Michael Henley

I am only just coming to realise the level of integration that Spotify has now reached with facebook. Publishing what I listen to is obvious, but today I discovered something a bit more obscure.

Alex and I have fairly similar taste so I decided to send him a couple of tracks that I had found with SpotON (the iPhone Spotify Radio app. It’s awesome, by the way). I sent them through this window:

I have received tracks like this before so didn’t think any more of it. However, I’ve just been on to facebook and this is what I saw:

Am I slow to the table on this one? I was not expecting that kind of integration…

Two weeks to part I finals; It’s the (almost) final countdown. Despite this looming deadline I’m still finding time to do a bit of blogging. Actually, looking back at my archives it seems that there is a noticeable upturn in my output during times like this. Rather than being a student, scraping by on doing things last minute and waking late, frequently with a hangover I am working solidly most days in an effort to make this degree decent. I haven’t so much as sipped wine in weeks. Madness.

Since I received an iPad at Christmas I have used it almost exclusively as my portable computer. I can write at a decent speed on it now (~70wpm according to some sources) and the weight is a huge positive over my obese 15″ MBP. This has come with some downsides and I think in a few weeks when I have a bit more time I will properly consider the trade-offs that I’ve made to make this work.

Blogging is something that I have always struggled with on mobile devices. In no small part this is because of the WordPress iOS app, which is frankly shocking. Now I know it is completely done by contributors and all that, but needing to write links in HTML is bad enough on a normal keyboard. On the iPad virtual one it’s just painful. Until recently I hadn’t really explored a way around this. Then a little while ago David pointed out Writing Kit as a general purpose Markdown editor for the iPad.

I have been playing with Writing Kit for a few days and I really like it. The extra toolbar makes writing the syntax easy, which given the way the iOS keyboard is arranged would otherwise be a little stilted. I can write and preview a post in the app and then export the HTML straight to the clipboard for import into the WordPress app. Finally I drop in images using the WordPress app and I’m ready to post. Simples.

There’s a lot more to Writing Kit than just this, but it’s the main purpose I have given to it. Absolutely check it out. It’s worth the £2.99

I’ve just seen the flurry of activity on twitter, TechCrunch and a few other places, around the very recently (like, today) launched unbound.co.uk. Basically, think kickstarter for books. Those that pay £10 get a copy of the ebook and £20 get the hardback, £50 get the signed hardback, and so on. All donations get access to the author’s “shed” where they post updates, draft chapters, etc.

Basically it let’s you support and follow to term a work of literature that you think is worthy of going to print but perhaps might not sail through the stuffy old world of publishing. If the project doesn’t reach the required limit, then you get your money back or can give it to another project (plus they get to pocket the interest in the mean time, I’m sure).

On the surface of it, I love the idea and will be following this closely. I’m curious how many people need to be behind it to get a book going; £10 to el cheapo student like me seems a bit steep but then I balk at paying 75p for a song, so what do I know? I also wonder whether it will be immediately useful to unproven first-timers or whether it will be more of a boon to the Terry Jones’s of the world (Jones is one of the pioneering authors, with a new piece of fiction ‘Evil Machines’) who are already proven in the minds of readers and so they will be more willing to take a punt on their next piece based solely on a well-written pitch.

Either way, check it out. I just signed up.

A few weeks ago I moved my blog over from being hosted with NearlyFreeSpeech to self-hosting on a Linode after Alex recommended them. NFS have been fantastic for the last few years but I decided I’d have a go with the flexibility that my own Ubuntu server hosted in London gives me. Bit of an experiment initially, although given the number of things I’ve put together to make it work I don’t know how easy it would be to migrate back. At first I set it up with nginx as the web server as it is nippy and light-weight, but it doesn’t support (somewhat obviously) Apache modules like mod_rewrite. Until this I hadn’t really appreciated how much stuff is written specifically with Apache as the assumed server (although as Alex pointed out, when you provide 60%+ of all web servers…) Now it’s running with nginx handling the static stuff, and Apache serving the dynamic content in a little bolted together set up. I will tweak this in the months ahead. I should say that Linode’s library has been invaluable in this process, and made much of the set up a breeze. The only thing I remotely needed to hack together was running Apache behind nginx, and that didn’t take all that long.

In the mean time I can’t recommend Linode as a server provider enough, and also hover as a domain name provider. Working with hover’s support, I got henley.co migrated from GoDaddy in under two hours. I’ll remind you that this is a process that’s meant to take 5-7 days. Absolutely can’t recommend their service and support enough on the basis of my experience so far. I’ve applied for an affiliate link so keep them in mind when you’re next looking for a domain host. Their service already beats GoDaddy hands down.

Finally I’ve added the WordPress plugin ‘Tweet Images‘ (apparently used by Stephen Fry, so I’m in good company) to try hosting my own tweeted images. Twitter and Twitterific on the iPad seem to support this API, but Tweetbot on the iPhone doesn’t annoyingly. This is all a little experimental, and with finals looming I’m probably not going to get it right in the immediate future. Apologies in advance to those that follow @michaelhenley, @mjdh, or subscribe to the blog. Hopefully I don’t balls anything up too badly!

Been playing with my iPhone in Italian. Partly I just felt like using a language I don’t speak very often and have forgotten a lot of. Trying out VoiceControl I found that it really struggles with the English pronunciation of Artists/Tracks/Albums and often plays the wrong thing or simply returns no results. The solution… to employ the most outrageous Italian accent I can muster:

Those who pay attention to the UK and technology will know that the Digital Economy Act is now law with all the threats of disconnection and censorship therein. I am not going to write a long analysis of this; we all know it is a travesty and a terrible example of poorly thought-out legislation that is highly vulnerable to the law of unforeseen consequences, as well as a testament to the kinds of things that really can get fired through Government and into law provided the right people want it to be the case. That scares me, but is a discussion for another day.

My response to this is simple and (for the moment at least) legal. My traffic is encrypted and tunnelled out to a different part of the Internet before emerging. At the moment my computer is Swedish and shall remain that way for a little while. A few mouse-clicks later and my machine can be Swiss. A few more and it is Malaysian. The simple fact is that I can’t change my hard-line ISP very easily, but VPN providers are numerous and many of them cater to exactly my needs. I am now spending a little more each month than I was before for Internet access, but I know that this access is secure be it from corporations, special interest groups or the Government. Oh, and now I donate to the Open Rights Group. You should too.

So who loses out from this? I am slightly inconvenienced but life doesn’t really change, but the people who really have found the majority of traffic being unencrypted useful are the security services. Just from a signal-to-noise ratio point of view until now it was really people who especially wanted everything secret who encrypted and so drew attention to themselves. Now a large proportion of those who are tech-literate will employ encryption, IP-spoofing, use proxies and VPN tunnels. Anything to make ourselves feel less intruded upon. The Swedish example shows that this will be the case, and that it will lead only to a small, and short-lived, drop in downloads.

I finally should give a sincere thank you to people like the ORG, and Tom Watson & Evan Harris, who was until recently my local MP, for not only raising awareness about this issue, but for working to try to make it at least workable. If we had people like this on the Front Benches instead of the Back we might have a Government I had some confidence in.

Following on from my post here I have just spent the past week using the Gomadic pack as my main source of power for the iPhone and I have to say that the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. When fresh batteries are used it can charge the phone back to full in a matter of hours. I would say that it is almost as effective as a wall charger for charging and you can even continue to use it while it charges – I am listening to music and writing this and the battery is still charging from it. I have barely connected the phone to the wall all week instead preferring to keep it in bed to use as an alarm (I was on the top bunk away from power). Every night it has charged the phone. I would guess that a set of batteries (4 AAs) lasts for maybe 1.5 full charges.

One thing which had me puzzled for a while was that sometimes the phone would tell me that the accessory was not compatible for charging. I think I have discovered that this happens when the batteries are running low and need to be replaced but I can’t be 100% sure. Also, sometimes the phone will stop responding when it is connected. Pulling the dock connector makes the phone start responding again and you can then reconnect it. Weird. Not sure why it is causing this behaviour but it doesn’t seem to be a permanent problem.

Overall a pretty good investment which has made this week must more enjoyable not to mention the ~16 hour journeys each way. Be aware that there may be the odd problem with it being recognised but despite this I would recommend it.

3 of 5 stars

I have been thinking about how I should write this post for a few days now, and also been waiting for an (as yet unreplied to) support ticket to go through.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that shortly after installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro I made a big mistake. After seeing that the Snow Leopard drivers allowed me to read and write to my internal HFS+ volume I plugged in my two WD MyBook Studio external drives to see if I could also read them. They didn’t mount so I popped into Disk Management and was asked what partition table they were using. ‘Simple’, I thought. They are GUID so I selected this and clicked ok. Then things went wrong. The drives came online but disk management showed them both as being unformatted. This was when I started to panic. Still hoping that this was Windows being silly I rebooted into OS X, only to be presented with two dialogs, one for each drive, saying that they were unrecognized and asking if I wanted to initialize, ignore, or eject. Now I start to panic. Disk Utility shows them as two partitionless drives.

Backups?

Ok, so I try to be pretty sensible about my backup policy. My MacBook Pro’s internal drive mirrors to a partition on one of the effected drive each night with SuperDuper!. Due to size issues however I keep my Aperture library on one of the external drives, with a vault on the other. My theory went that with this in place, and the most likely failures being a physical one on only one of the drives, my most important things kept on these would be safe. I admit that I never planned for both drives dying at the same time. Very very foolish on my part I know but I simply can’t afford to buy another set of 1TB and 500GB drives to image the external ones to. This seemed like the best solution.

Getting some data back:

I have to admit that I was pretty bummed out by the prospect of losing my largeish collection of photos from Aperture, many of which I haven’t put on Flickr for quite a while. There was also a collection of install images which generally come in quite useful along with some other bits and pieces. Basically I wanted/needed to get a lot of this back. Working on the principle that it was just the file tables which had been nuked I set to work trying out a couple of file recovery solutions. After scouring some blogs and support forums I found Boomerang Data Recovery Solutions. I ran the trial version of BoomDRS on the 500GB and was pretty damn happy to see it reporting the three partitions on the drive and detailing file sizes and names along with complete directory structure. I smiled for the first time in a few days. I knew that two of the partitions didn’t need recovering as one was an image of my internal drive which I could remake and the other was a copy of the OS X install DVD expanded to a partition which again I could remake.

Boomerang charge based on the amount you want to recover. This is where my problems with them began but I didn’t know it yet. I paid my £99 for a 1TB allowance (which I couldn’t really afford, but I digress…) and waited. Paying via paypal means you have to send your payment through a third-party called 2checkout. They take your money and then do fraud checks. After you have used paypal. This holds up the whole process for a day or so while they waste time. Once they finally release the order to Boomerang you get your activation code. I proceeded to begin the recovery to a third volume I labelled ‘Lifeboat’. My files began to reappear including the Aperture vault. To say I was happy would be an understatement.

After running for a few hours the folders I selected from the 500GB drive were all back. Boomerang were my new most favourite software company. Once I had repartitioned the 500GB drive and it was restored to its former glory I turned my attention to the 1TB drive. However every time I ran the scans from the Boomerang application on this drive it would crash. This happened regardless of the type of scan I tried to run. The support ticket I submitted including the crash report has not been responded to whilst they promise a response within 72 hours.

So I am sat here with ~850GB of unused recovery, a drive which I can’t use, and data still missing. Admittedly this data isn’t mission-critical. Mainly DVD ripped movies and TV shows along with the virtual hard drive for a Win 7 RC1 VirtualBox installation I had set up. I would rather not lose it but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

So I am torn. I have the most important data back thanks to the boomerang software and for that I am really happy and wouldn’t mind recommending them, but they have treated me as a customer pretty badly. I have extra usage which I can’t use thanks to their application crashing and no response to my support enquiry. I think if as a company you are taking this much money off people then you owe them a degree of support especially if it is due to a consistent crash.

So what have I learnt from this experience?

Firstly I think this shows just how much we need a unified file system standard. MS, Apple, the open-source community along with other interested parties need to get together and sort this. Waging their war on consumers machines is not a good way to go. If I as a fairly savvy user can make this kind of mistake with relatively little effort then you can imagine how easy it would be for someone less knowledgeable. Secondly I need to have an even more robust backup solution. I thought what I had was pretty good but evidently not. I also need to be a lot more careful but I do have a habit of blindly running into these things believing I can fix it if I mess up. Thirdly I need to make sure I put even more effort into checking software recommendations. I would love to recommend Boomerang for the work their software did on my smaller drive but the whole experience is marred by buggy software and lacking support. There are other solutions such as Prosoft’s offering which is highly rated but I am reluctant to spend a further £50+ on the hope they are any better. Once bitten, twice shy I guess.

As an aside, I have written this whole thing on my iPhone over a coffee in Nero. I am still pretty impressed with how easy it is to type on this thing. Why it consistently thinks I am trying to type ‘Whig’ instead of ‘which’ I am not sure but on the whole it works well. Aside from slightly aching thumb joints this is easy. I might actually be touch-typing better on this than on a desktop.

When initially setting up MovableType on my NearlyFreeSpeech-hosted site, I couldn’t find a way to get around the need for Authentication with Google Apps for email. Commenter Kevin Doyon informed me how to make this work, but as I had already finished the MT set up wizard I had to make the changes manually. I must begin by saying that I am no expert at this and am learning as I go. This is what has worked for me and might not work for you. You undertake this at your own risk, and as with any changes I advise you to make backups of everything before you start making changes.

Using your favourite FTP client (Transmit in my case), connect to the site for your MT installation. Navigate to /public/cgi-bin/mt, and find the mt-config.cgi file. Make a copy and rename it something like mt-config-old.cgi, and then open up mt-config.cgi in a text editor. At the bottom, add the following lines:

#========== EMAIL SETTINGS ===========

MailTransfer sendmail
SendMailPath /usr/bin/sendmail

Save the file back to the server, and then open up your web browser and navigate to http://domainname/cgi-bin/mt.cgi to access your installation’s control panel.

Select ‘System Overview’, and then settings:

From here you will immediately see the General Settings pane where we need to make changes. In the ‘System Email’ box, enter the email address you want to be displayed in the From: line of any emails sent by MovableType and click Save Changes.

Once it refreshes, enter an email address you have access to into the Send Email To: field and send the test. If all goes well then you will see a test email arrive in your account sent from MovableType, and the dashboard will report success:

That is it. Your MovableType installation will now be able to send emails as and when you have configured it to.

This likely only applies to the ~2008 MacBook Pro:

Recently my MacBook Pro has been rejecting burnable media. When I put those discs into the drive, it would make some noises a few times but never even spin up, and the after a little while would just eject the disc. The computer would simply state that it was waiting for the SuperDrive. While considering booking in (yet again!) to the Genius Bar at Regent St, I read somewhere that the suggestion was the try blowing some air into drive. I can only recommend using canned air for this, but after a few blasts the drive has started recognising the discs and is burning again.