Conor’s Bandon Blog

I’m very technical, I can figure most things out given sufficient time, but sometimes I just don’t get it. Take for example my recent purchase of a Nokia N770 Internet Tablet.

It is a fabulous piece of kit at an incredible knock-down price of €107 plus VAT and P&P. I believe it was over €400 when it was released. It’s basically a little hand-held computer with a touch screen that works over Wifi or your mobile connection (via bluetooth). I’ve totally got the hang of it and use it every day.

Except it came with this:

And I just couldn’t figure it out. I decided it was part of a stand of some sort but appeared to be missing the other parts.

So I gave up and left it at the edge of the desk. Yesterday I was on a phone call and was playing with it absent mindedly. Then this happened:

Oh for the love of god:

I blame Nokia

James rises to the challenge:

I’ve gone and got a Twitter account anyway.

What is Twitter you may ask? Well it is a web-site where you say what you are doing right now. You can do it via web, SMS or IM. Cos we all have such interesting lives and all our friends need to know exactly what we are doing at every moment in time. “finger up right nostril” “finger up left nostril” “bogey rolling” “bogey flicking”. Still it’s probably more interesting than the next Marian Keyes pot-boiler.

The reason I signed up was not cos of the original purpose of it but more for the interesting things that geeks are doing with it. Tom Morris scrapes Tube delay notices and twitters them so you can subscribe and get those updates via the same methods you use to send twitters. Kinda like the the District Line saying “right now, I’m bunched” “right now, some leaves are annoying me”. Neat.

It’s also far easier to twitter from your phone than it is to blog. So I will try to do a bit the next time I’m travelling: “I’m driving down the M8″ “I’m swerving into oncoming traffic” “I’m flying through the air”.

Looks like I’m one of the cool kids now. Check out what I’m doing in the sidebar of the blog. Next thing you know I’ll be getting a Second Life account. Nah.

I bought a nice Casio Waveceptor watch about 18 months ago from a great discount online store in Wales called The Time Zone. It’s a combined analogue/digital job and syncs the time using those big transmitters scattered around Europe.

The watch worked fine for a few months and then the analogue bit started losing hours and hours. I returned it to Casio UK who replaced the battery and sent it back. In no time at all the problem returned. I sent it back again and they replaced much of the innards. All was well for another few months and then it started losing time again!

I sent it back last week with a statement that I wanted a replacement watch since it was either flawed by design or by manufacture. It was returned this morning with a note saying they could find nothing wrong. Here we are 2 hours later and it has already lost an hour!!

Maybe as part of their “extensive testing” they should put it on someone’s wrist for half an hour.

What the hell do I have to do to get this bloody watch fixed? And yes, it is still under warranty.

It’s probably cost me as much again in postage every time I return it. For the moment, all I can say is avoid Casio Waveceptor watches like the plague. Catherine got a cheap digital Casio at the same time as me and apart from a battery change has worked perfectly since.

Technorati Tags: watch, casio, waveceptor, casio+uk, customer+service, design+flaw, customer+rights, warranty

At this stage a huge number of people have camera phones and actually use the camera to take those impromptu pictures. I remember asking why anyone would want a camera phone three years ago. What the hell would you take pictures of? Well, it turns out I had no imagination and I now take pictures of everything and anything.

Now most people take the picture and either send it by MMS to friends n family or just show it on the phone to people later. But there is a lot more you can do with them and most of those things are free. The main thing you need to do is to get the pictures off the phone and onto a PC or a web-site. Whilst the network operators here still think it makes sense to gouge us on mobile data charges, the option of sending directly to the web doesn’t really make sense here.

But if you are loaded, then you can do things like:

• Install Shozu on your phone and send all your pictures to the photo sharing site Flickr
• O2 customers can sign up for foneblog.ie and send pictures to that site
• If you have a WordPress blog, install Postie and send pictures from your phone via email to your blog

If you aren’t so flush, then there are a lot of fun free things you can do. First tho, you need either a data cable for your phone or a bluetooth adapter for your PC (if your phone has bluetooth). I recommend the cable as bluetooth is the most unreliable slow piece of rubbish ever to leave Scandinavia since the Volvo 480. For most modern Nokias that is the DKU-5 or CA-53 cable. If your phone didn’t come with one, they are on ebay.ie for €4 incl P&P. You’ll pay a fortune for one in a mobile phone shop so don’t bother.

Then you need the Nokia PC Suite software. Another unreliable Scandinavian but has lots of nice things like phone backup which you should really use in case your phone is nicked. This is free and there is a link to it on Nokia.ie

I also really like the Nokia Lifeblog software. This grabs all the pictures, videos and text messages from your phone and shows them to you as a timeline. Looks really cool. In theory you can then publish what you want to your blog but for some nutso reason, it only supports Movable Type blogs and not Blogger or WordPress. I just use it as an easy way of grabbing all the piccies off the phone and uploading the ones I want onto Flickr.

So you’ve got the cable and software installed and managed to download your pictures to your PC. Now what? Well you can put them up on a photo-sharing site like Flickr or Zooomr or Photobucket to spread the love. You can set the privacy on pictures on most of these sites so only those you invite can see them. I use Flickr and the free account is pretty good. I pay a few bob for a Pro account which allows me to upload as much as I like. There you can discover simple but powerful ideas like tagging where you add some labels to your photos like “cork” or “hurling” and then click on “hurling” to find all the other pictures on the site with the same label.

You’ve got your Flickr account and you’ve uploaded some pictures and you’re sharing them with your friends but you think “damn, I wish I could cut the edge of that picture and remove the red-eye on that other one”. The solution comes winging its way to you from Ballincollig in Cork in the shape of PXN8 from Sxoop Technologies. This brilliant piece of software allows you to edit pictures on your PC or your Flickr account inside a web-browser! You really have to check it out. It’s one of those “why the hell didn’t I think of that?” sites. No need for special photo editing software on your PC. You could edit the pictures in an internet cafe in Vietnam if you want. And it is easy to use too, check it out. And I’m not just saying that cos I know Walter, this is an awesome bit of software. It’ll soon let you add text to the pictures too so you can do wee postcards or posters for people.

And all this from taking a piccie on your camera phone whilst out having a walk. Isn’t that internet just the bees knees?

Technorati Tags: PXN8, Sxoop, Flickr, Nokia, PC+Suite, Lifeblog, Zooomr, Photobucket, Shozu, Postie, Foneblog

I see Apple have announced a new product allows consumers to manage and playback their digital-media files on their televisions.

They’ve called it the iTV. Sadly for UK purchasers, this means that it’ll only be capable of playing Corrie, Heartbeat, Celebrity Love Island and repeats of Crossroads.

tags: iTV, iProduct

So I bitched about Voda (twice) and the fact that I couldn’t upgrade the software on my N70 mobile. Then Ciarán, an old workmate, pointed out that I could get the phone unlocked by just calling customer service.

It turns out that they have to ask Nokia for the unlock codes for the N-series, five days later they texted me the code and now the phone can work with any SIM card (like Roam4Free for example). I never knew they would do this so good on them. I’m still on a long contract with them so I guess they don’t really care.

I then re-tried the software upgrade of the phone (as previously described) and the beauty worked! I have no idea if it is related to the unlocking or it is just a coincidence but I now have the latest (bar one) version of the N70 software and I’m a happy bunny.

The main obvious change is that it just seems faster, particularly the SMS menus. Hopefully they have also fixed the idiotic bug where if you paused an MP3 that you were listening to and then someone called you, it would play the paused tune at full volume for the world to hear rather than the ringtone.

If you have an N70, go get the upgrade. If it doesn’t want to upgrade you, call Voda and get the phone unlocked.

tags: Vodafone, Vodafone+Ireland, N70, Nokia, Roam4Free

I was all excited for 20 minutes today. Nokia have released a free tool to enable you to upgrade your own phone firmware.

I grabbed the one for the N70, backed up the phone, installed the software and waited for it to analyse my phone. Result? I have the latest available Vodafone branded firmware so no upgrade is possible.

The Voda numbnuts haven’t released an upgrade since last September! Meanwhile I have a good phone which would be far far better with the improved firmware. And they all wonder why they have no customer loyalty. 

Anyone know the name of a good dodgy phone unlocker in Munster?

tags: Nokia, Vodafone, Vodafone+Ireland, Firmware, N70

This gave me goosebumps:

Microdrives

You have no idea, none, how much I wanted a microdrive as a teenage geek. I would have happily chopped off my little finger yakuza-style to get one. And this guy, the luckiest man alive, has 8 of them!

And what is it about rose tinted spectacles that I would be happier now to be given a ZX Spectrum +2 with a Kempston joystick than a fully loaded Dell XPS?

I automatically deride anything that Nicholas Negroponte is involved in as snake-oil (Media Lab Dublin, I laughed when they announced it, I laughed when they closed it). But the $100 laptop has the potential to create a whole new generation of programmers from places you would never have dreamed, just like the Spectrum, BBC Micro and C-64 did for us as kids. Let’s hope he doesn’t screw it up.

I think maybe we’ve all forgotten the impact those machines, and “The Computer Programme” on the BBC had on a multitude of British and Irish kids. I shudder to think what I would be working at now if my parents hadn’t had the foresight to get me a Spectrum when I badgered them incessantly for it. And I know I’ve blogged this before, but it is still the funniest thing on the whole damned internet.

[tags]ZX Spectrum, microdrive, Geoff Wearmouth, comp.sys.sinclair, The Computer Programme, OLPC, Hey Hey 16K[/tags]

I’ve had the N70 since April and I’m still in two minds about it. My biggest beef is less with Nokia and more with Vodafone.

When I got the phone, I checked the firmware and it was at v2.x whilst a check on the web said that the latest was v5.x. I went into Choice Communications in Cork city and asked for an upgrade. It came back with exactly the same version. I badgered the Choice guy but his argument was that the “system” decides the correct upgrade and that’s what it picked. This is despite the fact that the worksheet had v5.x listed as the newest one. In fact what I figured out later was that v2.x appears to be the latest Vodafone specific firmware.

This is ridiculous. The current firmware is riddled with bugs and the whole phone is very sluggish. Try pausing an MP3, switching over to the phonebook and receive an SMS – instead of beeping, the bloody thing restarts the MP3 on speakerphone. Great fun in an office!

Does anyone in Ireland have an N70 with v5.x firmware and if so, how did you get it? Is there anyone who will flash one with generic firmware for a few bob? Is there any indication that Voda will ever release a branded v5.x firmware?

Apart from that, I like the size and shape of the phone, the speakerphone is excellent, bluetooth headsets work well (but don’t auto-connect for some reason) and I kinda like the Lifeblog idea as a visual history of my phone usage. I don’t publish that stuff to a real blog (it only supports Typepad anyway) but it is nice to have on the PC. Third party apps that I like include Shozu for auto-upload to Flickr (rarely used due to the idiotic Voda data charges), Airset (calendar sync), Opera (web browser), OggPlay (music player), Frozen bubble (game), M-SuDoKu (go on, guess), Python (what geek could resist?), FExplorer (file utility). Third party apps I don’t like include PicoBlogger (doesn’t bloody work at all).

Other gripes with the phone itself are the music player (utter rubbish), number of key presses to send an SMS and the low quality of the camera (for which I had high hopes).

Speaking of music players, can someone please create one targetted at podcast listening? What I need is something that allows me to fast forward quickly and allows me to bookmark within a track. I am sick to death of stopping a podcast 40 minutes in, returning to it later and then spending 5 minutes with my finger on fast forward trying to get back to that point. Maybe even the ability to manually enter a position in a track would be an improvement. I thought Oggplay would solve a lot of my issues but it gets completely confused with my tracklists at the moment so I rarely use it.

Luckily, so far I haven’t had the hot-leg effect that Bernie gets with his.

And finally, to repeat an oft-stated annoyance – would O2 and Voda please get a clue and provide flat-rate data plans like they do in many other countries? Can their number crunchers not do simple sums? 10000 users X crazy price per KB is a much smaller revenue number than 500000 users X €10 fixed extra charge per month.

[tags]Nokia, N70, Oggplay, Vodafone, flat-rate[/tags]