archaeologist, tech geek, cornishman
Shared Items in Google Reader
Jul 16th
I’m just getting into the idea of using the “shared items” feature of Google Reader (Google’s online RSS reader). I’ve been a heavy user of Google Reader right from the start, after using NetNewsWire (which is great) but wanting to read my feeds on a variety of devices (not just my Mac).
Google Reader has, for some time, offered a way for users to share interesting news items. You simply click “share” at the footer of an item, and that article is instantly available for others to see via RSS or your “shared items” page. I hadn’t really thought about the utility of being sociable with articles in my newsfeed, and have usually used Delicious or good old email to share things.
You can see what I have recently found interesting in the sidebar of this blog, or view my shared items via Google. I expect to syndicate a digest of them here as well, making my blog into a bit more of a hub for my online activities.
It will be a fun little experiment, if nothing else..!
Here I am, airing the house on a Sunday morning, when lovely neighbour does this
Jul 12th
I suppose he has to burn what he has, but that’s a lot of smoke!
“To Do” managers on Symbian S60 – where are they?
Jul 10th
iPhone users seem to have it all (except battery life) these days. There’s a slew of ToDo managers available for it, with beautifully designed interfaces, and crucially, for me at least, those that sync with online services such as ToodleDo or Remember the Milk.
Folks have been asking Remember the Milk developers for a Symbian S60 app for years, to no avail.
It took long enough for the perfect Twitter solution (Gravity) to arrive on S60, I wonder what’s up with developing for Symbian? Given the tens of millions of Nokia N95s, N96s, etc, out there in the world, why isn’t the Symbian software market flourishing? Where are the decent ToDo managers for our Nokia smartphones?
Anyway, enough pondering and ranting. If anyone has any good suggestions for a Symbian S60 To Do manager that has over-the-air sync capability, please leave a comment, and I’ll update this post.
The fabled Google OS
Jul 8th
Well, it had to happen eventually. Google have just announced their latest project: Google Chrome OS.
You can’t download it just yet, but we can expect to see products (initially netbooks) running it next year:
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Running on a Linux kernel, the Google Chrome OS will have its own windowing system, optimised to run the Chrome browser, and the browser alone. The web will be the development platform. Google don’t want users to have to worry about viruses, malware and security updates – “It should just work”. Sound familiar?
Expect to see the source code later this year.
Sample photos taken with an LG KC910 Renoir
Jun 17th
In the last few days I’ve taken a lot of photos with my new LG KC910 “Renoir”, and I’m quite taken with the camera.
Here’s a slideshow of photos taken with the phone – this will update automatically via Flickr:
I’ll do some more movie recording soon, and post samples here.
Adjust your sets, the look of my blog ha…
Jun 11th
Adjust your sets, the look of my blog has changed!
I’m using the wonderfully clean and simple P2 theme by Joseph Scott, Matt Thomas, Noel Jackson, and Automattic. I’ll probably get around to customise it a bit, so ’scuse the scaffolding for a while 
The LG KC910 “Renoir”
Jun 11th
Recently, my contract with 3 UK came up for renewal. Since I’m a frequent Skype user, I decided to stay with them and sign up for another 18 months. Despite loving my Nokia E71, a number of phones were offered to me free with my new contract. I plumped for the LG KC910 “Renoir” purely for its abilities as a camera – if I’m heading somewhere for the weekend, I can just take one device with me if I feel like it.
I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now, and, generally, I’m getting along with it.
The camera is just superb. The 8 megapixel camera is as good as any point and shoot, and the movie recording feature works wonderfully – my favourite setting being 640×384 widescreen – the video is crisp and colours well-defined. I’m very happy with the imaging functions, and that’s remarkable given how picky I am.
The video quality isn’t bad in low light either. Here’s a video taken at dusk, overlooking a river, with some bats playing over the surface of the water:
Bats on the River Avon from Tom Goskar on Vimeo.
The rest of the phone, well, after the E71, isn’t much to write home about. The interface is a bit clunky, the browser is passable, and the Java implementation is rubbish. But, it does the job – I can make and receive calls, and stab at the screen to send texts. I would *hate* to use it for Skype chat – the interface is just hideous – but making and receiving Skype calls works well.
I’m having trouble setting up my email too, which is annoying. It receives email fine, but sending an email with a photo attachment simply doesn’t work. This is doubly annoying, as it means that I can’t send photos to Posterous, Twitpic, Flickr, etc via email. I hope that I’ll work out how to fix it, or I’ll have to contact LG to see if they can help.
Still, the camera came with an 8GB MicroSD card which is easily accessible via a flap on the side of the phone, so it’s easy to take it out, pop into an adaptor and transfer to my Mac. I managed to upload a photo to Flickr via the web browser, but it’s a fiddly process.
So what about build quality? It’s quite a chunky phone, made entirely from plastic, which is a stark contrast from the metal solidity of the E71. But it doesn’t creak or bend, and is nonetheless sturdy feeling for a plastic phone. The touchscreen is plastic, so prone to scratches, and is resistive rather than capacitive, so you need to press firmly (but not too hard) to register a ‘click’. You can of course see the touchscreen yield under your finger in the right light.
All round, it’s not bad. If I’m using my E71, I miss the KC910’s camera – but if I’m using the KC910, I miss the elegance of the E71, and it’s great physical keyboard. Any on-screen keyboard is a pile of rubbish compared to the iPhone’s implementation, in my humble opinion, this LG’s included.
Expect more opinions as I play more with the Renoir (especially if I fix the sending email attachments problem).
De-branding my 3UK Nokia E71
Apr 28th
I bought my E71 last year from 3 UK (as a PAYG handset) to replace the first-generation 3Skypephone that I had grown to hate with a passion.
The E71 has been such a wonderful improvement over the Skypephone in just about every way possible. But it hasn’t been without its faults. The camera shutter can randomly take upwards of 5 seconds to take a photo, some photos have a horrible purple hue to them, and I have been unable to get online outside of a 3G area.
As regular readers know, I’ve been very forgiving with the E71’s camera, even taking some of its faults to my advantage. But on hearing about new firmware releases for the E71 that fixes the issue, I was, to be honest hoping that 3UK would do the right thing and update their branded firmware soon afterwards. No such luck.
But still, I wanted those fixes and improvements, and despite waiting for many months, 3 haven’t given them to us. Thankfully, I’m not alone, and “Gerrymoth“, all-round Nokia fan and also on the 3 network, wrote a guide to debranding a 3UK Nokia E71 to a generic “EURO1″ phone.
In a nutshell, all Nokia phones have a product code stored inside them. When you connect your phone to the Nokia Updater, it compares the code in your phone against a list of available updates. If 3UK haven’t provided Nokia with a customised version of the latest firmware, then Nokia Updater tells you that there are no updates available for your model.
You can use freely available software, as described in his guide, to change the code in your phone from a code that identifies it as being tied to a specific operator (like 3) to a code that identifies your handset as being a generic, unlocked phone, in need of a firmware update.
I am now the owner of a generic, unbranded Nokia E71 with the latest firmware update, and much happier I am too! The camera is improved, I can get online in a 2G area, and it would appear that the already excellent battery life is slightly better too.
Time well spent.
[Update] De-branding does not affect using 3’s Skype client, so you can still use your free allocation of Skype messages and minutes on a generic E71 without any problems. I have also been told that this also doesn’t affect video calling. To download the “Skype for 3″ client (only if you’re on 3) go to http://mobile.three.co.uk/sdf/skypeupdate
Testing posterous
Apr 27th
I've just signed up to Posterous to give it a whirl, and I'm hoping that this text will also end up on my blog. Fingers crossed.
Why I’m creating my own URL shortening service
Apr 16th
I’ve long been concerned about the proliferation of “short URLs”, whose use has gathered great momentum, especially in the light of microblogging services like Twitter.
Short URLs, such as those generated by TinyURL are convenient, especially when you only have 140 characters to get your message across. You can turn a huge URL, many hundreds of characters long, into just 25 characters or even less. Great!
Besides TinyURL, a proliferation of URL shortening services are available. Some that come to mind are bit.ly, tr.im, ow.ly, is.gd, to name but a few. And short URLs themselves are gaining use outside of microblogging services. You will see them in blog posts, emails (to get around the line-wrap-broken-link problem) and even on the printed page (see British Archaeology magazine).
But what happens if a short URL service were to disappear? The company or individual that runs it pulls the plug, and suddenly the web is littered with thousands or even millions of dead links. That would be bad. And it will happen.
I see the state of short URLs as a delicate balance. On one side, we have the originating (possibly long) URL. On the opposite side, we have the short URL. Hopefully, the original URL will work for many years. When I migrated the Wessex Archaeology website to a new CMS last year, I didn’t break any links. Some of those links have worked for more than 7 years, and I hope that they will still work in another 7. WA can make sure that they stay the same (and they will). But what happens to any shortened links that point to those pages? We can’t guarantee that same amount of longevity.
What happens to the TinyURL links in the printed magazine British Archaeology if TinyURL goes bust? They’ll break. But BA is available in many libraries and people do look at back issues. It would be nice if they could see the web pages mentioned in the articles, but there’s no guarantee that they will work because there are two parts of the equation that could go wrong. One, is that TinyURL disappears, the second is that the originating page is deleted or changes its URL without redirecting.
For short URLs that I create I would like my own control over at least part of that equation.
I’ve often heard the argument that the use of short URL services are only meant to be temporary, for links that are “here and now”. But how often have you come across something old, but still relevant, when doing a web search? For me, that’s a fairly frequent occurrence. Who’s to say what is quick and temporary today, isn’t actually really quite relevant and useful in the future?
By running my own URL shortening service, I won’t change what is being used elsewhere, but at least people looking at my Twitter stream, or wherever those tweets are syndicated to (this blog, for example), have a better chance of seeing what I’m linking to in a few years time. Especially if I plan to run my personal URL shortening system for as long as I’m alive and capable.
I suppose that one of the driving forces behind this is my training as an archaeologist (we don’t link throwing things away, generally, and that includes data). I can’t archive the pages I link to, but at least I can give folks in the future a better chance of finding what I’m linking to.
I have a nice short URL thanks to the .eu top level domain, so I will experiment with some different systems to see which works out – the simpler and easier to maintain the better. It’s got to last a long time…
[Edit] When I say “creating my own URL shortening service” I should clarify that I’m not programming one from scratch, but taking an existing GPL/Open Source URL shortener and modifying it for my needs (if it needs modifying)! I will probably have a public and private version, with varying functionality. Some good ideas are already flowing in through Twitter about identifying canonical URLs, which is great
