I set up Opera Unite last night. It’s very easy to set up, but you can see it’s an alpha. Here are some of the limitations I found:
No https so passwords for password protected sections are clear text
There’s no way to hide which services are running, which leaves you prone to hacking. ie. If you tell someone you’re running a chat service, they can automatically see you’re running other services also.
There’s no way to administer remotely - eg, if you want to change an access password or add a new lounge.
Names of services can be changed, but after renaming The Lounge, a “broken” version will remain in the services list.
If you close the browser, all services stop - there’s no option to leave Opera running in the background, and you can’t iconify the browser to the system tray. This means Opera always has to remain running and take up space in the taskbar
Photo browser doesn’t handle RAW files - would be good if it displayed the embedded JPEG
Can’t play music to an iphone because there’s no flash
Doesn’t work properly on the super modern IE6 (which I am forced to use at work)
On Firefox 3 (portableapps.com version), after starting to play a song you are returned to the top of the music tree
Photo folders are large icons only and filename gets truncated, which makes it difficult to navigate. There’s also no search.
Webserver doesn’t have PHP or MySQL
But, this is alpha - you expect issues. All in all, Opera Unite is very cool and very promising:
You can write your own Opera Unite services, which means you can bet your bottom dollar that other services will be coming soon, ala appstore.
You can hack customise services easily. For example, the home screen can be “customised” by renaming installdirectory/unite/home.us to have home.zip, unzipping it, editing the files, zipping, and renaming back to home.us. Cool, huh? By doing that I can hide the list of services running (#2 above)
Can run it on multiple machines - once you have your operaunite domain name (same as your my.opera.com id), each machine becomes a subdomain named as you choose. eg. party.myname.operaunite.com, work.myname.operaunite.com
You can install the same service multiple times - so you can have multiple chat rooms, or share multiple directories, or have different passwords
With minimal setup - pointing it at the right directory and adding a password, I have access to my entire photo library wherever I am. I’ve just renewed my Flickr Pro account but maybe I wont need to next year.
Now all I need is the iPhone to get Flash or someone to hack the media server so that it links to MP3s, and then I can stream music to my iPhone. I tried pointing the file sharing service at some MP3s hoping that would get the iPhone to play, but it didn’t seem to.
Some see Opera Unite as a gimmick that will drift into nothing. For me it’s already useful - I now have access to my entire photo library without uploading it to Flickr. And next time my brother can’t send me videos by Gmail because they are too large, I’ll just get him to install Opera Unite, start the file sharing service, and give me the URL.
If the services expand and Opera sets-up Unite to run even when no browser window is open, Unite could really change the web. You’ve got to try it.
Funnily, it’s not made me use Opera as a web browser though. I’m still using Chrome :)
I was playing with Stanza on the iPhone when I found Lee Child’s novel Persuader available free in the online catalog, under “Random House Free Library”.
Child is an excellent author - it you have an iPhone I highly recommend downloading Stanza (it’s free) and getting Persuader while it’s still free.
I’ve been very happy with the 26,000 yen PC I built at the end of last year except for one thing: Lightroom. It runs like a dog. A lame dog. A lame dog that hasn’t been fed for a month.
Everything else runs perfectly - even iTunes is as ok as you can expect from iTunes! - but not Lightroom. It’s just too slow and clunky.
It’s probably something to do with my 120GB+ photo library and the fact that most of my photos now are RAW, but that’s not the whole story. Lightroom was useable on my Mac with a comparable load. On my PC it isn’t.
So yesterday I decided to upgrade - I bought a Phenom II X4 920 (2.8GHz x 4) CPU and two 1TB hard drives to set up as RAID 0. With CPU and hard disk upgrade, I should get much better speed.
PassMark CPU Mark
5200+ X2 (2.7Ghz x 2): 1,280
920 X4 (2.8Ghz x 4): 3,285
i7 920 (2.67GHz x 4 x 2): 5,456
On the processor alone that’s a 2 1/2 times speed up from my current setup for 19,000 yen. Yes, the i7 would be faster, but I’d need to invest around 90,000 yen on a new motherboard, graphics card, and memory. I’d rather wait for the moment. The new processor brings the cost of my PC to 45,000 yen - 39,000 yen if I take out the cost of the old processor (I’m not including the price of the hard drives in these figures).
I did a quick test in Lightroom before and after installing the new processor, without installing the hard drives. Exporting 43 RAW files to 500 pixel JPEGs took 3m 45s with the old processor and 1m 27s with the new - which is almost exactly 2 1/2 times quicker. Nice.
Recalculating my Vista Experience Index score, I got a bit of a surprise. Not only did the processor rating go up, but graphics performance also went up! Once again, this score puzzles me. Not sure why the score for graphics should change because I thought that was all handled by the GPU. Maybe it’s related to the BIOS upgrade I did? Or maybe not everything is done by the GPU.
Processor: Old 5.2 New 5.9
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB: 5.9 (No change)
Graphics - ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics: Old 3.5 New 4.1
Gaming graphics - 3323 MB total available graphics memory: Old 3.6 New 4.0
Primary hard disk: 5.4 (No change)
Hopefully when I’ve added RAID 0 for the photo storage I’ll get even better results from the Lightroom test - Lightroom is very disk intensive. I’ll post the results in part 2.
There are some damn good free apps on the App Store. Hear a song and don’t know what it is? There’s an app which will recognize it. Bored and want a game? There are loads to download free. The AppStore is one of the most powerful features of the iPhone.
Here’s my pick - the apps that I use frequently:
Last.fm: One of the problems with an iPod is that you’re limited to the music and video you copy to it. YouTube for the iPhone breaks those limits for video; Last.fm does it for music. “Based on what you listen to, Last.fm recommends you new music” and let’s you listen to it all free. This app really is fantastic. Eg, I entered Belle and Sebastian and Last.fm played me Voxtrot (a sound so close to B&S that I’m wondering whether it’s actually the same people) and Acid House Kings. My new #1 iPhone App.
Mocha VNC Lite: Full access to your home PC from your iPhone. To get the VNC Server running under Vista, you need to run VNC server in user mode rather than server mode. You can click here for full details, but basically you need to unregister the VNC service if it’s running (there’s an option to do this in the VNC program group in the start menu, or just uncheck the box when installing) then start VNC in user mode (copy a link to your Startup folder to get this to happen automatically on reboot). You’ll need to know your IP address to connect, or use a service like DynDNS with a Windows client.
Kotoba: Free Japanese-English-Japanese dictionary. In Japan all JEJ electronic dictionaries (the ones you pay $200-400 for) are aimed at Japanese natives - if you search for an English word it will return Kanji with no indication of how to pronounce it - and are useless for foreigners. With Kotoba I no longer need to use my Korean-Japanese-Korean electronic dictionary. The only think that Kotoba is missing is Kanji recognition - ie, if I see Kanji somewhere, I can draw it or photograph it and Kotoba will tell me what it means. There are probably other dictionaries which will do that but I stopped looking when I found Kotoba for free.
NetNewsWire: RSS reader. Required free registration at Newsgator.com. My ex-#1 most used downloaded app.
ITN News: British news. Unlike other news readers, this one downloads full articles when you fire it up, so it can be used on the subway. I’ve never been impressed with ITN’s TV news coverage - which tends to be very shallow and sensationalist - but I am impressed with the quality of their iPhone offering.
Facebook: Makes updating facebook painless. Love the integration with the camera. Open facebook, click the camera button, take or choose a photo, add a comment/tag it, and then it uploads direct to your facebook.
Flixster: Trailers for the latest movies.
Bloomberg: Excellent news service.
Sol Free and CardShark: The two best free card games I’ve found. I’m currently addicted to Klondike 1 on Sol Free (I’m sure they deliberately throw in unsolvable games).
Labyrinth LE: Along with Super Monkey Ball Lite (which isn’t available on the Japan AppStore), this is a great demo of the iPhone’s tilt sensor. (I don’t play this often but I keep it on my phone to demo to people the iPhone’s capabilities.)
SnapTell: Take a photo of a book (eg, in a bookstore) and SnapTell will work out what the book is and link you to reviews on Google, Amazon. It really works. Amazing “wow” use of technology - how long before I can take a photo of someone’s face and it will tell me who they are? ;)
Some apps which I’ve downloaded but not used much yet:
Fring, Truphone, ShoZu: VOIP when connected with Wifi; integrate into Skype, Google Chat, etc. I’ll find these useful when travelling, I’m sure.
Ziibii: Blends flickr, facebook, twitter, youtube, and RSS together. This has just been recommended to me; I’ve yet to try it but I’m hoping it’s better than the other flickr apps I’m using - Klick and Darkslide - which leave a lot to be desired.
Darkroom: Uses the iPhone tilt sensor to ensure the photos you take are straight.
Shazam: SnapTell for songs. Hear a song and don’t know what it is? Play Shazam a few seconds of it and it will recognize it. I’ve yet to actually try this out.
My paid apps? I only have three, all bought when accessing the AppStore drunk - dangerous! But they were only $0.99 each (or 59p since I’m connected to the UK AppStore).
The only one worth mentioning is the Korean - English - Korean dictionary. It’s not as good as my $300 electronic dictionary but for $0.99 it does the business, especially since I don’t live in Korea anymore. Should I find myself back there, I might invest in the $3-4 dictionary which includes Korean-Korean.
It’s worth noting that for those of us living abroad, the inclusion of good electronic dictonaries saves shelling out several hundred dollars on dedicated equivalents.
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Nikon D700
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Nikon D90
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Panasonic DMC-G1
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Panasonic DMC-GH1/G1HD (check availability)
