Bright, hot and sunny in Lymington this morning. Bought the wife a dress...
Monday, June 28, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Photos of Winchester
It's hot and sunny in Winchester and I'm playing with my new phone. Fun, fun, fun!
Friday, June 25, 2010
Acquiring an iPhone 4 - how not to do it
I had a plan, and the plan was sound; get up early on iphone release day, arrive at the O2 store by 8am, buy an iPhone 4. Execution was rubbish, unfortunately, as I just couldn't get up early enough to avoid the traffic and the net result is that I'm still using my 2 year old iPhone 3G. So what now? The O2 website has a list of stores holding stock (http://stock.o2.co.uk) that updates several times a day. The mix of stores with stock changes at each update so they are obviously receiving a trickle of deliveries; the name of the game is to check the site and head to the closest stockist as soon as possible. That's what I'll be doing tomorrow, 'cos they've got the 16Gb version in Winchester. Tally ho!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Impressions of Dublin Airport
It's depressingly similar to Gatwick; the layout is a bit better, the food is a bit worse, but overall very alike. Starbucks sell their standard fare, but the chocolate muffins (the only food I tried) were a bit small and grim. Hopefully I'll be able to find a decent lunch, or perhaps dinner.
So I'm sitting in Starbucks in Dublin Airport...
...and the strange thing is that, without a data connection on either of my Wifi or 3G devices, I feel completely cut off from the outside world, even though, of course, I'm surrounded by people, many of whom speak English. It's a weird feeling, but without access to email or the ability to browse the web (is Tallinn airport really the only one that has free wifi?) everything seems strangely distant, even though home is only a couple of hours away. I'll get over it, but I can't help but hope that the office to which I'm going will have a wifi hotspot from which I can feed my addiction to data.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Apple's Bookstore - Any Good?
iBooks is a great app. Slandered by many, written off as inferior to Amazon's Kindle, it actually turns out to be a really good app for consuming text. Not only that, the recent upgrade to allow PDF reading opens up whole new classes of documents for iPad consumption - technical documents (many companies publish specifications or design notes in PDF), sales brochures, self-published books, work manuals, magazines, newsletters; the list is endless. The bookstore is not so good, but it does at least appear to be improving quickly. When I first picked up my iPad there were very few titles available (no Tolkien, for example, and almost none of the current authors I like to read) but this is being rectified (Tolkien is now well, if not comprehensively, represented) and I'm almost ready to make my first purchase. On that note, it's interesting that lots of titles are priced at or above their Amazon price. It might be that publishers are simply hiking eBook prices to hit the early adopters as hard as possible but I wonder also if this indicates extremely low distribution costs for physical books (if a paperback that retails at £7.99 costs only £1.50, say, to print and ship, there's not much room to lower costs for the eBook version). In fact, is an eBook actually a book at all? Sounds like a daft question, but in the UK books are exempt from VAT, software and online services are not, so it's actually a very important question. If eBooks aren't defined as books by HMRC (who are, I think, responsible for collecting VAT) then they're subject to a sales tax of 17.5% tax that doesn't affect their physical counterparts and might, therefore, explain some of the price difference. So, are there any bargains on Apple's bookstore? Well, sort of. Peter V. Brett's The Painted Man, for example, is available for £3.99, matching Amazon's paperback price (excluding shipping, of course). Bram Stoker's Dracula is free (and if you've never read it please check it out - it's an excellent example of slow-burning tension and horror) or, if you prefer to pay for your out-of-copyright literature, £4.99 or £5.49. Most books appear not to be price competitive with their physical counterparts so you're paying for convenience; personal circumstances will determine the value of convenience. Conclusion? It's a good start. The bookstore is reasonably well stocked (much better, it has to be said, than Amazon's UK Kindle store, which is non-existent - you have to buy your Kindle books from the US in dollars) with over 26,000 titles, the prices are high but convenience is considerable and delivery immediate. As new books are added and older texts fall in price, it will become, I suspect, a serious force, especially in the UK while Amazon refuse to play.
iOS 4 applications - looking good
And so, having been able to upgrade the first of my apps to the new iOS 4 version (I chose Evernote) I can confirm that it works perfectly. I therefore attribute the earlier lack of functioning apps to incompatibility with the new operating system. How long till all have been upgraded? It might be worth checking that your must-use apps have been released in a compatible version before upgrading your OS...
First impressions of iOS 4
The first thing you notice is that the upgrade process for iOS 4 (on my 16Gb iPhone 3G) can take a while. After about nine hours, and having interrupted installation of the apps in order to go to work, it is noticeable that I don't have any settings, contacts, music, videos, favourites, photos, texts or, possibly because of the interruption, working apps. What I do have is a working phone running iOS 4 that is currently syncing contacts from Exchange and which I can use, so not too bad. Any improvements? Folders work really nicely although it is quite easy to drop apps in the wrong place creating strange groupings of apps (reorganising your phone on a moving train might have something to do with this). The combined email inbox is good and now sports "To" and "Cc" icons to indicate direct and copied email. The phone feels no slower and, occasionally, faster than it did running 3.1.3. Text replace work just as well as it does on the iPad. The next step is to run a full sync and recover my missing media, but that will have to wait till this evening, after which more feedback. Update: there are loads of application updates waiting to be downloaded as soon as a decent 3G signal pops up. They all list "iOS 4 compatibility" or something similar, the lack of which in my current apps probably explains their failure to launch.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Nokia - no longer even trying?
Boing Boing have a brief piece (Nokia Anounces Treo-Killer: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/16/nokia-announces-treo.html) about one of Nokia's new phones. No idea what features it has, but it looks terrible and seems to represent an admission that everything but the basic candy-bar phone market has been ceded to Apple.
Don't Check out The Sun for iPad
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Jesus takes one for the team
A giant statue of Jesus outside a church in Ohio has been struck by lightning and burned to the ground (see BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/us_and_canada/10321466.). Two things:
1) Who builds a sixty foot statue of their deity from flammable materials (wood, fibreglass and polystyrene) without, it appears, a lightning rod (although, if I'm honest, I'm not sure anything could have saved this thing once it had been struck)?
2) Go Jesus! Turning yourself into a giant torch as you take one for the team and save neighbouring hospitals and schools is a noble act, worthy of any self-respecting mythical zombie-god (unlike the raising of the statue in the first place, which was a particularly awful crime against art and good taste).
1) Who builds a sixty foot statue of their deity from flammable materials (wood, fibreglass and polystyrene) without, it appears, a lightning rod (although, if I'm honest, I'm not sure anything could have saved this thing once it had been struck)?
2) Go Jesus! Turning yourself into a giant torch as you take one for the team and save neighbouring hospitals and schools is a noble act, worthy of any self-respecting mythical zombie-god (unlike the raising of the statue in the first place, which was a particularly awful crime against art and good taste).
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Film Review; 100 Million BC
I'm home alone watching, for my sins, a film called 100 Million BC. The kindest thing that can be said about this travesty of a film is that it isn't the worst movie ever made but bad acting, poor characterisation, awful special effects and a dreadful plot make it a strong contender. Miss it if you get the chance.
iPhone feature request: fine-grained notifications
Basically I'd like to be able to leave my phone by my bed at night which means, if I'm to avoid death by wife, that it must make no noise at all, not even a gentle vibration. Flashing lights are out too, so really I want it to lie as if dead until morning. Why not just turn off vibrations completely? Because during the day I want my phone to buzz in silent. So there it is; between 11pm and 7am no buzzing if in silent, with a toggle switch, and possibly other controls and stuff. I haven't, if I'm completely honest, thought this out in any detail.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Augmented reality still in its infancy | Macworld
Here is a brief article about a company making augmented reality software for mobile phones (http://www.macworld.com/article/151977/2010/06/augmentedreality.html). I keep forgetting about AR because my phone doesn't have the necessary hardware but I can't help thinking that it's a really neat feature and I'm really looking forward to trying it out on an iPhone 4.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Moving to Sky Broadband; No Problems!
Last month, after prevaricating for almost a year, I finally got round to dumping our phone and broadband suppliers in favour of Sky's combined package (TV, broadband and telephone). I was a little nervous about making the change because I'd been with BT and Force9 for a long time (and Sky, but only for TV services), their services worked and I was haunted by the horror stories of telephone disconnection and broadband service interruption that used to circulate a few years ago whenever anyone tried to change supplier. As it turned out everything went extremely smoothly. Sky's website is now rather good (I used to find it frustratingly difficult to navigate but things seem to have improved dramatically over the last couple of years) and the sign-up process went like a dream. Appropriate letters arrived a couple of days later, followed quickly by a wireless router. A week later I switched out the old router for the new and it just worked; no service interruptions, no phone number changes, no problems. It was an ideal switching process and my only regret is that I left it so long. Conclusion; if you're considering a change of supplier, just get on with it. If my experience is anything to go by, you won't regret it. Oh, and thanks to Mr B for suggesting the change; great tip!
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
iPhone 4; Killer Hardware?
iPhone 4 is out and running, hitting the shops on 24th June and available for pre-order a week today and, despite some negative press (like this weird piece in the Telegraph from their so-called Technology Editor: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7800676/10-reasons-not-to-buy-App..., it looks like a really good bit of kit. Why? Read on. I love my iPhone 3G. I take it everywhere and use it for email, browsing, blogging, news, movies, music, navigation, photography, image manipulation, IM and a host of other things but it isn't perfect and there are some clear opportunities for improvement, opportunities which the 3GS only partially addressed. In my mind, the biggest failings of the 3G were the camera (particularly in low light), speed and memory (it can be a little slow to respond) and short battery life (most of the other minor problems, like Copy and Paste, where fixed in previous software upgrades). With the iPhone 4 it looks like Apple have fixed these issues whilst also adding multi-tasking (really useful, but not something that had been on my list), a new and improved industrial design, HD video and on-phone editing, a fantastic new display, a forward-facing camera (plus a wifi-only service, Facetime, which might just be the feature that persuades my wife to have an iPhone), a gyroscope (new games, anyone?) and various other bits and pieces. This adds up, I think, to a killer package and represents a huge leap forward over the 3GS; I predict a hit. But what about the stuff Jobs didn't mention? An improved lock screen might still make an appearance and would be very welcome; a more elegant approach to network disconnection would be nice (the click-through dialogues quickly become tiresome, especially if you travel a lot and write email offline); a filter for unread email would save a lot of scrolling. The are other complaints, for sure, but they are minor issues and they may yet be fixed in iOS 4; even if they aren't sales won't suffer (I've already logged my intention to upgrade with O2). Conclusion; iPhone, recently challenged by Android for the title "King of the Smart Phones", has roared triumphantly back into a commanding position at the top of the technological hill and looks set to stay there for quite a while.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Van for sale, one careful owner, minor dents; no reasonable offer refused
One careful owner, perhaps, followed by 20 years sitting under a tree while quietly rusting to death.
Using an iPad in the garden on a sunny day
Ok, so I'm under the umbrella and the sunlight is intermittent, but the only (and I mean this literally) problem I've had using my iPad outside on a sunny day is that greenfly keep walking across the screen and their blood smears awfully when I try to brush them off. I'm hoping iPad v2 will have a greenfly-phobic screen coating. Apart from that, it's great. I've got a good solid wifi connection, the screen looks great and all that's missing is a long, cold gin and tonic. In fact, I think I'm going to fix that. Bye!
Ocean Village Marina
Sunny down at the marina, as we sit on the terrace of the Pitcher and Piano with a drink. Nice and relaxing.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
An iPhone and a Unified Inbox; Bring It On!
iPhone OS 4.0 brings with it, at last, a single email Inbox into which all your accounts can dump messages; no more flicking up and down the folder hierarchy to check multiple accounts. One of the downsides of this is that the promotional mails I receive from online retailers or service providers, which generally go to my home account because they're fantastically boring and time insensitive, will be mixed in with my work emails, potentially obscuring messages I actually need to read and deal with. One way to handle this would be to have Google (my home email provider) mark dull-looking email as spam but that's not very satisfactory; sometimes I want to receive emails from eBuyer or Novatech. I could create a new home email address and leave behind the junk but that's an awful lot of work after so long (ten years or thereabouts) with the current setup and I'd probably just end up forwarding stuff from the old account to the new. Instead my solution is to unsubscribe from all but the most interesting newsletters and promotional lists, ruthlessly hacking my way through the garbage to leave only the gems behind. This is a bit of a lengthy process (I hadn't realised quite how many lists I was subscribed to) but it turns out to be a strangely fulfilling experience, a bit like clearing the rubbish from the garage or ripping out that annoying shrub in the garden. All of a sudden my Inbox is useful, freed from a ton of junk mail, and I'm no longer receiving boring emails every few minutes offering holidays I don't want or cameras I don't need or tickets for shows I've already seen. So what else have I learnt during this exercise? Mainly that there are wide variations in unsubscribe systems depending, it appears, on how desperate the sender is to keep you on their list. Many (most, even) are really simple; click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email and your browser pops up to tell you you're no longer subscribed. Some are more complicated; the browser window shows boxes that must be unchecked, asks you to re-enter your email address or displays some other time-wasting annoyance that slows your progression to the unsubscribed message. A few, thankfully only a very few, are downright awkward; they (and this includes you, Microsoft!) require account logins, option updates, passwords or, at the most extreme, a click-through from a confirmation email. Once done, however, it is suddenly clear that an Inbox free from unimportant rubbish is actually quite liberating; I feel no temptation whatsoever to resubscribe to the services I've dumped and I've resolved that, from now on, only the most interesting emails (like the Daily Dilbert, for example) will reach my Inbox. Truly, freedom is great.
Using an iPad 3G with Vodafone
First thing to say is that Vodafone's 3G service is pretty much the same as O2's; inconsistent outside the cities but otherwise ok. On the train from Southampton Airport Parkway to Waterloo the Vodafone signal drops out in the same places as the O2 signal (hardly surprising - dropouts are almost all in the rural areas) with the exception of Winchester, where Vodafone performs well. There are two particular problems with the Vodafone service for iPads. Firstly, as far as I can tell, the package doesn't include wifi (the O2 package does and I'll probably switch at the end of the month). Second, you can't manage your cellular data subscription via the iPad, so ending or modifying he agreement has to be done by phone or in a store; not very convenient. The only other issue with Vodafone is that they didn't give me the necessary account credentials when I signed the contract so although my iPad connected successfully to their 3G network I was unable to download anything. The answer, from Vodafone's forums, is that the APN details need to be added before data will flow. To do this, go to Settings > Cellular Data > APN Settings and set APN to Internet, Username to web and Password to web. Now try Safari.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
The Mystery of Winchester's Missing Phone Service
Last week I wrote a brief post about the weak phone signal in Winchester (http://myryama.posterous.com/why-is-mobile-phone-signal-so-weak-in-winches). This weak, with a Vodafone data contract, it's clear that the problem is that O2's mast isn't all that well positioned and the mast seen from the train is Vodafone's (and it works perfectly). Mystery solved.
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