Windows 8

December 21st, 2012
I’ve been playing around with Windows 8 a little. I don’t rate it very highly yet. I was impressed with Windows 7; it’s familiar but powerful. Windows 8 takes things in a new direction, and I like to see things pushing forward. However, at the moment it feels like you have 2 operating systems installed. And they gel together even less well than the various VM environments there are, e.g. for running Linux on Windows, or Windows on Mac. Some stuff only seems to be available in one of the ‘OSs’ (such as restarting the system – it took me a long time to figure out how to do that.) And the stuff that’s available in both ‘OSs’ has clunky transitions (such as applying windows updates: I started in Metro, and clicked to see more details about the 20 available updates. I got jumped into the Desktop view, and I had to click again to view the details.)

rm -rf

December 5th, 2012

Argh! I just rm -rf all my iTunes library. I feel like such a n00b.

The music is backed up (in many places, including iTunes+) and I was in the process of adding Movies and TV shows to a backup, but deleted the wrong copy.

So, me and Caroline have 3 episodes of Battlestar Galactica left to watch on the iPad, and then we’ll have to wait to watch the final season until I’ve managed to recover them.

What’s happening to the Mac Pro?

November 4th, 2011

I own a Mac Pro, and my brother has been considering getting one for HD video editing of amateur/no-budget movies. The market for the Mac Pro has been shrinking for a while with many people that would have previously chosen a Mac Pro, choosing an iMac or MacBook Pro. The recent rumours of Apple considering ending the product line has given me pause to consider what the future might be for computer users with high needs.

I’ve written a series of articles exploring the future of the Mac Pro. I’ve split it to consider the wider context separately from Apple and the Mac Pro itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Wake on LAN (WOL) for the Point of View ION 330 motherboard

May 3rd, 2010

I’ve built myself an unraid server, using an atom-based motherboard – the POV/ION330, complete with a picoPSU, so it’s completely silent, apart from the hard drives.

Getting Wake on LAN to work on the POV motherboard wasn’t particularly easy. The settings in the BIOS weren’t clear. PME is a Power Management Event. It also has wake-on-ring. I enable both, but WOL still wasn’t working. Read the rest of this entry »