Posts by Ed

Good

Home sharing is my favourite feature, and it works well. AirPlay has promise, though I'm waiting for it to be supported by macs (Lion?)

Google reader seems quite a bit faster with the safari improvements.

Had problems...

Had problems on my journey from Kensington to Victoria down to Croydon and beyond... Very intermittent phone signal and almost non-existent data signal that kept dying.

Still works?

As far as I can tell, get_iplayer.pl (which uses flvstreamer) still works fine, and is a really useful script!

Dodgy stats

I cannot believe these stats. In a random sample of the 8 guys sitting near me, none have lent ID. 78%!? You'd be hard pushed to find 78% of people who have done anything!

A bit more editorial required?

If...

If Apple had reckoned the hype wasn't living up to the reality, they'd have quietly dampened it down either by denying something in some random comment some journalist happened to hear, or by quietly leaking some info.

You can be fairly sure that the rumours are at least within the right ballpark. It's not in Apple's interest to have people disappointed.

Fine for me

I use Be in Brighton and get a reasonable 5Mbit considering I'm 2 miles from the exchange. In London my parents use Be and get a reliable 12Mbit or so. Their tech support is good, they have a good IRC channel and forums. They have various options where you can chose to have speed vs reliability... Their website looks like crap though, WTF were they thinking?

I bought a TZ7

I bought a TZ7 in the summer and was very happy with it. Battery seemed to last well enough. The zoom is great - it's nice to be able to actually zoom further than you can see with your naked eye - something that I've not really seen on a compact camera I've owned before. I'm somewhat disapointed it lacks the more advanced options for controlling appeture and shutter speed, but everything else it does is great. The photos do seem much better than my previous camera - a Canon A10. Intelligent Auto seems to fairly reliably produce good photos, though oddly prevents you using it and changing even the most basic option such as image size or shape (you can chose 16:9 photos).

I'd really recommend the TZ7 (or the TZ6) for anyone who wants a easily pocketable camera with a great zoom that takes good photos and great videos without any messing around. If you want to tweak the settings, this isn't the camera for you.

My only problem is finding the disk space to store the all the video on - I filled a 16GB card on a 10 day holiday!

National Rail App

I use the National Rail app every day and I've never had a single issue with it - it tells me the platform the train will be on at the same instant that it's announced at the station, it does route planning, it saves data for offline use, it lets me work out connecting trains. It can help you work out things you'd have a really hard time trying to explain to someone on the phone - e.g. My train is running 10 minutes late, and I want to catch a connecting train at X or I can go to Y and connect another slower train - is the train from X on time or should I go to Y? etc, etc...

Either way, I had a Windows Mobile PDA a few years back and could see they were all changing into smartphones. I couldn't imagine why I'd want to pay an 18 month contract to be locked into Windows Mobile. The PDA got the job done, but it was hardly a 'joy' to use - frequent crashes, poorly made, easily damaged screen, stylus etc. I'm not saying the iPhone is perfect (background apps!), but in comparison...

Jailbreaking

I've jailbroken my phone twice, before 3.0 and after, and each time I've gone back to the default for various reasons. Sure, there are useful things - sbsettings the main one I cared about, but upgrading to a new version is a hassle.

Regarding the warranty, I restored my jailbroken phone via iTunes and took it to the Apple Store to be repaired (the mute switch had got sensitive). They replaced it immediately (great, new phone 1 week before end of warranty!) but the guy noticed that I had a battery life percentage still (which sbsettings turns on and survives a clean restore). I claimed no knowledge of it and all was fine!

There are things I'd like added/changed on the phone, but I'm willing to wait till Apple do it. As I would guess are most people...

Well...

I think we knew this would happen, eventually. Everyone could see that Microsoft's "We won't ship any browser at all" policy was just a bit of show.

Is it enough? What if you start a new browser - you're then at a competitive disadvantage until you're in the top 6.

I think it's certainly a step in the right direction, but I think it'll really confuse consumers. How are they meant to choose between browsers? Surely if they used IE before, they'll click the nice IE icon they normally click to get to the internet. Or they'll get confused because they didn't know IE wasn't The Internet. Or they'll click the pretty fox because it looks nicer than the big blue e...

I'm not sure it'll really make much difference - people don't switch from IE because they don't know any better - a ballot screen from Microsoft is not going to change that.

I used to...

I used to go into my old primary school to help teach the kids computers there - it was a lot of fun to do so. I'd love it if I still could go back, but with the current situation, I'm assumed to be a paedophile....

I'm sure this whole environment of suspicion puts teachers off - it only takes one child to make an accusation, and they've probably lost their job for life. I'd like to think that later in life I would do some teaching, but this really puts me off.

Tablet etc

Would be interesting to see a tablet designed around the iPhone OS (or similar) made with mobile components. The iPhone can achieve around 10 hours of fairly light usage with a pretty small battery - a tablet could have a much larger battery and perhaps very good battery life (depending on the screen I guess)...

I'd say they're mostly waiting for flash prices to come down, I'd say a tablet needs at least 64GB of memory - or perhaps we'll see an SD slot like the MacBook Pros have now?

Certainly similar

I'd say theres more similarities there than could be explained as coincidence... Looks like schoolboy plagiarism to me - changing a few words using a thesaurus and some superficial elements.

I agree, written is better

Video is fine for some things, but written is much faster to read. Have both, if you wish, but when I'm at work, I don't have the time to watch a 10 minute video to see if it's got anything I'm interested in - I can scan an article in a few seconds.

Departures

In theory the Departures tab shows exactly when the next train is (what it shows on the screens at the stations), not the timetable. In my experience on the circle line over the last few weeks, it's always completely wrong and doesn't work for random stations (Notting Hill Gate has never worked, yet is listed)... This is a problem for TFL to sort out.

I'm perpetually late to get my train every morning, so knowing whether it's worth running is really useful - if it's accurate!

You can see the same information here: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/livetravelnews/departureboards/

Autoroute

They basically haven't updated Autoroute for years - I tried a recent version a year or so ago, hoping they'd fixed some of it's rubbishness since I last tried it back on Windows 98 and it was identical as far as I could remember - terrible maps, annoying UI, not enough features.

Good riddance.

I grew up playing my way through the maze mini-game in encarta (windows 3.1?) so it's sad that it's going...