I think it’s about time for me to review some of the hardware I bought recently. First up is the new set of speakers that I got, the Creative Gigaworks T20 Series II.

My main workstation where I wanted to use them is a Mac Mini which doesn’t have any 5.1 output except for a digital optical out. Now, I don’t need any 5.1 on my workstation but i do like some loud music so I quickly started looking at 2.1 speakers on Amazon and eBay. Wow, there’s a lot of crap out there.

Loads of unknown brands, cheap little subwoofers, and dodgy looking 2mm-thick speakers. So like any geek I used the power of Twitter to quickly get an idea of what speakers other people liked. I got about 3 responses pointing me at the Creative Gigaworks T20 Series II so I quickly went ahead and looked at what all that was about.

Now, these 2.0 speakers are not the smallest, they are about 23cm high by 14cm deep and 9cm wide, but in exchange for that they don’t come with a big bulky subwoofer. Most of the subwoofers that come with 2.1 systems are very small and cheap and therefore not particularly good. Add to that all the wiring and you’re actually happy that these speakers don’t come with a subwoofer.

These 2 speakers though, wow, I didn’t expect such a good sound from a 2.0 system. The bass won’t bump you out of your seat, but is great for films and music and if you want you can pump up the volume and make your neighbours crazy without causing the sound to distort. The added bass and treble control is handy for controlling the kind of experience you want, especially if you sit only 10 cm away from them all day.

All and all I think these speakers are probably the best ones I ever bought and I totally agree with my Twitter advisors that these speakers are definitely worth the money (currently about £50 on Amazon).

So now it’s time for this year’s resolutions. I hope these ones are a bit more realistic than last year’s ones.

• Get healthier – I used to go running, and I used to weigh about 20KG less than I do at the moment. To be honest, I don’t care about my weight, but I do care that when I stop sporting I tend to feel worse and worse over time. So my only really must-accomplish goal for this year is to get healthier. I hope to lose some weight but it is more important to sport more and feel better over time.
• Finish or fail my master’s degree - This is kind of no brainer. This is my last year to finish my master’s degree. And to be honest: I don’t care anymore. But as it does seem like a waste not to finish it I think I have to give it one more try.
• (Co-)Organise more BarCamps - I have been involved with 2 BarCamps in London last year and although I’m not sure if I want to be in charge of organising another one I will definitely want to be involved in as many as I can spent time on. So, who is up for BCL8?
• Watch 52 movies of the IMDB top 250 – This was on my list for last year but it failed because Mel and I never set aside some time for it. Now we have a big screen and decent audio in the bedroom we might try it again. Plus we’ve actually been watching more and more older movies recently which means we’re kind of in the mood for most movies anyway.
• Fall in love with photography again – I haven’t really been making any photos last year because I guess I was pushing myself too much. I want to go back to the hobby I loved in 2008 and bring my Flickr account back to live.

It’s the time of the year again for New Year’s resolutions and so I start by looking back at the resolutions from the last year and how I did.

• Project 365 & 52 Themes – I completely failed on this. I came to about 100 in the Project 365 but gave up on the 52 themes after only a few weeks. I realised something very important: I am not a pro photographer and don’t want to be one. For me photography is really just a fun hobby, and as soon as it turns into something else it takes all the fun out of it for me.
• 52 Movies from the IMDB top 250 - We did try this, but somehow ran short on time. I think we maybe saw about 8 but simply never put aside any time to watch all the other ones. I guess we might have a better chance this year with a big screen in the bedroom.
• Try Linux - This is the only thing I really did, and only a few weeks back. With the arrival of my Dell Mini 10 I gave Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Mint Linux a try, but I realised it’s not for me. I agree with my original point that Linux is the best server OS out there, but for desktops it’s just not there yet. Like my friend Reinier said: why is Linux so innovative when it comes to architecture, but not when it comes to UI?

I guess I’ll have to do a blog post tomorrow with my resolutions for 2010 but I give it another night’s sleep to come up with some more achievable ones than last year.

• Creating Bootable Vista / Windows 7 USB Flash Drive – Simplest tutorial I found so far for making a bootable Windows 7 USB installer. No 3rd party software required, and very easy to follow.
• REYNHOLM INDUSTRIES : Welcome – Awesome IT Crowd related website, not made by the IT Crowd people!
• A Symfony 1.3 Gem: Open Files Listed in Exceptions with the Editor of your Choice – Very, very useful if you do Symfony development
• How to setup Snow Leopard on mini 10v with A06 BIOS – I couldn’t manage to downgrade the bios, so I used this tutorial instead. It worked!

When I replaced my MacBook with a Mac Mini setup I was always planning to invest some time into a netbook. I recently ordered a (RED) Dell Mini 10v with the plan to turn it into a hackintosh. After a few days (*cough* weeks) of tinkering I now have a machine I’m happy with.

In short: It’s a (RED), as in the charity sponsoring colour,  Dell Mini 10v that retails for about £250. It has a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 2GB ram (custom), a 1024×600 screen, and a 160GB hard drive. I installed Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on it and things are running smoothly. Here are some photos and some notes from my experience.

The cool

• I love the colour and form factor. I wish Apple would make a (RED) laptop with a 10 to 12 inch screen.
• I installed 2GB of ram (easier than I expected) and made some more changes to the hardware by installing a different wireless module and a bluetooth module.
• WiFi (802.11n) and Bluetooth work
• Sleeping works for the most parts
• Multi touch works including 2 finger scrolling, and 3 finger swiping
• It dual boot with Windows 7
• I managed to sync some parts of OS X through Dropbox, making this machine an almost virtual copy of my workstation when it comes to some of the every day tasks.
• I installed a few handy apps to make the most out of the small screen size and small trackpad.
  • Quicksilver: Most of you will know this app, but for those of you who don’t think of it as every app and document under the tip of your fingers, without having to touch the trackpad
  • Megazoomer: Zoom any app to full screen. Very handy for browsing, although it seems to be a bit temperamental sometimes.
  • Caffeine: Prevents your machine from falling asleep when you don’t want it to. Handy for when you’re giving a presentation or when you’re watching a YouTube video.
  • DropBox: Simply the best app for sharing documents across multiple machines. I can’t live without anymore.
  • 1Password: Never need to remember your password again. Combine it with DropBox and your passwords are synced across all your machines.

The not so cool

• Installing was a bit of a pain as it required a lot of reading, diving into tutorials, and most of all knowledge of both OS X and Windows. The most useful resource for everything seemed to be this Dell Mini specific forum.
• I don’t dare to upgrade to 10.6.2 because things might break. Add to that the fact that making a bootable backup is even harder, it doesn’t make for a very reliable machine that you would want to count on for your important documents.
• This is not the fastest machine. It can play SD quality video fine, but the new generation of online videos, including YouTube, seem to be very focussed on HD video, which this machine really can’t handle.
• The standard battery only gives about 2.5 hours of battery, about the same (or even less) as my MacBook did. Where is all of  that power going?! I though these machines were supposed to be energy efficient! I had a look at a 6 cell battery which gives about 5hour+ battery life but they are hard to find in the UK and ridiculously expensive. I had a 6 cell battery with my Dell Mini 10 (non-V) but crazy enough that one didn’t fit on the Dell Mini 10v. Bastards at Dell!
• Hibernation doesn’t work (for now) and I can live with that. The real problem though is sleeping. Although the machine sleeps, if I leave it overnight it will drain quite a bit of the battery (20%). I will have to see if this can be fixed.
• I really need to bring a USB mouse when I’m off to the Netherlands for Christmas for 2 weeks. The trackpad is nice, but if you want to do some real work a external mouse is a must. The keyboard is quite useable though.

The unknown

• I’m not sure if the VGA out works, I need to hook it up to a monitor.

The future

• I might one day take out the Dell logos on the front and back and replace them with something more Apple. I already looked around and found a few articles where people laser cut an Apple logo into their machine and added a glowing apple in it’s place. It seems to require a laser cutter though, which I don’t have.
• I might order a US layout keyboard one day to replace this one. I already set my keyboard to US which means I can type as I’m used to as long as I don’t look at the keys.
• If I hit the F1 key the screen flickers, goes black, and that’s it. This button is somehow wired to do something special that the OS X install doesn’t like. There are some fixes for this which I need to look into.

The photos

I’ve been looking at some javascript graphing libraries recently and noticed that this is still an area that’s in heavy development. The development of CSS3, SVG, and other new HTML technologies have given rise to a new breed of libraries. Here are some of the interesting ones I bumped into. I haven’t tested any of them yet, and most are badly documented, but it’s still interesting enough to give a first look.

gRaphaël

So I had never heard of the Raphaël JavaScript library until today but it seems to be pretty cool and powerful when it comes to doing visual things. It also has a graphics library which seems to be perfect for what I need, but I have to look into it as it’s fairly undocumented.

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

Kilian’s ico

Made by my Dutch friend Kilian at Wakoopa, a fork of Alex Young’s ico, based on the RaphaelJS library. It’s almost as powerful as gRaphael but just as undocumented. Luckily I know the guy so i guess I can hunt him down for advise.

Flot

Flot is probably the best JQuery graphing plugin. It’s not as flashy as some of the others but definitely as functional. Plus it has the added benefit of being written as a JQuery plugin which makes it so much easier to fit in with existing code.

I have a Three 3G Dongle that I occasionally use when on the road. Now that I have a NetBook with Mac OS X I plan to use it even more. The problem with this Three 3G dongle (Huawei E156G) is the software that comes with it. It’s bloated, replicates standard Mac OS X behaviour, and worst of all it disables your WiFi when you’re on 3G (because God forbid that you share your already slow 3G with another).

So a while ago I figured out how to use the 3G dongle without using the Three Mobile Manager software, but instead using the Mac OS X network manager. I decided to write it up now because I noticed a few more people with the same issues. This tutorial is based on a Mac Mini and Dell Mini running Mac OS X 10.6.2 and 10.6.1.

Step 1: Install the Mobile Manager

We’re not going to use the Mobile Manager, but this is the easiest way to install the drivers for the dongle.

• Just stick in your dongle into your Mac and wait for the 3Connect disc to show up.
• Run the 3Connect Installer.app
• When the installer is done, ignore any “new network adapters found” for now.
• Instead go to your Applications folder, and trash the 3Connect folder

Your drivers have now been installed but your OS X doesn’t know what to do with the dongle yet.

Step 2: Setup your network preferences

• Go to the Network panel in your System Preferences
• You should have a HUAWEI Mobile device in the list on the left, if it is not unplug and plug in your dongle until it does
• Click Advanced, and in the modem pane set the details to:
  • Vendor: Generic
  • Model: GPRS (GSM/3G)
  • APN: Three.co.uk
  • CID: 1
• Under DNS set the following two DNS servers:
  • 4.2.2.4
  • 4.2.2.3
• Then (I’m not sure if this is essential) go to the PPP tab:
  • Uncheck Send PPP echo packets
  • Check Use verbose logging
• Click OK to save your changes
• Finally, set the telephone number to *99#
• Hit Apply

Now when you hit Connect you should be able to connect to the network. Tick the Show modem status in menu bar to have a handy little menu in the menu bar that allows you to see how long you’ve been connected and much more.

Caveats

There are some downsides to this method. The main one being that you loose the ability to check how much data you’ve sent/received this month. I guess you can use My3 for that instead. You also lose the ability to sent SMS messages, which is why it might be wise to leave the 3 Mobile Manager in your applications if you ever use that function.

Finally I have to note that this hasn’t been thoroughly tested. I used to run this same method under Leopard and it worked fine, it now works fine under Snow Leopard too, but any weird hardware or software upgrade might break it, I’m just not sure.

In the last few weeks I’ve slowly fallen in love with this little application called TwoUp. I recently got a new 24″ monitor and realized that I can easily run multiple windows side-by-side. The problem is trying to make 2 windows not overlap but take up as much space as possible: it’s impossible by hand!

In comes TwoUp, which gives you a few little keyboard shortcuts to move a window to take the left, right, top, or bottom half of the screen. It’s a free product and has become part of my every day use. I can’t live without it anymore on a big monitor.

Irradiated Software – TwoUp.

There is also a more advanced version called SizeUp that gives you more positions (quarters of the screen, multi monitor support) which is not free. It’s only $13 so I might be buying this soon to thank the guy who made both apps for his great work.