This is half-pie.

…in this country is pretty much passé these days. Everyone’s got horror stories. The monopoly incumbent wholesales frankly unacceptably crap to everyone else, and the alternatives either aren’t widely available or have compromises of their own.

It’s all a bit rubbish, actually.

Recently I got a chirpy email from my ISP. It was good news apparently – I was to be transferred onto a new plan, for the same price, but with a new “as fast as you can go” speed maxing out at the somewhat less that overwhelming maximum speed of 8 Mbps. There were a couple of other compromises as well, like not downloading more than 2 GB in a day.

Gee thanks.

The laugh of the matter (I thought) was that although nominally I was on a 2 Mbps connection, I’d NEVER managed to get it to go faster than 1.5 Mbps ever, even in the very early morning hours of the assassin when sensible people are sleeping and competing usage should be at a minimum. So I knew that despite the chirpy ISP email, I’d see SFA difference.

It turns out the last laugh is on me. There is a difference. It feels slower and less responsive now; and web pages often get “stuck”, not displaying but spinning away. Testing it a bit, I’m finding that although the download speed may now sometimes get as high as 1.3 Mbps in the early morning, when I actually want to use it – evenings and weekends – it is disgracefully slow. As I write this, at about 9:20 in the evening, it’s down to 0.5 Mbps! And the upload speed is now almost never more than 0.08 Mbps.

Pathetic.

I’d rant more if the situation didn’t leave me with the sort of weariness tinged with anger and disgust that makes me feel that further thinking about the subject is a futile exercise.

Strange. I’ve just noticed a draft posting on my blog, uncompleted from the weekend.

As I tap this it’s late but warm and still, like those baking summers of youth. It is unclear whether the Motel we are in has intentionally provided free wireless, but nevertheless that is what I have discovered. Finding this at the beginning of the weekend really started things off nicely.

Becky and I are back at Lake Hawea, just two weeks after our previous visit. This time though, we’ve left the kids in Wellington with their grandparents while we rage it up at my cousin’s wedding here.

Since being away the weather has stabilised. Yesterday, the day of the wedding, was one of those amazing southern days where the sun is baking hot but the air remains relatively […]

As I read it I remembered somewhat squiffily tapping it into the iPod in the dark, having been over-pleased with myself at figuring out how to attach it to a local wireless network (a tip: sometimes wireless access points appear to allocate IP addresses outside the range that the ADSL router has allowed to be NAT’ed – and this can explain the sometimes infuriating situation where it’s possible to connect yet not actually go anywhere).

Obviously though I’d gotten tired of tapping and called it a night. As I should also now.

Information:

• iPod Touch 16Gb
• From Sydney Airport Duty Free

I’ve wanted one of these ever since the product announcement back in September. So, combining the opportunity of a short business trip to Aussie with the excuse of it being close-ish to Christmas, I scored one on my way back through duty free. The price I got was the equivalent of $100 off over the New Zealand price, not enough to make it cheap, or even reasonable, but enough for this Apple Fanboy.

I’ve had it for a week now, and I love it. It’s an experience to use, slim, black, tactile and glossy. It plays movies. It displays your photos (it even knows how you are holding it – portrait or landscape – and alters its display accordingly). It surfs the ‘net, and if you find a wireless hotspot to connect to there’s another world of other stuff you can do on it. It even plays music. Yep.

It’s not without its faults though, and some of these are annoying.

• the headphone socket is on the bottom, preventing the (rather inadequate) stand from working while the Touch is sitting in portrait position – but putting the Touch into landscape position to free up the headphone socket causes the music display to change to Coverflow mode – and while it’s like this there are no volume controls. Often I listen to music while working… and if I need to change the volume for any reason I have to physically pick up the device, rotate it 90 degrees, and manipulate the touch screen appropriately. Clumsy and irritating.
• only 16Gb? That’s not really enough for a decent music collection and a few movies and TV shows. I had to ditch some songs from iTunes.
• no FireWire connectivity, only slow USB 2.0.
• for some reason the Touch won’t “remember” any wireless connection that has a hidden SSID. For probably bogus “security” reasons my home wireless network is hidden from immediate view and has to be connected to by name. Until I altered this setting and started to publicly broadcast the network’s name, the Touch required me to enter the network name and passphrase every time I needed to connect.
• it appears that the Touch has trouble connecting to weak wireless networks – it will appear to connect happily, but then not allow any connection to websites (some sort of DNS issue). This seems to happen a lot in town on CaféNet, but only at what I suspect are the edges of hotspots. Other times (such as very close to cafés) it works just fine.
• I have a feeling that the music sound quality is just slightly not quite as good as my third generation iPod… but I have no way of quantitatively measuring this (although I am not the only person to have issues with the sound). The sound seems slightly less “spaced out” and clear, although there does seem to be adequate frequency response across the range. I tested both using my reasonably good set of Sennheiser PXC-100s, so it’s not the ‘phones…

Despite all this though, there’s no going back. Among the many things I love:

• watching the IT Crowd on the bus to work. Using a program called ffmpegX I was able to convert episodes thoughtfully provided by American friends to a format that plays well on the Touch
• having my favourite movies, ripped from my own DVDs (thanks, Handbrake) on call – I’m working through LotR, the entire series of Firefly, and Nick Cave’s The Proposition at the moment.
• the sheer geeky coolness of surfing on the thing; the Vulcan nerve pinch interface
• today’s new additions to the useful apps – in particular the astounding Google Maps app is very impressive. And let’s not forget the web apps and the way these can now be turned into widgets on the home screen.
• the all round coolness of the thing.

I can’t leave it alone, despite its imperfections. Get one if you can.

This is one of those postings for anyone googling for how to replace their Macbook hard drive. I had to do this very thing last night, and came across a gotcha with Apple’s own online instructions.

What the official instructions don’t tell you is that you also need a Torx screwdriver to complete the task. These are for the odd little six-pointed star shaped screws used to attach the drive caddy (or mount, whatever it’s called) to the drive. You have to take the old caddy off and attach it to the new drive.

I can only guess that they’ve omitted this as perhaps the official Apple replacement drives come with the caddy already. Whatever. Torx screwdrivers are sufficiently exotic that I didn’t have a set. Luckily for me there was still a branch of Trickies open within the greater urban area… so a quick 40km round trip drive later I had a new set of screwdrivers and the new disk in.

This was really my fault for not reviewing more of people’s experiences in doing this. Then I would have known.

Further reading on MacBook hard drive replacement:

• How to Upgrade Your MacBook’s Hard Drive [MacInstruct]
• MacBook hard drive upgrade [The Global Photographer]
• Swapping Hard Drives on the 13-Inch MacBook [Creative Mac]
• Macbook hard disk upgrade question [MacRumors Forums]
• Another MacBook Hard Drive Replacement Experience [Mac Forums]

It started suddenly: while I was working on the party invitation for Bella’s seventh birthday there was a sound like a quiet cricket’s chirrup.

And another, and another, marking a lazy rhythm.

Hmmm, it seemed to be coming from inside the MacBook. I must do a backup, I thought idly. Then the screen froze, all except the pointer.

Restart. Soft grinding noises – not my teeth (yet) but again coming from the machine’s guts.

White screen. A pause. While I waited and hoped.

Then, that icon of dread, a flashing question mark inside a folder. The hard disk was hosed.

This is really just another object lesson on the need for a decent backup strategy. I did have one, but I’d let it lapse to an extent. So I’ve lost two months worth of data.

And now I wait for a replacement to arrive from Ascent. The old disk appears to be completely unrecoverable, even with some specialist tools … and Apple seem happy for intrepid amateurs to perform the necessary surgery themselves.

Wish me luck.

At last I have a camera with a decent macro lens:

I thought I was doing OK with this shot – it’s a bit noisy (a shortage of light on the kitchen bench) but then I didn’t realise that the camera’s default compression setting was pretty severe. The “1” is one centimetre, and there’s one millimetre between each of the large gradations.

Hopefully by summer, I should know enough about how to work the damn thing. And no spider shall be safe.

I’ve paused from the playing of Zelda this weekend. Instead, I’ve been deeply engaged uncovering the mysteries of Inkscape, an open-source vector drawing tool.

Having scored a Ponoko beta invitation – or more correctly, Becky has, as I never quite made it to the beta meet-up – we needed to find a way to submit drawings to a certain spec given an impending deadline. My theory was that Becky could have the ideas, and that I could operate the drawing software. Having neither Illustrator, Freehand, or CorelDraw at hand, I thought I’d try using Inkscape. I’ve used it before for a few things, but not for anything more complex than a few lines and boxes.

I also thought that Inkscape would be a nice choice for Ponoko’s makers: it’s free; it runs on Mac, PC and Linux, and has a cracking good manual (the book version of which I have printed and bound for easy reference).

It turns out that playing with Inkscape is a lot of fun. I came up with an idea of my own that I’ve now finished the drawings for. Whether it’ll work or not is another question which may or may not be answered.

Meanwhile Becky’s still working on hers, having been abandoned temporarily while I did mine. She’s grasped Inkscape pretty quickly. And to help, I went down to Tricky‘s and scored one of their no-name drawing tablets (the XH1913 and actually an Aiptek – get the latest Mac and PC drivers here). It’s good enough for the job at hand, and connects happily to all our machines.

So at the very least, Ponoko has made us try some new stuff. Hopefully we can make the deadline, but if we don’t, we’ll have a good headstart when it comes out of beta.

I quite like the National Bank’s new lo-calorie two factor authentication system. Nothing extra to carry around; no extra passwords. Easy. [Disclaimer: I used to work there, on NBNZ Online Banking. But I left a while back now and was not involved in this project. The following are my own opinions yada yada yada…]

Called Online Code, it will send you a text message (at no charge) containing a short numerical code to your mobile whenever you (or someone else) try to do certain things in Online Banking. You have to enter this code to prove that it’s really you out there at the end of that long piece of string between Online Banking and your PC. The code lasts for the rest of the session; you won’t need another unless you log out or time out.

Interestingly, not only is it voluntary, but they allow you to choose what kinds of activities you’d like to be texted for. There’s little guidance given on this, so in order to set it up some thought needs to be given to the kind of threat the service could forestall. My thoughts on this follow; you should probably think about this yourself before making any similar decisions.

So for me, I’m thinking “What if someone somehow got hold of my Online Banking password – for example, from me using a virus infested PC; or a dodgy internet café; to do my online banking on?”

If this happened, there’s a risk that the person doing it wants my money. So in this case, I’d want to be texted if any value was being transferred out of my accounts to somewhere else. There are a few ways this could happen:

• One-off Payments: an obvious target. Therefore I need a text for any of these. No exceptions.
• Automatic Payments: well, the ones I have now are OK (unless my kids maliciously increase the AP from my account to their accounts – somewhat unlikely for me I hope but for some people this could be a real scenario: kids; flatmates; spouses) but the fraudster could create a new one to themselves and use that. So I want to be texted if a new AP is created.
• Bill Payments: again, the existing ones, which are mainly to my utilities, are OK. Who is going to want to overpay my Telecom bill for me? (Some might. But it’s unlikely. And if it did happen I’m sure could go to Telecom and get the money returned.) So I won’t need to be notified if any payments are made on those Bill Payees. But again, I will want to be texted to approve any new Bill Payee setups.
• Tax Payments: well, I suppose the fraudster could pay their tax bill from my account… or pay some random person’s out of sheer malicious pranksterism. I personally don’t think this is terribly likely, so I won’t require a text for this. On the other hand, I might change it back later. Do I trust the IRD to give me my money back if it did happen? I’m not completely decided as yet.

Here’s my current settings:

The options for addresses and passwords are also worth considering if you think a wider identity theft threat is credible – and as it costs nothing to tick the boxes I’ve done them too.

The easiest setup solution – down here at the bottom

On the other hand, maybe the easiest solution is just to tick them all. Then, if you get sick of being texted when you make a Bill Payment (the most common transaction in most internet banking systems) just untick that box only.

See? Easy. Although I took a long time getting here.

You’ve heard it before, and I’ll say it again. It was Mii.

We’ve had the Wii for a couple weeks now, and I’m coming to grips with it. (So to speak. That silly name renders even straightforward colloquialisms humorous – well, if your sense of humour is anything like mine I suppose.)

I’ve made my Mii.

And I liked him so much I’ve recreated him on the handy Mii Editor site, whose handy JPEG export facilities allow me to use my Mii as my member picture on all the web sites out there that’ll have me. Cheesy, but I like it.

Now I’ve let him loose and he’s been moonlighting over at Martha‘s house in her baseball team. True! [Update: Martha’s whole Mii family have come on an exchange visit as of this evening!]

I also got hold of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and after a slow start I seem to be getting it. But I’m only six hours into a game that the expert gamers typically take 40 to 50 hours to complete, so there’s a reasonable chance I’ll get bored first. Still, with the fishing, goat-herding, milk-drinking, horse-riding, and falconry for variation in between all the hacking and slashing at monsters I may get there yet.

The only real problem I’ve had is with the wireless connection: the Wii would connect to my D-Link wireless router but not sustain the connection. A bit of Googling lead to this page (co-incidentally by a Google staffer) on how she fixed a similar problem (flashing the router firmware) and after a slightly nervous bit of fiddling (though not with my Wii this time) all now seems to be well.

Although another TV would be good.

I’m at Upper Hutt now, and still no more wireless networks in evidence… not since Kaiwharawhara back in Wellington. Not even anything close to the station itself.

I guess the reason why there were so many back in Wellington may be as much a function of the landscape as any characterisation of the people belonging to either geography. As the train curved along the harbour shore, under the hill, it would have bathed in the beneficent rays of 802.11 radiation from any and all of the wireless enabled households on the hills above. In flatter countryside, such as through the Hutt and elsewhere, the wireless signals will have been stopped by the intervening houses.

Interesting. Now I wonder if I can post this before I lose cellular coverage?

[Several minutes later:] Nope.

Just past Upper Hutt there’s some rough country, a short tunnel, and then the grand-daddy of all NZ train tunnels (I suspect) under the Rimutaka Ranges. I’ll have to wait until I get onto the plains of the Wairarapa on the other side before I try to post this.

Just past the end of the Rimutaka tunnel is my favourite moment in the whole trip – I’ve blogged on this before – but you come down a long valley, swing to the left around the last ridge at the end, and out to your right is a long view of open country and a lake. Very pretty indeed. Except I’m on the left of the train tonight so I must be content merely in describing it.

The air noise increases just as we are about to exit the tunnel – yes, equalise the ears as we emerge. It’s sunny over here. The ranges and the prevailing winds are such that it can often be claggy and moist in Wellington but hot and dry here in the Wairarapa, which is probably why this particular commuter train is usually packed.

And so we pull in to Featherston.

[Several more minutes later:] Still no go on posting. And yet I can get to Google. What I’ve done is set up my MacBook to use my cell phone as a modem, via bluetooth. I couldn’t begin to describe how I set this up – it was a couple months ago now (with the aid of Ross Barkman’s pages on the subject, from memory).

Now we’re at Woodside, possibly the cutest train station in the country. Which is not saying much, actually. (In other words, it’s been painted recently and isn’t located in an industrial zone.)

It’s looking dry over here, just as it was in Wellington, but there is still some grass – a legacy of all the crap weather over Christmas. In fact, (he says, looking out the window a bit more) it’s definitely greener than is usual for late summer / early autumn.

Now to try posting this again…

[A couple minutes later.] Nope.

Well, there have still been no more wireless networks. Not so surprising out here in the country though. For amusement though, there are two other phones and a computer within bluetooth range though. Should I…?

I’d better not.

The late afternoon sun really does cast a nice light. On the other hand though, it still does nothing for people whose houses (and lives) are orientated towards the road. The train lines always seem to pass by their waste dumps back yards and you get to see the worst of what was supposed to be hidden from view.

To my left, in the distance, are the hills – the Tararuas. It’s raining up there – more of Michelle’s orographic precipitation. I wonder if they are on the other side, in their jungle house, as I type?

Not far from Masterton now. One last try…

[A couple minutes later.] No. Time to shut up shop and post this on a better connection.

Until later, then.