London….

Notes on London/For Londoners: It's been a few years since I've spent this amount of time in London. I think I'd forgotten what it was like so to help us all here's my observations:


1) All Londoners rush around too much. Even when your obviously just goin home you scurry along the pavements and spend alot of effort in not colliding with oncoming scurriers… Slowdown abit… There's alot of you, You'll collide alot less if you slowdown.


2) There is too many of you!!! Why do you all wanna live is such a small area squashed together like pilchards. Every little shed and lean-to is occupied here in Kensington. Move outwards abit.. See a field now and again. Give yourselves abit of elbow room…


3)Your driving is nearly as crazy as Russians!!! I see Transits coming from different directions rushing to a close to squeeze through a gap..only to realise that none of you are getting through and you begin to blow your horns at one another. If you all slowed down and moved out of the centre abit (see above) this would happen less.


4) Police sirens.. Every few mins a police car screams past, sirens blaring. It's really off putting.. Cops turn down the volume abit :-p In Biddulph Moor we hear a siren about once a week..and it's from a couple of miles away..sigh..


5) Your all so fashionable!!! If I was vain I'd be feeling bad about myself mooching up and down in my northern scruffs!!! Dress down abit.. then when you DO dress up folks will notice abit more.


6) I'm in Notting Hill and I have NOT Bumped into Hugh Grant or his like once…. Very disappointed..

Nevermind London.. I leave you tomorrow back to the open green fields…MY GREEN FIELD!!!! So GETOFF MY LAND!!!! k..bye x

Observations on Chromebook

As mentioned in an earlier post we've recently taken delivery of a Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. I'd decided on this platform as the unit was mainly for use by my daughter. I wanted something abit more versatile than an iPad, it unfortunately also needed to play flash for a site her school uses. I didn't want to inflict windows on her cause she's a good girl :-).. I ideally I was looking for a secondhand Macbook Air or late model Macbook, but they started at roughly twice the price of a Chromebook series 5 (not 550).
  So we've had it for about 4 days now and I've made time to use it extensively. Here's my thoughts.....

I'd tried Chrome OS or rather Chromium in a Parallels VM sometime ago and it appeared to be an OS comprised solely of the Chrome Browser. I along with many others was remarkably unimpressed and moved on... When I unpacked the Chromebook I found an OS that had obviously moved on somewhat from the VM experience but was still pretty much the same. I figured their would be some updates so I switched update mode to grab any available beta builds and a shortime later a popup asked me to reboot to apply the updates. I did so and BOOM... A very different experience. A proper app launcher, easier access to local and Google Drive storage. better multi user experience of which more later.

After applying all updates I'm currently running 22.0.1229.33 beta of Chrome OS. It's a much fuller OS than the one you may have seen before. Apps can now run in a windowed area so the experience is much more like Windows or even OSX. Many more apps have an offline mode such as Google Apps and Gmail so you can actually be somewhat productive with no Internet. It is not yet a valid OS for all users. No one wanting to work in any serious way with Audio or Video would choose Chrome OS, However it does handle cloud storage better than any other OS I've worked with and I'm enjoying using it for social networks and Blogging which I feel is what Google have in mind anyway.

The Chromebook we have is the earlier Series 5 as opposed to the current Series 5 550 (strange model naming imo..) It has a Dualcore Atom CPU as compared to a Dualcore Celeron in the 550 and I understand why Samsung have change to the more powerful Processor line. With a normal (7 - 8) of tabs open in Chrome things begin to bog down. Scrolling becomes 'lumpy' and your soon reaching to close a few un needed tabs. I'm very keen to try a 550 as I've seen it mentioned in reviews that this handles the OS in a much more fluid fashion. This one handles You-tube and everything my daughter requires just fine though.

One of the things I've had to experiment with has been how to get my Daughters films available to her as theirs obviously no itunes support unfortunately and Google doesn't appear to have an equivalent of Apple's itunes TV program and Film support as far as hosting the media locally. Lots of streaming options too. I found a couple of Apps that suggested they could play local media files but none appeared to work with any reliability and would be in now way workable for my Daughter. So what do we have? We have great Google Drive support is what. Drive incorporates a sharing facility where you can share selected media with another Drive user. As all my Daughters films are ripped from DVD's we have purchased, I uploaded a test film to my Drive account which I have expanded to 80Gb. I then shared the film to my Daughters Google account and when logged into the Chromebook and opened her Drive I saw the film in the shared section. This then streamed perfectly from the Drive browser window by just opening another Chrome tab. It will do just fine for now. Hopefully Google will either create a more elegant cloud video solution, or add something to Drive to facilitate this, or even better add proper support for local media playback such as twonky or similar.

To be continued....

Observations on the Apple TV

I've long been an Apple TV user. Since the first version and I'm currently using a v2. I really wasn't sure about the newer style one at first, but as it was cheap I invested.
When Airplay appeared I saw the plan Apple had for the units but curiously it's potential remains incomplete.
Apple needs to open up the plugin/app market for ATV so that it's easier for other relevant providers to use the platform with protracted negotiations with Apple and all the (no doubt) pain that brings..
regarding Airplay… we use the ATV as another Airplay destination in our house along with a number of Airport express units.. Often for audio only sources.. WHY do Airplay not work with ATV unless you have your TV on or switched to the ATV's hdmi output at the time?? I know it provides a nice screensaver for your music but come on…. If your Airplay source is just audio let it stream it headless..
And while we're at it I'm pretty sure I read that ATV has a BT chip in already alongside the wifi… For pete's sake plz let us use it for a keyboard!!! Would make Youtube and many more apps so much more intuitive to use.
I think a little more focus needs to return to Apple…

End of line..

Chromebook

I've always been fascinated/bemused by Googles ChromeOS, but couldn't justify getting one as it's essentially just the Chrome Browser as an OS. However I've recently found a reason to invest…. My Daughter. She's 5 and very tech interested.. (I'll apologise to her later) She now uses both my wife's and my iPad's but a lot of the sites she needs to use are in flash :-( Yes I could have gotten her a windows netbook and just run Chrome on it, but I love her and didn't want to inflict that upon her. Ideally a Macbook Air would be ideal.. But even s/h they start at £500 - 600… So as I've already created a Google environment for her ChromeOS became a valid solution.
Digging around on Ebay I found an ex-demo for just over £200.. Grabbed it and it should arrive tomorrow.
Humbly told the wife and she brought up an interesting problem.. "Will it play our iTunes library?" err nope… But then I had an idea….

I wanna test it first before publishing but lets just say it rhymes with frugal rive…

To be continued...

Apple & Samsung/Google

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet... Why is Apple so happy to litigate other companies in the way that they have just done with Samsung..? It goes back to the windows 95 case in the 90's where Apple attempted to litigate against Microsoft over UI design of windows compared to MacOS. In that case Apple failed, and now in this mobile age they are determined not to let the same thing happen again.
I use an analogy of Israel.. Leaving politics out of it.. Israel was attacked and because of this spent alot of effort on a strong defence.. and then a very tough policy of dealing with enemies..or suspected enemies. Brought about by past experience is what I'm getting at, and even though the stakes are alot different (and less) with Apple, the principal is the same... And recently Apple has bought an Israeli Solid State storage company..hmm
Bye for now...


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Here we go again...

One of my (infrequent ) blogs from a couple of years ago was an overview of me struggling to get through a holiday in rural Russia in the midst of 40 Degree temperatures, masses of insects and a cold water shower by means of tech... Well you guessed it. I'm going back to the same place nextweek.. though hopefully it'll be much cooler and I'll be taking a much more streamlined tech setup.
As long as the planes work my next entry will be from there.... My god what am I doing!!??


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