Making beef jerky at home

A few of my more amusing workmates last week held a "jerky off" where they brought in home made beef jerky flavoured in different ways and we tasted them all.

I've tried to make jerky at home in the oven but it wasn't very successful and no doubt burnt a lot of electricity.

The secret is to get a food dehydrator. I paid $54 (plus $20 postage) for one on eBay and it arrived promptly.

It's a nifty device with a fan forced heater in the bottom that blows hot air up through the drying racks so that it exits via little vents in the lid.

Bought some beef stir fry strips, nothing special and a bottle of honey soy marinade and left the beef to marinate in the fridge over night.

In to the dehydrator first thing in the morning and six hours later we gobbled up excellent beef jerky. This thing will pay for itself after about ten batches I figure.

The only drawback is the mess to clean up afterwards. I think next time I'll put aluminium foil at the bottom of the dryer.

That dried marinade cooked on to the base is hard to remove.

Spurred on by this initial success, my daughter has now made dried apple:



and yummy dried banana:

Django 1.1 please finish it

For the past few months I've been re-writing a PHP application in Django.

The PHP application was built on a framework called CodeIgniter which looks very good shares many similarities with Django but the stuff that Django gives me "for free" is great. I personally prefer Python to PHP which helps of course.

As we move through UAT towards production I've been anxiously tracking the progress of version 1.1. Today the outstanding bug list is down to three. (And one seems pretty trivial).

The main feature I'm itching for is aggregate functions in the ORM, the other is the ability to do actions to multiple objects in admin - like delete multiple.

Yes, I could install the latest from Subversion but that's not a good thing for future support, mind you we all ran version 0.96 for ages.

Keep up the great work Django developers, and how about another podcast?

iPhone Tethering on Telstra

Can't believe I've lived without this until now.

I'm on Telstra and just as an experiment took the iPhone browser here and clicked the APN link for telstra.iph (which for me mistakenly reported it would use telstra.internet).

Went to Settings, General, Network and there is was.

Unplugged my desktop computer's ethernet cable, plugged the iPhone in via USB and a new network alert was shown.

On the Mac, all was smooth sailing.

Works great, seems very fast and low latency (under 130ms to ping Australian sites).

This is a fantastic feature and I can understand the carriers wanting to charge extra for it but how can they justify it? We pay for the data on the phone anyhow but for some reason they feel that if we use that data in one way we pay more than if we use it in another way. What possible justification can there be?

I'm not alone in this view.

Carriers - don't try to limit this! You'll make more money and be able to upgrade your networks if you step up and just meet this pent up demand.

Early indications are that if Apple really wants to block this re-configuration they are going to have to work very hard in the hacking arms race.

Having tried it, and thought about the use, a phone that tethers is infinitely superior to one that doesn't.

Great stuff Apple, I hope that all phones will follow suit.

Update

You can load settings with tether enabled for many carriers around the world, including Telstra here. You open this page on your phone by the way.

For our Tibetan readers...

We do a little podcasting around here. Just launched is a series designed to help Tibetans moving to Australia to learn some English. It's called Tibetans Talk English.

This new site is the companion to the previous series which helps English speakers learn a bit of Tibetan, called Talk Tibetan.

It was a surprise to me that there are hundreds of Tibetans living around Dee Why at Sydney's Northern Beaches.

The podcasts are constructed in GarageBand with fine audio editing in Sound Studio.

Update

The ABC's 360 documentary series had a wonderful show on Tibetans in Dee Why including co-presenter Dorgee.

Journalism changed tonight

I've been listening to Dave Winer and Jay Rosen talking about rebooting the news so I'm primed for this.

As I write it seems that the election in Iran is out of step with the will of the people but the story has come out, not in the traditional media, but via "process journalism", where the story evolves in real time rather than being presented as the full story at the end.

Despite the fact that the mobile phone network was either deliberately disabled to prevent SMSs or quite possibly overwhelmed, news is coming out on Twitter and YouTube.

The Daily Show's story on the New York Times last week was very timely. One thing the Times said was along the lines of "the Huffington post doesn't have international bureaux.." and yet tonight we see that they have the best coverage.

WWDC Keynote remote experience

I really tried to stay asleep - if you can do that, but my dreams were awash with images of tablets and new iPhone hardware with front facing video cameras for live conferencing.

Despite a cold night and having the cat on 3, I was fully awake at 4am and headed down to experience the keynote via the live blogs.

The best experience, for me, was gdgt. Very simple, elegant and a nice stream of quality information and high quality photos. The site these guys founded, Engadget, also did a good job but took the approach of posting a series of stories as soon as they were announced.

On the software side I am looking forward to updating to iPhone 3 and Snow Leopard, on the hardware side the most interesting thing for me is the 13 inch MacBook Pro but I'm still getting good service out of the original Air and will probably wait. Seven hours battery life is a whole new ball game for a laptop and they are right to say that if it lasts five years I'm unlikely to still be using it.

The experience of WWDC I really wanted was a live video stream. There was at least one, so I did get to hear live audio and poor video of the end part of the keynote.

I'd have to describe the announcements as solid but evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Perhaps they're holding back exciting new hardware for Steve's return at the end of the month?

Enjoying talks on ABC Fora

The ABC in Australia has a series of TV and radio spots that bring interesting public talks to the audience who couldn't be there. It has a rather unfriendly name of ABC Fora.

For a long time, I thought it was something to do with plants but over time I've, mostly accidentally, heard some fantastic talks from this program.

It's on TV on Sunday nights on ABC2 at 6pm and Thursdays at 5.35pm.

It's on Radio on Radio National on Wednesday at 6pm and Thursday at 3am.

Oddly, I think I've heard the 3am broadcast more than the others.

The best way to access this material is via the web here.

The podcast feed is here.

The whole project is a partnership with FORA.tv which has some great stuff.

I'm starting to find that broadcast media - TV and radio, is basically a way to find out about what's available on the Internet.

So, why do so many tech speakers begin sentences with "so"?

So, I've been listening to lots of excellent technical talks on the internet lately, Pycon 2009 and Google IO for example. Perhaps it's just me, but one weird trend stands out for me, very often speakers either begin their talk, begin a new paragraph, or begin an answer with the word So.

WikiAnswers even has an answer on this. Yes, it's not grammatical.

But why is it so common?

"So" suggests the speaker is continuing a previous train of thought. So is a conjunction that can be used to connect two clauses.

Perhaps it's a way for a slightly anxious speaker to launch into their talk with a feeling that they are already on a roll rather than starting from a cold start.

In any case, it's a redundant element at the start of a sentence, that seems to have crept into wide use. I hope it dies out.

The ability to access the content of fantastic conferences via the internet is extremely valuable. Being there is great but after a long flight can be very tiring.

I wish Apple would live stream WWDC so I could count the so's.

HDTV it's worth it: BBC Earth

We watch a lot of low definition video around here - and while content is king, it's great to see something both content rich and high definition.

For the first time, this evening, I watched the BBC Earth BluRay disk and it is really stunning.

5 years to make, 45 camera people, 2000 days in the field, 204 locations, 62 countries, every continent.

I have no idea how they did it or how the stabilised all the shots from the air but I can heartily recommend it.

Digital radio delayed in Sydney

According to the Digital Radio Plus website I notice that the launch in Sydney has slipped to June 10 "due to weather".

Having said that there are 17 channels showing up on my receiver although many are silent or just test recordings.

The station I'm most looking forward to is ABC Radio National. Here in Sydney we only get it on AM, while places like Coffs Harbour get it on FM, I'd love to get RN in high fidelity and if possible stereo.

Personally, I think stereo would be a great asset even on a primarily talk station, the guests could be arranged on the sound stage to good effect.

Unfortunately there are rumours about that not only will RN be mono but that the bit rate might be disappointing. Surely this can't be true?

Android CupUpdate 1.5 in Australia

I've been clicking settings, about, check for update every day or so and finally it's coming down. Very exciting. I had a brief play with a Google staff member's phone the other day, will report back in a couple of days.

I used the G1 for about a week after I got it but reverted back to the much smoother iPhone. It will be interesting to see what Cupcake is like.

More news as it comes to hand.

Google Wave

Wish me luck. I attempted to explain Google Wave to a general audience this morning. Not sure if I succeeded. Audio is here.

Milkshakes namespace

Lunch at Lane Cove today with a bunch of programmers. The menu made me laugh.



I thought I'd have something from the Milkshakes namespace.

Mac monitor calibration with Spyder2

At work I'm using a high resolution, but poor quality monitor.

I've tried the manual calibration in the Monitor control panel but it just made things worse.

When mentioning this to our graphic designer he said that where he works they hire someone to come out and calibrate monitors for a few hundred dollars.

On the way home I dropped by Maccentric in Chatwood (a fine store by the way) and found that a Spyder2 express was AU$169 so I bought one on the spot.

The upshot of all this is, yes it has made the monitor work better but, my goodness, this is archaic software! I presume the PC version is better.

The profile it first installed disappeared when I switched from it in Display preferences. When it installed it left an unexecutable application on my desktop - perhaps a PowerPC application? When I rebooted, a generic app bounced in the dock for a considerable time. (I've now removed it from startup items).

Great idea, reasonable price, bad Mac software.

Dell Adamo port review

On Sunday, at the mall, I had a play with the new Dell laptop, called Adamo.

I'm a MacBook Air user, but this is cute.

At AU$3,800 I was confused because those Microsoft ads promised me that PCs would be really cheap!

Anyhow, what caught my eye was that the ports on the back edge include eSATA and a full size DisplayPort socket (I've only ever seen the mini version Apple use).

Surely eSATA should become the successor to FireWire? (Given that consumer video cameras are now recording to disk so that need has gone).

At the Dell stand (no, it's not a shop) the guy took the laptop out of it's security bracket so I could pick it up and feel it. The keyboard seems very nice but that's about all I can say - it was running Windows and locked down. Even the staff couldn't unlock the screen!

(Apparently there's been a bit of trouble with folks walking around their stands leaving the demo machines on porn sites without the staff noticing).

Seems like a nice laptop, for once Apple seems a little behind the curve in the port department.

Sometimes Linux is really better

I've been very impressed with the latest Ubuntu and it seems that the polish goes far deeper than just the eye candy.

Next week I'm off to Melbourne and the office lent me a nifty 3G USB wireless dongle, a Huawei model E169, supplied by Optus.

First I tried it on the Mac, the device has an embedded USB storage area that mounts as a disk and has the software in it. It's rather clunky but functional and of course you have to eject it before removing the device.

I plugged it into a netbook running the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (but presumably it's the same in the normal mix), and was automatically shown a very friendly connection wizard.

It seems to be pre-populated with all the details you might need. Suffice to say, it just worked.

Great to see a clearly superior user experience on Linux.

RSS being ruined by huge ads

I've been thinking a lot about my use of RSS for news.

Dave Winer's recent podcasts "Rebooting the news" are fascinating to a news junkie like me.

One thing that is spoiling my appreciation of RSS is the recent appearance of very large, tall ads in the feeds.

I can understand that the sources need to make money from their news, even Rupert does, but if the ads are much bigger than the content, you drive me away very fast.

Looks like it's time for the ad blocker, but that seems to be a pity because I value my feed authors.

Settle down a bit folks!

The de-enterprising of IT

At the end of the twentieth century the most complex, sophisticated, multi-user software was in the enterprise. Banks, insurance companies, manufacturing and logistics.

Since then, the tables have turned - dramatically. The most amazing multi-user software is now outside the enterprise. Facebook, eBay, Amazon, World of Warcraft, Google Docs and yes Twitter. It goes further than just being on desktops, this highly evolved collaborative software extends out to millions of mobile devices.

But, here's the thing, the upcoming generation, the "digital natives", are growing up with this new software and expect all software to be fast, live, and truly collaborative.

When these new workers arrive in the enterprise their expectations of what software can do will not be met by what they find there. They will be deeply disappointed by the quality, usability and sophistication of enterprise IT.

We enterprise developers face a challenge that comes from our children's generation. The way we think about punch cards today is nothing compared to the disdain that they will feel about our efforts.

The challenge is to bring the best of the web collaborative experience inside, or perhaps it's better to just de-enterprise IT?

In the future.. lenses will have worse flare

Had some time to kill yesterday so I thought I'd watch the new Star Trek movie. My concern was that I'd stick out as a middle aged bloke going to the movie on his own. That wasn't the case.

It's a good film, very true to the spirit of the series and manages to include lots of the best lines and ideas, but I am getting tired of black holes.

As a photography buff, I found the excessive lens flare quite amazing.

Surely both lenses will get better (and be just liquid controlled by computer) and indoor lighting will end up just being glowing paint or panels or whatever.

Did they add this in as digital effects or did they use High Definition Lomo Lenses or something?

Anyhow, enjoyed the ride and can recommend the film.

Sangean DPR-69 Plus DAB+ review

Did a quick run-around of Sydney stores to see who has stock of DAB+ radios. In the end I picked up a Sangean DPR-69 Plus at Harvey Norman for $239.

Mine is running software V3.2.10.22195-23. I wonder if users can upgrade.

It's a reasonably compact radio, easy to get going and operate without reading the instructions (although there are some interesting features that you wouldn't guess).

Amazingly, given that digital radio doesn't launch here in Sydney for another few weeks, the radio found 11 stations: 2CH - Easy 1170, 2GB, 2SM (no audio), 2UE (playing classical music), DAB Plus 1 (the same classical music), ABC dig DAB PLUS, Nova 969, RADAR- Get On It, SBS Digital One, SBS Digital Two, and Vega 95.3.

It's funny that many of the stations have included their FM frequency in their brand, this of course is one of the reasons that digital radio or internet radio is a good idea.

The sound from the radio's speaker is pretty bad, worse than most radios of this size I have around the house. The good news is that headphone audio seems capable of excellent fidelity. The stations vary a great deal but at best it sounds terrific in decent headphones and I'd be inclined to use this radio as an input to an amplified speaker pair.

The radio supports rechargeable batteries and will automatically charge them if you flip a switch in the battery compartment.

One interesting feature is that the radio supports some sort of audio level compression internally that you can adjust through advanced settings.

On FM the sound sounds obviously worse, although I'm a little suspicious that this may be deliberate to help push the technology.

One annoying thing is that the antenna doesn't pop out so you can have it vertical while lying the radio on it's back.

Obviously overpriced but we early adopters expect that. A pity it doesn't include AM.

Welcome DAB+!

I just wonder if we couldn't have a similar receiver that picks up 3G, WiMax or Wifi broadband internet and plays internet radio everywhere.

Update

Listened to the radio on the bus to work today and had pretty good reception along the way - certainly on par with FM. At home reception is marginal, they could do with some more power.

The Advanced info button rolls the display through:

• Station crawl of info, sometimes ads


• Genre - I assume, some are pretty funny


• "Sydney MUX2 9b" whatever that is.


• Time and date


• "9B 204.640MHz" - channel and frequency


• "192kbps / MP2" or "128kbps / AAC"


• Signal strength (presumably) shown as a bar graph

The set is a bit slow to turn on, at first I thought the button was intermittent.

Battery life is said to be 25 hours on 4 alkaline AA batteries which is very poor for a normal radio. I guess the recharging makes up for that to some extent.

Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix on Acer Aspire One

Fedora 10 with the LXDE window manager has been a pretty good experience on my Acer Aspire One netbook but the release of a new Ubuntu with a "netbook remix" prompted me to give it a go.

This time I decided to install via a USB key drive, it's a very smooth and quick experience. The .dmg image file is downloaded, then (I'm an a Mac desktop here), the image is simply copied over to the USB key using good old unix dd command. In my case, like this:

sudo \
dd if=/Users/marksp/Desktop/ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img \
of=/dev/disk4 bs=1m
Password:
946+1 records in
946+1 records out
992837632 bytes transferred in 260.975185 secs (3804337 bytes/sec)
Peter-Marks-iMac-09:~ marksp$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4Unmount of all volumes on disk4 was successful

Booting is snappy, 37 seconds from power on to login screen. Probably five of those seconds are in the bios and grub's deliberate delay.

Aside from hardware support, wireless, video and sound all just worked out of the box, the big feature is that the user interface has been tweaked to be usable on the netbook's smaller screen.

On logging in you get launcher shown above, with a menu of programs on the left and folders on the right.

When you launch an application, it kind of looks like it's running in a browser tab, kind of weird but it makes sense on a small screen. You can switch to the conventional blank desktop in preferences.

Wireless comes up very fast, much better than under Fedora on this hardware.

The graphics look lovely and fonts are now first class - this used to be the thing that really made Linux desktops look second rate. There are various little animations, such as when applications launch, these are nicely done and not overused. A couple of icons are low resolution, but otherwise all looks good.

Special keys on the Aspire One such as Fn-Volume and screen brightness work as advertised.

Shutting the screen puts it to sleep quickly, on opening again, just tapping a key wakes it up and wireless re-connects smoothly. I've had trouble with this on other distributions.

I ran Firefox and was prompted to install a flash player, it offered three alternatives, the first being a Gnome flash player called Swfdec. This install failed. I restarted Firefox and tried the third option, the Gnash SWF Player. Again, this failed. The third option, the Adobe Flash player failed saying "Could not find package "flashplugin-installer". Tried to find flash in the Synaptic package manager but couldn't see it there. Hmm.

Network browsing is excellent, it showed me all the macs, pcs, linux boxes and even a shared drive on my router. Double clicking on the icon for my mac, showed that it was using ssh to connect and wanted confirmation on the key. I logged in and could browse the disk via sftp. Great stuff, and all transparent to the user.

When setting up printing, it scanned my network and found both printers. When I chose the HP LaserJet it offered to download a proprietary driver which would "enhance the functionality" by making printing faster. I said yes but it didn't do anything, possibly because in the mean time the Update Manager had noticed some software updates.

The software update came to a halt for several minutes showing a terminal and saying it was installing a new version of a sound config file while "Configuring gnome-applets". In the end it carried on.

On rebooting after the software update, wireless didn't re-connect. I shut down, figuring that maybe the card was in a bad state but on starting up I found in Administration/hardware drivers that the "Alternative Atheros "madwifi" driver" was disabled. I enabled it, rebooted, messed around, edited interfaces deleted, rebooted... In the end I disabled the proprietary driver.

Now I can see my network again, but couldn't join it.

Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix is an excellent release but at the time of writing has wireless problems after a software update. After a few more re-boots it connected again but there is something strange going on.

Update

Wireless seems ok now but the fan was running all the time so I've installed acerfand and created an file called acerfand in /etc/init.d based on skeleton.

Next I did the following to make it start on boot and at run levels 2,3,4,5.

update-rc.d -f acerfand start 99 2 3 4 5 .

Despite all this, it doesn't seem to be starting on boot.

Update 2

OK, the correct solution to the excessive fan on an acer aspire one is a kernel module acerhdf.

Now I discover that to pass parameters to the module used to involve a line in /etc/modules.conf but that's moved to /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf

I inserted this line:

options acerhdf verbose=1 fanon=62 fanoff=52 interval=10

It's working and in /var/log/messages I'm seeing:

May 17 14:10:09 marksp-laptop kernel: [  172.080423] acerhdf: Temperature is: 59
May 17 14:10:14 marksp-laptop kernel: [  177.081401] acerhdf: Temperature is: 58
May 17 14:10:19 marksp-laptop kernel: [  182.080427] acerhdf: Temperature is: 58
May 17 14:10:24 marksp-laptop kernel: [  187.080432] acerhdf: Temperature is: 57

(Yes, I'm going to turn down the interval).

Digital Radio DAB+ launching in Australia

This morning I had a chat on Radio National about the launch of digital radio in Australia.

Now, I'm a technical optimist and tend to be an early adopter of things like this - I still have a stereo AM receiver in the room for example. For some reason I detect significant scepticism about digital radio.

Perhaps the broadcasters are being spread a bit thin, perhaps local radio is all becoming a bit irrelevant in the face of streaming internet radio (which I've been enjoying lately).

I hope the launch goes well, but I'd really like to see some elegant receivers that do DAB+ and DRM (for shortwave). It looks like some interesting sets are coming, like this UniWave..

Back home, attending PyCon

I'm back home after a few weeks, spent the day getting organised.

Where I stayed had a little shop with a very bored shop keeper who spent his time doing shelf art as you see here.

On the flight home and since I've been enjoying PyCon 2009 thanks to their excellent RSS feed of presentation video or audio recordings.

There's some great material there, lots for me to learn but marred by technical issues: bad slide video sometimes, distorted or bad audio. I would pay to support better quality in the future, it's certainly worth it. Thanks to those who put this together.

While roaming I noticed my iPhone saying "EasyAccess" across the top. I have no idea what this means, anyone know? It happened several times and I'm not sure if it was a certain carrier (I hopped between several while travelling).

Great to be back but I will miss the food.

And the hi-tech refrigeration.

Newspapers are dinosaurs, RSS is for news

The cleaner here in KL asked for the newspaper the other day, she wanted to clean windows. I don't have any so she had to make do. Newspaper is particularly good for cleaning glass.

Despite years of buying newspaper mastheads, Rupert Murdoch knows that in their current (printed) form they are on the way out. "Classified revenues are undoubtedly migrating to the web, probably not to return." When he buys a paper, he's buying the brand, and that is valuable to consumers trying to pick through the noise on the net trying to find the signals.

When, in my RSS feed, I saw the headline of Steve Gilmore's post on Techcrunch saying "Rest in Peace, RSS", I figured he's probably just doing Dvorak's old trick of saying something that lots of people will angrily disagree with to drive traffic. Then later he'll claim we all misunderstood and he's really actually not mad. He did make me pause to think, so fine.

I knew Dave Winer, developer of RSS, would respond and he did so with great eloquence and use of insightful metaphor.

For my money, RSS is a fantastic foundation. Every day I get up, make some breakfast and look at my news feed in Google Reader.

I feel pretty well informed, we do get the newspaper at home and I like to flip through it, but there's not much in there I haven't already seen and there's a whole lot of stories I am interested in that are either missing or turn up days after they appeared in my feed.

The agencies have claimed that Google is stealing their news, but really what Google news has highlighted is how little original news there is. If you look at a story you'll see that it's come from a wire service and is repeated in hundreds of other newspapers.

695 copies of the same story? We don't have to do that any more!

That intelligent de-duplicating of stories that Google News does so well needs to be applied to Google Reader. I do suffer from seeing the same story spread to all my favourite sites and be repeated.

The choice is between speed and insight - I chose both but I'd like to summarise my feed down.

I hope subscriptions to wirelessly networked news reading tablets will be the business model that supports thoughtful journalism.

Printing news on crummy paper and throwing it roughly in to the garden is a technology that should have died long ago.

Now, how are we going to clean glass in the future, there's a business opportunity..

Flight of the Conchords now available in iTunes Australia

Great news, the excellent HBO series "Flight of the Conchords" is finally available in iTunes in Australia.

Apple says television shows purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store can be viewed on a Mac or PC, iPod nano with video, iPod classic, iPod touch, fifth generation iPod, iPhone or on a widescreen TV with Apple TV. Episodes are priced at Recommended Retail Price A$2.99 per episode.

It's hard to pick a favourite episode, and series two struggled to match the quality of series one, but for my money series 2 episode episode 7 where the New Zealand Prime Minister visits is so deeply funny, I've watched it repeatedly and keep noticing new gems.

"Sorry Murray, dropped off there, bloody jet-lag, what day is it? yesterday?".

"Do you like bubble baths? oh I'm getting ahead of myself, do you want to have dinner?"

And much more... watch for Barack Obama, Bono, Elton John and Art Garfunkel (I'm not kidding - well about the last one).

MP5 Player review

There are gadgets in the Malaysian electronics stores that you just don't see in Australia. Perhaps for good reason.

I picked up an 8Gb pocket video player labelled "MP5 High Clarity portable DV camera MP5 player" for AU$138.

The screen is about two inches in diameter, although the box says three.

When plugged in to a computer via the MicroUSB socket, it mounts as a storage device and you simply drag files over. There's also a socket for adding extra microSD storage.

The sliding switch is for power.

On top there's a rocker switch used for "go forward" and mode selection.

On the back is the camera and a tiny speaker said to be "Hi Fi".

The quality of the camera isn't great, here's a shot of the excellent Hartamas Regency 2 pool from my room:

This gadget has amazing functionality, badly implemented. Here's a feature list:

• Screen 960 x 480


• Plays Audio: mp3, wma, Real


• Plays Video: AVI, divx, MP4, Real


• Photo viewer


• eBook reader: just text but supports bookmarks


• Still camera: 2048 x 1536


• Video camera: records xvid


• Stopwatch


• FM Radio


• Tetris


• Audio recorder


• File explorer

Operation is obtuse at times, some functions are accessed by pressing and holding one of the buttons for a few seconds.

Battery life looks like it would play about 1.5 hours of video, certainly not enough for a movie on a flight but enough to watch a couple of TV shows.

The screen is one of those with a very narrow viewing angle side to side. The irritating thing about it is that each of your eyes sees a different version and when you go right off line the image goes negative.

I marvel at the ability of talented local manufacturers to create these devices and wonder would could be achieved if they partnered with some decent user interface engineers.

Can't tell who made it, there's no brand as I know it other than "IsMy" on the back. A bit of searching and it looks like it's from Kingdig Industrial (Shenzhen) CO.,LTD. Model Number : KD-MP4-045.

Turns out it's a Rockchip RK2708 running firmware version 2.2.

As the box goes on to say "The story continues, expand your life colourful your day with your digital player" - how could I resist.

iDisk Sync - works fine

I'm a long time subscriber to MobileMe/.Mac. Despite the rather high price, the convenience of going to any new mac and having all my contacts, calendars, and bookmarks sync over is a real time-saver.

Syncing is a hard problem. In the days of the palm pilot I used to sync with several computers and use the palm as a way to do this, but sometimes I'd end up with duplicates of everything. Great way to spend a few hours on a flight - deleting every duplicate contact.

Now that I have an iPhone, the instant syncing of new contacts and appointments is fantastic.

There's one feature of MobileMe I've never tried before, the iDisk sync to your local machine.

Normally, when you click on iDisk in Finder it magically mounts (disturbingly without an unmount button) and you drag files in and out. The Public folder is a great way to publish files on the internet to give to people (rather than trying to attach them to an email).

If you turn on iDisk Sync in MobileMe preferences, the contents of your iDisk are copied to the local computer and any changes at either end are synchronised.

I've read some pretty bad comments about this feature, and it hasn't all been plain sailing for me, I've had a few sync errors even though I'm just syncing one computer so far.

Presumably they are having to sync over a WebDAV connection and can't take advantage of rsync style optimised algorithms. It seems to spend a lot of time "checking items" when I know rsync can do this in a fraction of a second.

One interesting thing is that even though the contents are actually stored on my local disk, it behaves as a separate volume and dragging a file to the iDisk copies it as if it were remote.

It gives me a great sense of security knowing that my key work documents are available even if my laptop is damaged or lost. Combine that with a Time Machine backup and I feel more backed up than ever before.

Update

Hmm, I do run into some problems. If sync fails, while there are tips around on the net, there's no user interface to resolve these issues.

If I edit documents in the iDisk area while auto sync is enabled I get errors like this:

So after a few weeks, my initial enthusiasm has waned a bit. Syncing to the cloud like this is something I want to do, but it's a tough problem. iDisk sync is on the way, but it's not there yet.

Update - works great after 10.5.7

I'm happy to report that since the system update to 10.5.7 iDisk Sync seems to be working perfectly. I haven't seen any errors and syncing seems as fast as I would expect given the file sizes and internet speeds I'm working with.