Moo.com review

Moo.com is one of a number of on-demand printers that provide some useful services through a web-based interface.

So far, I've had two sets of business cards and two sets of mini-cards from Moo and I'm very impressed with the quality and finish of the printwork, the price, the packaging and how easy the process of making the cards was.

Moo.com provides a web-based solution for setting up your cards. For mine, I chose 30-odd images from one of my flickr albums and used these as the fronts of my cards, setting up the backs with Moos tools. All very easy, and the results look great! At £10 for 100 mini-cards I recommend trying it out!

The problem with car design and the motor industry is.....

.... that the product they are selling doesn't really fit the intended use.

This post comes from a conversation a colleague and I had on the drive out to see a client.

My basic theory is this: the majority of cars that are sold today, are being sold on a range of features that aren't really compatible with safe and environmentally friendly use on urban roads.

The first part of this was sparked off by my asking 'why don't all cars sold today have a GPS linked to the engine management, so that in urban areas the speedlimits can be automatically enforced?'. This seems to me like a fairly obvious way of reducing the speed of the traffic for the price of a (guessing) £150-250 component.

My colleague pointed out that this would be a very un-popular move and probably terminal for the government that attempted to bring it in.

This prompted the discussion about cars and how they are marketed. Speed and power are very significant factors in this even still. It has been refreshing to see fuel economy finally getting the headline slot in the adverts for some cars, but it is still a minority that are discussing this.

I think the issue goes beyond the marketing however, to the way that as a product cars are designed. It seems to me that cars are being built as though for racing and then sold for use on the roads. Many cars are over-powered for the intended use, designed to deliver top-speeds far in excess of the legal speed limits and matching acceleration. Cars aren't it seems designed to operate as efficiently as possible at 30mph - the speed that most cars (used in cities or urban area) spend most of their lives driving at. To the point where in some of the cars that I've driven they are hard to keep down to the speedlimit and need to be contantly reigned in.

Hence the GPS linked speed limiting. If we continue developing cars as they currently are, designed for speed and acceleration, maybe we should be using some of the readily available technology to ensure that this power is used in an appropriate setting - the motorways, not on the urban roads.

Let them take something with them ...

When you attend a trade show, exhibition, conference it goes without saying that all the companies exhibiting their products or services will have to have a wide range of give-away items for their prospective customers to take away with them. These items serve two purposes - to remind the person who took them of the company or product and to facilitate collateral marketing where someone else sees the item and adsorbs the message from it.

So, the thing that suprises me continually with the web-in-general, is that comparatively few websites follow this metaphore through to their online activities. Provding downloadable or subscription driven content from your website is an easy way for your customers to continue their exposure to your brand after the point where they have leftyour website - and allows for the collateral marketing to take place.

Producing PDF versions of your printed materials, desktop wallpaper e-Zines and even desktop toys or games can provide a range of items that appeal to a broad cross section of your audience and allow them to pull your brand messages.

The range of desktop wallpapers available from the Pale Heretic website continually draws a significant amount of web traffic and continues to remind our audience of our brand and our website address even after they have left the site.

Windows Vista on EeePC - Done and working ... mostly.

OK. Given may (predictably) rapid dissolusion with XP on my EeePC - I love the way the OS is just so easy, hate the way that it's fat and uncontrollable (in my experience), I thought I'd just try Vista and see if it was actually possible and try and establish what does or doesn't work ... on my way to switching back to Linux.

I installed Windows Vista Business from a retail DVD ROM, via a USB DVD RAM Drive that has proven itself to be very useful.

The install itself takes about 2.5 hours and seems to go dead at a couple of points for period of up to about 20 minutes while the disk spins, but neither drive light comes on or the progress percentage increments. Stick with it. It will get there eventually.

Install to the 16GB partitioin and you'll end up with about 7 GB of OS installation on there.

Native screen rez is supported as are the hot keys etc. I needed to use the XP drivers for the LAN and ACPI hardware - go to device manager, choose the undignosed hardware and install the drivers by hand. This was sucessful and I was able to get the LAN and power sorted out quite quickly. I'll come to the WIFI in a moment.

A quick note about speed - not really any slower than XP. Overall the boot speed is about the same which given the fact that you end up installing onto a theoretically slower partition is quite impressive, and time to login-prompt is pretty well equal. After that, vista logs in faster but goes through starting all the services so you are looking at more-or-less similar time before you can actually get the start menu to respond or start an application.

OK. Wifi. Doesn't work. I've tried any native drivers (there don't seem to be any and the hardware isn't identified) an the XP drivers will install - if you diable the Wifi with the function key combination - but don't actually work or find any networks. I did some superficial research into this and there are other reports of people with similar experiences, and the only posted solutions are along the lines of 'use the XP drivers'.

Since the EeePC is a netbook, in my opinion it's mobility and therefore things like wireless are key to its usability. Without it, not so useful.

So all in all, impressed with the fact that Vista installs at all, pity that the lack of one driver is going to make it unusable and therefore rapidly replaced and quite suprised that speed wasn't a reason for uninstalling - this is an EeePC 900 don't forget ... thats a 900MHz celeron so processor power was always in short supply.

Uninstall != inv(install)

EeePC. Running Windows XP and need an easy solution for burning CDs. I have a USB DVD RAM drive so go to install CD Burner XP (which I have used happily many times before) and dicover that this oarticular piece of software relies on the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5.

No great problem - lets install that too.

It's as the install completes that the low disk warning pops up. Installing the .Net Framework takes a staggering 55oMB of disk space and on a 4GB partition, that's more-or-less unworkable.

So the plan is to uninstall it and try Deep Burner.

Uninstalling the .NET Framework only gives you back about 50MB of disk space. So where did the rest of it go? No idea. All I know is that 'uninstall' is not the inverse of 'install'.

Combing through the Windows folder has freed up another 100MB, but I'm now faced with a windows install operating with less than 250MB of free space in a 4GB partition.

I'm loathed to say it, but it may be time to rethink this whole MS Windows experience thing. To complete the trial I should investigate putting Windows Vista on here ... I wonder is that even possible?

By the way - Deep Burner installs just fine without needing the .Net framework.

EeePC + Window XP SP3 .... Going back to MS

This is an annoying post to be writing in some senses. I love the open source ideal. I love the speed and robustness of Linux. I love the automated application installation, the safety, the security, the choice of distributions and window systems.

So why does putting Windows XP in this netbook seem so very, very easy?

It's the interface and the support. Dammit. I'd much rather be using Gnome, but the hardware isn't quite supported, doesn't integrate quite as well. With Windows XP, I downloaded about 12 dirver packs from the Asus website, installed XP SP 2, ran the installers for the packs and I have everything working. And I mean everything. The hot keys. The audio and webcam, wireless and lan, touchpad in cluding 2 finger scrolling and a fast set of graphics drivers.

Boot times? No more than a few seconds slower.

Now, I'm fairly sure of a couple of things here. This installation will, like all windows installations, seem to slow down over time as the cruft builds up. But right at this moment this is about as easy an installation as I've done on this - and I've installed something like a dozen different Linux distributions on here over the 10 months I've had it.

I'll keep you posted, but I'm now going to push my luck and install some developer tools on here.

Oh .... and the thing I like best that I never got working under linux? I have a desktop set to 1280x768, and the display pans as I move the mouse at the edge of the screen to show the area of the display that is off the edge of the physical display. I find this much more use than having 4 desktops (as with Gnome or KDE) since I can run an application that needs a lot of display-realestate and be able to work, rather than being left with too little document space once all the tool palettes are on-screen.

This is all about user experience, and I hate to say it, but XP is coming out rather well....

Vincent Callebaut - Floating Cities

I saw this appear on MSN (here) and thought both the idea and the execution of the design was amazing. I finally got round to finding the architect behind this and wanted to share a link to his website (here) and the floating cities project (here).

Now, all I need is a big ocean plot in Second Life ...