Steven Perich

With the doom and gloom going around at the moment what better time is it to get stuck into something in your spare time that doesn’t involve work, and is cheap, environmentally friendly, delicious and sustainable?

I’ve caught the gardening bug. I think it started when I thought it was high time to finally clean out all the dead plants and mess in the garden, or when Laura’s brother in law dismantled his pergola and had a big gap in his back yard left, surrounded by brick, and I suggested turning it into a vege garden.

Any rate, moving on a couple of months.  He’s installed a 5000L water tank, I’ve donated a (now very healthy) worm farm and I’m usually over there with him once a weekend doing a bit of whatever needs to be done… Because the pergola area is now a huge vege patch!  Currently growing over there:  Tomatoes, cauliflower, pumpkin, corn, lettuces, carrots, broccoli, silverbeet, oregano, capsicum, onions, cucumber and probably one or two other things.

We don’t have much space here but nevertheless I’ve cleaned up the gardens and planted some seedlings and seeds. Here’s the result:

This is a coriander plant that was the size of the basil plant next to it a month ago. Down the bottom is a little chilli plant that’s starting to fruit one or two chillis.

This is a bunch of spouted seeds. We have.. Oregano, silverbeet, tomatoes, carrots..

Next to the seedlings are a few containers I’ve turned into makeshift vege grower things. In them are watermelon, silverbeet and brocolli seedlings that I raised from seeds. Now have to be patient and wait for them to grow..

This is the back area of the house which I just tidied up after a LONG time, put in some greywater diversion hoses (you can probably see them hanging off the white pipe) and then some nice red mulch.

What’s next? Installing a 2500L-ish water tank and building a bigger area on some concrete to lay down some mushroom compost and plant MORE veges!!

Just a quick one tonight to summarize my thoughts on TechNovus’s plans to release a “cloud computer” to the masses in Australia and India. Conceptually it’s not a bad idea, but it’s a bit ahead of it’s time and I can see a ton of flaws.

- their published market is “the masses”. WTF? The consumer and business markets have been completely saturated for years, at least here in oz. Who’s gonna want to “upgrade” to a machine that will have to first overcome the stigma of being slower, less reliable and expandible plus pay subscription fees?

- purchase of their computers required. Sure, they’re cheap(ish). But google and you will see that the current market trend is toward notebooks. In the low end and portability market, the Netbooks like the Asus eee-PC are killing it. TechNovus have no netbook range yet.

- the low end market that this is mostly targetted at is going to be the type that have a cheap 250mb/month Dodo internet plan. Given the recommended Internet speed of 1mbps for the TechNovus product, I can see gran’s overage fee at the end of the month being horrendous. Bandwidth is not ubiquitous enough yet for always-connected everyday computing. Not to mention grandmas stress levels after she gets knocked off her Internet connection the 7th time in a row. How will the average Indian user be affected?

- hardware is no more green than a laptop. My work issued Dell Latitude pulls 25W while being charged, approx 3W more than the TechNovus Navigator (and I assume the Published figures do not factor in a monitor!) A Netbook running an Atom cpu would eat this cloud computer alive in the greenwash stakes and still be connectable to an external monitor if required.

- Having worked as a sales engineer for a large SaaS web conferencing company I am very familiar with the concerns any business, hell even individual, holds over their data security and integrity. TechNovus better have a way to mitigate these concerns from day 1 or they will never penetrate any business market. By the way, forcing users to store data on a USB key won’t cut it. It’s cumbersome, insecure and prone to fail. Customers might as well buy used hardware and install Linux themselves. At least their fast hard drives can be used for data!

- more $0.02 on saas. It is absolutely wonderful for collaborative applications like web conferencing, presence, IM, unified communications and stuff like that. Most web 2.0 apps you know and love out there are collaborative apps. Many more you didn’t think would be collaborative in fact definitly are. They rely on user interactivity to thrive. Delivering standard office apps in an ASP model is a dumb idea. It’s boring, unsexy and has been done to death one way or another over the past 25 years. Just leave it to a monolith in Redmond and do something innovative!

- tell me again why I should pay $20 or whatever a month to use software I can download gratis? Linux, openoffice. They’re being offered. if Steve Ballmer is to be believed we’ll all be running office in the cloud in a year anyway. Good luck competing with MS!

No doubt I’ll think of more compelling arguments against this product but for now it’s 1amand it’s a school night

(Edit: So el Jobso goes and releases iTunes 8 on me today. Oh well!)

Forget Remote Buddy - this is WAY cooler! After having a good little play with the native iPhone remote control that lets you control iTunes on a Mac/PC over a wifi connection from your Jesus Phone, I got a bit teared up remembering the days I had my TV and stereo connected to a Mac Mini.  I’m a bit of an audiophile so have a half decent stereo - and after I replaced my Mac mini with a PS3 (hey, GTA4 is cool) I missed being able to EASILY control music (streaming through the PS3 is NOT fun) and have it come through some decent speakers (iMac speakers are not decent speakers).

Enter an 802.11n Airport Express and the problem goes away.  I set up the Airport, hooked its audio out up to a spare optical input on the Denon AVR, selected the Airtunes speakers in iTunes on the iMac, and started up the iPhone remote. Seconds later I was listening to lossless audio through my preferred speakers, sitting on the couch selecting my preferred music with the TV off and iPhone in hand!  So fun

Even better I can once again stream my DTS encoded audio back to the stereo. The Mac mini (with iTunes) did it (when it felt like it) and the PS3 does something funky to the bitstream to stop the AVR deciphering it.

All in all…a fantastic, affordable solution that works reliably and took less time to set up than it did to write this blog entry!  I’m impressed, Apple… (If only you could fix up the iPhone firmware to work this well)

I haven’t updated my blog in over a month, my bad!  Since then there have been at least 4 immediate birthdays, the iPhone 3G has been released, I’ve started getting hooked into GTA4 on the PS3, work work and more work!

I’ve been doing some internal spiritual reflection lately that I want to share on here when I have some time to type out my thoughts.  My gut feelings about the world we live in, while skewed now and then, have lately been that there is massive change in the way we live, work and play coming. To some it may be positive, to others it will crush them with negativity and cause many people to become broken. If you begin to think I’m a crack smoking hippie talking who’s going to start quoting Nostradamus scripture, dont worry, I’m not, just bear with me. =)