So I started looking for a new pair and to my surprise discovered Sennheiser was nice enough to have brought out a new model. The PX 100 II’s.  They have had a slight or not so slight update around the edges. I think the main things are:

• Broader and tighter headband
• One-sided cable with other ear cable going through headband
• Updated speakers
• No more case (but a nylon bag)

After searching the Internet there were lots of reports either way. Some said the sound was too basey, others said the sound was great. So after a couple of weeks of listening to them I think I can add now my own analysis.

1. The sound is slightly different. In my opinion better and still the stellar PX 100 sound. A+
2. The single cable connect thing is an absolute godsend! Just for that I’d buy them. No more feeling for the three dots to know where left is A++
3. I like the firmer headband. It’s better when listening lying down and it feels much more sturdy in general. A+
4. Downsides…..none.

Looks again like I’m a fanboy. I didn’t really set out to be one, being very cautious because of the different reports. In the end they just blew me away as the original PX 100′s did at the time.

One week later my old headphones turned up and now I have both. So far haven’t touched the old ones. The II’s are just so much more convenient and easy to use. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say about headphones but Sennheiser made them so much more usable. I am very thankful I did end up buying these even though the old ones turned up again. I am even thinking of selling my old ones because I can’t think of where I’d like to use them anymore.

So there you go. My fanboy endorsement for the NEW Sennheiser PX 100II’s.

I started using Ubuntu in earnest with 8.04 and 10.04 will mark 2 years of using Ubuntu at my work desktop. I am a Mac fanboy but in the office I have the choice Windows 7….well that is about the only choice. I decided to go rouge and run Ubuntu way back when. It works quite well for me in conjunction with CrossoverOffice. There are definitely nigglies and I wouldn’t suggest running it at work if you’re not IT savvy. Running it as home OS is a lot simpler because you are not dependent on Microsoft back-end services.

Anyway 10.04 is about to drop on us and it is a LTS release (Long Term Support) which is nice. It has lots of new cool features and the design has improved a little too. So have fun using it!

It costs about $370 to get a certification and another $125 every year plus a 3-yearly retest at $170 to remain certified. That is $1165 for 5 years or $2130 for 10 years. And that’s only certification. No courses to train and no materials.  Just imagine spending that money  on books! I think they’d teach you a bit more than the cert ever can. You can even specialise on your topic and not be over generalised.

Once you’ve read those books & invested the time to understand them you can’t tell me an employer won’t take you. By that time you should be a real expert in your field. Nobody will have charged for a piece of (unbound)paper and the know-how gain is all your doing. It gives you an immense sense of accomplishment. You’ll still go to training courses and conferences advancing your know-how. If that is not what you’re doing already I’d guess you shouldn’t consider yourself an interested expert in your field anyway.

I do agree that it is difficult for companies to recognise a good employee/candidate. It takes proper screening and good interviews with intelligent questions. The certification organisations  try and convince you that their cert gives you the assurance of quality and standardisation. Well….do they compensate for losses if that is not the case? If not, what is the use? Have I checked that the certification complies with the standards of my company? If not, are my standards wrong? Will that person then fit my company?

I think certifications (I do exclude product related certs here!!)  are  just an easy way out for companies employing people. They think if the cert’s there they can go and blindly employ. Of-course it is ideal for recruitment agencies and managers. You can rest assured that you’re promoting someone good – yeah right! So employing is: Person is alive – tick, has a CV – tick, can spell IT – tick and has the right certs – tick. Done. An employer that does that will only get my services if I’m really desperate (and even then I’d rather not). For all involved parties it is good to remember that employment is a two-way road. The candidate chooses the company as much as the company does the candidate.

I like to be challenged and prodded in an employment process. No cert is ever going to save me from curve-balls in real employment meetings. Only my know-how and education will (and education can be obtained by several means not only the institutionalised way. See www.buccaneerscholar.com for more detail). What an employer is/should really be looking for is engagement and interest. Without those you have a working drone (which sometimes could be what you really want but most of the time not). Where is the cert qualifying engagement and interest?

When I have people apply for a job that have an ISTQB certification for example, there are two groups that  I can discern:

1. Those that have been dragged there by their companies (and have never thought about what they are doing)
2. Those that aren’t good testers and need something that will give them a foothold

I have yet to meet someone who has taken the exam that admits to stand behind the ISTQB certification. I am guessing the same thing will happen to ITCP. Certs in my opinion are actually a qualifier for mediocre abilities and/or a disinterest in my profession. If I’m good then a certification is an insult to my abilities. If I’m not a cert won’t help me to become better it will just show that I’m as good as any other of the thousand cert-Joe’s out there. I’d be better advised to do something spectacular, amazing and outright creative with my time. No matter what it is as long as it has some relevance to my job and I can speak to it. It will get you the job.

So why do these organisations not make a course with an exam and stop calling it a certification? Then everybody who thinks this course is a good idea can take it  and those that don’t can stay away without getting a stigmata? By pushing it as a certification and even going down the path of trying to make it mandatory it just plainly looks like an IT-Tax…. I wanna work in IT so I have to pay $$$ and we’ll do an examisomething so that it has a hint of legality – yeah right!

Maybe someday someone will change my mind but I doubt I’ll ever warm up to certification. Remains the hope I won’t be run out of town anytime soon.

Over the next year I predict that I will need another 2-6TB of storage to cope with added data volumes (I intend on starting to film in 1080p resolution which is about 4GB for 15min of video). Currently the largest available drives are 2TB at a cost of about $300. The issue is not with the drive itself though. It is about how and where do I connect the drive to the network.

External USB/FW drives are too slow for real use (they are OK for incremental local backups though). So the remaining solution is some kind of NAS. My HTPC/Mac (see below) will fulfill that function. It is attached via 1Gbps Ethernet and has six drive bays available and a large power supply. The unit already sports a 250GB boot drive and a 1.5TB data drive.  The issue is that with that all the SATA ports on the Atom board are used. So the next drive will have to be attached to an extra SATA PCI card (which will have to be Mac compatible).

The new Snow Leopard also supports wake-on-use. That means the machine will wake on access of a drive. Currently I still need to wake it manually via WoL. Remains to be seen when Snow Leopard (10.6) will be “available” on the Intel Atom boards with all needed features supported.

The issues I have with data in my private home start to mirror what has been happening for quite a while in the datacentres. Not only does that mean I need ever more technical know-how at home to cope but it also means that something like the solution below gets interesting.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

This is of-course too large for private use but it does solve some of the issues you might encounter when building your own NAS.

One other thing that is hugely annoying in NZ is the lack of broadband flatrates. This effectively prevents you from performing sorely needed and large off-site backups. Currently I solve this problem by storing a USB hard drive off site. This HDD contains a copy of the most important data that I have (by no means all the data!).

So, what have you done for your backup today?

You’ll have either 5,10 or 20GB cap. So that only means that you’ll reach your download limit on the second of each month and not the fourth! What is it with peoples craze for speed? It’s the same stupidity as with the fiber-optic cable to the curb. We don’t need any of that if we’re going to d*ck around with these outdated data caps. What needs to go is the Telecom bottleneck-monopoly of the Tasman cable (Kudos to Kordia for wanting to install that 2nd cable).

If we had free market conditions on the international data highway we’d have no caps, it would make sense to up the bandwidth and private companies would invest in infrastructure.

But we have a Telecom controlled monopoly so nothing happens and now taxpayers have to cough up $1.5bn so that we can get some cables in the ground only to find out that they won’t solve any of our issues.

So go Telstra! 100Mbit will not really bring us any advantage. Give us a flatrate and keep it at 10Mbit!!!

After a lot of searching and reading I stumbled across Carl and his ledstuff.co.nz website. He really helped me select what LED lights I needed and has been very helpful. After sales service was also excellent and no-fuss-quick. So if you have any LED lights drop by his website and see what he’s got. Even if you haven’t thought about using LEDs before have a look. I think you’ll be amazed at what can be done today.

Also a good address for LED torches for that earthquake bin.

My overall Internet/phone bill (not mobile!) is about $1500/year. That’s a LOT of money and with the average kiwi income being $38,000 that’s prohibitive. Never mind if you’re rural. And I think 10-20GB is the norm for a household or will be very soon. We’ve now got all this talk about fibre-to-the-home but without descent cheaper plans this will go nowhere at all. I think the government should focus on the current broadband, push the technology and force the GB price way down or even force cheap flat-rates. They should take a cue from Sweden (one of the countries NZ government loves to compare itself to). Have a look at this.

I’ll just quote the most interesting part…

Hmmmm…. So pretty much everyone is getting a better deal than us ($=USD!).  Even if it is more expensive they are getting more bandwidth and no download limits. I’d be happy if I could get 5/50 without a limit. Pretty much anything without a cap would be great so that I can finally stop worrying in the last week of a month.

Let’s see when CityHop will have them….

I’d say that is a very nice reason to loose the fumes. Does a 150mph and a 150 miles per charge (probably not at 150mph though). The motorbike is called Mission One and is probably the fastest electric bike around at the moment. Have a look at the website for more pictures. Although I don’t want to see the price tag…..yet.

IKEA is a household name all across the World. All the World? No. Two small islands in the Pacific resist the trend. New Zealand has NO IKEA! Here in NZ we live without the cheap but quality goods. Especially Europeans miss their favourite furniture store.

There are hundreds of rumours around the so-called Auckland-IKEA. It’s probably more elusive than the Loch Ness monster.

Judging from the demand I see I can’t explain why we don’t have one. NZ’s furniture prices are astronomical and the quality is cr*p (if you don’t plan on spending your months wages on one chair). People even resort to fly to Sydney and go to the IKEA there and ship it to NZ. So an Auckland store would at least pull all of the north island clientele.

But on top of that reading this article it might make sense from another perspective…. meeting Kyoto.I can’t see our current suppliers of furniture being very environmentally friendly. IKEA seems to have hit the nail on the head. They are going in the right direction with their cheap but not at any cost program. And I think the consumer is at that crossroads now. We want affordable furniture (and anything consumable for that matter) but we want to be environmentally friendly and get quality stuff. IKEA falls into that category as does Apple, Toyota Prius (although that’s debatable) and others. So far I don’t see those companies not succeeding. Just the opposite.

Why is there only a small percentage of these companies? Why are consumers not pushing the obviously winning strategy? Why don’t we have an IKEA? Is there a petition somewhere? Does this need to go on a political agenda?

(linked image from Inhabitat)

You would be able to find offline GMail in the Google Labs tab in your GMail settings. For more details have a look here.

I’m probably not the right customer for this as I’m always online if I sit in-front of a computer but maybe this allows my wife to switch. She’s the one using the laptop. I will still give it a good go though. Who knows, the next internet-cable-cut maybe just around the corner.

I think this is a huge and important step for Google. If this works it is the corner stone that will be used to gun for Microsoft Office. This technology can then finally replace office software completely. Even companies could now join in (provided you’re not bound by legal issues of storing information off-site). I hope Google will be clever enough to provide this as one of their appliance kits as they do with their search-pizza-boxes. I know I’d love to leave Exchange behind too.

How can a company stoop that low? Not only do they sing awful but the whole idea is just frightening. Just imagine what will happen on youtube! There’s a reason why making music should be a challenge. Not everybody is made for making it. SO DON’T GIVE THEM THE TOOLS TO DO SO!

Anyway I just thought I’d share even if I had to think long and hard if I would. This exercise could have affected your ears permanently.

Oh and odd, that 75% of the notebooks shown in the ad are “old” MacBook Pros.

For me that was always the critical issue with VirtualBox. At work I use VMwae for most of my stuff and on my Ubuntu box I use VirtualBox. So I could never use the same VMs. Now I can! How cool ist that?! So for all those not happy with VMware Player or the VMware Server 2.x here’s your answer. I’d probably also say now that VirtualBox does snaphots too there’s no big reason for going VMware Fusion or Parallels.

I tried GIMP and it didn’t quite catch my fancy. I use it at work where I run Ubuntu but on the Mac it’s a little behind the times (not the features but the interface). So about a year back I got myself Pixelmator. At the time it was still version 1.0.x state. Even then it was already quite impressive. The current version is 1.3.2. Using most of the native and quick Apple CoreImage routines and the ImageMagic tool-set it really offers quite a bit to the amateur image editor. In Q1 2009 there will be the version 1.4 of Pixelmator and I can’t wait to see what goodies were added.

Pixelmator is not PhotoShop but it is enough for what most people need. In combination with iPhoto I think most of us have all bases covered. Pixelmator has a good chance of becoming a major contender. I hope they keep the price where it’s at currently and cater for the normal Mac users. So go and download the trial version and have a play.

No problems at all! So I’m quite happy. Even my theme (Amazing Grace) and all the plugins worked. The BackupWordPress plugin still didn’t work. No idea what’s wrong. Tried a lot of things but definitely a no-go. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. For now I’ll just manually backup my data…

The new interface is great but somewhat bright/light. All those shades of light grey! Oh well it’s not a biggie. Apart from that nice new features. Especially all the auto install plugins and auto update thingies will make my WordPress life easier.

So yeah, happy to be on 2.7! Just hope it stays stable.

This picture details who has what. Read the full interpretation here. I just find it a beautiful way to see this data. What I also see is a LOT of free space. So where’s the shortage of IPv4 addresses?! Why again do we have to switch to IPv6 (apart from that it makes sense)? Maybe I’m missing something….

Because bacteria love keyboards (some urban myths even say keyboards are less hygenic than your average toilet) I do like to clean mine in regular intervals. With the Apple type keyboards it’s now become pretty easy. Take a damp cloth with a bit of cleaning fluid (not too aggressive) and wipe. Easy as. But what about the common keyboard in the office?

I still have a Siemens-Nixdorf keyboard I like a lot (also low profile) but which fell prey to a coffee some time ago. Most of the keys around the right shift key started to stick. No cleaning helped alleviate that issue. I even took the keys out and tried. From time to time I read about the people that put their keyboards in the washing machine. As much as I’d like to believe it were that easy I thought my Nixdorf wouldn’t survive that. So I took it apart first to investigate if a dishwasher was an option. In the picture blow are the parts.

On the top object which is the back shell you can see rectangular openings around the circumference. In there are plastic hooks that hold the whole keyboard together. Release those with a plastic or wooden object. Don’t use metal (like I did) because that will damage the plastic shell. There are basically four pieces (note the fifth is the plug for the cord). The bottom one is the keyboard contact sheet. On closer inspection you will see that on the surface there are silver-metal contacts that the rubber sheet (3rd from top) closes when depressed. I think these would be the contacts that would not survive a dishwasher. They look like they would start to oxidise once they got wet.

So I washed the keyboard cord and the keyboard cover (2nd from top) in the top drawer of my dishwasher ate 45 degrees Celsius. I didn’t remove any keys. And I let the dishwasher use the dry cycle too. Then I let the washed parts dry. Depending on weather and means anything from hours to days is appropriate. Then re-assembled all parts.

The keyboard works like a charm again. The whole procedure was a full success and I think most keyboards would survive this treatment. I did notice a slight discolouration of the keyboard but I believe that is just due to the age of the keyboard itself.

So yes, a dishwasher can make the cleaning of a keyboard much more fun and less tedious than cleaning each key. Now I’ll try with my IBM keyboard…..