Update: 27/1/17 – MSN Messenger is gone now. This page is no longer relevant.
Quite often I will see a friend of mine has had their MSN account hacked, the hacked account will then send out spam to all their contacts that will look something like this:
2:46:51 AM ***Name Removed***: phewww +o( unbelivable, is that you??? who ever is it…is really similar to you lol …
http://***Link Removed***.com/pic_gallery.html
There are a few ways that your password can be stolen:
Through a Key Logger on your computer – A program that is designed to record everything you type on the keyboard and sends it off to a computer somewhere else in the world. (Unlikely, but possible)
A virus on your computer that is sending out the spam or stealing your password (also unlikely, but still common)
An exploit that gains your password if you’ve got the “Remember Password” option ticked in MSN Messenger, this one most people don’t see coming and I’ve heard it is common on websites that have flash games on them. (Sorry, no source for this one, if you do find a source please leave a comment and let me know and I’ll update the post)
Through a Phishing attack. This occurs when you come across a page asking for your MSN Account details, it could look exactly like the MSN Website. To check if you’re on the official MSN Webpage, it should have something like: http://something.live.com/, if it’s not that, don’t enter your password.
By clicking the link sent to you by someone from a hacked account. The link will be either a download, a phishing page or a malware infested page that does one of the things from above to get into your account.
The question is: What can I do about it? Well here’s your answer:
First up, change your password!
You can do this by going to https://account.live.com this is the official MSN account management page.
This method usually stops most types of spam right away.
What if you have forgotten your password or it has changed? On the Live Account management page, there is an option for forgotten password, click the link and follow the instructions there to reset your password. If you can’t remember your security question then there is nothing else you can do.
What Next?
There are some other extra things you can to do help protect yourself. If you don’t have any antivirus installed, I suggest you go get some ASAP. I recommend AVG, it’s free and seems to do the job quite well.
If you already have antivirus installed but you’re not quite sure if you can trust it, it helps to get a second opinion, the Panda Security Active Scan is a good free scanner that does a good job at removing anything major. Best of all, it doesn’t need to install itself to run, it runs entirely in your web browser.
Next, if you’re still using Internet Explorer, I suggest you get Firefox, it’s way more secure than Internet Explorer and acts as another layer of protection from certain Internet Explorer only exploits.
Windows Updates – If you have updates turned off on your computer, I suggest you at least go and update it once a month or so. The Windows Updates include patches that block a lot of the exploits that viruses use to get into your computer.
You can get to this by going: Start -> Control Panel -> Security -> Windows Update
These methods have helped keep my MSN account hack free and have worked for friends of mine to help them get their MSN accounts back in their control.
I bought my mother a 42″ LCD TV (A 720p Acer one) for around $900 about 8 months or so ago. We were using a cheap Set top box with it which also had a recording function. It wasn’t too bad, however it started to get a little… dodgy. This included fuzzy signal and recordings not working and such. So we decided to throw it out and build something new.
In my investigating, I decided that we should buy a Tivo. Before I got around to buying it, I visted a friend of a friend and they had this Media PC set up and it was working really well, so I instead decided that I’d go ahead and build my own Media PC.
Hardware
The computer has a cheap motherboard/cpu/ram setup with the old video card from my gaming machine (an nVidia 6600GT). I used the case from one of my old computers and bought a new power supply too.
My cheaping out on the power supply was a terrible idea, it has an 8cm fan that is fairly loud, which can get annoying when you’re trying to watch TV. Thankfully it’s not too much of a problem.
The hardware Specs are: 2.4ghz Core2Duo, 2gb DDR2 ram, nVidia 6600GT (128mb) Video Card and for the hard drives I use a 40gig System Drive (I have like 10 different 40gig drives lying around) and a 250gb SATA drive for TV Cache and Recorded Shows (I’ll explain later in this post).
I can’t remember the exact cost, but we’re looking at about $400 or so worth of parts (cheaper than the $700 Tivo).
The TV Card is the main part of a Media PC setup, you need something that isn’t so cheap that it fails to do what you want it to do but you don’t want to spend a billion dollars on it. The one I found was the DViCO DVB-T Dual Express. It’s available from a few major retailers for about $150AUD. It has good reception, a nice remote, allows tuning into two channels at once (record one channel, watch one channel, or two computers on different channels (see MediaPortal below).
A nice listing of hardware that would be suitable for a Media PC is at my Server Building guide, all you would need to add is a TV Tuner card, also the motherboard in that article has HDMI out, which is just perfect for todays High Definition TVs.
Software
There’s many different Media Center programs out there, the most common one being Windows Media Center, though, the version of windows I used for this didn’t come with it. Instead, I used a program called Media Portal, it’s free and has a lot of good features.
Some of the things that I think makes Media Portal stand out above the rest are:
The ability to share your TV to other computers in the house.
This means you can have your media PC watching one channel while another computer is watching another channel, or you can schedule recordings from another computer without inturrupting what’s happening on the other computer.
Hooks in with your existing video library
I have it connected to my server (Zoe) so it can see the videos stored there and allow easy access to them.
Nice easy recording options
My Mum can use it
MediaPortal is a Windows only program, I figured I would use Windows XP Pro 32bit, I had a copy lying around at the time and figured that it’d be fine. (See Further below for Issues)
Configuration
As for setting it up, I installed Windows, updated it to the latest version of Windows (then turned off automatic updating, Auto Updates are EVIL), I didn’t bother with Antivirus as Firefox + Common Sense makes Antivirus unnecessary (Note for all of you about to uninstall your antivirus, I know what I’m doing, this machine does not store any important data and losing it all to a virus isn’t a problem for me).
I installed MediaPortal and configured it, one of the things I did was mapped a drive that links straight to the videos share on my server (you will need to do this to get MediaPortal to see it) as well as got all the TV Channels added (some of the channels like Prime have 3 channels broadcasting the same thing, you can turn this off in the Server Configuration of MediaPortal).
With my dual drives, I keep the system on the first drive and then put all my video on the second drive. Drive 2 is named “Bruce” (name courtesy of my Dad). On that drive there’s a folder for recordings and a folder for TV Cache, TV Cache is used to store the timeshifting that allows you to rewind live TV. Note that the TV Cache is necessary whether you use Timeshifting or not, the way MediaPortal works is by having the server record the TV and save it into a TV Cache file and then the Media Portal program stream the TV from that file (don’t worry, you can run the TV Server and the TV Client Program on the same machine). Because it works this way, it allows multiple computers to be connected to the same TV Server. The setup in our home has the Media PC in the lounge room and I can access TV from the PC in my bedroom.
Other things of note: It’s a good idea to set auto login up and set MediaPortal to open when you turn on your computer. The remote will need to be configured to work with MediaPortal. I simply worked out what keys to press to make things happen in MediaPortal, then mapped them to the remote (also see, Issues below).
Issues
Building a MediaPC is not as simple as I had hoped. Here are some of the issues I came across.
General Windows Douchebaggery – The copy of windows I had used seemed to have some strange issue with Explorer not being a happy chappy. This caused random problems with Windows Explorer crashing. I have no clue why or how so I formatted. (See “Soon to come”)
Remote Issues – Two things here, firstly, the remote isn’t very responsive, you’ve got a list of 700 movies to scroll down through, and you can only press “down” once every second. I got around this by setting up the skip buttons to skip through a list page by page it doesn’t take as long to go through a list. The 1 second wait time between button presses is annoying though.
“Could not start Timeshifting” – I couldn’t find any information on this at all. It was an error that occurred when we had the media PC set to go to sleep rather than to bootup/shutdown. What I think it may be is that the TV Card isn’t properly freeing itself up when the computer goes to sleep, so it gets stuck and throws us this unhelpful error message.
Channel 10 Fails – A trick by channel 10 and other major TV networks is to make TV shows go for 10 minutes longer than they’re schedualed so that they make you sit and watch 10 minutes of the previous show, the intention of this is to get you to get interested in the show on before it. Unfortunately, this therefore means that when you’re recording TV, it starts too early and you also miss the end of the show. To fix this, there’s a setting in the Server software to say “Prerecord x minutes and postrecord x minutes”. I set both to about 15 minutes.
Running out of Space – Depending on how much you’re timeshifting with, MediaPortal needs room to move. For TV Cache this means upto 5gigs and for recordings you’ll want to set aside a lot more. Our 250gb recording drive gets full every now and then. The big problem with it is, it doesn’t tell you what’s going on, only that it can’t start the TV Stream. You will probably also notice that it will slow down a lot just before it gets completely full. I’m thinking up a possible solution to this (a warning system perhaps).
TV Stream Freezing – This happens rarely, but it still happens. Maybe, once every 2 weeks, the TV Stream will just crash, freeze, go glitchy or something equally unwatchable. The easiest way to fix it is to just reboot the computer, then everything is fine after that, it’s still a pain in the butt though, there’s so many points that could be failing (Media Portal, Windows, TV Card, Hard Drive).
Windows Incompatability – Media Portal REQUIRES Windows XP SP2/Vista SP1 or higher to run as well as the .NET framework. I also had issues getting it to run on Windows Server 2008. It doesn’t seem to want to run in VMWare or Sun VirtualBox on my MacBook either 🙁
Soon to Come
At the time of this post, I’m currently installing Windows Vista onto my Media PC. I figured it was worth giving it a shot (and again some time later I might try Windows 7 too).
I’m also perhaps looking at a method of doing a warning when the Media Center runs out of space (instead of having a big cry).
If you like the post, want more information or there’s anything you’d like to see on my blog, please feel free to comment.
The first thing we’ve been looking at, is replacing the library of CD’s we have in the library with the iPods.
A full CD can be ripped in MP3 format down to around 60mb (that’s at 160kbit VBR) (or, about 133 CD’s on an 8gig iPod).
The advantage of using these over using the listening post is that the kids can work along at their own pace, they can rewind and listen to the same bit again and you don’t have to have all the kids starting the book at the same time.
Another thing some of the year 6 classes have been using them for is for listening to educational pod casts. They’re currently doing Rainforests at the moment so we found a set of podcasts about rainforests, downloaded them and put them on the iPods. Here is the set of Podcasts.
Most important of all, the kids love using them.
As I come across more resources, I’ll post them on this blog.
This is part one of a few parts, Part 1 is explaining the configuration of the iPods and issues that may arise when setting them up.
We have 30 iPod Nano 8gb. These have a little screen, enough space to fit more than we would ever need (we hope) and they’re small.
I arranged the deal to get these with Apple over the phone, on the back of every iPod we got Apple to Laser engrave (at no extra cost) the school name and an Asset Number.
As for finding content for the iPods, I had to tread carefully around copyright, this means asking for permission to use the music/audio, finding free music, pod casts or other sorts of stuff to put on there.
For converting CD’s to put on an iPod, there’s 2 ways you can do it. iTunes is great for when it’s a music CD, however in some cases we’ve got books that are on CD. In some cases they’re split across 30-40 tracks and putting them on the iPods is going to be a nightmare. For the Audiobooks like this, I used a free program called Exact Audio Copy (I’ve been told it’s used by the pirates to create very good rips of Music CD’s). This program lets me rip the entire CD into a .mp3 and a .cue file. The .cue file can be used to expand the CD out to its original form with all the tracks if needed.
Issues I’ve faced
One of the issues I’ve faced in implementing these iPods is a combination of the current network setup, Windows and iTunes. When I plug the iPods (or any USB Storage) in, Windows assigns it a drive letter. Letters AB are reserved, C is for the local drive, D is for the CD drive, the plugged in iPod chooses the letter E and then for F we have one of our network drives. So, plugging in one iPod isn’t an issue, it’s just when I try to plug in 2 at once. The second iPod will try to take the drive letter F, but it’s already taken by the network share. iTunes comes up with an error saying “iTunes has detected an iPod in Recovery mode. Use iTunes to restore”. Here is Apples page on the issue.
The solution: We need to tell the iPod to mount on a drive *after* F. To do this you:
Go to Control Panels -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management
Click on Disk Management
Locate the iPod that isn’t working
Right Click and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths”
Change the Drive letter to something that isn’t taken.
Use the “Safely Eject Hardware” button on the task bar to eject the iPod.
Unplug then plug the iPod back in. iTunes will recognise it and everything will work 🙂
Charging the iPods
For charging the iPods, I’ve requested quotes from a few different places to obtain some Powered USB Hubs. The idea of this is that they won’t need a computer to charge, but I can plug a computer in to the hub to sync 5 iPods at once.
I looked at getting a proper iPod Docking station, however they’re around $1000 each. A powered USB hub is somewhere closer to $10-$20.
Headphones
The problem with the headphones that come with the iPods is that they sit in your ear. This would help ear infections to spread so we decided against using them. Instead we’re still awaiting replies from a few different suppliers to see about getting some nice sturdy headphones that don’t actually touch the ear and instead they cup over the ear. Our aim is to spend no more than $20 per set.
Security
iPods are small, small enough to be easily stolen. We’ve distributed the iPods as 5 per teacher in Yr 6 and made them responsible for locking them up every night after school and keeping track of them. Hopefully this way none of them will go missing.
Part 2 of this guide will be about what we’re using the iPods for, a few educational resource links and other issues that have arisen with the iPods.
Update: 29/1/17 – This is all old. Currently I’m using a HP Microserver and FreeNAS. Server Wise, FreeNAS is glorious for a NAS compared to OpenSolaris.
At the moment for storage, I use a set of external hard drives for storing all my data.
On my MacBook, I have: 500gb + 500gb + 200gb + 300gb External Firewire drives and a 500gb internal drive. This was going good for me, except for a few issues:
1. In the middle of the night drives would randomly spin up, unless they were positioned perfectly the hum would go through the wall and straight to my bed. This got annoying.
2. There is no redundancy in any of my drives, if a drive fails, I’ve lost all my data.
3. My music drive is only 200gb, I have more than 200gb of music, so my music collection is split into multiple places.
4. All the other computers in the house link through mine for music/movies. All our stored TV Shows (recorded through the media PC) get stored on my external drives and then accessed through the network. If I take my laptop to work, then there’s no access to movies.
5. Firewire is being phased out on the Mac Laptops, I’m due for a new laptop early next year and it most likely won’t have firewire, leaving me with no access to my drives.
So, because of all these issues, I decided to build myself a new server.
Now, I could run off and grab myself a nice HP ProLiant DL380 server for a mere $5,900 (plus extra for the drives). I’ve worked with similar servers at my work, but they’re loud and overkill for what I want to do.
I decided to do a bit of shopping around to see what I could get, I used my 2 main sources of cheap parts, umart and PC Case Gear. Difference between the two is that PC Case Gear has awesome support, a bigger range, faster shipping and and nicer looking website (but is a tad more expensive).
Now, the parts. I decided to go with an AMD Board and CPU, I’ve already built 2 Core2Duo machines and I HATE the way the CPU heatsink clips on, if you’ve ever had to push something onto a motherboard while watching the board flex as you do it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 5200+AM2 – Price: $87
I went as cheap as I could on the CPU, anything new enough can handle what I had in mind for it.
RAM: Corsair DDR2 Twin2X 6400C5 4gb – Price: $68
Corsair makes great quality, fast ram. For what I had in mind, 4gigs would be enough. This comes as 2x2gb sticks. Note that the speed is 800mhz and not 667mhz, so it’s not the slowest stuff. (The motherboard will support upto 1200mhz ram, if I could afford it).
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA780G-UD3H AMD780G FSB5200 4DDR2 1200OC VGA PCIE2.0 GbLA — $143
I’ve generally always cheaped out on motherboards, this time I didn’t so much. It has onboard Video, 4 slots for Ram, Gigabit LAN, 6 SATA plugs and something I didn’t know it came with, but is great, was the fact that the board uses 2oz copper, I don’t know exactly what they mean by that, but the board is thicker than usual motherboards and doesn’t bend anywhere as easily as the cheaper ones do. It also has high quality capacitors, so it *should* be a durable board. Note that the board has no fans on it, this means it will run silently.
Case: Antec Three Hundred Tower Gaming Case – Black — $104
I could have gone as cheap as I could on the case, but I’ve learned that having a good case will keep everything running together smoothly and quietly. The case also comes with 2 12cm fans (the bigger the fan, the more air it can move, the slower it has to run and all that means the fans can run silently).
Power Supply: Corsair VX-450 450Watt Power Supply – $125
This was the only part I bought from PC Case Gear, as I couldn’t find a suitable one from UMart. I actually wanted the 400Watt version of this, but they wouldn’t have it in stock till later this month so they gave me the option of getting this one instead. You should always make sure it has enough connectors for what you want to do, I was planning on running at least 4 SATA Drives on it, this PSU comes with 6 (perfect).
Hard Drives: 2x Seagate SATAII NCQ 7200RPM 32mb Cache 1tb – $159ea
1xSeagate SATAII 7200RPM 32mb Cache (earlier model) 1tb – Already Owned
1xWestern Digital SATA2 5400RPM 32mb Cache GreenPower 1tb – Already Owned
I already owned 2 of the drives and had them sitting in cases that I was using for long term storage, I cleared them off and shuffled data around till I could have them empty to use in the server. I didn’t realise one of the drives was 5400RPM, and I suggest against doing this, one 5400RPM drive could slow down performance for your entire raid.
Postage: umart – $39
PC Case Gear – $17
The umart order got posted with fastways. I got a message from umart saying they’ve shipped my order at 8pm one night, at 7:20am the next morning the order arrived at my door.
The PC Case gear order took 2 days to arrive.
Setting Up
As for setting everything up, it was relatively pain free. There was a screw hole on the motherboard that wouldn’t line up with anything on the case which was a little dissapointing. The case was pretty solidly built (some cases you can easily flex the metal of the case).
If you go to use an Antec case with the bottom mounted PSU, you should probably check to see if the cables from the Power Supply are long enough, because I got the umart order earlier and was just waiting on the power supply to test it, I tried to put a cheap powersupply in but the cables weren’t long enough to fit.
As what happened with the last machine I built, the cable for the power light on the case has a 3 pin plug (with only the two outside pins being used) but the motherboard will only let me plug in a 2 pin plug. I really with someone would set a proper standard for this as it’s happened to me twice. I ignored it, connected the power light to the hard drive activity light so I can at least see when the computer is turned on. At a later stage I might rewire the connector so I can plug everything into where it’s supposed to go.
The CPU heatsink felt a little dodgy going on, I may have done it slightly wrong, but when I did get all clipped on it felt sturdy (unlike previous Core2Duo heatsinks that felt like they weren’t clipped on properly).
Getting all the Hard Drives in took a while to get it all neat, carefully folding cables and moving everything around until it fit right. I also used a 40gig IDE Drive as the system drive. I was hoping it wouldn’t affect performance too much, it seems ok. (note, I carefully tested the drive for all forms of errors before using it, if you’re planning on using an old drive for anything, you should always use Spinrite or HDD Regenerator to test for errors (1 or 2 errors is reason enough to throw it out)).
I didn’t put in a CD Drive, I’m planning on borrowing a CD Drive from another machine to install the OS, after it’s installed I won’t need a CD Drive for running it.
System and Software
Now, for the system I wasn’t sure what I wanted to use for the OS. I knew I wanted to raid the drives together some how to add some redundancy in, I also wanted to have the system usable for other purposes as well (like web hosting, ssh access etc).
I had done a load of research on different raid levels, and I decided on using a RAID-Z, this is very similar to a RAID-5, where you get: Drive Size * (Number of Drives – 1) of usable storage space. In my case with 4x1tb drives: 1tb * (4 – 1) = 3tb of space.
This setup means that any one drive can fail without the system going down or any sort of data loss.
To use a RAID-Z, I need to use a form of Solaris, I chose OpenSolaris, it’s free and Open Source. It’s not exactly Linux either, it runs differently in a few ways. Though a lot of the commands are still the same.
I had some trouble getting the network sharing to work right, I followed a few different guides but found this one to be pretty good. If you’re going to do something similar, I suggest you do a lot of reading about everything so you know what you’re trying to do.
Statistics
Now for some numbers 😛
Transferring from my Mac to the Server, I get upto 60MiB/s, I get around the same from my Windows Vista Ultimate machine (Over gigabit ethernet).
On the server end, the network peaked at about 91MiB/s with both the Mac and the PC transferring files to the server. Compared to my Firewire drives, this is getting near double the theoretical maximum of Firewire. (Firewire does 400Mbit/s, a theoretical max of 50MiB/s, in practice I get upto 40-45MiB/s over Firewire).
Using the command: “yes > crapfile” on the server resulted in the drives being written to at upto 140MiB/s. Thus, with the gigabit connection to the server running at a max of 91MiB/s, the hard drives are no longer a bottleneck. (I don’t know how reliable the “yes > crapfile” command is, but it seemed to do the job pretty well 😉 )
Here’s a screenshot of the server during transferring data, note that the CPU usage is nowhere near being maxed out, the RAM is maxed out due to RAM caching, but it isn’t affecting the network speed so everything seems to be handling it well.
What next?
The server is currently in testing phases at the moment, I still need to set up permissions, reformat the machine to be 64bit (the version I’m using for testing was actually installed on a Pentium 4 then I moved the drive to the server machine), set up Apache/MySQL/PHP as well as build a web interface for administratrion. In the future I’m also working on building the comptuer into a “Home Server” machine that will handle as many things as I can think will be cool 😛
Naming
I figured I’d add, I named the computer Zoe, after a character from the TV Series called Caprica (currently there’s only a pilot released). I called the Raid “Caprica” too 🙂
Conclusion
In conclusion, I’m very happy with all the parts for the server, there’s still a bit left to work out software side too though.
The total cost for it all was: $585.84 without drives
With 4x1tb drives the cost is: $1221.84 (that’s $636 worth of drives)
Update: 27/1/17 – This cleaning stuff is good, but I personally use now a mixture of ~10% isopropol alcohol and 90% water with a Microfibre cloth.
Part of my job at my school involves making sure the computers are clean.
Today I figure I’ll cover something that I get a lot of people asking me about: How do I clean LCD screens?
Now, I’ve heard people in the industry say “Use watered down Windex!”…. Don’t do this.
Windex contains Ammonia, Ammonia degrades the plastic coating on your screen.
(I also heard somewhere that it can also make your screen get a yellowy tint).
Of course, if you’re one of those people who has always been cleaning with Windex, it does take a while of cleaning before you’ve ruined the screen.
For cleaning LCD screens, I use a microfiber cloth, it won’t leave any bits of cloth on your screen like your standard rag would and as for the cleaning agent I use some special LCD/Plasma Screen Cleaning Spray.
LCD Cleaner
This stuff is great, it’s cheap, you can pick something similar up from BigW. Getting one that has a dispenser for the cloths is also good and with tricky folding you can clean up to 16 screens with one cloth. It leaves no streak marks and requires no hard rubbing and fingerprints just disappear.
Long as you get a decent size bottle of it (the one in the picture I would call a decent size bottle), it will last you for ages. I clean the 32 laptops here every 1-2 months and the bottle is still about 2/3 full.
Today I went shopping for video cameras to use in the school. I had been looking around for suitable ones for a little while. People were telling me Sony, others were telling me Panasonic or JVC.
We had a few requirements:
Runs on SD Cards so that kids can record video, take the card out, plug it straight into a laptop and off they go.
Not too Expensive, we’re talking about using it with kids here. Accidents happen, lets make them not too expensive accidents.
Easy to use, we want kids to be able to grab the camera, turn it on, point at something and record.
Must work with Windows Movie Maker
Movie Maker is the real deal breaker with all the cameras I got a look at.
I contacted the local Camera House shop with my set of requirements and got a reply back later that day with a set of recommended cameras and an invitation to come check them all out. I didn’t think to bring an SD card with me so I could take some footage back to check it with Movie Maker. Instead the sales guy loaned me a 2gig card with some footage on it so I could test it out with Movie Maker (what a nice chap).
Note, I tested the cameras with movie maker (standard install) then installed the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack and tried again (no camera worked straight out of the box with Windows Movie Maker).
Camera 1: Panasonic SDR-7
This camera felt really small and light. It focused pretty quickly, which is a good thing for kids and moving the camera about a lot. Very easy to use and deals with low light alright too.
The camera was recommended to me by the ICT support group for my school.
While it was great in terms of usage, it was an Standard Definition camera and that really showed on the test footage.
As you can see from this picture, there’s interlacing going on, it looks a lot worse when you pan too quickly too. Also note, to get my computer to even read the file, I had to rename it from .MOD to .MPEG, Windows Movie Maker accepted the file but wouldn’t display any video. After I installed the Codec Pack… Still no video 🙁
Panasonic SDR7
Camera 2: The Sanyo CG9 (See Edit)
This camera was nice, it has a nice feel to it, held more like a gun than a camera. Super easy to use, takes photos as well as video. The focus time was a bit slower, however that’s mainly because of the bigger lens, so it takes higher resolution shots with the downside that it takes a little longer to focus.
In terms of image quality, this camera is great. It records into MP4 format. I attempted to get it into Movie Maker and it wouldn’t accept the file at all. After installing codecs… No Change. There was a program that would let me change the file format to AVI (it wasn’t converting, merely changing the file container) and it worked, imported it into movie maker just fine. Is it an ideal solution? Well.. No. It’s a bit of a hassle to get kids to do that.
Sanyo CG9
So, my next step is to find appropriate video editing software, free would be great. The cameras come with a copy of Pinnacle Studio, so I’m downloading an evaluation copy of that to test out now. Of course, I could just get the school a Mac 😉
I’ll update this post as I do more testing.
Ducky
EDIT: After downloading the Pinnacle Studio Trial version and giving it a whirl, the process seems fairly simple, a little harder than iMovie, WAY more stable and more features than Windows Movie Maker. It accepted both movie files without a problem.
Has a great little button to grab the media off the inserted memory card (even if I could get it to work with Windows Movie Maker, I’d have to find the media on the card first).
Some buttons are a little hard to find.. I’d create a title, look at if for 20seconds going “Now what?” then I see this little button in the corner saying “OK”. It’s a tad slow, came up with “Not Responding” a few times (cleared up after 5-10seconds) and seems to like to render the video a lot (it re-rendered the same scene like 3 times for no reason).
On my gaming PC (2.2ghz Core2Duo with 4gigs of ram and a beefy video card) it did seem to take a little bit when swapping modes (Transitions to Video Clips to Titles for example). Hopefully it’s not too much slower on the HP550 Laptops…
EDIT2: The CG9 is actually the cost effective version of the CG10. The one I actually used was the CG10. The CG10 offers better video quality than the CG9 and only takes 10MP Photos compared to the CG9 that takes 9MP photos.
Because there isn’t many suppliers of products like this, a few companies have a monopoly on these laptop cages. Of course, the padlock is a good idea, though we keep all ours locked away anyway.
On the note of storage units like this, I’ve been looking at ones for iPods (I’ll explain about the iPods later). I found one that looked pretty nice, it’s a 15 iPod Charge/Sync Machine. I liked the look of it and contacted the seller of the item (They’re based in the US). They sent me a quote that said:
SC15A Sync/Charge/Organize Desktop Station
List Price – $899
Discount Price – $699 (I guess he’s giving me a bit of a discount.. for no reason..)
Here’s the catch: Shipping/Handling & Insurance: $175
… That’s a lot of postage for a very expensive product.
So, the total price, $874USD… That’s $1327 AUD….. for a device that lets me charge 15 iPods at once…. My planned solution: A $10 Powered USB Hub… with lots of flashing lights inside it (it seems, the more tacky it is, the cheaper it is).
This post should be aptly subtitled “How to get applications to do what you want.”
There’s a program called Kindy Manager, it’s used for tracking child enrolments in After School Care stuff. This program also syncronises itself with the government CCMS, which is where we were having problems.
See, this program required use of the internet and offered no support for proxy servers.
I’ve heard the “horror” stories from the other schools, some schools paid for another phone line so they could get an extra internet connection that didn’t run through the proxy server (also, the other connection could not be linked up to the school network at all due to security reasons). Other schools had to move their Kindy Manager Database onto a laptop (that is, taking the database off the server and putting it on a workstation), taking that laptop home and running the connection through their home internet connection. The other way was to use one of those NextG cards for it (and sign up to a 12/24 month contract too).
So anyway, I figured I’d do something about it.
I sent off a friendly (but firm) email to the Kindy Manager guys explaining the situation and asked them what to do about it. Sure enough, I get a call later that day (awesome service) which started the ball rolling.
It’s less than 2 weeks since I started talking to them about the proxy issue (the first email was sent on the 5th Mar 09 and it’s now the 17th Mar 09) and the updated version will be available tomorrow from the Kindy Manager website.
Obviously, this method wouldn’t quite work with Microsoft, but when it comes to smaller software development companies, you could just trying asking nicely.
Here’s a few hints: When asking them about adding in a new feature, make sure you explain who you are and your role. Then explain what you (or other people) are doing to get around the problem and how much of a waste of time/pain it is to have to do the work around.
Don’t forget correct contact details and to be quite polite, software companies don’t want to have to deal with angry users.
Remember that software companies build their software for you, the user. Make sure you let them know exactly what would make their software a better thing to work with.
Ducky.
EDIT (18th March): So, we got the new beta copy to test out.. Looks like proxies are sort of working, but there’s a few more bugs to work out… Won’t be long now 😛
EDIT2 (20th March): Waiting on the bugs to be fixed 😛
So, our school bought 30 HP550 notebooks, with the idea that we could use 5 of them in each Year 5 and 6 classroom. We ordered them Tuesday… they arrived Friday (don’t you just love speedy delivery?)
Now, all the computers we have in our school run off an Image, and the image is the same as the other schools nearby with the exception of a few files, each laptop takes about 45minutes to image and set up to be working with our school (most of the time is spent in the imaging phase, copying the files over etc).
It was doing this image that I realised, they only come with a 10/100 Network card (a real bummer since we upgraded our school switches to gigabit last year). These laptops were destined for wireless anyway, so it’s not too much of an issue 😉
The build quality of the laptops is good, with one horrible fatal flaw. The mouse buttons are TERRIBLE. 1/3 of the clicks on the button just don’t make it to the computer. So you sit there hitting the button hard every time and that’s probably breaking it and making it even worse later down the track.
To fix this, we bought 30 mouses to go with them.
The “upgrade” from the HP530 to the HP550 would have been just perfect if they had kept the same buttons from the HP530.
I just hope that HP realise that the buttons are terrible and do something about it for the next model. I know I’m reccommending that we don’t buy any more HP550 laptops until they come out with a newer model.
As for some of the other parts, the Battery life is great. We stack them all up at the end of the day and plug them into the charger, they sit on the kids desks throughout the day. I haven’t heard of any issues of them running out of battery at all.
Speed wise they’re pretty snappy too, we got all ours with added memory, they’re all on 2gb of RAM.
Overall, they’re a very nice, well built laptop with the sole exception of the mouse button being terrible. If you’re looking at buying some for yourself/your school, make sure you get external mouses with them.
