I’ve just realised I’ve developed a new obsession.  It crept up like a sneaky stealth like burgler without me noticing and has started to take over my life.  It’s not eating pies – although I have had a fair few recently, I would have noticed the considerable weight gain.  It’s not buying new gadgets either – although it is closely related.  My obsession is connectivity.  Getting all my gadgets connected over my home network.  Why is this important?  That’s a very good question!

Looking back, I think it started when I bought my Philips stremium WAC7000 back in 2006.  I first of all bought the main centre station for the front room and a sub station forthe dining room  then later went on to buy another sub station for the main bedroom.  I toyed with the idea of one for the bathroom, but thought I was taking things to far.
I loved the fact I could store all of my music in one place and stream it to other rooms with no wires attached.  At the time it felt like pure magic and although in reality I was only human and could therefore only be in one place at once – it didn’t matter.  I would broadcast the music to all three sources and sit back smugly thinking how good that was.  Obviously I would be having several house parties any time soon and therefore this would be worth every penny.  It’s now 2011… still no house parties.

A few years may have gone by, but in that time I have had a few laptops and smartphones – all of which I have been battling to connect togther and with my streamium to see if I can share their lovely resources.  Varying success has been achieved.  I’ve certainly had my laptop playing tunes off my streamium and visa-versa and I’ve had the wii connecting to my laptop playing video and music.

But recently, in the last few weeks – the simmering need to connect my gadgets has gone into overdrive.  Why?
Because I’ve purchased two new gadgets.  A Seagate GoFlex Home 2TB hard-drive and a 2nd gen Apple TV.

These two items have brought together the following items.
Front room TV, Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, Streamium, wii and laptop.  Fully connected – I’m loving it!
Not only that, but the connection has manifested itself out of the house.  I can now log-in to my GoFlex from anywhere with an internet connection and access my media!  Bang!  That’s connected!

Being able to connect my streamium to my networked attached storage (NAS) has increased the 30GB capacity to 2TB!  I spent weeks stripping down a streamium so that I could install a new hard-drive.  It worked… but it wasn’t easy!

It’s also vastly increased the media that I have access to from my iPad and iPhone – Lovely!  Glad I only brought a 16GB iPhone and 32Gb iPad now.

Finally it has meant I can store mp4 videos on my NAS and stream these to my Apple TV for playing on the main TV in the house.

The only drawback is with the last peice of the connectivity jigsaw.

I have to have my laptop on for Apple TV to recognise the iTunes server on the NAS drive.  Damn!  This has meant the solution I have in my house is tainted.  Why should I boot up my laptop to play something on my hard-drive on my TV.

Well the answer is, I don’t have to put up with this.

I can jailbreak my Apple TV, install xbmc and use this to stream movies and video from my NAS.  Perfect!
Only, I don’t have a MAC running iOS and therefore have to wait for Firecore to release a windows version of Seas0nPass so I can do the necessary.

According to the Firecore blog this will only be a couple of weeks.

Or, I could buy a MAC.  After all.  That’s something else I can connect up!

Inside Microsoft HQ:

Mich Matthews (VP of marketing) – Ok guys, we have a pretty impressive smartphone that we’ve worked pretty damn hard on and I reckon we should let people know it exists. What-da-ya-reckon?

Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) – Good catch Mich, that’s why I pay you $280k+ let’s get our best guys on this baby right away. We need our ducks in a row on this one, we need an xbox success, no repeat of vista… Ok!

Mich – Well, let’s fly some kites, get some serious blue sky going on in here. What made the xbox such a success and vista such a… Um… a…. Well not such a success?

Steve – We never make bad products, it must have been the marketing budgets. How much did we spend marketing xbox?

Mich – $100m

Steve – and vista?

Mich – $500m

Steve – Ah. Vista must have been bad. I hope windows phone 7’s better.

————-

Although Microsoft are reported to be spending $400m on the launch of windows phone 7, this doesn’t ensure it’s success. However, it does show you Microsoft are serious about its new smartphone and by spending serious marketing budget it’s guaranteed every man and his dog are going to hear about this one.

It’s also interesting how close the budgets are between the vista launch and that of windows phone 7. Although when you consider the desktop market is in such decline and the smartphone market is enjoying such growth, it does make sense. Smartphone sales are expected to outstrip those of the desktop by next year, so for me Microsoft have set their budget about right.

The right amount of spend is so important, let’s take the $100m budget of Verizon and Motorola on the original Droid smartphone compared to the non-existent marketing budget for Google’s Nexus One. The Nexus One was a better handset with better software, but was outsold by the Droid – marketing made the Droid a success, simple.

It shows you can have a slightly inferior product, but through marketing tell people repeatedly that it’s good and they will believe you! Apple have been doing it for years… It works! Of course I jest a little, Apples products are damn good, but in all honesty are they the best out there? Or are we blinded slightly by the Apple razzmatazz of it’s marketing campaigns?

Windows phone 7 now has every chance of success. The marketing $’s behind this device plus the fact it isn’t going to be a poor (vista) product is why this could really shake up the smartphone market. This smartphone will support Office, Windows Live services and have the Zune music store. This smartphone will have an innovative UI not a clunky Windows Mobile platform UI. We’re sure to see a Microsoft app store, multitasking and notifications. We’re also going to experience Microsoft making the most of the Xbox Live brand within the handheld for gaming.
The final aspect will be the community. Developers have jumped at the chance to unleash their talents on both the iPhone and Android platforms. If they do the same with vigour for the Windows phone 7, there may be no stopping this new kid on the smartphone block taking the lead.

Microsoft have been quiet recently and has almost slipped into the underdog style status when compared to Apple and Google. Something a decade ago we would never have imagined. We also would never have imagined feeling slightly sorry for Microsoft, but I think there is a new public perception towards them, after all, we love the underdog.

I’m predicting the Windows Phone 7 will be a huge success and with the troubles Apple have had with the iPhone 4, it’s going to make for a very interesting battle!
Most of all though, I’m looking forward to Microsofts marketing campaign for the new phone, I hope they really do fly those kites and make it one to remember!

Barcodes. How long have they been around? Well since 1952 actually – invented by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, but they weren’t commercially used until 1966 and there were no standards in place until 1970. The Universal Product Code (UPC) which we still use today was introduced in 1973, the following year a barcode scanner was introduced and the first product to display the lines we are used to now was a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum!

But in this day and age where efficiency and speed mean everything in business (time is money!) it’s amazing to think that probably the world’s best time saving process was created so long ago.

Only recently with QRCodes have we seen a new advancement in the area. QRCodes being a 2D image that can contain a whole lot more data than a string of numbers.

Recently though, I’ve been playing with barcode readers on my iPhone. The most popular is RedLaser – but one often over looked is /index.asp”>Quickmark. This excellent iPhone (or Android) app can read EAN 8/13, UPC-E, UPC-A, Code 39 and Code 128 1D barcodes as well as the 2D QRCode format.

Now the advantage of being able to read code 39, which at time of going to press RedLaser cannot, is the fact you can specify alpha’s as well as numeric in your barcodes.

Now there are thousands of companies than produce their own SKU’s which contain both alpha and numeric characters so will have this information on their website or in their printed catalogues – but these same companies probably will not have the UPC reference for each and every product. Especially if the company is a supplier of multiple brands, i.e Argos.

Another useful function in Quickmark is to allow the app to redirect the user to a URL with the appended barcode reference once scanned. This therefore provides the opportunity for companies to enable users to scan their SKU and be sent automatically into their website to display the product.

There are also numerous websites where you can generate code 39 barcodes very easily. There are also font sites where you can download the code 39 font.
One such site that offers loads of useful tools for code 39 scanning is http://idautomation.com

If you are wanting to generate your own code 39 barcodes dynamically, you can easily do this using PHP.
It is important you have the GD library installed and can help if you also have FreeType, both of which require installation on your apache server which in many cases can only be done by your provider.

If you do have these installed then by using the scripts at…
http://www.barcodephp.com/1d/overview.php
You can very easily get started on generating your own barcodes on the fly.

I’ve had a blast at this and found it quite simple. One tip would be if you are trying to place your barcodes in a certain way on your webpage then the best script to use is the image.php script that comes in the download. This requires certain variables sending to the page – but apart from that is straightforward to use.
Many of the other demo scripts use header(”Content-type: image/jpeg”); which sets the contents of the page to an image. Once this is done it’s difficult to format your page as you want.