My Computer / Console History

I thought it might be fun to document the computers I’ve had over the years. I always find it fascinating to see the route others took into computing, but then maybe that’s just me.

  1. ZX Spectrum 48k
  2. Amstrad PC 1640
  3. Atari STE 520
  4. Atari STE 1040
  5. PC Amstrad 286
  6. PC 386 DX 40Mhz
  7. Pentium P90
  8. Commodore Laptop Pentium 60Mhz
  9. Pentium 2 200Mhz
  10. Apple iMac G3 300Mhz
  11. Pentium 3 500Mhz
  12. Apple Quicksilver PowerMac G4
  13. Acer TravelMate 240 Laptop
  14. Sony Vaio
  15. Apple iMac Intel Core 2.0 Ghz
  16. Asus Eee PC 701
  17. Apple Macbook (Unibody) 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo

Then there are the games consoles..

  1. Atari 2600
  2. Megadrive (Genesis)
  3. Gameboy
  4. SNES
  5. Saturn
  6. Gameboy Color
  7. Playstation
  8. N64
  9. Atari Lynx
  10. Atari Jaguar
  11. GBA
  12. Dreamcast
  13. Playstation 2
  14. GBA SP
  15. GameCube
  16. Neo Geo Pocket
  17. XBox
  18. DS
  19. Gameboy Micro
  20. XBox 360
  21. GP2X
  22. PSP

That list doesn’t include the multiple times I’ve bought the same console (the different coloured versions of of the GBA SP or the smaller versions of the Megadrive, Playstation, DS and GBA) or the numerous times those various PC’s were upgraded.

It’s scary to think how much I must have spent on this stuff over the years.

25 Open Source Web Applications

Here are 11 ideas (and 25 apps) to make better use of your webspace. They are all open source alternatives to major Web 2.0 applications that you can install on your own web server. Most require PHP and MySQL. All are free.

Why? By taking control of the services you use online, you can increase your understanding of PHP, MySQL, and how web applications work. You also get advertising-free (or subscription-free) versions of your favourite sites, and the ability to backup your data easily. In addition, with many of these scripts, you get to fully customise the software with your own unique look.

Blog
Publish your online journal, share your thoughts, write about your favourite hobby or promote your business. Blogs are everywhere these days, but they show no signs of decreasing in number. By hosting your own blog, you get far more control over the look and feel. You can download themes from the hundreds available online, but also you can extend the functionality of the software through freely available plugins.
Recommended software: Wordpress
Hosted alternatives: Blogger, Typepad.

Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, delete and edit content. Chances are you’ve already seen one of the biggest of it’s kind, Wikipedia, but with your very own wiki you can share it among friends and use it as a collaborative knowledge base, or use it to document your product, or as a personal notebook or even as a company intranet.
Recommended software: Dokuwiki, MediaWiki
Hosted alternatives: StikiPad, Wetpaint

Forum
Nothing gets people talking, more than a forum. A forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, bulletin boards or simply forums. Most forums have regular users, which can be a great way to build virtual communities. Forums can be focused around a specific product, lifestyle or genre, or can be much more informal and general.
Recommended software: Vanilla, PhpBB, PunBB, YaBB
Hosted alternatives: Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups

Photo Gallery
If you have photos you want to share with friends, family and the wider internet, there are plenty of services on the web that can do that for you. However, some people like to retain more control over their own photos, and not be restricted by the terms & conditions of some of the big sites. Sure, the big sites can offer exposure and a sense of community, but that’s not for everyone. There are plenty of cool tools to allow you to host your own photo galleries or photo blogs.
Recommended software: Filebrowser, zenphoto, folderblog, Plogger, Coppermine
Hosted alternatives: Flickr, Zoomr

Mailing Lists
If you run a business, or a hobby website, often you’ll want to be able to easily communicate your latest news and updates to your visitors. For some companies, RSS feeds have replaced the need for contact by email, but there are a wealth of people out there who don’t understand RSS, and they outnumber those who do, and sometimes only an email will do. While there are tools online to maintain mailing lists, why not run your own directly from your own domain name.
Recommended software: PHPList
Hosted alternatives: Campaign Monitor

Webmail
Hands up who has a Gmail or Yahoo email account? Even though many of you probably have POP3 accounts with your ISP, you favour the web based versions because they provide ease of access when you are at work, at school, etc. Well, you can actually install a webmail system on your own webspace, and take advantage of the services they offer without sacrificing your cool domain name.
Recommended software: Roundcube, SquirrelMail
Hosted alternatives: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail

RSS Reader
If you don’t use a news reader (or aggregator), they can be a great way to keep track of updates to your favourite sites. Almost every major website has an RSS feed that updates whenever they publish new content. By hosting an RSS reader on your own webspace, you can access your subscriptions from anywhere, rather than just when you are at your computer.
Recommended software: Gregarius
Hosted alternatives: Bloglines, Google Reader

Bookmarks
Social bookmarking is a great way to share interesting sites you’ve found with friends. By adding tags to each site you find, you allow other users to browse links by genre. Usually most services offer some way of subscribing to the bookmarks of a specific user. If you’ve ever used del.icio.us, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It also means you can access your own bookmarks from a remote location. By installing a social bookmarks system on your own server, you can do something different and stand out from the crowd.
Recommended software: Scuttle, Sabros.us
Hosted alternatives: del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Furl

Tasks
As an alternative to keeping a paper to do list, you can keep all your upcoming tasks online. You can even order tasks by priority and deadline, or organize them by context. For business use, you can have multiple users too and allow sorting of tasks by project. The beauty of running this from your own webserver, is that you are not reliant on third-party services, and you know it will always be there when you need it.
Recommended software: TaskFreak!, Tudu Lists
Hosted alternatives: TaDa List, Bla-bla List, Remember The Milk

Social News
Social, democratic, news sites (such as Digg, Reddit, etc) are great places to find the latest news stories and websites. URL’s submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. There are plenty of good reasons to host your own social news site, such as narrowing down the subject matter to a specific topic, or limiting the users to those on your LAN or Intranet.
Recommended software: Pligg, PHPDug
Hosted alternatives: Digg, Reddit, Newsvine

Calendar
There are 2 easy ways to manage calenders online. One is to use software on your computer such as iCal (Mac) or Sunbird (PC/Linux) and then install software on your server to parse the calendar file and display it online. Alternatively you can install a script that lets you actually edit and maintain your calendar directly on your website. Useful if you need to make changes when you are at a remote location.
Recommended software: PHP iCalendar, phpEventCalendar
Hosted alternatives: Gmail, Kiko

While all these applications are free, you will need some webspace with PHP and MySQL support. There are two options:

  1. Find a good webhost such as Segment Publishing, Media Temple or Textdrive. This is going to cost you.
  2. Run your own web server yourself. It’s a little more tricky to install and configure, but if you are running Mac OS X (or Linux), you can quite easily install Apache, PHP & MySQL or run MAMP/LAMP and host all this software on your own computer.

If you have a static IP address and a domain name (try Pairnic for domains) you can even setup a web address with a subdomain for each project. If you want to do everything for free, or you don’t have a static IP, you can even get a free subdomain using a service like DynDNS.

Conclusion

If you want to do something more interactive with your online prescence, or want to move away from the 3rd party hosted services, I hope the above list has given you some good ideas to build upon. Wikipedia is a good starting point for finding out more.

While I haven’t listed every service, or alternative, I welcome suggestions for glaring omissions in the comments below.

4 iTunes Visualisation Plugins

If you only download four visualisation plugins for iTunes, make it these four.

All Universal (for Intel Macs). All freeware.

  1. Volcano Kit – Minimal frequency/amplitude analyser.
  2. LED Spectrum Analyser – Everyone loves dancing graphs.
  3. GasLight – Mesmerising flames. Yum.
  4. Magnetosphere – Gravity. Magnetism. Trippy.

50 Free Windows Apps

  1. Firefox – Web browser, safer alternative to Internet Explorer.
  2. Thunderbird – Full featured email application.
  3. PuTTY or PuTTY Tray – Telnet & SSH client.
  4. WinSCP – Open source SFTP / FTP & SCP client.
  5. µtorrent – A very tiny bittorrent client.
  6. Skype – Free voice calls to anyone else on Skype. 
  7. Feedreader – RSS news reader.
  8. Pidgin – Instant messenger client (Yahoo/MSN/AIM/etc).
  9. HydraIRC – IRC Client.
  10. RealVNC – Allows you to remotely control other computers.
  11. Locknote – Encrypted notepad.
  12. Notepad2 or Notepad++ – Powerful alternatives to Windows Notepad.
  13. Recuva – Recover deleted files from hard drives and flash media.
  14. CCleaner – Clean unused and temporary files from your system.
  15. Softperfect Network Scanner – IP, Netbios and SNMP scanner.
  16. Softperfect Personal Firewall – Rules based software firewall.
  17. Winpatrol – Monitors your computer for adware, spyware, trojans & more.
  18. Xpy – Small tool which disables the default threats of Windows XP.
  19. Truecrypt – File & disk encryption toolkit.
  20. Eraser – Securely erase (and prevent recovery of) any file.
  21. VLC – Media player & streaming server.
  22. foobar2000 – Advanced music player and organiser.
  23. LAME Encoder – Codec needed to create MP3 files.
  24. XnView – View and convert over 400 graphic formats.
  25. Shareaza – P2P client (Gnutella, BitTorrent, etc).
  26. Popcorn – Portable POP3 client.
  27. Hamachi – Zero configuration VPN tool.
  28. SequoiaView – Explore hard drive usage using visual treemaps.
  29. DVD Shrink – Backup and compress DVDs.
  30. ImgBurn – Burn CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs.
  31. IZArc – Free alternative to WinZip, for file compression & archiving.
  32. Foxit PDF Reader – Lightweight PDF reader.
  33. SyncBack Freeware – Backup, restore and synchronisation software.
  34. Virtual Subst – Map virtual drives to local folders.
  35. Diskmon – Log and display all hard disk activity.
  36. Process Monitor – Monitor file system, registry and process/thread activity.
  37. Quicktime Alternative – Play Apple Quicktime files without installing Quicktime.
  38. Real Alternative – Play Real Networks files without installing RealPlayer.
  39. K-Lite Codec Pack – Play DivX, XviD and more.
  40. WAMP – Apache + PHP + MySQL
  41. DOSBox – Emulate an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics etc.
  42. Cygwin – Linux-like environment for Windows.
  43. Royale Noir – Official Microsoft Windows XP theme.
  44. electric sheep – Open source collaborative abstract screensaver.
  45. 123 Free Solitaire – Procrastination software (aka solitaire card games).
  46. n – Flash ninja game, with physics.
  47. Wget – Download files from the web via HTTP or FTP.
  48. NcFTP – Powerful alternative to Windows FTP.
  49. Blat – Send email via SMTP or usenet posts via NNTP.
  50. GetMail – Download mail from POP3 mailboxes.
  51. NirCmd – Tool for miscellaneous & useful, command line tasks
  52. SDelete – Securely delete files.
  53. NetCat – TCP/IP swiss army knife.

All of the above programs take up about 210mb.

You may also wish to burn spare copies of dban (secure hard drive wiping), Ubuntu, Ultimate Boot CD and Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.

Update: For more useful suggestions visit winAddons.

How I Got Into Computers

When I was around 7 years old, my dad brought home a ZX81 that he borrowed from someone at work. Made by Sinclair, the ZX81 was the first home computer available in the UK for less than £100. It had a whopping 1k of RAM with an 8k ROM containing the BASIC language, and there was no method of getting software into the machine without having to type long program listings in by hand on the awful membrane-style keyboard.

Needless to say, it held my attention for little more than afternoon.

A year later, for Christmas, I was given a ZX Spectrum 48k from my parents. The Spectrum, with it’s rubber keys, was a whole different ball game from the ZX81. It had a huge catalogue of colour games that were loaded using audio tapes and and a cassette recorder.

Thus began my love affair with the computer.

At age 11 I got my first PC. It was an Amstrad 1640 (640k ram, 20mb HD, CGA graphics (emulated EGA), 8086 processor, Gem Desktop). All my friends were getting Amiga’s and Atari’s, and I got this lunking great PC. However, it proved to be one of the best things that happened to me. Learning MS-DOS gave me a founding that would hold me in good stead years later (even to this day in fact). I used to play loads of Sierra & LucasArts adventure games on that machine, which is one of my fondest gaming memories.

A few years later, I finally got an Atari STE 520, later moving up to 1040 STE (my brother got the 520). To be honest, it was a games machine. I traded hundreds of copied games with my friends and loved every minute of it. It was less powerful than the Amiga 500, but it didn’t matter. We even linked the two machines via an RS-232 cable running through the wall so we could play multiplayer games against each other (my first introduction to networking).

When they finally got PC’s in our school, years later, me and a friend ruled the network. I’d just moved on up to a 386 PC that I built myself, and I knew the system inside out. After learning Borland Turbo Pascal in Computer Science lessons, we wrote a program that emulated the Novell login process. Just before logging you in though, it would write your password out to a text file. We installed it on a few machines in the computer room, and soon got the passwords of all our classmates, and more importantly the teacher.

The teacher had supervisor rights on the network, so we created another fake student user, gave them admin rights also, and used that account to run the network for about 3 months. We never did any harm, it was about learning the system and helping other people out from time to time. However, somehow I managed to delete the root of the server hard drive and got into a lot of trouble over it.

Next was a 486, then a Pentium Laptop, then a P2 Dual Processor, a PIII, and then a K6-AMD.

By this point, I was running my own web-design business. I’d done Uni for a year and realised it wasn’t for me, and was busy servicing local business with my newly found eye for design.

Whilst working on a contract for Serco Docklands Ltd (we did the website for Docklands Light Railway for about 4 years), we kept being supplied artwork on Mac CD’s. I made the decision to purchase an iMac DV. It proved to be another life-changing moment. I used OS8, OS9 and eventually OSX (grudgingly at first, mind you).

The Quicksilver G4 followed a couple of years later, and my love affair with Apple was cemented in place. Just after this, I closed up my web design company and began working for a large multinational telecoms & manufacturing company as a multimedia developer. 18 months later, for financial reasons, they decided to cull our whole department along with about 1500 other employees, and I was out of a job.

Having no degree, and no recent work to showcase, I found myself low on money and unable to find a decent job. I needed a new computer, and I wanted a powerful laptop, but I just couldn’t afford a Powerbook, so I opted for the next best thing, a Sony Vaio.

Apart from getting hot enough to cook bacon on, that machine was awesome (except for having to run XP). I had it for about a year before finally convincing wife that we really really needed a Mac again. 1 week later, we had juggled the finances, sold the Vaio and purchased an Apple iMac (Intel 2.0ghz Dual core).

It’s funny. As I look back, I wonder what my life would be like if I had been born 10 years earlier. Would computers have captured my imagination and attention in the same way at age 18 instead of 8? Or if I’d been born into today’s world with the Internet and high powered games consoles like the XBox. I feel thankful and priviliged to have been born in the right time and place to have experienced the growth of 2 distinct industries (computers and gaming) first hand.

Top 5 Albums

I like making lists. Particularly top-ten style lists. I like the challenge of trying to focus everything down. With that in mind, here’s the list of my top 5 albums of all time.

5. Metallica – The Black Album

Metallica at their peak (before they turned into assholes). This was the stage in their career when the passion shone through into their music. A great cross-section of powerful vocals and balls-out rocking. Every song on this album is a keeper.

4. Nirvana – Nevermind

Instantly transports me back to my younger days. Seattle grunge at it’s finest. Cobain’s anguish is clear in his voice which always sounds on the edge of collapsing, and Grohl is just a fucking machine on drums. Listen to ‘Territorial Pissings’ and tell me they didn’t rock out.

3. Smashing Pumpkins : Siamese Dreams

Again another band that I love. I love the mix of quiet accoustic sections, leading into heavier, grungier guitar sections, and then into flights of orchestra behind Billy Corgan’s distinctive vocal style.

2. Rage Against The Machine : Rage Against The Machine

The self-titled album that was the soundtrack to my teens. This album is angry, political and powerful. There’s a certain state of mind where nothing will else do. Best played at a very loud volume.

1. Nine Inch Nails : The Downward Spiral (Deluxe Edition)

Even before the remastered deluxe edition (in 5.1 surround), this was my favourite album of all time. I have pretty much everything NIN have ever released, but this album is the best they’ve ever released. NIN are almost a genre unto themselves, but their closest genre would be industrial/electronica.

Looking at my music collection spanning over 10000 songs and a wide variety of genres, it’s strange to see the my top 5 albums all coming from the same genre and a similar era. There are so many albums that almost made the cut, but the selection was based on a mix of how much enjoyment I got from that album and what percentage of the songs on the album album were worth listening to.

As a curious aside, I’ve listed below the ones that were shortlisted for the top 5.

The Also Rans

Red Hot Chili Peppers : Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Pantera : Vulgar Display of Power
Faith No More : Angel Dust
Leftfield : Rhythm and Stealth
Helicopter Girl : How To Steal The World
Orbital : The Middle Of Nowhere
Ministry : Psalm 69
Kid Koala : Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
Daft Punk : Homework
Portishead : Dummy
Mandalay : Empathy
Evanescence : Fallen
Jamiroquai : Dynamite
Soundgarden : Superunknown
Squarepusher : Big Loada
Front Line Assembly : Millennium
Annihilator : Set The World On Fire

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