technology – Page 10 – Nick Hodge's Blog

Starting to become a habit. Popout the Microsoft LifeCam, stare into the camera. Photo, upload. All my facial follicles are on a follicular holiday underneath my skin. Or maybe they were frightened by the five-bladed razor yesterday.

Last night, Duncan Riley challenged me on “my personal sponsorship target”. AU$1000 would be cool. Now that’s a serious amount of dosh to help out BeyondBlue.

An Example of Geeks for Good

Last week South Australia celebrated Water Week. As a previous resident in the driest state on the driest continent, water and water conservation was drilled into us from a young age. The current water restrictions in many states pale into insignificance compared to living on a farm with limited water supplies.

Geeks for Good is a thought-seed planted by Cameron Reilly on G’Day world 299, and his subsequent call-out to the Podcasting world at podcampperth.

Two previous school associates, Dr Paul Dalby and Chris Hobart – along with a former work colleague, Mike Seyfang; have taken the power of the internet, borrowed an idea from WebJam and created Water PitchFest.

Using flickr, twitter, youtube, blogging, rss and podcasting – getting the story out about water projects.

The litmus tests: comments, emails, project executions but most importantly connections.

Toshiba Hard Disk Upgrade

As my internal 100Gb hard disk on the Toshiba M400 (T2400) had only 5% free space: even after archiving photos and podcasts, I could not reduce the free space to under 10%.

Time for a new HD. Purchased from Auspcmarket, 200Gb 7200 RPM Seagate Momentum drive.

As much as this Toshiba has limitations that are starting to annoy me (read: screen real-estate: can I have a new XPS now, please. ta.) – adding and deleting the hard drive was extremely simple.

Process

Windows Vista “Windows Complete Backup” (in Backup and Restore) to second hard drive
Physically remove old drive, install new drive

remove two screws holding in the plastic cover
use the plastic tab to remove the hard disk in it aluminium bay
remove four screws holding the SATA hard disk in the bay
insert and replug new SATA hard disk
reverse install procedure.

PXE boot from network, where we have a network based, System Recovery
A pleasant UI appears; only confusing part was ensuring I had a copy of my disk drivers on USB
Restore from the backup, onto the new hard disk.
Reboot from new hard disk
Using Computer Management>Disk Management, Right-click “Extend Volume” to the full 200Gb
Done

Performance of the disk drive: 4.9 to 5.4; that is a10% increase.

SubSonic goes LOLCODE (and Microsoft)

Rob Conery, ASP.NET guru, has found LOLCODE.

He’s even translated Northwinds to LOLCODE.

Oh, and on another note: Rob Conery is joining Microsoft.

Thanks, Nickhac for the link and lulz!

Beta Testing for Movember 2007: Mo’Bro ID is 82950

I’ll start clean shaven on 1st November 2007

Why? Prostate Cancer Research and BeyondBlue. Are two extremely worthy causes.

Please sponsor me at the official web site: http://www.movember.com/au/donate/ My Mo’Bro ID is 82950

Flikr, Windows Live Photo Gallery is goodness

As Larry mentions in his post, the latest beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery is out.

After installing it, the first feature I tried out is the new "upload to Flickr". I am a Flickr Pro user: the ability to see and comment on my friend’s photos is like attending slide-show evenings from the comfort of your own computer.

The internal buzz in the leadup to announce even got Jeff Sandquist hyped! And Long Zheng, an excellent photographer also loves it.

Windows Vista added support for tagging photos as another mechanism for organising your digital memories. Windows Live Photo Gallery reflects these tags when upload into Flickr. Now as a Flickr user, this was a wow! moment.

Watch and listen to my (first) screencast.

Unified Communications + Windows Live = Knowledge Worker 2.0

I am a mere Knowledge Worker in a large Enterprise. Working online, my work productivity has seen some major changes of late

I’ve installed the latest Windows Live for my Windows Mobile 6 Treo. One of the interesting features is voice search.

It’s a little difficult to describe in text (and in Australia it’s a little not-ready, but US and UK Windows Mobile users should install the latest version) — we’re heading down a very interesting path. However, voice is starting to be everywhere.

Along with the Office Communications Server, the concept of presence, work, location, phones, voicemail and email start to coalesce into a connected smartness. I can dial into our system whilst driving and give voice commands to the server.

Where ever I am, my laptop is connected to the work telephone system. Outlook gets my voicemails (which are just sound files!) and my presence is connected to my Outlook calendar. Using caller ID, the incoming call is connected to our global address list.

When not on my laptop, using Windows Live on my Treo, I can chat over the Telstra NextG network.

Knowledge Worker 2.0.