Continue reading »]]> I’m about 1/3rd through a two month trial of Music Unlimited but like many trials, I’ve already made a decision about what I’ll be doing at the end of the trial.

Pro’s:
- Affordable (NZ$15/month), essentially the cost of one digital album if bought on itunes.
- Great audio quality
- Songs are quick to load (i.e. not much delay between tracks or when selecting a new song)
- Huge catalogue
- Nice web interface

Con’s:
- Not available for Windows Phone
- Very slow to load on PS3
- Clunky interface on PS3
- Seemingly a resource hog on PS3, since you can’t do anything (e.g. look at pictures or surf internet) when Music Unlimited is running.

So I guess the good news for Sony is that the fundamental elements of Music Unlimited are solid.  But it’s all the usability aspects that are not up to spec.  So I won’t be using it.  However there are just two things which would make me change my mind.

(1) Improve the software performance on PS3 to load faster, have better UI and operate in the background while viewing photos (as normal music does on the platform)
(2) Develop a Windows Phone App which allows songs to be stored on the device (i.e. so that they’re not downloaded over the data network)

So Sony, great job on this product, complete the items above and offer me another trial.  In the meantime I’m going to check out the Zune Pass.

Continue reading »]]> Firstly, I’ll start by apologising to anyone who visited this site over the past year or more since it was infected by a trojan/virus.  Hopefully you were sensible and had adequate anti-virus protection and were not infected.

I thought I’d better give an explanation for why the site had been down for several days…

A couple of weeks ago when I was home alone for a few days (I called it ‘bachelorfest 2011′ but that’s another story) I spent many hours trying to remove the trojan without wiping out a lot of work on my wordpress blogs.  It didn’t work, because when I came back on Sunday, the site was infected again.

I was faced with a decision, close down the site or just delete everything and build again from the ground up.  Obviously I’ve taken the decision to do the latter.

So I’ve finally got the site live, but there will be content that I’ve lost (such as the images in the post below until I re-upload them).  I’m not going to do too much work on the site for a few days (such as a new theme, adsense integration etc) until I get confident that the virus is gone for good.

If you ever come across anything like that on this site again, leave a comment and I’ll look into it.

Continue reading »]]> It’s 3:45pm and we ‘re sitting at our campsite at top10 holiday park. We’ve got the best site in the park (at least from Liv’s point of view which funnily enough, often coincides with ours).

We flew down to Christchurch on Jetstar on Monday morning (great experience) but had to wait for a couple of hours at Maui before picking up our camper van. For those not in the know, we’ve got a special relocation deal to take the van back to Auckland in 5 days for $5 per day. Megan checked, the same trip if you chose to do it would cost $2000.

Once we got the van we went to visit a relative of Meg’s and then drove north. We stopped for dinner and then drove until we were too tired and stopped at a DOC campsite.

Today we drove pretty much straight to Motueka with a brief stop at an animal petting farm and had lunch. At this point we got some frantic calls from our friends and family who knew about our trip. They were relieved to hear we were well out of harms way but our thoughts are all for those in Christchurch. When we got to the holiday park there was a man leaving to go back to Christchurch who had not been able to get old of his family.

Keep an eye on the twitter feed for more updates: Pete’s Twitter

Continue reading »]]> At the moment the very early hours of the new year (3am) find me playing Gran Turismo.

It’s a great game, the graphics are awesome, the physics feel realistic and there’s an insane amount of content, but what I really want to talk about is Spec B which I’m ‘playing’ at the moment.

For those who haven’t played it, it’s a mode for GT5 where you manage a team of drivers, developing their skills and experience over time by going through races and giving them instructions, essentially like a formula 1 team boss.

The brilliant thing for me is that you only need to push one button at a time, and only then occasionally (and on some races you can get away with none at all).

The other thing that’s been going on in my life is the recent birth of my second daughter. So I’ve found myself spending many hours holding my daughter (often as now in the middle of the night) and with little else to do. So spec b has been great.

But playing Spec B hasn’t been limited to when I’ve been holding Nat. I’ve also played while changing nappies, giving feeds, looking afte my other daughter, reading stories etc etc. So hence my conclusion that this mode was created exclusively for us young dads.

Take note other developers!

Continue reading »]]> Apologies for those who missed out on last night’s email, here’s the gist:

As you may have guessed from the subject, we’ve got a new member of our family, Natalie Jane Corin, born this afternoon after a six and a half hour labour (not counting the two weeks spent in the hospital beforehand).  She weighed 2.135kg (google tells me that’s 4.7 pounds).  She was born at about 36.5 weeks, so it is not surprising that she’s on the small side, but she’s healthy and we’re sure she’ll do well.  Megan is doing well also and we expect that both will not spend long in hospital.

Visiting is quite limited as Nat is in the special care baby unit at North Shore Hospital.  So probably best to give us a few days and arrange to visit at home.

Photos:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=248483&id=659092856&l=c9027eab4b

Everyone Else: http://www.peteandmegan.com/plogger/index.php?level=album&id=14

Continue reading »]]> I was hoping to pick up a Playstation Move Starter Pack last week, but to no avail, turns out everyone is sold out.

I sent a frustrated tweet to Sony and got this reply:

@petecorin PlayStation Aus & NZ wide has a shortage. We’re in the same boat in that SCE cannot supply our backorders either.

So, we still have no idea whether this was an ‘engineered’ shortage (to try and create the same market conditions as with the Wii) or whether they really underestimated the demand for this.  Also no idea when stores might be getting more stock, but some seem to think that Monday (4/10) might be the day.

Here’s hoping.

Continue reading »]]> I’m kicking off a couple of ‘hands on’ IT projects over the next few weeks.

Numero Uno will be to upgrade my PS3 Hard Drive from it’s stock 40GB drive to a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB drive.  That should give me plenty of space for all those PSN downloads and Guitar Hero songs and improve the load times of games marginally.

The next and bigger task will be to build my much planned and debated super low power home server (should be about 25 watts).

It will feature an Intel D510MO passively cooled motherboard with an Intel Atom dual core processor.  A couple of GB of RAM and another 500GB Momentus drive.  Every component has been considered for it’s power draw, so it’s not top of the line in any aspect.  It will be connected to the tv (Samsung LCD) by VGA and to the Sony receiver by optical (due to the fact that the motherboard lacks HDMI).

I’m also buying a 1TB Seagate external hard drive as a backup solution, so we will finally have an offsite backup large and convenient enough to provide a complete backup of more than 150GB of video and photos (as well as the much easier to back up documents and emails).

There’s also a new guitar on the radar and some planned spending on the PlayStation Move, but that’s for another post…

Continue reading »]]> Apologies again to the regular readers of this site, but in the past I’ve blogged about the technical resolutions to many of the problems I’ve had and it’s turned out that many others have the same problem.

We’re in Melbourne! I picked up a couple of Virgin Mobile Sim Cards with the plan of using my phone for data.

However I had massive headaches until I found a site that finally gave me the very simple settings I needed to make my mobile data work (this is on an HTC P3600i (Trinity):

Name: VirginInternet
Modem: Cellular Line…
Access Point Name: VirginInternet
The ‘This network connects to the Internet’ checkbox in ‘Proxy Settings’ needs to be checked.

I think the Access Point Name was what was getting me off the track.  Hopefully you should now be up and running.

Keep an eye on twitter for some travel updates.

Continue reading »]]> 6th October 2010 – Vote Today!  Today is the last day to send back your voting papers.  Most mailboxes (in my experience) are cleared by 5pm, so make sure you get them in before then.

There also turns out to be some other voting options, you can deliver your papers in person to:

Or on the day (Saturday) you can hand in your papers to the public libraries.  So no excuses.

— x –

I’m going to take a moment to be particularly geo/ego-centric and talk about my voting options in the upcoming local body elections in Auckland (9th October).

I live in Hillcrest, North Shore.  This puts me in the North Shore Ward and the Kaipatiki Local Board.  (To find this information for yourself, hit this page (if you live in an ‘a’ house (or ‘ b’ or ‘c’) then you will need to start your address with a number e.g. 2 41 Smith’s Street)).

North Shore Ward

The candidates for the North Shore Ward are (two will be elected):

Steve Ashby (no web presence)
Mary-Anne Benson-Cooper (no web presence)
Joel Cayford (North Shore & ARC Councillor, described below)
Chris Darby (North Shore City Councillor, Standing for ShoreVoice)
Harry Fong (no web presence)
Grant Gillon (Councillor, MP etc, has a strong web presence but a horrible website)
Ann Hartley (ex Mayor, ex Labour MP)
Vivienne Keohane (Councillor. Says “I oppose Grandiose plans for Auckland.  I support another Harbour Crossing…” something comes to mind about cake and eating it.)
Ken McKay (no web presence)
Jan O’Connor (current Councillor, is listed on google as an Andrew Williams supporter…)
Christine Rankin (Is arguably the most famous of these names, but struggles to get her policies up front (in fact I couldn’t find a site for her campaign)
George Wood (ex-Mayor of North Shore)

As I typed that list out, I was surprised by the number of strong candidates.  In fact, one could argue, that it’s a stronger list than the mayoral list.

I’m not really supposed to express any favouritism towards any candidates, but I feel so strongly towards one of them, Joel Cayford that I can’t help it.  In my penultimate year at school (6th form certificate at the time) I had to do a geography project on the topic of the North Shore Wastewater Treatment system.  I was supposed to interview someone, but instead I emailed a list of questions to Joel who was a North Shore City Councillor at the time.  To my surprise he responded in detail and I was able to use the material successfully in my project.  That’s the sort of thing that tells you a lot about a person and he’ll have my vote whenever he wants it in the future.

There are a bunch of other big names in there; Ann Hartley (ex-Labour MP and North Shore Mayor), Christine Rankin and George Wood (another ex North Shore Mayor).

Kaipatiki Local Board

These are the candidates for my local board (eight will be elected):

Alan Spilhaus
Vivienne Keohane
Steve Ashby
Harry Fong
Grant Gillon
Ann Hartley
Martin Lawes
David Thornton
Gary Thornton
Jennifer Yorke
John Gillon
Keith Salmon
Lindsay Waugh
Chris Marshall
Nigel Armstrong
Trevor Courtier
James Doleman
Richard Hills
Barry Holton
Nick Kearney
Chris Waterman

Again, this looks like a strong list, with a bit of spillover from the list above.  Some names certainly jump out at me, but you might have to talk to me offline to get my views on who to vote for.