Posts by moylan
87 posts • joined Monday 7th August 2006 15:45 GMT
Re: a massive operations fuck-up caused by a shortage of components
the only ones i have seen are those which the mobile providers are providing for free as upgrades to people on contract. and a civil servant whose department had all their blackberries replaced by winphone devices.
i've set up one of these and it was a horrible horrible device. the user has since smashed it with a hammer he hated it so much.
Re: I wonder...
aren't the only people who can vote and comment on apps in the google play store g+ users? slightly biased perhaps?
Re: Copy protection
at a government paid for course i was taught spreadsheets on vp planner which was a clone of lotus 123 which copied all the keystrokes required to do exactly what lotus did.
everyone had a copy of eventually sued out of existence vp planner instead of legit lotus.
Posted in Nokia: No Belle download for Apple users
half assed policy
i used to have to build a windows system every few months just to run nokias software updater. a real pain in the ass. people who are using expensive phones are more likely to be using operating systems other than microsofts. i didn't want windows on my then mac systems or now linux systems. it was one of the things that drove me away from symbian.
of course android is not perfect either with both my samsung wanting windows kies software to update the firmware and my sony xperia wanting similar windows crap to do the same. is it so hard to understand that people who use android might not be fans of ms?
Posted in Apple land-grabs fuel cells for mobiles
fun fun fun
these will be fun when it comes to getting on an airplane. no?
Posted in Motorola Pro+ Qwerty Android smartphone
where did it go wrong?
the e71 is where nokia went wrong. for me anyway.
on paper it seemed ideal. better than the e61i it was replacing;
* support for more than 2gb of memory cards and more memory
* fm radio
* camera flash
* standard 3.5mm head phone socket
* longer battery life.
* faster cpu
and then i used one for a while;
* global search was painfully slow if the phone had lots of information. around a minute to start as it preloaded all the data to 'speed' up searches.
* headphone socket mounted on the side so that it damaged the headphones i was using when i put the phone in my pocket crazy person that i am.
* fragile, i dropped mine within a week of getting it and the keyboard popped out. it went back in ok and never happened again but after the sheer indestrucibleness of the e61s...
* shutting down all running apps and rescanning my memory card for media everytime i ejected it to copy stuff on and off. and no way to turn that off. annoying.
* and adding a not required by irish law camera click in firmware update made me give it away and promise to never buy nokia again.
these days i use a samsung galaxy pro. nice!
Posted in Sony creates paper battery
insufficient suffering!
and hopefully they'll have the company of mozart and a banjo. :-)
smaller or smaller.
i don't have a problem with the kb used by a file but i often have a problem reading pdfs on ereaders. sure you can zoom in and scroll but that can be annoying and time consuming. a java app called briss does the job of trimming of excess margins. just my 2c.
it as a by product trims off a few kb.
Posted in Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56
love him or hate him
love him or hate him he changed the industry.
handles?
one of the reasons i love my olpc so much is the handle. the first laptops i used had handles but somewhere along the way they were eliminated.
these mobile devices are going to me moved around a lot. a handle wouldn't go amiss on some of these. even just a generic connection slot for people to add one might win a few sales.
agree
i'd even be happy with a lower powered version that eliminated wifi and colour screen. let it have blue tooth and use that to connect to a phone in a pocket that can share it's wifi and 3g. a bit of software could do that on most modern phones.
the psions i had back in the 90s and early 2000s were the 3a, 3c, 5, 5mx and could last a week on 2 aa batteries. averaged about 40 hours a week on the series 3s and 20-25 hours on the 5s.
it's tragic that 17 years after my psion 3a that modern phones struggle to have the capabilities of it's software.
as for keyboards. i liked the psion 5 but prefered the case and shell of the psion 3 series. the battery case hinge allowed you to grip it with forefinger and middle finger while using the thumb on the keyboard. and with your other hand i could get nearly 30wpm while walking around warehouse typing serial numbers and notes into it.
it's never going to be a major player but a small percentage of the market with loyal customers can be very profitable as apple has shown. most of the accountants and architects i meet who had psions would be rushing to get one as nothing has compared to their design excellence. the fact he sold all 2000 of the variants he made should show that.
Posted in HTC Flyer 7in Android tablet
1470 hours?
1470 hours? i don't think so. :-)
looks nice. like the idea of a stylus.
looking for a 7" tablet at the mo
if they didn't pay a licence fee to ms i'd buy one.
as nyelvmark said no powerpoint?
as nyelvmark said no powerpoint?
90% of management emails would be unviewable!!
yet i can't watch
yet i can't watch tv shows like bones or castle with seeing how super fabulous the crappy winpho7 is? this weeks castle episode had the lead take a picture and email it with beautiful close ups of him sending via outlook. wtf?! i was sending pics via email from my nokia n70 6 years ago. could have done it on my 3650 before that but the images were crap and data too expensive.
how much are they spending to advertise this crap again?
and as for nokia helping their sales numbers? nokia hasn't been able to write good software for 3-4 years. people aren't going to hand in their current symbian devices and replace it with winpho7 in any great number. most people i knew with symbian had gone symbian because they didn't want a winmobile device.
time for another tshirt
do you know if they still make the old
ben there
dunne that
bought the taoiseach
tshirts? haven't seen one in years.
thank goodness
that i only use/used opera on my symbian, android and iphone devices? it's an acquired taste but i like having the same browser on all devices.
Posted in iPlayer Global iPad app price announced
wait for the android version
i've said it a million times but i'd rather pay for a bbc tv licence than the irish version. at least the bbc puts out dozens of tv shows that i am interested in.
but i have zero interest in apple devices. hate itunes!
will be interesting to see if how much money this brings into the bbc. they're not perfect but have a lot of fans around the world.
no!
i'm a big fan of google generally but i have no faith in cloud technologies. the biggest obstacle is what happened in egypt. it doesn't matter if you live in a more stable country you are at the end of the day depending on your government not to shut you out from internet services. now add intermittent internet services (how many hours or days was your internet down last year?) and i have no trust in remote services.
i can get work done as long as i have my data to work on. put the data in the cloud and deny me access to the cloud and i can do nothing. so no cloud for me. i'll use cloud but make sure i have a local backup.
it's not often...
it's not often that you see rats jumping on a sinking ship!
hope they fix the biggest problem.
my nephew got a first gen device and it didn't play flash. i'm still waiting for an email from their update service to let me know when the player is released. even though it has been released, we only got a copy of it when my brother went to return the device. they're hanging onto it now that it does flash which is one of the main things that the kid wanted.
but the biggest problem was the toshiba version of the market place. it's tiny. it needs the google market place. the lack of apps is not forgiveable. they cannot expect app developers to target multiple stores. it will always be a sub set of the google market place.
you can seemingly install generic android on it and gain access to the google market place but that is a little much for the average user.
apple store?
there is no apple store in ireland. despite apples hq in europe been in ireland. so no genius bar. :-)
other bugs that annoy me
contacts - if i have more than one phone number on a contact i can't tell which number just smsed or rang me. very irritating as my brother swaps mobile numbers a fair bit. not an issue if i want to send an sms from the iphone but if i want to use the number on a different device then bloody annoying.
ical - month display has sunday as the first day which really irks me. more so because my palm devices had an option to set monday as the start of the week more than 10 years ago and psion way before that. ical on the desktop has this option but not ical on the iphone.
notes - i stored 100s of notes in this app as i did in the app on my nokias and palms before that. notes on the iphone corrupted frequently losing data.
capacity other - i will only know if this is an issue in a week or so as the number grows from the 300mb that it currently is. i have already noticed that itunes sometimes stops copying files mid copy which is what seems to cause it.
general sluggishness of os 4 on 3g hardware. 4.2 does seem a lot more zippy that the previous 4.x updates.
so not just the all tv shows are unknown bug.
don't get me wrong android is not perfect but it seems to irk me less and i haven't lost data... yet. notes going corrupt on iphone really turned me against it.
i still have no problem recommending iphone to people who want a fluffy easy to use device but i do point out these little things that annoy me.
ymmv
crap on a 3g
installed ios 4.2.1 on a iphone 3g. had just restored it after 'capacity other' had grown to 1gb after a few weeks since i last wiped it. hoped that this update might fix that so i installed it.
no real difference so far and only time will tell if the 'capacity other' problem goes away. one bug seems to be that my tv shows are now lumped into one group called unknown instead of episodes listed under the shows name. sorted in season order it's a very annoying mess.
looking at setting the device back to ios 3.1.3
not a happy camper. thank goodness i have an android phone as i no longer trust iphone for anything other than media an occasional sms or voice call.
Posted in Ten... budget Android smartphones
hmmmm keyboards
nice to see budget models with keyboards.
smarter ships?
the danes faced the problem of not having the cash for all the missions their navy needed to be capable of.
they invented stanflex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StanFlex
won't help with the carriers. but would help with the current destroyers which don't have functional weapons yet. the british are an inventive creative people and could make this a very profitable exportable system.
Posted in Nokia's new boss is Microsoft man
so closer ties to microsoft?
so will there be closer ties to microsoft? that wouldn't be a good thing for nokia. most of the power users for mobiles that i know use mac or linux. i haven't used nokia since the start of 2009. one of the things that really annoyed me then was that i needed a winxp system to download firmware or maps.
nokia do seem disorganised at the moment. a friend was trying to convince me to attend the meego conference in dublin and when i went to the site it had the wrong flag in the banner at the bottom. :-) ivory coast here i come!
http://conference2010.meego.com/
Posted in Judge Dredd returns to the silver screen
dr and quinch?
dr and quinch? wouldn't that be another hollywood butchering of alan moores characters? :-)
Posted in Judge Dredd returns to the silver screen
what 1995 movie?
what 1995 movie? i've never seen it. i never want to see it! once it was leaked that stallone would take off the helmet there was no reason to watch the movie as it wasn't true to the comic.
fingers crossed this attempt will do well. would love to see a strontium dog movie. so many great characters and stories from 2000ad.
Posted in Want to use WD diagnostics? Buy Windows
not really the point
yes, the end user could use bartpe.
but when you have a sick intermittent system the last thing you need is to download bartpe and then work out how to install some crappy win app onto a livecd which can be tricky when they require a reboot.
if wd had a downloadable iso with their tools installed it might be a bit more acceptable. the end user should not have to jump through these hoops just to test their drive.
so will have to add wd to list of hardware manufacturers who i won't buy from. even for my windows customers as i may have to bring a drive back to test on my linux systems.
their loss.
typical vodafone
my first few symbian devices were preloaded with crap links and software when i got them from vodafone ireland on prepay. so i switched to sim free phones.
i stayed with vodafone till last year when they changed their prepay plan so that every fecking page had a vodafone banner and crappy links at the top.
so i threw away all my vodafone sims. now using 3, o2 and meteor. no problems from them so far.
will never deal with them again. their loss. coupla hundred euros on prepay credit a year till that time.
Posted in Xbox Live billing site snubs Firefox
and they say that microsoft doesn't keep up
just a new version of 'dos isn't done till lotus won't run'
fact imitating fiction?
ds9, season 1 episode 17, 'the forsaken'
a computer worm infects the stations computers and they cannot remove it and ultimately have to live with it.
never thought it possible and then i read this article.
maybe organisations will stop using windows for embedded and control systems? don't forget they use windows on iss and on military hardware these days.
Posted in Nokia snaffles user data on the down-low
nope
just a person who likes peace and quiet. the noisiest sound from my cubicle should not be the stupid camera click when i take a screen shot of a customers system!
at home i have cats and i like to take pics of the little moggies and when the camera makes a noise they stop what ever it is they are doing so that is also annoying. i only get one shot of the little buggers with a noisy camera.
the person i gave the e71 to who was greatly amused by my distaste of the noise told me that he had been in a book shop in berlin and saw a book that he liked. to remind himself about it he took a picture of the cover. it wasn't a quiet bookshop but still 5-6 people looked his way making him self conscious. he now hates the click as much as i did.
yes people use cameras to take pictures that are inappropriate. there are laws to deal with those assholes. inflicting the camera click noise on everybody is accusing every body of being a criminal. i am not a criminal.
also the law was brought in when cameras were 640 x 480. now all camera phones can shoot video that is far higher res than that. why do not make a stupid noise when shooting video? surely video is worse?
the whole law is a stupid security theatre nonsense.
it's bad enough when you can be arrested in the uk for taking a pic on a public street. the best defense we have against corrupt cops is taking pictures on a public street. this is easier when the camera is silent.
nokia have inflicted this on more and more phones in countries that don't have such laws. why should i have to comply with a law that is not in my country? when i bought the e71 i made sure in advance that it could be used silently. there was no warning in the firmware update. there was no way to turn it off afterwards. trust me, i and many others tried. i think it put quite a few people off nokia in my circle of friends and geeks. my iphone and htc hero are silent (had a worry yesterday on my htc hero when they moved the click location but some helpful people here pointed it out to me. think i gave up so soon as i didn't want to go down the time i wasted trying to make my nokia silent again)
from a few quick surveys i'd say that only around 10% of users are annoyed with the camera click but that does not nullify our complaint. search google for nokia and shutter sound to see how unhappy a lot of people are.
i really do hope that nokia gets its act in order. such a shame as they used to make really great devices that i bought as soon as they were released. now i don't trust them. trust is a very hard thing to win back.
just my 2c.
Posted in Nokia snaffles user data on the down-low
thank goodness...
i didn't buy one.
nokia has the crappiest firmware update policies ever.
i had a n70, e61i and e71 at the start of 2009. the nokia firmware update software is a pain to use (at least it was then) and every month when i used it it would insist on downloading a newer version of itself which when i was on dialup took forever. so i always did the firmware updates at the same time. big mistake.
i hate noisy devices. the current trend for compulsory camera clicks in the us and asia are a particular annoyance. i always read the firmware update notes to see what was included in the updates before using them. when i updated the 3 devices they all got the stupid camera click. it was getting harder and harder to remove every year and i wasted a month of trial and error before giving up. i found partial solutions. specific software has been written to eliminate the click noise but nothing that worked 100%. i'd lose a lot of features of the camera or the flash would be activated every time. had a few people who thought they could sort it give it a go and they got nowhere.
in the end i gave away all 3 devices. €1000 worth of hardware ruined by a shitty update that gave no warning of what it was breaking.
i heard that the n900 was silent but after losing €1000 on the other i wasn't going to take the risk.
seeing this no warning sign you up for random crap doesn't help nokia regain the top smart phone spot they threw away. pity as they _do_ make nice hardware.
when ovi was announced i signed up and even though i tried unsubscribing 6 times it still sends me shit.
nokia get your act together! i _might_ consider buying your hardware if you stop this crappy behaviour!
i sit corrected
had a look and yes there is. it used to be in the general settings. now it is in the camera app settings. thanks!
woot!
disappointing
i cannot abide noisy cameras. the 2.1 on my htc hero has made the camera click mandatory. if the camera is set to silent then it is quiet, but there is no way to make the camera silent like there was on 1.5. so to use the frickin camera i have to keep switching the device to silent, and i hate the walled garden and itunes dependency that is iphone.
also at last the calendar app has an option to change the default time on reminders for new events but there is no way to make the default reminder = off. bloody annoying. i use the reminder alarm on only about 1 in 100 events that i add to my device.
quiet sluggish and has also crashed once in the hour i've had it.
if i knew about the camera stupidity then i wouldn't have updated.
thinking about giving up android over the camera stupidity. i threw away nokia e71, n70 and e61i after those camera started making noise that only leaves iphone which has a simple switch on the side to make it silent.
it may sound trivial but the whole cameras have to make noise debate is just stupid. the video cameras on these phones take far higher res images than the early still image cameras that were first afflicted by these stupid laws but they don't make the video cameras make noise. i could take the device apart and manually eliminate the speaker and just use a bt head set for phone calls but that would require work every time i get a new phone. its nothing but security theatre!
Posted in Brits are bored with mobile broadband
wifi v 3g
i have been using mobile broadband since 2004 on a nokia 3650 here in ireland on prepay. it was very expensive back then. as tech improved the mobiles added wifi and 3g got cheaper and faster.
now on my iphone 3g or htc hero i can get prepay at 99c for 50mb for a day. fairly cheap. i do use it but 99% of the time i am in known locations. home, work, various meeting spots, pubs etc. i have free wifi in those locations so so not use the 3g data. the only time i really need it is while on the move on public transport and i can usually wait an hour or so till i'm in wifi coverage to do what i want.
i'm not going to pay a monthly contract for a service i use 2-3 times a month on average. result is that i use less 3g data on my iphone or htc hero than i did on my nokia e61 4 years ago.
one bad thing about the iphone still not fixed in os4 is that i can't tell the device to use only wifi and not to try 3g. in bad wifi areas this means the device grabs data on 3g and costs me money with no warning. worse some apps grab data when you use them for high score tables in games for example. so i have pretty much given up on iphone. i can put it in airplane mode but then i can't send/receive texts or calls.
the htc hero has a great toggle icon that switches on/off 3g data. perfect! 3g data only used when i say so.
oh and os4 was a bugger to install. best way was to wipe the device with no backup and start again restoring then from the backup after the os was installed. no probs syncing afterwards.
Posted in Ten Essential... Android Games
gem miner and scrambled net
2 games
gem miner
dig for minerals. sell them and upgrade your mining equipment to dig faster see further. great fun and it's trying to reach spots that are awkward. map is regenerated randomly every time. great fun,
scrambled net
simple game. connect all the computers to the network by rotating the tiles that contain the connections. settings from easy to very very hard.
rfid
what if the patient has been in a fire? the password would not be readable. rfid as bad as it is would be the only option. surely by now we can make a rfid chip that can only be read within less than a inch or two that can't be intercepted.
interesting
i dial into 3-4 users computers a day to fix things. i'd say about 25%-33% pop up that message when i start to use ie on those systems. there are no other browsers installed on those systems. they just cancel that dialog as it doesn't mean anything to them.
easy solution
use the knife attached to the usb drive to hack off the finger or thumb that has the key. if you're in a rush just take both hands.
every time somebody shows me biometrics i ask them to google
malaysia machete mercedes
which leads to a grisly story of a man who can only count to nine after robbers took his 'key'.
or if you want hi tech then the german chaos computer club who copied and published Wolfgang Schauble's fingerprint. so if he ever uses his fingerprint for security again it can be accessed by anybody with a little knowhow.
what about...
> you can transmit data without giving everyone in the room a headache.
what about photo sensitive epileptics?
i we had all this working years ago when we beamed from pda to pda with ir. so the speed is super fast.
much preferred ir over bt/email/im for sharing info. fast simple and reliable. now to transfer 2-3k of text can take 5-10 minutes using bluetooth as you both turn on bt and search for the others device. using data costs unless you can find free wifi.
mumble mumble get off my lawn...
vodafone?
i had a prepay vodafone sim here in ireland and used it happily for a few years until recently. they changed the data plan without notice to alter all downloaded pages to having a vodafone banner and links at the top of every page downloaded. barring google ones, i suspect because they were too complex to easily alter.
rang to ask how to turn that crap off and it was told it was impossible so binned the sim that day.
maybe they could learn from google and make their ads unobtrusive. not wasting my 50mb data allowance with crappy links i will never use.
one question
at what point has windows mobile passed quality tests?
the os is flaky, unstable and power hungry. the development tools are awful.
i've yet to see a winmobile device that is useable as a day to day mobile phone.
they've been peddling this crap for how many years and they have not yet produced a viable system.
so roll on android.
Posted in Top Gear tops iPlayer hit list
no numbers for bit torrent?
at work the first show downloaded every week is top gear. none of us watch it when it is shown on bbc2. we just download it later. handier that way as on more than one occasion a few episodes have been stuck on an ipod/netbook for somebody going on holiday. considering it's an entertainment show aimed at technical people you would have to assume that a lot of people are downloading it rather than watch chained to a bbc schedule or desktop pc.
Posted in 2009's Top E-book Readers
pdf handling
while most of the ebook readers i have seen have claimed to handle pdfs, the hnadling of pdfs has been useless. it would be nice if the reviews put large pdfs on these devices to see how well they display them. get a pdf manual for a rpg game. these are often 50mb+ and are just jpegs stuck inside a pdf. i have yet to see a pdf reader display these useably.
Posted in eBooks: What to read on which reader
reading etexts
i have a small list of needs when i look for an ereader
1) how well it handles pdfs. text only pdfs are simple but some of the rpg manuals that i have are just jpegs inside a pdf file. how the ereader handles these 70mb+ files is paramount as to wether it is useable to me. the limited processor and memory means that none of the ereaders i have tried does these satisfactorily. to date i have tried nokia 770, nokia 810. sony 500, 505, 705. cooler and an olpc. the olpc is closest but the speed and controls are just not there. will probably need a faster processor and a touchscreen to be useable.
2) battery life and charging. the longer the battery life the more likely i am to carry it. also i don't want to have to carry another power brick so the ability to charge of a _standard_ usb cable is important.
3) screen. bw screens are great. please don't feel that you have to include a colour screen just to compete with a competitor. i want battery life and to be able to read outdoors in sunlight. colour screens that i have used to date impact greatly on these 2 abilities.
4) search. i'm constantly astonished by how many of the current ereaders don't have a search facility or a good search facility. it's all well and good to read a book from start to finish but i like to have a stack of books on my ereaders and be able to search for a phrase or a piece of info in the reference books i carry.
Posted in Spain cuts off 3m pre-pay mobiles
dumb move
all they are doing is creating an underclass. many of these people will not register. it's not worth the hassle.
i have no id, passport or driving licence. i don't travel and i don't drive. here in ireland you need 1 of these documents to create a bank account. in the 80's the government brought in similar laws to prevent terrorist groups like the ira from money laundering activities. did it stop the ira? not a chance.
however about 10% of the adult population in ireland don't have access to banking facilities. no credit cards, loans or savings.
all they are doing is punishing the innocent for the sake of catching a few bad guys.
Posted in Interead Cool-er
bought one, gave it away.
it was a good device and i had turned off the autoshutdown so that the book was left on screen so i didn't need to find and open it again.
the thing that i missed most was the lack of find. i've been reading etexts since i had a psion. on using palm, nokias and now stanza on an iphone. it needs a find. that drove me nuts so i gave it to my brother who just wants to read a few books. will have to see how he gets on with it.
