Chris Wood (without imported items)

My gorgeous wife Amanda, second from the right, after receiving her Student o...

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:57:47 GMT

My gorgeous wife Amanda, second from the right, after receiving her Student of the Year award last night at Coleg Menai's "Celebrating Success 09" awards evening in Caernarfon. She won it for her rapid progress and commitment to her Welsh course over the past year and I'm very, very proud of her..

Android: Samsung Galaxy I7500 x64 Drivers

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:12:43 GMT

Further to my recent post about transferring files under x64, I've finally got Windows 7 talking to my mobile without the need for intermediaries!

Turns out there is an x64 driver available, it's just Samsung decided not to ship it with the phone!

Click the link above to download the driver courtesy of Verizon in the US.
Extract it but don't run Setup.exe
Plug in your phone
Go to Device Manager and then choose to update the drivers on the device which has a yellow exclamation icon
Point the driver search to the "drivers" folder you extracted.

You may have to do a driver search several times, as once you set up the first device, two other devices suddenly appear.

Hope this helps somebody!

http://www.vzam.net/vcastmusic/Step3.aspx?modelID=34&driverFile=SamsungUSBDriver_4_40_7_0_v1_6.zip

WebCron

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:49:01 GMT

Just wanted to plug this service I found the other day as it's incredibly useful to developers but dirt cheap.

If you need to run timed jobs on your website but your provider doesn't offer you them (most don't or are very restrictive on the frequency of jobs), WebCron is a great tool. You can just give it a URL to load on a frequency or time span you set (maximum frequency is every 5 minutes) and it costs just €0.0001 per load.

Scoredroid (which is powered by an ASP.NET application) needs to run on a minutely basis, so I've done a home brewed solution to do that, though it's liable to stop working without notice if my hosting company decide to perform an IISReset, recycle an application pool, etc. An hourly kick from WebCron between 11am and 11pm is enough just to get the minutely activities going again if it has lapsed.

http://www.webcron.org

Twitter: Scoredroid

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:16:04 GMT

Just a little something I cooked up whilst watching the game last night on TV! All the latest scores from the Super League (Rugby League) via Twitter!

Just follow @scoredroid or use one of the hashtags you'll see in use.

http://twitter.com/scoredroid

Android: Transferring Files under x64

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:39:26 GMT

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Samsung doesn't make x64 USB drivers available for its Galaxy I7500 (why??!). So that means I've had lots of fun trying to transfer data onto it!

There are three ways I can think of to get data onto there:

1) Stick the files on a memory stick, put the memory stick in another x86 machine and transfer the files from there;

2) Take the external micro SD card out of the phone and put it in your computer (using an adapter, if necessary) and transfer files directly to it;

3) Use an x86 virtual machine to do all the work.

Number 1 is all well and good when you're just dealing with a few megabytes. As soon as you start talking gigabytes though, you'll be all day.

Number 2 strikes me as being the optimum solution, though it's annoying as you have to dismantle your phone and you can only transfer files to the external SD card, not to the internal one.

Number 3 is less straightforward to set up initially, but works fine and gives you very quick access to both SD cards on your x64 machine. This is how I transferred 8GB of music onto my phone this afternoon.

Setting Up

First, get a copy of VirtualBox. Install this, then create a new virtual machine, or use an existing one. I already had a Windows XP virtual machine, so just used this.

Boot up the virtual machine and when fully loaded, install the New PC Studio software that comes with your phone.

Final setup step! From the "Devices" menu, set up one or more Shared Folders from your physical computer. Probably a good idea to make them permanent. You can access these (in XP, at least) via My Network Places > Entire Network > VirtualBox Shared Folders. If you right-click on the shares, you can also map these as network drives, which makes them much easier to find in the future.

Transferring Files

Once that's all done, plug in your phone to your physical computer's USB port.

Your x64 computer should completely ignore your phone as it doesn't know what to do with it, but from Devices > USB Devices you should see your Android phone. Choose this and your virtual machine should start to load all the necessary drivers to interact with your phone.

You then need to turn USB storage mode on in the notifications area of your phone.

Your virtual machine should now have some extra hard disks (your phone's SD cards) which you can access via Windows Explorer.

Now it's just a case of copying files between the drives you've mapped back to your physical computer and the SD cards of your phone!

Even More Advanced..

If you turn on File and Printer Sharing on your virtual machine and add a virtual host-only network adapter, you can share the SD card drives on your virtual machine and then access these directly from your physical computer using a UNC path, e.g.: \\192.168.56.102\SDCard.

You'll need to know the IP address of the host-only adapter on your virtual machine. To find out this, just run ipconfig /all on your virtual machine.

Again, mapping the shares to a drive letter is useful.

New phone!

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:46:48 GMT

Received my new Samsung Galaxy I7500 phone today! Not got particularly far with it just yet, as I've been struggling with two things: trying to deal with the missing Android Market application and trying to get it do anything with an x64 computer.

The good news is the phone itself looks like it will be fantastic!

Hey! No Android Market!

I bought the phone SIM-free and unlocked from King of Gadgets. Looks like it's an import from somewhere in the Middle East though and ships with I7500JVIG4 firmware; completely different to the firmware used here in Europe. The other problem with that is that it meant Android Market wasn't installed on the phone, hence no easy way to install new apps. It would have almost certainly meant that I couldn't install the forthcoming Spotify app too, so not something I could happily live with!

The solution to this was to re-flash my phone using European firmware. I followed the instructions here and it worked brilliantly when using my x86 laptop:

http://androidforums.com/47854-post10.html

If you look at the last two characters of my previous firmware (G4), you'll noticed I've had a significant upgrade with the new firmware (H7).

x64 Woes..

The phone comes with a CD for "Samsung New PC Studio", which you're supposed to use to upgrade your phone with new firmware releases. After trying to work with it for over an hour in Windows 7 x86, Windows 7 x64 and Windows XP x86, I got sick of it crashing all the time and it refused to recognise my phone. Furthermore, the driver installation fails completely under x64 as the drivers aren't signed!

I'm happy to stick with firmware updates of the kind I mention above rather than persist with this awful software.

But that does leave me with a problem. I can't seem to mount my phone as a storage device in x64 Windows, so I can't sync my music collection with my phone. Still working on this one..

Spotify: Pape & Cheikh - Mariama ★★★★★

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:27:07 GMT

Tonight I'm revisiting some of the Afropop albums I bought a few years ago. This one's right up there as a personal favourite.

Rating: 5/5

Spotify: Two Michael Jackson tracks I can't get out of my head..

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:10:23 GMT

Despite fully acknowledging the genius of Michael Jackson, I wouldn't say I'm really a fan of his music. I tend to find that after listening to two or three of his songs I get bored and want to listen to something else. When he died recently, I really didn't feel the need to dig out my old "Bad" cassette and actually avoided the radio because of the constant playing of his tracks.

That said, Amanda and I watched a DVD she'd bought of the film musical "The Wiz" (1978, trailer) a couple of weeks ago. It's a Motown version of the Wizard of Oz story and stars Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow.

Two songs have stuck with me since, to the point where I find myself singing them in the car, the shower, etc. So now I'm going to get you hooked too:

You Can't Win

Ease On Down The Road

So there you go. You can listen to the full album too, if you so desire.

Spotify: Bob Brozman - Blue Hula Stomp ★★★

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:52:13 GMT

Bob Brozman is a slide guitarist who I came across through his collaborative albums with Debashish Bhattacharya and Rene Lacaille.

Spotify has one of his earliest albums (1981), "Blue Hula Stomp", which is a delightful listen. Close your eyes and imagine you're in Hawaii.

Rating: 3/5

Google Chrome: two tips!

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:42:29 GMT

I've recently switched from Firefox 3.5 to Google Chrome. The transition has been painless and I'm thoroughly impressed by Chrome's speed and elegance.

One problem I've encountered though is that some web sites refuse to work with it. One such example for me is the NatWest online banking site. Given that Chrome is built upon WebKit (the same rendering engine used by Apple's Safari browser), you can spoof your user agent to pretend you're really using Safari. The result? You can do your online banking in Chrome without any problems.

To switch your user agent, you'll need to launch Chrome with the following switch:

-user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB) AppleWebKit/531.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.3 Safari/531.9"

You can simply add this to the Chrome shortcut in your Start Menu.

Also, if you get the latest developer build of Chrome, you can use the --enable-sync switch to allow Chrome to sync your bookmarks between computers.

Spotify: Carla Bruni - No Promises ★★

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:36:08 GMT

All I can say is "meh"... Listened to Comme si de rien n'était too to see if she made any more sense in French, but it was equally pantalons.

Rating: 2/5

(Image)

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:11:17 GMT

(Image)

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:35:47 GMT

A Windows 7 tip..

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:43:05 GMT

I'm now running Windows 7 on all my computers at home and I have to say I'm impressed. I'm even used to the new taskbar, which I thought I was going to have difficulty with!

One thing that does seem to be easier this time around is drivers. Normally when a new version of Windows comes out, you have all sorts of problems because your older hardware can't be used. Because 7 is architecturally close to Vista, you can actually use your Vista drivers if there's not a more up to date version available.

However there is a problem: those pesky installers which refuse to do anything because it doesn't recognise your new operating system (often accompanied by a frustrating "upgrade to Vista" message!). To get around this, right-click on your driver's installer and choose Vista SP2 compatibility mode. The installer should then stop moaning and the install will go ahead as it should.

Spotify: Chickenfoot - Chickenfoot ★★★★★

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:41:45 GMT

Second eponymous album of the day, and an absolute cracker..

Rating: 5/5

Spotify: Steppenwolf - Steppenwolf ★★★★

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:20:49 GMT

Rating: 4/5

Spotify: Sheryl Crow - Live ★★★★★

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:29:53 GMT

Rating: 5/5

Spotify ★★★★★

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:09:09 GMT

Amazing. That good that I succumbed to the £10 a month premium subscription.

It took me a while to get over the fact I don't own anything for my money (like a disc or collection of MP3 files), but after that it's really liberating. I can listen to whatever I like knowing that royalties are being paid to the artists.

If I don't like the album I listened to, oh well. It's got me taking more chances already; I'm not a classical music fan, but I've listened to a few things on Spotify because I knew I wasn't spending £20 on CDs I'd listen to once. I'd usually try and find a pirated copy in the past because the cost didn't justify the amount I'd listen.

Spotify also solves my dilemma about my next mobile phone...

I want to ditch my iPod (Classic - 20Gb) and don't want to carry a plethora of devices around with me. A reasonably-priced smartphone that's a good snapshot camera, music player and.. erm.. phone is still not something I've found. My relationship with my Windows Mobile-based Samsung Omnia went sour very quickly.

So I knew I didn't want to pay the Apple tax on an iPhone and liked the feel of Google's Android mobile phone OS. The new Samsung Galaxy seems like the best bet. My final problem was that nobody sells a 32GB card for mobiles yet, so what to do about all my music?

The answer is the Spotify Android app, which is coming soon! I can pick any albums or playlists, sync them to my phone over wifi or 3G and listen to them when I'm offline. Absolutely fantastic! And as I'm a Premium subscriber, I get 320Kbit quality too.

My only slight gripes are that I'd prefer an Artists/Album browser that I can add things into rather than the whole playlist thing, and gapless playback would be nice.

Rating: 5/5

"Charidy", mate..

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:49:30 GMT

I've been putting off filling my Self Assessment (tax) forms for a couple of months now but finally got around to it this evening. One of the questions is whether I've made any charitable donations over the last tax year. The answer was "yes", and I winced as it added in another page of questions to fill in.

The main thing it wanted to know was how much I'd given to charity in the last year. Were it not for Just Giving, it would have meant me going through 12 months of bank and credit card statements.

Just Giving is a fantastic way to donate to charity on a once-off or regular basis. You pick a charity, choose an amount and that's it. What's more, it tells you how much you've donated between two dates and how much gift aid has been applied! Made my life much easier today.

In case you're wondering, I give to NACC, Blue Cross, the Woodland Trust, TNAUK, Depression Alliance, the RFL Benevolent Fund, Amnesty International and Save the Children.

If you're thinking of registering with Just Giving, I'd encourage you to choose some of the less well known charities to complement the better known ones. All charities make a significant impact on people's lives regardless of how well known they are; sometimes the lesser known charities might need the money more desperately though.

Songbird Podcatcher Hack

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:44:39 GMT

Just a little something I've cooked up this evening..

http://www.notablygood.com/Songbird.aspx

Didn't have a lesson yesterday as I was in too much pain, but had a skate tod...

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:16:58 GMT

Didn't have a lesson yesterday as I was in too much pain, but had a skate today and managed to go down the hill where I had my fall several times and this time without incident.

Feeling better about skating, though I'm a bit pissed off that I've lost some confidence..

Ouch!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:45:10 GMT

I knew it was too good to last! Had my first "bad" fall today: right on my backside which is now very painful.

Aside from that, a good day on the whole. Lunch at The Gate, a vegetarian restaurant that's meant to be highly rated but was a little bit "meh" for us.

After that, I went to the London Transport Museum. What an odd little place that is. It was really difficult to try and discern any kind of order to the place.. it certainly wasn't chronological, was thematic but only in places... Bit disappointing on the whole, sadly.

Then for our lesson tonight we skated around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. It was great fun, not least because it's the first time that we've moved away from that one stretch of Queen's Gate. We even negotiated pavements, pedestrian crossings, curbs, cars.. Everything went brilliantly until the very end when I stacked it while braking going downhill, something I'd done many times earlier in the lesson without problem.

Oh well, I'm alive. My bottom hurts and my pride's a little dented, but tomorrow's another day.

Lemons, twigs, grids and hills..

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:07:34 GMT

Today's skating lesson went especially well. I'm starting to conquer braking, so much so that Nic (our instructor) took us down a hill to practise. It was scary stuff, what with grids and twigs strewn everywhere, but I didn't fall once so I'm feeling very proud of myself :-)

We also learned "lemons" yesterday.. basically where you propel yourself along by making lemon-shaped foot movements. Not quite got the hang of that yet, and my turning needs more work.

But feeling very, very happy about my progress today. I'm sure I'll have days when I feel like I'm getting nowhere, so I'll enjoy the feeling while it lasts!

In case you're interested, here's where we've been skating:

View Larger Map

We've been skating on Queen's Gate so far, amongst all the tourists looking at the Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial. Tomorrow we'll be skating around more of the park though! Can't wait.

HeadBlade Sport - great bit of kit for us baldies! ★★★★

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:30:01 GMT

Bought one of these today from a gent's barber near to the hotel here in London. Used it for the first time tonight and I have to say I'm thoroughly impressed!

Imagine, if you will, the difficulties of shaving one's head using a normal face-shaving razor. Your wrist has to contort into some very odd positions and then hold those positions and apply pressure evenly so as not to nick yourself.

This little super-gadget makes the whole thing a breeze. It's just like wheeling a little toy car all over your dome.

Only thing it didn't cope too well with was my sidies.

Note - it's an import from the US (made in Culver City, California) and ships with a Gillette Atra blade. After a bit of Googling, it turns out that it's called Gillette Contour here in the UK.

I bought mine from Carter and Bond, but you can find 'em on eBay in the UK too.

Random fact: the other famous thing about Culver City is that it was home to the Hal Roach Studios, where Laurel & Hardy films were made in the first half of the 1900s. I'm currently about 20% of the way through a 20+ DVD box set of L&H films, review to follow..

Rating: 4/5

This is where we skated in front of.. back and forwards, back and forwards.. ...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:47:34 GMT

This is where we skated in front of.. back and forwards, back and forwards.. all last night!

Arrived in London and successfully (and illegally) got my T-Mobile phone tethered to my laptop for cheap broadband during my stay! Woo hoo!

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:02:25 GMT

Arrived in London and successfully (and illegally) got my T-Mobile phone tethered to my laptop for cheap broadband during my stay! Woo hoo!

First skating lesson in an hour and a half.. feeling a bit apprehensive but looking forward to it!

A good deed to end the day..

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:35:30 GMT

Just found two terriers trapped in my back garden! Absolute little sweethearts the both of them, despite them being scared to death.

A long walk around the village, a lot of door knocking and a large blister later, I tracked their owners down to a farm about a mile away. Dogs and family both happy to be reunited.

I have to have a cathartic rant though: if you own a dog and it doesn't have a collar or tag, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Last.fm drained my bank account..

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:38:19 GMT

OK, it's far too easy to spend money on iTunes when you're also using Last.fm.

Just bought albums by people I've never heard of before: Who's Your Momma by Anouk and Super Pro by The Hussy's (even though the apostrophe in the band name annoys me!).

Anouk is popular with Queen fans in the Netherlands, and The Hussy's include band members from a 90s band that brings me happy memories: The Supernaturals.

Loving Last.fm - thank you Virgin Broadband!

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:52:11 GMT

If you've seen where I live, you'll understand why my broadband sucks big time. I'm in the middle of rural nowhere-ness, so for the longest time I've struggled with 512k broadband whilst most people I know have at least 8MB.

Well last month we got upgraded to a whopping 1MB downstream. I can just about watch YouTube now, though the BBC iPlayer is still pretty unusable.

But one thing that does now work perfectly is Last.fm. I've been waiting for this for so long! So I'm lying in bed tonight listening to artists I'm familiar with and also some who are complete strangers.

Never knew Paul Rodgers did a Muddy Waters tribute album... so I've bought it already and it's downloading right now.

Something tells me I'm hooked already and my bank account may suffer.

(Image)

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:54:09 GMT

(Image)

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:53:08 GMT

Bought the Mini after a brief test drive. Absolutely brilliant - sporty but s...

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:51:36 GMT

Bought the Mini after a brief test drive. Absolutely brilliant - sporty but solid, which I suppose is just what you expect from a BMW. It got its first test in the wet today on a run to Cheshire Oaks and it never felt like I might end up slipping or skidding.

And for all those who have asked: no, it doesn't have a Union Jack on the roof, sorry :-)

Jun 4, 2009: Buying my new car! A Mini Cooper in Midnight Black..

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:33:28 GMT

@ Motorpoint, Burnley

Jun 15, 2009: Learning to inline skate

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:00:15 GMT

Jun 15–22, 2009 @ London (Hyde Park, probably)

Dusty In Memphis ★★★★★

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:59:18 GMT

Has to be my favourite album of all time. Dusty's vocals, whether sexy, anguished or playful, bring depth to a meticulously selected songbook.

Make sure you get the Rhino label version of the album with the bonus tracks. To think that the additional tracks weren't considered worthy of release at the time they were recorded! How standards must have slipped since then..

Buy it, then destroy your Duffy and Amy Winehouse CDs.

Rating: 5/5