Surface Pro 3 - Fantastic

I think the last time I posted something about the Microsoft Surface it was a couple of years ago. Although Surface Pro 3 didn't deliver everything I wanted, I bit the bullet and bought one any way. That was over 6 months ago.

There are a number of reviews out there about Surface Pro 3, so I didn't want to something about the surface that has already been covered. 

After using the Surface Pro 3 this is how I feel about it : 

• The product itself and overall is pretty impressive, I worried about performance etc... but I haven't had any problems to date. I did have a problem one night when it became really hot - I mean really hot. The temerature control came on and shut the system down - the fans could be heard fired up and whirring away. 
• The Type Cover is fantastic, and it is almost as pleasurable to type on the Type cover as the macbook pro keyboard. The trackpad is a bit of a dud, I feel like I was spoilt with the trackpad of the macs - which is probably the best trackpad by a mile. There's been times when I'm scrolling a webpage and it just doesn't scroll and I had to use the touch screen. I also have issues with the left click, it feels that it is getting stuck and the tactile feedback is just not there sometimes (I have to bend the cover slightly to try and pop it up).
• The screen is beautiful, absolutely gorgeous.
• The Pen placement is still a problem. It is probably better the previous surface pro magnetic attachment but when you try and place it in a bag it sometimes gets caught - its just an annoyance. 
• Pen implementation with one note is FANTASTIC I'm someone that writes, and draws pictures alot when I speak to people. I tend to use the back of what ever is around. With one note + surface + surface pen, I no longer need to do that I just use One Note. 
• I haven't found any issues with windows 8,  I have to confess I do like the start screen in windows 8 compared to the previous versions. But I am in the desktop  mode quite alot. I also like the idea of being able to tap the Windows key and typing the name of the application and Enter (Perfect).
• I like the swiping from the left to rotate the application, but I haven't had the need to put them side-by-side since I'm in the normal applications (not metro). 
• I haven't had the need to use the camera at all yet. 
• Sound is great for me - obviously this isn't something that provides the best quality sound possible through those tiny speakers. 
• One major problem that I'm facing is the wireless - I have intermitent problems with the wireless. This ranges from poor performance, to dropped connections, to being unable find and/or connect to my home network. 
• I am still disappointed that I don't wireless ac and mobile broadband. I'm waiting for the new Wireless AC routers before moving to Wireless Ac. 

I would consider getting the next version if it had mobile broadband wireless ac. 

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3TB vs 2TB

When you are looking to get your next harddrive, you might be in a possition where you have a decision in front of you on whether to purchase a 3TB harddrive or a 2TB harddrive. Often this may look attractive to you, the current prices of a 3TB harddrive are so low that it looks a whole lot more value for a 3TB harddrive than a 2TB harddrive.

I had rececently purchased a 3TB harddrive due to the value for money that it presented. The added extra 1TB and the lack of available sata ports on my motherboard fealt like a no-brainer. However, soon after installing the harddrive I slowly found that there were a number of hurdles that I had to cross.

First was my OS, after reading a number of posts online I found out that you really need a 64bit OS to support it. If you have one of the legacy OS such Win XP you can kiss that extra 1TB goodbye, it simply is not supported. But then again why are you still on Win XP ?

For me, this wasn't really a major problem. I was happy to quickly wipe my installation (because of the way that I had installed my OS - within a separate partition. Also, because I was using Linux, all I had to do was download and install the 64bit OS. However, I thought to myself what would someone with Windows do ? Some of the Windows install, especially the OEM versions, specfically only allow a 32bit install. This would mean that you either need to purchase an upgrade or a whole new version from MS - that extra 1TB is already starting to look not attractive.

Secondly, you need to make sure that you format it correctly. The legacy, I can all it legacy now, partition table format will need to be GPT. I had a whole lot of fun trying to figure this out - don't make the same mistakes as I did and check out my previous post.

Third, peripheral support. I have a number of harddrive enclosures and docks situated around the house. I use a harddrive dock next to my HTPC, the main purpose of this new HD was to use it with the HTPC. I found out the hard way that my dock did not support a 3TB harddrive since the dock had a firmware built in and it was 32bit. This has now led me to purchase a new dock.

Finally, this has not happened to me yet but it is theory - if you want to use the HD with another computer you need to make sure that it all meets the gotcha's mentioned in this post. This is something that you are going to have to remember and not take it for granted that it will just work.

There you go, the value of the extra 1TB looks like it is great value for money. However, you need to make sure that you are ready for it. I would suggest that you look at this post and review your decision carefully before you purchase that 3TB.

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New Layout - Experiment

I'm completely new to the world of Blogger, and I thought that it was about time to ditch the standard template for something that is a little more appealing. I first thought that I could create my own template, but for the time being I'm trialling out some pre-made templates (why re-create the wheel if you don't have to, right?).

So in the mean time you will see changes on the site, sometimes it might work and sometimes it wont. But for most part I hope it works.

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Cloud Storage for the Consumers

Much of yesterday was used up trying to look for a set of files, due to a recent hard drive malfunction I no longer know what I have and what has been lost.

After searching through my stack of hard drives  low and behold the files were located in the second last hard drive  That was lucky because the last hard drive was a IDE harddrive, and I don't think I have a suitable enclosure for it. 

But, this event got me thinking about the types of medium that is suitable for storage. One of the consequences of going digital is that we will be more prone to loosing information if it is stored incorrectly. Take for example, prior to digital cameras most people had their photos developed in a studio and they had a hard copy of the picture. These formats generally degraded over time, however, the benefit was that some of the information would still be legible - in the case of a picture you may still be able to make out what is being represented in the picture. 

Now, with the digital age and with digitising everything - some of the key benefits of course are that you have less clutter, and the quality wouldn't be expected to degrade over time. However, the key aspect is really time. 

Over time, with technology, everything tends to become outdated. I remember having tape drives holding vast amounts of information. For the general consumers were CDs, and then DVDs, then blue ray disks. The life expectancy of a DVD or CD's are 30 years, and Blueray discs are expected to be much greater of up to 150 years. Both of these haven't been tested in the wild yet to confirm whether or not this is the case. However, if you take blueRays as an exmaple - if you have stored media on a blueray disc there is no guarantee that in another 150 years you will have anything that will be capable of reading the media. In a consumers' sense, they wont have these types of machines available as they keep upgrading their technology. 

Now, in my case, I was thinking that I need a mechanism to :

1. store my information safely for a long time (maybe not for 150 years) but long enough based on the information
2. Be able to search for the information easily and efficiently
3. Be able to be accessed anywhere and any time 

After considering these as my requirements, physical media wouldn't be capable of meeting requirements 2 and 3. So the only item that I can think of that can meet these requirements was going to be personal cloud storage. 

There are so many companies offering free and paid services, they normally provide some sort of web interface to manage your files, or even multiple applications for your devices. In my case, they tend to meet each of the requirements very well. 

A couple of considerations to make when you pick a cloud storage provider : 

1. Check out how long they have been around - assess the risk of them shutting up shop and taking all the information with them. 
2. Check out whether they will breaking any laws - there were many people who used MegaUpload as  method of cloud storage. However, MegaUpload and MegaVideo were also participating in infringements which at the end brought down the company. All the users to date haven't been able to obtain their files. 
3. Consider using multiple hosts - have one as your backup to minimise the risk of #1 and #2. 
4. Make sure you understand the companies interest in providing you with free storage - Remember nothing is free in life. 

So right now, I'm using both drive.google.com and also UbuntuOne. I'll do a review on these soon, however, for the mean time I hope this has helped with your storage needs. 

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Whoa.. back on here again...

Ok, so the last time I took a long break I ended up going for a long time. Well I've had to shutdown the other site and have decided to come back here. Why, two reasons :

• Decided to move to Ubuntu for my desktop/server
• Accidentally deleted the partition with the blog database

So I lasted for about 1 year and a bit on blogEngine with Asp.NET running on IIS. However, the one thing that I wanted to get up and running (i.e image gallery) didn't end up happening. So I'm still in the lookout for an image gallery that I can integrate into a blog of somesort. 

Drop me a line if you know of one, or if you know if blogger can do it. 

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