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

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.

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

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

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

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 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

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]

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]

[tags]Frys, San Jose[/tags]

But one of the hinges on the DS broke recently. Looks like a design flaw to me (considering the new DS Lite has a much meatier hinge). Glue would not work. I spent hours searching for replacement parts. Finally, I found a guy on eBay in Pennsylvania who sold replacement cases and would ship to Ireland. $24 plus shipping and a week or so later, I had the case. Then I discovered I needed a special screwdriver to open it. This time Lik-Sang came to the rescue and for a few Euro I got the screwdriver in the post less than a week later.

Last night we took apart the old one, moved all the bits over to the new case and were shocked to find that it worked! Fiddley as f**k but a damn sight cheaper than buying a new one.

But it got me thinking about the DS. It has two ARM CPUs and the main one has about the same welly as a Palm Tungsten T. It has two screens, one of which is touch senstitive and it has Wi-Fi. Would it not strike Nintendo to offer a web-browser as a plug-in cartridge? Or an MP3 player or a multitude of things other than games which would make use of all its features? I know it is outside of their comfort zone and they don’t want to make the mistakes that Nokia made with the N-Gage. But still, it is a PDA in all but software. I fell asleep with that thought in my mind.
Anyway, I start checking blogs this morning and what do I find? Opera are releasing a browser for the DS!! Fan-bloody-tastic. Obviously, I ‘ll be keeping that cartridge for myself and not letting Oscar anywhere near it. I can’t wait to browse the web at a wireless hot-spot in an airport using a kids toy.
And Nintendo are going to release a digital TV receiver for it too. Not so awesome for us as we are now about 8 years behind on getting digital terrestrial tv in Ireland but would be tres cool for Freeview viewers in the UK.

PSP my bum.

[tags]Nintendo DS, DS Parts, DS Karts, Opera, Wi-Fi, PSP, Lik-Sang[/tags]

It’s then a simple matter of telling Skype to use the Bluetooth as the Audio Input/Output device and you can now make Skype calls using the headset and wander (not too far!) around the house.

I purchased €10 work of Skype-Out credit and was initially using some of it for the conference calls I make to the US when I’m working from home. But I suddenly realised that I could use the US toll-free numbers to dial-in to the conference calls from Skype. So these calls are now free! The quality can be patchy at times but is no worse than that from many of the people who dial-in using their mobiles.

As an experiment, I am going to try the same with Gizmo to see if the quality is any better. It is a fully standards compliant VOIP tool but with many of the same bells and whistles as Skype. I prefer the idea of standards compliance rather than the proprietary lock-in of Skype. If I get a chance I’ll try it today and report back.

If you do get the Neon Adapter (and I do recommend it), then make sure to install the latest Blue Soleil Bluetooth stack from IVT, as the older ones which ship with the adapter don’t work well with the Nokia PC Suite.

SMALL UPDATE: I bought $10 credit on Gizmo so I could test the performance connecting to POTS. Unfortunately the planned conf call was cancelled. But I dialled into the US Conference Center number anyway. Initial impression was that the voice quality I was hearing was better than Skype. Also, I often get failures in Skype with keying the conference passwords – the DTMF must get overly-distorted. I had no issue with Gizmo. So looking good overall. Next test is to find out from others how I sound on it and to see if they do free calls to US toll-free POTS numbers like Skype.

UPDATE 2: I’m in the international departures lounge in Logan. Customer needed to talk to me ASAP and I didn’t want to use the mobile, so I chanced Gizmo. It worked like a charm. I didn’t have the headset set-up so I was talking at the tiny built-in mic on the laptop and used my normal walkman-style headphones to listen to him. I asked him how the quality was and he thought it was fine. Particularly impressive when you consider the level of background noise and the constant tannoy announcements (Some poor announcer sap actually said “Mr Goldfinger please contact the SwissAir check-in desk”! Check it out.

[tags]skype, bluetooth, nokia, gizmo, voip[/tags]

Except it didn’t.

Weeks of fiddling ensued with no success. The USB composite device would be found and the drivers would load, causing the power light to come on but the install of the USB Audio Drivers always failed with “cannot find suitable drivers for device”. Nights of googling produced nothing. These are obviously not a popular product as there are almost no links to them anywhere.

I tried everything – install, uninstall, direct connect, hub connect, scour the philips site, scour all the USB sites. But to no avail.

This evening I had one final go. The various discussions of USB speakers in general all indicated that I had to have usbaudio.sys in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers. I didn’t but I did find a copy in C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386, so I copied that over. But that was not enough because I needed an INF file to allow Windows to install the driver and there did not appear to be any file called usbaudio.inf anywhere. A bit more googling brought up a discussion of a Siemens M34A Cordless Audio thingy. Totally unrelated to my speakers but one guy mentioned the use of a file called wdma_usb.inf in C:\WINDOWS\inf. Of course I did not have that either. But I did find wdma_usbinf.bak. Why the hell is that there? Who knows. I renamed it to wdma_usb.inf, unplugged and replugged the speaker and went through the install process, obviosuly picking the “manual route” and pointed the device install wizard to the INF file, annnnnnd, it worked!

For gods sake, PCs will never become ubiquitous with their own spot in the living room as long as rubbish like this happens. When I co-founded Advanticus back in 2002, it was on the basis that we were heading into the era of digital convergence where the consumer electronics guys like Sony and Matsushita would deliver on the vision rather than the PC manufacturers. We were just a bit early.

Cisco obviously believe it too as they have just dished out $5.3 Billion for Scientific Atlanta. If only Sony and Co would get their act together, they would leave Microsoft/Dell/Intel/HP and their buddies in the dust. However due to their obsession with DRM (and look what a fine mess that just got Sony into) and controlling the consumer, maybe the winner for living room space will come from left-field and we’ll all be converged on our Cisco Home Centers in 3 years time. I’ve just realised that the Linksys purchase was probably the first step in this.

Ye know, the tech news worlds blinkered focus on Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Web2.0 may cause them to miss the huge elephant in the room. Maybe it is time to dip my toe back in the cruel world of the stock market and put more money where my mouth is.

A Few Links: GMSV, Light Reading.

[tags]philips, speakers, usb, cisco, scientific atlanta, convergence, web 2.0, sony, drm[/tags]

Early morning in Paris in 1978 at 140MPH in a Ferrari 275 GTB!

The original story, with lots of updated detail is here.

I’ll dream happy dreams tonight.

[tags]jwz, paris, ferrari, vroom[/tags]

Courtesy of my big sis Fiona:

Everything you ever needed to know about canine eyewear.

But the best bits of the trip were the site visits to various companies. Some were rubbish; Cisco sent in their Software Configuration Manager to tell us about version control. Some were a bit strange; SGI had loads of restaurants whilst in the process of nearly going bust; Excite let us have a go on their indoor slide and gave a bland presentation and then a week later sold for a couple of billion to @Home. Some were bloody interesting; Guidant showed us how a stent is made; We got a tour of Bill n Dave’s offices in HP; We had an eerie feeling as we walked around Genentech thinking all sorts of science fiction fantasies.

But the highlight for me and all the other geeks was IDEO. This is a very straightforward company in concept – they do industrial design on contract. But their approach to idea generation and innovation is utterly unique. These people simply have huge fun making some of the most interesting products you can buy.

They showed us the development cycle they went through for a few things like a portable defibrillator. They let us play in their “box of tricks” which contained tons of materials and objects that they found interesting for whatever reason (texture, behaviour, colour etc). Every aspect of the company is done in a way to encourage new ideas, lateral thinking, relaxation and most of all, fun. This is a word much abused by corporate drones who think fun is a P&L in orange and green. But these guys _get_ it. Every year they are hired by a VC company from Sand Hill Rd to build their entry for the Soap Box Derby. They are paid to do this! I realised at that point that I had done the wrong degree…….

I know this may not sound particularly awe-inspiring but that changes when you find out some of the things they have developed over the years: The first production mouse for the Apple Lisa, the Palm V, the Humulin Insulin Pen, the original Microsoft Mouse, the Psion Wavefinder and one I particularly liked: the Berkley Fishing Reel Combo. These guys are design greats.

Tom Kelley, their CEO, wrote a great book a few years ago called “The Art of Innovation : Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm“. If you want to think sideways a bit, buy this book.

Tom Peters had just flagged that Kelley has a new book called “The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization”. I think I’ll be paying a visit to Amazon.

[tags]enterprise ireland, ideo, tom peters, stanford, vc, entrepreneurship, tom kelley[/tags]

Then, as a cub and scout for eight years, I tried everything to get my Swiss Army sharp to no avail. I mainly tried using stones. Total waste of time. I did actually buy a wet-stone in my early teens but had no idea how to use it:

As I got older and into my twenties, the obsession moved to kitchen knives. I tried and failed to use a standard steel a bit like this Wusthof:

Then I got the classic Kitchen Devils “mini crossed steels” sharpener. I think this was the first one where I actually got a result. The knives were never razor sharp but they were always able to do a reasonable job.

Then I hit the motherlode with the rotating disk sharpener (also from Kitchen Devils I think). This baby finally gave me what I was looking for – bloody sharp knives (in every sense of bloody). The only down-side was that it didn’t seem to sharpen all knives and after a while it stopped sharpening altogether (later I would discover that this is due to the build up of metal on the ceramic which can be cleaned off):

So things were on the up-and-up but of course I was never satisfied. Then a few years back I was in the Ballymaloe shop and found this beauty:

I’ve been using it for three or four years now. The big advantage it has is the presence of two grades of ceramic. The rough one to create a basic edge on something very blunt and a finer one to hone a knife that has just lost sharpness. It’s always worked well but suffered the same metal build-up and it was nigh on impossible to scrub off the metal due to its shape. But there were two bigger problems – firstly it was getting more and more difficult to keep an edge on knives even for a day or two and secondly it seemed to be creating very rough pitted edges on the knives.

Recently I decided to do a bit of further reading and discovered this excellent foodie web-site:

eG Forums (The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters).

They have a fantastic guide to knife sharpening and cover all the issues involved. The ideal for them is a sharpening-stone but that requires too much skill for my liking. The best alternatives are the angled ceramic sharpeners. The rotating disk ones that I had used are like crude mini-versions of these but damage the blade too much.

One that seemed to get good recommendations was the Spyderco Sharpmaker 204. I took a browse over to New Graham Knives in the US who were also recommended. They were selling it for $46.81 including instructional DVD. How could I pass up a bargain like that? A quick check to see that they would ship to Ireland and I put in my order. They shipped the following day and I got it in less than a week. Well impressed!

I did grin when I opened the package as out fell a box of plasters with the byline “because you’ll need them”.

I did the first few knives without watching the DVD and was happy with the results but not blown away. Then I watched the DVD and saw where I was making a few mistakes. I took my favourite chef’s knife (actually a cheap all-metal one from Marks and Sparks) and ran it through the four-stage 160 stroke process. I pressed the edge of it with my thumb and goddammed cut myself! I could not believe it. I’ve only ever cut myself by running a knife along flesh.This thing is now literally razor-sharp. When done right, the resulting knife will cut paper without any pressure.

So after a long, emotional and spiritual journey of over thirty years, I have now reached nirvana and will be happily slicing soft tomatoes with my lethal weapons until my hands no longer work.

Finally, some pictures of my pride and joy:

I’ve bought a few bits n pieces on eBay and the web recently and all of the vedors were top-notch and I’d recommend them.

First off I got an FM Transmitter for my car which takes a line-out from an iPod or a USB key. It has taken a bit of fiddling to get a frequency that is not used in either Bandon or Ovens but I’m very happy with it and it only cost ?27.94 including P&P. To be found here on eBay:

USB/MP3/iPod/DvD/Cd Player & Car Stereo FM transmitter

Vendor looks like he is in UK but item shipped from USA. Got it in a week.

To go with that I got a very nice Memorex 1GB thumb-drive. A bit of an odd shape but good value at ?42.49 including P&P. To be found here on eBay:

1GB Memorex USB 2.0 Travel Drive

Vendor took a while to ship it (ordered June 23rd, shipped July 6th) but it arrived a few days after shipment. Based in Singapore.

But the prize for the most unexpected excellence in online retailing goes to Discount Watches in the UK. I had spent weeks trying to find a good online seller of both Casio Baby-G GMS and Waveceptor watches. Thought I had found the perfect one in Germany but on ordering, it turned out they had no GMS in stock, so I cancelled.

Then I found discount-watches.co.uk. I emailed them to check in advance that they shipped to Ireland and that they had the watches in stock. No reply. Bum. Decided to try that old fashioned means of communication, the phone. No reply. Double bum. Rang the next day and got through to a lovely woman from Llantwit in the Vale of Glamorgan. Nearly said “I’ll have a bacardi and coke please Myfannwy” but asked about the watches instead.

Not only were both in stock but they only charge a fiver delivery to Ireland. The real clincher tho is their prices – less than half RRP in many cases! I ordered on the phone with the semi-expectation that I was about to be diddled. Three days later the watches arrived and are perfect. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

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