Well, a bit of a wash-out really. Sunday was a mental wash-out as I could do little more than sleep and watch the Grand Prix, Today was a wash-out due to drenching drizzle outside until late in the day.

At least, having looked at the Environment Agency’s flood maps it seems that both my house and the Department aren’t under any risk of flooding.

Dispite the weather pretending that it’s some other season, it’s is actually summer so it’s time to drive down to Cornwall again for a couple of weeks of complete relaxation.

Having read the long-term weather forecast for the next fortnight I think going for cliff walks is probably not a viable option, other than possibly for next Tuesday, as I’ve not packed my waterproof trousers and would prefer not to get wet. I have packed a few jumpers etc. as I’m guessing that it’s going to feel like Autumn more than mid Summer.

The trip down wasn’t too eventful, other than having to avoid the A420 due to floods. (On that front I’m pleased to say that my house wasn’t affected by flooding.) There were a few traffic jams due to the large number of holidaymakers travelling down.

Anyway, time for some sleep!

I’ve finished (as much as I’m going to) the video for the air show. It could do with slightly more trimming here and there but I can’t be bothered to wait another 3 hours for the iBook to render it and the jerkiness of iMovie makes it difficult to cut at just the right place.

Anyway here it is, it’s rather large, nearly 300MB, but it’s far higher quality than the previous effort (double the resolution and you can actually see the aircraft!) and about half the length.

Update 12:31pm:
A shortend version now (or soon will be once it’s finished processing) available via YouTube:

I’ve now set up a gallery containing a selection of my photos from last Saturday’s visit to the air show. Here’s a little selection:

I’ve managed to cut together a *very* rough draught of a movie based upon a combination of photographs and video footage taken using my Fujifilm F31fd compact camera of yesterday’s airshow. This hasn’t been helped by iMovie not being able to play or edit the clips in real time as I’ve had to put them on an external USB drive and the display updates get in the way of reading the disk so all I get is 1-3 second clips of video separated by 1-3 seconds of frozen display which then jumps on by that amount and starts playing again, often with some visual corruption, so I couldn’t do detailed editing or determine what was iMovie artifact and what was real artifact. (Oh and I got the name of the stealth fighter wrong in this draught, now fixed but I’m not going to run the 1 hour encoding again just to fix that.)

Update: I’ve changed the link to point to a faster server for the video.

This is my first live posting from the Royal International Air Tattoo via my N800.

WELl, I’ve mansged to get a grandstand ticket… the last one on sale! So I’m in a nice position for the displays.

I’ll be updating images in my gallery.

For those who have Nokia N800s.. there’s a new update out which adds, amongst other things, support for SDHC cards up to 8GB, Skype and Flashplayer 9. It can be found here.

There is one extremely annoying factor here, however. The only way to do an upgrade is to re-flash the internal memory completely, losing all your applications and many of your settings at the same time. It wouldn’t be so much of a pain if the back-up utility actually backed up all your settings and data, but it doesn’t. Basically it backs up about 70% of the settings used by the default applications which come with the machine out of the box (and not even the Nokia applications you download from their site). It would be *SO* much more user friendly if the upgrade was just that, an in-situ update of all the changed items and not a complete re-install.

This morning, having seen the remarkable weather forecast (only remarkable in the light of the weather over the last couple of weeks) I decided to take my camera and go for a nice walk around the University Parks to see what was currently photogenic. You can see all the photos in my gallery but here is a taster:

So, how visible on the web are you? Have you been data mined? Maybe you could use http://www.zoominfo.com/ to find out?

I see to be pretty invisible. Alec on the other hand…

Over the weekend I went in search of a solution to the problem of what to use with my N800 when I’m not within range of a suitable WiFi hotspot.

The obvious answer is, of course, a 3G phone to use as the net connection. Of course, as the N800 is quite a size it would be an advantage if the data connection slave, sorry phone, was small and light as well so it could be buried in clothing and not be a nuisance. Also there’s the problem of finding a phone contract which has a reasonable cost and a large enough data quota.

The package I came up with to fulfill these specifications was a Sony Ericsson W880i phone (it’s tiny! and 3G!) along with a T-mobile Flext-25 contract (£25 per month for 18 months) with the Web’n’Walk Plus data package (£12.50). This is the cheapest phone+data contract on the market at the moment. You can have the Flext-20 (£20) tariff with the standard Web’n’Walk package but this doesn’t allow the use of the phone as a Bluetooth modem, which makes it useless for my purpose. Still, a 3 gigabyte (yes, you read that correctly)  usage limit for £12.50 from a mobile phone company is still a good deal and unheard of before now, it makes mobile Internet use practical. The same amount of data with Orange would cost you in the region of £10000!

Anyway, before I carry this set-up around with me I have to transfer my mobile phone number from my Orange account over to the T-mobile one. I’ve requested a PAC code, which will probably take until the end of the week to arrive in the post, and then it’s another 5 working days for that to be activated at the T-mobile end. Once that’s in place I can swap the SIMM between the Treo (for light-weight, compact networking and easy texting) and the SE-W880+N800 (for high speed, full on mobile networking and a nasty numeric keypad for texting) depending upon the situation.

There is only one problem with respect of the SIMM swapping, however. The SE-W880’s SIMM slot is a beast to get the SIMM out of, it really is. You need to use a pair of small-nosed pliers to grab the edge of the SIMM to withdraw it. They obviously thought you’d never want to do this.