Mumblings

I was just Jaiku'ing with Whatleydude about the fact that I've not blogged in a while, and I suddenly realised that today is my Voxiversary! Yep, I've been on here one whole year today.

I just wish I'd found time (and inspiration) to blog a bit more. After all, I'm equipped for the job with my N95 and almost constant net availability. Fact is, work is stupidly hectic right now, and has been for a few weeks now. I've slipped into a dull routine of the same journey every day, seeing the same people, sitting at the same desk, seeing the same wall out the window, routinely being too tired when I get home to do anything and doing the routine stuff at the weekends.

Friday next week sees us heading off for a holiday in Cornwall again though, so hopefully I'll come back freshly inspired. Dare I say 'Watch this space'?

Here's to the next year of Voxing...

I'd been led to believe that RouteMaster buses were no longer in service. Imagine my delight after missing my bus today when this trundled into view!

It was a real pleasure to jog along behind and jump on board, and then alight the same way a short distance later, enabling me to catch the bus I'd missed previously. Very convenient.

Apologies to any amputees out there, but just what's going on here!

£10 each seems clear enough, though I can't see them having many takers. $15 for two sounds like a reasonable price. But then to have a picture of three boots, all in a different colour just seems manic to me!

Despite appearances to the contrary, I'm still here - just extremely busy I'm afraid.

We've been through a hectic upgrade period at work, and have just hit the post-upgrade lull. Consequently, we're now using the time constructively to get detailed test scripts prepared in time for the next 'busy' period at the end of March.

This means we're actually as busy as we ever were!

They say there's no rest for the wicked, and I think we're proving it right now!!

Yep, another N95 post.

Tired of waiting for T-Mobile to come out with the latest firmware (see my recent post) I decided to take the plunge and debrand my N95. Thanks to an article by adonisdemon here, I found following the instructions quite straightforward, though I did hit a couple of minor problems.

Based on his instructions, I followed a fairly simple step plan, as follows:

1. Note which applications I use/have installed. Make sure I know where the install kits are, or can be located. Make a note of the T-Mobile VoiceMail number - this setting will be lost! (See Tools/Call Mailbox)
2. Backup the phone, using PC Suite. This is with the old Product Code, just in case.
3. Install the NSS software.
4. Connect the phone to the PC (note: close down PC Suite or NSS won't find the phone)
5. Update the Product Code using NSS (I opted for EURO 1 SAND - 0534851)
6. Power Cycle the phone Off/On - I had to do this as I was having problems backing up the phone contents at this point.
7. Backup the phone contents again using PC Suite, Do it twice just in case. This backup has the new Product Code.
   
8. Offer up a libation to the gods, and Upgrade the Firmware...
9. Restore the backup from point 7. As long as the restore works, delete or otherwise lose the backup from point 2 - it will 'brick' the phone if you try to restore this onto the new Product Code.
   
10. Add in the Voicemail Number again.

At this point, I was assured all would be well with my world. And it would have been, but most of my applications were now missing. Never mind, I had point 1 above to fall back on. It's an unpleasant task, but at least it gave me a chance to review all the stuff I'd installed. Do I really use it all? Are there any alternatives?

I decided to bite the bullet and give Shozu another go, as I'd had some comms problems earlier today with Share Online 3.0. My previous attempts at using Shozu were abortive, as mixed with Vox Mobile, the two conspired to kill video recording on my phone. I've come to the conclusion that T-Mobile must have been the culprit, as initial tests show that Shozu and Vox Mobile can live happily together on this firmware. In fact, they can both also live happily with the Location Tagger beta running as well! So far, I've tested Shozu uploads to Vox and Flickr (geotagged, yay!!), and I've uploaded a test video stream to Qik. I've not reloaded Kyte at this point - for my purposes I see no need at the moment with Qik installed, though that may change later.

All my other apps are now installed, all my settings for contacts, email accounts etc have all been retained, and with the Demand Paging in this version of the firmware, it's fun seeing how many I can run concurrently now. Something I only dreamed of with the T-Mobile firmware in place.

Oh, and the phone can still make phone calls! :-)

Differences I've noticed?
 

• The Web'nWalk button is now Music (I've changed it back to 'Web'). I've lost the T-Mobile home page, and starting the web now leads to a bookmarks page.
• Sliding out the music controls doesn't bring up that hideous circular menu thing - it just rotates the screen display.
• There are some additional options on the menus - including an N-Gage application that I've not fired up yet, and others that look equally intruiging.

All in all, it's only early days, but I'm a pretty happy bunny right now, and only wish I'd taken the plunge earlier!

I've been waiting for something like the Location Tagger (LT) app from Nokia Beta Labs for my N95 for some while now. This allows photos to be automatically geo-tagged with location information, straight in the EXIF data. Nokia say it will become part of the normal functionality in future, but has been released as a stand-alone beta app for now.

In a search for similar functionality, I'd tried Showzu previously, but that killed the video functionality on the phone for me. I'd tried a couple of other applications that purport to be able to geotag my photos too, but they either plain didn't work for me, or were too fiddly to get results, or (shock horror), I'd have had to pay for them!

So along comes Location Tagger from Nokia to answer all my prayers. Except. This app needs to run in the background, checking on GPS position to add to any photos that are taken. Now, my N95 might be a bit 'special', but I have a particular problem with this. As soon as I open my camera app, all other apps close: Music, Jaiku, Messaging, whatever is running just disappears from the Task Bar never to be seen again. Same with Location Tagger. It's running, I open up the camera screen, the LT icon appears on the camera screen. I take a picture and one of two things happen: either the picture is saved, but without the geotags and the Location Tagger closes, or the screen goes blank, the camera app itself closes and I lose the photo completely.

I had a particularly disappointing weekend, as I'd hoped to get some decent geotagged photos during a drive out to Kent.

Now Nokia would say they have the answer to all this, in the form of the latest firmware for the N95, which allows for On-Demand Paging (ODP). This would allow multiple apps to share the available RAM, thus allowing concurrency and true multi-tasking among the  apps.

For my sins, I have a phone on a T-Mobile contract, and I've written before about how they drag their heels in making available the branded version of the firmware, but this time it's serious! OK, I waited a few weeks for Assisted GPS, but it's been a couple of months now, and still no sign of the ODP firmware upgrade for us T-Mob customers!

I'm rapidly being led to the conclusion that the only option open to me is to invalidate the warranty on the phone, and de-brand it in order to get the upgrade. Not an option I'd take lightly as I still have some 9 months to go on the warranty.

I've been urged by others who have taken this drastic step to do it, it won't hurt, and I'll be forever grateful that I did it. But I have this reputation with computers in general: as soon as I depart from the norm, things break. My greatest fear is that I'll 'brick' the phone during the process, or forget to copy down a vital setting and lose access to Web'n'Walk, or VoiceMail, or SMS or any of a myriad other settings that are hidden in the depths of the phone. If anyone has taken this step with a T-Mob branded phone and has a 'dummies guide' handy then I'd certainly appreciate any pointers, but in the meantime:

C'MON T-MOBILE, STOP DRAGGING YOUR HEELS, AND RELEASE THE FIRMWARE UPGRADE!!!

I've been neglecting you lately. Not on purpose, you understand, but life has been a bit 'busy'. Work has been totally manic, with whizzing deadlines and impossible workloads and timescales. Personal life has been hectic - I can't remember the last time we had a weekend free, just for 'us'. Evenings have been spent vegging out, or working on my other web sites which need attention (see previous posts for details on this). Family telephone support has been needed too, as one of my daughters dogs was involved in a collision with a car - 2 broken legs, a broken hip and fractured pelvis, poor thing survived though - he's a fighter!

I fully intended this year to find time to leave more comments to my neighbour's posts, as well as to try to keep up my own posting rate. But here we are, 3 weeks into the year and I've failed so far. I've even been neglecting Jaiku and only posting once or twice a week at best.

I did log into Vox earlier today to try to catch up on what's been going on in the neighbourhood, but OMG - 7 or 8 pages later and I'm still not seeing posts I've seen before! The intention was to find the last point, and read/comment forward from there, but I'm so far behind that any comments would probably be superflous now. I'll have to revert to a quick scan and only comment where I'd be adding something substantial to the post rather than using comments as a way of saying "Hi neighbour!" and not really saying anything (don't you hate it when that happens?)

Hence this apology of sorts. Still, it means I've made another post, so things can't be all bad, can they?

Being a bit paranoid about the poor performance of the battery in the N95, I decided not long after getting the phone to purchase the portable power pack (Mobile Survival Kit) from Proporta. 

I should say right at the start that I'm rarely far from an electric power point and Nokia charger, whether that be at home, in the office or in the car. My idea of getting the Proporta was for those times when I'm on holiday walking across the Cornish moors and in need of GPS, or Google Maps. See, I told you I was paranoid!

Anyway, the kit comes with multiple connectors for various phones, and the battery is charged via a USB port from the PC although an adaptor for a mains plug is also included. The good news is that when fully charged, the pack can be carried with a short connection lead for when needed. It's not much bigger than the N95 itself, and can charge the phone from flat up to a maximum of three times from a single charge! More than enough to get me off the moor...

The nice thing is that with the variety of connectors provided lots of different devices can be charged.

Have I used it in anger yet? Well no, to be honest.  It's always kept fully charged and ready for action, but I've been lucky enough to not be away from power points long enough to have needed it yet. I look upon it as a form of insurance for now...

I got this headset for Crimble, having had it on my Amazon Wishlist for a while. I've used it a few times, so it's time for a mini-review.

There are three buttons on the right earpiece, which will no doubt confuse all the lefties who buy it. Up/Down volume, and a do-it-all function button. Setup was straightforward after charging the headset, which comes with a mains charger only. Pairing with the N95 was an easy process: switch BT on, switch the headset on and Add Device on the N95. Enter the id-code (0000) and away you go!

In fact the process was so straightforward that I got confident and even paired the headset with my PC for Skype usage and listening to LastFM at home without being tethered to the PC by wires. With the PC upstairs, I can hear music in every room in the house through the headset, which is great!

In use, the headset is quite comfortable, then the headband resting on the back of the neck takes some getting used to. The set is light enough not to be a problem, even with extended use - and it even fits on my 7 and 3/8ths sized head!

I find the sound quite bassy, which I like, though I have experienced some cut-outs as reported by others. Apart from that, sound quality is more than acceptable - this is the first headset I've had that lets me actually hear the music during my commute on the tube - my iPod was never really up to fighting the ambient noise levels of the trains and traffic in the street. I was a bit confused at first, as playback was so quiet through the headset, even set at full volume. Then I realised that the N95 was only set to 40% volume! Pushing that up to 90% easily solved the lack of volume problem - I had to subsequently reduce the headset volume a tad to make it comfortable.

I've not really used it for making calls as yet, though this can obviously be done (I make very few calls on the phone, believe it or not). Tests with Skype have proved that the voice pickup is clear enough for use, though it can at times sound a little 'echo-y'.

Overall, I'm more than happy to be finally free of the wires, and would recommend this set to other users.

I've never really understood the 'drink yourself silly' aspect of new year celebrations. Actually, I've never really understood the need to 'celebrate' the changing of a diary date, to be honest.

What I do love though, is that everybody else does. They stay out far too late, getting far too drunk while I'm in bed, fast asleep. I'm a natural morning person, never able to stay up late. But that does mean I can wake up early, and enjoy the early morning when no-one else is around. New Year's Day is a perfect example of that.

We woke in the dark (though I must say my sleep was disturbed last night by the fireworks), and left the house just as it was getting light, for a drive around the Essex countryside. I'd planned a circuit route starting from Ongar, and Mikki laughed when I said the starting point for our journey was some 35 miles away! We got there in no time at all on the empty roads, though there was a heavy mist coming down. I popped into Ongar Church to take a look as it was signposted as being founded in 1080. It's one of those quaint Essex flint churches, with a weird octagonal spire.

The main purpose of the drive was actually to hunt out some more village signs for my database, as well as checking out a mediaeval castle. I'd spotted two village signs by the time we'd got to Ongar, so had started the day well. We headed in a general north-west direction, taking in the villages of Fyfield, Willingale, Roxwell, Good Easter (yes really!) before getting to Pleshey. By this time the mist had thickened into a fog, and I'd checked out several old churches on the way too.

Pleshey Castle now consists of a moat and some fairly major earthworks and not much else. Check out the OS map for the village (use the Get-a-Map service and type in 'Pleshey' as the search term). The castle is in private hands and is open by appointment, and payment of a fee only. What I did see was a fairly large motte and bailey castle, surrounded by what is stilll a significant moat for a castle that's been derelict for over 400 years.

Having reached the main target of the day, we started to head for home - it was now 10:30 and the day was getting on, there was much more traffic noticable, even on the back roads by this time. We managed to stop for a few more village signs though - High Easter, Leaden Roding and Sheering were all spotted, and we even did some shopping in Harlow before getting home in time for lunch.

Highlights of the day? The two hares sitting in a field on the approach to Pleshey, the two roebuck deer wandering along the road on the other side of Pleshey, and the sheer delight of driving on empty roads through the London suburbs early in the morning. This is the only day of the year when the latter is possible!

So other than sleep in, what did you do?