breathalize

I have to admit the one thing that I have been missing since I got my iPad in June was a decent stylus – I have tried a couple of the cheap ones but found the basic disc of capacitive foam on a stick wholly underwhelming.

I was therefore intrigued when I saw mention of a new stylus called the Touch-Pen for iPad – the main difference here was the tip was more like a semi-sphere than a disc meaning it would have a better chance of contact which ever angle I chose to write with.

Having used one now for a few days, it is a great addition to iPad – the tip design as I had hoped provides a very fluid contact with the screen allowing a natural style of writing.

It is essentially a multifunction pen with a light, laser pointer and pen and a stylus attachment – the attachment is just pushed on when needed, which to be honest means it is easy to lose. It would have been nice to have seen a threaded fitting to secure it.

That aside I have been able to use it to doodle diagrams etc. effectively and my four year old is able to use it to practice writing letters and numbers in his various apps. It also has the added benefit of reducing the inevitable smearing from using a finger. So happily it does exactly what I bought it for – I would recommend it if you are looking out for a decent stylus.

There are several demo videos here – http://touchpen.us.com/pages/demonstrations

UPDATE: It looks like this has changed – both the 460G1 and the 685G1 is now back on both the HP support list for ESX 4.1!

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/servers/4x-servers.html

I have to admit I do not always check the VMware HCL when moving from version to version of ESX. Normally I would check when there was a major release from say ESX3 to ESX4 as it would be a natural point to retire old hardware.

As part of our move to ESXi I was refreshing one of the environments and suffered some issues while trying to PXE build a blade. After trying various fixes and reading up on suggestions I came across a post stating that the BL685G1 (the blade I was trying to rebuild with ESXi 4.1) was no longer supported as of the release of 4.1.

I was somewhat surprised to read this, so off to the HCL I went and sure enough it would appear that HP have taken 4.1 as the opportunity to ditch the BL685 G1 from support.

So painfully in mid-version ESX4 it looks like we have to source new kit to keep up with VMware releases – which is a shame as other HP and Dell models with the same AMD Opteron 82xx processors seem to remain on the HCL for 4.1 .. and the blade seems to run 4.1 absolutely fine.

With money very tight today

And every budget squeezed

How do keep your VMs in shape

And report on them with ease?

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Well luckily for admins all

though desperate it may seem

A free reporting tool is out

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A windows server is all you need

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You will need to run IIS

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If you don’t have a SQL box

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The reports get even better

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Once it’s up and running

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On your return the screen should show

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Now while there are restrictions

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You can check out Veeam Reporter Free edition by downloading it here.

This post is part of Veeam’s Blogger Contest to get the word out about Veeam Free Reporter 4. I have used the product for about a week now and it is really useful for all kinds of reports on your VM environment. Fellow bloggers have more conventional posts on their impressions of the product so check them out as well. All proceeds of the competition go to charity.