Richard’s Blog-o-Shite

{shakes fist}

The other day, I turned up in Birmingham and realised I hadn’t packed a tie, so I needed to wander off and find one. Not knowing the area, but having found a likely shopping centre on Google Maps, I decided to fire up Nokia Maps on my Nokia N95-8GB and use its built-in GPS to give myself walking directions. I had been using this application quite a lot since the start of the year whilst wandering around Birmingham staying in different hotels and having to find my way on foot to a Client’s offices.

So I was disappointed to realise that my subscription to the navigation element of the app. had expired, so I reluctantly renewed it at the cost – whatever it was – and used it to find me way there and back.

Now I prefer the Google Mobile Maps application to Nokia Maps, but that only had driving directions and public transport … except that a couple of days after renewing, I saw an article which mentioned the directions on foot facility in the latest version of the software. Now downloaded to my mobile and yes, indeed it does have foot navigation. And it’s free…

Bugger!

I have resisted buying a BlackBerry – or strictly speaking having one bought for me by the company I work for – for the following reasons:

1. If I want a phone, I’ll use a phone – the smaller the better, so it fits in my pocket.
2. If I want to check or send an e-mail then I’ll fire up a laptop and do it on proper hardware.
3. I don’t want “Sent from my BlackBerry” added to my e-mails!
4. My Nokia N95 8GB does everything I want: camera, phone, texts, e-mail (I have a special e-mail account set up to be checked on it) and satellite navigation using Co-Pilot software.

But when BlackBerry introduced their Storm, I thought “at last, a BlackBerry that might fit my requirements!” So I spoke to the MD and he said I should go right ahead and get a BlackBerry. I dug a little deeper and found that Orange - who we are switching to – don’t offer the Storm: it’s Vodafone only. And besides, the BlackBerry Storm on Vodafone may not work with Exchange (or it possibly might … for an extra £26 a month on top of your price plan!).

Now as our company e-mail runs on Microsoft Exchange, that rather means that the Storm is as useful to me as a chocolate teapot. And it was slowly becoming apparent that being able to access my e-mail or be advised that e-mail has arrived on the go without needing to fire up a laptop with the Orange 3G dongle was becoming more and more of a requirement, it seemed I was stuffed.

So back to square one. I thought. I asked the IT bods to set up mail forwarding for me, so that incoming e-mail would go to my Exchange account and a copy would be forwarded to an e-mail address I had set up especially for this. I had set up my Nokia N95 8GB to fetch e-mails every 30 minutes and it worked.

Except that replies would appear to come from my own address and wouldn’t be properly synchronised with my work e-mails. So I Googled for “Nokia S60 exchange mail” and found this link to Nokia’s Mail For Exchange.

Downloaded, sent to the phone, installed and set up in a few minutes. Then a few more minutes tweaking the settings so it worked and voila! My Outlook Calendar and Exchange e-mails were sync’d to my phone. I’ve set it up to be connected during my working hours (8.00am to 6.00pm Monday to Friday) and then outside those working periods every four hours – I could have made it more frequently, but one last check at 10.00pm and then once every four hours over the weekend is more than adequate.

And It Just Works!

So I now have my Nokia doing what I want as I want it done.

And the award for Most Pointless Text Message today goes to Vodafone:

“We continually invest in our network to provide a reliable service & you’ll be pleased to know we’ve now improved coverage in an area where you use your mobile.”

Excellent! Which area is that? Given that I live in South-East London during the week, work in South London, visit clients in Central London twice a week and travel home to Norfolk each weekend, wouldn’t it have been an idea to tell me which area had been improved?

I just received a delivery receipt for an e-mail and at the end of the message, before the sender’s contact details it reads “Sent from my Blackberry”.

Who gives a toss?

Maybe I should end all my e-mails with “sent from a computer using Outlook”. Or maybe I should end all my letters with “signed with a ballpoint pen and sent in the post”.

Why am I so disgruntled*? Well apparently my new job brings with it a Blackberry of some sort, so presumably I’ll be telling everyone and their cat that I’m contactable this way all the time too…

So with the move to London happening soon, one of the items I had to sort out was my Internet access. Here at home – working for myself from my office on the side of the house – I have a business broadband package from Demon with fixed IP addresses for all the computers and printers. When I’m out and about, I usually use a 3G USB dongle from Vodafone which is more often that not either a regular 38Kbps service or on occasion nothing more than a pretty white plastic thing for decoration only. Where there is good coverage, it’s supposed to deliver 1.8Mbps with the promise of 7.2Mbps in parts of London though annoyingly Rotherhithe doesn’t appear to be in the Promised Land but just outside – I’ll check when I get there.

So anyway, with 5GB/month I thought that might make it easier: no need to get a phone line and a broadband package, just use my allowance for a change.

But Mrs RHM then suggested I should get a webcam for my laptop so I could help the kids with their homework if need be and also keep in touch with her. Fine, I thought, though alarm bells started ringing: she uses our venerable iMac while the rest of the family have PCs.

So what’s the problem with the iMac?

Well the iMac and OSX Leopard has iChat which promotes its video chat features. To use it to its best, you need to have a .Mac account – which is expensive for what you actually get which is why I abandoned my .Mac account after a couple of years – as does your friend and .Mac is pretty much a waste of time for anyone on a PC. “Never fear”, says Apple, “you can always link up with AIM.” What?

“iChat works with AIM, the largest instant messaging community in the U.S. You and your buddies can be either AIM or .Mac users. Text, audio, and video chat whether your buddies use a Mac or a PC. Sign in with your AIM account, and all your buddies appear in your iChat buddy list.”

Great! No-one in the UK – OK, I exaggerate a tad – uses AIM: AOL Instant Messenger. The client software seems to have issues here on this PC, by the way, which comes as no surprise to me having once used AOL software for testing purposes. Go on: ask any of your connected friends what they use for instant messaging and they’ll say “MSN” (or “Windows Live Messenger“, to give it its proper name).

You can, of course, download the Mac Messenger client, but the ‘usual’ home user version does not support video messaging. Not really a surprise as I think Microsoft doesn’t really bother with Mac users as they’re lost causes as far as “the Beast of Redmond” appears to be concerned.

Maybe this is another reason not to get a Mac? Until Apple comes up with an instant messaging client that supports video messaging with Windows Live users, you’d otherwise be partially cutting yourself off from the majority of computer users, at least here in the UK.

I can’t recall who it was who said that the time to bring in oppressive legislation to clamp down on individuals’ civil liberties was when there was any fear and uncertainty of the kind that the Government continues to spread as part of the so-called War on Terror (itself started in response to US foreign policy and their illegal invasion of Iraq, which we decided to join in as the 51st State…).

We are already one of the most watched countries in the world, in terms of CCTV cameras per capita, so perhaps the news that “Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK” shouldn’t really come as any surprise.

Whilst they’re more than welcome to plough through the Spam I receive – more than 1,300 yesterday alone – and take action against the spammers, they can fuck right off if they think I’d be happy for some shiny-suited, job-protected twat in some local authority or agency to be able to read my private messages to friends and family.

It’s none of your business!

And this piece by AC Grayling in the Guardian pretty much sums up my thoughts about those who trot out the trite “if you’ve done nothing wrong…” nonsense, although far more eloquently than I could.

I had a journey to go on today: Google Maps reckon the outward leg should have taken 3 hours. The Garmin i3 (aka Psycho SatNav Bitch as ’she’ tends to taunt me with unrealistic targets, even the way I drive) reckoned around 2¼ hours. My Nokia N95-8GB with Nokia Maps, on the other hand, reckoned 4 hours. Something of a disagreement.

In the end, the combination of the time of day, the occasional spray and muck left over from gritting (even though it hadn’t been icy) and the way I drive meant it took 2½ hours.

The routes themselves were almost identical, the only difference being the route in or around Grantham.

And the other differences were:

1. the Garmin had the speed camera database to warn me of “accident blackspots”;
2. as the Nokia was on the cradle and connected to the car kit, every spoken direction muted the radio which is a tad annoying when the voice prompts get a little frantic; and
3. the Nokia’s display also shows the current speed (good) and the time left rather than the ETA (bad).

Looks like there’s still no ideal solution for me, but the Saga-driver Nokia is closest as it’s so nicely contained within the phone.

The additional Kingston 1GB DDR2 RAM SODIMM arrived by courier today from Dabs.com.

I was slightly worried about taking a screwdriver to a day-old laptop and removing the keyboard to get at the RAM slots, but it was fettled within a few minutes, re-booted and is now boasting 1.49GB.

I fettled Firefox last night as well. Then had to install some web server extensions and my FTP program of choice with the FTP site profiles I use.

Now it’s a case of deciding how many and which project management software programs to install.

I’ve also been playing with Microsoft Office Groove as a potential replacement for the good old Offline Files. And the new laptop meant downloading some updated software from Vodafone for their 3G datacard, which looks like an improvement over the old software.

Only problems so far have been the quality of the sound from the stereo speakers – my old Dell Insipron 8100 is much better in this regard – and the mobile ‘drumming’ from the datacard when its communication is picked up by the microphone/speakers.

The position of the vents is better than my old Portégé so you don’t get a toasted forearm when you’re holding it in Tablet mode. Oh and the 5-in-1 Bridge Media slot (which supports SD™ Card, Memory Stick®, Memory Stick Pro™, xD-Picture Card™, SD™ IO Card) is a nice feature. It’s just a pity that it doesn’t support Memory Stick Pro DUO™ cards as I’ve just bought one for my daughter’s new Sony digital camera.

Well played!

Calendars.

A necessary evil these days.  I can’t be bothered with paper ones in the same way that diaries never worked for me.

No, I prefer my good old Outlook Calendar. In the latest version, it can also be set up to synchonise with a webdav-enabled web server which is nice, except that you can’t then simply go to the URL and view your calendar online, for instance in an Internet café or on your mobile. No, the .ics file can be downloaded and imported by applications like Entourage or Outlook, but you can’t really read or amend it when you’re out and about.

When I can be bothered, I can synchronise my Nokia phone with Outlook when I’m back in the office, just as I can my iPAQ, so that’s useful, but it means I have to be around the base PC and have to manage the connection.

I can also export my Outlook calendar and import it into Google Calendar. That’s all very well and good but it’s a slow, manual process.

No, what I want is a calendar that I can amend at my desk. It’s automatically published at regular intervals to the web where I can choose to keep all or part of it private or restrict who can view it online. I want to be able to add to it or change it on my mobile with any changes being made to all the versions automatically the moment I’m in range, either of a decent high speed GPRS link or a 3G one. And I want to be able to update it through any web browser and have those changes propagated immediately to the PC and phone versions.

Surely that’s do-able?