I pay for my Gas and Electricity on a 3 months cycle, I always pass a meter reading to make sure that it is true to life and none of this Estimated stuff as that could leave you with a nasty shock when they do actually read the meters. Due to both the high prices and how much equipment I own that is powered by electricity – I decided to get myself one of those fancy meters that tell you in real time how much is been used and how much it all costs. I Called my Supplier (Souther Electric) and switched to a package which allows the free device.

It Arrived

I Need to say that it took MANY weeks for this to arrive, they claim they had lost the shipment but finally it turned up a few days after I called to complain (funny that). It was simple enough to clamp the device onto the 4th wire which ran to the fuse box, this is powered by battery.

The base unit was white and branded “southern electric” but it was in fact produced by CurrentCost and is called the Envi. The base unit talks to the device wrapped around the electricity supply by wireless of some sort and although there is a RJ45 on the back, I suspect this is not Network but more Serial.

Device in use

Once you have set everything up such as the time, the rate and so forth – basically it tells you how much is been used Now (in Watts), How much per day (In local currency) and per month (estimated of course). I suppose if you could end of getting paranoid and worry about switching things on but the idea was to find out how much juice the computer really takes and also to spot large spikes (and get rid of them) during the day.

The goal

When I get the chance, I plan to power everything down and see that it reads Zero. I need to power on the normal stuff that stays on all day and night such as Modem, Router, monitors on Stand-by and so on – this should hive me a rough reading of how much per day I am wasting. The next step is to power on one computer at a time (complete) and leave for a while – see how much each uses.

A graphical example

With the TV + all Media boxes on (Cable, Satellite) and house lights (which are fitted with energy saving bulbs) – I was burning up about 44 Watts or about 12p per day. I booted a Laptop, desktop and 2 monitors and we jumped up to 80 Watts or 22p per day. Now you might say – so what right? What if I started to power down (or get rid) of external drives, surplus Laptops and such or even jumped to a single screen?  The goal as I said was to work out if the computers were eating up the electric or in fact hardly making any difference.

I shall post another time a complete break down of each device with per day usage – the result might make interesting reading.

Spotted a good deal

At a random store, I saw that they had some Philips which was previously £35 ($53) but now only £19 ($28). They ticked all the boxes such as Volume control and had a DJ style which means they fold up into themselves for easy carrying around. I took the chance and bought these things – would I be disappointed?

Specifications

Frequency response 15–28,000 Hz
Acoustic system Closed , Open
Magnet type Neodymium
Voice coil CCAW
Impedance 32 Ohm
Maximum power input 500 mW
Sensitivity 106 dB
Speaker diameter 40
Diaphragm Mylar dome

How do they sound?

They come with a short lead (which is great for a ipod / mobile etc) and an extension which allows pretty far distance from the sound source. It comes with an adaptor to convert from 3.55mm to 6.5mm type.

The ear cuts are not as big as I would have liked and some sound does escape as expected. For long term use I never came across my ears hurting and they are fairly light on the head. Unlike a lot I have tried, the band fits my head and they stay on no matter what.

Volume could be better and bass is hardly there – these are not the worst thing I have heard and nor are they the best. I ended off just keeping them as I had got rid of the packaging already. I may have been wise (though not practical) to get the store to open a few and try them on my phone.

The Idea

It Pushes the base of the spine inwards which gives you better posture while sitting and will put an end to bad backs as we know it. My Office chair already had some sort of lumbar support but it was not a lot and as this was so cheap – I bought and fitted.

Does it work?

The easy answer is yes, as it sticks out so much (which is good), even if I do not sit back into the chair, I can still feel this support and already can feel the benefits. I would suggest buying one for the car, one for the office and one for home.

On most of my desktop and laptop computers I have various memory card readers but they all seem to be missing the one I need – this been Micro SD. While out today in one of these cheap shops where everything is £1 ($1.50) – I Spotted this all-in-one reader. My reasoning here is that you cannot go really too wrong given the price, I knew it would work as in picking up the device so I took the plunge and bought the thing.

Construction

The top of the device was literally falling off and had I not broke out the super glue – it would have been lost in next to no time. I choose the colour as per the picture, there was a bright pink model which was not to my taste. The device consists of a the top part (clear plastic as you can see) with one small circuit board inside and the USB Lead is underneath.

In operation

We can see it supports:

Support SD, MMC, RS-MMC, Mini SD, T-Flash, MS / MS PRO, MS Duo / MS PRO Duo, M2

Mini  SD, T-Flash, M2 use without adapter

Underneath we have the USB Lead which folds into the device and once out – only has about one inch worth of lead, no USB Extension lead is supplied.

Judging by the size, maybe they assume you will attach this to your keyring – while this is possible, it is not something I need to have on my person all the time.

In Use

This thing does what it says on the packet and it perfect for me to use both at home and at work. You cannot really go too far wrong with the price and do not expect it to last too long in heavy use. This allows me to quickly move files onto my Micro SD Card on my Android phone.

T-Mobile

I called there technical support and the first problem was they had no idea what I was talking about, I need to stress here that if a company provide so called Technical support – they need to train there staff on what equipment they sell along with any info (such as updates) that are coming forth. Once we had broken down the conversation to the basic’s such as the HTC Hero was a Android phone and it was running Version 1.5 plus Google have released Version 2.1 some time back etc – we had a starting block.

The Tech Guy basically searched on the web (I had already done that) and asked the people around him and finally he came up with the statement that HTC need to release this first and I should be calling them, he even sent a SMS to my phone with there number. I was in fact no further forward in finding out when this thing will be updated.

HTC

Press 1 for Tech Support, Press 2 to get through to a guy who has no idea what we do – option 2 it was

After explaining what phone I owned and him struggling to find it on his list of models he supports, he then told me it was not in fact called the Hero but the G2 touch! He had no idea of this so called update and it may or may not come out at the end of March – he told me to call T-Mobile, they might have an idea as we sir do not !!

He then went on to explain that if for example T-Mobile do not request an update, they will not make one – so I need to be blaming the operator and not the people who actually made the phone right? I suggested that maybe I should have bought an iPhone and he shocked by saying “yes, Maybe that might have been a better idea” – amazing or what !! I never got his name and nor did I record the conversation but boy, I wish I did now.

Conclusion

I should not have to fight to find out when a major update then I can actually download and put on illegally will be coming from either my carrier (T-Mobile) or HTC. How can they have phones already for sale running Sense UI and T-Mobile branding yet have no update for me?

As someone mentioned, Android is fragmented rather like Linux and the reason why no matter how good it might get, it start to get bad quickly when you hear of stories like this.  I am locked into a 18 month contract, 4 months have passed, so some time before I can swap.

Will I be buying more HTC Stuff or Android? If it was at this stage then I would have said no way ever again due to lack of support and knowledge from the people that make it. Maybe I should have just paid the money and bought Apple.

We got in some new servers at work, this been the Dell R900 4U Servers and what peaked my interest was the fact that this servers comes with 2x 6 core Xeon CPU’s – that’s 12 Cores of 2.4Ghz Power. It is easy sometimes to forget what is going on in the server / business world when sitting at home and looking at awe at the 8 Core (2 x 4) Mac Pro or the new 6 Core I7 CPU. This post is just to serve as a means to show you what you can get, this is for a box that might run 12 virtual servers and maybe not quite suited to playing the latest games (the noise would annoy you too much anyhow – its like a jet taking off).

CPU

First this server can take FOUR six-core Xeon processors – running at 2.6Ghz each. What we have here folks is 24 core box that can take out any Mac Pro that may come along – yes that is no doubting some serious number crunching ability.

Memory

It can take up to 128GIG ram – combine this with your 24 Cores and we agree it can run a whole bunch of Virtual machines while taking up only one space in the rack.

Hard Drives

Let us add to this 15K RPM SAS Drives in a RAID configuration – this will stop any bottle neck that might be caused by slow 7200 RPM Drives. The goal of this server is not to serve out 100TB of data. you have other servers for that (NAS etc) but to have pure speed, even so you can stack in some 600GIG Drives x 4 or so and your good to go.

Money

One of these does not come cheap – not by a long stretch – with the money for One fully loaded server you could buy a very good car indeed. The noise of this thing when it spins up can be heard a few streets away and no space for your top end graphics card – this is not a gaming rig.

Nostalgic gamers wanting a little old-school action on the PC (without having to dig out the console) may want to steer clear of a recently-released PlayStation 2 emulator touted to be “far superior to all other PS2 Emulators released before it.”

Chris Boyd of Sunbelt Software reports that web surfers should always be wary of “free applications” on the Internet, however the post focused on this particular emulator currently residing on various websites including Appzkeygen(dot)com and movieutilitesonline(dot)com .

Called Play 2 Emulator, the PS2 program comes in three flavors: “crack,” “keygen,” and “serial.” Apparently– but not surprisingly– the files aren’t emulators at all, but something more sinister.

“A pair of files will be dropped onto your PC, including a randomly named executable in the Windows directory and xpysys.dll in your System32 Folder,” Boyd reports. “You’ve actually wound up with Trojan-Downloader.Win32.CodecPack.2GCash.Gen.”

He went on to explain that this particular trojan has been used in everything from “fake codec scams to rogue AV hijacks in previous months, and is probably going to stick around for quite some time.” He also added that, in some cases, infected surfers have reported rogue anti-virus programs appearing after acquiring the trojan.

When I got my Dell computer, along bundled with the software was Dell DataSafe Online - this is a free online service (with 2GIG Plan) to allow you to automate backing up for pictures, documents and other important files on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. While I discarded this to begin with – I have took another look at this and will explain how it works and how it is different from say dropbox.

The Cost

The prices go something like this:

2GIG – Free

10GIG – $29 per year

30GIG – $39 per year

50GIG – $49 per year

100GIG – $59 per year

How does it work

You create an account on that dell page and at the same time download the client (Windows only from what I can tell) and this will attempt to work out what to back up, picking any document, pictures and so forth. It is by no means perfect on this automated selection process and will not go and find picture stored on another drive, working only inside the User account folders. If like me to the backup came to more than 2GIG – then you will have to revert to folder view and now we can drill down and tell it what you need to back up – this part though does not count up how big each folder is.

Once you are happy with what it is you need to back up – you need to pick a frequency on how often it should backup (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) and at what time or you can tell it that the backup will be started by you on a “as needed” basis. Just a case of now pressing backup and leaving the machine to try and upload 2GIG (or close to) worth of data.

Speed

The initial backup, if you choose a lot of files (in my case 1.89GIG) and how fast your upload speed is (mine is 768K) can take 5 hours, shocking though it sounds, this is how long it would take me (roughly) to upload that much to a FTP Account. You can pause jobs while they are running should you find you have no bandwidth left for anything else or if you are subject to a restriction (such as capping).

Recovery of the files

You have a couple of choices here – you can use the client program or you can go to the website and login to get your files. At this stage of the program though, what I am not sure about is this:

If I delete some of my files and let the program backup as normal, will it delete the files that are no longer there? I will have to test this function much later and report back – I am suspecting it keeps all and you have to maybe manually go and delete them online yourself.

Is it not just another drop box?

The simple answer is no, dropbox works by creating a folder in your “My Documents” folder and anything you put in there is replicated online. Dropbox is more suited to sharing files with others easily or keeping a file in sync.

Thoughts and conclusion

The initial backing up is a long and drawn out process, this is the fault of my upload speed and not the program though. It gives you a complete dump of all your important stuff online and you can even access the files from any computer with a web browser – this can be handy in the event I need access to my CV for example.

There is MANY solutions out there, Dell are not about to go out of business and you can buy some space if that is important to you. This is not a solution to backing up your entire harddrive and I would never suggest anyone try and do that anyhow as it is a pointless task and very time consuming.

Gibe it a try anyhow – its Free and it may save your life when you need that important file you just deleted.

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games, called Apple and Steam a natural fit.

“If there’s anything like iTunes on the PC right now for games, it’s Steam,” Connors said. “So you’ve got two great leaders in digital distribution coming together.”

Steam is the pre-eminent digital distribution platform for PCs. With more than 1,000 games and 25 million user accounts, Steam is by one estimate responsible for more than 70 percent of digital game purchases. Bringing the service to Macs means wider selection, quicker updates and more episodic content for Apple’s traditionally game-deprived computers.

Valve wants to position its games not as static products but as part of an ongoing, constantly updated, ubiquitous service, company co-founder Gabe Newell told Wired.com in advance of Monday’s announcement.

“The traditional model has always been that you have these really extended development times … where you do nothing for customers for several years and then you try to drive everybody into the theaters or into the stores on a given date,” Newell said. “It makes it hard to steer your decisions based on customer feedback, and customers don’t particularly like that. They would like to have the experience of being part of an entertainment community where they’re getting something on a daily or more frequent basis.

“The Mac represents a great opportunity to deliver these things.”

Bringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said.

• If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.
• By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, director of Steam development, in Monday’s press release.

“We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360,” Cook said. “Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows, the company said.

“Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, said Portal 2 project lead in the press release. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Bringing Valve’s gaming engine Source, and the company’s Steamworks development and publishing suite, to the Mac will make it easier for developers to bring games to OS X.

“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs,” said Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development, in the press release. “We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Easy updates

Steam lets the company take full advantage of the freedom that the PC and Mac platforms give it to constantly update and tweak its games. For instance, the developer has updated its 2007 game Team Fortress 2 more than 100 times, Newell said.

This wouldn’t be possible on a closed system like Microsoft’s Xbox Live, he said: “Microsoft’s QA fees … would be several hundred thousand dollars to do the updates that we did to Team Fortress 2. And that ignores the fact that the cycle on these closed platforms would have taken years to get all these updates through.”

Most recently, Valve leveraged its ability to push updates through Steam and engage its fan base by dropping hints into its 2007 cult hit Portal about the game’s upcoming sequel, letting the fans be an active part of the game’s announcement.

“We want to bring content creators and consumers closer together to minimize the latency between what somebody on the team does versus a fan’s ability to participate in that experience, not put more barriers between them,” Newell said.

Valve isn’t the only PC developer with a strong, engaged fan base looking to Mac. Telltale Games, creator of the episodic Sam and Max games, announced last month that it would be moving to Mac, even inviting fans to vote on which of its games should be ported over first.

While Telltale has not confirmed any of its games will be on the Mac version of Steam, Connors called getting his companies titles on Valve’s digital-distribution platform “a no-brainer.”

“We have games that run on the Mac and we have games that run on Steam, so our goal is to be there,” Connors said. “We think they’re going to do a great job with getting the Steam client over there and we want to continue to be a part of it.”

Asked to name other developers that we’d see on Steam, Valve’s Newell demurred. But Steam’s popularity means that as Valve goes, so go other gamemakers. Steam on Mac means many more games on Mac.

“(Mac) has all of the right pieces, and we know other developers see that as well,” Newell said.