Ok ok, I’m sorry, I know! – its bad of me to be late again in my duties but I’m settling into a new lifestyle here!

I shall tell the tale of a new gadget in the household of geek, Last week whilst away on business (that’s right – check me out going away on business!) my phone (e65) decided that it didn’t want to let anyone else hear my voice and the microphone stopped working, the day after it still wasn’t working but then decided in the evening to revive itself and come back to life, however after that I thought that I couldn’t really trust it as a microphone is a rather vital part of a mobile phone in emergencies.

Therefore I purchased a Nokia N95 8gb which is a bit of a large expenditure I agree but I’d like to be safe in the knowledge that my phone works but also I loved the gadgety goodness of the phone – the accelerometer in it is awesome with the availability of so many applications that make the most of it – the LightSabre app which does what it says on the tin, Moving ball app which is just a ball that moves depending on the rotation of the device and Waterbox which just simulates water when the phone is moved – all very simple yet fun applications which add to the novelty of the phone.

I’ve found it so much faster to use than my e65, writing messages, going to the phone book and so on is just much better on it – and it can handle more applications running at the same time due to more ram and also the way it handles the applications to make sure that there is always ram available.

I’m looking forward to the ‘bysamir’ and ‘Aikonlab’ websites being available again soon hopefully as at the moment they’re offline or being modified and have a goldmine of great applications so I’m sure I’ll update you on those soon.

Sorry!, I hvent been around as much as usual for a while but my excuse is going to be that I started work last week and therefore have been a bit busy etc but normal service should be resumed starting with my report on my new purchases!- Today I took the plunge and bought a new monitor (22” of pixel lovliness) and a new swivel chair for my study – this counts towards my dose of new gadgets for this month and I must say they are brilliant. There is a great feeling that comes with buying some new gadgets / equipment that cannot be replicated. After they’re installed you can just look at them and think ‘I like this’ which is what I’m doing right now.

I’ve set my new monitor up next to my old 17” Dell as a dual monitor set-up and its brilliant, having mail and media on the smaller and browsing/working on the mahoosive one is just a joy. My new monitor is made by ‘Belnea’ who I must admit I’ve never heard of!, but it was cheaper than others that I saw in other IT shops in the area at £139.99.

I shall try to resume usual service and bring some great news about developing tech soon! (I’m keeping an eye on Googles ‘Android’ Mobile phone open source operating system)

My first week with my OQO has been brilliant, to start off I shall list what I’ve installed on it so far:
Firefox – it’s a must for me
Office 03 – Outlook, word,
Office 07 – Just OneNote for now so that it isn’t slowed down a lot by the whole of 07
Popcap – Bejeweled & Bookworm – they both work brilliantly with the active digitiser as you can drag along some parts of the games
VNC – Fantastic for controlling media centre pc and also normal pc as well as checking what the upstairs computer is up to whilst you’re downstairs
Synergy – To have my PC’s mouse and keyboard control the OQO by moving the mouse to the right of my pc screen (Just like my laptop does when moved to the left)
Windows Live Messenger – again it’s a must for me, used on all devices
VLC – rather good for playing videos, If I find that media player cant handle some videos I intend on trying this to see if it gets along better.
Nokia PC Suite – to take advantage of the integrated Bluetooth with my phone.
DivX – I watch quite a few DivX videos.
And finally AVG – my antivirus of choice.

Like I say the games run rather well on the device and don’t seem to run sluggishly. Typing on the thumb board is relatively good – I’ve more than managed to have many conversations on live messenger using it comfortably and so I’m happy that it can be a good sofa surfing device for me.

I should also be fair and note a couple of downsides I’ve noticed – the heat, yes as my initial research showed from surfing the internet and reading forums, the device does get rather hot, which isn’t ideal but I think I could cope with it, its not going to burn the skin off my hands but it just gets a bit hot is all. Secondly the noise, it doesn’t annoy me so much as it just makes my mum say ‘is that thing going to take off?!’ which is a fair point, it does make a bit of noise – or rather the fan does. But I’m ok with that – it is a full computer in the size of a couple of phones tagged together.

I am really liking my OQO and will soon have my Nokia 770 up on the mighty ebay I think.

Chrome

I’d also like to talk about this small bit of news, as soon as I heard ‘Chrome’ – the Google Browser was out I instantly downloaded it. I was rather impressed – it loaded quickly and seemed to have some great functionality, the home screen with your most used websites was fantastic, however, I found that part of the comment system used by Facebook didn’t work on it (specifically the ability to comment on someone’s status – this has been adjusted by the looks of it and now works). More importantly on my OQO I found that it crashed the whole device on a number of occasions, sadly I just can’t be having that so it therefore found its way back off the device, its still on my pc and laptop to keep trying though. For the first incarnation of the browser I think it’s been very successful and could be giving other browsers a run for their money.

Yesterday Expansys had a deal on the OQO Model 01+ whilst the model is a few years old I couldn’t resist on the cheap price of £300 for a umpc, it arrived this morning and I’ve been installing all my usual applications on it and I must say that I love it. I’ll state the down sides first - the heat is a bit high, it gets rather hot to hold, but when its on the dock I dont really mind that. Its not running xp tablet edition meaning a few missing features but the in built keyboard should be better than handwriting recognition in theory for me (any good free handwriting recognition apps out there??), It has an active digitiser instead of a touch screen which is a bit awekward and annoying but it saves me getting loads of finger prints on it.

Its got 512 mb of Ram a 1Ghz Processor and a 30Gb harddrive all of which are a bit outdated but for the price (£300) its not too bad for the size - just a bit bigger than the Nokia 770 internet tablet that it’ll be replacing for me. I think its going to be a great icebreaker type device with people asking what the hell it is due to its small form factor and appearance of full xp which is brilliant and fun to use. Its surprisingly snappy too (that is until I get all my applications onto it knowing my luck)

The pro’s definately include using VNC with it - controlling my media centre tv / pc combination was brilliant and will make controlling it a lot easier, and checking on the status of the upstairs computers whilst downstairs a lot easier and fun. Browsing the internet on it is fun too - its able to run flash etc (however youtube videos have a bit of lag which I’m sure wouldnt affect watching small clips too much) this means its got the full internet (none of that reduced rubbish I had to put up with on the internet tablet) and as its xp it’ll have pleanty of available applications for it along with normal office suites.

In conclusion - I love it!

Any questions?

I’ve recently started learning to drive and after only 8 hours of lessons I still don’t love it, don’t get me wrong its going to be brilliant once I’ve passed but I just don’t enjoy it as much as perhaps I should so its got me thinking – at what point in the future are we expecting cars to drive without the aid or hindrance of humans like in I-Robot.

I know that you can already get the system which parks for you but does this mean we are not that far from a completely automatic car? – just imagine it – potentially less traffic jams due to cars being smart enough to figure out where to go and avoid them, faster safe speeds and perhaps less accidents – if any at all?

Either way it would be a bit easier for me if cars drove on their own.

Yesterday (admittedly almost today as it was at 11pm-ish) I updated my Nokia E65 to the latest firmware version, now this was released ages ago but I never installed it on my phone as I didn’t see the need and I didn’t want to risk loosing all of my applications.
So I went through the process of backing everything up through the Nokia PC Suite which looks very nice now, this took quite a while but I found afterwards that it also backed up my applications which I was pleased about. I then went about installing the latest firmware which worried me a lot as I was using a slightly dodgy cable which concerned me as it could have corrupted the data or lost the link at any time which could have bricked the phone if I’m right?. Gladly it didn’t and  I now have the latest version of the firmware on my phone.

And … I’m amazed! – it seems to run much quicker and crash less now, every time I’d go into my phonebook previously I had to exit out of it again after going into a contacts details as the contacts just froze, This problem seems to have gone now. The main menu also appears to load faster.

Whilst upgrading firmware normally doesn’t worry me, it did on this occasion but not anymore, I’m pleased I did it though as its great. Now I’ve just got to get a modern phone so that I’m not installing firmware updates that are months and months old. Once I start my full time apprenticeship I’ll get a contract and therefore a nice new shiny phone (I’m thinking of the N65 8gb, E66 or E71 depending on cost)

According to a recent study (don’t you just love that phrase?) blog readership is going up in the UK with 1 in every 84 web sites visited being a blog, at first this didn’t sound a lot but this is apparently 101% more than the figures 3 years ago, which is pretty darn amazing.

Source: http://www.techdigest.tv/2008/07/uk_visits_to_bl.html

Now of course this increase in blog readership could mean there is even more great information for people to look at and research into, however on the other hand it could just mean that silly, funny and entertaining blogs like http://icanhascheezburger.com/ and http://ihasahotdog.com/ are on the up.

Some people are quite worried about this increase in the number of people able to express their opinions so widely so quickly however I think its great! – whilst I understand that a real social life is important just think of the increased socialisation that now occurs thanks to blogs and forums with people being united through a particular interest for example.

Heres something little to keep you entertained however  I will warn you that it is addictive and may have you playing it for about an hour or more:
Fantastic Contraption

I’ve seen the Optimus Maximus keyboard floating around the internet for a while - its a keyboard with individual L.E.D displays in each of the keys which can be customised to show different shortcuts and pc stats and so on. The Maximus is the full size mega expensive version which at a quick google seems to be about £790  wheras the ‘Pultiuis’ is the mini size similar to that of a number keypad and looks much more useful to me - with 15 keys all customisable it fulfils the need that large size just goes over the top on, however this will also probably be expensive.

Whats the maximum you’d pay for some gadgetry? which to be honest shouldnt cost that much - you can get keyboards for under a fiver in some places.

Over the past two days (Friday and Saturday) I haven’t been on my computers very much,. On Friday it was my 6th form Valedictory (which I scrubbed up for, put a suit on and gelled up my hair) and yesterday I was out for a friends birthday however I get back today and find that the internet – it’s missed me.
 Google Reader has over 600 unread articles waiting for me (I’m sure other people have more however) and Facebook seems to have missed me even more having sent me loads of emails to inform me of new goings on.
Do you think I perhaps have a little too much of my life on the internet? – I don’t, I think its great that I’m able to be spoon-fed so much information and keep up to date with stuff other people are doing on Facebook, isn’t technology wonderful!
One day I might actually use my phone to get onto both those services and they won’t miss me as much as they have done over the last few days.

Do you find that if you step out of the internet bubble for a little while, it misses you so much?

I saw this video a while back and its just popped up again in the good old rss but I still think its brilliant. The EEE Pc is charming me over evermore with its ability to run xp now and this touchscreen mod which would mean not having to use the tiny little touchpad. I was also looking into an oqo umpc but the eee with the touchscreen mod is cheaper and newer than the oqo model 1. Has anyone had any experiences with the EEE Pc – is it really that usable?