@nechbi

Well, I can’t believe that it has been nearly a month since I last updated this site, where has the time gone? I feel very bad for leaving you all hanging..

It’s also this time last year that I was on by big adventure of the West Coast of America.. awww happy memories, also sad ones too…

I have had my K750i for nearly a month now – still loving it, It does appear to crash from time to time, especially when I am trying to transfer images from my phone to my Mac using Bluetooth – but other than that I am pleased with it.

I have upgraded this site to use the new Movabletype 3.2. The interface is slightly different, but as I upgraded a while ago, I haven’t gotten around to playing with it properly..

I hope to resume to normal operastion soon.. Until then bye for now…

I have started to have a play with Flickr, as you will probably have noticed from the addition to the homepage. It’s a great way to be able to store and share your photographs.

I took a look at this ages ago, but didnt really spend very long on the site – not really sure why?

I am getting into the whole photography thing big-time at the moment hence one of the reasons that I am getting a Sony Ericsson K750i. I have over 3,200 digital photos organised in iPhoto on my mac, and I found that the hardest part was getting them from there onto a website.

Since my trip to the USA last September I have tried a few different methods to put my holiday snaps up online. After my trip to Portugal last month I created a new blog in Movable Type as a location to store my photos, but it doesn’t really work.

So I had a proper look at Flickr. Somebody has created an iPhoto Export plugin that make the whole process a piece of cake. The beauty of this is that it takes all of the keywords assigned in iPhoto and passes them onto Flickr to use as your tags. Great!

After an initial play with Flickr, I signed up! I like the amount of control that you get over your photos by making them public & private, as well as assigning them to family or friends..

This is a great website – I don’t understand why I didnt use it before…

All has been a bit quiet recently, as I have been away basking in the Portugal sun for 9 days, in a rather nice town called Albufeira. It’s so great to be back to the usual dull, drab, wet British Summer… NOT! In typical fashion I hear that there was a bit of a heat-wave when I was away!

The holiday was just what I needed – a total chill-out, relax on the beach, drink-a-little-bit affair… So different than my marathon sightseeing adventure of last year!

Oh well back to reality..

The hit US show Lost will finally be shown here in the UK from August 10th on Channel 4.

This is nearly a year after I saw all the promotional billboards during my trip to the USA last September! I have heard so much about it during my trip and on various websites since, and have started to wonder if it was ever gonna be shown here in the UK…

Seems that Channel 4 changed their mind from showing the series back in January because of the success another ABC show by the name of Desperate Housewives.

Roll on August..

The whole point of this exercise was so that we could make use of modern technology to keep in touch with my other-halves family some 4 & a half hours away up country. It seemed a pretty simple solution, as we both have computers and broadband – all we both needed to get was a webcam.. or so you’d think….

You may want to read Part i & Part ii for the story so far…

So after finally getting the webcam to work with my Mac I tested iChat with one of my friends who has a PC and uses AOL. Although he is still only on a dial-up connection we were able to use the video fine, if but a bit jerky.

Things of course were not as straight forward when it came to trying to connect to the people that this whole exercise was about..

I got them to install AIM Messenger and set-up an account. Then when it came to connecting via video we had all sorts of errors to include:

“(My Buddy Name) did not respond” and “No data Received in the last 10 seconds”

I tested the set-up at home connecting to my other halves eMac, and even my old PC – both worked a treat!

I found a Video Conference Tutorial for iChat and AIM which had a stack of useful tips in getting iChat & AIM working. There were a load of references to Firewall setting in this and other articles I have read, but was sure that it couldn’t be that because I had already successfully connected to somebody outside my network on AOL.

I found that Apple had a couple of automated test AIM accounts for testing video. I connected to one of these, and everything worked as it should. So it definitely couldn’t be a Firewall issue.

After reading on a bit more of the iChat & AIM Tutorial, I found this:

If you are experiencing a variety of problems with iChat 3 after upgrading to Tiger the next thing to try is trashing the preference file.

I did this and initiated a video conversation, it failed. But they then initiated a video conversation with me – and IT WORKED!! I was almost taken-a-back when I saw my video window minimize and present me with a smiling face of my other-halves Mum!

Now thinking about it, when I had previously chatted to my friend who has AOL, I was unable to initiate a video conversation with him, but he was able to with me… Odd? My next thing to look into – But hey it works!!

Now I just need to get my other friends onto AIM – You know who you are!

While I was on a roll with all things webcam, I started to look into trying to get my Wireless Internet Camera connected to my Mac.

The problem is that D-Link in all their wisdom have devised some proprietary Active-x Plug-in that means that the streaming video output by the camera is only viewable via Internet Explorer on a PC. Seems pretty daft really, as they are selling the camera as a security product, you’d think that they would make it accessible from any platform, anywhere?

I emailed them a couple of times months ago to see if they had any plans to open up their product to other platforms, say Pocket PC, but got a very firm negative response from them.

Since then, as you know, I bought my Mac Mini and of course the product does not work with that. I did try using VLC Media Player with no success. A little disappointed but not too concerned as my main use of the camera was from work to check on the dog.

Anyway, to get back to my opening line about being on a roll with webcams, I stumbled across a product called EvoCam yesterday that claimed that it would connect to my particular Internet Camera – Would you believe it – it actually works! Not only does it stream the video BUT it also allows you to pan & tilt the camera.. Nice One Evological!

I just love it when technology works as it should!

After the hassles of finding a Mac compatible webcam, I believed that things would be plain sailing from now on – how wrong was I….

I plugged the new device into my Mac Mini and installed the drivers found on the accompanying CD. ..So far so good.. I launched the Logitec application that had been installed, and there I was looking at myself on my LCD TV! Everything works as expected!!

I am a big user of MSN Messenger, and was aware of the HUGE limitations of Messenger:mac (Shame on you Microsoft!). As it does not provide video messaging like the PC version has done for years I turn to Apple’s iChat.

I have read many-a-good-review of the new iChat provided in Tiger, which uses AOL’s AIM network, and was keen to see it in action. I dug out an old AIM account that I had from yesteryear (from my AOL days back in the late 90′s) and after a few attempts at remembering my password I was logged in.

Opening the preferences for iChat, I loaded the video settings to be confronted with a “No Camera Found” message. That’s odd I had just used it a few minutes ago using the Logitec Application. After a spot of Googling I found to my horror that iChat only supports Firewire and not USB webcams!

OK, not to be too fazed by this I downloaded AOL’s AIM for Mac to see if I could use that.. Again, like Messenger did not support video!

So I resorted to a spot more Googling and found a link to iChatUSBCam a small program that enables USB cameras in iChat. I did have to download the older Logitec drivers to correct an issue with slow refresh rates, but other than that it works a dream!

I have still yet to test the camera with a ‘live’ person on the other end as I have been busy, so you may find a Part iii to this story..

I can appreciate why people are so reluctant to switch to a Mac – Yes the operating system is far superior to Windows, but it’s the whole incompatibility issue that holds a lot of people back. If Apple want to make iChat a success why limit the types of camera you use? For me this especially seems to contradict their whole Mac Mini concept of a PC user switching to a Mac will have their own keyboard, mouse, monitor – WHY does this exclude webcams?

There is an online petition about this issue – go sign your name!

I have been thinking of getting myself a webcam for my Mac Mini for a little while now – with Apple’s iSight being my desired choice. Unfortunately with its £99 price tag its rather more than I’d like to pay for a webcam.

Looking around for an alternative to the iSight, I started by flipping through the Argos Catalogue. The choice of webcams are huge – ranging from the very cheap 20 quid cams all the way up to the more advanced and expensive. On closer inspection I was surprised to see that my options were in fact somewhat limited. All worked with Windows XP but ONLY 2 were Mac compatible!

The Cheapest was the Logitec QuickCam Pro 4000 but at £80 was only a fraction cheaper than Apple’s own offering.

After that I decided to leave the idea of getting a webcam until..

I went to PC World during the Bank Holiday weekend. I had a quick look to see what Webcams they had to offer. After a picking up numerous boxes to see if they were Mac Compatible I picked up the box for the Logitec QuickCam Pro 4000, I looked at the price – £39.99. Could this be correct? was it the same webcam that Argos had for £79.99? It turns out that it was; a special promotional offer of £40 off until 31st May!

Thank-You very much, this will do very nicely!

I knew that I wouldn’t be able to resist for very long.. I have now upgraded my Mac Mini from Panther to Tiger.

Not a very dramatic upgrade to be honest, OK Spotlight is neat, as are the Dashboard Widgets, but at the end of the day the relatively small enhancements to the other bits of the OS make the move from Panther to Tiger similar to a move from Windows 95 to 98. Nice but not earth shattering.

It’s still a first class operating system, and I don’t think that I’ll switch back to Microsoft again in a hurry – I am even selling my PC – as I haven’t used it since I bought my Mac..

After updating to MT 3.16, I still was unable to turn off Trackback Pings for all the old entries that had it turned on.

I really did not relish the thought of having to manually visit a hundred or so entries to disable Trackbacks, So I did a spot of Googling.. and found this rather helpful page. As you are unable to update all your entries from within MT – why not do it using SQL… What a great idea, I hadn’t thought of that – obvious really… So thats what I have done:

UPDATE mt_entry
SET entry_allow_pings = 0
WHERE entry_allow_pings = 1

Let’s hope this will stop those annoying Online Casinos from SPAMMING my website. It should also make my webstats a little more readable!!