Wedded bliss

Personal, Photography

So, it’s just over two weeks since our wedding civil partnership. We spent the week before mostly cooking as we were doing all the catering ourselves. Everyone seems to have liked what we did (catering for 50 is tough!) so I guess we did something right :)

We had a few hicups – a last minute champagne substitution and a marquee that was distinctly not watertight (thankfully it didn’t rain) but luckily the weather was great on the day.

We were both petrified beforehand but the ceremony went well at Southwark Registry Office and the "celibrant" was really good. Afterwards we had a pretty good party back at our house and although it was a little packed everyone enjoyed it.

So, some pictures :)

Stupid Vista DRM

Personal, Tech

I’ve been really sceptical about all the naysayers that claim that Vista’s inbuilt DRM is somehow going to destroy the fabric of the universe. Or something.

But, when I come to try and watch a DVD on my new Vista Ultimate box in Media Center or Media Player I am greeted with the informative message that:

"Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your Video card."

After quite a lot of digging it transpires that my LiteOn DVD drive (which is quite old) has RPC1 region free firmware, which is unacceptable to Vista. I have now had to take a retrograde step and enforce my DVD drive to obey regions just to get a legit DVD to play. Yes, obviously, I could use VLC or some other player but I don’t really see the point in spending money on Vista Ultimate if I can’t use all its features.

On top of this, my Casino Royale DVD subjected me to minutes of adverts and PIRACY IS WRONG messages that I couldn’t skip. I just bought the DVD, why am I getting lectured at! Why would anyone want to do things "the right way" I don’t know…

Bah.

Windows Home Server

Personal, Tech

I’m on the beta of home server, which is supposed to act as a central media storage hub that grows with you, gives remote access and stuff – perfect.

I’ve just been through the setup and despite the fact that it has a Vista-esque backdrop to start with it soon turns into the familiar server 2003 setup GUI. Then it rebooted into DOS text mode setup titled "windows 2003 small business server". Make your mind up!

Installation did take a fair while and I lost track of the number of times it restarted, but it did eventually get there.

All in all it’s pretty decent and I love the remote access stuff. It certainly needs some polishing, but the community seems good so I hope it’ll be a good product in the end.

I now need to decide whether to carry on running it – if I do, then I need to get some new cooling kit for my PC as it all sounds like a jet engine at the moment…

Living with Vista – part 3: a poor sleeper and an early riser

Personal, Tech

I’ve written before about how Vista’s new power management sucks. Since then I’ve found that getting it to go to sleep (even with the modifications to the advanced settings) is a bit flakey at the best of times. I think I’ve tracked it down to uTorrent – if it’s running (or even has been running) then Vista will refuse to go to sleep.

So, assuming that I even get it to go to sleep I’ve been finding that Vsta is waking itself up at 4am each night (and not going back to sleep even though the inactivity timeout is set to 1 hour). I’ve eventually tracked this down to Media Centre’s automatic listings update feature. Turn this off and it won’t wake itself up – not a great workaround for those that use it a lot :(