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Facebook's import of my Blog into its "Notes" section has been on the blink for a few weeks and today finally gave up on me - so I've reconfigured the feed and re-synchronised everything, so hopefully it will stay up to date now. Apologies for any confusion.

New Toy: A little MP3 player.

As a bit of a techie I like my gadgets. I'm not over the top in this respect, but I like it when technology can improve my life or do something useful. So when I buy new "toys", I've generally thought quite hard about it.

I really don't intend to start making this a "Gadget Review Blog", but when I buy new "toys" I'll try and say why I bought them and what I think about them in the hope that my thoughts benefit someone else - or myself at a later date.

Why buy a little MP3 player?

The background to this is that, after much deliberation, I bought a big-proper 30GB Apple iPod about a year ago. I'm very pleased with this and it's good for long journeys, by train or car, or to give me a day's tunes at work. But, despite being almost miraculously small for what it does, it's too big and too fragile to be used when walking, cycling (on quiet roads only of course), or when at the gym.

So, for a while I've been thinking about a cheap, ultra-small, solid-state music player to go alongside it. For the less-technical, solid-state means that it has no moving parts. Given that I like iTunes (for reasons I won't go into here), an iPod Shuffle seems like the obvious choice - as it will easily sync to an iTunes playlist (or smart playlist). It took a while to come around to the idea of a player without a screen, but I can see how it fulfills the need to just shove something in your pocket full of your favourite tunes, and go. So a Shuffle has been on my shopping list for a while.

THEN, I discovered iTunes Agent, which is a far-from perfect piece of software, but one which allows you to sync non-Apple devices with iTunes. This opens up the possibilities a bit more.

Originally I sync'ed my Sony Ericsson Walkman mobile phone with it, and took that to the gym a few times. However, the controls on the walkman phone aren't great (they get locked out by the phone's "auto-lock" feature) but then I found the Creative "Stone".

The "Stone" is Creative's equivalent of the iPod Shuffle. It's got 1GB capacity, no display, simple controls and ~8 hours battery life. At around £23, it's about half the price of an iPod Shuffle! Bargain.

So I got one. Here it is with headphones, close up, and next to some chewing gum for scale!



Looks pretty. Looks TINY!!! But does it do the job?

And I'm happy to say that yes, it does. It's easy to use, sounds good and does everything that it says it does. I've not had the battery run out on me yet. It feels sturdy and has survived many hours in my pocket already without much damage.

I could only pick out three odd things, though these are more observations than annoyances.

1. It can only be charged from a USB port. It comes with a short mini-USB cable to do this, but other charging options would be nice. Having said that, charging is quick and the battery lasts a good while, particularly as it's not a device I'll use for LONG periods of time.
   
2. It takes a while to start up. When you turns it on there's about 20 seconds of silence before it does anything. My guess is that it's scanning the files that you've loaded onto it. Fortunately it only does this after a total shutdown. You can happily pause and restart music and it will only turn completely off if you leave it paused for a long time.
3. Unlike the iPod Shuffle, it doesn't have a "hold" switch - used to "lock" the controls so that you don't make accidental button presses when the thing is in your pocket. However, this isn't a problem as the buttons are very nicely set up so that they need too much force to press accidentally, but not so much that you can't easily use the controls.

Overall, I like my "Stone" and I'm glad I bought it. It serves a simple purpose and will make many a trip to the gym with me. I'd recommend it to someone that wants a simple, cheap, micro-sized media player, and with iTA, you can sync with iTunes and have a "Shuffle" equivalent for half the price.

Error messages and defensive programming

So here it is. I'm a geek! There, it's out, you can all start jeering me and calling me a spod and asking where my sandals are, or, at the very least, call me up asking why your screen has turned a nice shade of purple.

This therefore might not make complete sense to all of you.

The other day at work I did a software upgrade on a test system. Once the main upgrade was complete it was supposed to automatically go round and upgrade some components on some remote systems. Because I don't trust this process I was logged on to the remote server and watched it happen. And I watched it fail. The process just stopped without doing what it was supposed to do. I then tried to do the upgrade on the remote system manually and that failed too.

I logged the fault with my software supplier and today they came back to me to say that it had initially failed because a disk was full, and that when I manually tried to re-run it, it failed again because a file was locked.

So, we pay thousands of pounds for this software and they people that develop it can't even write:

$SUCCESS=open($FILE)
if (not $SUCCESS)
then
log_error("An error occurred while opening $FILE")
end if

Admittedly an error like this was written to a (very large and mostly indecipherable) log file, but did it not occur to them that this might be something that the user might like to know about?

I despair sometimes.

A good ride and a few new things

It's Bike week!

To celebrate I did 13.75 miles round the hills of Wroughton and Chiseldon. A good hilly ride that I did with a really fit friend and actually managed to keep up!

This week I've discovered a funky kettle that heats water on demand in a few seconds. Genius. I'm forever switching the kettle on, walking off and then forgetting about it (repeat three times before ACTUALLY making a cup of coffee). It's expensive but I reckon it'd pay for itself quickly (the manufacturer says 2 years) and save loads of energy too!

I also discovered Bikely.com further to my post about route planning, Bikely is now my favourite way of doing cycle routes. It gives gradient profiles, allows you to share routes, downloads routes so that you can do fly-throughs in Google Earth. The only thing it doesn't really do is give you a decent map of a long route. You can get a crib sheet with vague directions but I would want to do a long ride on roads that I don't know with just that. Recommended!

Blatant Plug: Iko

I'd like to recommend a band. A band who don't quite have the status of "next big thing" but who, in my opinion, thoroughly deserve it. A band who, as far as I can tell, have been on the verge of being "big" for about 5 years.

I recommend them not because the lead singer and guitarist is an old friend of a friend, but because I think they're music and songwriting is fantastic, and because I think they have a really unique sound that should be appreciated by more people.

I appreciate that music is subjective. You may hate them. But please try them out? They are Iko and they've just released a little video of their recent tour of Denmark. They live at http://www.ikomusic.com and http://www.myspace.com/ikomusic

Thank you.