Unlocking my new HTC HD7

I thought I’d share my experience of unlocking an HTC HD7 handset, as I wanted to use it on other networks, here and abroad.

Background

Before getting my HTC HD7 phone, I had been a customer of Orange for years with various handsets and upgrades over the time. Literally, about 12 years, as  I took out a contract phone back in 1998 whilst at university.  My latest handset was the HTC TyTN II running Windows Mobile 6.0, which I loved, but had been waiting for the release of the Window Phone 7 and more importantly, the HTC HD7 handset.

To be honest, I would have stayed with Orange, except I really needed an HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 handset, but they were (and, currently, still are!) exclusive to O2 in the UK.

The HD7 era

Come December 2010, I couldn’t wait any longer and bought one on a Pay As You Go tariff, except I didn’t overly want the PAYG part; the O2 30-day contracts looked much more appealing, so I took a £20 per month contract plus a £5 bolt-on for internet access (I’m a geek!).

I wanted to keep my existing telephone number that I had for many years with Orange, and so went through the whole PAC code thing with Orange. To be honest, it could have been easier, but hey.

Status as of: This morning

At the time of writing this, my cherished telephone number has now been ported across onto the O2 30 Day Contract – I haven’t touched the PAYG one, as it was a waste of time.  Also, I’m still waiting for Orange to finish billing me, but they assure me that this is ‘normal’.

The next problem, is that O2 don’t really service the area where I live very well.  I’m not talking about internet connectivity, as I can use WiFi at home, but if I can make a telephone call from my house, that would be… nice.

So, I needed to change networks – but to who?  I decided to get a PAYG sim for another network and try it out before rushing into anything, and this is when I confirmed that the HTC HD7 was locked to O2. Big surprise? No.

I stumbled into the 3 (Three) shop today and bought myself a £10 top-up which comes with a free sim, and sure enough, the sim lock kicked in on the ol’ HD7, meaning that it is O2’s lock on the handset preventing other sim cards from being used.

IMEI ‘Unlocking’ Websites

Google quite helpfully found me lots of websites that, for between £20 and £40 (GBP) they could unlock my handset. Yeah right.

Despite my efforts, none of the websites even worked, let alone getting me through to the shopping basket.  Even so, this all seemed far too dodgy, and so I thought I’d call O2 themselves and see if they can do it. Properly. Even for money.

Calling O2

I was expecting O2 to say ‘no, naff orf’, when asked about unlocking my handset, but interestingly, they didn’t.  The chap on the phone did have to speak to someone else, and later explained that if I were to be using the original PAYG sim that came with the HD7 handset, then O2’s official stance was that I needed to have waited 12 months before they’ll allow me to unlock it for use on other networks.

Luckily, my ‘saving grace’, was that I wasn’t using the PAYG sim that came with the phone; I was using a 30-day contract sim from O2.  This meant that they could unlock my handset for me, and for free too!

I had to give them the IMEI number and within about an hour, I had an email back from the guys at O2 with the eight-digit unlock code for the handset.  I simply had to stick the new Three sim into the phone, turn it on, wait for the O2 sim lock and enter the code, and we’re in.  And I didn’t have to pay a penny more. Job done.

ReadyBoost what?

So, today, I heard about this fan-dangled ReadyBoost thing in Windows, and I thought I’d try it out.

From what I understand, I can use a USB memory stick as extra RAM for my PC – this sounds great, as I’ve recently bought an 8GB memory stick.  It has to be worth a try!

Side note: Considering that I practically *live* on a PC, I’m really surprised that this one slipped by me.  I’m a bit taken a-back that something that has the power to do this, is something that I already own, and I can try out for nothing, other than a little time!

So, here goes!  Working totally off of intuition alone, lets see how far I get.

Here’s a few techie-details about what I’m working with:

• System Spec: Dell Vostro running Windows 7 Ultimate
• Memory Stick: SanDisk Cruzer Blade 8GB (approx. £14)

Crack-on.

So, I’m guessing I need to insert USB memory stick into the PC, as this is slightly important to the process.  This is the box that Windows 7 makes happen:

I’m guessing it’s the last option that I need, so I’ll go for that one. Here’s the next screen that appear:

In the screen above, I’ve got the option to:

• Do not use this device
• Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost
• Use this device.

It appears that I am limited to using 4GB of the available 8 on the stick, so I’ll go in heavy with the ‘Dedicate this device’ to see where that takes me.  Clicking ‘Ok’ makes the following box appear:

Once this has finished, the above box disappears, leaving me to wonder what’s happened, if anything. Lets go looking..

Inside the ‘Computer’ screen, the drive appears to be used, around the 4GB mark…

Checking what’s inside (because I’m nosey) here’s what it shows:

So, that’ll be my 4GB file then. Now. What does it actually do? Hmm. I don’t actually know, nor how to use it.

Time to start reading the manual. Or Wikipedia, at least. Here’s what it says:

“ReadyBoost is a component of Microsoft Windows, first introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista in 2006 and bundled with Windows 7 in 2009. It works by using flash memory, a USB flash drive, SD card, CompactFlash, external hard drive or any kind of portable flash mass storage system as a drive for disk cache.

ReadyBoost is also used to facilitate SuperFetch, which allows it to perform analysis of boot-time disk usage patterns and creates a cache which is used in subsequent system boots

Using ReadyBoost-capable flash memory (NAND memory devices) for caching allows Windows 7 and Vista to service random disk reads with performance that is typically 80-100 times faster than random reads from traditional hard drives. This caching applies to all disk content, not just the page file or system DLLs. Flash devices typically are slower than a hard disk for sequential I/O so, to maximize performance, ReadyBoost includes logic that recognizes large, sequential read requests and has the hard disk service these requests.

When a compatible device is plugged in, the Windows AutoPlay dialog offers an additional option to use the flash drive to speed up the system; an additional "ReadyBoost" tab is added to the drive's properties dialog where the amount of space to be used can be configured. 250 MB to 256 GB of flash memory can be assigned (4 GB in the x86 versions of Vista and Windows 7). ReadyBoost compresses and encrypts, with AES-128, all data that is placed on the flash device; Microsoft has stated that a 2:1 compression ratio is typical, so that a 4 GB cache could contain upwards of 8 GB of data.”

So, it appears that after a few minutes of looking online, that’s all I need to do to make use of the space on the memory stick.  There’s no obvious signs that the USB stick is in use, such as any increase inside Task Manager, as that still shows the 4GB of real RAM on my PC. 

I can only assume that is what it needs, and I’ll have to check back another time with any results I find on using it.

In terms of testing this, I’ve got a load of videos of my little son to mess around with; I could try that to see what effect it has, if any. Watch this space.

#BrettsMovieTest

“The best thing on Twitter…”
“Not a bad quiz, I suppose”
”Yeah, I quite like it…”

So, for one reason or another, I started posting movie questions on Twitter, and it’s sort of grown a little more than just that, which is open to all, providing you have a Twitter account, of course!

http://twitter.com/#search?q=brettsmovietest

or follow me http://twitter.com/brettrigby

#BrettsMovieTest is exactly that – a fun, meaningless, points-only quiz on movies using screen-shots that I’ve taken from the movie myself;  The shots are not always the key shots as used in movie’s promotional material, as that would be far, far too easy. Instead, I try and get glimpses from the film, of scenes that you wouldn’t probably guess unless you have actually seen the movie.

Of course, me screen-grabbing ‘moments’ from the movie means that it could go either way – some shots I’ve taken, I think I'll really puzzle people for a couple of days, (such as the shot from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off - below), but turn out to be really easy and vice versa!

I don’t really know why I started the movie test, but I think I was bored at home one afternoon and would see how good my mates were at movie trivia.  If anything, I thought that those who were following me at the time who soon de-follow me sharpish, but if anything, more followers have come along because of it, which is great!

I started to have to worry about keeping track of the scores, and back in the day where there was only a few questions out in the wild, I had the winners marked on a torn-off scrap of paper.  As things moved up a peg or two, I started using Excel, but then I ended up creating a sub-site on my personal domain name just for the movie test, which is over at brettrigby.com/brettsmovietest.

But I’ve recently decided to ditch the Excel spreadsheet in favour of just keeping the scores on the website, as I end-up storing the info on the winners in two places, and then forget to keep one up to date, as they’re not linked or anything fancy like that.

Process

People have asked how I’m getting these clips, so I thought I’d mention about the process of posting a screen-shot.

First of all, I have to pick a movie that isn’t too obscure, but on the other hand, too distinguishable a movie will only make for an easy question.

So, once I’ve decided on the next movie, it’s simply a case of getting the disc into my PC, spinning it up in Windows Media Player and then the hunt begins for the shot.

As I said earlier, key people from the movie are out. I made the mistake in the past of getting a screen-shot of Clint Eastwood holding a particularly iconic handgun into the view of the camera, and the amount of people who said that it was too easy was crazy.  It was, I agree. Because of this, main characters are out, unless they’re obscured in some way, or facing away from the camera enough to make you think.

Once I’ve got the shot I want, it’s as technical as pausing the movie and then starting up the Snipping Tool inside Windows 7, which I think is an absolutely brilliant snipping tool, almost made for this purpose!

The JPEG image is then saved to my local PC and then through the wonders of the HootSuite Windows Twitter client, it’s uploaded to ow.ly and is posted out for all to guess on.

I try to reply to all incorrect guesses and send the message out as a broadcast message, so that all participants of the test can see.

Once the correct answer has been submitted (only through Twitter) then again the details are broadcasted to all, as soon as I can.

Mistakes, fixed by the Twitter Timeline

Yes, it’s true, I have made the odd mistake here and there on all of this, but seeing as it’s only for fun, so it’s not so bad. The biggest mistake that I’ve made is to respond to a message containing the correct answer, before reading back on the Twitter Timeline to see if anyone else guessed it first.

Obviously, I have rectified any problems or mistakes as soon as possible, but it helps that people playing along are on the ball and notify me pronto! Any more that come along, I’m sure I’ll get told about!

Where/where will it end?

Good question! I suppose when I run out of movies to rifle through! I haven’t got any immediate plans as yet to bring it to a holt, but then I didn’t have any plans to begin with!

I was quite surprised about how competitive some people are when playing it! It’s probably what as driven me to carry it on, to be fair.  Getting a bit of feedback occasionally is good - It makes it a bit more interesting for me doing the test, as I try to think of movies that they not have seen, that may just vex them long enough to get something constructive done!

Anyway, as long as people think it’s ok, not bad, or adequate, then I’ll continue trying to keep everyone on their toes!

Project: Build my *own* PC

Way back in the early days of computing, it was much cheaper to buy the components of a PC and assemble it yourself, as opposed to getting one off the shelf.  You used to be able to build a PC and make a healthy mark-up on it too.

With the rise in popularity of home computers, companies are banging out cheaper and cheaper PCs all the time, making the margins less and less but focusing on volume of sales. This all means that it’s no longer profitable to build a PC and try to sell it, but it does mean that we end up buying what these companies have spec’d up for us.

What I want to do, is to price-up and build my own PC, choosing the parts that I want, allowing me to focus my financial attention where I’d like.

My Current PC

I have a Dell Vostro 220s, which has the following specification:

• Intel Core2 Duo 2.66 GHz (E6750)
• Originally 2GB of RAM, but now 4GB
• 320GB Hard disk drive (as standard)
• ATI Radeon X1300 256MB video card with 2x DVI outs (as standard)
• It originally came with Vista Business, but I’m now running Windows 7 Ultimate (64bit)

In all, I think I paid around £450 about 3 years or so ago, without a monitor.

I actually swapped it for a laptop! My mates’ teenage son ordered it from Dell on his dad’s business account, and then decided he wanted a laptop when Dell told him that it would be yet another 3 weeks!  I stepped in, bought the laptop he wanted, and did a trade.

The PC is doing absolutely fine, to be fair and I haven’t had any problems with it to speak of.  I’d like to build myself another PC, as I’d like to use this PC elsewhere at home and have a newer one for myself, and because I can.

The main drawback with this PC, is the ‘s’ in the 220s model name; this means that the case is a slim-line case, i.e. a low profile case. This had caused me grief in the past, when trying to get more expansion cards for it, such as a gigabit network card and, more recently, another dual-output graphics card to run alongside my existing card.

The motherboard itself has one 16x PCI-Express slot, one 1x PCI-Express slot and two (I think!) regular PCI slots. The existing graphics card consumes the 16x slot, so when I wanted a gigabit card for it, I managed to get a 1x PCI-Express low-profile Belkin card off of eBay, but still new. Great, no problem, but twice the price of the same card which was of regular height.

When I wanted to scale-up from the two Samsung 23” widescreen monitors that I’m using to three, (same problem for four monitors), I purchased another dual-output graphics card, but of the 1x PCI-Express edition, meaning my gigabit card was out, and back down to the 10/100 that comes on-board. No problem, except the graphics cards drivers kept conflicting with each other, and I’d often boot the PC up to find both sets of drivers had been binned and I was back down to 640x480 resolution on one monitor. Not a good look on a big screen with high-resolution capabilities!

So, I re-sold that on eBay, and bought a matching pair of Sapphire cards, but one in 16x and the other in 1x – still had driver grief, and these didn’t work out, meaning I returned them for a refund. :o(

So, I’m back down to the two screens on the standard card that came with the PC, but having the momentary taste for a third monitor has made me want it more.  (The fourth monitor can wait until I get a bigger desk, or can afford one of those scaffolding sets…)

Also, (and it’s a fairly minor point), the most amount of RAM I can have in this PC is the 4GB that the board supports. Running 64-bit Windows certainly helps scoop up that last little bit though!

What’s going to happen to this PC when I get a new one? Well, that’s a whole other blog post..!

My new PC

So – the first question is really, “what I do want my new PC to do that my current PC doesn’t do?”

Well, obviously, I’d like more power. The dual-core processor I have is great and I can see the difference between that and my home server, which has the Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz single-processor model.  The Quad-core processors are coming down significantly in price now, and so I’m looking in that direction with my rose-tinted goggles on.

More RAM is also a no-brainer. Currently, I often allocate 1-2GBs of RAM to Virtual PCs, meaning it’s straight off the top of the total RAM available to the PC overall, as the virtual PCs don’t share this RAM back to the host when not used; it’s allocated and reserved wholly to the VPC.

In terms of hard disk space, I currently have a 300GB drive, as I mentioned earlier. Of that, I reckon I actually need 30-40 GB of usable space, as all my personal files are stored on a network share, so I need enough space to have the following installed:

• Windows 7
• Visual Studio (Because I’m a dev-geek)
• Office 2007 (or 2010 beta)

So, I’m wondering if I can see how much a snazzy new solid state drive (SSD) is – the ones I have seen so far, tend to be around the £2-3 per gigabyte of capacity, so a 40GB drive could £80-120.  This isn’t too far off the price of a 1-1.5 terabyte SATA II drive, but I’d only be buying a SATA drive and not using the capacity of it for anything.  Also, if I were to buy an SSD, then the read/write speeds are amazing and will have a big impact on the boot-up time of my PC, as well as normal work.

Multi-monitor capability is also another area of particular interest – obviously, I’d want to get a graphics card that could handle the two existing monitors that I currently have, but I’d want to be looking at making it as easy as I can for myself to get another card of the same make/model that will simply slot-in and work, giving me the flexibility that I’d like to go to a third monitor.

The case. Ah, the case. In all of my previous PCs (and I’ve had a few!) I have always had a midi-tower or bigger, by shear chance and not by selection.  When this 220s came along with it’s slimness, it didn’t really bother me aesthetically, as it normally lives on the floor under my desk anyway.  This time, I want a case that will be the full width, saving me any future grief with expansion cards (Arg!) as well as provide lots of bays for any number of drives that I’d like to throw at it in future.

The last main thing, is a bigger power supply unit (PSU) – I currently have a 250W unit in this 220s tower and when I was looking into those two graphics cards, lots of websites recommended a 350+W power supply because of their draw on the power.  Whether this is true or not, I don’t know, but if I want a space for a few more drives, then I’m going to need a PSU that can potentially take the drives and not get louder and louder when the pressure’s on. Which reminds me, I’d like it to be quiet too – I’m not fussed if there’s a bit of a hum from it, as I’m not precious about absolute silence from the PC really, but having said that, given the choice, certainly, I’d go for the quieter option.

In terms of what I do on my PC, it’s mainly work stuff, in that I don’t use my PC to play games – I never have. If I want to play games, I’ll turn the PS3 on and go from there, but the PC has always been for ‘doing’ stuff.  Microsoft Visual Studio 2008/2010 don’t need massive graphics cards to operate, nor do web-browsers, or Microsoft Office.

So, that’s it really. Lots of processing power, RAM and a big case. Hmm. That should be interesting…

< quick dash off to the internet >

Ok. Here’s what I have spec’d up, literally from the aria.co.uk website to gather some high-level info on prices, availability, etc. (All prices include VAT, as I’m not VAT registered to claim it back!!)

Case: Zalman MS1000-HS1 Mid Tower, at £93.94

I saw this case in a .net magazine a week or so ago and was quite taken by it.  It’s big, spacious and… big.

It’s got space for 7x 5.25” drives, room for 7 expansion slots, has 3x 3.5” hot swappable drives as well as space for my suitcase. And, at 200mm x 560mm x 500mm it’s still a Mid tower.

Proc: Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz Quad-core (1366), at £205.61

This was actually the cheapest i7 processor that aria do, but a quad-core 2.66Ghz processor isn’t really to be sniffed at, I don’t think. A mate at work has the 2.8GHz model and it sounds good from him, so a bit of recommendation in there too.

This i7 processor was the first component that I picked out, as the socket-type on here determined which motherboards that I could look at.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R (1366), at £133.94

This wasn’t the first board I noted, but the first one was £280, and was probably a very nice motherboard too, but I just didn’t see the point in having that and spend all that much more on it.  This GA-EX58-ED3R, other than having such a memorable name, does everything I think I need it to do – it has lots of expansion slots, it can take a daft amount of RAM for a desktop machine and it’s compatible with the 1366-socket processor that I’ve chosen.

In addition to all of that, the motherboard has an on-board 7.1 sound card and, more interestingly, a gigabit network card, negating my need for an additional card for that.

RAM: G. Skill Trident 6GB (3x2GB), at £152.74

Well, what can I say? 6GB of RAM really ought to be enough for anyone, but without shelling out a kidney for it, I thought £150 for 6GB was enough! 

This is DDR3 PC3-16000C9 2000MHz Triple Channel Kit RAM, which has lots of numbers to sound impressive, even if it’s not.  It’s a stark contrast from the 4MB of RAM I had in one of my first PCs though!

Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 9800GT 512MB, at 64,61

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t need high-powered graphics cards, as I am not going to use my PC to play games on.  The reason I have chosen this particular card, is because it has dual-DVI output slots and has 512MB of on-board RAM, which sounds like a lot to me. 

It’s a PCI-Express card too, and the motherboard I’ve selected should be able to take two of these. 

I’ve just noticed that the cards appear to be full-height cards too – something which would have ruled this option out straight away with the slim-line case of the 220s.

HDD: Patriot PS-100 32GB Solid State Drive, at £64.61

Not a bad price, I thought. Originally, I listed a pair of 1TB Western Digital SATA II drives with the intention of RAID’ing them, but then as I mentioned earlier, why do I need big drives to waste the capacity. And, if my data is stored elsewhere, why not get an SSD drive to get the PC up and running fast.

I’m sure that one day, I’ll find a 32GB SSD drive in the back of my cupboard here in my office and think “blimey, I remember spending a lot of money on such a small drive…” – just like I do when I still come across the 40 or 60GB 3.5” hard drives from days of old.

PSU: Corsair CX Series 400W, at £39.94

Well, what can I say, it’s a big power supply and it’s not a bad price. The blurb says that it’s fairly quiet… I can’t measure it in terms of decibels, or anything against what I’ve got, so it’s just a matter of price really. £40 seems fine, no? Again, no games, so no fancy one needed. Nor do I need one that has neon lights on, as you wouldn’t see it inside the Zalman case anyway!

Chip Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro R2, at £15.26

Originally, I picked a £55 chip cooler, but scaled it back in terms of price. I know some people that would choke at the thought of putting a £15 cooler on a £200 processor, but if the processor is so powerful and does more work quicker and I’ve admitted I’m not going to be doing large processing work that often, then it shouldn’t matter. Of course, this then raises the question why I need a powerful processor, but I’ll skip that and pretend I still need it anyway.

Sundries: 2.5” to 3.5” bracket to hold the SSD drive, and a tube of CPU-paste to help transfer heat away from the processor to the chip cooler quicker. Sub-total here, at about £13.00

Phew.

So, that’s it. Obviously, I’ve left out the price of the operating system, as I have a license for that sorted already. All in all, here’s the price that it comes to: £783.55, excluding any delivery costs of course. And VAT on top of the delivery, on top of the cost of the parts.

As I mentioned though, this was all done straight from the aria website – I’m sure that I could shop around for each part and save a few quid here and there too, but that’s really a job on the day, with a fist full of cash, as the prices and parts really can differ from one day to the next.

What’s the plan? I’m going to work on getting the spare £785 together and go from there. No doubt that as soon as I do, the price of these particular components will have dropped and newer parts become cheaper, but I’ve always taken the attitude of buying as best as you can at the time you have the money, as PC parts are bad for dropping in price due to the market.

What’s the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF)? Well, it’s a bit better than it was! When I first priced up this PC, it turned in at over £1200 – not a happy face did my wife have.  Admittedly, it is still a hell of a lot of money to waste on yet another PC for the Brett Rigby scrap-head of PC parts, boxes, etc that fills my loft. And my shed. And the space under the stairs. And even the boot of my car. (I kid you not.) 

If I could somehow get the price down a little further to around the £500 mark, that would be fantastic and I’m sure my wife would be much happier about all of this, but I fear that it would mean settling for a lesser processor, or less RAM, etc, when the whole point of looking into all of this, was to get what I wanted. My boss at work suggested buying in dribs and drabs to help spread the cost of the PC across many months.  I like his thinking, but I am also reminiscent of the days of getting enough new parts together to fit all at once. And then finding out that the motherboard wasn’t exactly compatible with the new processor, or the RAM was shot before I fitted it.

Anyway, I’ll try to blog something here and when I get this new PC.

Windows Mobile Twitter Clients

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now, (http://twitter.com/brettrigby), maybe for about 8 months or so and thought I’d mention about some of the fun I’ve have had using Twitter clients on my Windows-based mobile phone.

I currently have an HTC TyTN II mobile phone, which runs the Windows Mobile 6.0 platform. I’ve had this for about 18 months and I really like it.  It’s everything I want/need in a mobile phone, plus more.  (Except the 3G coverage around my area is pants.)

Tiny Twitter
Since playing around with Twitter, I started out using a free Twitter client, named Tiny Twitter, which was a great introduction to the world of Tweets and micro-blogging.

Here’s a few screenshots of Tiny Twitter in action:

I found this application being reviewed on a website somewhere and thought it looked like a good place to start. And it was free.

Tiny Twitter served me really well, allowing me to scroll around the tweets in and out of my account.  It’s fairly basic, but as I said, a brilliant start.

Twikini
Once I got into Twitter properly, which admittedly took a while, I got twitchy.  I started to look around to see what other client apps were available, which is when I found Twikini.

Twikini is available as a free time-limited demo, and is then a few pounds to purchase the full version registration key.

I really liked Twikini and didn’t regret buying the full version license of the software, and this is the Twitter client that I have used the most, as I guess that I’ve had this installed for about 4-5 months.

Moving from Tiny Twitter to Twikini was a big leap – a bit like going from Windows XP to Windows 7, as the Twikini user interface was much more appealing, and much more intuitive. And, if I’m honest, much easier and more fun to use, which is an important factor.

Twikini is great, as it allows you to swap between multiple Twitter account, if so desired.  I have set-up several other accounts for different purposes and was able to simply and easily add each one to Twikini and swap at any given time between them and send out accordingly.

If I’m honest, I had a few problems in the end with Twikini not sending out retweeted messages, but I’m not sure that this wasn’t to do with problems I had on my phone at the time.  Sending new tweets was always ok, but re-tweeting something gave me grief.

Which is when I started looking around again.

moTweets
I haven’t long found out about the moTweets Twitter client application and have already been very impressed with it’s use. 

As much of a difference that Twikini was from Tiny Twitter, moTweets is that much different again from Twikini, as the user interface is fully-loaded and action-packed.

moTweets offers two versions of the same software:

• One that is free and has advertisements present, consuming vital screen-space
• The other that is a pay-for version which doesn’t contain any ads.

Again, you get the same functionality that Twikini provides, but it feels so slick and expensive-like! Everything just looks so much nicer and more stylish than I could have expected.  The animation in the scrolling adds to the whole application experience. 

One difference with moTweets over both others that I’ve noticed, is that you’re able to have the application fill the entire screen, removing the standard Windows Mobile ‘chrome’ around the edges – a subtle difference, but one that gives the application much more room to work with, especially on a small screened device such as the TyTN II handset.

As I said, I haven’t long been using moTweets but already think it’s a great application, showing off what can be done on an aging platform such as 6.0.

Getting rid of Sky+ TV – Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

So, as I was saying, the plan is to get rid of the need to have a Sky+ subscription, and here’s what I’ve done about it so far.

I was reading a blog post by a chap called Tim Heuer, as he’s done exactly what I wanted to do, using a device called the HD HomeRun by a company called SiliconDust.

The HD HomeRun is a twin-tuner, network-attached FreeView device, in that it doesn’t have a hard-disk drive inside, nor even be aware of what it’s doing with the signal that it’s converting from the aerial, but instead making this feed available to the other PCs or Media Extenders on the network.

Basically, he’s used a computer to talk to the HD HomeRun box and store the resulting file on the network, where his other devices, such as an Xbox, can find it and playback at a click on a button.

That was exactly what I wanted to do.

The idea was to get one of these boxes, connect it to the network and have the software installed on the Windows 2008 Server running in the house.  This would record the channels that we tell it to each week and save the programme as a file on it’s hard drive.

Then, on the same computer is an application called TVersity, which is used for streaming files/photos/music across a network, that the PlayStation 3 is already configured to talk to.

So, I did a bit of research online and found this You video handy, amongst others, and felt this was the way to go.

The HD HomeRun itself, I bought online at a website called OneVideo.co.uk, and, including postage, it came to about £145. (I’m telling you this not to brag about how much it costs, but for pricing up later!) 

It soon turned up, delayed because of the snow in the UK apparently, but it wasn’t long before I discovered the slight downfall with it, namely the software.

The website and the box all harped on about some open-source software called ‘Total Media DVR’, but I couldn’t find it on the install DVD, and it looked so-so on the website, so I didn’t bother with it at all.

I’ve seen videos of people using Windows 7/Vista Media Center to talk directly to the HD HomeRun, and be able to control it all from there.

This is where I got stuck for a little while, as I had to download Windows 7 drivers from SiliconDust’s website that were still in Beta development, but this took a few days of searching through forums to find out.  (If you’re needing them too, the Windows 7 drivers I had are here.)

Once I had the correct drivers, I soon had Windows 7 Media Center able to change channels and record the TV programmes to hard drive for later playback using one of the two tuners, meaning I couldn’t utilise the other tuner unless another computer on my network had Media Center configured in the same way.

But this isn’t the model I wanted – I wanted my *server* to handle the TV side of things, and bang-out the video over the PlayStation.

Media Center did the trick, but it’s not staying like that, as Media Center isn’t installed on Windows 2008 Server! And even if it was, I’d have to remotely connect to the server from a PC, open Media Center, add a program to record and log off again, hoping it would all work.  But still this is only using one of the two tuners.

To be continued…

Getting rid of Sky+ TV

That’s the plan, anyway! Here’s what I’m thinking so far…

We have had Sky+ since my wife went onto maternity leave from work, as she was getting bored being at home for so long and not being much stuff on day-time Freeview TV. And it meant that I could then get to watch ‘Lost’ on ABC… But it was for her sake, honest.

Anyway, about a year and half has gone by now, and we use Sky+ quite a lot, but not for any Sky-specific channels. We more use it as a modern-day VCR, as it simply records all the channels on the five channels that have been available in the UK for the past 15 years or so, namely, BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. It’s not that we don’t like anything on any of the other channels, it just worked out like that.

Very, very occasionally there’ll be something that will catch my eye on Sky1, but I couldn't honestly tell you the last thing I watched on there, let alone recorded it for later.

Once all the programmes that we like are ‘Series-Linked’ by Sky+ there’s no immediate rush to watch them, and so we end up having a night here or there catching-up on them.

Currently, our monthly bill for Sky+ is about £20 a month. Not a massive amount, but still £20 less to spend on sweets and chocolate each month.  If I cancel the subscription to Sky, then (I’m told) that the Sky+ feature (i.e. the recording part) will stop working also.

So, the aim is to replace the Sky+ box with something else that doesn’t have a monthly or annual subscription, but will give me the channels that we watch AND have the ability to record programmes for later playback.

However - The menu and remote controller combination for Sky+ is going to take some beating. The interface for the Sky TV guide is very simple to use and easy to record programmes, or even entire series of programmes using the Series Link feature.

I have a Playstation3 console, and there is a TV-tuner adapter available for it, called PlayTV and is £59.99 online. But assuming that it all works fine, that means that I’m restricting the places that I can watch any of the recorded content to the one TV-set in the lounge. 

But, ideally, I’d like something that can record a particular Freeview programme and save it as a file on my computer network. Then, the plan would be to use TVersity on the server, streaming the content to my PlayStation3.

I’ve found a possible solution, but more on that in the next post.

Backups

Yes, yes. I know. It’s that same old waffle about how you should backup your PC, etc, etc. 

Everyone knows that they should do it, but everyone leaves it until ‘later’.  Only, like I did, ‘later’ comes and smacks you around the head after something bad has happened and things are lost.

Why not think about it a little, enough to do something good, and then forget about it?

Windows 7 has a Backup and Restore application built in and allows you to select the files and folders that you want to save, point them to an external or network drive and simply schedule the task to happen whenever you want it to.

“But I haven’t got an external drive?”

Maybe you don’t.  Quick search at Aria.co.uk to find that they’re selling a 1TB (1024GB) USB External hard drive for under £66.

£66… 

That might sound a lot if you only have a tenner in your back-pocket, but seriously, I even thought about buying another one, as £66 to save all your work/photos/etc on? Magic.

Chances are you could probably find a bigger/faster/cheaper one elsewhere online, but I doubt there’ll be a lot in it.  Either way, you have to think about how you’d feel if your computer as you know it disappeared, as people forget that things do still get stolen these days;  people who I used to see when doing home PC call-outs seem to think that they’re safe from viruses, malware and any other nasties out there in the wild, but didn’t give a second thought to what would happen if they had their house broken into, and the laptop with all their life’s holiday photos, or photos of the kids, late parents/grandparents/etc.  All those memories are just as ‘gone’ as if a virus trashed the hard drive, or even if the drive itself failed.

That’s my story, the one of the failing disk drive.  It’s easy to forget about the earlier holidays that I have lost in addition to the ‘bigger’ holidays that we’ve had, such as when we went to Niagara Falls in Canada.  All these photos were arrogantly ‘safe’ on my new shiny 300GB hard drive, but even new drives can fail and I can vouch for that. 

So, I’ve been stung. Not as bad as it could have been, as we didn’t have children at that point, and I would have been absolutely gutted if I had lost the photos of my little one during his first weeks in the hospital, or doing funny things at home; you know, the sort of photos you will want to look back on in years to come.

Windows 7 makes the process easy, I promise. 

If you’re a ‘bit of a billy’ on the PC and normally fumble your way around it to make it work to a fashion, then follow the standard settings in the wizard that walks you through it all, and you’re away. 

If you’re a touch above that and feel you know what you’re doing and want to hand-select the files and folders to backup, then fine, do it that way.

Fake a disaster and restore something

Might sound a little overkill, but then, what’s the point in backing something up if you don’t know how to get it back?

If you’ve got access to another computer in the house, why not plug your newly purchased and backed-up external drive into that and find out how easy it is to get to your files?

“But I haven’t got Windows 7…” (yet)

Well, quite possibly not. And that goes for a lot of people out there who haven’t literally just bought a new PC. Quite a lot of people out there are still using Windows XP and for one reason or another didn’t upgrade to Vista.

I’ll find out about the standard backup/restore applications in Windows XP and Vista and will put a blog post up on here soon.

Failing that, I’ll see if I can find a relatively cheap third-party application that your mum can buy and install without needing help from someone in a call-centre in New Deli.

New toy: Webcam!

One of the toys I put on my Christmas wish-list this year, was a webcam, as I’ve never actually owned one… Sad story, I know, but finally, I now have one!

Anyway, I’ve got the webcam that I asked for, and that my in-laws kindly bought for me, which is a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema, and it’s great!

Amongst all the tech-specs about how good it is, its says it’s a HD Widescreen webcam, filming in 720p HD, up to 30 frames per second. But the much better item on the list, is that it’s got a built-in microphone. So, no need to sit there with the geeky telephone-operator-style headset for me, I can just sit there and jabber away!

Although at £50 it’s not the cheapest webcam on the market, it certainly does feel like it’s worth the money, as it gives the impression that it was made properly and will work forever.

One very nice touch, is that it’s got a really good autofocus feature, like normal digital cameras, meaning that you  don’t need to keep adjusting the lens when you change where you sit, nor do you get a general focus-on-everything approach to it.

I did contemplate the Logitech equivalent, which is the Quickcam Fusion Webcam, but I’m really pleased with what I’ve got.

In terms of use so far, I’ve been talking to my mum and sister on it using Skype’s video-chat and it works really well.  I’ve also been using Skype to make normal telephone calls through it too, as the microphone is that good and it means that you don’t have to hold a phone to your ear all the time. (And because I wanted to really, as it would have been cheaper to use the free minutes that come with my mobile phone contract.)

Summary: Definitely good fun and a classy toy nonetheless.

Marks out of 5:

An introduction to Windows Azure

Azure? Isn’t that a colour?

‘Windows Azure’ is Microsoft’s new toy and when it goes live properly, it’s going to be big.

Basically, Azure is Microsoft’s answer to the Cloud computing, where companies like Amazon currently have the market share with their products.

Cloud computing is similar to regular web-hosting packages, but offers scalability in remarkable ways. Here’s what I mean.

If you have a website for your business selling ‘Widgets’ (whatever they may be) and you’re about to put an advert in a national or international newspaper, telling everybody about your new fangled Widget Mk II, then the thought may (or should) cross your mind about whether your current web-server that you’re using can handle vast amounts of traffic from lots of people around the world trying to buy a Widget or two from you.

I’m not talking about hundreds of people all connecting in at the same second of the same hour, on the same day; more like thousands or hundreds of thousands in that same timeframe. 

Typically, web-servers slow down, as they’re trying to cater for each and every user-request in turn. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are very much this approach – hit the website as many times as possible in an attempt to make the website’s server crash and fail, causing a potential loss of revenue.

There was a big thing a while ago whereby bookmakers were being extorted for large sums of money, or risked a massive DDoS attack during big race days.

One solution to this, is to contact the people that host your website and take out an additional contract for another server, and get the two servers linked and share the workload. Good idea. Expensive and time-consuming, but certainly valid. But then, just one more server? What if you had needed another but wanted to keep costs down and lived to regret it later? Or maybe you actually needed an additional 10 servers?  But then, what if your advert flops and no-one wants to visit your site to buy a widget? You’re then stuck with those however-many servers for the duration of the contract, 12 months maybe?

In steps the wonder of Cloud computing!

What if, just before those adverts get printed, you check the settings on your website and change an innocent-looking ‘1’ to ‘25’ and press save, and magically, there’s 25 servers cooking away at serving your website? And, even better, what if you only paid for what you use?

And then, once your advert has faded away in yesterday’s news, you then want to scale-back your 25 webservers to just 1 again. Simply change that setting back and press save. Job done and no contracts to worry about.

This is exactly the scenario that Windows Azure is going to help with; scalability.

In addition to this, Microsoft are currently spending lots of money building their own Content Delivery Network (CDN), which are data centres around the world to host the same data - if you’re in the States and you visit the Widget site, then you’ll get content delivered to you from the data centre there; if you’re in Europe, the website will be delivered you as a visitor from the European data centre, meaning that you don’t have to wait for the data to cross the Atlantic Ocean, so it should be a quicker response for visitors coming to your site.

Once a website is deployed to Azure, the person visiting the site won’t know the difference, as it just looks like a website at the end of the day.  But as long as that website appears during the busiest time of year for the Widget site and the customer is able to spend their money, then the job is done.

As a developer myself, this stuff should be fantastic. I’ve been playing around with small applications myself with a test-account on Azure and it’s really easy to use, once you get to grips on what’s going on.  Also, as all of Microsoft developer toys, such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), ASP .Net and ASP .Net MVC and so on, are all being baked into the big cake, everything should just ‘work’ and work efficiently too.

Hopefully, that should explain a little as to what Azure is, and why it’s important.  I’ll post more articles on here later.