chrisgreen.co.uk

This year I’ve decided to split things into two posts - one for here and one for my IT PRO blog. For the personal blog I’m doing my resolutions, for the work blog I’ll be doing my technology predictions for 2008.

I should add at this stage that I am hopeless at sticking to such resolutions, but it remains important to at least try. You never know, this might be the year that one sticks!

Chris Green’s 2008 New Year Resolutions

1) Blog more - both my blogs (this one and the IT PRO blog) have been suffering a bit of late. I’m not losing interest in blogging, quite the opposite in fact, it is just a problem with spare time, and not having any. I need to blog here and at IT PRO more than once a week each. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more time this year as things continue to settle down at work and hopefully at home. Also, now that we have completed the migration of the IT PRO blogs away from the abysmal system we launched with and onto Wordpress, using it will be a lot more practical and pleasant.

2) List stuff on eBay - before anyone gets the wrong idea I’m referring to my own possessions, not anything I’ve ever received as a press gift of review item. I’ve become overloaded with junk again, and I need to do a massive eBay selloff to get some space back in the house. That means getting rid of things like obsolete computer equipment and software I’ve bought and subsequently replaced with other kit (for example I have a pile of CRT monitors I desperately need to get rid of), DVDs I no longer watch, obsolete DVD players and Freeview boxes, plus anything else I’m not using any more that is occupying space and cluttering the house up.

3) Pay down my credit cards - they are way too high and need sorting, sharpish. Item 2 will go some way to helping.

4) Get some exercise - I’ve spent the last 18 months driving a desk and I’m really feeling the worse for it. I have not been travelling to the extent I usually do over the course of a normal year, and believe it or not, all that time usually spent out at conferences, running around airports and generally working in the field does do some good in terms of keeping you healthier than normal (you don’t eat as much, you eat at regular times and you get some upper and lower body exercise from all the walking, running and luggage carrying). I’m not talking about getting back into the insane shape I was in at school and university (it would be nice, but is ultimately unnecessary), but I do need to be more active, and I’ll feel better as a result. That means less time in the car and more walking, getting back to the gym more often, dusting off the golf clubs now and again, and maybe laying off the Coke - maybe!

5) Write more - not just blogs but do more journalism in general, I need to write much more than I did in 2007, more news and especially more features and reviews. I am going to set myself a target of writing at least one review and one feature a month as a minimum, and see where it goes from there.

6) Podcasting - need to do the podcasting more regularly, and start doing some of the video stuff I’ve been threatening to do for a while.

7) Summer Party - For the last three years I’ve been talking about holding a summer bash at the house for family and friends, this year it will actually happen. Now I’ve said that we had better have the weather to make it happen.

8 ) Redecorate the conservatory - it’s a mess, I hate the colour and the roof needs some work to stop it leaking - again. All stuff I need to do this year and the sooner the better so that the conservatory can be used come the summer, as right now it is not somewhere I’d like to be, let alone entertain guests.

OK, I know I said the next post on this blog was going to be my Skypephone opus, and that is coming next, but I just wanted to slip in a quick post about my latest purchase and how much fun I am having with it.

On Monday, in-between having a puncture fixed on the car and trying to install Leopard on the MacBook, I did a load of Christmas shopping, and treated myself to a little gift.

Having recently received a iPod Nano as a gift, I’m using it a hell of a lot (it is a lot lighter than my 60GB iPod Video, which I still think is great, but the Video Nano is nice for taking to work and on short trips where I don’t want a brick in my pocket). The trouble is that the video output cable for my 60GB iPod Video doesn’t work on either the Video Nano or the new iPod Classic. Apple has removed the video out from the headphone jack on the new models and instead only offers video output from the dock connector (and they’ve changed the pin outs so that older dock connector video connectors etc won’t work).

Anyway, I decided to cash in my Nectar points, and in Argos I picked up the new and improved composite video cable with dock connector. It wasn’t cheap - £35 before Nectar discount - but you get a fair amount for your money. It is a well made cable, with a dock connector at one end (push-pull type rather than with locking clips), and three metal phono connectors at the other. There is also a USB connector, allowing you to charge your iPod while playing through the cable, or even sync it. Also included in the box is the new-style USB power supply. Its the same one bundled with the iPhone, so it is half the size of the original USB Apple power supply. US buyers get just the US 2-pin head attachment, us Brits get both the UK plug attachment and the 2-pin European attachment.

As a result of buying the cable (which works with the Video iPod as well as with the new models) I’ve been watching a huge number of video podcasts on my big TV in the study, as well as watching a roaring fire, courtesy of Cali Lewis and iYule.tv.  Even though I was only playing th iPod Nano version of the iYule video rather than the high-res one, it still looks and sounds great.

Nothing sinister, just having one of those weeks where I am very unsettled.

Part of it is to do with last weekend’s office move. I’m in new surroundings - OK, it’s just another two floors up in the same office building I’ve been in since I joined Dennis, but it is still a bit weird (since I’ve been there we’ve steadily worked our way up above sea level - we started on the ground, then the third, we are now on the fifth. Next move will probably be to the water tower on the roof

Ultimately its a good thing that we’ve moved - it will be better for productivity, we have more space, we are now working in the same space as our colleagues on the other Dennis technology magazines (a really good thing), and its about a thousand times quieter and a more professional working environment for my team.

There’s also a lot going on within the team itself - lots of change (for the better), new faces, new job roles and new ideas for the coming year. All really positive things, all things I’ve wanted to happen, but as you might expect these are things that introduce an element of uncertainty and thus anguish into the mix.

And that’s why, for the fourth night in a row, its past 2am and I’m wide awake, buzzing with energy and ideas, with no sign of being able to sleep. Even my trusty Melatonin isn’t able to knock me out (and I’ve smuggled enough of it back from the US to open my own branch of GNC).

As I write this, I’m re-watching the Top Gear Polar Special as there’s nothing else on. Yes, over 300 channels and there is nothing worthy of watching.

My next blog post here is going to be about the 3 Skypephone. I’ve been playing with one of these for the last couple of weeks, and now feel ready to convey my thoughts and pass judgement on it. Basically it’s brilliant, and is without doubt the unexpected gadget hit of this Christmas. While I love my iPhone, if you can’t justify £270 for the handset and £35-£55 a month to the bandits at O2 for something loosely resembling service, then £49 and a minimum of a tenner a month in top-up gets you one of the nicest phones I have used since I got my beloved RAZR V3. If you get it on a contract, ANY contract with 3, then the handset is free (contracts start at £12 a month). The Skype deal is simple. Whether you are a pay-as-you-pimp or contract user, you get effectively unmetered Skype-to-Skype voice calling and IM messaging (it’s 4,000 minutes and 10,000 IM messages a month, which even I would struggle to max-out in a month and still hold down a job).

The coverage area and quality of 3’s service has improved a lot since I last went near them (just under a year after launch, when I bought a phone and then sent it back as I was so dismayed by the quality of the phone service and the customer service). Sadly, 3’s front line telephone customer service is still very poor (though I’ve experienced worse - it’s called T-Mobile), but the actual mobile service has definitely moved up a notch. So much so I bought (note, bought with my own money, not blagged) a USB 3G modem and service contract from 3, and I can’t speak highly enough of it - I even get a HSDPA connection for the entire overground part of my tube journey to and from work. The same quality of signal and calling service applies to the Skypephone. I’ve had only two brief instances when it couldn’t get a 3G signal, and had to step down to a 2G roaming signal. The rest of the time - fast, reliable, all-you-can-eat Skype goodness.

I’ll post pictures and something similar to a balanced review in my next posting, but for now, keep £49 on standby, or if you go to Carphone Shed, you can buy two for £85 - a bargain!

Phones are a bit of a thing for me at the moment. I’ve been doing a fair amount of radio and TV talking about emerging technologies for 2008 and Christmas gadget gift advice, and all of it has been dominated by talk of phones. I’m in desperate need of a new phone as I do need to carry two phones (one being the mobile number that’s on my business cards, the other being the number that only family and a few close friends have - thus ensuring they can always get hold of me even when I don’t want to be disturbed by calls on the work mobile). I currently have the iPhone, I adore the iPhone and I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen if and when the time comes that Apple asks for it back (the phrase “from my cold dead hands” has been banded around a few times of late).

So either way, one phone is going to have to be an iPhone, or maybe Le iPhone. The iPhone is a must, having integrated into my everyday life more quickly than even my first BlackBerry. The other phone is still in play. I did have a Motorola Q9H for a while, which was a great bit of kit, but it broke (it was a pre-release sample to be fair). Trying to buy a replacement is not easy, hardly anyone sells it and those that do want the national debt of Zimbabwe for one.

I am also very drawn to the Samsung SGH-i320. It’s not a new phone, but it is cheap, and has a surprisingly nice QWERTY keypad. It’s Windows Mobile-based, which is not good, but Motorola managed to build a Windows Mobile phone that isn’t shit, so hopefully Samsung has managed to do the same. The Skypephone is definitely being bought no matter what, just cos its soooo cool and nice to use.

I’ve also added a new plug-in to this blog. I’ve enabled the Twit This plug-in, to make it easier for other Twitter users and me to tweet about posts on this blog.

Also, I’m finally beginning to warm to Windows Vista, it’s only taken a year! I have one live machine at home running Vista (the rest of our Windows machines are running XP and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future), a laptop from a well-known games console-making electronics giant that was allegedly built for Vista and shipped with it pre installed. Unfortunately it took a ridiculous amount of work and time to actually get it to work reliably and to interact properly with all the built-in hardware in the laptop. Most end users would have smashed it to pieces in frustration months ago. Hopefully the release shortly of Service Pack 1 will address many of the well-documented shortcomings of this OS.

Better still, buy a Mac, along with a copy of Leopard and save yourself nine months of pain.

I’m playing a lot with video, with a view to turning my hand from audio podcasting to video podcast production. It is a lot of fun, and I’ve found a good use for my otherwise obsolete but excellent quality Samsung/Medion Hi-8 camcorder, adding nothing more than a £6 USB video capture dongle I bought on eBay. I’m particularly taken by Ustream.tv and Seesmic.

Finally, I’m watching a lot of video podcasts, thanks to the recent gift of a 8GB iPod Nano (which is a lot smaller and lighter to carry than my 60GB video iPod). Chris Green hereby gives the seal of approval to the following video podcasts:

• Mahalo Daily
• Geekbrief.tv
• Tiki Bar TV
• Diggnation (not a new discovery for me, but still worth a nod)
• Onion News Network (from the publisher of The Onion)

Ultimately - I need a rest - a proper rest - and maybe a few good bottles of wine, some good home cooking, a working Macbook again and some quality time with my friends and my DVD collection.

Oh, and a trip to Vegas would also go down well - need to sort something out there, I’m missing Vegas almost as much as I miss San Francisco.

The recent introduction of IMAP support to Google Gmail is nothing short of a godsend, particularly for people like me that have more than one active Gmail accounts (for example, I use one for all my eBay stuff, one as a general back-up, one for freelance work etc) but for those who want to manage multiple Gmail accounts through their native web interfaces, all that logging in and out can be a pain in the arse.

Not any more!

I’ve been beta testing a new app called Mailplane. It is a Mac OS application that lets you do all sorts of funky things with a web-based Gmail account, such as drag-and-drop file attachments, iPhoto integration and chat management. Best of all, it gives you a very simple way of having multiple Gmail accounts and being able to switch between them just by clicking on the appropriate email address in the account list in Mailplane.

While it is in beta, Mailplane is free, and I have some spare invites going if anyone wants to have a play with it.

It’s going to be a busy few weeks for me - I’m already half way into a huge travel schedule (San Francisco last week, got back yesterday nght from Frankfurt, off to Brussels next week and Barcelona the week after - with the possibility of New York the week after that) and I’ve still got a bucket load of techy stuff to catch up with.

For a start, I need to install Leopard. The plan is to deploy this on my main Mac mini (the Intel one) first, as I need to rebuild my desktop Mac OS X install anyway, so I’m going to do it as a clean install, and then rebuild from there. Once I know everything is working and compatible, I’m going to nuke and rebuild the Macbook. As it is now on its third hard drive since I bought it (started with the factory-fit 80GB, then upgraded to a 160GB, then downgraded to a 120GB with the intention of putting the 160GB in the Mac mini - BTW, anyone know what bits of a Mac mini I need to dismantle to do that - most I’ve done to one is take the lid off to fit more RAM?) the current Tiger install is starting to complain a bit, as its objecting to having been cloned from one drive to another, to another.

Besides, I think it is always best to move to a new OS with a clean install, it s agood opportunity to dump all that software you don’t use, debris on your system and any trial or demo software that may be on it.

The thing is finding the time. Doing surgery on the Mac mini before installing Leopard is going to take a bit of time, so I’m guessing I’ll lose a day just doing the hardware swap and initial OS install. I’ve also got a load of PCs that need bringing up to day and back into use (I built two machines recently, one to use as a Media Centre, the other as a new, albeit short-term, desktop capable of running Vista).

And I need to have another big eBay clearout. I’ve noticed that the floor in the study is disappearing again, as is space in the DVD cabinets.

So here’s the plan:

Mac

• Reinstall Leopard on 1.2Ghz PowerPC Mac mini (which is currently living in the office and is already running Leopard for review purposes, must bring that machine home and make work buy me a Mac, or start billing work for use of my hardware)
• Upgrade internal 2.5inch hard drive in Intel Mac mini
• Install Leopard on Intel Mac mini
• Reinstall Mac software, make sure everything works with Leopard
• Nuke Macbook and reinstall with Leopard
• Install Leopard on 1.4Ghz PowerPC Mac mini

PC 

• Reinstall Compaq laptop with Vista (having now worked out that it is in fact Vista that keeps making it hang, and not duff RAM, I think it needs a clean install, and some more compatible drivers. Also, undecided which version to install, as it’s graphics card is modest and it doesn’t support the funky graphics stuff)
• Install Vista Ultimate on the new temporary desktop machine
• Install Vista Ultimate on the new Media Centre machine
• Decide finally which room the Media Centre is actually going to live in
• Nuke and reinstall Gateway laptop with Windows XP, give to mother to replace elderly P3 desktop machine
• Nuke and reinstall test PC with a triple-boot of Windows XP, Vista Ultimate and some form of Linux, probably Ubuntu or Linspire - not sure yet

Other

• Set up new NAS box
• Remove cable modem and associated wiring from study
• Build wall-mounted charging rack for portable devices (an ideal I am  shamelessly stealing from Cali Lewis)
• eBay clearout of items I have bought that I no longer want/need/use/can’t remember why I bought in the first place

Well - that’s the plan at least. All I need now are 12-day week with 5-day weekends and 32-hour days!

Live streaming straight to the web at justin.tv - I really think this has so many applications, particularly for business.

http://www.justin.tv/chrisgreen

I’m still massively jet-lagged after my flight back from San Francisco yesterday, so I’m currently spaced-out on the sofa in the study watching episodes of Come Dine With Me.

I’ve also had a chance to do a little housekeeping on my blog, and have added links to some of the new web services and social media things I am playing with:

• Dopplr
• Yelp
• Upcoming (OK, not new, but realised I hand’t linked to it on the blog)

Still on the lookout for invites to use the following though, so if anyone has an invite to share, I will be most grateful:

• Seesmic

Cheers

Chris

For many, the day is finally upon us. at 10am this morning Apple is holding a small press event at its Regent Street store to mark the UK launch of the iPhone.

Whether the device will actually go on sale today remains unclear, but whatever happens we will know the following information just after 10am:

• UK pricing
• Exclusive UK network carrier (sadly, this is 99.9 per cent certain to be O2, the Tub of Lard of mobile phone networks)
• Airtime pricing
• On-sale date

Also, a Chris Green prediction - I expect to see Apple also announce a 16GB iPhone today. The launch of the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the mobile phone circuitry, in 8GB and 16GB varieties, coupled with Apple ditching the 4GB iPhone and cutting the price on the 8GB model suggests that a 16GB capacity bump was planned, but held back from the recent iPod Special Event in order to give the company something new to announce alongside the UK iPhone launch.

Holding back a 16GB version of the iPhone means the company has a genuine new product skew to underpin  today’s announcement, rather than coming to market and just saying: “The same old iPhone product that has already been on sale since June is now available in another territory.

The one certainty about the iPhone announcement - IT WILL NOT BE 3G. There is no need, no point and most importantly, Apple has not submitted a 3G device for radio-communications approval by Ofcom.

Speaking personally, I would not want a 3G iPhone at this stage, as using 3G would crucify the already borderline battery life of the device.

Reading the news that yet another retail chain has failed in the face of competition from bigger online rivals and major supermarkets, one has to wonder if the economics of online retailing in any sector are such now that only the biggest bricks-and-mortar traders can hope to compete on equal terms?

read more | digg story

Following on from an interesting post I read on Drew’s blog, I’ve been thinking about the social web tools I use, and which ones I actually rely on and which are, well - bollocks!

First up, the good list - the top five things I use regularly and to an extent depend on for news, information and keeping in touch with people:

• Twitter
• Blog
• Google Web Search
• Flickr
• RSS Feeds

And now, the shit list, the five things I have used that I consider to be pointless, redundant and/or just plain rubbish:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• MySpace
• Pownce

So I guess the question is - what are your top five?