I am a little disappointed by the cost of the new device, but Apple devices are a ‘premium product’ we all know this, so it can’t be much of a shock.

 I’ve put together a spreadsheet highlighting the total cost of ownership for the new devices, and for comparison, put the comparison up from this time last year when the 3G was announced.

I remember back in the day when I was on a 56k dialup account with Demon Internet they were somewhat of a necessity when downloading 3mb mp3 files!

Nowadays, everything has grown in size, we’re still waiting the same amount of time for things to download, but they’re bigger, and we have faster connecitons – it’s all relative!

Anyway, to my point.

I was attempting to download a MMORPG game client this evening and struggling to get more than 20k/sec with an ETA of 24 hours(!) on my ADSL line (which is syncing at 14mb)…. so, at the advice of a fellow downloader, i tried freedownloadmanager

This enabled me to download the 1.3GB client in around 20 minutes at around 1127k/sec…. yes thats 1.1Mb/sec

I know this technology isn’t new, and has been widely available for a long time, but for those of you who have written off download managers over the years, now may be the time to give them a second look.

You simply upload your chosen mp3 file, drag a box around the slice you want to use and click create ringtone!

You are then presented with download options, including M4R format for importing directly into iTunes!

Genius!

http://audiko.net/

This is only the case when actually navigating to www.google.com or .co.uk NOT when you search from the embedded google search bar in iPhone Safari. I’m not sure of the cause of this yet – i would guess though that the embedded search hits a specific google URL which is not configured to format the results properly.

Check below for screenshots comparing the old and new search results.

They say hindsight is 20-20, but back when i had a Windows Mobile phone, I sent a mail into the Skype support dept asking for the SMS gateway number so i could send cheaper texts. Maybe they found my email after all this time!

Check out the Beta here http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/download/skype/windowsmobilebeta/

This is great news for developers, amazing news for RiP Dev… not so good news for the flourishing try-before-you-buy cracked app scene.

[Source] http://ripdev.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/ripdev/managed-mt/mt-tb.cgi/23

If only this wasn’t April 1st… we might beleive this!!

I remembered checking out the iPhone version of this popular PalmOS app when it appeared on Cydia some time ago, and after trying some of the more cumbersome ‘tethering’ applications like Netshare and 3Proxy, I was very pleasently suprised with the simplicity of PdaNet.

So while sat here in the broadbandless apartment, I downloaded PdaNet to my iPhone again from Cydia. I looked in the options and there was a new feature called USB mode, which had me intrigued immediately.

I went to the page to download the Desktop Client (XP/Vista version and Vista 64bit versions available) and gave it a shot.

Since I don’t have a wireless connection on my desktop PC this was the ideal machine to test on.

PdaNet desktop requires a USB connection to your iPhone, and requires iTunes to be installed.

Once installed and with your iPhone connected, you simply start PdaNet on your iPhone, then right click the PdaNet Desktop icon in the system tray of your PC and choose connect….. and literally 2 or 3 seconds later, you’re connected!

I strongly recommend you check this out, even for use on your laptops – as I’ve found that XP and Vista can sometimes be problematic for creating Ad-Hoc networks. For information…I tried it in Windows 7 and it was a lot easier.

http://www.junefabrics.com/desktop

I’ve not had a new PC for a while, my interest in PC hardware has faded as my career moved forward and things seem to have changed quite a lot! My last PC was a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 with an AGP slot.

My new PC is an HP ML110 Dual Core Xeon with PCIe slots. I’ve never dealt with these before, so they were a little scary to start with.

I dual boot this PC (Vista Ultimate and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise) and since i love rely on Media Center to record all my television, the on board video provided by the ML100 was simply not going to be enough.

I contacted friends who are still very current with their hardware in the hope of finding a nice Nvidia or ATI card to sit in my nice new PCIe 8x slot… little did i know that decent 8x graphics cards are very hard to come by. So i started to do a little digging.

It turns out that the way PCIe is built, the first part of the card (closest to the end you screw in) is for power alone. The second half of the card (the part that varies in length depending on 1x 8x or 16x) is for data bandwidth. I found a forum thread where someone explained this and that in theory you should be able to plug a 16x card into an 8x slot and run the card at 50% bandwidth.

So i went out and bought an Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT in the hope that the forum guy was right!

When i got home and tried to install the card… i was presented with this….

A PCIe 8x slot with a closed end.

So i took out the soldering iron, unscrewed the heatsink, covered the motherboard and began to melt away the plastic at the end of the slot. Eventually, it looked like this…

This enabled me to fit the 16x card in perfectly.

 As you can see by the images below, its working just fine!!

If you choose to do this with your own motherboard / PCIe slot, please take the UTMOST care to not damage anything. I will not be held responsible for any damage you may do to your hardware.

In order to make this install work, you need to enable IPV6 – you can leave it set to assign automatically. Once this is done, run IPCONFIG and make sure an address is assigned.

Now reboot the server and run the Exchange install again.

Secondly, i have volunteered to be one of the first customers to allow their hosting account to be moved to a new shiny datacenter which may be causing some issues accessing the site. In return though i get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth! Nice.

Stay tuned folks!