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?

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)

As some people may know Firefox is just the best browser on earth and right now they are trying to get a world record – the most downloads in one day so therefore please help set the record!
So far there have been 1,904,770 downloads and it runs until 6pm tomorrow (18/06/08).
On top of that Firefox 3 is just brilliant, adding extra features on top of the old versions and a faster speed apparently.
Download it here:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

And for my next suggestion, I recommend ‘Synergy’, its brilliant – its able to connect two networked computers and have them both be controlled by the keyboard and mouse of one of them – the server. It even works across platforms – Windows, Mac and Linux.
Currently I have it on my desktop and laptop but it’s also recommended to have it in a home cinema setup so a laptop can control the media centre. It’s a bit hard to set up and threw back a few errors but eventually its working. You can get that here

A little while ago I made this blog - here

And I can confirm that I have managed to make it! - demonstrated below, I had to have the lights off as it works by finding fingers locations based on light and the way it shows when touching the glass. The video is low quality as it was filmed on my normal camera (Kodak V1003) because my camcorder was in the box being used for the whole thingymabob.

Thanks to the creater at: http://ssandler.wordpress.com/mtmini/

To start off I’m going to apologise for not being around for a while – I’ve been busy leaving school, not in the naughty truant way but in the normal it was my last week of school way and me being the busy person I am was dealing with multiple things, yearbook, a playground project I’m working on (redesigning one of the local playgrounds) and sorting out my last ‘Silver Surfers’ lesson (teaching local OAP’s how to use computers) but that should mean that now I’m able to have a bit more time … oh wait – no, I still have exams, silly me
Onto the blog - Cryptic title, not so cryptic Blog – my question is, how are tutorial books and dvd’s still around when the internet is just full of free tutorials, videos and guides that do a perfectly good job (If not better) of showing people how to do stuff – including the tutorial section of IT Pro!
I’ve recently got into After Effects and Photoshop and I don’t think I’d ever dream of going out and buying a guide book like ‘Photoshop for dummies’ just because of the multiple sites dedicated to the purpose offering step by step tutorials often on more tasks than a book, they also have huge forums of suggestions and help for specific problems. Along with that there are some fantastic videos taking you through every step you need to do – in real time, rather than reading a little book and looking at small black and white pictures.

The website that got me into it was http://www.videocopilot.net - this guy is brilliant and has made loads of tutorials guiding you through the basics of After Effects through to the expert uses of the program as well as plug ins and he has even developed packages of extras that can be bought – which are a much better use of the money that you’d normally spend on tutorial books because they actually give you something in return, along with all that you can download the project files which are used in the tutorials (I know you can sometimes get them with books but come on – these are free!)

Basically – I think that the tutorial book is going to be a dying trend unless something changes and for some reason the internet is turned off or something.

When I first saw this I thought that it wouldn’t be that easy to make or that it would require some parts which I just wouldn’t have but the reality is that I am SO going to be able to make it and hopefully, it will actually work.
It looks cool just from the perspective of being able to do what we’ve seen in those Youtube videos of multitouch screens for ages.
I would highly recommend visiting here and checking out the video below, I will be trying to make it and will hopefully succeed. Wish me luck!

Heres something entertaining to look at whilst perusing the internet. I was just editing a photo in Photoshop for a friend (taking out an ex) when I remembered an article I read a while ago about someone who had used Photoshop to recreate an image of the cartoon – Jessica Rabbit in order to make her look like a real person. The person used source images mainly of Angelina Jolie and just done an amazing job in making it look realistic especially the hair which I find incredible considering I never find it easy to work with.

Anyway, theres also a video of the whole process and a high resolution image too on ‘Pixeloo’:

http://pixeloo.blogspot.com/2008/04/jessica-rabbit-untooned.html

http://pixeloo.blogspot.com/2008/04/jessica-rabbit-process.html

I am a software addict – I love what software can do, the different tasks that it can perform and the completly wide array of those available, for photo editing there are loads, from the free Gimp and Paint.net to the Fireworks and Photoshop, they are all brilliant and so adaptable, with the plug-ins available for Photoshop its difficult to imagine what it can’t do in the field of photo editing.
Video editing is just the same with the preinstalled – Windows Movie Maker to the Sony Vegas Pro, Cyberlink Powerdirector, MAGIX Movie Edit Pro and finally Adobe After Effects (and Final Cut Pro). I’ve recently been following through loads of the tutorials done by a guy called ‘Andrew Kramer’ on http://www.videocopilot.net/ and I must say that they are brilliant, I’ve found them to be the first place for anyone to look to learn Adobe After Effects – they are fantastic and cover loads of different things related to applying effects to footage but also creating videos without pre-existing footage.
I do of course use web browsers the most followed closely by office software but I’ve also found that I’m using more and more pieces of software – video editing, photo editing, web design, flash animation and so on – there is just an endless supply of time consuming activities which can be made fun. Sure they can also be used in companies whereby I dare say they’d become less fun to use but I find them very amusing to use.

So – anyone got any recommendations for software for me to get addicted to?