Review of the Nexus 7

I was lucky enough to receive a Nexus 7 as a Christmas present, so having had it for a few months I thought it worth a quick write-up.

Nexus 7

I wrote a while ago that I didn’t think 7″ tablets were worth it, and for a while I wasn’t interested in them. I owned an iPad in any case. I did start to find I wanted to look things up while in a different room to my computer or the iPad and so having an extra tablet would be useful.

The improvements in tablets of that factor and the cost helped sway my desire. Then it came down to a choice of which one.  The iPad Mini had not long been announced, the Kindle HD was coming to UK shores and there were offerings from B&N and Samsung as well as others.

I wasn’t interested in a cut-down Android experience, which ruled many of them out (the thought of rooting them didn’t appeal) and hence I hinted on my desire for the Nexus, as it came with an unfettered version of the latest release.

OS and Software

I have an Android smartphone, though its an old version and much of the interface is hidden behind the phone manufacturer’s skin, so it was hard to get a good impression. I’ve been impressed with 4.2 and it’s proved easy to use, easy to get to grips with and obviously affords a lot more flexibility than iOS. Home screen widgets, for example, save a lot of time delving into specific apps and provide a quick overview.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how it does a number of things, such as zooming in on links with small target areas in Chrome. The range available in the Play store has allowed me to do everything I’ve wanted. I also prefer how notifications are handled compared to iOS as well. Continue reading…

Lessons Learned Going Offline with HTML5

I recently built a simple web-based CRM tool only to run into a problem: my users didn’t have internet access all the time, so couldn’t reach it when on the road. Primary use was going to be on phones and tablets, so I could have built a native app, but with both Android and iOS devices to support it would have meant learning two new coding environments or a framework which could publish to both.

Having played with some of the features in HTML5 I was aware it had the ability to work offline, storing data locally. So I did a bit of research and began knocking something together. I thought I’d outline some of the lessons I learned on the way.

Giving credit where it’s due, I leant heavily on Alex Gibson’s example, you can find his code on Github.

Making a web page available offline

To make a file available offline, you need to create a cache manifest. Some of the older tutorials I found name it with a .manifest file type (e.g. offline.manifest, cache.manifest) but this didn’t work for me, you need to name it with a .appcache file extension (e.g. offline.appcache).

In there you need to reference all the files and resources you want available offline, and you can also set which files should never be cached as well as what to do if someone tries to access a page which is not available.

To make it easier, I created a completely separate file (offline.html) to do everything I wanted when there was no internet access, using Ajax, in one page.

I did add support to my .htaccess for a cache-manifest content type, but it worked fine before I had done that. Continue reading…

How to Decide on a Processor

It used to be fairly easy to figure out how good a processor was in relation to another, the main manufacturers (Intel and AMD) had two lines apiece — one budget line (Celeron/Duron) and one performance line (Pentium/Athlon) — and the higher the clock rating (measured in Mhz/Ghz) the better it was.

These days the raw clock speed is only one aspect of how fast a processor is and with the chip companies updating their ranges more often, using multiple cores and inventing their own benchmarks, it can be very hard to understand what exactly you’re buying.

Now there is an argument to say we don’t need to worry about processors any more. Any chip offers at least enough power to do anything a user wants unless they plan to do lot of video rendering (and even then it’ll just be slower). While that may be true, I still recommend avoiding the budget end of the CPU spectrum when buying a new computer so you have a machine that’ll last as long as possible. The price difference is usually minimal and it’ll be more future-proof (I installed Windows 8 on a six-year-old machine recently, the only upgrade it had received in that time was some more RAM). So knowing what you’re buying is still useful, and it lets you compare apples with apples when it comes to prices.

The Current Market

Intel and AMD are still the big boys in the desktop and laptop markets, if you want to run Windows it’ll be on their chips. If you’re looking at a Mac, they’re powered by Intel chips.

The current ranges broadly divide as follows:

Manufacturer Low-Power Budget Standard Performance
Intel Atom Celeron
Pentium		 i3/i5 i7
AMD C-Series
E-Series		 Sempron
Athlon II		 A-Series FX

To be honest, I spent a lot of time looking at the various chip ranges and ended up more confused than when I started. The Intel i-series chips seem the easiest to follow, which AMD seems to be replicating with an equivalent A-series (the higher the number the more powerful the processor) but there are still some old chip families kicking around to confuse things. Continue reading…

Booting Linux from a USB Stick using a Floppy

The trusty old Fujis that make up the bulk of the computers I deal with day-to-day tend to be pretty reliable, but I have noticed a few going down with (what I believe are) faulty disk drive controllers (to be fair, these machines are at least six years old). The system runs fine, all except seeing a hard drive.

I’d obviously heard of running a computer from a solid state disk of some sort, it’s not new. The Raspberry Pi runs off of an SD card and I’ve seen a few projects using Compact Flash. So rather than bin another machine, I thought I would experiment to see if I could get Linux to run from an old USB flash drive I have lying around (Windows was pushing it on size if nothing else).

At first I looked for a lightweight distro, something close enough to Windows in look that, should I put it in front of one of my users, it wouldn’t freak them out. Precise Puppy seemed to be the answer.

Once loaded it runs from RAM, which made it responsive, but the design was a bit hard on the eye and to save any changes permanently you had to remember to click a button to write to the USB stick, which was a slow and tedious process. It also seemed to asked me to confirm some settings every time it started, not great when a machine rebooted, I could already hear the support calls. The final straw was the difficulty in getting an RDP client working.

I went back to a distro I knew a bit better and which looked easier on the eye: Linux Mint.

Installing Linux

To be honest, once I’d decided on Mint, I didn’t do anything particularly special, just picked the USB drive as the installation drive after booting from a Live CD/DVD. It took a bit of time, but once it was installed it ran from there without needing to do anything else.

I decided on a 4GB drive as 2GB was a little tight should you want to install anything else (and Mint isn’t the slimmest by default, it isn’t designed to be).

You could also install it using something like UNetBootin I assume.

The only slight issue is on boot you get an error saying hd0 is out of space and you have to press a key to continue, whether it does or not has been a bit random, but a reboot usually sorts it out. Continue reading…

Second-Hand PCs Offer Great Savings

I’ve normally buy computers brand new, but at work I’ve found a great source of cheap computers that do the job at knock-down prices: eBay. Businesses are always looking to save money, but most couldn’t cope without their computers. In our case they’re largely used as thin clients, along with running a web browser, perhaps an office suite and some have an email client. If you want to buy a new machine these days you’re looking at something with multi-gigahertz multi-core processors and truckloads of RAM that’ll set you back £250+. It’s overkill for what most people use their computers for.

I found a low-powered Atom processor more than up to the task for the majority of my use.  Tablets and smartphones have much less processing power and significantly less RAM than a desktop, yet happily do everything from web surfing to games. Previously, I’ve asked whether Atom-powered computers were worth the money (and decided not). I can confirm that’s still the case because of what you can pick up second-hand.

My latest acquisitions on eBay were two Fujitsu-Siemens workstations with 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processors and 1.5 GB of RAM. They came with copies of Windows XP Pro and are more than capable of doing what 99% of users need. Their specs weren’t cutting edge and these machines were about six years old. They’re not particularly power efficient, they had signs of wear and they use some non-standard parts, making replacing bits harder if they fail, but they only cost me £25 each (including delivery). That’s less than the cost of a Raspberry Pi! Continue reading…