Today I attempted (successfully at the moment!) something that I have been looking to do for a long time now, an upgrade to my oldest Mac Mini.  I finally got round to installing the two memory chips that I have had for ages, to make the total RAM in my music centre to 1GB.

I have two Mac Mini computers and jolly good they are too.  The one I use all the time (I am typing this on it now) is a newer version of the affordable, compact Mac desktop.  It has an 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2gb RAM.  I also have a Mac Mini that is connected up to the TV downstairs which works as a media centre, streaming music around the house, and in particular into the rooms downstairs.  This Mac Mini is a little older, and in fact I got it a little cheaper as it was being super seeded by the new generation minis at the time.  Its is a 1.83GHz Core Duo processor and just 512mb of RAM which for just playing music in iTunes was fine.

Anyway I wanted to upgrade for the simple reason that I wanted to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on it and therefore I thought that it would be much better suited to having at least 1GB RAM.  I also had to spare 512mb chips handy because when I bought my newest mini that had been upgraded, it came with the original chips, which I thought that the time I could use to upgrade my media centre mini downstairs.

I have put it off so long because I have been aprehensive about doing the job.  Mac Minis are, well, mini and compact and therefore poking around inside them can’t be the easiest of jobs and if you don’t know what you are doing then something could easily go a miss.  I searched around the net for a few minutes and found endless guides on how to replace the memory in an Intel Mac Mini, many of them where video tutorials and they are all pretty easy to follow.

The hardest part of the upgrade was getting the case of the Mac.  You have to prize it off with a putty knife or a thin wall paper scraper would do the job.  Its hard because you really don’t want to put too much pressure on the case as I was affraid of breaking it.  However you do need a little brute force in order to free.  I did make some minor scratches on the case, but most of the internet guides said as much.  The good thing is, is that the marks are left on the bottom so that you don’t see them when the Mac is in use.

From there is was easy, however beware as at the front there is a small black wire that needs to be removed in order to lift off the CD Drive and hard disk, and you must remember to replace it.  I forgot to replace it and although the Mac worked the fan was going mad and therefore I assume it is something like a temperatire sensor.

Today I got my hand on a nice new gadget. The gadget in question is a Panasonic SD card camcorder. So I thought that I would share my opening thoughts.

I have been looking for a Hard Disk camcorder for a while now, and I also needed one for work, however there are few, reasonably priced hard disk camcorders that are compatible with iMovie 08 and therefore when I saw this SD card one was compatible then I snapped it up at a good price. The advantages of using a hard disk or SD camcorder are that you do not have wait for the tape to play into the computer before you can start messing with your movie. However they do have their disadvantages, the main one being that the quality of the movie that is shot is not as good as a DV camcorder. With me not wanting to shoot movies that will end up on DVD I thought that I would give this one a try. Most of the movies that are shot end up on the web at around 500 pixels wide and therefore I am hoping that it will do the job.

First impressions are good. The camcorder is very light weight and is in fact much more like a camera than a camcorder. The small sample clip that I shot was decent quality although I hardly used it really. iMovie seems to pick the camera up a dream and drop the clips into the iMovie library really quickly which is great. So, so far so good, but I will keep you posted on the quality!

My latest gadget arrived today after a rather rapid delivery from eBay. I had heard that you could record audio onto your iPod and so after a little research from my friend Mr Google I found that the gizmo that I needed was a little gadget called iTalk.

The device is made by Griffin Technology, manufacturers of many iPod gadgets. It is tiny, about the size of a cigarette lighter and it attaches to the dock connector at the bottom of your iPod video (mine is 60gb). Then you have a simple menu option to record. Speak away and the microphone built into the iTalk device does the rest.

I was skeptical at first when I was looking to buy as I wasn’t sure that the audio quality would be up to it, but it really isn’t bad at all from the built in mic. I really do want to get an external 3.5mm jack plugged mic that will fit into the iTalk unit and then clip to your tie for example and I think that the sound quality of the outputted .wav file will be better. If anyone can recommend a mic then I would be grateful. All in all a good £12 spent.

I have been after this for a while as there have been more than one occasion when I have been out and about and I have wanted to go online, in hotels and other places etc. Today my mobile broadband arrived, from the Three Mobile.

Its a nifty little device and so far so good as I am getting speeds on up to 700kbps which is fine for general browsing.

Over the last 3 or 4 months I have been embarking on a learning revolution. The learning being about creating websites using the Internet. The minutes that I started using Wordpress I immediately thought that it would make an excellent Content Management System (CMS), and I was right, as I have learn’t in the past few months. Armed with all this knowledge I have now launching Education Themes.

There are many authors out there that are producing what are known as ‘Premium Wordpress Themes”. Premium in that they do that little bit more. Brian Gardner of Brian Gardner Media has produced some excellent easy to use premium themes, that are designed for using Wordpress as a CMS. Being a teacher I have thought for a while now that Wordpress could be used as a CMS in school and colleges in order to make it easier for staff to manage their websites.

Armed with lots of learning in the recent months and endless amounts of trying things again and again until I have gotten them right, I have launched (as part of Equal Design) Education Themes. Education Themes will produce Premium Wordpress Themes that are suitable and tailored for use in schools and colleges. We are also going to be providing some other services such as installation, theme customization and other bits and bobs.

The first theme, Green Leaves, was released yesterday and can be purchased from the Education Themes website. The themes will all be released under one licence, that being a multi-user, developer licence. For more information on this, visit the website, as the license details will appear their shortly. I am now working on the second theme, Blue Waves, which you can take a sneak preview of here. Both of these themes are best suited for school websites.

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Education Themes Website
Green Leaves Premium Wordpress Education Theme Demo
Blue Leaves Premium Wordpress Education Theme Demo

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on a new project - educationthemes.co.uk. The site will be a place where education establishments can purchase premium Wordpress themes to use on their websites, whether for departmental use or for school’s and colleges themselves. During the development of the website and the themes I have grown the loath Internet Explorer 7 and therefore here are the top 4 reasons I think it should be banned as a browser!

1. Annoying Pop Ups

So there you are surfing away happily browsing through well known sites that we all know and love and we get the pop ups starting. The one that really gets on my nerves is the one that tells you that the site might be a ‘phishing site’. My response is no I hate fishing, no go away! And it is one of those menus that you can’t just ignore as it sticks in the middle of the page annoying you until you do something. Urgh!

2. It Looks Rubbish

When Microsoft made the step from IE6 to IE7 they changed the look and feel of the interface radically. What they thought was an excellent effort at slimming down the interface and removing the clutter, was in fact one of t he most annoying things ever. They removed the menus at the top which was really annoying (and yes I know that you can get them back) and they have changed the function location to much for my liking.

3. Tabbed Browsing

Now don’t get me wrong I am a great fan of tabbed browsing and this is one of the features that was long overdue in IE. However they have sort of got it wrong as when you open a new tab it sticks some stupid ‘about: tabs’ link in the address bar. You start typing away with the address that you want and inevitably the URL ends up wrong. What a crazy idea

4. It Doesn’t Display Web Pages Correctly

This is the problem that I have been having with it over the last few weeks. You can make a website using proper CSS layout. Look at it in Firefox, Opera and Safari and it will display perfectly while you sit back and admire your work. Fire up IE and you see a completely different web site. It is clear that Microsoft have something very wrong with this and it is really annoying. As I write this I still have not managed to fix my site in IE. A real pain.

So we need to start a campaign to stop people using Internet Explorer and use something else. I would recommend Firefox. Comment if you agree (or disagree for that matter!).

I have been running quite a few websites for a while now. First of all there is this one, the blog, there is my videos and photos website and also there is the Equal Design site that has just started. However I have been pondering how to use my ‘personal’ sites best for a while now. Here is what I am thinking.

I find myself having about 3 - 4 personal (and by that I mean about me) sites on the web, however I only every really get chance to update one of them. The one I update of course is this one, the blog. Most people seem to know about this (those that know me anyway) and therefore it is the one that they check. Therefore I have been wondering what is the best way forward with my sites.

I have decided that Mark Wilkinson Photos and Videos will be no more as of today. I am not going to update them anymore and instead I am going to use this site as the home for all of my content. I suppose the next question I asked myself is do I change the domain of the blog over to my main domain markdwl.co.uk? I have decided not to and it will stay on Penny4Them. It is a good name which I like and it has lived here for getting on for two years now and therefore it is going to stay here.

So I am going to continue to do what I have been doing with photographs and that is to post everyday pictures here and I will link to the galleries of all the photos, probably on flickr. As for video content, which I hope to expand in the near future, depending on time, I am going to post it write here. Therefore I am going to be adding 2 more categories to this blog, photos and video and then post things in the appropriate category.

I am still thinking about a dynamic homepage that brings in the latest posts from ’selected’ categories but that will mean changing the look of this blog, which I am still finding a good design (thanks Simon!). So there you go, keep you eyes out for some new content and categories soon!

I love gadgets and always have. I am a self confessed geek and proud of it! Today got me thinking as I was working away on the computer ‘what are my top 6 favourite gadgets?’ You know the things that I really couldn’t do without. So here goes.

Mac Mini

I have written Mac Mini here but really I mean any Mac. I had an iMac until recently and that was great to. Macs are great. They are just so easy to use and unlike PCs at times, they do exactly what you tell (sometimes you get the beach ball of doom but not often!). The Mac Mini is so compact it fits anywhere. I actually use 2 of them. Once is downstairs next to the TV that looks after all my music and streams it wirelessly around the house and the other is my desktop computer that I use all the time. Without this piece of kit my life would be very different so it has to be number one on the list.

Mobile Phone

I am not a great geek in terms on mobile phones. In fact often when I tell people what type of phone I have they are often shocked and they assume (being a techy) that I will have an all singing all dancing sort of phone. My Sony Ericsson K750i is great. Its 2 megapixel camera takes good photos in good light, but I only use this in an emergency. It is really easy to use and up to now it is reliable. I think people are getting to carried away with phones. At the end of the day they need to be able to text and phone people and anything else is a bonus. Anyway it keeps me in touch with those that I need to so it is a great little gadget.

iPod

The invention of the iPod has got to be one of the best inventions of modern times in terms of consumer electronics. What it has done for the way we all listen, store and manage music is phenomenal. I have an iPod Video 60GB which I have had for a while actually. Like most Apple products that I have experienced it performs really well as is a doddle to use. It allows me to keep my music, photos and also contacts with me wherever I am which is great.

Panasonic Lumix Camera

This has to be the best camera that I have had. It is almost like an SLR camera (I think they call them bridge cameras) when looking down the view finder you are seeing the digital image exact. It also has a massive 12x optical zoom which is very handy. It takes some great photos.

Card Reader

My small portable card reader is another essential piece of kit and for 99p it has probably been the best value gadget I have. It makes transferring photos from the camera to the computer much easier as you don’t have to mess around trying to find the wire that came with the camera. Just pull the SD card out of the camera plug in to the card reader and then it just acts as a flash drive.

Flash/Pen Drive

I have had one of these for a while now and the first one I bought I still have. It is a crucial 256mb drive and it cost me a whopping £40 about 5 years ago. Now I use a Bubsi 2GB drive which was actually bought from Argos as it was on a saving and I had one of those £5 off vouchers they do at Christmas. They are really handy little things for transferring files here there and everywhere. Great when you use a number of different computers like me.

So there you have it. They are my top 6 gadgets, what are yours?

Today my new mac mini computer arrived that is replacing the old iMac that I sold a few weeks ago. It is a truly amazing piece of kit that not only looks the part on the desk but also functions (at the moment, beautifully).

Having just bought my Dell PC to with the excellent 22 inch monitor I wanted to use the monitor for the next Mac that I bought and therefore that was why I decided to opt for the Mac Mini rather than replacing my older iMac like for like. I know they are not as powerful as the iMac computer but I think that this will do just fine for my needs.

So what spec is it I here you geeks whispering to yourself? It is an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz machine with a 120Gb hard drive and 2Gb memory. This means that it will be approx. 30% faster than the older iMac that I had plus the fact that this is double the memory and therefore that will help to.

I actually bought the Mac second hand off eBay from a seller that had excellent feedback. He was selling it brand new (it was purchased from an Apple Reseller on the 21st March and I have the receipt from the shop!) as it had only been opened and booted to check it was fine before deciding that he didn’t want it. Why? My thoughts too. Anyway as it had been booted I thought that I would just wack in the DVDs that came with the system, reinstall Leopard (the operating system) and then I would have a fresh copy just like turning it on for the first time. That was fine and it installed no problem. However I now no longer seem to have all of the iLife ‘08 programs that are pre-installed on every new Mac. I have GarageBand, iPhoto and iDVD but do not have iMovie and iWeb. This is strange and if the re-install that I did had wiped them why are some there and some not.

Doing some research on the web I know that people buying a Leopard disc to upgrade from Tiger would not have iLife ‘08 installed because Leopard doesn’t come with iLife ‘08. However with this being a brand new machine I assume that it should have come with iLife ‘08 pre-installed and therefore this should be on the ‘recovery’ disc. Indeed it has installed some of the programs. Anyone have any idea what has happened here and why some of the programs have gone?

Other than this it is a pleasure to use and knocks socks off my Vista PC. Just hope I can get to the bottom of where the missing iLife programs have gone.

Since Christmas I have been working hard on other things, hence the lack of posts that have been written here in comparison to last year. A few weeks ago I launched Webmark Design, my web design venture in the local area. Well this has turned into a great success, so much so that I have formed a partnership to produce our new web design company. I give you Equal Design.

We are offering affordable web design to small and medium sized businesses including advert sites, information based sites and content management systems. We are also offering eCommerce solutions to business too.

Check out our website at equaldesign.co.uk.