Stand out tracks from the night for me:

Ricky Warwick – Wild & Wonderful (orig – The Almighty)
Ricky Warwick – Jesus Loves You (orig – The Almighty)
Ricky Warwick – The Arms of Belfast Town
Therapy? – Stories
Therapy? – Diane
Therapy? – Opal Mantra

The lighting at The Wedgewood Rooms was pretty harsh again, lots of red and green everywhere.  Still, I got a few good pictures which you can see at http://www.mygigpics.com.

//ian

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It’s not all doom and gloom, there are of course many titles available right now.  At least I was able to get a sample chapter of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”

I got the notification that my Amazon Kindle order shipped today, with delivery expected in a couple of days.
In my excitement, I hopped over to the Kindle book store (accessed via Amazon.com as opposed to the .co.uk) to queue up some books and previews ready for its arrival.
It’s accurate to say that I’m left a little deflated and disappointed by the titles that are unavailable for UK buyers right now.  This could make for an interesting couple of days worth of tech news.

I  was initially surprised to find that there isn’t an obvious way to see any of the popular Best Sellers listings, be it NY Times or perhaps anything else localised for the UK.  All I could do was list _all_ of the Kindle books and sort by ‘Best Selling’.
Top of the list was Glenn Beck with “Arguing with Idiots”.  Maybe I should know more about him but other than him being on FOX and maybe talk radio, I don’t.  I decided to get queue up the “sample” of his book anyway.
BTW the list price of this book for Kindle is $13.79 (or £8.44) including VAT & international wireless delivery via Whispernet.  Match that against the Digital List Price and Print List Price of $29.99, as well as Amazons price for the Hardcover ($16.47) that’s a pretty decent saving.
Scrolling down the list, there wasn’t really anything on their Best Selling list that took my fancy.

I remembered that Dan Brown had a book out recently and thought I’d grab the sample of that too.  Unfortunately, it seems that none of his books are available on Kindle.  Let’s clarify that, none of his books are available on Kindle for UK customers.

The explanation from Amazon is “Due to copyright restrictions, certain Kindle Titles are not available everywhere.”
I bet this is going to become a talking point as Kindles are shipped around the world.

I decided to go through the New York Times best seller list (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/bestseller) for Hardcover Fiction:

1. THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown
2. A TOUCH OF DEAD, by Charlaine Harris
3. THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett
4. THE PROFESSIONAL, by Robert B. Parker
5. THE LAST SONG, by Nicholas Sparks

Oh dear, only one of the top 5 is currently available to UK buyers, The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

Perhaps the local market would be better so I went through the UK Sunday Times best sellers list for paper backs (http://tinyurl.com/d9av7f):

1. Cross Country, by James Patterson
2. The Gift, by Cecelia Ahern
3. The Private Patient, by PD James
4. Once In a Lifetime, by Cathy Kelly
5. Arctic Drift, by Clive and Dirk Cussler

Again, only one of the top 5 were available to UK buyers – The Gift by Cecelia Ahern, not my cup of tea at all.

There are at least 3 books on those two lists which I would be tempted with if I was bored at an airport, alas I’m unable to get them to my Kindle right now.
Additionally, I looked for books by Max Brooks (World War Z, Zombie Survival Guide) and found that they aren’t available to me either.  At this point, I’m starting to get serious buyers remorse so I’ve decided to stop looking for the moment.

Of course, let’s not forget that Internation Kindles have only started shipping today.  There is plenty of time in the next 48hrs for Amazon to iron out the copyright issues that they use to explain the titles that aren’t available.
Perhaps they should at least have a ‘notify me/download sample when this title is available’ mechanism, I hope they are working this through now.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are of course many titles available right now.  At least I was able to get a sample chapter of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”

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Earlier, I saw this Duff McKagan post and decided that copying it might be a good way to keep me posting regularly.

According to my last.fm weekly chart, my top 5 artists this week are:

1. The Wildhearts (103 tracks)

I’m still completely in love with The Wildhearts latest release, “Chutzpah!”.  An absolutely rip roaring album which is as good, nay great, live as it is in the ears.

It has some fantastic sing-a-longs and the usual witty lyrics that Ginger is so well known for.  I particularly like that a couple of tracks have other band members as vocalists.

2. The Black Crowes (12 tracks)

The Black Crowes have their latest effort out, “Before The Frost” and download only “Until The Freeze” which you get free when buying the former.

http://www.rollingstone.com…

I was pretty disappointed with their last album, Warpaint.  It was a bit too country for me.  Before The Frost, however, returns to the bluesy side of the band, although without as much of the good time rock’n'roll swagger of By Your Side or Shake Your Money Maker.

3. Alice in Chains (11 Tracks)

Alice in Chains return with Black Gives Way To Blue.  I’ve only listened through it once but definitely enjoyed it, the ‘new’ singer really fits in well and it totally sounds like an AiC album should.

4. Metallica (8 Tracks)

The 8 Metallica tracks must have come on as part of my random playlists, there’s no particular reason for them.

5. All Time Low (7 Tracks)

I picked up one of their albums, Nothing Personal, after they had featured in Kerrang for 3 or 4 weeks in a row.  Very listenable and in a similar vein to Fall Out Boy.

This week I’m looking forward to seeing Black Stone Cherry and Duff McKagan’s Loaded at the Portsmouth Pyramids followed next week by Alexisonfire/Four Year Strong/Ghost of a Thousand and Therapy?/Ricky Warwick.  I’ve gotten hold of a photopass for the T? gig too which should be great.

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I travel a lot for work and quite often my flights are longer than just a couple of hours.
This means that my MBP battery life isn’t long enough to sustain the entire flight and besides, I don’t often get to fly First Class so space is quite limiting.
I therefore usually carry a book or two in my carry on luggage.  Ranging from business style ones (Crucial Conversations, anyone?) to fiction, they can add substantial weight to my bag.  Not forgetting the expense of course.  If i’m bored at the airport, I’ll check out the bookstore there.  For example, I bought a whopping book from Dublin airport last week which wouldn’t even fit in my bag.

I’ve coveted the Amazon Kindle for a long time now, pretty much since it was released and especially since they launched the Kindle DX earlier this year.  I know I’d need a US mailing address to open a US account and get it delivered but that’s fine.  The only thing that has stopped me getting one yet is that I am concerned at not being able to buy books for it.  I just don’t know if you can purchase books “off Kindle” – i.e buy them on my MBP and transfer them to the Kindle via USB.
The last couple of times I’ve been to the US, I’ve had the Kindle 2 in my ’shopping basket’ about to hit the “order” button but backed out at the last minute.

Given that, you can imagine my excitement last week when I heard via @derrenbrown that the Kindle was finally being launched outside of the US.  I went straight off to Amazon and pre-ordered, despite the $40 import tax on top of the quoted $279 ordering price.
Now a week has passed since I ordered and now I’m really starting to think this through.  A lot of noise has been made over the last few days about the cost of books to the UK market being higher than the US one.  It’s not that which bothers me so much, I’m more concerned about whether it fits MY purpose, not the markets.  I’ve started to wonder if I’ve just fallen for the media hype.  Other than the Kindle, my other option is the Sony Reader which is available in the UK right now.  It’s also the chosen format for Waterstones.

I need/want to be able to do the following:

1. Carry books with me without over burdening my back/bag.
2. Be able to buy new books instantly over the web and move to reader easily.
3. Read PDFs and Word docs.
4. Occasional annotating and ability to find the notes quickly/easily.

I don’t need web browsing – I have my iPhone when in the UK and my work BlackBerry for when I’m roaming.

Kindle International scores the first 2 but apparently doesn’t fair so well at number 3.
The Sony Reader Touch Edition hits 1,3  and 4 but doesn’t have integrated wireless for instant download.

People have suggested getting the US version of the Kindle DX which has much better PDF support apparently.  However, I think I then lose the wireless aspect.
Now, there is supposedly a new Sony Reader out in December, the Daily Edition.  A larger screen and wireless (3G I think) access to the Sony store are it’s main features.  That could well hit all three of my requirements, if it’s released in the UK.
However, if we are talking about waiting for a new release, the Kindle DX is being touted for a 2010 Q1 release internationally so perhaps I should wait on that one?

Price wise, the Kindle International racks up at ~£218.35 including the import tax and shipping from the US versus £250 for the Sony Reader PRS-600 Touch Edition.  (It doesn’t surprise me that the Sony is more expensive, it’s quite the norm for anything on their brand.)  There is, however, a smaller Sony Pocket Edition at £160 which has fewer features and is basically a bare bones eBook reader.

What am I to do short term?

• Leave my Kindle order and hope that it’s either good enough for my needs or that the market for used Kindles is good in a month or so.
• Go with the cheaper pocket Sony reader and wait for the International DX release or the newer Sony Daily?
• Forget about all of them for the moment and see if this is just a fleeting ‘want’ and not a need?

Let’s see…

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Yes, I know this is an oft talked about topic but I don’t mean it in a “Which is better?”, fanboy way.
I own both (as well as a very, very under used Wii) but historically, i’ve invested far more into the X360 than the PS3 both in terms of buying games and actual game time.
I’m trying to decide if I should continue with the almost 100% support of the X360 platform or whether the time has come for me to start moving over to PS3…

Most of my friends also own X360’s so back when I had lots of free time for gaming, I spent time playing online over the fantastic Xbox Live network. (XBL, gamerpoints and marketplace really are the differentiator between the two platforms but I’ll save that commentary for another post..)

There is also the small matter of the ongoing gamerpoint competition.  It seemed ridiculous back when we all started out with X360s a couple of years back but we ended up getting hooked into trying to beat out each others scores.

This meant that when a game is multi-platform (as most are these days), I get the X360 version because of the achievement points.  Sad but true! Contrast the 30 odd games I have for 360 (my total games played count is around 70) with the fact that I have only four games for the PS3 (2 of them downloaded from PSN): Metal Gear Solid, Little Big Planet, Zombie Apocalypse (PSN) and Wipeout (PSN).

However, the last 18 months or so have seen me get an even MORE time intensive job as well as marriage, meaning my game time has slipped dramatically.  I don’t think I’ve played online with anyone I know for nearly a year.  We used to regularly hit Rock Band or Guitar Hero online, FIFA and PES (before it sucked) along with the co-op story mode features of GoW and Halo 3.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been contemplating moving to the PS3 as my sole gaming entertainment provider but I’m not sure I’m ready to take the plunge.  With todays release of FIFA 2010, I’m tempted take the chance and go with PS3.  However that means limiting my online play to strangers and my leaving my 360 owning friends to pull further away on the gamerpoint front..

Do give it a go on the PS3 and just see how often I find my self thinking “I should have stuck with X360″ or should I stick to what I know and keep the PS3 for exclusives only?

Decisions, decisions..

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Seeing as I work in technology, that obviously means I’m the first port of call for friends/relatives with any kind of computer issue.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my wifes friends asked if I could take a look at her lappy – a Dell D610.

She hadn’t used it for a few years as she got a newer lappy, now couldn’t remember her password which left her husband SOoL when he wanted to take it with him whilst he’s away with work.  To make things a little less straight forward, there were a bunch of photos on it of their kids when they were younger, so I couldn’t simply reinstall the OS and go.

Getting the pics off was pretty easy – Re-Installing the OS was not.

I managed to get the photos off with my trusty 3.5″IDE->USB adaptor.  Took the disk out, hooked it up to my MBP and copied them off.  Well, it wasn’t quite that simple as I didn’t realise OS X wouldn’t search an NTFS drive (probably something to do with spotlight writing the index but being unable to write to NTFS natively).  After a bit of driver wrangling, I managed to get the device to show up in Windows 7 under VMWare Fusion and quickly found the pics.

Right, just the OS to go.

I burned an iso of XP with SP3 slipstreamed in and went about trying to get the lappy to boot from CD.

Once I realised that the boot menu was having no effect, I checked out the BIOS.  Yup, completely locked out with an admin password.  This meant I couldn’t change the boot priority or anything at all.

Bugger.

A bunch of Googling turned me on to a method of wiping the BIOS admin password completely by shorting out the EEPROM.

It took me a while to work it out and I absolutely refused to pay the jackass with the youtube video promising to show you how to do it for a fee.

So, in the interests of freedom of information, here is how to clear/reset/remove the BIOS password on a Dell D610.

Notes and disclaimer:

This worked for me.  If it doesn’t work for you, i’m not responsible for that.
You will be cutting metal from the casing.  You need to be careful not to leave any residue on the motherboard incase it shorts anything out.
As part of the process, your machines service tag details will also be cleared.

1. Get your BIOS locked Dell D610.

2. Get a paperclip or safety pin.

3. Get a phillips or crosshead screwdriver and some metal cutters (heavy duty wire cutters should do it).

4. Remove the power supply, battery, CD drive and HDD.

5. Unscrew pretty much all of the screws on the bottom of the D610.

6. Remove the bottom case.

7. With the rear of the laptop closest to you, you should see a white label covering the modem on your left.  There should be some black plastic covering which stops the CMOS from touching the motherboard.

8. Just above that, there are some holes in the metal casing. You need to access a chip underneath that area.

9. CAREFULLY remove the metal.

10. Take your paper clip and prepare to short out the two pins 2nd from the left.

11. Connect the power supply and power on whilst shorting out those pins for about 5 secs.

12. If you are doing it right you’ll hear the fan kick in.

13. This message will then show on the screen.

14. You can either press FN+x or let it reboot on it’s own..

15. Now you will be able to go to the BIOS (Press F2) and make whatever changes you need.

16. Reassemble the case

It’s actually a pretty simple process once you know what chip is where, although you must be extremely careful when cutting the casing.

I hope that helps someone and saves them a few bucks.

//ian

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I was fortunate enough to win a competition via twitter answering a question posed by Ginger (@gingernyc).  As I already had tickets for the gig, I asked for a photopass in lieu of the actual prize of two tickets to the gig.
Of course, the gig was amazing and I managed to get some pretty good pics of a great band, with great songs, having a great time.

You can check them out at http://www.mygigpics.com

//ian

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If I just quickly want to add a podcast i’ve just downloaded, or add a new playlist or single song, it would take at least 10 mins.
5 mins of Backing Up
5 mins of Copying Applications from iPhone
x mins of Actual Sync

The copying applications passed me by for a while, I misread it as copying TO iPhone.
It turns out there is somekind of problem whereby the applications i’ve bought OTA on the iPhone don’t always get sync’d back to iTunes.  So iTunes, instead of just downloading the app from the appstore itself, tries to copy from the iPhone.
Note:  I’ve not looked online for any confirmation of an official problem, this is just my experience.  YMMV.  I’ve also not reset/restored my iPhone at all which is what generally all ’solutions’ begin with..

Anyway.  I decided today to download the applications that don’t show up in iTunes and make sure that what was in there was totally in sync with my iPhone.

Once this was done, the backing up portion of the sync took less than 15 seconds, and complete sync action took less than 2 mins.

Hurrah!

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“iTunes cannot sync information with the iPhone “Macca’s iPhone” because syncing has been disabled on this computer. Do you want to enable syncing? (y/n)”

Weird, I thought.  I haven’t disabled anything.  I wondered if this was a problem with Office 2008 as last time I sync’d successfully all of my Exchange based calendar items were triplicated..  but that’s another story.

Anyway.  Clicking on Yes (to enable syncing) brought up another error:

“Syncing cannot be enabled on this computer”

So, lo and behold i’ve had out of date calendars and contacts for weeks.  Music, photos and video sync’ing was absolutely fine though.

When it happened again this morning, I tried to open iSync this morning and yet another error:

SyncServices: Can’t connect to the sync server:
NSInvalidRecievePortException: connection went invalid while waiting for a reply ((null))

Looks like something funny going on with the local sync configuration.

Fortunately, the fix was easy.  I renamed the Local sync folder to Local_bak.  iSync then created a new one automatically.  I can now sync without any problems at all.

1. cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/SyncServices/
2. mv Local Local_bak
3. Start iSync.

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