On to the device. The Clip is small. Seriously small. Think of a small device that fits your palm, and cut it by half. It’s that small. The pictures do it no justice. It’s that small. But it is packed with plenty of features. This isn’t a full fledged review, so I’ll just cover it in general.

Design:

The current trend seems to be to immitate the controls of a certain wildly popular DAP. Immitation is surely the sincerest form of flattery.

The Clip has a 5 button setup arranged in a circular fashion, with a global modeless Home key situated to the top-right part of the setup. The circle D-pad, in typical “Sansa” style has a blue LED backlight. The backlight is bright enough for operation in the dark, but unfortunately you cannot adjust the brightness of the wheel

Above the backlight is the 2 colour (yellow and blue) 4 line OLED screen. It is bright enough to read in the dark, but like other OLED screens will become almost unreadable in direct sunlight. Screen brightness is adjustable through the Settings menu.

The Clip itself is fully made of plastic. It feels a kind of “cheap” plastic but it seems to be durable enough for slight mishandling.

One of the things that I personally did not like was the placement of the headphone jack. It is places at the top right corner of the unit which feels very uncomfortable to hold and use, and comes in the way of the volume controls if you have a L-shaped headphone plug. Ideally they should have switched the USB and the headphone jack or placed it at the bottom or the top.

Interface:

The interface is quite intuitive. I’m used to the Sony Walkman interface and felt right at home with this interface. Just some minor difference were present which anyone can learn quite quickly.

Some people might be worried that being so small may have adversely affected the user friendliness of the Clip, but set your worries aside, because unless you have really huge fingers you’ll be perfectly fine. It has the (now) standard 5 buttons plus a home button. For all those of you who really hate a certain Cupertino based company for not having modeless volume buttons, this tiny little player has it, so rest assured that you can change the volume anywhere, anytime and blindfolded.

In the Music menu you have the standard Artist/Album/Playlist view, which nowadays all DAP seem to feature. Along with this, you also have the ‘podcast’ and the ‘Audiobooks’ option in this menu. Music, podcast and Audiobooks are treated as 3 separate entities.

Music has all the standard options like shuffle and repeat. The player supports OGG and FLAC as well, along with the ubiquitous MP3. I have not really tested gapless playback, but the friendly folks at abi and Sansa Forums say it does not do gapless playback.

The podcast and Audiobooks menu have this nifty resume feature, in which you can resume playback of the audiobook/podcast you were listening to. Note, I dint say “last listening to”, but “listening to”. Yes, you can have multiple audiobooks and podcasts going on and pick up just where you left off. This is one of the features that sold me on this device(or rather sold this device to me ).

In the Radio version of Clip, there is a standard radio tuner. As much as I’d like to praise it, it falls flat on its face. The tuners is average at best as compared to my Sony player (God knows how those Sony people make radio receivers so powerful and clear, but then again that has an all metal body). The reception is good only in open areas. The Clip features radio presets, along with Radio recording. I have not tried recording from the radio yet.

It also has a voice recording feature. It isn’t all that great but works decently enough – passable. It records in WAV format.

In the Settings menu, you can find a 5-band EQ that has 5 equalizer presets and a custom 6th preset to tailor it to your liking. There’s also sleep and power timers and a host of other options.

Sound Quality:

Now, we come to the SQ of the player. It uses a SoC (System-on-a-Chip) manufactured by Austrian Microsystem AS3525 (which really doesn’t matter to us). OK, but how does it sound? I’m not an audiophile, but I do know bad playback when I hear one. But, you’ll have to chuck the bundled earphones for a better one.

Well, for a casual listener, it sounds very good. I’ve had a Sony NW-A608 before this (which was also a 2GB DAP), and this one does sound as good as that. Yes, I’m going to be bold enough to say that it sounds very good but then again SQ is subjective.

Battery Life:

Sandisk has rated the Clip for 15 hours of playback. I have not yet got that much time to test it but by the general patterns of my usage, I’d say around 12-13 hours of playback should be achievable. It maybe less compared to the current crop of players, and that is my only gripe.

Overall Thoughts:

Overall, I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants their first player, or a cheap small player. The low cost and the great sound quality makes this a great bargain and a lesson that the bigger companies (I’m looking at you, Microsoft, Apple and Sony) can surely learn.

I bought this for Rs. 2350/- which roughly translates to around $50. I’d call that a great bargain for a branded (ie. a non-Chinese) 2GB Digital Audio Player with great sound quality and a nifty set of features.

Just as promised, I’m back for more Windows Vista customization action. In this part, we will discuss in detail the steps to follow to customize your install.

Let’s take this step by step. I’m going to assume that you have VMWare and WAIK already installed, have your Vista DVD ready at hand, have your softwares on demand and have a steady internet connection for any Windows Updates and Anti-Virus updates that you need.

Step 1: Setting Up the VMWare environment with Windows Vista

Okay, now that you have VMWare installed and running lets set it up. Firstly, you are going to create 2 virtual machines. So, create 2 virtual machines with around 40GB hard disk space allocated to each (You do not need to pre-allocate them as this will save hard disk space). For simplicity lets name the first one as “Vista VMWare” and the second one as just “Vista”.

We are creating 2 virtual machines because we do not want VMWare Tools installed onto our “core” copy of Vista. Thus, we will be installing VMWare tools in the “Vista VMWare” copy and transfer all our setup files to a folder in that machine.

Now, we need our “Vista” to be able to read the drive from the “Vista VMWare”. So, in the “Vista” virtual machine, click on the “Edit Virtual Machine settings” and then click on the “Add” button. A new window will pop-up (most likely after a UAC prompt). Select “Hard Disk” and click “Next”. On this page, select “Use existing Virtual Disk” and click “Next”. In the next windows it will ask you for the path of the virtual disk to use. Select the virtual disk that you setup for the “Vista VMWare” and click “Finish”. There, now you have setup your Vista to read another hard disk.

Now, install which ever version of Vista you have/prefer on both your virtual machines as you normally do on a computer. Alternatively, you could make an image of your Vista disk and run it off the hard drive for faster install.

After you have setup Vista on both the virtual machines, install VMware tools in the “Vista VMWare” virtual machine. This will allow you to copy files to and from the virtual machine. Shut down this virtual machine and boot the “Vista” virtual machine, open “My Computer” and check if it detects two disk drives. It most probably will, and now you are good to go.

Step 2: Install all softwares required

Well, this isn’t all that a complicated a step anyways. To install your softwares, boot into your “Vista VMware” machine, and create a folder called “Installers” or “Setup” (or whatever floats your boat) on the C: drive (because as of now, you do not have any other drive). From your real computer, drag and drop whatever softwares you want to be preinstalled in your customized OS into this folder.

After that is done, shut down that virtual machine and boot into your “Vista” virtual machine. You should be able to find all the files that you wanted to install in the D: drive.

Before installing you must do an important thing, that is, use the Administrator account to install softwares and delete your account.To do this, open the Run Dialog and type in “secpol.msc” (with or without the quotes, doesn’t really matter). A familiar and annoying UAC prompt will greet you. Push it away with a Continue and then the “Local Security Policy” window opens up. Navigate your way to “Local Policies” -> “Security Options” and there you will see the first entry as “Account: Administrator account status – Disabled”. Open that and click “Enable” and then “OK”. Close the window and log off the system and be greeted with the magical super user account “Administrator”. Log-in using the Administrator account. Now go to the account settings and delete your own account that was created by the Windows Vista setup so that only the “Administrator” account remains.

Feel the power of the Administrator account as there are no UAC prompts to nag you anymore.Now that you have unlocked the Administrator account, just install everything and be happy that things are going easy and just fine. After installing all software make sure that you setup your internet connection just as you would do in real life and run Windows Update to download any security fixes and patches. Once your work is done here you can shut down this machine.

Step 3: Creating the Windows Preinstalled Environment(WinPE) disk image

Now that our Vista copy is ready we need to actually create our bootable WinPE image using which we would boot and install/capture our vista install.

We need a folder (lets call it WinPE on the d: drive, so its path is d:\WinPE) where we will copy all the WinPE files required for a bootable WinPE disk. Do not create the directory as it will automatically be created for you.

Now, open a command prompt and navigate to PETools folder in the WAIK directory. It is usually c:\Program Files\Windows AIK\.

So you would type

 cd "C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools"

Now, you would type

"copype.cmd x86 d:\WinPE\"

to copy the files to the WinPE folder we’ve just created in the d: drive. The “x86″ declares that we are going to use a 32-bit WinPE environment. The other options are ia64 and amd64 for 64-bit WinPE environments for IA-64 and AMD 64 architectures respectively.

Once this is done, we need a tool called ImageX. This is the program that is going to capture our Windows Image. It is located in the “Tools” folder of “Windows AIK”. So now just copy that into d:\WinPE\ISO\Tools. You need to create the tools folder, it will not be present.

After copying, open a blank notepad and copy-paste this into it.

[ExclusionList]
ntfs.log
hiberfil.sys
pagefile.sys
"System Volume Information"
RECYCLER
Windows\CSC
MSOCache
[CompressionExclusionList]
*.zip
*.cab
\WINDOWS\inf\*.pnf

The [ExclusionList] specifies files to be excluded from being captured, while the [CompressExclusionList] excludes files from compression, and captures them directly. It makes sense as .zip and .cab files are already compressed and do not benefit from further compression. Now save this as “wimscript.ini”.

The final step in the creation of our bootable ISO is the actual creation of a bootable ISO (yes, you read it right). Now that we have all our files ready in the d:\WinPE folder we will use the Microsoft tool called oscdimg to create an ISO. Open up the command prompt, navigate to the Tools\x86 folder and type:

oscdimg -n -bD:\WinPE\etfsboot.com C:\WinPE\ISO C:\WinPE\winpe.iso

Here, the -n switch indicates support for long file names. The -b switch indicates that we are going to make this disk bootable and the path indicates the file to write to the boot sector. The remaining two paths specify the source files and the target ISO to be written to.

Now you will find a new file called winpe.iso in your D:\WinPE folder. This is a bootable image of our Windows Preinstalled Environment. Mount this in the “Vista” machines’ virtual CD-ROM drive and if you want to now, change the boot order to CDROM-HDD-Removable Disk. I’d prefer if you do this now, because you would have to do it later anyway.

Step 4: Final checklist for your “Vista”

Boot into the “Vista” vm one last time. Now, before we are ready to capture the Vista install just run through the following checklist, with the correct answers given in the brackets.

1. * Did you enable the Administrator account? (Yes)
2. * Did you delete your own user created account? (Yes)
3. * Did you then disable the Administrator account? (No)
4. Did you install all software? (Yes)
5. Updates? (Yes)
6. * Any temporary files in the c: drive that you dont need, did you delete those? (Yes)

The points marked with an asterisk (*) are essential and should not be skipped. Once you are sure that you’ve done everything, and set it up as you like it, just for one last time open “My Computer” on your vm (yes, I know, Vista calls it “Computer”, I still prefer to keep it personal) and see if you can see 2 hard drives viz. C and D drives. After this, you are ready to use the sysprep tool.

The main idea of using the sysprep tool is to “generalize” the copy. That is to say, to allow it to be installed on hardware other than your own. This tool flushes the driver cache and clears the system identifier – these are unique for each system, so we need to ensure that they are cleared. So, now we run sysprep. To do so, open Run and type “sysprep”. It will take you to the sysprep folder in Windows. Here run the sysprep.exe and select the option “Enter Out-of-Box-Experience”, tick the “Generalize” option and select the “Shutdown” option.

Alternatively, you can also type this in the command prompt:

c:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /oobe /generalize /shutdown

You can also add the /quiet switch but I find it unnecessary. A sysprep dialog will appear and then after it is done your system will shutdown. Your system is ready for capture.

Step 5: Capturing the image

Now that you have sysprepped your install, do not boot from the hard drive. Remember the ISO we created. We are going to boot from that. Mount the iso as usual in vmware and enter the BIOS setup in your vm and set the boot order to CD drive first, then save and exit.

At the next boot, you’ll see a “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD…” so press a key. Now, WinPE will begin to load, with a XP style DOS progress bar first and then the familiar Vista style green progress bar following that. After WinPE has completed loading you will be at a command prompt. Don’t be fooled, it’s not simple DOS, but a full fledged Win32 environment with full access to network, but thats out of our scope now. You will be on an X:\ drive which is a RAM drive created. Anyway not to worry about this, just switch to e:\tools and you should find your imagex.exe there.

Remember why I told you not to install anything on the “Vista VMWare”? It’s so that we have enough hard drive space to capture our image of this OS. We all know that it is mapped to the D drive in this vm, and are going to use that as our target, since you cannot capture the image of a drive onto itself.

Now for the final step in our capture process. After you have navigated to e:\Tools\ type this:

imagex.exe /capture c: d:\os.wim "Vista"

This will capture the image of the “C” drive to the path “D” in a file called “os.wim” with a label “Vista”. This is because you can store multiple images in a single volume, and a label is an easy way for you to remember in the future which image you want to apply.

ImageX is probably going to take its own time now. It took me around 45 minutes for a 20GB image (yes, I had almost everything on it) and it got compressed to aroung 4.71GB. So you should probably go out for a walk or something like that right now. After this is done, you can shutdown this virtual machine as your customized vista install is created.

If you think that your image is bigger than you media, then you should probably either remove application (defeats the purpose), enable higher compression (I’ll show you below) or buy a Dual Layer DVD.

Well since it is easier to increase compression this is what you do. Remember when you were running the imagex tool? Now we are going to add another switch. Type this line below instead of the one above.

imagex /compress maximum /capture c: d:\os.wim "Vista"

The one with compression specified at maximum will generally take double the time, so be ready for a really long wait. It might take you a few trials before you are satisfied with your image, but it is totally worth the wait.

Well, even though you have created the image, its still not there on your real machine. So, boot up your “Vista VMWare” vm and open “My Computer”. You will find your image called os.wim on the C drive. Copy that to you real computer hard drive and then you are done.

Step 6: Applying the Image

Now that you have created the image, you need to actually apply it. Before applying you can test it out in your virtual machine. So, boot into WinPE as before.

Now, before we apply our image, we need to make a partition and make it the active partition in the system. For this we use the DiskPart tool which is already present in our WinPE copy. So just type diskpart in the WinPE command prompt and you will be in diskpart tool which you will immediately notice by the prompt changing from $p$g to DISKPART>

In DiskPart just execute the following commands.

DISKPART> select disk 0
DISKPART> create partition primary
DISKPART> active
DISKPART> select partition 1
DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick
DISKPART> assign letter=c
DISKPART> exit

What this basically does is select the first disk, and creates a primary partition in it. Then we set it to be the active partition and quick format it to NTFS. Then we assign it the drive letter C and then we exit DiskPart.

Once this is done, the system flags the C drive as bootable. Now switch your prompt to E:\Tools where the imagex is located. Assuming you still have the os.wim in the D drive, type this:

imagex.exe /apply d:\os.wim 1 c:

The “1″ specifies the volume number to be applied in case you have stored multiple images stored in the same volume. This will take around 10-20 minutes.

Once this is done, reboot the vm without pressing any key as we want to boot into Windows Vista rather than the PE. The initial setup will take some time after which you are greeted by the Out of Box Experience screens, where you have to setup your Vista. After doing all of this (which can be automated as well) we end up at the login screen. Now all you got to do is login and check if all your updates and programs are installed.

That’s it. Wow, it is a long process, but once you have your customized image you won’t waste days after formatting to set up your system.

P.S. : I suck at signing off notes.

Sounds boring? It is anything but that. The beauty in the game is that you “control” a lowly crayon(which is not all that lowly as you may think). You use the crayon to draw paths from one side to another. There is no concept of a “life”, so if your ball pops off the edge of the screen, it’ll just automatically spawn at the default position of that level.  In the later levels, you draw hinges, levers and anything that you can think of in 2D. As far as I have played, the physics are almost spot-on. The reason I say almost is because there are some ways you can trick the game into doing stuff in a umm…. non-conventional way.

The beauty of this game is in its replayability. I mean, sure you breeze past through the levels the second time almost exactly the same way you did the first time, but then that would defeat the purpose of the game. The game physics shines when you try to create an overtly complicated mechanism for a very simple objective.

It's so simple...or is it?

Once you pardon my drawing skills, you can see from the above screenshot, I’ve just created a very complicated mechanism for a trivial task. And you know what? It works. The sheer amount of creativity and ingenuity that you can put into this game is limitless. Someone else could have easily come up with a different solution to this  level. Heck, I could come up with another completely original solution if I play it after a couple of days.

The background music is very pleasing and unobtrusive. The game UI is strictly minimalist, with only 3 options when you first start (not counting the obvious ‘Exit’ option). The graphics are true to its roots-exactly how it should look like. Don’t let the above screen shot fool you into thinking it’s  flat, dull looking game. Screenshots can do only so much justice. You can mindlessly doodle away on the canvas for hours on end together.

I completed the game in around 5-6 hours. It’s not a very big game by any stretch of imagination, but hey so wasn’t Portal. Overall, this is one of those games which have the charm of being simple and minimal. The easy learning curve and the way the difficulty smoothly ramps up also adds to the experience. If you are tired of all those “big” linear games,  want to go at your pace with a game, and love puzzle games, there is no doubt that you will love this. Others, try it regardless. You never know, you might just love this hidden jewel.

And they probably have the slowest and the most bloated system ever.

Over the course of time, plenty of temporary files, settings for older softwares that you have already uninstalled, non-unregistered registry keys remain.You could spend hours in the registry manually removing all entries. Or you could format your computer and set it up afresh.

Ok, so now that you are lazy like me and have decided to format your computer. That still doesn’t solve problems. This is because, installing an Operating System hardly takes time nowadays (eg. Vista takes around 40 minutes from zero to desktop), it’s the part where you install the related softwares that takes the whole day. And don’t even get me started on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Update. Service Pack 1 takes over an hour to install on my system. With Windows Update also taking around 45 minutes to an hour to just install the updates.

Oh, and if you have installed other Microsoft Software like Office, then your wait gets even longer, because you need to wait for the Microsoft Office updates to install as well.

Not to mention the fact that you need to install audio/video codecs, your preferred internet browser, its extensions (if any), a download manager and the list just keeps growing.

Would it not be easy if you could have all this directly pre-installed along with your Windows Installation? Yes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do it without any background knowledge in scripting? A loud resounding YES.

Starting from Vista, Microsoft has ditched the traditional install method in favour of a superior imaging based install (WIM). The new method is much faster(compare an hour of install for Windows XP, roughly 1.5GB to a 30-40 minute install for Vista Ultimate weighing at 9GB).

To us end users this means easier custom installs. You no longer need specific versions of application that are made for easy integration into Windows install. I might even be bold enough to say that if you don’t want to strip anything out of the default installation, you don’t need BartPE or vLite either.

Since this is going to be a somewhat detailed explanation of the method I have used, its going to be in multiple parts. In this part, we will just cover the basics of what is to be done.

First things first. We need a few software before we start on our journey of customizing our Vista install. They are:

1. VMware / VBox / VirtualPC : We use a virtual machine software so that we do not need multiple computers. And this makes it easier when a restart is in order too. I am using a copy of VMware.
2. Windows Automated Installation Kit : It is one of the key tools that is required to create our customized image.
3. Windows Vista : This is the copy of vista that you are going to install.
4. Software : This is upto your own discretion. These softwares are going to be installed onto your virtual machine.
5. Internet Connection : This is used for to run Windows Update to make your image as latest as possible, patching any security vulnerabilities on the way. I’ll assume that you have internet as you are reading this page right now.

Make sure that you have plenty of hard drive space before you begin as you are going to create more than one virtual machine. Also, hard drive space gets gobbled up pretty fast while installing applications.

Overview:

Here is a short summary of what we are going to do in order to get our customized vista image.

1. Setup a virtual machine
2. Install Vista
3. Install all the softwares and then update it using Windows Update
4. Generalize our install
5. Capture the image of the hard disk partition where it is installed

That’s it for part 1. Stay tuned for the part 2 of the procedure where we will go through a detailed step by step overview of what is to be done.

What to say, we spent more time walking around the college than actually seeing events. The only one that we actually saw was the Robot Wars. Yes, only one decent event. We just saw the semi finals and the finals.

The main reason we had come there was to see the Microsoft Surface. Along with that, they were even demonstrating the ReacTable. The ReacTable was a pretty impressive demo with two people playing out instrumental music.

On the other hand, the Microsoft Surface was a blooper waiting to happen. Arguably just lesser than the Windows 98 BSOD before its launch. They had started the drumming software and called a person from the audience, who apparently was a good drummer. His movements were so fast that the Surface couldn’t track them essentially skipping notes like older CD players skipped songs while on bumps.

Thus, the entire purpose that we went for was defeated. Still, all was not lost. For the closure of the event, they had the laser man show.

The performance was only for a few minutes, but in retrospect, these few minutes were worth every bit of visiting the IIT festival. It is indescribable in words, pictures or even videos. You just have to be there to see it.

We also made a few new friends there waiting in the queue to get into the auditorium for the final event.

Overall, it was a pretty worthwhile experience.

This is arguably the most common sentence used by newbie programmers who make their foray into the computer programming world. Similarly, this is my first statement marking my entry into the ‘blogosphere’.

So,

“Hello World”

again