I opted for the HTC Desire-S as my mobile of choice a while back and I’m still happy with that now, the iPhone was a contender but I really wanted to get into Android development, I still do, one day. I also have a modded HP TouchPad running android as my tablet of choice which works well, again the iPad was a contender but I got the TouchPad in the fire sale for an absolute bargain.

Anyway for my birthday i wanted a new MP3 player mostly for when out i’m running but I also have an Alpine Stereo in my car which i can hook an i-device to and the iPod nano does work very well and has great battery life. The only down side was iTunes, it’s not that great, not on Windows anyway (which is my O/S of choice) and I run Windows Media Centre at home with a lot of extenders which links in nicely with Media Player, but not at all with iTunes.

I could have done some hacks but I really wanted a simple and neat approach. This led me to MGTEK dopisp. And I have to say it works really well. I’m still in the trial right now but will most probably be shelling out the 20 bucks for the full version soon.

I also had the problem that the iTunes library was not updating when I was adding new albums to my collection. I had to clean the library data and then add the music folder again, then I lot all play lists, it was quite annoying.

The install is dead easy, now i simply plug in my iPod and sync it the Media Player, no iTunes, no problems.

More to come on this when I’ve had more of a play.

The camera worked, but it was really foggy, I cleaned the lens with a cloth that I got free with a smart phone screen cover a while back but it was still pretty bad. I decided to take it apart and found the internal sensor cover had some sort of residue on the inside, possibly from some previous exposure to moisture.

Here’s what to do:

1. Remove the 3 screws holding the external case together.
2. Remove the front circuit board from the main board, it simply pulls apart.
3. Undo the 2 screws holding the sensor cover in place. (Circled in red)
4. Clean the filter with a cloth, being careful not to touch it with your fingers.
5. Pop it all back together.
6. View in clarity.
   

This guide could have been more detailed I supposed, but there really is very little to it. Take apart, clean, put back together.

Firstly, 1&1. They are cheap, there’s no denying that, £19.99/month (+VAT) for a 1GB RAM, 20GB HDD 2k8 R2 VPS with unlimited traffic. Full remote desktop access and fairly straight forward to get it up and running. but, the support is useless, no SLA’s, they have the most miserable support staff I ever had the misfortune to speak to and although uptime is generally OK, when there’s a problem there’s zero communication and status pages are never updated. So if you don’t really care about server uptime and need a very cheap Windows server, then this is the VPS for you. I actually still have a contract with 1&1 although I’m slowly phasing it out, I have only one site left running there which should be moved in the next couple of months. I had some ASP and ASP.net sites originally with MSSQL but now everything has moved over to PHP with MySQL I no longer need the Windows box.

I also had a GoDaddy Virtual Server once upon a time, again a Windows VPS, they are also at the low end of the scale when it comes to prices, but again you get what you pay for. I was paying about £30/month for a Value 2k8 server with 2GB RAM and 30GB HDD (1TB/month Bandwidth). Again, No SLA and awful customer support and communication. On the plus site the Godaddy girls are nice to look at, but I can’t think of anything else nice to say I’m afraid. GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons likes shooting Elephants, which didn’t sit well with me so I cancelled everything immediately. Some of my clients still have a few domains via GoDaddy, personally I prefer 123-reg as they don’t shoot animals.

Rackspace, now this is totally the other end of the scale but they are seriously seriously good. They pride themselves on fanatical support and although I’ve never actually had a single problem in the 6 months I’ve been with them now, they are lighting fast at responding to any queries. They are not cheap, but you need to work out how much your time is worth, and if that time is spent well on the phone to 1&1 support and explaining to clients why certain web services are continually down. I decided my time wasn’t well spent, rather wasted, and so took out a dedicated server contact with Rackspace, via Di Schofield. I pay roughly £800/month for a Managed Cisco Firewall and a Dell PowerEdge 2950MKIII Server Intel Xeon L5335 2.0GHz Quad Core CPU with 2K8 R2, ~500GB RAID5 HDD and 32GB RAM. This includes all backups, anti-virus, additional IP’s, 100% SLA, the works. Perhaps a little over-specced for what we need but it’s nice not to have to worry about it, ever.

EvoHosting, the smallest of all the companies I’ve mentioned, but for value for money these guys really are awesome. No VPS here, just Web hosting for PHP and MySQL but it does what it say on the tin. the cPanel is a nice little touch, full of useful stats and easy to use, they also continually keep customers informed of any updates and outages on their blog and twitter feed, responses are also very quick. The packages are very reasonably priced, £8.99/month (+VAT) for 6.5GB HDD space, Unlimited bandwidth, 15MySQL databases, 15 websites and a stack of other features. I had a couple of teething problems for a few hours the other week, but other that that they have been superb.

So, there you have it.

“The BlackBerry Administration Service cannot find the records you were looking for. Verify the search criteria you specified and try again.”

Odd. I checked AD an everything was in order, I also check on Exchange and again everything was fine. after a bit of Googling, I came across this post which led me to the fix. Within the Blackberry Administration Service, navigate down to:

Servers and components – Blackberry Domain – Component view – Email

Then click on ‘Refresh available user list from company directory’. When I did this I got the error:

“The user list from the company directory cannot be refreshed because a mailstore server is not running.”

So on my BESx server I then had to set the ‘Blackberry Mail Store Service’ to Automatic and then set it running. Then when I clicked the button to refresh to available users list it rsponded with:

“The user list from the company directory has been queued to refresh.”

Sorted.

I do a little bit of running here and there, mostly in the treadmill in the gym and I really struggle to run without any music. You just can’t beat a bit of of Queens of the Stone Age to keep you going.

Anyway, I’m not sure if I just suffer from incredibly sweaty ears or something but I was really struggling to get some headphones that would stay in my ears. I tried a variety of headphones from Sony MDRX50′s to another brand that escapes me right now but were made from a gel type material. All of these fell out in under 2km, the Sony over head headphones with the foam pads worked better, but the foam absorbed the sweat and they soon fell apart. So, I bought a set of Sennheiser PMX-70′s from eBay based on some reviews that I had read and used them for the first time today.

I was a bit concerned a first that they were too big. There is no way to adjust them and they seemed to clear the back of my head by about an inch. But after trying them and running in them I no longer have any concerns. I managed 6km at lunch and these were still firmly fixed to my head by the end of it. The sound quality is fine, they are very light and I think they look pretty cool (They also match my shorts!)

Sennheiser PMX-70 - Recommended by Dave, what more could you ask for.

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.m4v : video/m4v
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.webm : video/webm

If you haven’t already seen the build post, you can view it here.

I also bought hedgy some new food, it was kinda on special offer, ish, I hope he/she appreciates all this!

Hopefully more to come…

Update:

Here’s the Fonz enjoying Spikes food:

I’ve spent a lot of time tidying up our CSS, moving images over to the CSS file and generally just making the code neat. Now that the site is nearing readyness one of the jobs was to move the images over to a sprite. For those of you unaware of sprites, first take a look at this image:

Well, that’s a bit of a mess you might be saying, but no, it’s actually quite a good idea. The idea being that when you normally load a page from a website, each image is requested and then sent to your browser separately, all these request have overhead of course. If you combine them all in to one slightly larger image then you only have the overhead of one image, so overall the data usage will be lower. As it is of course, this one image is of no real use. The clever bit is in the CSS where you basically tell it the size and co-ordinates of the part of this image that you want to use. For example:

background: url(img/my-sprite.png) no-repeat top left;
.sprite-mydiv{ background-position: 100px 30px; width: 20px; height: 20px; }

On your little blog or website with a few visitors then you probably won’t notice the difference, but you may still have fun putting your sprite together. It’s also very easy to create your image sprite, head on over to http://spritegen.website-performance.org/. Then upload a zip file of all your individual images and it will, for free, create your single sprite image and all the CSS with all the positions required.

Of course you can go nuts on site optimisation, tweaking a byte or 2 here and there, I won’t be going quite that far but I will try to make a half decent effort.

I inherited the original CSS file and I’ve since changed it quite a bit, using what I needed from the old CSS. I was after a way to quickly scan the site and strip and unused CSS from the file, thus making the file smaller, thus making the site quicker to load. I used http://unused-css.com/ to do this for me automatically and was very impressed with their site. Simply enter your site details and set it running. It will then email you once it’s complete and you can then further clean the CSS file via the options on screen and download your new file.

The original CSS file was 38.2KB, the new, cleaner CSS file was 25.2KB, so ot a bad effort.

Once the old CSS had been removed I then minified the CSS. This basically shrinks the CSS file further by removing comments and any unnecessary whitespace (I ran it at the highest setting, you will still wan’t to keep your original file for future site development). For this I headed over to http://www.minifycss.com/ and uploaded my CSS file. The new minified file size was 17.7KB, which is 46% of the original size.