Interesting article on the BBC news website about the change to Digital Radio, or DAB.

The change over to digital TV is well under way, and Wales is now 100% digital, there’s lovely now see. Less than two years to go before analogue TV is obsolete everywhere. The advantage TV has over radio is that a TV can be used with a set top box (which are almost always under the TV, set bottom box anyone?). A radio, however, is not convertible. Once the analogue service is turned off those radios are pretty much useless. In the home there are many ways of getting ‘radio’ and many people use their digital TV but once you are out and about portable or in a car it’s different. The biggest problem is car audio, millions of cars are going to need new radios. (Might be a good time to get into the ICE business?)

I was curious to see if retailers were still selling analogue radios, so I took a look in Currys and Comet.

99% of the radio equipment was DAB in both stores, but there were a few analogue sets on sale. I think those sets should have big red stickers on them:

THIS DEVICE WILL BE OBSOLETE IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS

Meanwhile I am considering getting an Apple TV. Streaming audio off the web, all my music and video on my home entertainment system.

Way to go people, be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Digitise now.

I had an interesting job recently. A client wanted their Asus netbook upgraded with a bigger SSD. The existing SSD was 8Gb and he wanted a 64Gb installed and all the data cloned across.

The netbook runs Ubuntu Linux, the dedicated netbook variety. My normal method of drive cloning is to connect both source and target drives up to my MacBook Pro via two USB to SATA adaptors and run the Drive Utility on the Mac. Apart from the Linux disk format and the fact that these dinky SSDs did not fit any of my adaptors it looked easy. NOT!

The netbook does not have an optical drive so I was beginning to think the job was a non-starter. However:

You can boot a netbook from an external CD drive connected via USB, so I used my Freecom external CD/DVD drive.

Clonezilla is an open source live CD that boots the netbook into Linux with dedicated cloning software, once you have your head around the menu system it works well.

I had to do a double clone, the target drive to a SATA external drive on USB, as an image, then fit the new drive and restore the image. Easy!

I was very impressed with the Asus, it has all the features of a larger machine. While the client was with me I got his Skype account working with video, the Asus has a built in web cam and microphone.

If anyone has a use for a mini SSD of 8GB I know where one is up for sale.