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One thing it has taken me a long time to get used to with Skype is people ringing me out of the blue. I use the program a lot, to the point where, when I’m sat at the computer, or plugged into Wi-Fi with the phone, I’m showing as online. This means that people tend to call me without warning, expecting me to be ready and waiting to pick answer.
Talking
In theory this shouldn’t bother me. After all no one sends me a text message before they ring my mobile. And yet, with Skype, I was getting very annoyed when someone called me without warning.
I think this has been partly down to the loud and aggressive tone Skype ships with, but also because when someone calls I have to scramble for the headset, resulting in a wire trailing from the computer to my ear (I do keep thinking about some Bluetooth headphones, but I’ve not yet seen one I like). It certainly has something to do with the device, because Skype calls on my phone are less bothersome.
I’m still not settled, but I have worked on my initial reaction and I’ve now got as far as being pleased, although not quite to the nonplussed I am when my mobile rings. Maybe when I’ve been making calls from the computer for as long as I have through a phone I’ll be less agitated.
Over the last year I’ve come to love the little volume mixer in Windows Vista. I don’t know if it was around in XP – I didn’t notice it (and didn’t have a need for it then) – but since I’ve been using Skype more and more, and at the same time listening to podcasts, watching DVDs or playing a game, it has become very useful.
For those of you who don’t know what the volume mixer is (and I’m sure there will be plenty of friends pointing out it’s been on Mac’s since OS X and in every Linux distro’ for the last ten years), it shows you all the software which is outputting sound to your speakers and allows you to adjust how loud each on is. This is particularly useful when you are listening to more than one thing and it’s become such a staple of my computer use that it is now almost always open on the second screen.
If you are using Skype, and have all your sound coming out of the main speakers, the other thing I would recommend you get is some software to stop the microphone picking it up. I use the standard utility provided by Realtek with its motherboard chips, but if you don’t have something similar there should be plenty of free stuff around (although, for once I haven’t checked).
It really isn’t my month for software. I’ve had problems with the new Trillian and the Nokia software that synch’s my phone and now, after having doubleTwist installed for about a year I finally got around to using it only to discover it either doesn’t like the amount of music I have (on my phone or in my library), or the fact that the music files are on a server elsewhere in the house. And now, after all of that, I’ve started playing Lord of The Rings Online (LoTRO) and found out that doesn’t like my network set-up either.
The problem with doubleTwist I’m not too bothered about. It would be a useful program to have working, but, as I’ve mentioned, I got it a long time ago when it was still in another beta version and I’ve not missed it. At some point I’ll start talking to the developers and users in the forums, do some fault finding, and hopefully get it working.
Not having Trillian is annoying me, but I just need to put some time aside to get a new all purpose IM and so far other things have got in the way.
LoTRO not saving its settings is a bit bothersome though. Not only does this fail mean that all the graphics and audio options have to be put to how I like them each time I load the game, but all the keybinds have be setup again as well.
I play the game a couple of times a week, each a two hour slots (payments of sympathy for my busy life can be forwarded to overworkedbychoice@leighbarlow.com), and every time the game fills one of my screens (upsetting the resolution on the other one), asks me if I want to run DirectX 10 mode and plays the music and intro at some ridiculous volume. And each time I put all that right, then load up a character and put in all my keybinds. This ritual has already become ingrained to the point where I load the game ten minutes before everyone else just to get it all sorted.
On the plus side I have solved the phone synch’ problem, and I’m hoping there will at least be some way to load keybinds in LoTRO via a command line switch. Besides, as I’ve said before, I like the challenges these glitches throw at me (although as I type this I’ve just found out that LoTRO will just shut down if I don’t interact with it for a while, guess I won’t be firing it up early from now on [heads hits desk a few times]).
I seem to be suffering from various computer program fails at the moment. I’ve had issues with the new version of Trillian, doubleTwist doesn’t like my set-up (more on this in a later post), Lord of The Rings Online not saving its settings and now the software that synchronises my phone with Outlook has stopped working.
Nokia E71 Smart Phone
The actual synch software still seems to think it’s working fine, and has not reported any errors. This means that I don’t know when the problem started and therefore have very little idea exactly what recently installed software has caused it.
I plug the phone into the computer, the Nokia software starts, does its thing, claims it’s finished, and yet when I check the calendar or my contacts nothing has changed.
While I enjoy tracking errors on the computer this is one that I don’t even know where to start so I’m not looking forward to hunting for it. In the meantime I have that same feel I get when I know the back-up software isn’t doing what it should. It’s like watching the water get slowly higher and higher around your house knowing that at some point it’s all going to come crashing in around your ears.
As I’m always in search of new and useful utilities I play around with plenty of different beta and full release programs. If something is in beta I tend not to care if various bits of it don’t work. Even if the main purpose of the software fails I tend not to complain as I don’t run a standard set-up. What I do dislike, however, is when a full version of a program doesn’t work. And when one software company blames another I tend to lose interest completely.
Tillian is a good example.
I’ve used the software over the years in various forms while it was in beta. It proved very useful, allowing me to connect to all the different IM networks I use from just one front end. When it was finally released as a full version I didn’t hesitate to upgrade. After installing it all worked very well. The new interface proved excellent and the problems I’d had connecting to Yahoo and ICQ had vanished. Then I loaded iTunes. Fifteen seconds after minimising the music program it popped up again.
As I have a hot key one the keyboard linked to loading it, I presumed I had caught this while typing. I minimised iTunes again and carried on working. Fifteen seconds later it appeared again. I knew I hadn’t done anything to cause this and Trillian was the only new software I had installed in the last week, so I was instantly suspicious of it. I undertook the usual error checking procedure: closing both programs; running them separately; re-installing Trillain; changing some of the preferences. All of this pointed to the new utility causing iTunes to appear whenever they were both running. Worse than this, if the iTunes window was open the focus would be switched to it.
As I now knew what the problem was I decided to check the company’s forums and help sections, hoping to discover a solution. It only took a quick search to find a number of other people who had flagged up the same issue. The response was that the problem lay with iTunes and Apple had decided not to fix it.
Now I’m Traillian is entirely right, and it is poor coding by Apple, but they don’t appear to offered a fix for the issue and so the two programs cannot coexist on my machine. I am therefore left with the choice of ditching iTunes or Trillain. That is now a difficult decision.
I’m sure, as is nearly always the case, Trillian has made a commercial decision and the loss of a few sales is far less than the cost of changing their software. Sadly it doesn’t leave me a happy user, but that is life (and, yes, that’s five hundred words of me just moaning, but every now and again I’m allowed to).
It’s all very well getting a 500Gb USB drive for $80 (£50), but what if you don’t need that much storage space? More to the point what if you want to spend a lot less cash.
Dead Hard Drive
Given the prices of half and one terabyte drives, for a small amount of money you should be able to get lower capacity drives. Sadly now they rarely come in anything less than 250Gb and when they do they are only a few price points cheaper than the 500Gb ones. For example, I found 120Gb drives selling for $50 and £35.
If you step down to USB sticks you find they are not only very expensive in comparison but they are difficult to find over 32Gb.
Hopefully with the advent of SSDs the sticks and memory cards will catch up, but in the meantime, cheap, low capacity, external USB drives are hard to come by.
Dead Hard Drive
My back-up strategy has still been bothering me. Not because I keep forgetting (it’s all automatic), and I’m not concerned about the copy corrupting either (I have the original and two others), but because all the data is held in one place.
I’ve finally decided to solve this by using an online back-up service. There are plenty of choices, all with numerous good reviews. What I’d not looked at before were the synchronization services. The advantage of these is that not only are my files being saved online but I can also access them from any computer with Flash installed.
After reading some good reviews I decided to try out Syncplicity. An extra selling point of this one is that I get 2gb of free space (up to 5gb if I refer friends) and as I’m a writer and all I need is a bit of space, this works for me.
As with any back-up service, the only way to really know if it works is to wipe out all your other data, and, unsurprisingly I’m not willing to do that. I have checked out various MS Word documents and the synchronization program that runs very quietly in the background appears to have worked.
All in I’m very happy. My data is backed up at home and now it’s also on the net; so if my house burns down I’ve still got it. And all this is being done without me being involved.
My name’s Leigh and I play a MMOG (massively multiplayer online game).
These days this is nothing special, every man and his son plays Counter Strike, Halo online or World of Warcraft. Gone are the times when it was a past time talked about in hushed tones.
Halo Online Screen Grab
The one I play is a super hero based one called City of Heroes. Don’t worry, I don’t actually want to be a super hero flying around in spandex any more than the majority of people who play Halo want to be space marines. (Well, if I happen to be bitten by a radioactive spider and find out I can climb buildings and shoot web from my wrists I’m not going to complain.) I play this game because some of my friends do.
Each week, for a couple of hours, we all sit down at our computers, fire up the game and arrange a conference call on Skype. We spend our time doing missions in the game while laughing at each, talking about other stuff and generally catching up. If we weren’t doing it while we played this particular game we’d be doing it while playing another. If we didn’t play any online games we’d have the same conversations sat in a bar (except for the fact that we live in different cities).
For some people it’s all about the game they play, and I won’t deny that if the game was particularly boring we’d stop, but, for us, it’s as an excuse to talk without being bothered by child or partners.
A report about how teenagers consume media showed an interesting similarity in use. Games consoles connected to the internet are used by teenagers in favour of mobile phones when they want to talk to their friends. (See the report here.) For these young people it is mainly due to cost, but it led me to wonder how many more people will be using games as a form of social interaction with real life friends now that those games are not restricted to hardcore gamers. After all, sitting on the phone talking to a friend for two hours is not as acceptable as having time set aside to play a game with a friend. I could even be suggested that this type of activity is more acceptable than meeting at a friend’s house for a poker night.
A couple of weeks ago I came back home after a few days away to find that my media server wasn’t working. This is not unusual. The machine runs Windows XP and I have it set to run auto updates and re-boot if it needs to. I also have a password set at the sign-on screen so if it has restarted itself a small amount of manual intervention is required.
Dead Hard Drive
This time, however, when I attempted to use VNC to access the machine I got no response. I did have a screen plugged in to help solve problems like this, but the key word here is ‘did’. Recently the screen was attached to my main computer in the study so I could play around with multi-monitor options.
The fact that server was dead didn’t mean I couldn’t access my data. I’ve been rather sensible over the last year and added not only a second drive to the machine, but also a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device to the router. Each night everything on the server is copied to that second drive and to the NAS. The fact that the machine wouldn’t re-boot just meant that I pointed the other computers to the NAS and things were back to normal.
When I did get around to plugging in a screen I found that the main hard drive had failed. What I’m now left with is a box in the cellar that won’t start up, one hard drive that won’t work and a secondary hard drive which I can’t access because the machine won’t boot from it.
I’ve ordered a new hard drive, but the pain is going to be unplugging everything carrying the box up stairs, fitting the new kit and re-installing the OS. I think what I actually need is a rack mounted system with hot swappable drives the automatically format themselves with a drive image when plugged in.
Then again, this is only a small home set-up, so maybe I’m letting my general laziness get the better of me.
Pasting something between different programs on a computer used to be simple – you knew that as annoying as it was all the formatting you had done was going to vanish. Then, a few years ago things started to change. Web browsers became things you ran applications in, not just programs you used to view html pages. Along with this came a drive to preserve formatting, so that should you want to paste something between Google Docs and Gmail the underlining and the bold didn’t go away.
Formatting
Other software also joined in and now we have the other extreme. Something written in Word or OpenOffice, can be pasted into Gmail or WordPress and the magical formatting pixies make sure everything looks the same.
Except this isn’t what I wanted!
I don’t want the font type and size or the colour of the text to be copied across to an email just because I’ve drafted something in Word (because it checks spelling and auto-corrects stuff on the fly). What I want is nice, simple, plain text to appear in the email window. And don’t even get me started on what happens when you copy email addresses around.
The result is that Notepad is getting used a lot more because that wonderful little program doesn’t let the formatting pixies play in its garden. Long live Notepad.
