Our Freeview box is becoming more and more temperamental and I have been looking into alternatives such as PlayTV for my PS3. The ability to watch, record and pause Freeview is quite compelling. The extra features they have just released in a software update follows on from the Sony ethos of continually improving and offering value added features free of charge.

“Included in the latest PlayTV software update is an upscaler, which enhances the Standard Definition TV signal for a crisper and more vibrant picture. The Switch Back feature allows you to flick easily between the last two channels you watched and there are now extra fast forward and rewind speeds, letting you fly through the commercials in your recorded programmes with ease.”

This kind of got me thinking too about the other tv catchup services that are available in the UK too like the iPlayer. The excellent BBC iPlayer which lets you watch and listen to radio and TV programs from the last week, works pretty well with the built in PS3 browser. There is also another version suited to big TV’s too

The Bigscreen iPlayer is much more suited to the resolution and size of 40, 50 or 60″ TV’s now found in peoples living rooms. With the addition of programs in HD, the PS3 is becoming more and more valuable as time goes on. Its certainly no longer just a console and Blu-Ray player.

Update: I have posted a photo on my business website.

I created a quick Firefox plugin to enable you to search the Soccer Manager database when scouting players. You can get it here.

Regular daily, weekly and monthly backups should be implemented in any business or situation where you can’t afford to loose items stored on your PC and servers. In the past this could be quite a costly process with tape drives and complex backup software.

However, with the drop in price of hard drives believed to fall by at least a 1/3 every year, the cost of an external hard drive to backup your whole system should now seriously be considered in any business no matter how small. Used in conjunction with excellent open source or freeware backup software available, comprehensive backups can be configured quickly, easily and automatically to your external hard disk.

I am gonna show you how to go one stage further though and backup your vital documents off site with Amazon S3. From Wikipedia:

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services.

S3 launched back in 2006 and offers very competitive rates for file storage. At time of writing S3 cost $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used and $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in. Full pricing can be found here. In short their pricing is extremely competitive.

We are gonna use a bit of beta software called S3Drive which is still in development and requires the .Net framwork.

Backup to S3

All the usual caveats apply, make sure you have everything backed up before proceeding. I can not be held responsible for anything that goes wrong with these instructions.

1. You must have an Amazon S3 account, you can sign up here
2. Download S3Drive from here
3. Run the S3Drive installation program (S3Drive0.6.msi), if you do not have .Net installed it should prompt you to install it but alternatively it is available from here
4. Once installed you will need to configure your S3Drive. Run the ‘Configure S3Drive’ option from the start menu.
5. Click on the first option, ‘Enter or Change your Amazon S3 access information’. You will need to enter your ‘Access Key ID’ and your ‘Secret Access Key’, both found in the Access Identifiers section when you log into your S3 account in your browser.
6. Click on second option, ‘Define your Hard Disk….’. Enter a name for the bucket in the box, create the disk and then assign it a drive letter.
7. Click Finish. The service will then be started

This should create a network share for your amazon bucket and assign the drive letter you set for it. However on first installation I had to manually map the network drive.

If you navigate to My Computer / Computer now you should see this drive which works in the same way as any other hard disk attached to your computer except it is actually located on Amazon’s servers. Try copying a file to it to ensure all is working.

Next it is simple a case of configuring your software to backup to this ‘drive’. I am using Syncback to do this and my other backups. An excellent introduction and tutorial on configuring Syncback Freeware is available at Lifehacker.

There are a couple of  thing to bear in mind, firstly, you are backing up across the web. Unless you have an exceptional connection, backing up your mp3 collection is gonna take days and days. For large amounts of data, I would recommend splitting up and backing up in much smaller sizes. Secondly, this is not the complete solution, this should be run in conjunction with another backup solution too. In my case I back up on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to an external drive in addition to my really vital commercial work stored on S3.

There are paid alternatives to this such as JungleDisk which is available on Mac, Linux and PC. Further, my Mac buddies tell me the excellent ftp client, Transmit,  now offers S3 integration.

Good luck and if you have any questions I will do my best to help.

After getting the design sketched out and the feature set documented, last week I spent 3 days continuously designing, coding and tweaking. Its a bit of a contrast with the last single column, light on dark design and I still need to add a couple of bits to it but I am pretty happy with the outcome.

For those of you reading via RSS, get over here for a look and let me know what you think.  More information about the coding and development can be found on my web design site Eminent Style.

One area I would like to see improve would be the documentation. As a new user, or someone who hasn’t used it since the early releases, I did feel on the first few uses as though I wasn’t doing things the most efficient way, rather blindly using it. However its worth perservering, the lack of documentation is a very small inconvenience, I have just imported my 20 odd gb’s of music in and it feels right. I would recommend a download – enjoy!

Checkout my views on the earlier, less stable versions here and here.

However just recently the automatice update has been failing with the following message.

Invalid Update Control CTF File

After doing some research and exploring on my machines it appears as though the CTF files have become corrupt in some way and need to be deleted.

How to Fix

Disclaimer: Remember to backup everything before making any changes.

As far as I am aware this only applies to Windows Vista and XP. Navigate to the following locations and delete only the CTF files leaving the BIN files on your PC’s (for me there were two ctf files I needed to delete).

XP: Navigate to “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Avg8\update\download”

Vista:  Navgiate to “C:\ProgramData\avg8\update\download”

Good luck!

From the press release Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer states:

“…. we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.”

Microsoft has posted Steve Ballmer’s letter in full to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang online here and Yahoo responded publicly here, stating:

“From the beginning of this process, our independent board and our management have been steadfast in our belief that Microsoft’s offer undervalued the company and we are pleased that so many of our shareholders joined us in expressing that view. Yahoo! is profitable, growing, and executing well on its strategic plan to capture the large opportunities in the relatively young online advertising market. Our solid results for the first quarter of 2008 and increased full year 2008 operating cash flow outlook reflect the progress the company is making.”

I can’t help feeling that this could be a short sighted mistake on Yahoo’s part. Yahoo’s share price will fall now that Microsoft has pulled out and Yahoo will struggle independently against the behemoth that is Google. I think Yahoo realises this and their solidarity has already been diluted with their agreed strategic partnership with Google and Microsoft cites this as one of the reasons (along with the share price) of the withdrawal of the offer.

What will be really interesting is where Microsoft goes from here, their assault on the web in which they trail Google to such an extent, has been dealt a major blow by this. Is there another company that would benefit them to the same extent that the Yahoo acquisition would have? What do you think and is this the end of the matter?