Before school had finished for the year, I was lucky enough to acquire a promo code for a one month free trial of Fatso. Fatso is basically what Netflix is in the US, except in New Zealand. Fatso allows you to rent DVDs from their website which they deliver in the mail to you instead of you going to the store and picking them up.

You start off by adding movies you want to rent into a queue. They have a large selection of titles, over 22,000 according to the website. Not being a huge movie person, I didn’t find the selection lacking, but more overwhelming for me. I feel that the range is more than adequate for any normal movie loving person. You can view movies by genre or by new release, most popular or any of their other categories. You can also search for a title if you want. This service works best if you have a large queue, and in that queue you have some titles that are not new release. If you only go for new releases, I think you are going to be disappointed with this service.

When you have titles in your queue, Fatso will send you out the number of DVDs according to your plan. For the trail, I had Unlimited with 3 DVD’s at a time. When you are looking at your queue, beside the movies that are out, it will say how high the demand for that title is. This will give you a good indication of how long it could be till you will be able to get that movie. When a disc is available for rent, there is a “Get Now” button which will automatically add the DVD to your dispatch queue ready to be sent out to you. For the new releases, it felt like a race most of the time, which the “Get Now” button only showing up on the hour, and you had to be very fast to get it. Sometimes the service would go down because of the demand, which is very poor on their part. I think they should have a better way of handling New Releases. However I was lucky to get 2 new releases on the day of their release automatically without having to use the “Get Now” feature.

You can see the status of the DVD in your dispatch queue. When the DVD has been sent out, it will say the date that the movie has been sent out to you. The service was really fast with the movie coming the next day, expect for weekends (which i understandable.) When you get the movie you are free to watch it as many times as you like and keep it for as long as you want (well for as long as you are continuing your subscription) and can send it back at your leisure. To send it back, back you just put it in the included envelope which is freepost and put it in any postbox. Simple. During the Christmas season, it did take about a week for it to return to them, although that is to do with the postal service and not Fatso. Although after the Christmas season, it only took 3 days to get there, which is much better. When you sent the movie back, you can go on the site and tell them you have shipped it back and they will then dispatch replacement DVDs, even before the ones you’ve sent have returned. The idea of this is that you’ll get movies while the other ones are still in transit so this will minimize waiting time and give you the best experience form the service.

One last thing I want to mention about the service is it’s movie recommendations. How this works is that when you rate movies on the service, it will go and find movies that people with a similar taste like and give you recommendations of movies they liked. This is sort of how the algorithm works. I found it to be very average, mainly because it kept recommending me TV shows when I just wanted movies. There was no way for me to say I was not interested in television shows so it would stop recommending me them. Maybe if I could have done that, the movie recommendations could have been better. I really needed good recommendations from movies to see, and unfortunately this service failed me there.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to continue my service and needed to cancel it. They make it very easy to do so and even help you out by extending your subscription time so you can watch and send back those movies that you still have lying around your home. 2 weeks is more than generous to give you to return these DVDs. In that amount of time, you can watch them half a dozen times and then send them back on time. They don’t delete your account when you leave them either, meaning you ratings, reviews and queue still remains for whenever you decide you want to come back, or in my case when you can afford it. Kudos to them for making the leaving of the service a great experience. It makes me feel bad for having to leave them in the first place.

Overall, I did love this service and would recommend it to anyone looking for a Netflix service, or anyone who loves renting movies. I think it’s great value for anyone that is more than a casual movies watcher. The postage both ways is fast and you will always have a movie in your hands. If I could afford it, I would have definitely continued my subscription with them. Do give Fatso a try. They have a 2 week free trial which is plenty of time to get a feel for the service and fall in love with it. After that, plans start at $10, although for the Unlimited with 3 DVD’s at a time will cost you only $32. If anyone out there wants to pay for a 1 year subscription to Fatso for me, feel free to!

Not all of us are as fortunate as I am to start the new year with a brand new computer. If your current system is anything like my old computer, which I happened to have left behind in 2008, it is probably a little messy and in need for a good clean up. What better a time to do that than at the start of this brand new year. Here are some things that I recommend you do if you haven’t done so already.

One thing that I know many people don’t do is backup their computer. Whether this is just your important documents, or all your user files or ever single thing on your hard drive, having a back up copy of your files is very important. If something was to go wrong and you lost everything, you’re probably going to wish you had a backup of your files, but were either too busy or too lazy (or both) to do that task. It could be as simple as dragging you files over to a few blank DVD’s and burning them, or copying your files to an external hard drive. Make sure you backup as soon as possible, and if you can, have a regular backup schedule for 09. Most modern OS have this functionality built in but there is also software available to make this much easier and somewhat automated.

Everyone has software installed on their computer that they don’t use anymore. This would be a good time to uninstall and delete any programs you don’t use anymore. Along with uninstalling software you don’t need, this would also be a good time to delete files on your hard drive you never use anymore. You don’t necessarily have to delete them for good. You can always burn these “junk” files to a disc for if you ever needed them again. Both of these things should make your system run a bit better and also free up some hard drive space. No doubt that in 12 month time, you’ll have more junk on your computer that needs uninstalling and deleting.

Your computer is not the only thing that get messy and frequently bombarded with more junk that gets pushed aside to deal with later. If your email inbox is anything like mine, it is hit with bacn (“emails that are subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all.”) This includes emails from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg or any email subscriptions you had subscribed to in the past. I recommend that this would be a good time to start taking action against it and whenever one of these messages come, instead of deleting it, archiving it or just ignoring it, go and unsubscribe to stop these notifications. Not only will this help stop your inbox from getting bogged up, it will also be one less thing to think about when checking your email in the morning.

These are just a few things that I think everyone should do as soon as possible. A clean computer is a better performing computer and makes you a more productive person. All of these may not apply to everyone but there must be something that I have said that does apply to you which you can do something about today!

Well it officially just ticked over to 2009 in New Zealand. I wish my regular readers a Happy New Year! Best of luck for 2009 and lets hope it brings joy to you and your friends. Hopefully this blog can survive one more year longer.

The clock just ticked over to Christmas Day in New Zealand. I wish you a happy Christmas day and hope today is great and you have a good feast and get fat. Also say hello to all your relatives from good old yum9me. Have a great day and enjoy your presents. Sorry about not getting my one, the shipping container fell into the sea and destroyed them all.

See you in a few days after I’ve finished playing with my beauty below.

…for now.

Not too long after PDC 08 (Professional Developers Conference) where they showed Windows 7 for the first time, a pre-beta build of Windows 7 leaked onto the internet. I decided to snap it up to play around with for a bit. I did use a little hack so I could get the fancy new taskbar working in this build as it is disabled and hidden away by default. I am so glad I did get this because it has made me excited for this operating system. There are many reasons why, and below are just a few of them from the 6801 build.

I’ll start off with the most apparent new feature in Windows 7, one that I had mentioned above, the redesigned taskbar. The taskbar is now a bit taller than the previous one, and it shows icons by default instead of names of the windows. It works similar to the dock in Mac OS X with your running programs/windows and quick launch all together in the same area. you are free to pin programs to the taskbar by either dragging or assigning them to the taskbar. To differentiate from a quick launch icons and open windows is a orange glass behind the icon. Multiple windows of the same program are grouped together and can be accessed by hovering or clicking over the icon which brings up a preview bar with showing all the open windows. They have also changed the behaviour of the notification area. By default, there are your 3 or 4 main items such as sound, network, windows defender and battery. When you have programs that use the notification area, by default they are hidden. You can however change the options to show there all the time. I think this is interesting as it make the taskbar less cluttered, especially for those of us with heaps of notifications taking up a reasonable percentage of out taskbars. The whole taskbar is a little weird to start off with. i was a bit worried I wouldn’t like it, but it is something you do eventually become accustomed to.

While explorer stayed pretty much the same, the significant improvement was the the sidebar. In Vista, it use to show favourite locations. While it still has that, they have added so much more, including Libraries, Homeshare, Network and Computer and everything underneath them. This makes accessing specific locations much easier in Windows 7 compared to previous versions. Libraries is a great addition to explorer. A library is a virtual folder which hold the contents of multiple folders including you user folders and network shared folders. There are all put together in a virtual folder, with the same categories we’ve been used to such as documents, music, video and such. You are free to add different locations to the library, for example folders from an external source such as USB hard drives. They have also introduced federated search into Windows 7 which allows you to search from external sources. One good example for this that I have used was a Flickr search. This allowed me to search Flickr for picture from explorer, and all tags and information were viewable from explorer, just as if they were local images. One last thing I did notice in Computer was now external flash drives and media cards show the used space bar, similar to hard drives to there. This is a small thing but I wonder why it wasn’t included in Vista.

They have done a bit with the networking in Windows 7. Seeing and selecting wireless networks is easier now. You only have to click on the notification to get the list of networks and connect to them. Also the network stuff in explorer has added a bit. First off, in the sidebar in explorer, you can launch a Remote Desktop Connection to a computer on your local network just by right clicking on the computer name. Also in 7, you now have the ability to make shared folders from other computers made available to you offline, with synchronization as well. The would be great for sharing media over a network and store it on multiple computers without having to copy every time the host machine adds to it. You can store the files offline for you to access and synchronize any changes to the folder on the machine. The last thing they’ve added in Windows 7 is Homegroup. Unfortunately I don’t have another Windows 7 machine to actually play with this feature but by the sounds of things, it is going to be an interesting part of Windows 7.

Dragging a window up to one of the edges of the screen does something very useful. If you drag a window to the top of the screen, it goes fullscreen. If you drag it to either the left or right sides, the window takes up half the screen space on that side. One way this could be utilized is in a copy and paste or dragging situation. You can have 2 windows on either side of the screen at the same time and move stuff from one window to the other. You could also put  2 programs up and use say a chat client at the same time as browsing the web and be using the maximum amount of screen real estate with no overlap between windows.

One major annoyance in Windows Vista was the User Account Control. This lead to people getting very frustrated when doing tasks such as running and installing software with the UAC cutting in with the black screen until the prompt was dealt with. This lead to people disabling it so it wouldn’t be annoying and in turn, it reduced security of the OS. They did a much better job with fixing it so you aren’t tempted to disable it. The prompt is now non intrusive and you can deal with it at your leisure so you can continue on doing your computer tasks without being disturbed by these UAC prompts. They’ve managed to change how this works to make it much more user friendly and give people no reason to want to disable this. Thank you so much for this!

After having a not to pleasant experience with Windows Vista and trying to get it to install drivers for a Intel Webcam, I decided to take it to Windows 7 to see how it handled it. In Vista, I plugged it in and spent about 3 to 5 minutes waiting for it to identify the device, search for drivers, download the drivers and then install them. It does pretty much the same thing in 7, just much faster (just over 1 minute, which for most was the downloading of the driver) and it gives a better indication of what it is actually doing, including download percentages for the driver. It is such a small thing and I am happy it works right in this version.

This is just an introduction of a small selection of some major features coming in the next version of Windows. There is still more to come in terms of features, but nothing that major. Most of the stuff is under the hood which improves performance and reliability. This became very apparent to me when testing this operating system on an older machine, one that would slug with Vista on it. Windows 7 performed pretty well on this older hardware, better than expected to be honest. I really enjoyed using it and if the public beta, release candidates and release versions of Windows 7 are as great as this, Windows 7 is going to be a phenomenal operating system when it come out next year. I can’t wait!

Screenshots of Windows 7 can be seen here. A picture is worth a thousand words so there are an extra fifteen thousand.

Windows 7 was used on an Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz CPU with integrated ATI graphics and 512mb of DDR2 RAM. Experience may differ depending on system.

On Saturday morning, my friend Josh and I were up bright and early to hit the road for our first out of town Geocaching trip. This is the first time we have been out of the Dunedin Area together to get Geocaches and we had planned this trip carefully to maximise efficiency of getting a large number of caches, 67 to be exact. There is no point travelling so far and using so much petrol to waste time piddling around. Preparation for this included printing off maps, the cache pages, making labels and uploading GPS data to the GPS receivers.

To start off, about 1/3rd of the caches we planned to getting were on the way up to Oamaru. Unfortunately for us, the first cache on the road we passed before we knew it, so were started off pretty bad, but then we managed to get seven for seven on the next map which rose our spirits again. We did considerably well on the way up there finding half of the ones on the road, missing the other half with a few did not finds but mostly we skipped the rest so we could make out way to the main destination for food and because we would maximise the number of caches we could get in in the same time period.

When we got there, we stopped for food. For some reason, all the fast food places were really full of people, there was some concert thing in a park and the main street was an absolute mess. Lucky for us, we don’t need to be there so after eating, we made our way to the first cache we plan to get in Oamaru. When we were going to our first one, there was a lady walking around there which we though would make it difficult to get to the cache. Lucky for us, her husband was down underneath getting the cache so we were lucky enough to meet a fellow Geocacher.

Next we slowly made out way to the closest caches to the previous one and made our way around. We were cutting it for time so we had to cut all the more difficult multi-caches from our maps. Still as we went around, we again only found about half of the ones we attempted. There are way more caches in Oamaru than you would expect and a lot take a bit of time to get to, and time is something we didn’t have much of. When we realised we only had about an hour left before we should start heading back, we decided to just go for the easy ones to get to and do them and then make our way back home.

Unfortunately for us, we only managed to find about 1/3rd of the ones in Oamaru. We will definitely need to come back here some time to acquire the rest. Although if there is a next time, we won’t be spending a great proportion of our time getting the ones on the road there. Partly because we have already got half of them. Our trip wasn’t as successful as we would have liked with some of the caches no where in site and mostly us running out of time to find the other caches. Our final stats for the day were 27/67 caches. Not too bad although it would have been nice to get them all. Maybe next time our trip will go as well as we planned. Still had a blast roaming around looking for the Geocaches anyway!