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.
After seeing Grim’s Nokia N800 and reading about Alec’s (and also finding out that I need to pay no more income tax on my Nan’s estate) I decided to buy one for myself along with the bluetooth keyboard.
It arrived on Wednesday and I’ve been playing ever since.
A quick summary of the device can be made thus: It’s a pocket sized Linux computer without a keyboard and can communicate via WiFi or Bluetooth and has a display driven using an X server and uses an embeded version of Opera for a web browser.
Well, it works well, though there are limitations, as there would be with such a small device. Having said that, it was relatively painless to download and install all I needed to connect the machine to the work VPN service so that I could use the WiFi there and once I’d installed an xterm program and OpenSSH hacking the system, based upon Debian Linux, is a doddle.
There are two things so far I’ve not been able to do. The first and most important for me is get standard X wiindow fonts to work. The second is get an development environment set up so that I can build and install applications such as the full set of commandline utilities along with bash etc.
Oh, and did I say that you can display remote X programs over an ssh tunnel on the device.. sweet.
Brown puns…
Well, now some MPs will be Brown nosing for a job in the cabinet.
For the first time in history people with little power will be hoping for a Brown out.
Ta-dah!
Via an e-mail from Susan Hutchinson to our IT Support Staff mailling list: Middle-ages IT help-desk.
Alec: Yes, this is the same Susan Hutchinson from UCLCC.
Well, on the final of The National Lottery People’s Quiz earlier today they did actually use some of the footage taped at the pub quiz a number of weeks ago and, yes, I didn appear in the shots.. at the back for about 2 seconds in total. Woohoo! Not exactly a starring role.
My friends in the audience did manage to get a lot more airtime but I only spotted Anvita, Sam and Andrea and couldn’t see Sion and Andy. However, the large sheet with the Queen Victoria’s Truncheon picture on it did, somehow, get shown quite a lot in the audience shots!
Anyway, this brings my total TV airtime now to around 10 seconds, the other 8 were in a TSW news report on the Camborne School of Mines Geothermal Energy Project where I was shown twiddling the knob on an oscilloscope (while in a further shot the geophysicist was show working the computer.. dunno how that happened).
Having seen the week’s weather forecast on BBC’s Country File programme I made the decision to stuff washing the car and instead find somewhere outside where I could enjoy the brief spell of usefully dry weather while it was available. (i.e. the rest of the week’s weather is forecast to be rubbish!) So, then I had to try to work out where to go.
I came to the conclusion that the Ridgeway would be too wet and anyway I’ve been up to that stretch of byway by the White Horse a couple of times already this year. I really wanted somewhere with a bit of elevation and to possibly have something to photograph. I decided upon Wittenham Clumps as I’d never visited them even though they’re only about 10 miles away.
I was pleasantly surprised by the place. In between the droning of light aircraft (the worst of which are modern aircraft with high speed propellers which are loud even when the aircraft is miles away, unlike the old cessnas and pipers) it was pretty peaceful with lots of birdsong in the woodland and around the meadow with only the occasional bang of a shotgun, posisbly trying to kill the said birds, who knows.
I was glad I had thought to take along with me my binoculars and my camera and had a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours of more solitude than normal. (And I worked out that the worst culprits for south Oxford aircraft noise were air cadets.) By the time I’d got back to the car park at about 3pm cars were literally queuing to get in, so if you want to visit, go early.