itssamuel.com is the home of Samuel Cotterall, a web designer & developer from the north west of England.

Since I moved my hifi seperates, desk, and record collection all into one corner of my room I have been listening to a lot of albums. Here’s a run down…

Test-Icicles - For Screening Purposes Only
The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
Belle & Sebastian - Push Bar To Open Man Old Wounds
Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire De Melody Nelson
Air - Moon Safari
At The Drive-In - This Station Is Non Operational
The Good Life - Album Of The Year
Spoon - Gimme Fiction
Pizzicato Five - Big Hits & Jetlags 1998-2000
Domino Records - World Of Possibilities

Technorati: Music Playlists

After going out with a film studies student a few years ago I have seen my fair share of shit, low budget, pretentious, arty short films. You know the type, they are always filmed in someone’s bedroom by candle light, by someone with Parkinson’s disease, about some teenager who ultimately kills him or herself.

Well, this film, “Untitled Document” by Garry Bain, is pretty much just that, only it’s good. No, actually, it’s fantastic. It documents the anguish of a twenty-something office worker and his eventual onset of madness, appropriately synced to Radiohead’s “How To Dissappear Completely”.

According to Garry, the film had a budget of £300, which covered the cost of the guitar that gets spontaneously smashed at one point. And that, in my opinion, is worth every penny.

It’s essential viewing for anyone who has ever enjoyed “Fight Club”, or ever dug Coupland. Or infact ever worked in an office. Or liked Radiohead. Just watch it.

You can download “Untitled Document” here (WMV, 32.4Mb, 5:54 Mins)

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept of RAID (Redundent Array Of Inexpensive Disks) it is a way of running multiple computer hard disks at once to speed-up or back-up data. You know, normally you would use some SATA disks, or even those cheap 7,200rpm ones that everyone has in their computer.

But this guy has other ideas. Using a 4-way USB hub he has created a quad RAID array (3.9Gb total). The full story can be found here, with some great photos.

Ok, I know, the it’s not very fast, or large, but it’s the basis of something that could potentially revolutionise home computing. Say we had four 1Gb Compact Flash cards, each on it’s own USB 2.0 port, RAID’d to boot an operating system such as Linux or BSD, with an additional SATA disk for file storage, then things would be a heck of a lot quicker than they are from a standard hard disk.

And, I hear companies are already trying this out, we could dramaticly reduce the size of laptops (mine is a slow 5,400rpm disk, which you really feel dragging) or media centre PC’s without losing any performance.

If I had a bit of money I would give it a go.

Here is a photo I took in the week to document myself setting up an Apache web server. Sometimes things just don’t go the way you want them to.

My advice? Save on the beer and buy some hosting.

As far as wannabe web designers are concerned I have always been more reluctant to take on new technologies. For example, in 1999 when my parents bought a computer with a built in DVD player (a Pentium III 550Mhz, those were the days), I was initially really impressed with it and decided to start buying DVDs, but soon went back to VHS when just because we didn’t have a player hooked up to a decent television, and the things cost too much.

Now we have eleven in the house.

The same applied when it came to upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It cost too much money, it was buggy, and I was scared of change. Eventually, I have become used to it.

Last month I jumped in at the deepend. I bought myself my first laptop, or “Notebook” as you Americans call them, an IBM Thinkpad R50e. Then a wireless router to go with it. After I set it up I sat down and admired this nice little network I had going - pretending to myself that I was some kind of really on-the-ball kind of guy with my pro looking “notebook”, downloading all these very Web 2.0 type applications, suck as Flock, and adding SlashDot to my del.icio.us bookmarks.

The next week I went out and bought myself a Nikon D50 - abandoning all I had said about 35mm and medium format film being better than digital, and how digital is the death of photography, and how they are a waste of money. But it’s a good camera, it serves it’s purpose, and like all recent technologies, it need improvements.

But none of these advances have made life any better. Five years ago I could have networked all my computers with an ethernet router, some RJ45 plugs and some CAT5 cable. I could have watched any film on video - and I wouldn’t have had to worry about it getting scratched - and I could have put a bit of Selotape over that square and recorded over it if it was rubbish! And, thanks to Aristotle, photography has been around for thousands of years, and the camera as we know it has been around for a few hundred, and that technology did the job just fine.

So, that is where I stand on the issue; I think we should all embrace technology, but we need to be less obsessed with gadgets. As we go into 2006, a new year of digital temptation, I’d like to remind my readers that we survived perfectly fine without the ability to watch a movie on a 2.5″ screen on the way to work.