deKay’s Blog

Browsershots runs your supplied URL through a metric plethora of browsers, on assorted platforms, and then provides you with screengrabs on how it looks! They seem to have a bank of virtual machines doing the real actual work, and you are placed in a queue, but it’s certainly easier than installing all the OSes and browsers yourself.

I was surprised to see that this very blog not only broke on some systems, but actually killed the browser. Now that’s power!

Play Asia started selling these recently. They look like a Megadrive variant of the many Famicom “famiclones” out there, but they’re not - they’re officially licenced by Sega! And they’re really cheap too, coming in at under £20. You get 20 games built into the unit, but it also has a cartridge slot to play original (and forthcoming re-released) cartridges. I tested it with quite a few games of varying geographic origin, and aside from the UK version of Street Fighter II SCE crashing, I didn’t have any problems.

Anyway, if you want one, get thee over to Play Asia. They even come in green and blue!

And still the netbooks keep coming! They previously concentrated on cost, but now they’re adding style. See:

No word on specs or price yet, though.

Dell to launch ‘Eee PC beater’ today | Register Hardware

Lenovo, them folks what make the ThinkPads these days, are about to release their own machine into the EeePC/Aspire One/MSI Wind/HP Compaq 2133 region of the mini laptop markets.

The IdeaPad S9 and S10 have slightly higher specs than the Wind, but with similar price tags. All these netbooks can only be a good thing for the prices of the things, yes?

Lenovo heralds netbook PC duo | The Register

Remember a while back when I posted about how v1.2 of SyncMate was horribly broken? And how I had to revert back to v1.1 while they sorted out the issues with the driver on my Vario II?

Well, good news everyone! I thought I’d give the relatively recently released v1.3 a punt. And guess what? It works! Not only that, but they’ve added a few useful new features.

For a start, you can now sync your bookmarks with Firefox instead of smelly old Safari. You can also sync your calendar with Google Calendar too, and similarly sync contacts with Google Contacts. They’ve also added the ability to see your call log, and, most usefully, you can now mount your mobile device as a drive (although this feature is currently in beta, it worked fine for me).

SyncMate is available in free and paid for versions (the latter with more features) from Eltima.

Fo some reason, my XP Pro install in Parallels on my iMac lost internet access a few weeks ago. I wasn’t bothered as I hardly use it for anything. Today, however, I needed it as part of the install of Amiga Forever 2008, which only really works in Windows due to there not being a decent Intel port of UAE for the Mac. But I digress.

Having tried all the settings in Parallels, resinstalling the Parallels Tools in Windows, rebooting Windows, and repairing connections, I was still getting nothing. Supposedly an update to Leopard (10.5.3, I believe) can cause the Mac OS firewall to block DHCP requests from Parallels hosted OSes, but the firewall was turned off and XP could get an IP easily enough.

There has also been a recent XP update that can cause HTTP access to seemingly die, particularly if you have ZoneAlarm installed. However, I haven’t installed this update, and don’t have ZoneAlarm on the XP install. Besides, I’ve had no internet access on XP for a while longer than the update has been around.

Eventually, I found an almost-fix. Almost in that Internet Explorer on XP now works, and I can ping addresses, but for some reason Firefox still can’t see the internet. Anyway, it’ll do for now.

This post here provided the answer, which, if you can’t be bothered clicking, basically requires you to type this into your Mac’s terminal:

sudo killall -HUP pvsnatd

At some point this week (I’m not sure when), Virgin Media kindly upgraded my broadband package for free! So instead of the never-made-full-use-of-it 4Mb I had previously, I now have probably-still-won’t-make-full-use-of-it 10Mb instead!

I’ve had a HP laptop in several times in the last week, suffering from severe audio stuttering - in Media Player, VLC, when playing DVDs, and even just playing the Windows start-up jingle. It’s almost like when I had a nasty 16-bit ISA soundcard in my ancient PC and tried to play Half-Life.

We tried all sorts - scanning for viruses, defragging, reinstalling drivers, reducing the hardware acceleration, adding more memory, changing the volume… everything. But it still kept doing it.

I did notice that in Task Manager, whilst playing MP3s in Media Player, svchost was spiking at around 80% CPU usage, and Media Player itself flicked between 30-odd to 80. Playing the MP3s in other media players showed a similar thing. It was all very strange.

Thankfully, the ever amazing internet and some carefully chosen search terms married up to provide a solution. It would appear that some HP laptops of similar age to this one, as well as other machines (notably Sony Viaos) are prone to suffering from audio stutter. The reason? A mis-detected hard drive mode!  It seems that XP is seeing them as PIO rather than DMA drives. You can change the setting manually, but after a time, XP forgets and the cracked sound returns.

This forum topic explains it a bit more, but, more importantly, is what led me to this page - complete with a VBS script to fix the problem once and for all!

We ordered an MSI Wind laptop (rebadged and sold in the UK as a PC World Advent 4211 Netbook) for work recently, and it arrived yesterday so I’ve had a chance to have a play with it.

My very first impressions were quite poor. It looked very nice, is small, light and seems reasonably well built. However, it wouldn’t power up. Every time it tried to boot past the POST screen, the hard drive squealed and it switched itself off. Even after fully charging the battery, it still refused to boot.  I thought it was DOA, but then, it finally started up properly and has been fine since. Very odd.

After the usual Windows setup stuff (it comes with XP Home), there was about 15 minutes of “Tech Guys” automatic customisation, no doubt adding nonsense to the machine I don’t need. Not that it matters, as Home is going to be replaced with Pro anyway.

Once properly up and running, I was able to give it a test run. It seems very quick (although has no bloat on it yet), and the keyboard is pretty good to type on. The trackpad is a little small, and the area on the right for scrolling isn’t marked - and the “scroll sensitive” area seems very narrow making it awkward to scroll. The trackpad button is very stiff and rather small too, and would benefit from protruding above the case rather than sitting flush.

Comparing it to an EeePC 701, the Wind would seem to be the better machine. It’s 1024×600 screen is both larger (10″) and higher resolution than the Eee’s, the keyboard is superior, and the unit isn’t actually much bigger. In fact, it’s slightly thinner, and appears to be a little lighter too. It has all the same ports as the Eee - VGA, three USB, audio, ethernet and an SD card slot. In addition, and unlike the Eee, it has bluetooth built in.

The 80GB hard drive is acres more space than the Eee’s 4GB, but it isn’t flash which may impact on battery life (which I haven’t tested) or resilience to knocks. The Wind has a built-in webcam, but its quality is rather poor compared to the Eee.

In terms of price, we paid just under £240 for the Wind, whereas the EeePC 701 set us back about £185. Is the extra £55 worth it? When you consider that a copy of XP is around £55, then you could argue yes - especially if you were going to put XP on your Eee anyway. Here’s where to get one.

Firefox 3 is amazing.