John Large - Technology & life Blog

Finally invested in better batteries for our gadgets

John Large — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:02:20 +0000

It’s been a long time since we last had a decent battery charger & batteries. In fact it was october 2007. I remember it because we took them away with us to NYC for a trip and they never came home with us. Since then, many of our gadgets come with good quality built in lithium ion batteries, so there has been little need for a battery charger. Regular visits to the pound shop or ikea have been perfect for cheap batteries, but far from froogle or Eco.

So we invested in an energizer accu recharge. It came bundled with a set of 1300mah batteries and cost £5.99 from asda on offer. We also opted for some heavy duty 2300mah batteries to power things such as our digital camera. The 4 2300mah where more expensive at £10 but they are well worth it for high drain devices. Now here is the fun part. We spent £16 in total. We have been buying disposable batteries in packs of 4 for £1 each and buying maybe 8 packs a month. So in two months this will have paid for itself, and these are guaranteed for 100′s of charges so they will essentially save us hundreds of pounds over the coming years. The Eco benefits & the cost benefits make this purchase a no brainier and I really hope all my readers will switch to this much greener & cheaper way of powering gadgets.

The charger does AA and AAA batteries so we will be getting more packs of batteries for all our remote controls and clocks. Wonderful.

Battery life has so far been great, with the 1300 mah batteries in my iPod dock far outlasting the previous disposable batteries, and the 2300mah giving 3 times the battery life in our Panasonic lumix digital camera.

Anyway I recommend this gadget to everyone, see the pics below to familiarise yourself with the product before buying.

The eternal dilemma – environment/cost considerations

John Large — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:22:45 +0000

I’m not really an Eco warrior. I do my bit, save power & recycle like everyone should, but the major driver for me in being more economical & in turn environmentally friendly is costs. I hate paying lots of money to oil company’s, gas suppliers, electricity companies and other multi nationals who literally have us over a barrel. They have given us an appetite for energy with low costs and now we are held to ransom paying huge amounts of money to continue our lifestyle. Much worse is that many of these things such as driving to work and heating our homes are not luxuries. If we don’t drive to work or to city centres to shop, we put nothing back into our economy and then become a burden on the rest of the taxpayers. This burden may not be that great for city dwellers but for anyone who lives remotely rurally this is a nightmare scenario.

Many people live in suburbs, its the way communities have developed since the introduction of cheap vehicles & fuel. Now these people, myself included, are being squeezed for everything they are worth while inner city dwellers feel little of the pinch with regards to fuel. They may complain about small hikes in public transport costs, but this is nothing compared to the costs of fuel.

3 years ago when I bought my diesel car, diesel was sub £1 a litre. By Easter this year it is expected to hit £1.50 a litre. It now costs me £40 to drive 170 miles, not factoring in the cost of my car, insurance, road tax, servicing, mot. Now city dwellers will claim that there is no need for a car, but they would, public transport is very convenient and often leads these people to be better off. Have you seen the cost of the London congestion charge & the cost of parking?

Rural folk have access to terrible public transport, bus routes are being cut or stopped completely & train fares have become extortionate. Looking at my own running costs, I am about £400 a month to use my car. Inner city folk will pay nowhere near this amount in public transport and yet complain about fares and service non stop.

This has left me in a huge pickle. I currently drive an old but very well maintained land rover Freelander. Anyone who has lived through a Scottish winter will attest to the need for a 4×4. It is the most economical car I could find in this class of vehicle averaging 32mpg on a run and 24mpg around town. I would never part with my land rover, it is my hobby, I am however seeking out a daily driver to save money.

I see two options available to me, the Nissan leaf 100% EV which is ludicrously expensive to buy at £25k plus, but cheap as chips to run or the toyota Prius hybrid.

The leaf has a 24kwh battery which if charged on an economy 7 tariff at around 4p per kwh would cost 96p per 100 miles, or simplified less than 1p per mile (compared to my current 25p per mile in the land rover). The only limiting factor is the 100 mile range but I could either run up and down the country using fast charge stations, or visiting friends & family along the way, or use the Land Rover for the few long journeys a year and use the leaf daily for everything else. The only barrier to me doing this is getting the car itself. I am self employed as is my wife, in the current climate finance companies will not touch self employed people unless they are on a very healthy income. We are on a good wage but it’s not astronomical. We were recently declined finance on an £11k car due to our self employed status so £25k is a long shot. I would love to go out and buy a leaf today, I would even entertain a lease but they are also hard to come by.

The second option is a Prius. Again a used Prius can be picked up for around £6-10k used, but I’m struggling to figure out a way to finance it. Lenders aren’t lending so I’m kind of stuck in limbo until I either save for the Prius, or wait until finance picks up and finance a leaf. It seems a bit daft to buy a Prius whilst keeping a land rover for the winter or long journeys, so the leaf is definitely the way I would like to proceed. If anyone has any ideas how I could finance a leaf please get in touch.

Sorry this has become somewhat of a rant, but I’m really exasperated by the whole situation. I want a leaf, I want to do my bit & save money, but the barriers to entry are pretty great. I would love to lease or finance the car if someone would give me the opportunity, until then I’m stuck with a car I own outright with no way of making the situation better until the economy improves. Welcome to Tory Britain in 2012.

Energy saving & economising – energy monitor

John Large — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:07:21 +0000

I finally managed to get hold of an energy monitor for the house. I’ve been looking for one of these for a good while and finally got a great deal on an unwanted eaga monitor via eBay. My monitor is brand new and in original retail packaging and cost me £11 including delivery.

The monitor itself consists of a live cable clamp, a battery powered transmitter and a mains powered monitor. The live clamp clips around the live feed cable on the house side of the electric meter. Small magnets detect the current running through the cable and the transmitter broadcasts this to the desktop monitor. We have put our monitor in the kitchen so we can keep an eye on our consumption.

These units are a great way to reduce you consumption. Giving you live data about your usage and spiking when you turn on a device shows you how much electricity everything in the house uses. I was surprised to find with everything on standby the house still consumes 120w of power. With the iMac and MacBook pro on also this jumps up to 290watts. I’m fairly happy with that.

Another live indicator is how much the power you are using is costing you. Ours is 12p a unit so we can see that on idle the house uses 2p per hour and around 4p per hour with the computers on.

Other menus include the greenhouse gasses our consumption emits and the energy consumed in a given timeframe from 1 hour to 100 days.

The live data is the best deterrent and really makes you go around switching things off to reduce consumption. Simply putting the macs to sleep when you step away from the computer will save a small fortune over a year. I’m going to put timers on the major sockets to turn everything off standby at 1am until 8am which will probably save another small fortune over a month or year.

Below are some pictures of the monitor showing the various modes. Watch how the consumption rockets when cooking on an electric oven/hob with the water heater on at the same time. It jumps from 333watts to around 6.5kwh

Raspberry PI – the perfect project machine?

John Large — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:23:06 +0000

Anyone who knows me personally or follows my twitter/blog will realise I’m the eternal hardware geek. I love tinkering with stuff, hacking it to go beyond its manufacturers limitations and generally trying to squeeze every single use out of my hardware. I used to do loads of Xbox hacking on the original Xbox, experimenting with various chips and firmwares and generally making that underpowered box do much more than it should. From web servers to media players, fully fledged emulators to NAS I used my xboxs for everything. Then along came the Apple TV2. A £99 fully self contained box of joy. With a simple software mod (jailbreak) I was able to install XBMC on the atv2 and replace my 3 original xboxs from my home. These where fully reconditioned, chips removed & donated to charity as simple xboxs once again.

The real benefits of the atv2 is hardware decoding of h264 so all my 1080p MKVs play perfectly without any lag. They play over hdmi to my Hd tv so everything looks great. I now have 2 apple tvs setup to use a central MySQL database for xbmc and all my movies & TV shows are stored on a central server. This means all my machines and media centres are in sync. I can stop watching something in the living room and resume in the bedroom, or in the office, and there is no duplication.

This setup is superb, but now I see the Raspberry PI and I’m wondering if it can overcome the only limitation of my setup, the hardware limitations of 720p output from the apple tv. This isn’t a major issue as I only have a 32 inch HDTV, but I’m always curious. I won’t update Tvs until they die, it’s a waste of money and resources. 720p is more than sufficient for this screen size but there is always that what if, what if I can build a machine using a Raspberry PI for £22 with 1080p hardware decoding of MKVs.

I tried to get a couple on the release date but they sold out so quick. I’m thinking about buying 4. 2 will become media centres and the other two will become a cheap NAS & web server to put all my retired HDDs in and run php, MySQL and a backup server.

I still need to come up with an inexpensive case for these machines, and I would really like to recycle something to create the cases. I’m tempted to put the media centre in old console cases, such as a snes case for a retro feel, but I may just fabricate something to VESA mount on the back of the TVs. I also need to figure out a good remote, I might go the USB dongle route, as you can buy the dongles in the pound shop, and the remotes are cheap as chips from china or hong kong on eBay. I also need to figure out how best to build the Linux image for the media centres. It will need to be stripped right back to use as few resources as possible and run xbmc only.

I’m still wanting to see what kind of power consumption eh can manage, with the ATV2 managing 2-5 watts draw between idle and max, I’m not sure if anything will come close. The power consumption is a big issue now as I plan to run all out computers & servers, not to mention the media centres on renewable energy. I’ve already got plans to build a wind turbine from recycle parts and some fabricated parts, and I’m going to buy some solar PV panels to roof mount at our new house. This means that we can work for free, after the initial outlay for the parts and building. That means every bit of kit I buy has to be a trade off between power and power consumption. The iMac never uses more than 120watts, the MacBook peaks at 60watts and the apple tvs at 5watts each. I have a few external HDDs which use just over 10 watts each and with the TV at 240watts I’m looking at requiring a pretty constant 500 watts which is excellent. If I can produce more I may use a feed in tariff or even power what I can of e rest of the house from it. But that’s a different blog post.

Well this blog was supposed to focus on the project in hand, but as I haven’t yet been able to get any raspberry PI boards that will need to wait for the next post. I’ll keep you up to date with this project.

Pendant Pixie website

John Large — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:18:08 +0000

Pendant Pixie is another site I developed with my wife to sell her hand made pendants. The site was actually very straightforward to develop. We spent a morning thinking about the look and feel of the site and decided we wanted it to be light and to the point. We then spent an afternoon making a logo and colour scheme and the site was developed over the next few days. It’s based on zen cart but I’ve modified the code quite aggressively as used on some of our other business sites. This system works very well for our needs.

Probably the most time consuming part of the whole process was the data entry when adding the products. We photoshopped a lot of our designs onto our template and uploaded them to the cms over a couple of weeks. We now have over 300 pendants listed and we are working tirelessly to expand our range. Vicki used to sell them on etsy/folksy/eBay but the fees quickly add up other sites so it makes more sense to have our own site and promote our own domain.

We are already receiving quite a lot of orders on the site and I’m working hard on optimising the site (SEO really bores me but I’m quite good at it so needs must). The site is receiving a few hundred unique hits a day, which is tens of thousands of uniques down on koolbadges but it will get there.

So what is Pendant Pixie? Well essentially we source wooden scrabble tiles from charity shops, jumble sales, car boot sales and the Internet, often with many letters missing, and we recycle them by turning them into unique scrabble tile pendants. We apply one of our many designs to the back of the tile and glaze it over to make a hard wearing durable piece of jewellery. In many cases we can offer the buyer a letter of their choice on the reverse of the pendant, which makes them even more special.

We love recycling & hand crafting items for people. We have become very good at it between koolbadges with over 14,000 customers and even more orders fulfilled, vickis photography site Iprint selling her amazing photo prints and now Pendant Pixie we have really become hand made specialists.

Well the SEO & dev continues. If you read this blog please do check us out, or even better give us a link. It really does help.

Apple airport extreme – a worthy purchase

John Large — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:42:50 +0000

We finally took the plunge & invested in an apple airport extreme. We have been having a lot of problems with our normally rock solid Cisco router and e crappy salem router supplied by Sky. The problem is while we are in between houses we are living in an apartment. It’s not ideal as we are used to living in a larger space. The key to where we no rally live is the lack of wifi interference & channel overlap. Before we moved out of our last house there where no wifi networks in range of our property, not one. Now we are in the apartment there are over 30 picked up with weak antennas such as the iPhone and over 50 if scanning with the MacBook pro or iMac. This interference causes havoc.

As an example of the interference, no matter which channel we select we are clashing with a couple of other networks. Throughput is right down and stability awful. I would normally hardware with cat5 and a gigabit switch but that’s not really feasible when we don’t own the property. I decided to invest in the pricey airport extreme and what a difference.

I’m not sure I’m 100% happy with using the airport utility to configure the router, but it actually did pretty much everything I needed out of the box. One thing that wasn’t activated out of the box was the 5ghz antenna. It was running on plain old 802.11n. I instantly activated the 5ghz band on the router and what a difference. The iMacs, iPads, MacBooks all connect at 450Mbps. There is nobody within range using the 5ghz band so all the interference has gone. The only issue being the reduced range but within an apartment it hasn’t been an issue.

The apple tv 2′s stream all of our 1080p mkvs with multiple DTS audio stream without any buffering in XBMC and the whole home cinema/media centre experience has been greatly enhanced. In fact the whole network performs as fast as most wired networks I’ve setup so for a £140 investment I’m very happy.

Next time I’ll update you all with the automation of my XBMC using couch potato & sick beard with usenet. It’s like a PVR but much better. Until then a few pics.

Call of duty MW3 on iMac – apple osx lion boot camp

John Large — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:05:09 +0000

I’ve been having issues with my Xbox overheating. It’s due an upgrade but I’m saving hard for a new car so I’m not spending any money. Since I don’t have any windows machines anymore I decided to setup a boot camp partition and install windows 7 to play modern warfare 3.

My iMac is a mid 2009 model iMac with the 2.93ghz core 2 duo processor, 4GB of ram and a nvidia GT120 dedicated graphics card. I thought this would be plenty to run Mw3 in low graphics settings, but I was so surprised to see it run at high graphic details with 2x anti aliasing enabled and sustain a minimum of 30fps on really detailed open maps. When in buildings where less scenery is visible its possible to hit 60 or 70fps. Bearing in mind this is with everything set to high so the graphics look great, and 30fps is perfectly playable & fast. If you want an even faster gaming experience you can reduce the graphics quality. This is also running at the iMacs native resolution of 1920×1200 resolution.

The first step was to run the boot camp assistant in utilities and download the latest boot camp drivers. I saved it to a memory stick for installation later in windows. The next step was to partition the hard drive. I decided to set aside 100GB for windows as I’ve got MW3, BF3 and elder scrolls skyrim to play on the pc (until the Xbox is fixed).

Once partitioned I rebooted with my windows 7 ultimate X64 in the SuperDrive. Remote holding the option key on the keyboard and select the windows disc to begin the installer. Work through the installer and when asked to select an installation partition, select your boot camp partition and click format. Once formatted proceed with the installation. Once complete the system will reboot and boot into windows.

Next insert the thumb drive from earlier and install the drivers. The setup failed to boot on windows x64 so I went into the installation folder and into the apple folder to start the installer manually. This will install all the graphics, airport, volume controls and every other driver required, ensuring maximum compatibility.

The final step was to install MW3 and startup the game. At first boot it was running at low graphics settings with no antialiasing. The fps using fraps was around 90fps. Once I cranked everything up this dropped to a very playable 30-40fps average even at such a high resolution. This is a great solution for mac owners, much more favourable than emulation. The performance is superb, especially bearing in mind that my machine is 2 years old. Owners of newer i5, i7 and quad core machines would see even greater performance.

I’m about 60% through the game now, with no slow downs & rock solid reliability. I can’t wait to try skyrim later today.

Here are a few pics of the game running. Apologies for any typos, I’m typing this from the iPad in a car park during a break from Christmas shopping.

If you found this post helpful please checkout our family Badge business – After all it pays our bills & keeps the lights on. Kool Badges Button Badges

MacBook pro finally upgraded.

John Large — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:17:15 +0000

I finally took the plunge and bought the MacBook pro to replace our ageing dell 1545 laptop. What an upgrade. I was really torn between the portability of the MacBook air and the power of the pro. After weighing it up and asking certain techy friends I decided to ditch the portability of the air and go for the slightly heavier but more powerful pro.

So far I’m really impressed. The apple migration assistant was great and copied everything over Ethernet in a little over an hour from my old machine to the new one. That’s over 90gb of stuff copied & organised with only a few clicks. Today I’m sat in a coffee shop working, modifying php scripts, uploading files and configuring a MySQL database. What’s more I fully charged it last night and after 5 hours of use I still have 36% charge left, and it’s been hammered today already. So much stuff open including dreamweaver, photoshop, safari, mail, iTunes.

Another great thing about this laptop is the unibody design. My previous laptops always felt a little brittle, like if you picked it up it would break in two. This laptop feels very sturdy & rugged.

Granted all these perks come at a price of over £1000 but our new philosophy is to invest in the best. For too long has cutting costs caused headaches and days of installing & reinstalling.

So far I’m loving iCloud & photo stream. All my photos in sync ready to use on the iPad, iPhone & macs. So much easier than trying to manually sync everything up and creating duplicates.

Anyway a few photos of the new baby.

Bruce Blinds SEO

John Large — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:45:53 +0000

I’m still performing SEO for Bruce Blinds. It seems that the keyword Blinds is very hotly contested. I guess big companies have a lot of money to spend on optimization & Adwords.

So far I’ve changed the mod rewrite rules to produce friendly URL’s and changed a lot of the on page content. Also improved is the internal link structure of the site which aims to get more links to each & every page of the website. I’ve now got the total of internal links upto 108k and over 62k links coming in, mostly from the same sites (my own sites) but it’s a good start.

I’ve already hit position 5 in Bing & Yahoo.co.uk for blinds which is much better as the site was essentially unlisted before.

This Week I’m concentrating on their Velux Blind section. This has had little to no work done on it. I’m also improving their Social Media strategy over the coming weeks.

Please checkout some of their velux Blinds, let me know if you have any ideas on optimization for these pages, as always I love to hear from the blogs readers.

Acacia Apricot Velux Blinds
Acacia Azure Velux Blinds
Acacia Bazzar Velux Blinds
Acacia Beige Velux Blinds
Acacia Black Velux Blinds
Acacia Blue Velux Blinds
Acacia Bottle Green Velux Blinds

Bruce Blinds – SEO

John Large — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:29:52 +0000

I’ve taken on a big SEO project for Scotland based supplier of Blinds Bruce Blinds. The project is to last 2 months and is my first major SEO project for 2 years. It all came about after chatting with my Brother In Law who fits blinds in the Dundee area and also sells them from his website. I normally wouldn’t take on such a task but rather than being paid for the project, my brother in law is going to invest in my next big idea, an iPad and iPhone app, so it works out nicely.

I’ll keep you posted on here with the progress and expect a lot of links to be added to the footers of my own sites.