Stuart James ( Tooey )

A Window 7 desktop gadget under a little load the usage graph is pretty much useless... this view is at 120% not sure how much screen estate I can give to it.

I am the occasional listener of TWiT(This Week in Tech), I was listening back to a previous weeks podcast while doing some work and they talked about open beta for gdgt.com, and as you do thought I would go sign up and have a play.

So I created a profile, and added a few devices that I own. After a few minutes though I started to wonder why I was doing it. Reviewing products is nice but either professionals do it, or people like me blog about cool tech they have and they want to add their own two cents. Why would I really want to go on to another site other than to join all the information together and organsie it in one location. That might be reason enough you might think, but pretty much anyone that writes anything about a product does it for some sort of recognition. By putting any effort into a site like this it seems I am basically giving my time away for little to no recognition other than to make a number go up on their site.

Maybe if more of my friends were using it I would use it more but with current missing integration to Twitter and Facebook it doesn't have the social competitive drive to make me spend much time writing on a site that doesn't link back to my own.

We shall see with time how it develops, it is a little mean to critisise a site that clearly displays it is in beta. But when its open beta its fair game in my book also I have added two links two to their site in this one post, not bad even if it isn't an amazing review!

Just under a year ago I got a Dell Streak this updated the way I use my phone before this point I was on a Nokia E90 after breaking a few XDA style phones over the years prior. So I am not new to the smart phone industry but as with most techies changing onto an Android/iPhone/Windows Phone 7 was a change of user models.

Well last Tuesday I took my Dell Streak into O2 for repair since it had developed an annoying problem where, when you placed it on the table or put pressure on it in pretty much any way it decided it was a good time to restart. As a replacement they gave me a Samsung feature phone...

I never really realised how dependent my life had become on my "smart" phone, this feature phone can make calls... i haven't made one yet, send texts without easy access to my contact list ... i haven't yet, receive texts I have had a few but generally are automated. The one real feature of note is I haven't even found the charger yet. With my Dell Streak a daily charge was essential, so this has been nice but equally I haven't used it so it is good that it doesn't need any charge.

After walking out the store to the bus, I suffered quite bad withdrawal the useful things like sending or checking emails, weather, news,  twitter/Facebook all being ripped away was very confusing. I am used to filling the 5(to 60) minutes waiting for a bus with general tinkering on my phone with a feature phone all I can really do is play catch.

I thought this was just me being a bit on the quirky side, but after several days I am still finding this phone completely useless. My feelings are that we don't use our "phones" as telephone device but purely for information retrieval. We pull down information for analysis when we have brief moments to review.

Maybe it is just my use case or the fact that I am too lazy to add peoples contacts to the phone, but even if I did add them I would have to allot a period of time to talk to someone or take the hassle of typing on a 1-9 layout keyboard to send a brief text.

Is my phone making me more anti-social than I am by factory settings? Or is it just a different form of communication that is now common to the "smart" phone.

First you need the NTFS3G module: NTFS3G for N5200

This is installed too

/raid/data/module/NTFS3G/system/bin

To mount the drive, you will need to un-mount the old hdd that is mounted using the built in mount with read only permissions to do this you will need to type something like:

umount /raid/data/usbhdd/usb/sdd1

if you don't do the above line you will receive the error

fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy

Finally to mount the usb hdd you will need to type

mount.ntfs3g /dev/sdd1 /raid/data/usbhdd/usb/ntfs/

All done, should be configured with read/write access.

I have been using a VPS for about a year and half now I registered with UltimaHosts on the 15/11/2009 so I have a fairly long history with them. I was previously with another company based in the states that was slightly cheaper than UltimaHosts but not by anything noticeable I left them after they accidently deleted one of my VPS's and left the broken one unfixed. So I moved to UltimaHosts a little skeptical after having a bad experience and since being with them I have been very impressed.

Every now and then computers have problems we all know that, Ultimahosts has never gone below the 99.9% on my Virtuozzo VPS. They once went down for a few hours but worked hard to resolve the problem and thats once in the over a year been with them. The only other problem I had was there was a problem with there billing system so I was unable to pay them straight away(you can see why I worried about this problem), but this one resolved smoothly and has been running ever since without Issue.

There are always three measures when it comes to hosting in my experience one is performance, this has never been a problem with UltimaHosts the connection from the German vps to the UK is wonderful and the server performs well under load. The second is uptime that as I said before is excellent. Then finally its rapid support that we all hope should be needed because of the excellent uptime, well having raised a handful of tickets over the last year I with rapid response to memory (it has been a while since my last one) problems are certainly resolved in 24 hours if not just a few(2-5).

Finally I have to admit there is a little of persuasion in this article since they gave me an offer no one in the computer industry could refuse review our Google Checkout and get a free budget VPS. So everything I said above is true and unbiased since I wasn't even asked to review them but It has been a while I feel I know them well and can give a good opinion of UltimaHosts.

So heres a bit of info on Google Checkout, 

Firstly as always start with bill, nasty as it is to deal with bills it is very reasonable price from UltimaHosts

In my case I had already signed up with a Google GMail account, so was straight through to the card details

Standard security check my login details

Finally confirm purchase

We're all done money whizzing its way to UltimaHosts

All done and bill is paid

Well how simple is that enter a few details credit card etc, and payment done. Very fast very easy and would recommend google checkout to anyone.

While looking on amazon for some accessories for my Dell Streak one of the links they had was to this

Incase you didnt realise this is apparently: 

7" 4GB Rockchip 2808 Dual Core Android Tablet PC with HD video playback and Wi-Fi

Reference: Amazon Link

While on holiday I was hit by annoying dilemma, I have the Android Dell Streak, that has the inability to connect to an ad-hoc wifi without rooting the device. So after looking around I found an interesting solution for Windows 7 users.

Hidden away in the code of Windows 7 is some functionality that never got completed, and seems to be taken on by a company called Connectify this allows you to not just create a one to one ad hoc connection but also to change your little wireless card into an access point.

This is very very useful and solves the Android problem since it see's a access point and is happy. I installed the latest version and had alot of problems that I was a little disheartened about. In that version they had developed there own equivalent to Internet Connection Sharing(ICS) to solve the problems with xbox etc. This didn't seem to work but the earlier version worked smooth as a charm.

So if you are looking for a free easy solution to get your Android phone working easily with your laptop connection or just want to boost the speed by a local access point try Connectify is a great tool and just a tip be patient it takes a little time to set up the access point when you click Start Access point.

Note: Please note this software only works with Windows 7 all other versions wont work sorry XP Guys.

View Developer Site: Connectify.me

To Download the latest version goto: CNET Download

Download the Older version ( 1 . 2 ):  http://www.connectify.me/download/1.2/ConnectifyInstaller.exe (Read Source Article)

I was recently using Putty an open source SSH client software and I noticed a notice I had not seen before.

LEGAL WARNING: Use of PuTTY, PSCP, PSFTP and Plink is illegal in countries where encryption is outlawed. I believe it is legal to use PuTTY, PSCP, PSFTP and Plink in England and Wales and in many other countries, but I am not a lawyer and so if in doubt you should seek legal advice before downloading it. You may find this site useful (it's a survey of cryptography laws in many countries) but I can't vouch for its correctness.

Now this got me interested so I started looking into it more and found more and more worrying information. As I'm a UK Citizen my first country to read more into was the UK I found that it is legal to use encryption within the UK but you have to apron request be able to decrypt the information. That's not really an issue because they have to get a warrant to be able to ask you to do this and if they can do that they can take your PC that has the information on it anyway.

So anyway back to my dilemma for TooGaming we are going to be international trade with countries such as India and the middle-east since it seems that these countries tend to big players of the older DirectX play games. Now looking into it I found an interesting issue under the Wassenaar Arrangement there are restrictions on distributing crypto information within certain countries.

So when writing software that you are going to distribute you not only have to worry about tax, trading law you also have to go onto encryption law I am not sure what other issues there are to be looked into but I doubt this will be the last red tape that makes me go .

I got an email today from what seemed a repeatable company that asked the company I work for to put a link to a emergency dental website on our website. Now this got me thinking about how to comment on things that annoy you. This is obviously an SEO technique to try to get this website higher in the ranking. But my issue is if I then write a comment and link to the website I do there job for them annoying hey.

This also got me onto the topic of how to review something without promoting something. There is very little ways around reviewing a product without linking to the spec or some aspect of details about the product.

Its an interesting dilemma, especially with the time of year when lots of reviews come out

Best Christmas Wishes

The Mad Tooey

The company I work for is doing more advertisements and one of my roles is overseeing online advertisement so we have been with Pay per click google adwords for a bit now and had good success from the campaign. So we are looking into expanding into other search engines so I have spent a little time today setting up our account to get started in the new year.

Now I know Microsoft in a way arent as dominent in the market in fact is 3rd place with a 9.28% in September 2009 but on some mythical reasoning *taps nose* we are working on adwords equivalent for it. We all know MS spend big on projects but sometimes I do feel they get a little too serious. As I have had many conversations with colleagues about the wonders of making numbers go up and there is nothing better than visualising that with a crazy graph that really means very little. I think MS has missed a trick when you log into Google Adwords you get a great graph showing how things are going where your hard earned money is going, when I logged into Microsoft adCenter i get a table and a FAQ  where's the fun in that?

Granted I haven't spent ages on Microsoft adCenter and I'm sure it can generate some nice business like reports but I think the UI could do with a little work. The graphs aren't only my niggle with the UI experience seems the Tools dint really work(may just be a problem on my computer). The sign up process doesn't support Chrome so I'm back on IE and still tools don't work. Its interface is very cold like it was designed for boring suite like people who look at reports instead of playing with mechano.

Maybe it will grow on me but MS need to learn to be a bit more fun