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Its got 512 mb of Ram a 1Ghz Processor and a 30Gb harddrive all of which are a bit outdated but for the price (£300) its not too bad for the size - just a bit bigger than the Nokia 770 internet tablet that it’ll be replacing for me.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)

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?

Update:- I’ve just noticed that the iPlayer Beta is now available here and its looking amazing and the stuff below still applies, but to be honest I don’t want to update it all.

I’ve just heard through the grapevine of rss that the iPlayer will be getting a version 2.0 in beta form very soon which will run alongside the normal version for a while and then replace it eventually. The new version attends to one main feature - radio. The BBC Radio ‘Listen Again’ or iPlayer radio will be fused with the iPlayer potentially doubling iPlayer visitor numbers apparently. Other changes include:

•  Radio fused with iPlayer
• ‘Last Played’ - shows your most recently played items for you to go back to and continue watching if you haven’t finished it.
• Full Schedule showing all of the schedule for the BBC (presumably) which then indicates what is available on iPlayer
• ‘Yesterday on TV’ - pretty self explanatory, basically for those people wanting to see what they missed last night and catch up.
• Rss Feeds - not sure why you’d want these, perhaps so you cant watch something as soon as its available or to keep in touch with a particular program
• Bigger playback window for watching in normal mode
• Better radio quality - presumably higher bit rates

Source

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.