Mac mini and EyeTV

Since we got rid of our VCR, several years ago now, we've been using EyeTV on our iMac to record TV and radio, streaming the resulting recordings to our living room TV using a discontinued Elgato product called EyeHome. This worked well for a long time, though if there happened to be significant wireless network activity while we were watching, we'd get a stuttering picture. The rest of the time it was great, as we don't watch much live TV, and we could also easily edit out the adverts and reduce the length of films scheduled in 2 hour slots by as much as 25 minutes.

This neat setup recently fell apart when our EyeHome developed a fault with the video card, and also started to randomly drop the audio while streaming some recordings. Since Elgato doesn't make the product anymore, I had to decide whether to get a streaming box from another manufacturer, or to try something else. I also wanted to take the opportunity to move all our music to a dedicated machine, and solve the network streaming problem. I thought it would also be good to be able to record TV on a box in the living room itself, as our iMac is in the office/spare room. Overnight guests Chez Bsag have often been surprised and delighted to be woken at 2am by the (very bright) iMac screen turning on when EyeTV starts to record some late night film on Channel 4. We tried to remember to clear the scheduled recordings when we had guests, but it didn't always work out like that.

The Mac mini was a fairly obvious choice and others, like Jon Hicks, have written in detail about setting the mini up as a media centre. I was tempted for a while by the AppleTV, but I'd still have to record TV using EyeTV then export the recordings to the AppleTV, which seemed like a bit of a pain. The other advantage of the mini is that I could run Squeezebox Server on it to pipe music to my venerable old SliMP3 player.

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Logitech VX Nano mouse

I've just got a new mouse for my computer at home, and I'm really pleased with it. It's a Logitech VX Nano cordless mouse, and I got a really cracking deal on it from Amazon. Despite the abomination that is the Logitech Control Centre, I quite like Logitech mice, and I've had a variety of them over the years. My work mouse is a MX 1000 Laser, which is also good, but has a tendency to 'skip' a bit sometimes.

What I wanted for home use was a compact mouse with a small receiver that I could easily travel with when my laptop and I are on the move. I also wanted a mouse which has an 'off' switch: the previous one didn't, and ran through batteries as if they were going out of fashion. Buying a mouse without being able to handle it is always a little risky, but I felt fairly confident that I would get on with it. Now, I have Tiny Hobbit Hands, but have always used quite big, chunky mice and felt comfortable with them. The VX Nano is small, but with my fingers on the buttons, my palm sits quite comfortably on the top of the desk in a natural position.

The tracking is excellent and very precise (much better than my MX 1000, actually), and the extra buttons are very useful, as you can remap the functions with the software. I've mapped the forward and back buttons to forward and back in Safari and Path Finder, and the switches which activate when you rock the scroll wheel from side-to-side trigger the keystrokes for the next/previous tab. The software now allows you to set up different mappings for different applications, which means that I can have the same button action to navigate through tabs in Textmate and Safari, even though the keyboard shortcuts are different. Very handy.

The best thing about the mouse is the scroll wheel. By default, it behaves like any mouse wheel, with 'notches' for each increment of scrolling. However, if you press the wheel down and release, it goes 'frictionless' (almost -- obviously it can't break the laws of physics). It's hard to describe how cool this is, but you can flick the wheel to scroll very quickly, or move it gently to scroll very precisely in small increments. The receiver is also incredibly dinky, so that you can leave it plugged in to a laptop all the time, without worrying that you'll snap it off accidentally. I've plugged the receiver into the USB port of my wired aluminium Apple keyboard, and it is completely invisible from the top. When you travel with the mouse, there's a little slot for the receiver inside the battery compartment, which also turns it off automatically. All in all, it's a very nice mouse.

Canon PowerShot G10

I've been planning to replace my old camera (a Casio Exilim EX-Z40) for a while, so when I got some money for my birthday recently, I put it towards a Canon PowerShot G10. I spent ages trying to decide what to get. I wondered initially whether I should get a low end digital SLR, but I really wanted something that I could easily carry around with me routinely. Whenever I've regretted not getting a photograph in the past, it has usually been because I haven't had a camera with me, not because I haven't had the right camera with me. So that narrowed the field a bit. I was also sure that I wanted a camera which could produce RAW format files, and one which allowed a lot of manual control. My Casio Exilim is actually quite a good camera in many ways: it's very small and light, it generally exposes images pretty accurately, and the battery life is great, but there's really no manual control at all. There are 'scene' modes (for portraits, night shots, landscapes etc.), but since you have to dive into the menus to set them, it's a bit of a pain, and you end up shooting on automatic all the time. Your only artistic input into the photograph is in composing the shot, which was starting to annoy me.

After narrowing it down a bit more, it came down to two cameras: the Canon PowerShot G10 and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. Both are very nice cameras, but quite different in many ways. The Panasonic has a lovely Leica lens, and a lower pixel count, supposedly resulting in better image quality. But the lens is rather short at the longest end. The Canon is very well built with plenty of dials to control the most-used settings, but some people have reported a poorer image quality, particularly at high ISO levels. But Aperture can not yet read the RAW files produced by the Panasonic, while it can deal with the Canon files, and I worried about the restrictive length of the lens.

Eventually, this in depth review by Bill Lockhart, and actually handling both cameras swung my decision in favour of the Canon. As he says, the image quality is great provided that you stick to ISOs below 400 (or embrace the noise in the same way that people enjoy film grain). It's a compact camera, not a DSLR, but it's remarkably good for a compact camera, and being able to carry it around all the time is a huge bonus.

I'm still getting used to the camera, but I'm having an enormous amount of fun with it. I've been quite dismissive of huge Megapixel counts before, so I'm astounded how much difference 14.7MP makes to the detail over a 5MP image. Working with RAW files in Aperture is another revelation, and I'm really impressed about both the initial quality of the images, and about how easy it is to make them really pop with small adjustments. The LCD is gloriously crisp, and seems huge after the screen on the Casio, and the optical stabilisation is amazing. I hand-held this shot of Cleo with a shutter speed of 1.0 sec: I was steadying my hand on the sofa, but even so, it's pretty impressive that the shot is as sharp as it is.

The camera handles very well, and most of the controls you need for day-to-day shooting are directly accessible, without needing to go through the menus, which is very useful. It's a camera which makes you want to keep taking photographs. I've been screeching to a halt regularly on my bike commutes, and leaping off to take some image that's taken my fancy. I've posted a few photographs on wingsopenwide, and if you start with this image on flickr and work forwards through my photostream, you can see some more that I've taken with the Canon. There will be many more to come, I'm sure!

Bag lady

My name is Bsag, and I am a bagaholic.

I'm not remotely interested in your Prada or Gucci or other 'It' bags: no, my thing is rough, tough bags with lots of pockets. My problem is not that I want to collect a lot of them, but that I'm absurdly picky and a perfectionist when it comes to bags. I want something that's comfortable to carry fully loaded, particularly when riding a bike (like a rucksack), but that is easily swung around to access the pockets (like a messenger bag). I want a bag that doesn't look huge on me but has enough room for the daily essentials plus a few extra bits for longer excursions. I don't want to rummage, so I like lots of pockets which happen to be the perfect size for exactly the kind of stuff that I carry. I want it to be tough, well made and engineered to last. Oh, and I want it to be waterproof (or at least showerproof) as well. That's not much to ask, eh?

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iPhone 2.0

As you will have seen if you follow my Twitterings or see them on the sidebar here, I got an iPhone last week. When the original iPhone came out, I fell in love with it, but I couldn't afford it at the original prices, and I also had a mobile contract to finish first. The timing for the 2.0 version was perfect, as was the reduction in price. With all the hoo-ha over the release (O2 got inundated with registrations of interest), I thought that my chances of actually getting hold of one would be low.

As it happened, I got lucky. I tried to order one online early on Monday morning when O2 started accepting pre-orders. The server went down almost immediately, and as I had work to do, I wasn't able to try it again until lunch time. Amazingly, my order went through, and unlike many others who were unlucky, when it arrived on Friday by courier and I activated it through iTunes, the activation went straight through without a hitch. I know that others had a much less smooth experience, but for me it worked really well.

I've been living with the iPhone for several days now, and I really like it. I've been waiting a long time to get a small, mobile device that offers such a seamless experience with my Macs. 3G/Edge wireless works very well, and connecting to a WiFi network is seamless. The screen is beautifully bright and clear, so that reading web pages and emails or viewing photographs is a real pleasure. The touchscreen gestures are wonderfully intuitive and easy to use, and I even quite like the touchscreen keyboard. I'm a touch typist, so it's never going to replicate the experience of a full sized, physical keyboard, but I think it's a very effective and efficient compromise for a small, handheld unit. With one or two minor exceptions, everything is as beautifully designed and functional as you'd hope from an Apple product. In the past, I've had Psion PDAs (2 different models) and Palms/Treos (3 different models), as well as a clutch of smartphones (as well as some dumbphones). So I've had quite a bit of experience with using these kinds of devices, and I can honestly say that I've never used a phone/PDA/internet device which gets so much right. People argue that the latest Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Blackberry does everything an iPhone does, has a better camera, better battery life or whatever. But for me, the point is that the iPhone does pretty much everything you want in such a seamless and integrated way that you don't have to think about it: you just use it.

Of course, it's terrific when you are out and about and want a burst of information or entertainment in a handy package that you always have about your person. But I'm also finding that I use it at home a lot, where I have a laptop which replicates all ¹ of the functions of the iPhone -- even portability. Somehow, if I'm browsing my email or reading RSS feeds or FriendFeed, it seems so much more comfortable to pick up the iPhone, curl up on the sofa and browse through the sites than it does to do the same at the laptop. In short, I find that it's a device that really delights me, which is a fairly rare thing. I know that there will be someone who comments, "But it's just a phone!" (Jonathan, I'm looking at you ), and that's absolutely true. But it's a beautifully designed, elegantly functional device that I thoroughly enjoy using, and I don't see why I shouldn't celebrate that in the same way that I enjoy looking at a Victorian suspension bridge, a beautifully turned ceramic bowl or a beam engine.

¹ Except GPS. ↑

Macworld 2008

So, the Stevenote is over for another year, and some very interesting stuff was announced. The MacBook Air is a really stunning design, I think. I love the way that they emphasise the weightlessness of it¹ by tapering the edges of the case so that they are not actually sitting on the surface of the desk. It makes it look a little as if it's floating. Of course, there's a compromise for losing the weight and shrinking the thickness so the specs aren't as good as the MacBook Pros, but I think it fits its intended niche pretty well. Though it's gorgeous, I don't want to buy one. Correction: I want to buy one, but can't justify a need for it.

I was also very interested in Time Capsule. As it happens, I was in the process of thinking about getting more external storage, possibly Network Attached Storage, to enable me to back up all our computers using Time Machine. Our existing discs are getting a bit too full for comfort, and would be better employed to store music or to hold bootable clones of the drives. Time Machine is brilliant -- one of the best features of Leopard in my opinion, and while I thought I'd only use it for backup, it has saved my bacon a couple of times when I deleted files unintentionally. Anything which makes that process even more transparent and effortless would be a great thing. I don't currently have 802.11n wireless in the house, and Time Capsule seems fairly decently priced for the capacity offered.

I'm also intrigued by the iTunes Movie Rentals. We have a LoveFILM subscription which we enjoy, but it has a number of drawbacks. The somewhat random nature of the order in which you receive the DVDs (depending on availability) means that you often end up with a pile of very serious, depressing films when you actually feel like watching a light comedy. It's also not very spontaneous because of the postal delay, so if you find that all you've got when your parents come to visit is a batch of incredibly sweary films (for example) you're a bit stuck. Finally, we intermittently have trouble with scratched discs (something I've ranted about here before). When our player hits a bad scratch, it tends to jump back to chapter one. This means that we watch films with one eye on the DVD counter, so that if it does its skipping act, you can at least laboriously skip forward through the chapters to just after the point where it failed.

If (when rentals appear in the UK iTunes Store) there is a good range of films (including foreign language films and independents), we might well ditch our LoveFILM subscription and just rent-as-we-go: for our level of usage, the price would be about the same.

¹ OK, I know it's not literally weightless -- 3lb (1.36kg) is not nothing, but it's pretty light. ↑

Easy adjustment

A month after getting my new bike I'm a thorough convert to hub gears. Not only are they wonderfully smooth in use and pretty much sealed against the crud that comes off the path, but -- as I discovered today -- they are also a dream to adjust.

New bikes tend to need a bit of tightening up after a few weeks of use and settling in. Cables stretch and fixings loosen, and you find that gears start to drift out of correct adjustment. The Shimano Nexus is no exception, and on my last journey, I found that third gear wouldn't stay in gear, and a few of the others were a bit tricky. I was anticipating the greasy, time-consuming horror which is gear adjustment when you have derailleur gears. I've always found that you spend hours patiently adjusting screws back and forth, only to find that if you get the bottom of the range right, the top is out, and vice versa. It's like a bike equivalent of the 'Right Said Fred' piano moving experiment.

In contrast, the adjustment process with the Shimano Nexus is absurdly easy. There's a little windowon the upper surface (and on the lower surface, in case you've got the bike upside down) of the hub which shows you two vertical yellow lines. When you're in fourth gear, the lines should meet. If they don't (mine didn't), it needs adjustment. All you do is rotate a knurled collar where the gear cable enters the twist grip shifter on the handlebars until the yellow lines align -- no tools required! A quick flip to first gear then back to fourth allows you to check that the lines are still aligned and tweak if necessary, and that's it. It's an entirely non-greasy, easy, two-minute job, and everything is back to smooth efficiency afterwards. I think I'm in love with a hub gear.

Back in the land of a working computer

Well, that was interesting, but I'm glad it's all over. After a couple of days of upheaval and camping out on Mr. Bsag's computer, trying to find files or applications I needed, I'm finally back on my own, working computer.

I've learned a few lessons:

1. Do not trust the hard drive S.M.A.R.T. status -- in my case, it was gaily saying everything was fine (la la la) until the second it wasn't and my hard drive failed.
2. Backups are good. Frequent backups are even better. It's only when you find that your last backup is 48 hours old that you realise that you actually do get quite a lot done each day, and that you've now lost that last 48 hours of work. I was very fortunate and only lost a few emails.
3. Web applications really come into their own when you lose your files. I still had access to my calendar, some of my email from another computer when mine broke. Of course, the opposite is true when your internet connection goes down...
4. Apple's Migration Assistant is actually rather good. I haven't used it before, but faced with many gigabytes of data to somehow shift onto a fresh system without wiping out default files, preferences and so on, I thought I'd give it a go. After all, I still had my backup, so if it went wrong, I could just reinstall and start again. It was very easy, and as far as I can make out, almost everything transferred smoothly, even my custom installed applications in /usr/local. Mysql seems to be broken, but that's not too bad. I'm also glad that my backups are just plain filesystems now, rather than some obscure catalogue format, which you have to restore using a backup application. I just had to plug in the firewire drive, point Migration Assistant at my full back up, and go.

I'm so reliant on a computer for work and personal stuff, and have my computing environment so customised to my habits, that it's amazingly disruptive to be without my own computer. The sooner I get multiple computers and easily sync-able files sorted out, the better.

Broken

I apologise for the silence around here (and for any unanswered emails), but my laptop hard drive died on Monday, so I'm in computing limbo-land. I'm camping out on Mr. Bsag's iMac, but that means I can't do anything computer related at work, so there's a lot of running about and improvisation going on.

Luckily, I had a backup from late on Saturday (backing up is boring until the instant you need it, and then you are incredibly grateful that you took the trouble to do it regularly), so I shouldn't have lost much data. However, there's a lot of organisation to do when I get a replacement or a fix, which is not a good thing when I have a deadline looming on Thursday.

I'll be glad when it's all over, and I'm back on my own, configured-just-how-I-like-it machine.

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