did not want to hang out about delivery, as a random 1-5 days means no idea when it might turn up. I paid of the Saturday delivery, which cost me £8.98 extra. I ordered this Friday before 7pm and it arrived by 9am the next morning. What I did not buy at the time was brackets (as they could bot get them to me the same day) or a SATA 3 PCI-Express card.

Fitting the device

I had only just recently rebuilt my Dell machine from the ground up with windows 7 home premium. I looked inside the case and there was a small shelf above the HD and underneath the DVD. I screwed two screws and it sat there just fine, no real need for a Caddy to be honest. I then got my hands on Acronis True Image bootable CD and this allowed me to simply clone the drive from the 750GIG already fitted to the new 120GIG SSD. Changed the boot order to reflect the new drives and wiped the 750GIG drive once into Windows 7.

How fast is it?

I am running on SATA 2, so the full speed of the drive is not been used but a quick test from power on and it was on the desktop and ready to work in 30 Seconds. General opening of applications are near instant, a reboot takes a fraction of the time and a shutdown is also quick.

Do you suggest I buy one?

Depending on what hardware you ware running and how much free cash you have will be the deciding answer here. Some people complain that only running from 120GIG will soon fill up but if you have another drive (which you must have now to boot your computer) all the other files can happily go on there. I feel the speed increase for £100 is worth the money, everything you do on the computer uses the Hard drive in some shape or fashion.

But I thought you said it was not worth it?

My work laptop has SSD and once you start adding on the domain, antivirus and so forth, it takes longer than it should. At home it boots fast as it has none of that to worry about. The only thing I can say is that after a while you will get used to the speed and some people do not power down computers. For me personally, I like to power up the computer (Windows or Mac) and been used to having it ready very fast, not taking 2 minutes before it is ready.