.tom

Skypephone 2

I’ve been using the 3 Skypephone since December last year. I’ve been a Skype user for about 4 or 5 years now, and jumped at the chance of having it built in to a mobile phone.

While the original Skypephone (I have the white and blue version) has been a stalwart companion since December, it does have its problems. News of a new Skype handset from 3 has grabbed my attention.

Skype on the ‘old’ Skypephone is great. I can see who is online and call them with its very simple interface. I can also enter into a Skype text chat with my contacts. While this could be great, the phone’s T9 predictive text dictionary does not integrate with the Skype client. Thus if you’re a heavy chat user it quickly becomes deeply frustrating, even when sending an SMS.

If it weren’t for the text input problems, it’s a good phone. So I am very interested to see what improvements the “Skypephone 2” will bring at a software level. Useablility is key.

The 3mobilebuzz blog has some of the emerging details about the new Skypephone, and I suppose we’ll all know come its release on 18th August.

ICUK Web Hosting are amazing

Without the risk of sounding like an advert, I’d like to heartily recommend web hosts ICUK to anyone on the look out for hosting. Over the last few months I’ve had to use their support quite a lot while setting up a content management system: requesting backup restores, confessing to my stupid mistakes when let loose with the root password, asking for advice, etc.

Our website became overloaded one weekend, and their support team even replied to my email on a Sunday night within 10 minutes, and fixed the problem.

Today I managed to completely muck up a database user, causing a site to go down. I don’t normally publicly admit to my mistakes, but I learned a lesson in the process, and won’t be doing again - I won’t go into specifics as it’s a little embarrasing…

Suffice to say that ICUK were so utterly wonderful and courteous in helping to fix the problem, considering it was all my fault, that I’m feeling rather evangelical about them!

This post is a way of saying thanks to Tim and Leslie at ICUK Hosting for helping me out, and a genuine recommendation to people on the lookout for new web hosts.

Blog move

Astute readers will have noticed that the look of my blog has changed somewhat.

I have moved my blog from WordPress to Tumblr, as an experiment. While WordPress will still run most of the blogs I look after, I was after something for this blog that enabled quicker posting and no maintenance. And Tumblr seems to do the job rather nicely.

Some of the images in older posts may have broken in the transition, but hey ho! That’s life..

For my personal blog I’ve decided that I don’t need all of those plugins, and all of those updates. I’m trying less is more to see how it goes. I’m also interested in the social side of Tumblr, so consider this an experiment!

Test Post

Video: The water of Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury

While at Chalice Well Gardens in Glastonbury, back in April, I captured some video of the water that flows out of the well on video. Visit the film on Vimeo to watch it in HD.

The water of Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury from Tom Goskar on Vimeo.