While this review is technically a year late – the iPad is not a new device and most people have probably seen one, tried one or actually own there own. The purpose of this quick review is to give a viewpoint of someone who had no interest in anything Apple including the iPad and even stating that I could not see a reason to go out and buy one. As you may know from the previous post, I managed to enter a competition GFI were running over the Christmas season and was the lucky winner. As I only had device a few days, it maybe is not a fair review so far, but as I said, it is a first impression of this magical device apple like to call it – does it live up to the hype?

Out of the box

Inside the box when it arrived it came with the iPad itself, a White USB Apple lead which a plug adaptor that allows it to take various plug ends and in my case it came with a UK plug sliding in part. What apple do not supply is any form of cover (even if it was a cheap one), headphones or a cleaning cloth.

Upon switching on the device – it tells you to plug it into iTunes, now why would this be so? What if a person who bought this had no computer? They should really publish this right on the front of the box. The other thing you will need by the way is so form of payment card, this can be visa and such and there is no way to get around this I could see.

Setting up via iTunes

When you plug this into your computer, the first thing is Windows will go and find a driver, on Windows 7 this happens automatically. iTunes will now guide you through the process of setting up an account and it got to a page asking me for credit card information. Although I own a credit card, I do not like the idea that something is set up to automatically bill me if I buy something, I may do this by accident. I just read that it needs an account to get Apps and there seems no way to get around this.

Adding Applications

You have a choice of using iTunes to browse the App store to add applications or you can fire up the App Store direct from the iPad. I have noticed the iPhone Apps looks really blocky on the iPad and they normally stick ‘HD’ on the title to let you know it’s iPad. Coming from an Android background, while there is a need for paid applications there should be more ‘Free’ Applications. The one that sprung to mind was Skyfire and while this is 100% Free on the Android, it seems to be £2.99 for the iPad (and by chance is $2.99 stateside – they never heard of conversion rates?).

There is an App for that

I wanted to expand further on the applications side with everything that I need seeming to cost money. I wish to give a few examples to back up my moans though. TuneIn Radio is an application that lets you listen to internet radio stations, it also gets your locations and presents all the local radio for you quick listening pleasure. This is on the Android Market place and it is Free yet it seems here on the iPad and iPhone it wants to charge me 59p. Now you may say 59p is nothing and worth every penny and maybe I agree but the very same program with the same functionality costs money on the iOS devices? As it happens I would rather use my Android to listen to the radio as its a bit more portable than the ipad.

The device itself

How heavy is this thing? Well according to the apple web site – 0.68 kg (1.5 pounds). After sitting with it in my hands using it for a few hours solid, you start to feel the weight. While the speaker is small and on the bottom, it provides more than ample sound, there is always the headphone socket of course for any type of headphones.

I went out and bought a case, I needed something and the local PCWorld had Speedlink Gala iPad Wallet Case.

I need to add that this looked not too shabby in the shop but once I got home and inserted the iPad, it was not as good as I thought. While there is a hole on the bottom for the power supply lead, there is no way you can plug this in easily whilst the case is on. The Case (as per the picture) obscures the button and same around the sides for the volume and the on/off switch. I will probably buy a much better case later on to be honest – this will do for now though.

What is good about the device?

The Screen is very clear indeed, it will get messed up with smudges and finger marks but overall very clear and glossy. The Speed at which the device starts is good – this is down to the fact it is using a Mobile phone OS of course and essentially I still state it is a big iPod Touch. The Battery life is where it is at – claimed at 10 hours, this works longer then my mobile phone in fact. It is easy enough to find apps and very easy to use. The on-screen keyboard is very good, maybe not for typing a long story but general use it is fine.

The bad side (yes there is one).

I cannot believe how the apple fan boys sat there saying how amazing this thing was and forgot to mention some of the short comings but let me go through some of the points I think is worth mentioning.

Just about every single app that is of any use costs money, there is a lack of “try before you buy” type apps on a lot of the stuff I looked at. I wanted to connect my Bluetooth headsets yet the iPad seems to not find a single device when I activate Bluetooth and this includes 3 desktops, 2 laptops, various mobile phones and headsets. I was hoping to use a bluetooth headset along side skype – seems not.

I managed to find apps that made the screen turn black with no way that I found to kill the app. I tried holding the power button, the home button and combinations of the two – eventually the app stopped working and I could get back to the desktop – does apple not have a hard reset? Am I missing the pinhole that should be there? Not like I can remove the battery right?

I need to mention of course that Streaming sites (aka flash based) are of no use. I tried the Ustream and Justin.TV app and these are ot only for the iPhone but work very badly. My idea of sitting on the couch and watching a stream is not reality just yet.

Should you buy one?

I stated at the start that even when they first come out, I could not think of a use for such a device other than it was “Nice to have”. When I get in from work and after I have had something to eat – I can pop open the iPad, browse a few websites to catch up, run the Engadget program to see what is happening in the world of Tech, catch up on my YouTube Videos and finally look at Facebook. If I had powered up my computer, due to have 2 large screen (dual screen), I could have done all of this in my multi-tabbed browser of course in about the same time.

My advice is that this is a nice toy to have and own, yes you will use it to death in the first week but expect to soon put it to one side once the novelty wears off – much like it did with your smartphone. If this thing had Adove Flash & Air as well as a FREE VNC client – it might well be amazing.

Synology have a low end product for sharing USB Hard Drives ( as well as printers) which is called USB Station 2. You can buy this product for £79.99 – I am not sure of USA Pricing at this time. This uses the same OS as the rest of the Synology Range (DSM 3.0) so you can use it as a download station, share printers across the network and even plug in a USB Wireless network card and make this thing wireless. You could spend the same money for a Print sharing device and it may look and act like the PogoPlug (except it is not shocking pink) but is in fact a full blown NAS – just with USB Speeds for the drives.

On the back – Connections

It is quite simple around the back, it features 2 USB Ports, a RJ45 1Gigabit connection and a power socket. If you need more devices, you can just add a USB Hub (Powered if you want to add 2.5″ External Drives) and away you go.

Different from a PogoPlug?

There is a few devices around at the moment that share USB Drive and one of these (which I owned briefly) was the PogoPlug – this shares out the drives two ways, one by means of a program you install which maps the drive letter P: for you and inside this is each USB Drive plugged in. The other way the PogoPlug works is you access the device online and this allows easy sharing of any media across the internet – the goal here is to provide a link via email and that person can get at the pictures, movies or whatever it is you shared out.

This device like any NAS shares using standard SMB (windows) sharing as well as the apple protocol and various others, this makes it super easy to connect to the device without the need to start installing programs. Let us not forget it can share your media as it has an iTunes Server, Media Server (DNLA/uPnP), and other methods of sharing the contents.

Sharing across the internet is were it gets a little tricky for the average non-tech person and this is not a fault of this device but more of the router which will have no idea how to pipe through port 5000 on it’s own. What I can say though is it allows complete control over who gets to do what and when.

Conclusion

Given the choice of this device, the Linksys USB Sharing and the Pogoplug, not only is this cheaper but has a LOT more features included – if it’s USB Device sharing your after for a low price – this is the one you need.

Having used these devices now on a daily basis across a handful of machines, used most of the services it has to offer and even added some extra packages, I wanted to write a post about how I felt this was holding up and was it living up to the hype or was it starting to crack under the pressure? This is written with one users in mind (me) across computers running Windows 7, Linux and Mac OS X – the main aim of this was a shared Music, Movie, Backdrops collection, example been if I add some wallpapers, all the computers can use them as required.

The NAS as a iTunes server

I have in my collection 38K worth of Songs, by iTunes server, I am not referring to the in-built iTunes server function but more me sharing out a folder called Music and tell iTunes to add that folder. There is a few issues with this – when first adding the folder the NAS Box will go wild and it takes some time for iTunes to add the complete folder. The other side effect is that iTunes does not monitor this folder at all – I had to drag and drop anything new to iTunes. Further to this – if I want iTunes on all computers, I had to repeat this process on each one but once it is all done, it works to a degree. I think we can blame more iTunes for this and maybe it is time I had a new player.

The Proper iTunes Server

Built into the NAS box is a proper iTunes capable server and this fixes a lot of the problems above in that it will add any new song to the share. Why do I not use this function? Well I do of sorts but I am not happy with the way iTunes displays the shared server files. It has to index all the files and this can take some time – best to leave that in the background.

Download Station

This is by far the most useful feature so far, if you combine the Google Chrome Plug-in, it can auto grab any download links and feed it ot the NAS Box to download into a share of your choice. It can handle torrents, News Servers files (NZB) as well as normal style links. The best part here is you can just switch off your computer and it will handle the download over night.

FTP Server

This is something I have already used, when I first set it up, I simply created a user, allowed them access to the FTP, popped the port on the router and let them know what do to. When I tested this the next day, I was shocked that I could delete a file – I checked the settings again and on ‘Shared Folders’ there is a setting to ‘Disable modification of existing files’

Once this was in place, this stopped the FTP users from deleting files but allowed the Windows Shared users to carry on with full management. The other aspect is what is to stop random people trying to connect and brute forcing there way in? Well this is where IP Auto Block comes into play. You can specify how many goes and how quick before they are blocked:

Surveillance Station

The NAS comes with this built in and the cheaper models have a licence for camera where-as the more expensive models come with 15. You can buy more licence if you need them and can form an excellent security system using IP based Webcams (Wired or Wireless) – cheaper than an Axis Solution for example. I Do not have any IP based Webcams to test this with but it looks good none the less.

Disk Thrashing

Where NAS does not compare to a desktop drive (as in installed inside the machine not USB) is when you start to push the NAS Hard and it will start to slow down. A good example of this is when using the download station to grab let us say 6 files at once (remembering I have 50mbit Service), add to this the download station putting some of the downloads onto the right share (it must save it to a temp folder), trying to play a HD Movie while adding some songs to iTunes on another machine. At this point you can tell it is struggling, the movie buffers and the downloads start to slow down. While this won’t happen that much really in the course of things, it is something to remember.

Power On & Off

Not happy about it eating up power while not in use? There is a function you can tell it what time to switch itself off and another to switch it back on. You cannot make a Schedule of many times, it is one time on and one time off. While this is a good idea, I personally just leave them on all the time, not like they are noisy really and using that much power.

Overall

I am quite vocal when it comes to things not working as they should and at no point did I sit back and say “wish I had bought …… {Insert another make here}…. It has done everything I need it to do and having 4TB on hand and not worrying about splitting up files across many drive is a godsend and worth every penny I paid for it. My advice to people is buy as big a drive you can – in my case it was 2 x 2TB drives. If you can afford it – maybe get the 4 or 5 bay model – imagine have 10TB on tap !!  

I have been looking into NAS and this one device I have seen which interests me. The website is HERE and we shall go through what it is, what it does and why you might want one (or something similar). First of all let us explain that NAS is Network attached Storage and this allows a box dedicated to sharing space across the network so that any computer can get at the information stored. Some boxes just share the drives but some come with a whole range of extras such as Web Server, Torrent client and iTunes Server.

What is a NAS

While there is nothing to stop you from setting up a machine and sharing the drives, do you really want a full blown desktop computer humming away and eating electricity just to share some files? What is much better is a small dedicated box hidden away in the corner with a lot of storage space. Add to this RAID and you have some sort of protection if the drives goes bad – but this depends on what type of RAID you choose.

What else can this do?

The main thing here which might be worth pointing out would be for example the iTunes Server – you can have one central place for all your tunes and the computer will see them. I have tested this myself with FreeNAS but I personally proffered a shared directory and adding them to each iTunes.

On the back we have a USB port – this can be used as either a USB Printer or another Harddrive for even more storage. The Fan you see will be making some noise but should power down as the unit is not needed.

Limits of this device

While the device is very cheap (£117.49 from Aria) there is some limits on this device. It supports a maximum of 1.5TB Drive per bay – so the Max Capacity will be 3GIG – this will go down once formatted of course and it would be wise to pick two drive of the same capacity for proper RAID. It does support JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) which added all the capacity up and presents it as one drive – it uses the first drive then the second as it fills up. If one drives goes – you have lost everything in JBOD mode, so be careful.

So you have a nice shiny new Mac and you want to take Audio from various sources to be mixed for let us say a live stream. Maybe you need a Skype conversation broadcast (both sides), play some music from iTunes and even get some video from youtube with the Audio coming through as well? You may notice a sheer lack of “StereoMix” on OS X but never fear, there is a solution for you.

SoundFlower

The good news is there is a FREE program which gives you a dual channel and a 16 channel virtual audio device for OSX, this goes by the name of SoundFlower, once installed, you now have two extra devices on both output and input by the name of SoundFlower (2ch) and SoundFlower (16ch) – for most people the SoundFlower (2ch) should be fine.

Line-in

Rouge Amoeba give out a free Utility by the name of LineIn, this basically allows you take one input (say a microphone) and pipe it out to another output (say Soundflower).

 To use this for say Skype:

Audio Output – SoundFlower (2ch)

Audio Input – SoundFlower (2ch)

On Line in – select as my picture above or simple Microphone your using to SoundFlower (2ch) and now on the stream select SoundFlower (2ch) as the Input, the people will hear both side of Skype due to the fact the Mac alloows most programs to choose input and outputs. You need SoundFlowerBed (comes with SoundFlower) to pass SoundFlower (2ch) output to Speakers so you can hear the Skype caller.

Audio Hijack

This is not a Free Program but its by the same people who make LineIn – Rogue Amoeba and this gives you the extra controls over what is been diverted to SoundFlower.

Here is the screen were we can select a Microphone and piping it through to SoundFlower, once you click Hijack – all sound coming through the Mic will be diverted to SoundFlower, just like Line-in (same as).

If you notice, on the left is a list of programs, this grows as you have various programs open – anything that can generate Audio will be listed. In this example we shall choose iTunes but any work. Select the Effects Tab (far right) and right click on one of the empty Effect Tabs (Click here to insert effect).

  You need to pick 4FX Effect and branch out to pick Auxiliary Device output. What this does is bring up a box while looks a little like LineIn, you can pick the output device here.

Your good to go.

Once you have set up the Aux device as above, this is a one time operation and your good to go each time you start the program. If you capture Skype, you do not need to capture the Microphone as both side will be broadcast. You can Mute or un-hijack to stop the program from going out on the stream.   

Apple recently brought out both iTunes V9 & Quicktime 7.6.4 and you may well be tempted to download this, updates are good right? I was eager to update and went to the site to grab my copy (64bit Version) and update. The look of iTunes had gone from Black background to white and had a few new features. This will be no problem if you do not run Wirecast but if you do? Then you may be in for a shock.

Updating iTunes

When you update iTunes, it updates Quicktime and takes this from 7.6.2 to 7.6.4 and if you run and use iTunes (as I do), then it will update your Music library to the new format. All seems well until the next stage – you try and run Wirecast.

Wirecast Crashes

Upon running Wirecast, it tells me the program has failed and is looking for a solution with no visible reason why it has failed. At this point I wondered if I had installed a Windows update, did WebCamMax kill it or has my WebCam Driver been updated for example? Looking into the event Log helps:

Faulting application name: Wirecast.exe, version: 3.5.4.1, time stamp: 0x4a8beecf
Faulting module name: quicktime.dll, version: 3.5.4.1, time stamp: 0x4a8bee8e
Exception code: 0xc0000005

Now it was clear, Wirecast needs Quicktime to run and as they have updated in some way the windows version, wirecast will fail every time.

The Solution…..

First thing I did was export my playlist to XML format from iTunes V9, I then add/removed both Quicktime & iTunes. I had on my drive a copy of iTunes V8.2 and re-installed this – at which point it told me my library on iTunes was in the wrong format. I deleted the folder in “My Music” and it re-created a fresh one then I exported the XML back in. I now ran Wirecast and this ran straight away.

Does it kill the Apple version?

Rob from Corndog Computers did a quick test and it ran fine – so all Apple users are happy to update no problems. People may well blame windows here but it was Apple who wrote Quicktime so …..

Will it be fixed?

I have emailed a few people inside Telestream so they are aware of the issue, made many people aware in the streaming community and posted a forum post on Wirecast side. I am sure the Programmers will issue a fix soon as it could effect a lot of people – at least a handful know about this now.

Regular readers might have remembered me writing before about tagging my entire MP3 collection so that it contained all the Album Art, correct Artist and song Title and was in order, I recall this took me some time to complete. Why am I going through this process again? Read on to find out more..

When I had the iMac and as my wife had the iPod, I choose to use iTunes as my main music storage and player. I had (by accident maybe) told iTunes to re-arrange my collection and copy the tracks to the iMac iTunes Library. This was fine as long I backed up the files and had the iMac. I do not own the iMac any more and while I did have a complete backup, I was not happy that iTunes had re-arranged everything for me, I must preferred the order of Artist / Album it started life in.

I kept a complete backup (in the correct order) of my collection on a 500GIG External Drive BUT more then half of these were not tagged properly wit most reading “Various Artist” type thing. You could argue that it does not really matter and I agree this may be true but I have imported them all into iTunes (on the PC), made sure iTunes does Nothing with the ordering of these things and I am now going through again tagging album by album. Yes it will take me some time but this time is the last time I will have to do this. I can Tag as I get new stuff and it is not a problem – just a complete pain in the arse.