Gadget Review of the Year - 2011

Well, if I'm going to do a review of the year, it had better be right now because there's only five hours of 2011 left.

Things were a bit lean on the gadget front this year, mainly because I bought the ultimate gadget in June, a new house! We had been talking about moving for some time, but we finally decided to bite the bullet and go for it. We weren't prepared for quite what a massively time-consuming (and to be honest, stressful) thing this would be, but it's done now and we're settled in nicely.

Other than that rather expensive purchase, I managed to acquire a new Xbox 360 Slim (after the other one suffered a rather drawn-out demise). It's a much more sleek unit than the old one, and having 250GB of storage is a bonus. It has also proved its worth as a decent media player too, as I've been using it as a stop-gap DVD player and media streamer in the lounge.

I also got a second Apple TV for the bedroom, and I also got round to migrating my iTunes library onto an external hard drive to free up space on the iMac. I've been upgrading a lot of my music to Apple Lossless, and ripping a lot of DVDs, so having the extra storage has been pretty much essential.

Other than that, in November I retired the HTC Legend and managed to finally get my hands on the Gadget To Rule Them All, an iPhone 4. This is, it goes without saying, quite the most magnificent thing in the known universe and why I didn't get one sooner is beyond me. Obviously, I considered the new iPhone 4S but ultimately it came down to money, so the 4 ended up being the better deal. iOS5 is excellent, and it has already become indispensable.

The final gadget acquisition of 2011 was an Apple Magic Trackpad for my birthday just a couple of weeks ago, and like all Apple gadgets it is superb - it really takes advantage of Lion's multitouch features, and now I've got used to it I can't see myself going back to a mouse any time soon.

And I can't let it go without saying that 2011 was a sad time for the gadget world when we lost Steve Jobs. We won't ever see another quite like him.

So goodbye 2011, and let's hope 2012 is filled full of gadget-goodness for you all. I have my eye on the home cinema conversion for starters - let's see how that one pans out!

iPhone, therefore iAm

If you've been hanging around here for long enough, you'll remember my inner turmoil back in mid 2010 when I was trying to choose a new mobile phone. I eventually settled on the HTC Legend, and in the main I've been pretty happy with it. Android is a fairly decent operating system, and the availability of decent apps improved immeasurably in the 18 months that I had the phone. My main gripes were to do with the hardware of the phone itself, rather than the operating system. Firstly, there was nowhere near enough onboard storage (the phone was constantly telling me it was running out of space) and the screen was a bit small for web surfing (and more recently, Kindle reading).

So anyway, my 18 month contract came to an end and it was time for me to choose yet another new phone. Would I go Android again? Or would I, just maybe, finally opt for the iPhone? When the iPhone 4S was released, I was - like everyone else - a bit disappointed by it being just a gradual evolution of the iPhone 4, rather than an all new iPhone 5.

But at the same time as Apple showed the world the iPhone 4S, they also sneaked out - with little fanfare - a cheaper, 8GB version of the iPhone 4. With it being effectively a "last gen" phone with less storage space, Apple were asking a very reasonable price for it.

I'd heard a lot of good things about the Tesco phone network, and in particular their good-value 12 month contracts. I figured if I could manage the upfront cost for a handset, then 12 months would be ideal.

The amount of minutes, texts and data on offer for £25 a month were more than enough, but the handset prices were still a little on the high side. If I wanted the latest-and-greatest iPhone 4S then I'd have to find £335 for the phone itself. However, if I was happy to slum it with an 8GB iPhone 4 it would only be £200. Talking to friends who were still stuck in their iPhone 4 contracts for several more months, but who were still incredibly happy with the performance of the 4, I decided this was the way to go.

And here we are. I've now had the 8GB iPhone 4 for a little under 2 weeks, and I absolutely love it. I realise it's not the 4S, but compared to my wilderness years without any iPhone at all, it is just brilliant. So finally you can hear the end of my "I wish I had an iPhone" moaning. It's here, and it's staying.

Thanks Steve

Steve Jobs - 1955-2011

Like a lot of people, I woke up this morning to hear the incredibly sad news about the death of Steve Jobs. We all knew he was ill, probably very ill, but I wasn't expecting it so soon. The way he'd been talking when he stepped down as Apple CEO a few months back, I figured he still had years ahead of him.

So many people have said so many poignant and truthful things already today. Friends like Rich, Oli and Sam - just regular, everyday Apple fans - have already paid tribute to a man who touched their lives in a unique way. I can imagine others (those who obviously don't understand) saying "But you never even met the guy! What's the big deal?"

I'll take a moment to share my perspective on Steve, and what he did for me.

I've used Macs for a long time. Back before the original iMac. Before the iPod. Before they were cool. For me, there was always something great about them, even those monochrome Mac Classics that I used in the early nineties. They had character. They were different.

And then, Steve came back to Apple after his "wilderness years". He launched the iMac, and what a machine that was. Then came OSX. Then came the iPod. In those revolutionary products, Steve captured the attention of the world and showed them something that they didn't even know they wanted, but simply had to have.

Through my job, I got to buy and play with a lot of Apple kit. The G3 iMac, in particular, revolutionised my view of what a computer should be, and should do. I was never going back. I'm sat here typing this on an iMac right now.

Apple's meteoric rise has been astounding. Only recently, Steve's guidance saw the iPad become their next massive success - and again, a product that "experts" thought wouldn't sell because there was no market for it.

Today, it seems like everyone is brandishing an "iDevice" like a style accessory. The majority don't have Macs, and never will have. They probably don't know the first thing about the history and evolution of that piece of technological wizardry they're holding, and nothing of the contribution Steve has made to their lives.

If I've got one regret about how massively successful Steve made Apple, it's that not enough people will look down at their Apple product on this monumental, awful day, take a brief quiet moment and think to themselves, "Thanks Steve".

I like to move it (iTunes, that is)

When I bought my iMac last year, I foolishly thought that a 500GB hard drive would be plenty big enough. But you know what they say, you can never have too much storage and my recent regime of ripping DVDs into iTunes as well as upgrading a lot of my music to lossless files has meant that those 500 gigabytes have been getting used up pretty quickly.

I figured that I needed to locate my burgeoning iTunes library somewhere else, off of the iMac internal hard drive. I had a few options, and the one uppermost in my mind was Network Attached Storage (NAS). After discussing this with Olitee though, he was firmly of the opinion that this wasn't necessarily the best option. Not only was it expensive, it might not work exactly as I wanted it to. I'd still have to have iTunes running on my Mac in order to be able to get my files to my AppleTV and Airport Express. His answer was a big external hard drive, locally attached to my Mac instead.

However, the thing I liked about a NAS was that - if it was a two-bay one, with two separate drives inside - it would automatically mirror one drive to the other in case of failure. I wouldn't be able to do this with an external hard drive would I?

I've used Apple's Time Machine to back up my computer ever since it was first introduced in Leopard, and I love it. It's incredibly reliable. What I didn't realise though, is that Time Machine will not only back up your main Mac drive, but it can also backup up other attached drives (providing they are formatted for Mac), so clearly, if done correctly, I could get Time Machine to backup my external iTunes library in addition to my main Mac drive.

So, learning from my "you can never have too much storage" lesson, I decided to go the whole hog and get two new drives - a 1TB for my iTunes library, and a 2TB for Time Machine.

Moving your iTunes library is reasonably straightforward, but there are a few potential pitfalls along the way - things have to be done in a certain order. You can search for "moving iTunes to external drive" if you want some more in-depth tutorials on the subject, but here's how I went about it.

Firstly, because I wanted Time Machine to be able to backup my iTunes drive, I needed to format it for Mac use. By default, most external drives come preformatted as FAT32, and rather stupidly, the ones that are Mac formatted cost more money?!

Anyway, you need to fire up Disk Utility, choose your drive in the left-hand column (make sure you choose the right one!) and then go to the "Partition" tab. I only wanted the one partition, so I chose this from the dropdown and ensured "MacOS Extended (Journaled)" was selected. Hit "Apply" and in only a few seconds you have a freshly formatted drive, ready to go.

The important thing to realise at this point is that you CANNOT just drag-and-drop your iTunes folder onto this new drive and expect it to work. It won't. You need to let iTunes do your housekeeping for you - that way the iTunes program can keep track of what is going where.

Needless to say, before you start messing with any of this, make sure you have a backup in case things go awry.

Then, in iTunes, you need to go to the File menu, and then choose "Library" -> "Organise Library".

From here you'll get a dialog giving you two check boxes - the lower of the two says "Reorganize files in the folder iTunes Media". If you've already got your library set up this way, then it will be greyed out and you won't be able to click it, so you needn't worry about this step. If, like me, you didn't have it this way, you can check this box at this point. DON'T choose the upper "Consolidate files" checkbox just yet - that comes later! Click "OK" and iTunes will set everything up in neat subfolders for you, in a central repository called "iTunes Media", subdivided into music, movies, TV shows etc. To be clear, you don't HAVE to do this - you can leave your folder structure as is, but to my mind allowing iTunes to set it up makes the next steps easier.

The next part is to tell iTunes that you want to move your library somewhere else. You do this via the iTunes "Preferences" option. Go to the "Advanced" tab, and you'll see "iTunes Media folder location" at the top.

Click the "Change" button and navigate to your external iTunes drive (I named mine, rather imaginatively, "iTunes"). You need to create a folder inside this drive for your media files, so create one at this point using the "New folder" button. You can name this new folder anything you like, but I opted for the default "iTunes Media". Click okay, and then ensure both the "Keep iTunes Media folder organised" and "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" checkboxes are ticked. Click "OK".

Now comes the slightly scary bit. Go back to the iTunes "File -> Library -> Organise library" menu, and this time check the "Consolidate files" box. Click "OK", and iTunes will warn you that it's about to copy everything into the new location and that this cannot be undone. Click "OK", and the long and arduous task of moving everything will commence. This could take minutes or hours, depending on the size of your library.

Bear in mind that this does not remove your original media files from their previous locations - it copies them, not moves them. This means that you'll have all your music, movies and so on in two locations now - the new one, and the old one. Clearly the object of the exercise is to free up space, so you need to find your original "iTunes Media" folder and drag it to the trash. It's VERY important not to trash any of the other iTunes files - just the media folder. The other files "iTunes Library.itl", "iTunes Music Library.xml" etc are vital to the correct operation of iTunes. If you get rid of these, you'll lose all your play counts and playlists.

Quite iTunes, and then restart it. If you've done things correctly, iTunes will simply restart without protest. If it does, then you can empty the trash, deleting your original media files and freeing up all that lovely drive space!

For most people, that will be quite enough tinkering. Everything will work as it should, and when you add new music or videos to iTunes, they will be stored on your external drive along with all the others. However, if you've got computer-OCD like me, you'll want to move all those other iTunes files that I just mentioned too.

Make sure iTunes isn't running, and then go to your original iTunes folder location, and there will be those few files (iTunes Library.itl, iTunes Music Library.xml, iTunes Library Genius.itdb etc) and folders (Previous iTunes Libraries, Album Artwork etc) in there. You can copy and paste these into the root of your new iTunes drive (i.e. NOT in the iTunes Media folder) and then, once this is done, you ned to start up iTunes whilst holding down the option key on a Mac, or shift key on a PC, and iTunes will ask you to choose an iTunes library. Click "Choose library" and navigate to your new drive and click OK. iTunes will start up, and from hereon will remember where to find its files. You can delete the original files once everything is working correctly, or if you're paranoid like me, you can back them up safely in a separate folder somewhere else in case of disaster.

All of this will mean that you've moved all of iTunes, wholesale, to your new external drive.

By default, Time Machine WON'T be backing up this new drive at this point, so make sure you go to the Time Machine preferences and remove your iTunes drive from the "Exclude" list under the "options" menu. The next time Time Machine works its magic, it'll backup not only your internal drive but also your external iTunes drive as well. Sorted.

And we're in.

It has been ten days now since we moved into our new house, and things are starting to resemble something approaching normality. We still have a lot of boxes which haven't been unpacked, but they're mainly books and CDs, because as yet we don't have any shelves to put them on.

I've had Virgin Media TV, broadband and phone installed, and as part of the install upgraded to their 500GB Tivo. This has taken a bit of getting used to, as it is a much more complicated (but also more capable) device than the old V+. As for broadband, Virgin insisted on me having one of their SuperHub combined modem/routers - which I didn't really want, but customers apparently don't have any say in the matter. I was happy with my separate cable modem and router, but I guess it's one less power plug. Despite the SuperHub being 802.11n, the wifi doesn't even reach halfway across the house so I've been making do with my old Devolo 85mbps homeplugs, just to get the internet where I need it.

However, I've today set up something a little better - still not my intended wired gigabit network, but certainly more robust than my current solution.

I've gone for another product by Devolo (because they really are the best when it comes to powerline networking) but this time I've opted for their dLAN 200 AV Wireless N adapters. Instead of each plug just having one ethernet socket, these have three, and not only that but each acts as a 802.11n wifi access point as well, which is handy.

Basically what this means is that I've got three wifi access points, giving good coverage all over the house, and the ability to hard wire all the devices that support it as well - three in the lounge, three in the cinema and three in the study. The monitoring software tells me that I'm getting about 115mbps across the wired devices which is good enough for the time being. I don't rely on wifi all that much (I'm not a big fan of it really) but if I do need it (for phones, laptop, Wii, Kindle etc) then it's available.

On a more disappointing note, it looks like it'll be some time before I'm able to set up the garage conversion as the home cinema. I'm sorely missing my 5.1 surround sound, but there are other priorities at the moment - apparently we need furniture and stuff?

Moving on up

I've recently noticed that my last blog post was way back in February, and now we're in the middle of June - so let me apologise for my lengthy absence. I do have a good excuse though.

It would appear, that after much stress, we're moving house at the end of this week. We put our house on the market at the beginning of March, and finally, last weekend we exchanged contracts on our new property.

I hadn't realised quite what an all-consuming exercise moving house would turn out to be. Between that and work I've done nothing else in the meantime. There have been no new gadgets, and no new projects at all - obviously they've all been on hold pending the move.

What this does mean - now that we're finally going - is that the new house will present all kinds of new opportunities for gadgets, tech and tinkering. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Some ideas that I've had so far:

• A wired gigabit whole-house network


• A dedicated home cinema room, possibly with a projector


• A Network Attached Storage media library


• An Apple TV and Airport Express house-wide audio/video system


• A new, upgraded, bigger, better lounge hi-fi

I dare say there will have to be some decorating and general DIY that will have to come before any of these projects, but it's nice to have a plan isn't it?

As a starter for ten, I've got the Virgin Media engineer coming on Monday to install my new Tivo system so at least that's one new gadget to be getting on with. I've also got a new Fatman iTube valve amplifier/iPod dock system on the way courtesy of Audio Affair, which I won in one of their Twitter competitions last week. Once I've unpacked all those cardboard boxes I'll try and blog about both these additions to my gadget world. Stay tuned, and bear with me please... this may take some time!

It was all going so well.

After my triumphant victory over the red ring of death last month, I had been feeling pretty good about my ability to fix broken tech. Not only had I mended my old CD player but I'd now brought an Xbox back from the grave.

Buoyant from these successes, I then went about taking my washing machine apart in order to replace the perished door seal. I was invincible!

Sadly, my geek-pride was about to take a bashing. My Xbox promptly died again. Red ring of death and everything. Try as I might, I couldn't resurrect it again. I was beaten.

However, not to be completely thrown by my apparent failure, I used this as an opportunity to buy a shiny new Xbox 360 Slim. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess.

I'm still waiting to find out if the washing machine repair fares any better...

Green Is Good

After yesterday's post about my Red Ring of Death nightmare, I received my x-clamp conversion kit in the post this morning. Eight screws, eight carbon steel spring washers, eight metal washers and sixteen nylon washers. I couldn't begin to wonder how a few pence worth of bits from a hardware shop would repair my 360, but I was prepared to give it a try.

Needless to say, the installation of these bits is more than a little fiddly, but so long as you're organised and patient, it's not difficult. Here's the tutorial I used for this part:



I followed the instructions to the letter, plugged everything back in and tested it. Here's the result:



WOOT! I shall see how long it lasts, but for now - we're up and running again!

A visit from the Red Ring of Death

It had to happen sooner or later. I've owned my Xbox 360 for a little over three years now, and it was only a matter of time before it decided to call it quits and break down. I'd been experiencing graphical glitches and lockups on the 360 for a couple of weeks, and I knew that it was on its way out. Sure enough, at the start of this week, it resolutely refused to start up, displaying the dreaded "Red Ring of Death" - three red flashing lights on the front of the machine, which under normal circumstances would be a friendly green colour.

I went to check my Xbox account to see when I'd registered the 360, and sure enough I was just outside of my warranty - how very typical. With Microsoft wanting the best part of £100 to even just look at my Xbox, I decided that drastic times called for drastic measures.

Having received some guidance from tech guru Tom, I discovered that my most likely fix would come from tinkering with the heatsinks which are supposed to keep both the CPU and GPU cool. The internet is alive with reports of how the cooling in the 360 is particularly rubbish, and the method of securing the heatsinks onto the chips (flimsy metal x-shaped brackets) was the main culprit. The accepted method of sorting this out is to crack open your 360, rip out the offending x-clamps and replace them with something more substantial.

I'm not going to replicate the methodology of getting into the 360 on here - there are some brilliant tutorials and walkthroughs on YouTube. Without them I would have struggled to even open up the Xbox, because Microsoft really don't want you to get inside. However, once you know how (and so long as you have the requisite T10 and T8 torx bits) it's relatively easy. The videos I found most useful were these:





Getting the x-clamps off the bottom of the motherboard was the most difficult part, but with a little patience and perseverance you can manage it. And this is the point I find myself at at the moment. I've stripped down the 360, removed the x-clamps and heatsinks, cleaned the CPU and GPU and I've ordered a set of screws and washers from eBay. I really don't know whether this little project will work or not, but even if it doesn't I'm really no worse off.

Standby for update...