Phones4u aside, the phone is mostly fantastic.  Jumping on the touchscreen bandwagon, the Tocco Lite is an iPhone for plebs like me who can’t afford the real thing.  My previous phone, just for reference, was a Motorola L6, which was gorgeous, but was beginning to show its age a little (not in performance, just in a few cosmetic scratches to the case, which turns out to be more plastic than metal, despite appearances).  The Tocco Lite has a comparatively enormous screen, is more or less the same size, and is actually fractionally lighter.  That’s good, because it means it’ll sit in my pocket nicely.

The Good Stuff

The touchscreen works very nicely, and although it isn’t clever enough to handle multi-touch, it responds very well and doesn’t get things wrong very often at all.  It’s a 240×400 pixel screen, which is nice and bright, and fantastic for viewing photos on.

The home screen has three views to it, a little like the iPhone’s application pages, which you scroll through horizontally.  The Tocco Lite doesn’t have application icons, but it does have widgets, which are essentially little visual shortcuts to various areas of the phone.  They can be placed anywhere on your home screen, though I found that I actually had to be careful where I put them so that I could still swipe left and right to the other parts of the home screen – if I happened to have my finger on a widget it would try to move the widget around rather than going to the other screen.  I’ve learnt to keep an area clear towards the bottom of the home screen, and do all my swiping there instead.  It’s just a shame you can’t add your own widgets.

Calls and text messages, and in fact all the functionality of the phone itself, are all fine.  It’s all pretty predictable, with everything working as you’d expect it to.  With very few physical keys, text messaging is a key area for a touchscreen phone to get right, and I’m pleased to say that the Tocco Lite performs very well in this respect.  You can enter your text via a numberpad that comes up, using the familiar T9 predictive text to help you, or you can tilt the phone on its side and use a full qwerty keyboard – that’s my preferred input method at the moment, simply because I find it faster typing with two thumbs than with one.  It’s fairly accurate most of the time, so unintended spelling mistakes are kept to a minimum.

I mentioned earlier that the screen was good for viewing photos.  Actually this is a bit of a showpiece for the Tocco Lite.  Bring up your photos (which, sadly, are a little clumsy to get to) and they come up on the screen filling the width of the screen, whether you hold the phone normally or on its side.  In fact, you can hold the phone whichever way up you like, even upside down, and it’ll still show you the image so that it’s the right way up.  Very neat.  And as an extra party trick, with the phone held in landscape, tilting the phone slightly left or right will cause the photos to slide along, as if falling off the side of the phone.  Very cool.  Unfortunately it does mean that if you want to view a photo for any length of time you have to make sure you hold the phone still, otherwise it tries to scroll through them all.

Internet is reasonable, with the default browser being fairly straightforward to use.  It’s nothing special though, and as the phone relies on GPRS and EDGE it’s not particularly fast.  I’ve actually ditched the built in browser though, and have downloaded Opera Mini 5, which is much nicer to look at and use, and by compressing everything via a proxy server actually makes it quite speedy, even on GPRS.

The Bad Stuff

It’s not all good news, unfortunately.  The back of the case, under which hides the battery and the SIM card, was devilishly difficult to get off first time round (I eventually managed it by taking some advice from a forum and pushing with the palms of my hands, rather than my fingers), and once off, it was a little too easy to slide off again afterwards.  The first time I went out with the phone in my pocket the back of the case stuck itself to my leather wallet, and when I pulled the phone out it was missing its back casing!  I’ve resolved that for now by simply putting the phone in the other way round, so the screen is against my wallet instead.

Another in-pocket problem has also become apparent – it far too easily unlocks itself.  The lock button is on the side of the phone, and is just a little too easy to press.  To unlock the phone all you have to do is hold in the lock button on the side, or press a button that appears on the screen.  Several times now the phone has unlocked itself in my pocket and tried to set alarms.  Thankfully never anything more serious than that, no phone calls made, but an annoyance nonetheless.  The Tocco Lite does come with a Gesture Unlock feature, where you draw a letter on the screen to make it unlock, but that seems to be a little redundant given how easy the phone is to unlock.  I think it would have been better to have an option to have Gesture Unlock as the only way to unlock the phone, rather than as an additional way, deactivating the lock button on the side and forcing you to unlock it deliberately.  If it continues to be a problem I might have to put a number lock on the SIM card or something as well.

One thing I was a little disappointed by was the lack of connectivity to Mac computers.  I really wanted to be able to synchronise the phone with my computer, so that contacts and my diary could be copied across by Bluetooth, as I’d done with my Motorola L6.  Sadly, no one thought that Mac connectivity was important, so it doesn’t work.  This meant I had to manually put in all my contacts again, which was a pain.  I’m getting round the diary issue for now by loading up Opera and using Google Calendar instead.  Takes a little longer, but it works.

And my final complaint is that loading additional applications onto the phone can only be done via the phone’s web browser.  You can’t connect the phone to your computer and copy the files across, they just come up as unrecognised files and don’t install.  So you have to download the .jar files from a WAP site instead (I’ve been using euploader.com).  And you have to do this with the built-in browser, not Opera.  It would have been nice to have been able to transfer stuff across from the computer, rather than having to pay for my internet twice.

Conclusion

On the whole, though, it’s a fantastic little phone.  If you love the iPhone but can’t afford one, this might well be a good choice for now.  Sure, there are better phones out there, but you pay more as a result.  The Tocco Lite is affordable, looks fantastic, is blindingly easy to use, and I’m very happy with mine.  I’d give it a very respectable 8/10.

Well, sort of.  In actual fact the box was a hand-made creation, the template for which I had made on my computer and printed onto card, constructing quietly and surreptitiously in the study so she wouldn’t notice.  Fairly simple, but it had a sticky tape hinge, our wedding logo on the top half, and the clasp was made with two split pins and a tiny elastic band.  It was quite ingenious.  Inside, the earrings were actually just a printout from a web site, which could have been a let-down, were it not for the explanation – I was taking my wife to Cribbs Causeway to buy her the real thing.

A little explanation is needed here for those of you unaware of our particular problem.  We live in the country.  The middle of Somerset, to be more precise.  The nearest motorway is about an hour away, and the only way to get to one is via A-roads, some of which have two lanes, but most of which don’t.  In short, we’re a little cut off from the main thoroughfares of motoring.  In addition, our nearest town is Shepton Mallet, which is tiny.  There are shops, of course.  They’re both very nice.  Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but let’s just say that the range of shops isn’t exactly dazzling.  Day to day this isn’t a huge problem, but for special things like earrings we’re pretty much up a creek without a pointy stick.

So I took Ellie to Cribbs Causeway.  This gave us a choice of four good jewellery shops, plus those fashion accessory shops too.  The reasoning went beyond just practicality of purchase, of course.  I could have ordered something online, after all.  The trouble with that is that a) you don’t get to hold it in your hand beforehand, b) it might not be what she wanted, c) the postal strikes might have caused problems with the delivery date, and d) if it was coming by post Ellie would have got to it before I could.

It was undeniably the slowest wander around a mall I think either of us have ever embarked on; a fairly heavily pregnant Ellie doesn’t make for a nippy walking speed.  Still, it allowed us a chance to spend time looking at everything, which was good.  I have to admit it was the first time I had ever been into Accessorize – let’s face it, it’s not somewhere I need to go into for myself.  She finally settled on a lovely little pair of earrings from a very reputable store, which sparkled very satisfyingly.  They’re simple enough to be worn on a regular basis, so not too showy, but still gorgeous to look at.  I was pleased with the purchase, and Ellie is too.

Of course, there is more to Cribbs Causeway than just jewellery shops.  A lot more.  In particular, I found myself in a mobile phone shop asking to try out a Samsung Tocco Lite, which I had been researching online for a while as a replacement for my Motorola L6.  It was nice to actually feel and use rather than just seeing photos, and I was suitably impressed.  Then came something a little unexpected – Ellie persuaded me to buy it, there and then.  Not exactly what I’d planned on spending my money on that day.  Still, she seemed keen that I should buy it, and it was after all the phone I had fallen in love with (after the iPhone of course, which is still infuriatingly beyond my meagre budget), and the demo in the shop had only confirmed it as being a good phone.  So, still in a bit of a daze, I bought it.

It’s a full touch screen phone, with a bare minimum of actual buttons, and everything else happening on screen instead, in much the same way as the iPhone, just on a smaller budget.  It’s about the same overall size as my L6, so it should still fit comfortably in my pocket, and it’s actually lighter too.  I’m really impressed with it so far, in particular the ease of use of the touchscreen qwerty keyboard which pops up when you rotate the phone on its side.  I think the only niggles I’ve found so far are that it doesn’t support Java games very well, and it doesn’t synchronise with my Mac.  But overall it’s a fantastic little phone, and I shall undoubtedly enjoy using it for some time to come.  It did feel a little out of place, purchasing such a lovely new toy on my wife’s birthday, but I maintain it was her idea…

My job means sitting in front of a computer all day, playing with the internet.  There are of course times when I leave my desk, or need to use a different computer, and then it’s nice to still have the same tools to hand.  So I’ve put my diary onto Google Calendar, so that it’s available wherever I am.  Nice.

Oh no, wait a minute.  I also need that same calendar on my mobile phone.  So far there is no bridge directly between Google Calendar and my Motorola L6, unless I load up Google Calendar on my phone’s browser – but that costs me money because I’m on a PAYG tariff and I don’t get any free data, so that’s out of the question (not least because it’s far from instant, even using the incredible Opera Mini browser and its clever servers).  So, that means having the calendars on iCal as well, so that I can use iSync to copy everything across.  And here’s where it all gets rather complicated.

There are two ways to get a Google Calendar onto iCal.  One is to subscribe to it, using the address that Google Calendar gives you in the settings.  Unfortunately that’s a read-only solution, which isn’t all that useful.  The second option is to set up iCal to use Google Calendars as a WebDAV server (I’m not going to go into the details here, just search around for “iCal WebDAV Google” or similar).  That’s a much more satisfactory solution, as it means that you can make changes on iCal and have them copied across to Google Calendar.

Today I came across a slight additional problem, however.  In setting up the iCal WebDAV thingy, I had the main calendar showing up fine and then all the other calendars showing up in iCal under a folder called ‘Delegates’.  Initially I didn’t think that was going to be a problem, but when I opened up iSync it couldn’t find those delegate calendars.  Poo.

The solution (yes, here it is, eventually) was to subscribe to those other calendars using the first method above.  That makes the calendars visible to iSync, and while it doubles up the entries in iCal you can untick them so they don’t show up.  Changes you make to those calendars either on Google Calendar or iCal will be saved, and those changes filter through to the subscribed versions on iCal, which can be picked up and copied across to my phone via iSync.

In case you’re wondering about the phone end, yes it is possible to create events on the phone, but it’s a little cumbersome.  If I create an event on my phone, when it gets synced across it gets put in an ‘Unfiled’ calendar on iCal.  I then have to manually move each of those events into a Google Calendar WebDAV calendar so that it’s visible elsewhere.  Not ideal, but it works.

Unfortunately I just can’t justify buying myself a new phone, since my Motorola L6 does actually work fine.  So rather than get depressed about the situation I decided to have another go at revitalising my phone and getting the most out of it.  A little research got me Opera Mini 4.2, which is a sleek and feature-filled web browser for my phone.  Not only is it infinitely nicer to look at and use than the built-in one, it’s also miles faster thanks to a proxy compression that Opera provides – basically every web page my phone requests is sent via the Opear server, compressed until it’s tiny and then sent to my phone, which speeds up download times considerably.  The result is that my phone is now capable of checking e-mails and looking at web pages without a century passing between pages.

Then I started downloading yet more stuff.  I came across some cool Java games, which were promptly uploaded to my phone and installed.  Not all of them work, and those that do have to be very lightweight ones because my phone doesn’t exactly have much processing power – animation is debatable really, and 3D stuff is complete out.  But I’ve found a few really addictive games in there, including one with a grid of various shaped pipe pieces that have to be rotated so that they all connect up – simple, but I just can’t put it down.

During my surfing around looking for further ways to enhance my mobile experience I stumbled across ModMyMoto, a web site dedicated to Motorola users who want to make their handsets do more than they were originally designed to.  There are games and software that can be downloaded, but then there are more in-depth mods like changing the skins and core functionality of the phone.  I decided I’d have a go at installing a skin, as there were a couple of tutorials on the forum that made it all look very simple.  They had comments like “it’s as easy as that!!!”, “and that’s it!!”, “and you’re done!!!”.  I should have paid more attention.  Superfluous and over-zealous use of exclamation marks in a technical document can only be there to cover up how potentially difficult it actually is.

So I downloaded a piece of software onto my PC, which would be what I’d use to ‘mod’ the phone.  Then I needed to install the drivers for the phone so that it could find it.  One of the drivers Windows managed to find all on its own, which was nice, but baulked at the others.  That meant registering on a Motorola developers’ forum and downloading yet more software, pretending that I was a software developer.  That came with the drivers I needed, and once that was all set up I could run the modding program to start applying the skin I’d downloaded.  First of all I had to copy a whole load of files across (gif images, to be used by the skin).  No problem.  Then I had to go to the “seam editor” part of the program and set a particular ‘bit’ in the phone’s internal coding to allow it to use custom themes.  Again, no problem there.  I turned the phone off and on again, and hey presto! the skin was installed.

And my goodness was it awful.  It did look vaguely like the screenshot, but it wasn’t anywhere near as satisfying as I was expecting, it flickered annoyingly, and was impossible to read.  That was when I read the line at the very bottom of the tutorial I’d been following, saying that if I’d backed up a particular file from the phone then I could re-upload that to set it back to its default skin.  That would have been fine if the tutorial had told me that the file needed backing up before I overwrote it.   Not good.  A little further searching around showed that the only safe way to get the original theme back was to do a master reset.  Which I did.  And lost all my phone numbers, ringtones, photos and settings in the process.

Fortunately, getting the phone back to normal has been fairly straightforward, thanks to a quick iSync to transfer my calendar and most of my address book across (though, curiously, some phone numbers were not transferred across, for no apparent reason and with no pattern to explain it).  I’ve still lost the photos I took on the phone, though that it’s a huge loss as I didn’t use it very often anyway.  Still, it’s been several hours that I would have been able to use elsewhere, all thanks to a tutorial not telling me some key information until right at the end, almost as an aside.

So, let that be a lesson to you (and me).  If you’re ever tempted to ‘mod’ your phone, make sure you’ve got everything backed up, even if they don’t tell you explicitly that you’ll need to.  And don’t trust any article that says “it’s as simple as that!!”.  Trust me, the exclamation marks are a bad omen.

Now, it may appear from this post that I have nothing better to do with my time at the moment than waste countless hours sat in front of a screen twiddling knobs and tapping incessantly on keys without really achieving anything productive.  And they may be a modicum of truth in that hypothesis.  However, I can assure you that the time I have spent playing has been (for the most part) well-chosen and has not adversely interfered with the normal running of my life.  It has of course been lots of fun.

First of all, I recently acquired something I have wanted for years – a steering wheel.  No, not for my car, but for the computer.  And since all my games are now on the PS2, it had to be one that I could plug into that.  An hour or so on eBay and a handful of reviews culminated in a purchase of a Logitech Driving Force EX steering wheel, which was plugged in and tested as soon as I was able (i.e. the evening of the day it arrived – see, I didn’t skip work for this), driving my current favourite game: Gran Turismo 4.

It took a while to get used to, having learnt all the basics of the game using the standard controller, but it wasn’t long before I was hooked.  The steering wheel provided good feedback, with resistence and vibration like a real car, and actually made the cars a lot easier to drive with precision – which is what that particular game is all about.  More recently I’ve even started playing around with drifting and controlling cars on off-road courses, neither of which I could master with a normal controller.  I’ve also found myself preferring to turn off the traction control systems, opting to drive ‘raw’ and more in tune with the car, and that’s rewarded me with a much more pleasing feel to the drive.  And aching arms.

Unfortunately the Driving Force EX isn’t without its faults.  I soon discovered (and later found others who had found the same) that the “flappy paddle” gear change buttons on the back of the steering wheel don’t work with my version of GT4.  Apparently it’s a known issue with that particular steering wheel and my particular release of the game – in other countries it’s absolutely fine.  I’ve scoured all sorts of forums and suchlike, and the general consensus is that there is no solution.  The error itself is in the wiring of the steering wheel, and the option that would usually remedy the situation is bemusingly disabled in PAL versions of the game.  So I’m left with no alternative really but to keep the game in Automatic transmission, missing out on that final piece of absolute control.  Well, I say no alternative, it seems you can get the flappy paddles to work, but only by unplugging the power supply to the steering wheel and using it as if it were a normal controller, meaning you get all the right buttons in the right places but no force feedback.

Still, I’ve had a whale of a time with the wheel so far, and it’s been incredibly addictive.  I’ve spent many late hours screaming round various tracks, wearing tyres ragged and inevitably smashing into my fair share of walls too, but even so there has been the satisfying reward of some awesome corners and moments of superb and flawless control.  The trick now is in reducing the number of accidents and increasing the occurrence of brilliance.

Meanwhile, up on the Mac, I’ve rediscovered (again) my love for Transport Tycoon.  Or, to be more precise, OpenTTD, which is the open-source version that is still being developed and tinkered with by people who refuse to let the game die.  This all started (or restarted, as the case may be) after a trip to London, and my mind got all creative and geeky looking at train station configurations.  So I downloaded the latest version of the game and started playing again, and after a few false starts I’ve got a rail network going now that’s pretty efficient and elegant too.

Something that’s fairly new in the world of OTTD is the idea of “Path Signals”.  There’s a wiki that goes into a little more detail than I can afford here, but basically it’s a type of signal that allows a train to reserve a route through a section of track.  The advantage is that you can have multiple trains using track that would otherwise be limited to one train at a time with the other signal types.  It’s very clever.  In its simplest form it means you can have a really disorganised mass of track, whack some path signals in the right places, and let the trains sort themselves out without worrying about them crashing into each other.  Marvellous.  Obviously it’s a little more complicated than that in practice, but it does allow for much more elegant track designs, with more crossovers, less track, and fewer bottlenecks.  I love it.  I’d show you some screenshots, but the number of people who’d actually find that at all interesting would be so limited that I’d be wasting my time.  Still, at least I thought about it.

EDIT: Due to popular demand (okay, one person, yay Phill), here are some screenshots of my current OpenTTD game.  I’ve hidden the trees to make the track a little clearer.

[View with PicLens]

And yes, I am a geek.  Thank you for noticing.

1. This is a nerdy post.  I’m not even going to try hiding that.   Apologies to readers who are not even slightly interested in nerdy posts.  I promise to write something less nerdy next time.
2. I am primarily a Mac user, and I fully expect this to influence my opinions to a certain extent, despite my attempts to be unbiased.
3. I am using Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 on an HP laptop with a 2GHz dual-core AMD processor and 3GB RAM.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into what, for many people, is probably old news.  Vista has, after all, been around for some time now, despite its monumentally slow and cautious uptake (mainly due to the shocking support for old hardware and software).  It’s worth putting it all in context though, and consider what other products Microsoft brought out before and what their competitors have been doing.

When Windows XP was released we all rejoiced.  It was more stable than previous versions of Windows, it looked prettier, and boasted better performance on the same hardware.  It was easier to use, more accessible to people who had never used a computer before, and was quickly adopted by home users and businesses alike.  Around the same sort of time Apple released its Mac OS X, which was built on a solid Unix framework and looked pretty.  It caught on quickly with existing Mac users, but didn’t catch many PC users because it was still just that little bit too alien to make the transition easy.  XP was the overall winner of that initial battle, and Microsoft kept its market share with ease.  Then we entered ‘The Great Silence’ in the Windows world, where we heard little more than security updates, despite Apple bringing out version after version of new Mac OSes, each one better than the last, each one slowly but surely eating away at Microsoft’s supporters.  And when Vista finally did make it out into the open, it was slower than its predecessor (hence the need for more powerful hardware to run it) and didn’t deliver anywhere near the full compliment of promised features.  It broke established software, caused all manner of problems, and as a result businesses and home users are still sticking with XP in defiance until someone can convince them that Vista really is worth the bother.

That brings us up to date on the history, and brings me to the operating system I am now sitting in front of.  My reasons for buying Vista are covered in my previous post, so I won’t repeat them here.  The title of this article pretty much sums up my first impressions – it’s shiny.  From the instant you see the logon screen it’s as if it’s shouting “hey, look at me, I’m shiny too!”  So much of the interface feels like it’s been copied from Apple’s groundbreaking innovations, even if it is in a trademark Microsoft way.  The Vista installation still had those annoying factoids about the system, telling you what it was good for – as if we needed telling what it was we had just bought, just in case we thought it was actually a toaster.

Vista Home Premium uses the funky transparent windows theme that everything but the Home Basic version comes with.  That means that the background shows through the title bar and the windows borders.  The point of that is… well, actually I have yet to find a good reason for that.  No doubt someone said it might be fun, and when no one said it wasn’t possible they threw it in for the sake of the WOW factor.  Sure, it’s pretty, but so what?  You can’t see enough to see what is actually underneath, and it does tend to muddy the display slightly with inconsistency.  Interestingly they turn that transparency off when the window is maximised, because clearly then you don’t want to see what’s underneath.  Again, I’m still not sure of the reasoning behind that styling feature.  Window shadows I can understand, that gives you the impression of depth and brings the frontmost window up more clearly in front of the rest, and glowing close buttons makes sense too.  The Start button is another oddity though – they’ve replaced the word “Start” with the Windows logo, which makes sense I suppose, and made it round, but slightly too big for the taskbar so that it shows over the top of everything else just a little bit.  Sure, it’s nice to know it can do it, but again – what’s the point, exactly?  Theme creators will doubtless be dancing in the ailes, but for an everyday user I’m not sure it’s a styling feature that’s really better than a normal button.

And that’s really where things come to a crux – is Vista actually better than XP, or is it just different?  Sure, XP did look a little “Fisher Price” with its bright colours, but it did the job effectively.  The transparent windows in Vista is eye-candy, nothing more, and to me smacks of Microsoft trying to hit back at Apple’s undeniably beautiful interface, which has always sported a subtle use of transparency and shadows.  Vista takes that idea, boosts it to the max, and hopes people are impressed.  Like a teenage yob seeing a Ferrari with a spoiler and then gaffer taping three on his own Micra and standing next to it as if to say “beat that”.  Yes, Microsoft, very clever.  Now grow up.

I can’t be completely critical, however, as there are some very good points to Vista that are worth mentioning, even if only superficial (I’ve not focussed on benchmarking or performance as I have no way of testing that scientifically).  The minimise, maximise and close buttons are good – they’re clear and easy to use, arguably better than in XP, and certainly bigger and easier to get to than in Mac OS X.  And the glowing of those items when you hover over them is a useful addition and a good bit of user feedback.  Similarly, the new Explorer (which, curiously, no longer appears to have a name at all) is very nice to use, and in particular the unifying of the icon and the text label in one clean box is a nice visual touch that I’ve not seen anywhere else but which I can confidently say is better than the rest; subtle highlight colour, subtle border, subtle rounded corners – and all round a fantastic job.  Controls for quickly and easily changing the thumbnail size is a handy addition too, although the largest setting is only really useful if you’re viewing a folder of photos, and then it’s almost not big enough.  My favourite part of that whole file management interface though is the location bar, which shows you your position in the file tree and allows you to click each component to go back several levels at once, like a breadcrumbs trail found on many web sites.

So, is Vista better than XP?  And, almost as important now, is it better than Mac OS X Leopard?  Well, as with all technology that is widely used, that’s debatable.  My own personal preference is that despite Leopard’s rather clinical feel it’s still a much more mature interface than Vista’s, which feels like it’s trying its utmost to show off to its friends.  Vista is shiny.  Very shiny indeed.  But it still feels like Windows, and in that respect it still fails to impress me or reassure me that it knows what it’s doing, or that it’ll leave me to it if I’m confident I know what I’m doing.  Maybe more time will persuade me, maybe I’m still too in love with Apple to see how great this operating system is.  Time will tell.  In contrast to Vista’s Window’s Sidebar which is insisting on telling me the time, in addition to the clock in the taskbar…

I’ve not actually owned a laptop since my first year at uni, which was when I bought my very first computer – a bottom of the range Novatech notebook with a 366MHz AMD processor, 32MB RAM, Windows 95, and very little besides.  It was £600 too, which on reflection wasn’t actually the bargain I thought it was at the time.  Still, I got a good year of use out of it, getting it to do all sorts of things it wasn’t supposed to be capable of, like running all sorts of Windows 98 programs and running a skinning addon that made it look like Windows XP (which was very new at the time).  Since then I’ve only had desktops, and most have been Macs.

This new laptop (which I’m writing this blog post on, sat in my lounge on my comfy sofa), achieves two primary uses, plus a few other smaller ones.  Firstly, it replaces my old PC, a 1.2GHz tower running XP very slowly indeed, despite a recent reinstall and a very minimal set of programs.  Clearly the hundreds of security updates to XP have taken their toll and made a once powerful computer into a walk through treacle.  So this laptop will enable me to continue being able to test web sites in Internet Explorer (which isn’t available on the Mac).  It’s second main purpose is that I can potentially take it to meetings – after all, it’s good for a web designer to be seen to have a computer!

Of course, there are other perks to having a laptop, which have already surfaced this evening.  I’ve already enjoyed the luxury and novelty of being able to sit downstairs and use the computer, which is slightly more sociable than hiding away in the study.  Ellie and I have also tested out the built-in webcam by Skyping my parents and having a nice half-hour video chat with them.  Lots of fun!  We were going to try the same with my Grandma immediately afterwards, but I don’t think she was actually in front of her computer at the time.

My next job will be to give an evaluation of Vista.  Yes, I know every Tom, Dick and Harry has already done that, but I haven’t.  I do of course have my own pre-conceived ideas and prejudices, especially because I’m primarily a Mac user now, but this is my first real experience of actually using Vista, so I figure it makes sense to muddy the waters with my own opinions on what it’s actually like, now that the hype has died down almost completely.  But I’ll leave that for another post.  Maybe the next one.

I also have an old Palm m125 which I’ve been carrying around with me to act as my diary, syncing it to my Mac when I remember to.  It does the job, just about, despite being older than the PC (it would have been new in 2001).  I say it does the job, actually it’s been throwing tantrums just lately, refusing to switch on and then losing everything in memory and thus any changes I’ve made since the last sync.

Then there’s my mobile phone, a Motorola L6.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as old as the aforementioned relics, but I did buy it back in 2006, so it’s a few years older than your average mobile.  I still reckon it’s got at least another year of use in it though, despite the paint coming off the bottom, a dodgy battery connection (sort of fixed by stuffing some paper between the battery and the cover) and a dead camera.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I’ve been looking at laptops this afternoon.  My poor old PC really does need replacing, and a laptop would actually be useful now.  I’ve steered clear of them in recent years, simply because I’m not mobile enough to warrant having one, but now it may serve a purpose.  There are occasions when being able to take a laptop to meetings with clients would be an advantage.  So it would be a case of combining the need for a new computer to test web sites on with the ability to take stuff to meetings.  I’d need something cheap, small, able to run Vista, XP and Linux.  Vista is important for future-proofing, allowing me to continue supporting stuff in years to come, while XP is needed so I can continue to test sites in IE6 (although I have found some software that emulates IE6 that works in Vista).

The Palm will probably be taken out of service before too long, though hopefully replaced by my mobile phone rather than another palm-top organiser.  All I really need is my diary synced to a device I can carry around with me, and if I get a Bluetooth dongle I can do that with my L6.

Of course, then there’s the question of what I do with the old technology.  I’m not even entertaining the idea of just throwing it away, far too much goes to landfill as it is.  Thankfully I’ve found several organisations that will take at least some of my relics away for either recycling or reuse.  My PC can be reconditioned and resold, as can the two CRT monitors gathering dust in the study, and hopefully some of the other bits and pieces can go the same way.  Only a small amount would need disposing of, like my old Epson printer which can’t be fixed.

So, that’s the way the future’s looking for me – out with the old and in with the new.  Although, knowing me, it’ll probably happen in reverse order.  Still, it’s a good plan, especially given that we’re planning on moving house in a few months’ time – the less junk we have to transport the better.

EDIT: I have now purchased a new laptop!  Yay!  Should be here within 5 working days.  It’s nothing too fancy, more for business than anything else, but should give me everything I need.  It comes with Vista, which is important from a support point of view, and I’ve discovered that I can run IE6 on Ubuntu via the Wine emulator, so hopefully that should mean I don’t need to install XP as well – which is good because licensing restrictions mean I can’t install the version I’ve already got.  No doubt I’ll post an update once the laptop arrives and let you all know what I think of Vista.

Having bought my wife a new mobile phone I found myself thinking about technical things (to try to quash the feelings of jealousy at her having a nicer phone than me), and after much research I found I could actually make use of the Mac Mini for very little additional cost.  We don’t watch much TV, so it wouldn’t actually be of any benefit to us for me to install a funky internet TV system, but watching iPlayer and YouTube on the telly sounded like a cool idea – much more comfortable than several people trying to cram into the study to watch stuff on my computer.

This, then, is not a detailed tutorial on how to create a media centre, but rather an explanation of what I have done to create my particular system.  It might not be what you need, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to every question you could possibly have on media centres.  But I will be including screenshots to explain stuff, and hopefully someone will find at least some of this useful, or vaguely interesting.

The operating system and other software

I have Mac OS X Tiger installed on the little box, which actually gives me all the basics I need.  In addition to the basic install I have iLife (for sharing my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on my primary computer) and Firefox 3.  Yes, I could have used Safari, but Firefox comes with some cool plugins that will come in useful, and I’ll come onto that a bit later.

The internal hardware

The Mac Mini is running on a 1.42Ghz G4 PPC chip with only 512MB RAM, which is pretty pathetic by modern standards, and it really struggled when I was using it as my primary machine for work – browsing the web is no problem, but running a dozen large programs all at once really was asking too much from that amount of memory.  However, in this particular situation it should be plenty, and the onboard graphics chip handles video well enough.  And since I’m not going to be downloading massive media like films to play on it I don’t need much in the way of hard disk space either.  iPlayer and YouTube both stream their data so I’ve not had to clear out any space on the hard disk yet.  And if I do find myself needing more space later I can always delete some unwanted programs that I don’t use any more (Adobe Creative Suite isn’t really needed on a media centre).

Control freak

So, how do you control a computer from a sofa?  The immediate answer is an Apple Remote, but I don’t have one.  Neither do I have a spare keyboard to plug into it.  However, I did happen to have a wireless mouse knocking around.  Of course, there is only so much you can do with just a mouse – a keyboard is a necessity for typing stuff.  At least, that was until I discovered that Mac OS X actually comes with a virtual keyboard, which they cunningly call Keyboard Viewer.  Now I can bring up an on-screen keyboard and type with the mouse!

If you want to find it, you’ll need to go into System Preferences > International > Input Menu, and select the Keyboard Viewer from the list, and make sure you tick  “Show input menu in menu bar” at the bottom of the window.  You’ll get a little icon in your menu bar showing your country’s flag, and in that menu you’ll be able to bring up the Keyboard Viewer.  By default I think it comes up in the small mode; if that’s too small for you to see from the other side of the room you can click the little green expand button in the top left corner and it’ll expand to a bigger size.

DVI to S-video

A TV is not a monitor.  They speak very different languages, and display images in different ways (at least if you have a traditional CRT TV, if you have a flat screen TV it might be different).  However, a search around the net showed that all I needed was a DVI to S-video converter, provided by Apple, and I’d be in business.  I found one at a good price on eBay, and it arrived in the post yesterday.  So that plugs into the DVI connector on the back of the Mac Mini (Macs use DVI instead of VGA, don’t ask me why, but they effectively do pretty much the same thing), and the other end of the adapter provides a phono socket.  Yes, all you need is a standard phono cable like you’d use for your speakers and you can connect the adapter to a scart adapter.  Lots of adapters, yes, but it works.  OS X recognises what sort of display you’re using and adjusts its settings automatically when it boots up, so that makes it nice and straightforward.

So, that’s a lot of adapters, but it basically follows this sequence of connections:

Mac Mini DVI port > DVI to S-video adapter > phono cable > scart adapter > scart splitter > scart socket on TV

You might not need the scart splitter, but we’ve got too many devices and not enough built-in scart sockets.

Sounding good

The scart adapter I bought (from Tesco) actually has four sockets – video, s-video, left audio and right audio – but at the moment I’m only using one of them.  I’m sending the video to the TV but sending the audio straight to my sound system courtesy of a 2.5mm jack to twin phono cable, plugged into the headphones socket on the Mac Mini.  Sounds fantastic.  As long as the sound system speakers are turned on.

Getting online

My broadband router is upstairs in my study, where my old PC is connected to it via a traditional CAT5 cable, while my G5 and my wife’s laptop both connect wirelessly.  I do have another wireless dongle, a US Robotics USR805422 54Mbps USB adapter, which I used to use on the PC back when it was my primary computer.  Unfortunately no one has seen fit to make a Mac-compatible driver for it, so that presented a bit of a hurdle for my Mac Mini.  I didn’t really want to fork out for a new wireless dongle unless I really needed to.  And that was when my next brainwave hit – I could use my wife’s wireless dongle instead (she was out at the time so couldn’t argue).  Some Googling revealed that there was indeed a Mac driver for the Asus WL-167g.  I found a link on someone’s blog to the right software, downloaded it and installed it on the Mac Mini, and after a little tinkering around I got it working – hoorah!!  Unfortunately rebooting the computer meant that the software revealed its flaw – it wasn’t remembering connection profiles so you had to enter the network password every time you logged in, which wasn’t quite what I wanted.  Eventually I found a link to the official driver on the Asus web site, which appeared to be exactly the same software, but I installed it anyway and that seemed to solve the problem.  The Mac Mini now boots up, automatically logs in and connects to the internet.  Nice one.

A few little touches to make things easier

Of course, controlling a computer from the other side of a room has its difficulties – reading what’s on the screen is a bit of a nightmare.  I’ve set the resolution to 1024×768 for now to allow enough room for everything to fit on the screen, but it does tend to make the writing rather tiny.  I know my way around the OS well enough that I can get around without needing to be able to read everything, but there are a couple of things I’ve done to make it a bit easier for other people.

The dock is on the left hand side of the screen to allow for the keyboard viewer which sits at the bottom of the screen, and is set to be pretty big so you can see the icons nice and clearly.  Magnification is on too, so the icons get even bigger when you need them to be.

I’ve also set the mouse cursor to be bigger too, courtesy of the Universal Access options.  Not too big, just a little bit larger so it’s easier to find.  Unfortunately the Universal Access options don’t appear to provide a way to make all the text bigger in the OS, like you get in Windows, but you can zoom in by pressing Control and using the mouse’s scroll wheel.  And yes, that does work if you’re using the Control button on the Keyboard Viewer.

In Firefox, I’ve installed the Fast Dial plugin to give me nine big links when you open a new tab, like Opera does, which I’ve set to go to YouTube, iPlayer and RadioTimes.  Saves typing them in each time or going through a menu of bookmarks that’s too small to see.  This plugin even gives you a screenshot of the site so you can see where you’re going before you get there.  I’ve also installed the Zoom Toolbar which gives me three handy buttons in the toolbar for zooming in and out of web pages – useful if you want to actually read what’s on the web page.

In use

Now that it’s all set up, I’m really pleased with it.  It plays DVDs nicely (and with less interference than with our actual DVD player), plays all the music shared by my G5 computer upstairs, and iPlayer quality looks fantastic on the TV – I’m not using the uber-high-quality version either.  It’s only a 21″ TV and it’s not HD, so I guess any more quality than that would be wasted anyway.

Using a mouse as a remote is a little odd, but I’d get used to it.  It does give more control than a normal remote, but of course it does lack those instant control buttons that would make pausing and skipping chapters a little quicker – with the mouse I have to move it around (to wake it up) and then find the right button the on-screen controls before I can do anything.  Still, that’s a price I’m willing to pay for now.  I could invest in a wireless trackball mouse with programmeable buttons, but I doubt I’d be able to graft those buttons into the functionality of both iPlayer and YouTube.  So, a mouse it is, for now at least.

In conclusion

I only paid around £250 for the Mac Mini in the first place (second hand on eBay), and the only additional hardware I’ve needed to buy is the DVI to S-video converter and a few more cables.  My wife has graciously allowed me to use her wireless dongle with it, on the condition that I set up her laptop to use my old USR wireless dongle while she’s at work so that she doesn’t need to worry about it.  The fruit of my labour is that this morning I sat eating breakfast watching Top Gear on iPlayer from the comfort of my sofa.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

My own conclusions seem to run along the following lines: PCs are cheap and familiar and make good home computers, but tend to get easily overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of software available and it susceptibility to viruses; Macs are beautiful and easy to use once you get the hang of them, but the insistence on top-quality hardware pushes the prices up; Linux is great for getting down and dirty with networking and programming and suchlike, but lacks the intuitive user interface for most normal people.

I was slightly dubious, therefore, when I came across this video entitled “Mac vs. PC”, inwardly groaning at the thought of yet another OS-bashing video.  However, this one takes the idea a step further, drawing inspiration from a cartoon/toy/movie franchise that claims to be “more than meets the eye”.  This video is definitely worth a peek!

Many thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for this particular link.  Good stuff.