graham’s blog

I just couldn’t wait

I’ve quite a few friends who have bought Nokia N95 8Gb mobile phones these past few weeks. This in addition to a good friend who visited last weekend from the States and had two iPhones led me to make an impulse purchase the day before yesterday.

This is the result. I was putting it through it’s paces yesterday and it’s really cool. The internal GPS works a lot better than I thought and the downloaded maps of Europe resulted in zero data being transmitted

How is your phone shaping up?

Intruder alert

I don’t know why, but this blog has been experiencing a fair amount of sp*m lately and I’ve been having to clean it by hand. I don’t know about you, but sp*m in my blog upsets me more than it should as it is an unwanted intrusion.

I tried tweeking the controls of my sp*m killing tools but that hasn’t made a lot of difference. In the end I’ve taken the decision to approve comments myself, for the time being, before they appear so please be patient if your comment doesn’t pop up swiftly.

Reduced leisure time

I’ve been very busy lately with my various web activities.

Firstly I have been making progress with my professional site. I have set up the domain names (two actually) and have chosen to continue with my Web Host Siteground because I have had nothing but good experiences with them since hosting my first site a few years ago. I have chosen and modified a theme and worked with my personal graphist (my daughter) on the artwork. I’ve added some content on what the business is all about and layed down the foundations for the rest of the site. The hardest part is defining the details of what I am offering and laying the groundwork for what I will charge for doing it. It’s not a get rich quick scheme but I don’t want to lose money either. I also have to decide and give limits to the time I am willing to devote to these activities so that my employer (of my real job) gets what he is paying for.

Secondly I have been working, once again, with my daughter, on a website for some clients. They want a website and wish to manage the content themselves. I’ve arranged the domain and the hosting, installed the software (WordPress) and I am currently adapting it for a non-blogging website. In doing so I am using a theme that lends itself to using pages in preference to posts and that can accomodate different headers, footers, widths and lengths. I’ll write more on this later.

Lastly I continually find new andf exciting stuff on my travels around the web. First you might have noticed the new badge for utterz which is a great service that even has a local number here in Switzerland. The base activity is phoning the number and leaving a message which is automatically added to the website but also to various blogs and social media depending on configuration. Any image, text or video sent 10 minutes before or after the call is mashed into the resulting post. I should perhaps have said “maybe” because I sent some images to calls I made early this morning but I had to add them manually afterwards. Perhaps I did something wrong?

The other service I subscribed to this morning is Issuu which transforms pdf files to “books” on a public timeline and viewable a lot like the previews to Amazon books (You flick through the pages). It’s rather neat although most of my PDF files aren’t that interesting at first sight.

Over to you. What’s up and happening around you?

Strange happenings at home

For a few days now I’ve been unable to use Twitter at home. I first noticed it because twitterific refused to connect (twitterific is a Mac twitter client by the way). There are often interruptions of service over at twitter so I didn’t make a lot of it at first. When it kept on occuring this weekend I insisted and discovered that I couldn’t log on to my account even through a browser.

Strangely though I was able to connect through my widget on Netvibes and received updates through my feeds on Google Reader.

So last night I tried harder but without success. I tried from all the computers at home, both Mac and PC, I rebooted my router (both soft and hard reboots) but the problem persists. According to a twitterfriend my best bet will be an upcoming change of IP (It changes from time to time) as the problem appears to be occuring somewhere in my provider’s hardware. A traceroute shows that a connection is made but results never make it back. 100% packet loss…

I don’t have any other problems (that I know of). Everything else is fine. It’s strange.

One might not be enough?

My son David showed me this earlier so I’m spreading the geekiness!

And now for something different

My handwriting recognition is pretty poor but I didn’t really make too much of an effort to write clearly and distinctly. Below you will find the translation to text before correction.

I’ll keep you posted of the advancement of my handwriting recognition tests as they develop.

Up with the dawn

An illustrative post this morning. Habitually I start work early and am here just after 7am. This morning I was greeted by a moonset over the Jura mountains.

I’ve been too busy to even Twitter these past few days, with appointments back to back throughout the working day. Incidentally speaking of twitter you can catch up with my timeline here. Don’t forget to follow me with your own twitter ID!

I’m also available on the newly launched Pownce that has been in private beta since last summer but although I was quite active in the early months most of my Pownce friends have left and I can’t really update both services.

Digital Pens

I’m testing speech recognition, GPS enabled digital cameras and Digital Pens for my organization. I’ve already reported on the first two but have said little about Digital Pens.

My report on Mobile Computing recommended all three technologies but when I asked our purchasing department to obtain a few examples of each they reported that the Logitech Digital Pens were no longer available for purchase. Frustration.

Further investigation has revealed that Logitech appears to have transferred their Digital Pen concerns to an American Company. On checking further the pens are available at Logitech USA but are listed as having been discontinued all over europe although stocks of Paper and ink cartridges are still available.

I have managed to get my hands on an older model and the drivers and software so I’ll be checking it out. With no support in French however I anticipate having to abandon this track.

Personally I think a better route to take would be Java/Symbian/WindowsCE development on mobile phones either with touch screens or pointing devices.

I will be investigating further but if you have any ideas could you leave a comment or contact me? Thanks.

Wordpress Themes

I think I’ve finally decided on a new theme for this blog and I’ve changed the header image, cleaned up the widgets and blogroll and now I’m ready to roll!

Incidentally the header image was taken on vacation in Scotland and is a rose from the Falkirk Castle gardens.

Now I will be reorganizing the categories so that there are less categories to browse. While doing this I will be retro-fitting the tags. In this way I hope to make the blog more readable and enhance the user experience (said with tongue in cheek).

I promise that tomorrow’s post will have absolutely nothing to do with design or content.

Progress

I still like this theme although my son David finds the whiteness uncomfortable…

I’ve changed the stock images to my own from our trip to Scotland late last year. I’ll get some more done later and probably change from time to time. For now there are 5 images in rotation. If you refresh the page it might change.

I’ll be reorganising categories and adding tags in time, to develop some structure. I did try a few magazine/newspaper style themes but due to my unorganized way of blogging these would need a lot of work