It’s here, and the Nexus 9 has been added to the wooden family of electronics. I’m pleased.
The quest for wood-effect skins on all my devices continues.
Thatâs a rosewood BlackBerry Q10, a (very subtle) black woodgrain edged Moto360, and a bamboo Google Nexus 5.
A matching bamboo skin for my Nexus 9 is in the mail. Watch this space.
In case youâre wondering, the BB skin is from DecalGirl, and the other device skins are from Slickwraps.
It’s here, and the Nexus 9 has been added to the wooden family of electronics. I’m pleased.
The quest for wood-effect skins on all my devices continues.
Thatâs a rosewood BlackBerry Q10, a (very subtle) black woodgrain edged Moto360, and a bamboo Google Nexus 5.
A matching bamboo skin for my Nexus 9 is in the mail. Watch this space.
In case youâre wondering, the BB skin is from DecalGirl, and the other device skins are from Slickwraps.
The quest for wood-effect skins on all my devices continues.
That’s a rosewood BlackBerry Q10, a (very subtle) black woodgrain edged Moto360, and a bamboo Google Nexus 5.
A matching bamboo skin for my Nexus 9 is in the mail. Watch this space.
In case you’re wondering, the BB skin is from DecalGirl, and the other device skins are from Slickwraps.
The quest for wood-effect skins on all my devices continues.
That’s a rosewood BlackBerry Q10, a (very subtle) black woodgrain edged Moto360, and a bamboo Google Nexus 5.
A matching bamboo skin for my Nexus 9 is in the mail. Watch this space.
In case you’re wondering, the BB skin is from DecalGirl, and the other device skins are from Slickwraps.
A couple of weeks ago, the Moto 360 went  on sale here in Canada. I got up at 5am and hit the internet. My intent was to reserve one in a local store so that I could go and pick it up later that day, but I was out of luck there. Instead I ordered one from Telus.com and it arrived in the mail two days later.
I’m not a tech reviewer – not much of a writer either, for that matter – but I wanted to post to talk about my first impressions during the week and a half I’ve had this thing on my wrist.
When you take the device out of the box and fire it up it takes you through a few brief setup steps, a quick usage tutorial, and then that’s really it. If I had to describe my first 10 minutes with this $280 device in a single word then I’d go with “underwhelming.”
It doesn’t take long, however, to figure out that’s the beauty of the 360 (and, I would assume, all Android Wear devices): this is, first and foremost, a watch. It doesn’t try to be a computer on your wrist, and nor should it.
Aside from telling the time, the functionality my watch provides is more or less just another screen on which to view my Google Now cards and Android notifications, but in practice this is more useful than I ever thought it would be, and I am a huge fan as a result.
When I get a text or an email, or even a Lync message, a quick glance at my wrist is all it takes for me to decide if it’s something important enough for me to take my phone out of my pocket (or maybe even sit down in front of my computer), or if it’s something that can wait. If I want to open the message (or whatever) on my phone then a quick swipe left and a tap is all it takes – when I get my phone out, the relevant content is already on the screen.
If a quick (one or two word) reply is all that’s needed then I can just talk into my watch. I don’t know that I’d do this in public necessarily, but it is actually a useful function despite my knee-jerk initial opinion about it.
The watch face itself is configurable and there are several designs to choose from. I’ve gone for “classic,” a simple watch face that displays free/busy information from my calendar in a subtle, unobtrusive way.
Talking of my calendar, this is yet another killer feature for me. Being able to see details of my next meeting at a glance (and being able to swipe to see the upcoming stuff that follows it) is hugely useful (although again, I didn’t realize how use useful it would be until I had it).
Battery life has been a talking point in early Moto 360 reviews, but I have no concerns in this area. I have ambient mode turned on, and when take my watch off at the end of the day it usually has 30%-40% battery remaining. It certainly requires charging every day, but that’s fine by me.
So should you get one? Well I love mine and I’m glad I bought it. I recognize that this is a first-generation device though. It will be followed, no doubt, by versions with improved functionality, better displays, better battery life… in a year or so there will probably be smartwatches available that make my watch look like a relic of time gone by. If you’re not OK with that then wait until version 2 hits the shelves. For me, I’ll consider upgrading when that happens but the functionality I get from this model is worth the money to me, even if it turns out that I change to a newer model in 18 months time. If you think in the same (geeky) way as me, get your chequebook out and snap one of these things up. I’d recommend it to anybody.
Let me know in the comments if you have questions about it! I’d be happy to answer them.
A couple of weeks ago, the Moto 360 went  on sale here in Canada. I got up at 5am and hit the internet. My intent was to reserve one in a local store so that I could go and pick it up later that day, but I was out of luck there. Instead I ordered one from Telus.com and it arrived in the mail two days later.
I’m not a tech reviewer – not much of a writer either, for that matter – but I wanted to post to talk about my first impressions during the week and a half I’ve had this thing on my wrist.
When you take the device out of the box and fire it up it takes you through a few brief setup steps, a quick usage tutorial, and then that’s really it. If I had to describe my first 10 minutes with this $280 device in a single word then I’d go with “underwhelming.”
It doesn’t take long, however, to figure out that’s the beauty of the 360 (and, I would assume, all Android Wear devices): this is, first and foremost, a watch. It doesn’t try to be a computer on your wrist, and nor should it.
Aside from telling the time, the functionality my watch provides is more or less just another screen on which to view my Google Now cards and Android notifications, but in practice this is more useful than I ever thought it would be, and I am a huge fan as a result.
When I get a text or an email, or even a Lync message, a quick glance at my wrist is all it takes for me to decide if it’s something important enough for me to take my phone out of my pocket (or maybe even sit down in front of my computer), or if it’s something that can wait. If I want to open the message (or whatever) on my phone then a quick swipe left and a tap is all it takes – when I get my phone out, the relevant content is already on the screen.
If a quick (one or two word) reply is all that’s needed then I can just talk into my watch. I don’t know that I’d do this in public necessarily, but it is actually a useful function despite my knee-jerk initial opinion about it.
The watch face itself is configurable and there are several designs to choose from. I’ve gone for “classic,” a simple watch face that displays free/busy information from my calendar in a subtle, unobtrusive way.
Talking of my calendar, this is yet another killer feature for me. Being able to see details of my next meeting at a glance (and being able to swipe to see the upcoming stuff that follows it) is hugely useful (although again, I didn’t realize how use useful it would be until I had it).
Battery life has been a talking point in early Moto 360 reviews, but I have no concerns in this area. I have ambient mode turned on, and when take my watch off at the end of the day it usually has 30%-40% battery remaining. It certainly requires charging every day, but that’s fine by me.
So should you get one? Well I love mine and I’m glad I bought it. I recognize that this is a first-generation device though. It will be followed, no doubt, by versions with improved functionality, better displays, better battery life… in a year or so there will probably be smartwatches available that make my watch look like a relic of time gone by. If you’re not OK with that then wait until version 2 hits the shelves. For me, I’ll consider upgrading when that happens but the functionality I get from this model is worth the money to me, even if it turns out that I change to a newer model in 18 months time. If you think in the same (geeky) way as me, get your chequebook out and snap one of these things up. I’d recommend it to anybody.
Let me know in the comments if you have questions about it! I’d be happy to answer them.
Iâve mentioned in a couple of previous posts that Iâve refreshed my home server recently. In setting everything up I spent a lot of time googling around looking for information on how to do things that for the most part Iâd done before on my previous server.
To help me avoid future googling if/when I need to go through this process again, Iâve been creating a whole bunch of bookmarks this time around. I thought Iâd share them in case theyâre useful to anybody else.
As I mentioned briefly in a previous post, my home server is in desperate need of an update. Last weekend I took the plunge and bought the hardware necessary to build a replacement.
I donât need anything especially powerful â the chief function of this device is as network-attached storage â but I do want room to grow and do things with this new server that werenât possible with the hacked pogoplug device I was using previously.
I bought a Celeron-powered Intel NUC, a 750gb harddrive, 8gb of RAM and an 8gb USB drive. My intent was to use the 8gb drive as the boot device, keeping the harddrive entirely free for storage purposes.
I chose the Intel NUC primarily because of its small size and low power consumption (it uses a particularly small amount of electricity with the Celeron processor in the model I opted for). Iâm a big fan of this platform though, and when the time comes to replace the media-centre PC that lives underneath the TV in our living room I will probably buy another one of these. That said, the platform is not not without its problems. Read on, to learn how I set mine up.
First things first is hardware installation, and this was especially simple. You remove four screws from the base of the computer and the lid slides off. Inside youâll find a metal chassis for the 2.5â HDD, and you lift that out to revel the motherboard.
In my model of NUC thereâs a single SODIMM slot for the RAM, so I slotted that in. Next up is the HDD itself. The chassis includes brackets to hold the drive in place and the power and data connectors are already positioned. The drive just slots in, and you insert a couple of screws to hold it in place.
And thatâs really all there is to it! You put the cover back on, and tighten the four screws on the base of the unit. Done.
The first thing to do is update the systemâs BIOS, and this really is an essential step. This thing comes with Intelâs visual BIOS, and the version it ships with has some issues.
Updating isnât difficult: Head on over to Intelâs website, download the latest firmware and put it on a USB drive, boot into the BIOS and hit F7.
Even with the latest version installed, the BIOS is where this thing falls down, in my opinion. If youâre planning on installing Windows 7 or 8 on this thing then you probably wonât run into any problems. My plan was to install an alternate OS though, and I ran into a whole bunch of issues. I believe this was because of bugs in the BIOS and its implementation of EFI, but I donât know enough to say this for sure.
My plan was to install vSphere Hypervisor and use this thing to host a couple of virtual servers. vSphere has a hardware compatibility list and none of my hardware is on it, but Iâd done some reading and learned that I could slipstream drivers for the HDD and network card into the install. Nevertheless, I never did manage to install vSphere â the install just froze every time and I couldnât get through it no matter what I tried.
The next hypervisor I tried was Proxmox VE. The install completed just fine, but I couldnât get the server to boot. While the problems I had with vSphere may well have been in relation to my use of unsupported hardware, I firmly believe my problems installing Proxmox were related to the BIOS, or at least an incompatibility between the EFI implementation in Proxmoxâs version of the Linux kernel and the BIOSâ EFI implementation. I never did manage to get this working either, except for briefly with a cludgy workaround involving booting from a live-CD and entering the relevant commands to make GRUB boot the OS installed on the HDD instead.
After a day of frustration and failed attempts to install an OS, I moved on to my third VM hypervisor, oVirt. With vSphereâs proprietary solution the OS and the hypervisor are closely intertwined. Itâs possible to install Proxmox on top of an existing Debian install, but itâs not the recommended way of doing things and the process seems complex. oVirt, by contrast, seems to have been designed to be installed on top of an installation of CentOS. An all-in-one install image is offered, but after the previous dayâs failures I didnât even bother with this â I did a (successful!) minimal install of CentOS and then used the yum package manager to add oVirt on top.
With the hypervisor up and running, I used the web-interface to install Ubuntu Server into one VM and Windows Server 2008 into another. I plan on adding two more virtual machines, one Linux and one Windows, for testing and playing around.
I get paid every other Thursday, or 26 times a year. That mostly means I get paid twice a month, but twice a year there’s a month where I get paid three times, and this is one of those months.
Since a big chunk of our expenses are monthly, getting paid three times in a month means I have some extra cash left over to play with, and this month I’m going to use it to replace our home server.
Above is our existing home server. It’s a pogoplug device that I’ve hacked to run debian linux. It’s primary function is as network attached storage for all the other devices in the house, and the box to its right is a 2tb USB hard-drive. It also runs a LAMP stack for development, and some torrent software so it can handle downloading duties without any of the other computers in the house needing be kept on.
It only has 256mb of RAM though, and just occasionally if it’s under heavy load things fall down. The torrent daemon is usually the first victim: sometimes I go to check on the status of a download only to find that the downloading process has run out of resources and shut itself down.
My requirements for a replacement are that it handle all the tasks the existing server does – without the problems caused by the limited memory, uses electricity sparingly, and also gives me room to grow and try new things that I haven’t even thought of yet.
My plan is to replace it with a machine I build based on an Intel NUC.
This thing is a barebones machine (it doesn’t include any RAM or storage in the basic package), but it could be useful for many scenarios (I think it would make a great HTPC, for example) including mine.
I’m going to max it out with 8gb of RAM, and this 32-fold increase over what I have now should allow for a whole host of new possibilities.
I’m going to take advantage of the extra resources by attempting to install vSphere Hypervisor on it and split it into a number of virtual servers. One will be linux-based to replicate the functionality of the existing server, one Windows-based VM, and maybe two extra VMs (one linux, one Windows) so I can separate my playing around from mission-critical server duties.
I’ll be posting more as I work my way through the process.