What a classic!
(via Scoble)
iPod Touch and the ‘classic’ geek blunder
The most famous blunder of all time, according to Vizzini from the Princess Bride, is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” but the most famous blunder, I think, for a geek is not to research fully the geek tech they are going to buy.
I treated myself to an 16Gb iPod Touch yesterday, I’ve been meaning to get an iPod for a few years and being a user of iTunes at home for my music collection it was a logical step. The iPod Touch is a great little device, not too heavy and has a great screen but hey you already know that because “we” geeks have read all the reviews, and if lucky enough to have a nearby Apple Store we’ve had a play with one.
So late yesterday afternoon I took a spin down Pitt Street here in Sydney to Next Bytes (Apple Reseller) and purchased my iPod Touch, I even bought a nice silicon protector for it. I resisted the urge to open it and play with it on the trip home and ripped the packaging off once I was in front of my PC.
My Location
Google Maps My Location uses either GPS (if it's available on your phone) or triangulation from the closest towers to show where you are. And yes, it works in Australia.
But it's not as impressive as I first thought. When I tried it initially in the Melbourne CBD (where there are
lots of towers) on my non-GPS-capable Nokia 6230i, it showed the map and pinpointed to within a few hundred metres of where I was at the time, pointing roughly to the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane. Wow!
Alas it turns out that it points to that location wherever I am in greater Melbourne. Oh dear.
Still, at least it got the right city and continent. That's a start.
Freebies of the week
SnagIt 7, notable for being able to capture long web pages, is bein
g offered for free download.
So is Camtasia Studio 3.
(via Greg)
Getting used to Thunderbird
I'm liking Thunderbird. Ditching Windows Desktop Search and installing Google Desktop Search has worked well — suits my filing system. Well, except for the occasional __GD_something_or_other process that wants to keep running when I'm shutting down the PC.
Things I've had to get used to in the switch from Outlook:
Alt-S to Send doesn't work. Alt-Enter does (Outlook supports that too.)
The column sorting icons being upside-down.
It defaults to sending from the account you're looking at when you start the new mail, rather than a fixed default. Easily changed if you remember to check it.
It also inserts the signature automatically when you change the From account, which is neat.
It didn't take long to get used to the vastly better IMAP performance in Thunderbird.
I don't use a Calendar plugin. Tony pointed me to a Nokia phone sync, but I haven't tried it yet — I do backup my phone contacts, but for most of them I don't have email details, so syncing is not really a priority for me.
That's about all at the moment. I've imported all my old Outlook folders into Thunderbird, which took ages, but works fine. So, byebye Outlook!
LEGO string
If you find a small white box with 4500584 written on it, it has Lego string in it. Googling 4500584 lego didn’t find anything, but now it should.
Fixing the time
Ed Bott on how to fix the time sync in Windows (and the godawful error: “The time sample was rejected because: The peer’s stratum is less than the host’s stratum.”)
He notes this list of alternate time servers in the US. It makes sense for reliability purposes to choose a server close to you; indeed some big corporates run their own time servers.
As it turns out, Microsoft has a KB article documenting a number of servers around the world: 262680: A list of the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) time servers that are available on the Internet.
Choose one near you today!
Another day, another broken form
This time it’s the BBC’s Children In Need appeal. Okay, so CIN isn’t meant to be seen outside the UK, but what with Channel BT and YouTube, it should be no surprise that bits of it (such as the superb Doctor Who short) have been seen around the world.
And I decided I wanted to donate. ‘Cos it’s a good cause and the dollar’s going well against the UKP.
A quick Google and I figured out what they were talking about when they asked about Gift Aid. Something for UK taxpayers only, alas.
But the billing address caught me out. Okay, let’s put my state name in the County field. That should work. Country… well they only seem to have continents, not countries. Australasia is it I guess. Dunno what the credit card company will make of that.
Submit… ah, it seems to be doing something. Uh oh, it rejected the postcode. Wrong length. Uh no, my four digit postcode is all I have. Tell you what, I’ll stuff it with zeroes. 0000003204. That would crack Aussie Post up, I’m sure.
Resubmit and… oh. It thinks it’s already running. “Your request is being processed….. Please be patient….”
Well I am normally, but at time of writing it’s been giving me this error for 20 minutes.
Has it gone in? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll check my credit card transactions in a day or two, and hope the Children In Need don’t need my donation that much.
(Oh what the hell, you might as well enjoy it here too.)
Google Groups filtering
I like Google Groups a lot, but it’s far from perfect. Of all its annoyances, the lack of a killfile (filter) is the biggest.
Fortunately there is a solution for those using Firefox:
2. Install Damian’s Google Groups Killfile script
3. View one of the offending posts in Google Groups and click on Ignore User. Hooray, now I can finally read melb.general free of all those MI5 Persecution posts! (You can read all about that here, if you wish.)
Statistics shows Rudd has created more jobs than Work Choices
In a demonstration of how difficult it is to single out a root cause the changes in a figure derived from complex behaviour, an economist (using the exact methodology that John Howard cites for determining the contribution of Work Choices to labour market growth) has shown that:
… [Kevin] Rudd has added many jobs – in fact 10% more jobs per month than Work Choices did.
So: politician lies; footage at eleven. If the government wanted to actually measure if Work Choices made things better, they should have said something like “everywhere except WA”, or “only applies to people born after the 6th of the month” or whatever. Then they’re would be two systems, and you could actually measure it.
Myself, I’m looking forward to the decrease in employment because Rudd is no longer leader of the opposition (read the article, you’ll understand that comment eventually).
This is not news
Look, I’m all for citizen journalism. And Cameron Reilly is a good guy — an intelligent, witty, talented individual.
But “Man disputes $66 traffic fine” is NOT news. Something that happens thousands of times a day across Australia is NOT news. Not unless the protagonist is a senior cop or politician.
Certainly it’s worthy of a blog entry. But showing up on a news site (particularly as the top item) just makes a mockery of what citizen journalism could be and should be.
Surely there must be some real news people could be reporting on? I mean, stuff that actually matters to more than one person?
Bloody convergence again
Follow up from this rant.
I got so sick of my stupid Dopod 838Pro being incapable of operating like a phone that I decided to have a trial separation. I borrowed a colleague’s mobile phone and thought I’d have a go at using a separate phone and PDA for a while.
The separation didn’t last long… I’m back using my converged device again.
I was amazed at how hard it was to do common tasks with the mobile. For example starting a text message required 5 button presses on the phone compared to 2 on my device. Then entering the message is so much simpler on the Dopod’s Qwerty keyboard. Admittedly I’m out of practice with numberpad texting. Having a large touch screen is a huge advantage for a user interface.
So now I’m stuck with trying to figure out how to make the Dopod behave better as a phone. I’ve uninstalled lots of apps that probably suck a fair bit of cpu. Hopefully that’ll help.