Rancho De La Hore (Royalla dot net)

Like most of you, in my far distant past I used to offer to build PC’s for friends and family, I had plenty of spare time and the know-how to help people who otherwise would have to spend stupid amounts of money to have someone else build a PC for them. This was before Dell came along and offered good value for money and an easy to use on-line ordering system and I pretty much exclusively answered “Dell” whenever anyone asked me which computer they should buy (or worse still, asked me to build one for them).

These days it’s just not worth the time and effort to build your own unless you:

1) know what you’re doing

and

2) are a tight ass

(I am both, so still build my own PC’s)

Imagine my shock when after years of recommending but never actually buying a Dell, I decided to follow my own advice and sample their wares. The old Asus laptop Kristie is using for the business is on it’s last legs and it was time to look around for a replacement and taking advantage of the extra tax deduction for small businesses was a little extra incentive to do it soon.

I did a small amount of research and based on good experience with the Dell Studio 15 which we won last year in a competition I ordered a Dell Studio 17, pretty much stock except for increasing the screen res to 1920×1200 and a custom pink casing, using a 15% off coupon and moneybackco (5% rebate from Dell) saved me another $200ish bringing the total to about $1200, comparing this to the specs (which aren’t important for this rant) on equal laptops from other manufacturers and this couldn’t be beaten.

So I pushed the order button and waited 8 business days and I cracked it open plugged it in and turned it on to be greeted with this:

Lovely I thought, a familiar sight to anyone who’s ever overclocked a video card (no, I didn’t) and my immediate thought was that the shitty on-board GPU was shot. I promptly then went on holidays for nine days and forgot all about the laptop and this problem. One other thing I noticed and didn’t think much of it was that it was missing a webcam and fingerprint scanner (which are supposed to be standard on the Studio laptops), I didn’t give it another thought until talking to a friend she informed me that her Studio 17 which she ordered a day after me (on my advice) had both these items.

When we got back I immediately called Dell to try and get the graphical problem sorted out, and enquire about what the hell happened to my webcam and fingerprint scanner.

To cut a long story not so long, I spent two hours on the phone to Dell on the first day going over standard troubleshooting which I had already performed myself (install new drivers, update BIOS, etc etc) but I tolerated it because I know Dell has to satisfy itself that there is an actual hardware issue, the end result of this was having me re-install Vista on a BRAND NEW FRESHLY INSTALLED laptop. Despite knowing it wouldn’t make a lick of difference I did this, and surprise, it didn’t make a lick of difference.

I was promised a call back from a level 2 tech to escalate the issue.

I waited.

No call back, so I called again, spent another hour and a half with another level 1 script reader in Bangladesh…errr, I mean Melbourne, I also mentioned at that time the missing webcam and scanner and he assured me he would create a case for that issue as well and put me through to Customer Care to talk about that.

I was on hold for 10 minutes then lost the phone connection. I called back and was put on hold and transferred to four different people, each one more clueless than the last until finally I was told all the Customer Care people were busy and they would call me back.

I wait.

Nothing.

I called again and got through to Tech Support, after going through all the same old shit again, with some new shit this time (he actually told me to install the “Studio 17 Wallpaper” as part of the diagnosis process, for an ultimate WTF moment) and an hour and a half more of my time he finally ordered a replacement motherboard to be installed. Presumably this would solve the problem, but wouldn’t help me much with the missing webcam and fingerprint scanner.

So I tried once again to talk to Customer Care and after being on hold for 20+ minute finally spoke to a human who wasn’t completely unhelpful or unsympathetic but said she had to get approval to waive the $200 fee associated with a returning a product (another WTF moment). I smelled a shitfight while I tried to explain that I ordered a laptop with a webcam and fingerprint scanner but didn’t get one, again, promised a call back later today, it’s currently 3:30 and I’m not holding my breath.

So a total of about six hours on the phone and still no solution to a simple problem.

I also twittered randomly while waiting on the phone, here’s a transcript because I know if you’ve read this far you love pain (in reverse date order, oldest last):

• 1hr 30mins and I may have a solution, maybe, but the promise that they will call me back today doesn’t inspire confidence #dell
• 1hr 15mins, finally get on to Customer Care and she can’t find the case the tech support guy says he created
• 52mins #dell
• @justinitsuj I think I know the script better then they do now.
• On hold for 10 minutes, he’s gone off to get a coffee and forgotten about me (I was going to say CURRY, but that’s racial profiling), right?
• @justinitsuj luckily I haven’t got anything of value on there, they already had me install Vista again, clean install, problem still there
• Install video drives again, install wallpaper (huh?!), re-flash BIOS, here we go…
• 30 minutes and counting and I’m about where I have been with every other tech support drone, no progress.
• Back on the phone with #Dell, one of this clowns diagnostic steps is to install the specific studio wallpaper, all I have to say is WTF
• "Our customer care representatives are all busy at the moment, I will have one call you back by the end of today" - yeah, right.
• Person number five just hung up on me, I hardly said anything apart from that innocent comment about her mother!
• Stop putting me through to tech support when my issue is NOT technical, sheesh. #dell
• Shoot me now.
• At least their on hold music doesn’t suck too much, if "doesn’t suck" means Kenny G, ugh.
• Gave up after being on hold to nowhere for 5 minutes, trying again, ho hum.
• not=now, still on hold with gawd knows who…I think I’ll just ask for a refund and save myself the next 3 hours on the phone
• Oh great, he put me through to someone else and they are not putting me through to someone else…the journey continues.
• I think I’ve been hung up on, we were getting on so well too! Oh wait, there he is…..aaaand, I’m on hold again……
• (Zeus is not the -fake- name of the guy on the other end of the phone)
• On phone to Dell tech support, Zeus help me!

I had always recommended Dell on the basis of the apparent value for money and support. This experience hasn’t been terrible enough to make me stop telling people to buy Dell rather than offer to build them a PC, because I’d rather open that can of works again but I will be less enthusiastic in the future and will provide a caveat that Dell are great if you don’t have any issues or don’t mind talking to a phone operator with more training on how to speak with an American accent than on how to actually deal with a technical issue other than reading from a script.

This may seem like a long whinge over something insignificant but the bottom line is it took way too long to get the technical issue to a point where they would admit an obvious fault (and organise a repair) and I also did not get the item I ordered, the process to sort that out is looking to be just as long if not longer than the technical issue resolution.

We’ll see, will report results.

It won some kind of advertising award for being amazingly clever, or something, click below.

It’s been a while…

Thanks to Cav for finding this and posting the link: AliensRL is a tactical roguelike game, created in 7 days, inspired by the "Aliens" movie and the "Alien Breed: Tower Assault" computer game.

How awesome does that look? Not convinced? Check your pulse, you’re probably dead or something.

Download it here: http://alien.chaosforge.org/index.php?module=downloads

Also, I’ve almost completed configuring the HTPC and after moving away from XBMC for various reasons have settled on Media Centre using the MediaBrowser plug-in. Eye candy-wise it’s pretty close to XBMC but it also seems to handle playback smoother than XBMC mainly due to the fact that MCE is able to pass off decoding of video content to the GPU rather than doing it all on the CPU. In English that means playback is smoother and quieter.

I also stumbled upon this, it’s a remote control app for iPhone which lets you emulate a keyboard, touchpad and remote control all in one…why did I buy a DiNovo Mini? (because I don’t have an iPhone yet).

I recently joined ultrageekdom and built a HTPC to replace my aging XBOX and negate the need to run TVersity and even manually convert non-XBOX360 content (i.e. you know, Debian ISO’s….) to be playable via the 360 (i.e. WMV).

Since I built the HTPC it’s been fine (apart from a few niggles, I still need to configure the harmony remote properly) but I haven’t been able to play back any 1080p content smoothly. I’ve been blaming a combination of the hardware (the hippie green low power CPU 5050e) and motherboard (Asus M3N78-EM) and Windows 7 for not being optimised yet, which is partially true. The other issues is that I’m using XBMC to play back which is an amazing media center but notoriously doesn’t use external codecs for playback, which is great if everything works out of the box but shitty if it doesn’t.

Anyway, I found the solution to my problem via the Media Center community forums  with this:

http://shark007.net/win7codecs.html

and the 64 bit components if you’re running Windows 7 64bit:

http://shark007.net/x64components.html

Go through the config screens on both and fiddle the settings as appropriate, and viola! smooth as silk play back in Windows Media Player (haven’t tested VLC yet but I assume it should work the same). Apparently CoreAVC would also have solved the problem but it’s not free, and free is good.

However this doesn’t solve the problem of XBMC not playing smoothly because as mention it doesn’t use external codecs, so…now I just need to do the following:

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=43511&highlight=external+player

to set up WMP as an external player within XBMC and it’s done, not that it was really a big issue since even on a 100” screen sitting 4m away I can’t tell the visible difference between 720p and 1080p, but it was the principle of the thing.

Having just installed WHS for the first time over the weekend I figured I would share some thoughts. Beware, technical content.

My main reason for using WHS was the stupidly large collection of external and internal hard drives of varying sizes which were getting hard to manage using XP in a drive-by-drive basis. I literally ran out of drive letters after mapping various drives from other PC’s on the network. WHS lets me consolidate them all in to a single pool of storage and makes adding and removing drives from that pool easy as pie. 

My secondary requirement (and this will make some readers cringe) was the ability to run the WHS server as a second utility PC, for iTunes, playing video, music, uTorrent MSN Messenger, burning CD/DVD’s and other tasks previously taken care of by the same hardware running XP. Yes, I know you’re _supposed_ to run WHS headless but I’m currently treating it like I did the XP install, complete with dual monitors and fancy wallpaper, take that!

After some initial apprehension about whether WHS could handle being used as a regular desktop install, the only real workaround I had to do during install/config was download the msi install for Live Messenger (8.5) because it didn’t want to install from the .exe. I haven’t managed to get the newest version of Live Messenger running yet but I’m working on it.

The bottom line for installing and running apps on the desktop is that anything which will run on Windows Sever 2003 will run on WHS, this also applies to drivers for your hardware. I didn’t have a problem getting all the drivers running on a five year old socket 754 motherboard (Asus K8V SE Deluxe). I even managed to get my bluetooth keyboard/mouse and Logitech Z-10 speakers and LCD screen to work as they did in XP (using the XP drivers in compatibility mode).

As far as I understand it the Raid-lite system is really just a striped set with the addition of optional mirroring for nominated shares, all handled by the software and configured by the very easy to use console. There’s no limit to how much data you can set as redundant other than the amount of disk space you have (i.e. you need the same amount of free space as you are setting to be redundant, obviously).

I’m still not 100% sure what happens if a drive in the non-redundant pool dies suddenly but I’m assuming anything which was balance to that drive will be lost forever, but that’s really no different to my old system of individual hard drives and there’s the advantage that (hopefully) WHS will warn me ahead of time if a drive is going to die so I can remove it from the storage pool and the files on it will rebalance to the other drives before the target died (hopefully). Some automatic settings to make this happen without intervention would be nice.

From what I’ve read the system uses the boot drive as a scratch area while it balances to the bigger your install drive the better, so yes, use your 1.5Tb drive as the primary boot drive (I wish I’d known this BEFORE I installed mine on a 320Gb).

I promise, once I get another "utility" PC organised I’ll put my WHS server in a closet and stop using my WHS install as a desktop, maybe.

Final note, there is a site entirely dedicated to users of WHS with lots of great hints and tips and a pretty active forum, http://www.wegotserved.com/.

EDIT: The WHS console supports add-ins for supliment or add new features to the server, some useful ones I have found in my travels are:

• Duplication Info – Gives you information on which files are duplicated where over your various hard drives, unfortunately doesn’t give you any control over where the files actually go.
• uTorrent – Allows you to manage torrents from any PC on your network using the WHS console.
• Windows Home Server Disk Management – Designed for users who need more detail about their server’s storage status than what the standard Windows Home Server Storage interface provides, with 3D wire-map diagrams!
• My Movies – Metadata management for media files stores on the server.
• WHS Task Viewer – Remotely monitor and manipulate tasks on the server.
• Samsung Photo Frame Controller – A little specific but I have one of these frames running at home and this add-in lets you manage it from the console.
• WHS DB Check – Checks for problems with the WHS backup database
• Remote Notification – Send System Health notification emails from the server

Here’s a full list of add-ins or here, and a page of the most popular add-ins.

The new version of Windows Live Messenger has one great feature which made it worth upgrading to. That feature is the ability to stay logged on with multiple PC’s at the same time and have the messages delivered to all of them, this saves the inevitable problem of people sending you messages to a machine you’re not actually logged in to.

Unfortunately, the new version also had a deal breaker “feature” also, being that when you used the inbox button/popup menu it would load hotmail in your default browser where previously it would load it in IE no matter what your default browser was and because I use Opera as my primary browser and hotmail hates Opera, this annoyed me a lot…until….

Changing Windows Live Messenger 2009’s Hotmail button to use Internet Explorer instead of the default browser

Jonathan Kay wrote a little app which fixes this issue, load it up, press a button and your default browser is ignored in favour of IE for the inbox link only (so following links within messages still go to your default browser), it’s simply genius!

Now if only Microsoft would update the Messenger client on the XBOX 360 so it didn’t kick off ALL my other messenger sessions whenever I turned my XBOX on.

Here’s a few cool things I’ve found recently:

Aeon skin for XBMC

This is almost certainly the best looking skin i’ve ever seen for any media centre app, the added bonus for people who don’t give a crap about actually installing XBMC/Aeon is the large collection of movie, music, game and tv show related backdrops all in glorious 1920×1080. For example:

Wallpaper in 1920x1080 example from http://www.aeonproject.com/backdrops.php?cat=bg_movies

browershots.org

Skip over this one if you don’t care about creating cross-browser web applications, if are and like me have never heard of this web based tool, time to hit the link above. It’s a web based tool which makes screenshots of any web design loaded in pretty much every browser which has ever existed, it’s not very useful for actually debugging rendering issues since it just gives you a static screenshot but as quick reference to see how your site appears in over 70 different browser versions, it’s fantastic!

and finally …

Kidlandia

Create and customise your own fantasy based map for kids (and you know you’re going to put your name on there too!), they offer a printing service (on rolled or hard canvas) but it’s pretty expensive and the preview mode gives you an image good enough for use as a nice wallpaper. Here’s the one I created:

Alexland from http://www.kidlandia.com/Share.aspx?MAPID=12775

So after a couple of years and some half-arsed attempts to get the royalla.net domain back from some filthy squatters they finally gave up and let it go without so much as a “sorry about that”. Arseholes. OK, so I offered them $1 for it, once, they weren’t keen. I think my exact words at that time where, “fine, I’ll just wait until you realise it’s not even worth $1 and get sick of paying the yearly renewal”, it seems I won, ha!

The other good news is that apart from some widget stuff on the right side (work in progress) and the missing gallery, I have finished moving the site to the new server and everything seems to be working with special thanks to Velvet Blue’s Update URL plug-in which saved me messing with the database or manually relinking 400 images, yay for me!

So, update your bookmarks and rss feeds to http://www.royalla.net, again!

Don’t Panic!

I’m in the process of moving the entire blog to another server (actually the Qnap 409 NAS) and it looks like the images have broken along with some other things (the gallery, which may be broken forever, but I have a replacement installed and ready to go)…this could take some time.

Celebrities are inherently more interesting than regular people because they’re celebrities but I wouldn’t follow just anyway and any I do start following who ends up being a boring twit (pun intended) I’ll stop following, quick smart (I’m looking at you Ashton Kutcher, even if you do have 1.6 million followers you’re still a boring dick, quantity <> quality)

However, there are a few standouts (in no particular order):

Courtney Love (courtneylover79)

Her tweets make absolutely no sense at all, she’s probably drunk/stoned/stupid or maybe her keyboard is broken? Even when she’s mildly coherent her babbling still doesn’t make any sense to a sane person.

Who couldn’t be interested in someone who tells the world:

watching diablo on the vuew on you tube and shld be sleeping i l;opve pam! where do people getthis shit? edera we m,ust discuss the next on

e with silver! ;pts and ;lots of ei;ver o ;ovethe onme you macdefor me so much i could CRY amd shri,ptom whats up i wnt my Upcycle!

Indeed, you want your Upcycle, don’t we all?

Brent Spiner (BrentSpiner)

Best known as Data from Star Trek his tweets aren’t your traditional fair, he’s using twitter as a way to tell a story where he seems to be weaving his real life in with a fictional (?) one, 140 characters at a time.

He’s on a commercial break at the moment but promises to return with a new story.

The Stand (various, see below)

Swine Flu turned out to be a storm in a taco shell but a creative bunch of people have assumed the identities of the major characters from Stephen King’s The Stand and are playing out the entire story via twitter, M O O N, that spells awesome.

• http://twitter.com/VegasWalkinDude
• http://twitter.com/motherabigail
• http://twitter.com/m_o_o_n
• http://twitter.com/Nadine_Cross
• http://twitter.com/frangoldsmith
• http://twitter.com/DaynaJurgens
• http://twitter.com/Nick_Andros
• http://twitter.com/Stu_Redman
• http://twitter.com/larry_underwood

David Hewlett (dhewlett)

The quirky egotistical doctor from Stargate:Atlantis and slightly weird movie “A Dog’s Breakfast” tweets are about as interesting as mine, which makes him OK in my book.

Some other random ones:

Kevin Smith, Jason Mews, Diablo Cody, William Shatner, Levar Burton, Rob Dyrdek, Gerard Way, Pete Wentz, Dave Hughes…and all my actual friends (not listed).

I also found a Cracked post on 10 Celebrity Twitters Worth Following, I only had one so far (feliciaday), oh, make that two (hodgman) but just added Neil Gaiman.