Last friday to celebrate me signing on to a new job I bought a NAS (Netgear ReadyNAS DUO V2). A NAS is just a black box with harddrives that share them over your network so you can access them fro wherever in your network. It’s really geeky to have one but I thought I needed one. I used to have everything on a server but decided that wasn’t working anymore now that I’ve upgraded to a Windows 2008 server complete with an active directory and stuff, all of a sudden we noticed some lag when playing stuff off it. So off I went and bought this toy.
Function-wise it lives up to expectations. It does what I want it to do and it does it well and smoothly. But Netgear really should have take a page from Apples book and asked the question “how would the end consumer want the interface to work”. Because their interface is a giant mess with gigantic problems. For example, if I attach a USB drive to it there’s no way to tell the NAS to copy a file from the USB to the NAS – you have to have a computer to copy it through. So Say you have a 10 gig file on your USB drive and want to copy it. Instead of copying it straight away on the NAS, you copy it through the PC meaning alot of network being used for nothing! You have to enable the SSH through their site saying “you’ll lose warranty if you install this” and copy it through Linux commands! What’s upp with that!? Ok bad example since the bottleneck is still the USB port, but if you want to copy a file from one drive to another, you still have to copy it through your PC and all of a sudden the network is the bottleneck. And it shouldn’t need to be!
And you can’t create a directory on a drive that isn’t defaulted to the root and automatically shared to “everyone” with full rights. And you can’t manage the “admin” user access in any way either…
So if you can learn to live with a crappy “it made sense to us” interface, than yeah, go buy it.
A little followup on yesterday’s post – I updated my Samsung Galaxy SII with the officially released Android 4 and I kept an eye on the connection indicator to see if they had gone the same route as Apple. Nope, still only HSPA+ 🙂
Btw, gotta love flashmobs (although this seemed a bit TOO well organized)
Time for another “I hate…” post.
I hate it when marketing departments screws with technology terms and twists them. The latest example is .. can you guess… that’s right, Apple! Read this if you’re interested in the technical aspect of it – or let me summarize. We all know what 3G is on cellphones today. It’s pretty fast. So the next thing is ofcourse 4G which is really really fast. But there have been a technical debate about what defines each. Most people agrees that the technology called “LTE” is what really is 4G. Actually as far as I knew there wasn’t anyone saying anything else. Well in the latest iOS update Apple and AT&T decided to redefine it and include HSPA+ as 4G. HSPA+ has been available for years through the 3G network. And yes, in perfect conditions HSPA+ can come up to the same transfer speed as LTE. But that don’t make it 4G because it still uses the overcrowded 3G range. LTE is a new technology that uses new infrastructure which is what I, and every other sane tech nerd, call a new technology – when you need to change the infrastructure!
I mean, did Intel ever overlock a Pentium 3 CPU to ~2 Ghz and call it Pentium 4? Ofcourse they didn’t since Pentium 4 is a completely different architecture!
But I guess the marketing departments at Apple and AT&T decided that doesn’t matter and just went for calling HSPA+ 4G and BAM! overnight Apple has the most 4G capable devices in the world (but not a single one publicly available that actually uses the 4G network). Good work And it also makes it easier for them to sell the new iPad in europe as a “4G” device even though it can’t handle European LTE!
Now the big question is how will they sell the iPhone 5.. I mean they can’t brag about “it has 4G!” since the iPhone 4S already, by their definitions, has 4G!
Let these technical things be for technical people and let marketing do ads. I mean if technical geeks where to make ads it’d probably be something like this –
I usually don’t miss much Star Trek related. Or movie related. So when a friend of mine said “have you preordered the Blueray of The Next Generation?” and I’m all ????. I had no idea this was even happening so gimme a minute to handle it. It was just too good to be true!
Finally suspended my Facebook account. I’ll miss George Takei’s funny posts, my wife and sisters statusupdates about all things irrelevant but funny to know.
But I won’t miss the “I have to check my Facebook!” feeling when I go to bed or the cyberdrama that sometimes fuck things up in real life. And I won’t miss an evil coporation forcing their will upon me, even if it was for free. So for now it’s suspended. Maybe in the future I’ll feel a need to have it but for now, not so much.
Everyone who wants to know what’s happening with me and the family just have got to learn to check this instead. Sorry!
For alot of reasons I’ve given up my dedicated IP address I’ve had pointing to my server home, most of all because it was costing us money better spent elsewhere (see post about “soffa”!). So I repoint my kristoffer.com domainname here to Blogspot instead so everything except my image gallery is here instead. The image gallery is now at “stoff.gotdns.org” which is the dynamic IP address for my server at home.
It’s that time again. Time for some big player to decide how the rest of us should think and behave to better suit their business ideas. This time it’s Facebook deciding that we have to have the Timeline feature to display our Facebook profiles. I wouldn’t be alot against it if it wasn’t for the fact that they a) are forcing it upon us when we don’t want it and b) that alot of messages sent to my wall as private messages before summer 2009 are now tagged as “viewable for friends” which means I have to go through several year removing more or less private messages in my Timeline to remove alot of stuff that the people who sent them might not want.
But I’m taking the time to do it but still thinking if it’s not just time to delete my Facebook account. I just which there was some other nice way to tell everyone of my friends and family what’s happening and show pictures of my son and stuff. Can’t really ask people to check in my Imagevuex gallery everyday. And not every picture is posted there, most photos taken with my mobile is just for Facebook-fun…
Not sure what I’ll do…
There are two bills in the US congress that threaten the very core of the internet – FREEDOM!
First we have the very publicized “SOPA” which is a very broad reaching bill that will enable copyright holders like the movie studios to censure websites in the states if they in any way host copyrighted material, talk about how to illegally obtain copyrighted material or even link to anything that has copyrighted material. That bill is being redrafted since there was so much opposition to it but as Jimmy Wales said in his tweet – “it’s not off the table”. And then we have PIPA which isn’t that bad but would still make it possible to force sites like NataliePortman.com to go overseas and censure it for the people in the US.
I support them in spirit of what they are trying to do. I mean if I spent a fortune producing a movie only to see it on a torrentsite for download day after release I’d be pretty pissed off to. But they are still so broad and cover so many things that they would change how the internet works since people that run websites would need to go through them almost non-stop to make sure there are no copyright infringements anywhere. How much would YouTube have to work to keep it clean? And Facebook? And google search (cause let’s face it, google is a great searchtool to find torrents.. if you’re into that).
Everytime a dictatorship like oh I don’t know … say China blocks the internet for their citizens the west are quick to condemn it, saying “what gives them the right to control what their citizens can see on the internet”. Well this will give the US government that power. And it won’t be political but $$$.
So on wednesday some sites like Reddit and Wikipedia will be offline. As will NataliePortman.com. There isn’t that much that we, as non US citizens can do, but this we can do!!
Now I’ve played with my Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 3G for a few days and ready for a judgement.
In short … “pleased”.
I’m happy with the size, the wieght, the battery life, the customization, the speed, the apps, alot of it I like. But two of the things I used in my pros and cons list isn’t living up to expectations!
First it’s the USB connector. I’ve read a few reviews and I checked up on “prisjakt” for technical specs and nowhere did it say it required a special USB connector. Everywhere I looked just said “USB”. But it seems they liked Apple’s idea of having special connectors so you have to buy their accessories if you want more adapters and stuff. For my iPhone I had 3 USB cables, one for work, one at home and one in my car. They each cost around $50. And now I have to buy 2 for my Galaxy Tab for $50 each. That just plain sucks! Why do they do it that way? On the Galaxy SII phone you have simple micro-USB connector that is enough to charge and transfer things, but apparently on the Tab it’s not enough.
Secondly it’s MKV playback. On my Galaxy SII phone there’s no problem with MKV playback. But on the Galaxy Tab I I’ve only found one media player capable of playing MKV files so I know it has the power to play them, I just don’t know why I have to have a special media player for it! And it wouldn’t have been a problem if I could buy the full version of that media player but alas the writer of that player had his account frozen so I can’t buy it and the demo version is only for 3 days. So until I can either find another player capable of playing MKV files or his account is fixed I can’t play MKV files without converting them first. And converting them only takes 15 minutes but it was one of the reasons I chose the Galaxy Tab – the only player for the iPad that could play it flawlessly was the VLC player which isn’t available anymore (without voiding the guarantee by jailbreaking it).
But I’m still pleased with it. These two things are problems that will be solved in time but also two things that I used as pros for the Galaxy Tab that didn’t live up to expectations. But still, just the fact that I can change the user interface on it with a few clicks and that I don’t have to hook it up to my computer or installing iTunes or getting a special SIM card for it and yadda yadda, I’m still pleased 🙂
Also pleased with Mobilgiganten.se that delivered it in 24 hours after I ordered it!
I’ve been wanting to buy a tablet for a very very very long time now. And I finally ordered one and hoping I get to play with it today.
I got into a bit of a tussle with my friend Mats who loves his Apple things. He has an iMac, iPhone and iPad and he just loves how they all work perfectly for him without him having to do things. As you may know, I had an iPhone 3GS for 2 years. I was quite happy with it but when I saw what the Samsung Galaxy SII could do there really wasn’t any way I could not switch. And I’m perfectly happy with my phone!
From a technical point of view, the things that makes the Samsung Galaxy Tab better is – standard USB connection, better screen resolution and better DPI, better cameras (both of them), smaller (because of the smaller screen), new bluetooth standard, DLNA support, stereo speakers and twice the RAM. I probably won’t ever use DLNA, the stereo speakers maybe and taking pictures with it is doubtful too. The only downside is a slightly slower CPU (1000 vs. 1066) but the difference in RAM more then outweighs that!
But putting aside the technical differences, what Apple does well is interfaces and making things that “just work” without having technical skills. Well I do have those technical skills and I don’t have an iMac or an iPhone that this tab to interact with, I have a PC and a Samsung (android-based) phone. So it makes perfect sense for me to buy the Samsung (android-based) tab I think. I don’t have to “take a chance” and see if the iPad 2 does what I want it to do (like play MKVs without converting them or having to hack it to install VLC), think that I know this one will? And I also like to change my interfaces now and again which, as I understand it, isn’t that easy without jailbreaking your iPhone but easily doable on an Android device. Just look at my “World of Wacraft”-screenshots and how often I change my interface there!
But one huge, majorly disappointing thing is still the lack of being able to upgrade the storage. I thought you could upgrade it in the 8.9 (but not the 10.1) and most retailers list memory upgrades as accessory. But they will have that ability in next years lineup which right now only has a 7.7″ screen which is too small for me. Or rather the difference from my 4.3″ screen on my phone to a 7.7″ is too small to justify the cost of upgrade. And speaking of cost, another + on the Samsung side albeit $20-$30…
Thanks to the wonders of the world wide web time machine I have been able to restore the updates for 2000!! I have the updates for 2001 as well as restored the missing ones for 2010. Pretty sweet huh?
And anyone saying they’ve had a blog for a long time should check it out, the first capture they have of my kristoffer.com was back in 1998 🙂
I’m finally done adding old updates to this blog! I started this blog way before blog was even a word, back in 1997. Unfortunately I don’t have those updates (and the internet archives only goes back that far) and let’s be honest, before 2002 there wasn’t that much interesting happening. But all the updates dating back to January 1st 2002 are now added to this place. How many blogs can say that? 🙂 So now you can read about all my travelling again and my sadness when I lost my best friend and the excitement when I met Helena 🙂
Also added it to Facebook so hopefully you’ll get a notice there when I update this place. Just hope that works as intended.
I read an article yesterday slamming media for not being more critical in their coverage of Apple. And it’s true, very rarely do you see, in Sweden anyway, some news that are criticizing Apple for anything. Sure we had that small little debate about Apple and Google geotagging everything (but as opposed to Google, Apple cached everything in a local file meaning if you managed to hack in to someones computer you could backtrace where their i-Device had been).
I can’t say much about Mr. Jobs, not because he’s recently passed but because I just don’t know enough to say anything about it. Most of my knowledge about him comes from “Pirates of Silicon Valley”. And I can’t say much about Apple as a company since I’m no business analyst.
But what I can say a lot about is their mobile products, iPhone and iPad. What positive I can say, and I said this a week after owning my iPhone I had for over 2 years, is that Apple has a very, very keen sense for interfaces. They make so much stuff easy for the average joe. But in my opinion it ends there with them. To my knowledge everything they’ve ever put into their iPhones have already been done by someone else. They just make it easier to use and overprice it. For example, I recently switched to Samsung Galaxy SII. It cost me about $600. How much would an equal Apple product cost? .. according to Webhallen it’d be around $1200. That’s double the cost. For what? I still can’t play my MKVs “out of the box” and all that other stuff. And I still can’t update my firmware without iTunes (or has that finally been unlocked now?). The Samsung phone already has everything that Apple introduced as “new!” with the iPhone, they even have the “S” in the model name. And did anyone, anywhere write that? Cause on a tech level it’s true but noone (except tech bloggers) seems to put that in print! No, instead Aftonbladets and Expressens webservers went down one night when I was working and for a second I thought we had internet connection issues. But nope, they just got overloaded thanks to their “Apple releasing a new product!!” coverage.
By the way – what happened to all those “win an iphone 5”-competitions I saw banners and links to? 🙂
No, I think it’s down to the fact that people just love an underdog that wins! It’s like the Brawn team in Formula 1 a few years ago. Very close to bankrupt, the boss keeps believing and somehow manages to pull the team together and they kick ass and win the championship against the evil competitor that has for a long time owned the throne, Ferrari. And people wrote alot of good stuff about Brawn as a person and the team as a “wonders can happen!”-thing. Not many dared to say “they exploited a loophole in the rules that allowed them to go between 2-3 seconds faster per lap and after everyone had caught up they didn’t win a single race”. And it’s the same here, Apple was very very close to bankruptcy when Jobs came back and started the whole i-Device thing and they’ve now won over the evil competitor, Microsoft. And little does anyone ever mention “the first thing Jobs did was kill the Newton and now, some 15 years later their iPad is one of their strongest products!”.
So my grief isn’t with Apple or the entire “iOS v. Android” thing, my grief is with the media not being the least bit critical when reporting on Apple, that annoys me…. Damn no I need cookies to make me feel positive again!
Let’s talk toys. Specifically media players, or media streamers or whatever you wanna call it. Small boxed that you connect to your TV or projector to play your digitalized movies. I started that project about 3 years trying to find a good solution to it. And I’m still not happy! The closes to “satisfied” that I’ve come is actually Popcorns A110 which is so low tech and “just the facts”-scaled down you can get. But the fewer “cool features” you have the less things can go wrong!
I’ve tried having a PC but in the end with their fans and harddrives it just makes too much noise to have it at the TV. So I’ved tried it with the PS3 and that kinda worked but doesn’t play all the stuff I have and some stuff bugs out. Lately I’ve tried two “Xtreamer” products. First I tried their “Pro” which was suppose to be media player and network storage all in one, so I could have 2 2tb harddrives in the same machine where I store the movies, awesome to combine them. But their idea of “network storage” didn’t exactly jive with my idea of it so after playing with it over the weekend I exchanged it for their “media player only” product “Sidewinder 2”. So far it looks awesome and it plays everything I’ve thrown at it…. BUT!!! they have a major error in their software. Either that or they have a weird since of “interface”! Because their “Back” button is really an “Up” button. For example, I have shortcuts that points directly to my Movies directory on my server. And I have a shortcut pointing to my TV directory. When I go into the shortcuts menu and click “TV” I come to the TV directory fine. Now when I click “Back” I, and I believe the rest of the world, would expect to get back to the shortcuts menu. But instead I’m take to the parents directory of “TV” which is just wrong and I have to go back to the home screen to go into the shortcut menu to go to the movies catalog again. It’s messed up and you’d think a very small thing but it’s actually a big deal when browsing around!
This all just means I’m left wondering … “how hard can it be!? Why don’t I get together with Ricki and Jimmi and design one ourselves and just make three copies of it for ourselves and leave everyone else wanting one”…
This is what you’d in sweden call an “i-lands problem”, a small insignificant problem that someone in Africa would say “I wish I didn’t have bigger problems than that”. But it still annoys me!
Saw a really good story yesterday on the TV4 News about abusing online identities, in this case for political purposes. It’s basically about two young “everyday” women who found out that someone have set up Facebook pages in their names, using their personal details and photos and joining political groups. And the person doing the story, Lena Sundström, got some first hand experience about this when someone set up a fake Twitter account in her name pretending to be her. Ofcourse there’s nothing new about fake Twitter/Facebook accounts, that’s a rather old story but using it for political purposes was a new angle for me! Especially with Lena Sundström (who’s from South Korea but raised in sweden since she was like 6 months) who have done numerous stories about Sverige Demokraterna, a political party in Sweden who wants to send all immigrants back home and it’s been interesting to see her meeting people and they having no idea she’s an immigrant until they meet her for the interview.
I’m pretty grateful that even though I’ve had an online presence since -98 when I set up my first website and started a blog nothing like this have happened to me. Maybe that’s because I’m too boring, I dunno…
It never seizes to amaze me how a simple little thing in the tech world can be so damn hard. Especially when dealing with Sharepoint!! A few years ago we had to upgrade our Sharepoint 2007 from a 32 bit architecture to 64 bit. There was no change in sharepoint version, a small upgrade of SQL version from 2005-2008. Yet that one little project dragged on for months and cost thousands, if not tens of thousands, dollars. And now when we have to upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 we’re kind of in the same spot having to spend all that money. And really, all we’re doing is going from 2007 of a product to 2010, how tha hell can that be so complicated? But it, and part of me is thankful for it since I have a job because of it. But part of me says “how hard can it be!?”.
Saw the last episodes of “Stargate Universe”. I kinda liked the first 2 “Stargate”-series but they were never ever even really close to striking a human cord or draw out any intense emotions. Because to be honest they were always making fun of themselves and it was hard to take it seriously.
But “Universe” was different. Even from the beginning it felt so much better and more human than the other ones. Less humor, more human. And episode 18 of season two, “Epilogue” was… well science fiction at it’s absolute best! I don’t know if it’s because of how my life has changed so much in the past years or what but I actually dropped a tear in the incredibly well written and directed sequence of TJ’s sickness progressing, that was intense.
I’m pretty pissed it got cancelled ofcourse. But hey, life goes on…
Before 2008 I always considered cellphones as a “nice thing to have” and mostly used for texting. Then I bought a HTC Cruise, mostly for the GPS feature. I still have it in the car for that one purpose but that’s when I was introduced to how techie they can be cause it had a very primitive and slow browser and RSS reader so I could read news and stuff on my way to work.
Then in 2009 I went over to the light side and got an iPhone 3GS and since then I’ve used it alot – Facebooking, surfing, still reading RSS, doing some bank stuff and also audioplayer with Spotify.
Now it’s time for the next step. But which one to buy? It’s very much like updating your computer ’cause you know that next month there’s one better. I’ve got my sight set on the new Samsung Galaxy SII but they seem to be out of stock everywhere and before they get new ones in it’s time for HTC’s new Sensation. Not sure how it’ll end but either way, it’s gonna be my own present to myself!
Maybe I should explain what a “Star Trek”-day is for those that don’t know. It’s when a bunch of us trekkers in Stockholm (also known as “Stockholm Trekkers“) get together in Skarpnäck and some of us watch “Star Trek” or some other science fiction and some of us just sit around talking about what’s new and happening and alot of talk about TV and movies and tech-stuff. It’s a great chance to catch up on what’s happening with alot of my friends that I don’t get to talk to as much as one should. And to see some old classic “Star Trek” episode. And to indulge because we usually end up eating pizza and candy, Coca-cola and alot of other sugary stuff!
And nowadays it’s also a chance for me to get away from home 🙂
The Internet is great for alot of things. One of those things is when you hear a quote and wanna check it up. Unfortunately, as everyone should know by now, you can’t really trust the results when searching at Google for example.
And when they offed Bin Laden a quote was circulating and attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. It was a good quote (“I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy“) but as it turns out it wasn’t him. Fortunately we still have some real journalists out there who actually do their fact-checks about stuff like this. And unfortunately we still have tabloids like Swedish Aftonbladet that will print anything on their website to make people click it. Like the other day when they said Chuck Lorre called Charlie Sheen a heroic addicted monkey. Had they just checked around they… well they probably would still have printed the story ’cause it’s juicy stuff, just not really good journalism. And that makes me a sad panda.