Nick Jackson

I just though I’d take a photo of some of my bits of tech, partly because it’s shiny and partly because I wanted to try some methods of diffusing the flash on my camera. For the record, a sheet of white paper in front of the flash - whilst working well - results in a blinded photographer.

In this photo you can see my laptop, my iPhone (With headphones), my Mighty Mouse, my backup drive (320GB, for Time Machine), and the USB cable for my camera. Not shown is the USB hub which ties it all together (It’s hidden down the cable hole), but I’m sure you’ve seen those before.

I’ve finally spent my birthday moneys, plus a bit of my ever-struggling student loan, and bought myself one of those iPhone things.So far, I’m impressed. It’s slick. It’s elegant. It’s easy to use. The screen is beautiful. It syncs with my music, videos, contact, calendars and email without so much as a “Do you really want to do this? It might change something!” warning.

As usual with Apple kit, there are hundreds of people on Flickr who assume you want to see every detail of the unboxing, so I’ll leave that part to them. Suffice to say it was refreshing to be able to have a new phone without spending 40 minutes negotiating every detail of the contract with someone behind a desk. Activation was a bit slow, mostly due to the incompetence of the network here at Brayford Quay. However, activation was simple, and didn’t need a mountain of information. Number porting is the inevitable 5 working day wait whilst the people at T-Mobile and O2 negotiate between themselves over who exactly is responsible for my 11 digits. If you know my phone number, don’t worry. It won’t be changing.

Obviously I’ve only just got my new toy, so I’ll post an update in a few days with how it’s working out. Right now, I’m off to play.

I’ve gone out today and bought myself (Amongst some bits of stationery) a new USB hub, and a new external hard disk (320GB for £49.99 - can’t complain).

The reasoning behind this is simple - I need a new USB hub to connect the mountain of devices I have to my laptop without running out of ports, power or both. I opted for a nice 4-port USB 2.0 hub (Powered) in order to be able to connect and juice up my various bits and pieces via a single port. Since I’ve still got a mini 1.0 hub, I reckon that 9 ports should be adequate for most purposes. If not then I’ll invest in a 7-way hub - but that’s getting silly.

On the hard disk front, I wanted it to use as a backup device - but no mere rsync backup device! No dodgy 3rd-party backup device! No, this was going to be a Time Machine backup device!

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