(This is my way of saying that despite Internode’s port-availability-checking doover, there were in fact no Optus ports left in the exchange, so stuck with ADSL1 until such time as I move house.)

I know this is nothing new. There are dedicated devices (ka-ching!) that already do it, as well as software+hardware-addon combo for one of the higher-end Nokia N-series phones (also insanely expensive). But iPhone has the advantage of being a platform with a huge pile of developers wanting on, so perhaps there’s more chance of an inexpensive simple magnifier app?

I don’t see anything in the app store yet, but if it’s possible then that’s really only a matter of time…

UPDATE: Well, it looks like there’s something that might do the trick, Makayama Camera Pro. It’s not meant to be AT (you can tell that from the price, US$19.95), it’s really just supposed to add some basic missing functions to the iPhone camera, but I reckon it’d work well enough as a basic magnifier.

This and eReader are making me think my next phone — in eighteen months or so — may well wind up being an iPhone after all.

At a hardware level the plan is to nab a pair of 1TB SATA disks. They can be had for ~AU$250 each. But I’d like to get more than 1TB of storage out of them while also having some data duplicated. Some data matters enough to want it mirrored, some is essentially throwaway stuff: nice to have, but if I lose it I really don’t care that much.

The traditional way of doing this on a UNIX-like system would be to allocate part of the disks to a mirror, and part to a stripe or concat volume. The downsides of doing this are reasonably obvious: if you lose one disk you lose all the data on the concat/stripe, and you have to allocate the storage up front.

(Gross simplification, I know, as you can probably recover data if it was a concat rather than a stripe, but there’s a certain amount of stuffing about involved and I wouldn’t exactly guarantee it working.)

So I’ve been reading about Windows Home Server with some interest. They have a sneaky trick: there’s no mirroring at a disk level, instead you can tell it to mirror individual files or directories and those will then be copied to two drives.

So there’s no need to allocate storage up-front — and in fact WHS won’t let you do that anyway — just mark stuff to be duplicated and it takes care of things. If you lose a disk, you lose anything that was stored on it that wasn’t duplicated, but you don’t lose access to stuff that was stored on other disks because it’s not doing the concat/stripe thing.

There’s a known data corruption bug in the current release version of WHS, so I wouldn’t trust that. But there’s an update being tested at the moment (they’re up to RC4) which is supposed to fix that and improve write performance. That it also introduces an exciting new problem when the disks are approaching full is uninspiring but the development group seems to be aware that it’s a problem and planning to address it, so…

I’ll be grabbing the 2×1TB disks soonish and will at least give WHS a try. The fallback position is the “traditonal UNIX” approach. I don’t see that I have anything but UNIX-geek cred to lose by trying Microsoft’s tool.

(Incidentally, this granular duplication model is something the Linux weenies miss when they ridicule WHS and start in on how people should just use a Linux box instead.)

But recently I bought a laptop, expecting mostly to use it as a portable desktop: hook up the big screen and the real keyboard, but able to pick it up and take it away with me if needed.

Over the last week, though, we’ve had a sick dog in the house who needs to be watched and who has trouble with the stairs. As the computers are usually kept upstairs, it became necessary to shift our stuff downstairs so we wouldn’t have to deal with Mr Stoned Lab treating the stairs as a perilous slippery-dip.

So I’ve been getting used to using the laptop in broadly the way it is meant to be used: sitting on the kitchen table, using the builtin screen and keyboard. I’ve had to bump the fonts up in PuTTY (now using 16pt Lucida Console, rather than my usual 14pt), and some things are a bit squinty to read, but mostly it’s OK.

Not really liking the keyboard much, but I’m used to having that sloped and without the big chunky bit in front, and the trackpad is of course bloody awful, but a regular old USB mouse does just fine.

The machine is running Vista SP1, and that’s been perfectly adequate. I’m not trying to hook up to a corporate network though, so there are all sorts of nasties I’m not dealing with there.

My one Vista observation is that the Sidebar has got a lot less dreadful since I last tried to use it. It is no longer gobbling up all the CPU on a regular basis, and on a widescreen display there’s quite enough room to have that little strip of gadgets down the side. I’m running with third party clock, iTunes controller, ISP download meter, CPU monitor, and a neat little tool that shows the top 3 CPU-using processes. sidebar.exe has only rarely made its way onto that list, and never with more than 2-3% CPU.

This experience has convinced me that it’s probably worth my while to buy a 24″ widescreen display for upstairs. With only one working eye it seemed kind of pointless, but the sidebar thing really is genuinely useful.

My one small Vista complaint is that I’d like to have window borders be completely solid the way they are on maximised windows, but all the time. I don’t care for the translucent effect (which can be disabled), nor do I care for the frosted look. But I do like the compositing window manager a lot.

Unfortunately most (all?) WindowBlinds themes suck. They are usually completely unable to cope with larger fonts. You can tweak that in the WB configuration interface but it usually just makes it look like amateur hour.

Oh, other Vista complaint: Magnifier isn’t terribly good, and ZoomText is (a) terribly expensive and (b) crap on Vista anyway. Guys, Apple and the Linux weenies can both do an adequate screen zoom as a builtin, it may be time for you to do it too. Sometimes copying features is good.

All this said, I’m still doing some things on XP and Linux. The old desktop machine has been repurposed and is now running Ubuntu Server LTS plus VMWare Server. This gives me a Linux environment when I need it — and boy has VNC gotten better over the last few years! — plus a stable unchanging always-on XP system for video transcodes and handling the Topfield stuff.

Please, nobody start carrying on about how Linux can do video, it all still sucks asteroids through garden hose compared to DVD Decrypter and AutoGK on Windows. Really. And for subtitle work there is simply nothing (free) better than SubRip and Subtitle Workshop, also both Windows-only. I laugh at your puny gocr wrappers!

Anyway. It’s nice to have the freedom to work downstairs when needed, so all up the laptop experience has been pretty decent.

There’s some truth to that, but the real game is almost certainly rigging things so that the performance statistics look better prior to the next State election, at which point we can expect the ALP to be making a lot of noise about how things are “better”, when in reality they are probably worse.

Public transport in Melbourne is a mess and it’s only going to get worse. I don’t know — or particularly care — what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not another $8 billion on freeways. Not unless it’s a special bus-only freeway…

The range of content is pretty small: a few shows each from ABC (US), ABC (Australia), Nine, Disney, and MTV. But it’s a nice start.

Now, if only there was some way to at least use fansubs with iTunes-purchased video content. Or, y’know, subtitles included.

Well, I’m not quite sure what those people were talking about. I’ve set it up with a Windows XP VM on a machine that had previously been running Windows XP and as a test I hit it with my usual DVD-to-AppleTV process: rip to disk with DVD Decrypter, convert to XviD with AutoGK, convert subtitles using SubRip.

It’s been a little bit slower than the same stuff running natively, but not significantly so. I don’t have numbers — I forgot to collect stats before nuking the native XP install — but it’s doing the DVD->XviD at ~real-time, which isn’t a whole lot slower than when there was no VMware in the middle.

I’m happy enough with this, particularly given that this is batch processing — fire off a whole heap and forget about it — and that this is a beta with debug code.

Incidentally, I did try using dvd::rip from the Ubuntu packages, but the cluster support is failing — the final “put all the bits together” step barfs claiming there’s no video stream — and while I can indeed do transcodes one-at-a-time without using the cluster stuff, there’s no batch support without it. So while that would probably be faster, life is too short.

To recap, this is a Dell XPS M1530, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, GF8600MGT video. Essentially a 15″ desktop-replacement type system, about as grunty a GPU as you’re going to get in a laptop without paying crazy money for an Alienware machine.

So far so good. It’s running Vista Ultimate (I’d have been happy with Home Premium, but I opted for the red one, and that comes with Ultimate) with the VMware Server beta handling a Ubuntu VM for work-stuff.

Overall it’s been nice and stable, performing about as expected. I’m a bit leery of running it with the lid closed — it’s hooked up to a 19″ LCD most of the time — as it gets a bit toasty, but having reorganised the computer room a bit it isn’t really a problem to leave it open at the back of the desk.

Also rather enjoying the new version of Opera. This plus Privoxy has become my “default” web browsing environment, with Firefox and IE available where necessary. An Opera addon to load the current page in IE or Firefox — rather like the equivalent for Firefox — would be nice, though.

Despite concern that working with this as a mobile machine wouldn’t really be viable with my crappy vision, it’s been OK so far. I’ve got fonts turned up a bit in Vista, and typically run PuTTY, eReader, and Opera with monster fonts as well. Since that covers most of my non-gaming use it’s been OK.

Overall, pretty happy with the purchase. It’s no Macbook Pro, style-wise, and the disk is a little loud, but it does appear to Just Work and it’s not what I’d call bad looking.

(Yes, yes, we could probably do the relay thing, but the point of a pre-order for WotLK would be to have it on launch day, so…)

Now thinking maybe all six seasons of Scrubs, but that doesn’t account for all of it.

Time was I’d have had absolutely no trouble just buying $1000 worth of CDs in a single batch. Clearly things have changed!