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August 28th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

Following on from the previous post, and the good things about cutting tiles etc its only fair that i now post about bad things. Specifically, part of the finish up work involved drilling holes in the tiles so that i could put the shower riser amongst other things on the wall. To make 8 holes in the wall took over 2 hours! I understand that you need special tile drills to cut through tiles and so i had what looked like the best that reasonable money could buy…. and i bought 4 of them, just to be sure. Given that these were roughly £7 each its not cheap and what annoyed me more was that they were useless. Totally useless. In fact the pack of 3, varied size, drill bits from ScrewFix’s ‘own’ brand were better at cutting – its just shame they were so fragile.

I’m convinced there must be a better way. I know that some tiles are easier than others but what do the ‘normal’ people do for the ‘abnormal’ tiles? I’ve seen you can get water cooled tile drills, but what is it that makes the difference between £7 and £45 ( £25 drill, £20 water cooler unit ) ? If anyone has used one, please let me know. I’d love to know what the difference is. Until then, i’ll just stick to breaking drill bits and getting new ones.

And, for those avid readers who will know how covered in crap you get when using a diamond wheel tile cutter, the attached photo is how stupid i looked! Just make sure you don’t brush away odd bits of tile too quickly – they very easily cut you as i found out!

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August 25th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

Okay, so its not quite, but the new bathroom bliss is almost there. The new floor is in, the ceiling and the lights are done, tiles, loo, sink, all sorted. Only a few things remain. And with that in mind i thought i’d share a few DIY good and bad points i’ve learnt while doing this room.

• Plumbing : I’ve never been fond of plumbing before. There is too much that could go wrong. I’ve never been confident with solder fittings, and compression fittings never seem to work for me. As a result, this time i went for push-fit fittings. Rather than the push-fit plastic, i decided to pay a little more and go for the push-fit copper fittings. Although more expensive, i felt that the inner diameter of the copper pipe is a little bigger and would therefore give more flow. In addition you don’t have to buy the inserts to go in the plastic tubes. Over all i’ve been really impressed with these. At first i was really nervous about the fittings because once connected the pipes are still able to twist and that’s just not normal! Having said that it is really useful when fitting pipes. All in all the plumbing was really easy and quick. I had one leak, but i don’t think that was the fittings, perhaps just dirt. I would use these again without hesitation.
• Waste : Unlike the push-fit plumbing which was not something my Dad recommended, the chemical waste fittings were and i’m pleased to say they were a good recomendation. Essentially this is a chemical based glue which sets within two minutes. All the previous waste fittings i’ve used have been copression fittings and again, i’ve never been pleased with the way they work. In contrast the chemical fittings just work. You can see the adhesive creates a good bond with the pipe and as it is really simple to do.
• Tiles : Okay, so this isn’t exactly new, but still worth a mention. Without question, the easiest way to cut tiles is with a diamond wheel cutter. Its very messy but well worth it. You can shave mm’s off a tile and to this day i never had a tile crack. Goggles and ear defenders are a must, and i would really recommend short hair or a hat – the spray from the cutter goes everywhere and this evening i spent ages getting clean. I think i need a trained ape to pick bits out of my hair after cutting tiles!

So there we go, my top tips for bathrooms. Probably not the best of posts, but after 5 weeks decorating a bathroom, details aren’t what you want to remember!

August 20th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

Just a quick post from me this morning. I was catching up on the weekends news over tea this morning and discovered that the BBC have added a range of social bookmarking tools to every news item they produce. These included del.icio.us and Facebook amongst others. I find this interesting for a number of reasons.

Firstly, its interesting that the BBC are in a way ’sponsoring’ these tools by advertising them on the BBC site. Although they have chosen a number of different tools that ultimately do the same thing its no doubt that the BBC support will help to extend their use.

And that in itself brings me on to my second point. I agree 100% about the need to share bookmarks between systems but i’m not convinced about sharing book marks with groups of people. The reason being that different people have different opinions about what constitutes a good site and a number of times bookmarks are literally bookmarks rather than favourites as such. As a result with a large enough group of people all with differnt views, in my opinion, all you are doing is basically catalogging the internet! That maybe a good thing, i’m not so sure. As an example i gave up looking through a friends del.icio.us links the other day because there were simply too many.

Lastly, the other thing i find strange is over book marking news items in general. For me, bookmarks and favourites are sites that you use and that are useful. They stay relevant over time and although you might not use them all the time, the pages are always current. I’m not so sure the same can be said for news items.

August 17th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

For a while now i’ve been writing on this blog and for most of the time i’ve got the impression that i’m generally writing for myself and yet To everyone! Recently though that has not been the case and a number of people have mentioned items that i have blogged about. And to me this is great. I’m sure others in a similar position will agree it spurs you on and makes you write more. However, where it has affected me is over knowing who, or more specifically how many people are actually reading what i wrote.

In order to solve this problem I’ve gone down two different routes. The first route is that of FeedBurner. This is a stats too that collects information about an RSS or ATOM feed in the form of hits and even subscribers. As a fan of Google tools i was pleased to read that FeedBurner has recently been acquired by Google and so was sure that this would do the trick. What i failed to realise though is how varied these figures can be. While i can understand the reasoning behind the fluctuation, i was suprised that there wasn’t something better that could be done to resolve the problem. FeedBurner’s case study helps to explain a bit more if you are interested.

To add to the confusion i was always suprised by the difference between the site hits and the feed hits. I generally attributed this to many people who visit the site rather than subscribe via a web based or standalone feed reader.

My next steps were to look at site hits. Historically i used to use a tool called Urchin. This was a server side tool which would log site hits. It was fantastic and at the time provided much more information than i could ever want about my site. Once again, as with all good tools, Urchin is now owned by Google and has been rebranded Google Analytics. The interface to this information is superb and adding the collection tools to a site was simple. Once enough data had been collected it was then possible to track site usage by page, time of day, time on the site and so on. One other interesting metric is the key words used to find your site. Some of the top hits from my site are “Andrew Feltham” ( obviously ), “car remote works when against head why”, and “how do i hang a stable door” – so obviously perfect matches to the categories i’ve chosen to blog about!

As a sideline, i do hope these two tools get integrated together now that they are both owned by Google. I’ve also recently added the Feedburner stats tool to the site in an attempt to better understand how people use the site and what they like that is on there. It will be very insteresting to see how these two tools compare especially given Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner.

So, in summary, i know you are out there, and i’ll be posting more accordingly. I’ll leave the stats to tell me if that is a good or bad thing!

August 14th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

While we are all used to the number of security updates that you have to perform for a Windows machine, since getting the Mac i have been suprised how many updates are available. The difference with OS X seems to be that the majority of updates are feature updates rather than security updates. Today in particular was a bad day for updates because i had iTunes, SlingPlayer, OS X updates and based on Andy’s post i also updated Ecto.

Despite the aggravation of downloading all the updates, both Ecto and SlingPlayer seem to have improved a lot. The previous version of Ecto despite being left on overnight never managed to detect the tags & categories from my blog. Ecto 3 was setup and active within a couple of minutes and to my delight even had all of the tags & categories – hence using it now to write this. SlingPlayer was also another success and the update ( including a firmware update ) seems to have corrected the sound levels and increased the streaming quality.

So, i’ve established that updates are easy, now if only i could understand uninstalling!

ecto, osx

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August 13th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

I decided to take a break from the bathrooms last night and headed over to Ringwood to have dinner with my parents. Its amazing because i never fail to relax when i’m there. We had a really nice meal, some wine and a fire. Very peaceful. Very relaxing. The evening became really special though as the night was drawn in.

Until about 8 or 9pm it was still cloudy but after that the skies started to clear up. When you looked up, all you could see was a fantastic peppering of stars all over the place. Bright ones, faint ones and a number of constelations. They were all over the place and perhaps one of the nicest displays i’ve seen in a while. But then it got even better. Sitting in the hot tub watching the stars you started to notice the odd shooting star. And then another one. And another. In the space of about 20 or 30 minutes we must have seen over 20 shooting stars. Although some were just like sparks in the sky, some left really visible ’scratches’ in the night sky. It was really amazing and was aparently known as the ‘Perseid meteor shower‘.

I can blame the stars for my bad neck. Worth it though.

August 12th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

So after a full ( ish ) day of DIY the evening ahead should be a great evening enjoy Wine ( and beer ) with guys I sometimes play ultimate. Given that i’m outside on my laptop¹ i think i’ve covered most of the bases i mentioned earlier. While i’m browsing what strikes me is how much technology can do, and yet how simple the things we want but don’t have seem to be. For example, i’m in my garden using wireless to connect to the internet. My blog is saving this post as i type it every 5 minutes or so. I can, in theory, chat to friends or family and i could even make an internet phone call without costing a penny. It’s great. I say in theory i could chat to friends or family but in truth i can barely see the screen! They say a team is only as strong as the weakest player and that statement is also very true about computing. The best applications can be made useless simply because you can’t see the screen, because you run it on an operating system that crashes all the time or simply because the interface is crap.

While i can obviously get over the problem of not being able to see my screen the point i’m making is a serious one. Software in general is focused around the business – things to make life cheaper, quicker or smarter, and although they claim to make things easier they very rarely do. Most new releases of software add features and make existing products more complicated rather than easier. The problems that they solve aren’t always the problems that people want either and i really can’t understand why this is.

Apple and Google are the only companies that i’m familiar with that are the exception to this rule. In my opinion why the seem to succeed is because they make sure everything is simple, and that everything works together.

August 8th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

The internet, its a wonderful place. You can rant, you can say what you want, and you can connect people. Its perfect for getting a group of people together to demonstrate how frustrating it is when companies don’t care about the implications of labels that say things like ‘Warning, may contain traces of nuts’. And that is just what i’ve done.

Warning, may contain nuts.com was created because i am allergic to nuts and often get frustrated with the ignorance ( or is it apathy ) that exists around the subject. I figured if i get frustrated by it, others will do to. The site is intended to be a portal for people in similar situations. I’d really encourage people to forward on the link so that other people can share there experiences and hopefully one day convince companies that what they are doing is just ridiculous. If you are in support of the problems then i’d also ask you to register with the site. The more people we have to demonstrate the support and scale of the problem the easier it will be to persuade companies into a different way of thinking.

Please, please, please give it a read from time to time and if you know of others in similar situations, forward the link on so that they can do the same. Thanks.

August 7th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

Yesterday i turned 26 and although its not one of the 5 categories i gave myself only a few days ago it is the topic of todays post. However in a shameless way i’m also using ecto to publish the post, so there may be something about that too.

So, 26. Closer to 30 than 20 now ( although i guess that was true 183 days ago too ) and as always it feels no different. This year was a very different birthday though. For the first time in a number of years that i wasn’t on holiday, that Sally wasn’t here, and that it wasn’t sunny. Instead it was a quiet family evening with Mum, Dad, and Chris. And i have to say it was really nice. The rain didn’t spoil anything and i think i saw out my birthday sitting in a hot tub staring up at what was an amazing starry night.

I got some really nice things too. My brother seems to have this knack of finding clothes that i haven’t seen anywhere ( despite looking in the same shops ) that i really like, and as always despite my input my mum and dad always manage to find something appropriate – this year golf clubs!

As usual many a cake was eaten while at work, although i was suprised that the flapjacks went a long time before the very tasty chocolate brownies, which even rival Campo’s ( i’ll do a taste test if forced! ).

And now for the background post, ecto. This is the first time i’ve used it and so far its not offensive. While writing this post it has always been searching for ‘categories for entry 47′, so seems like there is something wrong there. On the plus side, it did seem to pick up the tags and the categories that i had created. On the downside there is no ‘obvious’ way to add links to a post, which i would have thought is bread and butter stuff. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes and has 20 days left on its trial license to impress me. Again, if you have anything to suggest or recommend, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: ecto, osx, birthday

August 5th, 2007 by Andy Feltham

Continuing the themes mentioned before, todays post is on my Mac. About two or three months ago now i decided to bite the bullet and make the switch from windows to Mac. I use linux a lot at work and so some of the unix like features were appeling. To be honest though the driving force behind the switch was the growing frustration with my Windows machine. I decided to buy a Mac Pro and within a week i loved it. I wouldn’t say i’m an adict yet, but i can see why people like them.

As an example, when i booted the machine, the sound was originally coming out of the internal PC speaker. Not ideal i’m sure you’ll agree. Having spent less than 30 minutes on a mac before i was fully expecting changing this setting to take me a couple of hours. Mac’s are so easy to use that the real situation was quite different. After finding the control pannel equivalent i was able to ’search’ the buttons that were applicable to sound ( OS X highlights the appropriate icons for your search terms ). The really odd thing about Macs is that there is no okay, or apply button and so after i had quickly found the okay button, changing the selection from the drop down list was all i needed to do before my hifi suddenly kicked in with sound! I was amazed at how simple it was.

While Macs are stylish, clever and cool, there are a number of things that i’m still unsure of or unable to do. I hope someone reading this might be able to help.

Alt Tab
I like the fact that with a Mac you have one application running, with multiple instances. This makes sense to me however at the moment this feature is flawed when it comes to application switching. The alt-tab equivalent on a mac switches between applications but if for example i have two firefox windows open, the alt-tab will only switch to the current one. When using the terminal application, the apple key and left or right switches between the instances of the application but this doesn’t work on fireforx – instead it goes forward or back a page. So, in general, how do you swap between instances of an application?

Uninstall
Installing an application with a Mac is easy. Really easy. Dragging the application file into the applications folder installs the program and the necessary files. However, what i can’t understand is how i remove an application? As far as i can tell there is no uninstall, remove or delete for applications. The only options i have are ‘Move to Trash’. Although i haven’t verified for sure, moving an application to the trash doesn’t seem to trigger the removal of the required files in the same way that installation does. So, how would i remove an application?

Users and groups
In unix systems, users and groups are controlled by /etc/passwd and /etc/groups. I can find these files in /private but as far as i can tell, adding a user to a group via /private/etc/groups does nothing. How do i manually modify user and group permissions?

Keyboard mapping
I can’t stand the apple keyboard and mouse. I use a natural keyboard at work and with my old PC and so i really find the apple keyboard and mouse too small and not very ergonomic. As a result i’m using my old windows keyboard. The hardware works well together with a few exceptions. Apple it seems have deceided that Shift-2 is actually the @ symbol. I can’t for the life of me find out how i can change this and although i’ve just about got used to it, i now find myself coming into work and typing @ where i want ” – its very anoying. I’ve also noticed that the apple mouse doesn’t seem the have a concept of right mouse click. One feature i do like though is that the second mouse button works to ‘display all applications’ when clicked. If i could get my microsoft keyboard to do these things, and to behave as normal i’d be a happy man.