Wasted 4 hours on a stupid idea

So after seeing how much time it takes to render a scene in Daz Studio 3 64bit on my office machine DELL M6500, I started to wonder: would it be nice if I can do the rendering job on my closet server machine, while I continue doing the scene on the M6500.  So I decided to install Daz Studio 3 on the closet server.

Everything went well until it started complaining that the "OpenGL version is in 1.1 which is not sufficent for Daz Studio.  Please upate to OpenGL 1.3" (or something like that).  So I spent time to install the latest driver first from Asus, then from ATI.

At the end, I found out that on the screen directly connected the server machine, Daz Studio finally started up and running, but through the remote desktop, it still didn't work.  It seems like when I use remote desktop, the graphic driver is the remote desktop client app, so that means my original idea was actually not feasible. 

So, great, wasted a whole night on something that wasn't working in the first place.

Setting up my Android phone

Software to reinstall on my HTC Desire phone:

on SD Card:

Evernote
Angry Birds Rio
Pulse
MediaFly
App 2 SD Free
AudioGalaxy
Dropbox
SNES Emulator
GBA emulator
Androzip File manager
MyRadio
Hong Kong Newspaper (serach "Hong Kong" in Chinese)
Google Goggle
eBuddy
Glympse
Pandora
Kindle
SketchBook Express

In the phone:

Google Voice
Amazon MP3
Google Marketplace
Winamp
Amazon AppStore
SugarSync
YouTube
Due Today Lite
ColorNote
Terminal Emulator
MoreLocale 2
Twitter
iHeartRadio
Vevo

Dell Precision M6500 and Disk Director / TrueImage

I have a habit of keeping a disk image of the system I have so that if something really go south, instead of relying on the IT people which may take several days before I can get my machine back, I can restore the partition by myself.  Since I am getting a new Dell Precision M6500 machine so once again I am doing partition back up.  I realized that M6500 has problem running the Full version of Disk Director and TrueImage (both version 11 and version 10), so I have to stick with Safe mode.

The process is actually pretty simple.  First I booted up the selfboot Acronis CD, select Disk Director 10 Safe Mode, shrink the drive D until I get 200Gb of space, then I create a new E drive partition with 200Gb of space.  Then booted to True Image 10 and back up both the C and D drive to an image on the E drive.  That's about it.

Now I even have freedom to create another boot partition with whatever crazy OS I like.

Playing music from the cloud: nice in theory, crappy in reality

I was hyped up by all the talks about playing music from the cloud.  So I tried 2 different cloud music solution: Amazon Cloud Player and AudioGalaxy.

Amazon Cloud Player doesn't work for iOS devices yet, so I only tried it out on my Android phone (HTC Desire).  I got some music from Amazon, plus uploading some of my own music.  The result of playing it using our company network was pretty terrible.  So was lagging here and there.  So basically, not practical for my use.

AudioGalaxy stream data from my home machine instead of from some cloud storage.  It has both iOS client and the Andriod one.  Using both of them at home, which I assume that it streams music in my LAN instead of using the Internet, is an awesome experience.  I enjoy it so much, and both my Android phone and my iPad was able to handle them smoothly. 

Using AudioGalaxy on the road, on the other hand, is a completely different story.  I tried using the 3G connection to play music, and I found that the iOS app was stuck and not able to get to the player.  Restarting the app, though, seem to solve the problem. 

Using the office network, both the iOS version and the Android version were terrible.

So I guess as for now, using the iPad with 3G connection with AudioGalaxy is my best mobile streaming option so far.

Stupid me stupid keyboard

I was being frustrated by the apple bluetooth keyboard because my Macmini kept saying that it cannot be recognized. It turns out that the keyboard was being taken over by my iPad. The sad part is that 20 minutes of my time was wasted before I realized that.

Remote control my home machine isn't as practical as I thought

I was always wonder how amazing it would be if i could access my home machine remotely anytime I want, anywhere I want. In fact I was even thinking about paying for gotomypc so that I have that feature available to me anytime I want.

With the iPhone app LogMeIn, I can do exactly that without paying any subscription fee. So I got the app, tried it out, and found that it worked fairly ok. Still, I did not find the need to use the feature. That is, until this morning.

I was trying to start some long batch process this morning, but did not have time to do it before I left room. So I was miles away from home, wondering if I had to wait until I got home and got this long process started.

Suddenly I remembered that I had this logmein application. Perfect moment to try it, I thought.

So I tried. It worked, but the experience was not that pleasing. It was slow and sluggish. Well, still, I guess I should be thankful it at least work, and give me this option to do so something that was not even possible before.

Finally able to run Amazon Cloud Player on my Hong Kong HTC Desire Andriod phone

I was frustrated for a few days because I couldn't run Amazon Cloud Player on my HTC Desire Android phone which was brought and I was in Hong Kong last year.  When I tried to open the application, I will get the message saying:

"To purchase MP3s from Amazon, please change the language in your 'lanaguage & keyboard' setting ..." 

And then refuse to even load up EVEN when I only want to play music on the device.  I tried to follow the Amazon instruction.  But then when I went to the "Lanaguage and Keyboard" page, I found that I only have one English locale option: English (Hong Kong), and then 2 more Chinese options.  Really not good.

Fortunately, I read messages on forums and found that there is a free app called MoreLocale and it does exact what I need: add another locale in the list.  So I installed it and used it.  Sure enough Amazon player shows up afterward.  This is the moment when I found Andriod better than iOS.