blog has moved to France

So, it finally happened! The blog has left home and moved to France. My Dedicated server arrived this morning, and i moved the blog and this is the first post on the new machine. the machine that is running the blog is a 1.2Gz Ceneron 220, 1Gb ram, 250Gb hdd and 100mb/s internet connection. compaired to the box at home, its got more ram and hard drive space, a lot more bandwdith but processor power is slightly lacking. i am looking into upgrading to a newer box soon though. OVH's (French site, UK site here.) next box up has 2Gb ram, a dual core Pentium E2180 or a P4 3Gz with HT (i want the E2180!) and has the same amount of storage and bandwidth. we will see how this works out over the next few days. any questions, opinions, etc, leave comments!

BlogPosts: Bloggers Tools: Evernote, Twitter, GTalk and IWantSandy

So, for the last few days i have been running my blogging tasks with 4 major tools: Evernote, Twitter, GTalk and IWantSandy. These are invalueable tools, which i want to talk about today and tell you how i am using them.

Evernote

Evernote

Evernote is a great service for taking and hosting notes. I have it installed on my workstation at home, and use the web interface for taking notes while i am away. since the web service and application are linked, they all sync up. and easily too! there are versions for Windows Mobile, Java ME phones, iPhones, Windows and Mac PCs, Web Front End and more. check their downloads page for details.. The service is currently in BETA, and invite only, but your favorite blogger (me!) has 20 invites for the first people who post a link on their blog (side bar, blog roll, etc) to my blog, and send details via comments.

IWantSandy

IWantSandy is an Email Personal Assistant. The idea is simple: your given an email address to which you send requests. These requests could be "Remind me to blog about Evernote at 10pm" or "Remember Bobs phone number is 2125554542". there is a list of examples you can use here. Sandy then emails you what she heard (you can turn this off if you prefer) and then will remind you 15min before a given appointment. now, i use Sandy with both Twitter and GTalk. Twitter sends me SMS messages when i get Direct messages from someone, in this case, Sandy.

And GTalk allows me to see what is going on directly on my desktop or the web with GMail. This all works very well, and very seamlessly. IWantSandy is complety free, and all you need to do is go and sign up on the site. Since sandy talks to both Twitter, you can also send requests a few ways though this. Twitter accepts SMS messages and GTalk requests. usually if i am out and about, i can send an SMS message and if i had a GTalk client on the device, i could use that too.

small blog update

so, yesterday i mentioned that the blog is being powered by a CDN for all the Javascript, CSS and images. this, from what i can see, has hepled speed up the site. This will tide me over till my Dedicated Server arrives, when ever that will be.... :( anyway, i have updated the front page. to show full posts, not just the Excerpts. If anyone has any complaints, please leave a comment...

SimpleCDN now powering this site and the image site

So, a few days ago, I mentioned SimpleCDN, a very cool Content Delivery Company, which has a very novel approach to CDN business: one time charge. I talked about it before, and a few days back they updated their pricing for smaller files (under 100k). Well, for the last few days, I have been trying to figure out what the best way was to upload files to their site for delivery, and I have found it!

One of the features SimpleCDN offer is called AutoCDN (see bottom of the page). The way it works is by changing the URLs on your site. So, Take the SimpleCDN logo of this post as an example.

[update] removed URLs. right click the image and see the URL its pointing to.

better yet, I don't need to upload the image to their servers to host it. all I have to do is append the the autoCDN string to the front of my URLs (by the way, only works with my domain name, so no cheating!). this works great, and only involved minor tweaks to the Image hosting site! Thank you SimpleCDN! :)

CTR500 Cellular Travel Router: close, but no cigar...

CTR500

so, reading JK on the Run this morning, i found their post on the CTR500 Cellular Travel Router by Cradlepoint and though "SWEET! I WANT!" but, its missing something very important: Battery power.

if i am "out and about" in town or somewhere, with my laptop, iPhone, etc, and i am sitting in a Cafe or waiting on someone, i dont really want to spend money on their WiFi service (if they have one). Plus, if they do have one, they are usually limited to 1 device. so, i cant check email on the iPhone, download music on the iPod Touch, and lark about on the Web with the OQO all at the same time. one at a time please... So, this, if it had a battery, would be perfect! even if it only latest, say, 5 or 6 hours running, i would be very happy with it.

so, i wonder how long it will take someone to bolt on a battery pack to this...

SimpleCDN: just got better!

Yesterday i posted about SimpleCDN and talked about the price of their data structure. Any file between 0 and 1mb was charged 1 credit, which works out roughly at $1 (unless you buy in bulk). Well, today i was uploading some files for testing, and noticed i was only getting charged 0.1 credit for small files. I though it might have been a bug, but after checking their pricing page, its correct! files under 100k are now only charged 0.1 credit! concidering 90% (if not greater) of the images on my Image Hosting site are under that size, i am starting to look into using them as my CDN! now to work out how to automate the upload from C#...

Some MotorLoggr news: XMPP, Twitter, OpenID

So, I finally got my SQL server up and running for MotorLoggr. Still nothing there, but if you would like to play with an Alpha version, drop me a mail at motorloggr@gmail.com. Anyway, I have been playing with some cool stuff for the last while, and I though I should post some interesting links.

First off, Twitter. I have been using Twitter for ages, and I see that the likes of IWantSandy is using it for taking notes, etc. So, I had a look at their API, and managed to get a C# app reading data easily. all you have to do is call an authenticated HTTP page (see the API under Direct Message Methods) and you can get back JSON, XML, RSS or Atom. very nice and easy. Only problem with it is its polled...

That's where XMPP comes in! I have been playing with AG Software's agsmpp-SDK. with literally just a couple of lines of code, you can build an app that talks directly to XMPP. What's XMPP? Its the protocol that GTalk, Jabber, etc, talk. pretty cool stuff... will be looking at a bot that you can chat to and add data. I may also look into using Windows Live Agents for Windows Live Messenger...

Finally, OpenID. This is something I have been very interested in for a while now. There is a Membership provider based on OpenID, which I would like to play around with... Lets see what I can actually implement... :)

simpleCDN: Exactly what it says on the tin!

I found simpleCDN Today, and i am very interested and a bit bowled over! the idea is simple (hence the name). you upload a file, and your charged for that. and thats it. no monthly charges, no bandwidth charges, no usage charges. NOTHING! well, except the upload in the first place...

the Pricing page shows how much you pay for different file sizes. for example, files upto 1mb will cost you 1 credit ($1). 1-5mb costs 2 credits. and it goes up. 20gb will cost you only 335 credits!

So, some maths here. Say, i get back into podcasting (which i would like to do, eventually) and i do both a Video cast and MP3 cast. the MP3 would weigh in at, say, 15mb, and the video would be about 50 - 75mb. it would cost me 5 credits to upload the MP3 and 9 credits to upload the Video. but that would be it. no more charges. with S3 (as an example), i would pay a reoccuring charge of about a cent a month to host both (mp3 would cost $0.002 and the video would cost about $0.007, but amazon round up, so we say a $0.01). for each download i would be charged $0.002 per mp3 and $0.008 per video. doesent sound like a lot, right? Ok, but if i get 100 downloads of that , that works out at $0.80 for the video and $0.20 for the mp3. if the file has a "long tail" of 1 - 5 downloads a month, thats another 1 - 4c per month. hosting for the year would cost between 2 and 9c.

again, doesent sound like a lot, but after a year, this place would pay for itself. especially if your working with files over 75mb! 100 downloads of a 75mb file would cost you $1.27, 6c per month reoccuring for 5 downloads and another cent or so a month for hosting.

If you sign up, they even give you 15 credits to play with! signed up already, and i will be playing with this over the next while.

Building a New Media Centre PC, Part 2: AV receiver

So, in the previous article, I mentioned I talked about the PC part of the Media Center (I see the Media Center as more than just the PC, its the whole package). My Current setup has a Yamaha RX-V357 AV receiver and speakers (standard speakers that came with the amp). Now with the Advent of HDMI, and Multiple HDMI sources, I really need to upgrade to something with more bite (and an appetite for HDMI!).

So, not really knowing a lot about Amps and Receivers leaves me in a bit of a pickle. So, I went looking and found this article over at ECustics.com which tells you want to look for in a home cinema receiver. In the article, they talk about everything from inputs to ohms and Codecs. and in the section about Codecs, they drop a name: Onkyo TX-SR606. They mention that this will decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD (master audio) and it has 4 HDMI ports. Since 4 is the magic number (not 3 as they say) for me, this is the Amp for me. and, not only that, its cheap! So, how cheap? Well, Komplett have it currently for EUR500. and, for that price, with 4 HDMI connections and everything else, plus the fact I can get it in Black, I am very wanting this!

Next time, I will start looking at speakers. Leave a comment (they now work) if you have any questions or advice for either my Receiver or the Media Center. always looking for feedback!

MotorLoggr: Log car related costs, easily

There have been a couple of services popping up around the place allowing you to track fuel costs, etc, and it has gotten to a stage that its starting to annoy me. not because the services are there, but because of my own stupidity. Last July, I started coding my own Data Logging website for tracking Oil and Fuel consumption on my car, with the intent on making it available for public use. Well, the first checkin went in at 19.24 on the 22nd July 2007 and nothing major has happened since then...

Both the domains MotorLoggr.com and MotorLoggr.net (with both go nowhere at the moment) are registered as of the 21st July (There was some spec writing going on, but I knew the name before I started coding).

Anyway, I am here to announce the return of the project, and I hope to have a demo and prototype working by the end of the month.

Some of the ideas that this will include will be secret for a while (mainly because I am not sure of what half of them will be... :) and also for "security") but there will be web service access so tools can be written for phones, pocket PCs, desktop app's, etc. If anyone has any suggestions, please leave a comment.

PS: I would love to add a screen shot, but I am having problems with my internal network and I am not sure where my SQL box is.... Odd problem to have, I know, but hopefully i can fix it soon!

Mozy

BlogRush

My Tweets

Recent Blog Entries

Recent Comments

Popular Posts