Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
My old email provider home.se is moving to a new
platform and are disabling the mail forwarding feature that was in
place earlier. This enabled me to just forward all emails sent to that
address to my Gmail account and have everything in one place.
Now this is no longer possible. I suspect that the email forwarding
feature was a problem for them as they couldn’t display ads in the
webmail interface for the users that had that enabled. So I don’t
think it’ll be back.
I can access these emails via POP, so this raises the question: how
can I enable the “import” of these emails into Gmail via POP? Two possibilities present themselves:
use a POP client (like spit Outlook) and create a rule that simply
forwards all received emails to my Gmail account
code a little script that grabs the emails via POP and sends them
on, using cron for example to schedule it.
The second option is the most fun of course, but it would be cool if
there already was something like this out there. Any ideas?
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I’ve been reading a lot about SMS.ac lately. They sound like a scummy company with a litigious bent.
(See Mike’s post for background.)
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[in progress]
- Engadget podcast
- Gillmor Gang feed
- Inside the Net feed
- Morning Coffee Notes feed
- Tech Nation with Moira Gunn feed
- The Podcast Network: The Tech Conference Show
- This Week in Tech (TWiT) feed
- TPN Rock: The Rock Show on the Podcast Network
Note: iTunes doesn’t make it easy to get info about podcasts out of
the app, so this list is updated by hand.
Updated on Sunday, 2006-03-05.
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Dave Winer has an elevator pitch for OPML
blogging. What
he means by “OPML blogging” is managing your weblog in an application,
the OPML Editor, that enables you to choose whether to post an entry
as a single sentence (or two) or in a more structured way with a
title.
I can see the point. Sometimes you just want to post a link, or a
quote, or an observation. That’s why I implemented my post-by-email
feature
to this blog. Any mail sent to an address with a certain subject line
gets appended to that day’s observations
post (if the
file doesn’t exist, it is created.) The title of the post is always
“Observations”. I got this idea from Fredrik
Lundh, though I don’t think he posts via
email.
I have a command-line version, but I usually just email from
Gmail.
The cool thing about this approach, and the reason I call it a moblog
application, is that I can post from my mobile phone via
email. Granted, this doesn’t happen often, but it’s nice to be able to
have the feature.
OK, so that’s my take: I agree with Dave that sometimes you just want
to get the stuff out there, without writing an essay. I’m not sold
on the application though. Granted, I haven’t used it yet, because as
far as I know it doesn’t work with blosxom. But even if it did, where
would I use it? I do some blogging at work (on breaks, naturally),
some from a windows box at home, and some (like now) from a laptop
running Linux. Each of these platforms supports emacs with remote
editing via SSH, which is how I usually post. And when I don’t, I can
use Gmail from any computer, or use my phone.
So, titleless blogging is cool, and liberating. Using the OPML Editor
ties you to one application and one machine, that has to be running
Windows or MacOS. That’s not so liberating.
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Looks interesting. I’ll hear how it sounds tomorrow when I subscribe to the feed in iTunes.
That reminds me, I have to create a podroll.
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This looks interesting, a watchmaker’s blog
journal. Lots of info
about watches and gears and stuff. Pretty interesting. But there’s no
feed! How come? Just an excerpt is enough, if you want to drive
traffic to your site.
Another site that should have RSS is The Luminous
Landscape.
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Jon Udell suggested in the
latest Gillmor Gang
podcast
that blogs should be seen as the extension and evolution of
resumes. If you’re a professional in the English and American sense of
the word (i.e. an architect, lawyer, scientist, support engineer etc.)
you should write about what you know, what you’ve learnt, and how you
work in your blog. After all, any employer worth their salt will do a
Google on a prospective hire before asking them to sign the dotted
line. It can be embarrassing to know that you posted beginner’s SQL
questions on a forum just weeks before applying for that DBA job.
(Jon’s argument is in text form in a blog entry.)
I’m not sure I buy into the argument, though. Most bloggers keep a pretty relaxed view
about their professional life. After all, if you spend your work days
thinking, which is basically what professionals do, you might want to
kick back with a rant on politics in the evening. And even if your
employer allows you to blog, would they be happy if you do it during
working hours, especially if you’re building your online resume, so to
speak?
I’m not sure what my current employer says about blogging. We have
signed a Code of Conduct, which is basically a marketing device to
enable the mothership to claim that their employees are ethical, or
that they have at least signed a paper saying they know the difference
between right and wrong. But from what I remember there was no mention
of blogging.
We do have an internal blog, where I sometimes post stuff that’s
relevant to the day to day work of my department. But that’s more
something that fits between a “Staff.All” email and a casual
water-cooler conversation with someone from another department. I
doubt I could wax lyrical there about the latest trends in ticket
tracking and support work. Is this the place for that? I highly doubt
it. Like I said, I want to relax after work. Work sucks. I really
don’t want to think about it too much outside 9—5.
That said, I do try to keep stuff from wandering way out of line here,
because this is my digital identity, so to speak. (I also try to not
mention where I work, even though my co-workers obviously know.) I
personally find some weblogs fascinating in their mixture of
professional writings and things of a more personal nature. And that’s
OK, because I do think the line between work and personal life is
blurring. Not only in work’s favour, I hope. What I mean is that if
it’s OK for me to be online helping out the US team at 22:00, it’s
also OK for me to take a morning off to take the kid to the
dentist. It’s give and take.
Hmm, this post has the earmarks of late-night rambling. Better stop
before my professional credibility is eroded.
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Gotta love Russ. A few days
after exposing his utter-non-hipness and confessing he doesn’t “get”
MySpace he signs
up for an account and starts trying to grok
it.
I’m pretty glad my job doesn’t involve trying to fathom the fickle
youth market. Like Russ, I don’t feel especially old, but the stuff
that the kids are into (communities like
Helgon and of course MSN chat) is out of my
radar. I understand it in principle, but I don’t grasp the finer
points. This blog is basically a personal broadsheet, the model is a
hypothetical online journal from perhaps the nineteenth century —
genteel, feelings under wraps, “stiff upper lip” etc. I can’t imagine
letting it all hang out here. That’s not the kind of guy I am.
It should cheer him up that older people have consistently made money from younger ones throughout the ages (or at least since “teens” appeared as a consumer group) and if you just try your best you can probably manage.
At least with the older kids I have some kind of cred. My 5 minutes of
manual reading have enabled me to use BitTorrent effectively, which is
something my so-called internet literary youngsters have not figured
out. But I shudder to think of what kind of fuddy-duddy I will appear
in the four-year old’s eyes in about 7 years…
Yeah, I’m getting old, and it sucks.
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Lately Engadget’s feed in Bloglines has had a lot of duplicates. I’m sure this is due to the feed ads they’re using, they seem to screw up the “modified” flag of the entry somehow.
I haven’t noticed anyone else complain, however. Is the problem with Bloglines or with Engadget?
Update 2005-12-30: The problem is that Engadget (or Weblogs, Inc) have started to publish the same entries under different URLs. The problem is not confined to Bloglines, either. Below is a screenshot from SharpReader:
I really hope that someone can fix this, the feed is almost unusable as it is.
Rui sees the same problem.
Updated on Friday, 2005-12-30.
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[This post has been edited. Reasons for this are given below.]
(Warning, most links in Swedish.)
Fredrik
Lundh:
After spamming hundreds of Swedish blogs with misspelled marketing
messages, anonymous representatives for the Swedish company “[H—
& N—] Consulting” are now mailing misspelled legal threats to
any Swedish blog that mentions their name. While we haven’t been
threatened yet have only received a single incomprehensible threat
this far, we just want to make it clear that we don’t have any
plans, at this time, to publish their name, nor the names of
“blogrankers”, “ppckungen”, “betalaperklick”, “carbzone” or any of
the other sites run by this company, on any of our sites. — the
administration
[Update 2005-11-04: the above has been edited in accordance to the
wishes of H & N Consulting.]
[I’m as of this writing number three two in a google for the name of H&N’s CEO, hereafter referred to by the alias “XXX”].
This post by
Stattin
has been retroactively
censored, which
shows that the [redacted] XXX has some kind of pull in these
matters. One wonders just what he’s trying to hide?
Update 2005-11-04: Someone calling themselves “Blogrankers” has a
blog at
blogrankers.blogspot.com. The one
and only post made there has been removed. There is a cached copy on
Bloglines (in
Swedish).
There was a mildly interesting flamewar in the comments to the post,
now no longer available. Someone calling him- or herself “stev”
defended Blogrankers.com there, calling their detractors
“Communists”. He used an English idiom in that he capitalized the
initial letter of svenska (“Swedish”). Interestingly enough, this
same quirk can be seen in the post referenced above.
Update 2005-10-28: Fredrik gets his
letter.
Update 2005-11-01: I finally got my letter in the mail, threatening
me with up to two years of prison for breaches of the Swedish data
privacy law PUL, and my provider with legal proceedings if they did
not remove the information. The letter was signed “H & N Consulting”
but with no other contact information. The sender address was the same
as the administrative contact for the domain “blogrankers.com”.
I agree with Bengt that these guys have no legal leg to stand
on,
but I am no lawyer. I don’t have time or energy to make an impassioned
stance against the injustices of the situation. So I’m caving in to
their demands. This also saves the legal community in Sweden a lot of
bother they can do without.
I could say it’s scary that a company can use these kinds of scare
tactics to silence valid criticism. The scariness is alleviated,
however, by the sheer stupidity of their actions. They’ve managed to
alienate a large number of influential voices in the Swedish blogging
community, who, even if they will censor their posts, will never
forget the name of the people who made them do it. I predict that the
financial future of the company is bleak.
However, I did make an unwarranted assumption about XXX’s physical
appearance. I wrote that he was covered in phlegm. As I have never met
the person, this was uncalled for. I have no real way of knowing the
what the physical aspect of the gentleman is. For any offense this
comment may have caused, I apologize.
Update 2005-11-04: cleaned up and fixed links.
Update 2005-11-06: small edits and clarifications.
Updated on Sunday, 2005-11-06.
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Russell knows about the evil stalker
blog and outs
Jacek Rutkowski
as the author. Predictably, Jacek denies authorship:
Russell Beattie in his latest post wrongly identifies author of this
blog and motivations that lie behind it […]
It would be interesting to run a author-comparison scan on sentences
like that and the normal utterings of Mr
Rutkowski:
I have seen lately very pathetic and lame movie “Wallace & Gromit:
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (strangely it is number one in USA now
but it is because Americans love everything British and this
claymation movie is British) […]
I know Russell gets up people’s noses and is certainly no shrinking
violet, but being the target of so much venom must be pretty
unnerving. How someone can summon so much hate for another person whom
they’ve never met is beyond me.
That said, I’m glad Russ is cool about it. I would have called the
cops.
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I’m returning the Nokia N90 tomorrow. I’ll miss the gorgeous screen
but not the hefty size.
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Nokia sprung a surprise on us today with then announcement of the
E-series business phones. You can get the skinny on the devices over
at Jim’s wiki:
- Nokia E60: small, full featured S60 phone.
- Nokia E61: a phone with a full QWERTY keypad and its sights set directly on the BlackBerry
- Nokia E70: a S60 “wing” phone with the QWERTY keypad deployed on either side of a screen.
All phones share the following features:
- GSM and UMTS wireless
- Integrated Wifi
- Bluetooth and infrared(!)
- platform-agnostic email push (see Carlo’s thoughts for more)
With a line-up like this, the recently announced Sony-Ericsson
P990
suddenly pales. Sure, it too has Wifi and a smartphone operating
system, but it’s not part of an integrated business solution that
Nokia has built around the E-series. It’s basically a stand-alone
device, marketed by a company with a strong consumer focus.
The E-series can be used as VoIP terminals with certain commercial
switches — and you can bet that support for open source products like
Asterisk will follow. This opens up
another line of attack for Nokia trying to gain market share. Think
about it: you can have one device that works as a VoIP terminal
internally; you can ensure that the mobile worker has access to email
and data at decent speeds nearly everywhere; and you can get this
product from one company that provides tools to manage the complexity.
Microsoft was supposed to clean BlackBerry’s and Nokia’s clocks with
their Exchange server email push component and their plethora of
Windows Mobile devices. But these devices are fragmented among almost
as many manufacturers, none of which have the clout to make a
concerted biz push like Nokia. And as for the server component, we
still haven’t seen it where we are (we’re an Exchange shop.)
On a personal note, either the E61 or the E70 can be my dream
device. Forget
the Communicator; these phones have all I want and more.
So, once again, Nokia has sprung back, keeping everyone off their toes
with a really strong product line. I must say I’m surprised at this —
I thought Nokia had dropped the ball on corporate messaging and the
biz phone market. But this changes everything. It’s up to the
competition (I’m looking at you, Microsoft) to up the ante or fold and
leave the table.
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[Note to self: don’t write future reviews as a series of blog posts — gather all this stuff up and present it in a coherent fashion.]
The N90 has a little joystick on the side of the phone. This is
primarily used in camera mode to control the flash, exposure etc., but
it has some nice uses other than that. If you have a reminder that’s
due, the phone will make a sound and show the reminder on the cover
screen. You can use the little joystick to stop the tone or “snooze”.
However, this doesn’t work for incoming Bluetooth connections. You
have to flip open the phone to accept those.
Speaking of camera modes, there are two. One is the “camphone mode”,
with the screen opened in 90+90 degrees. The other is if you flip the
camera housing 90 degrees with the phone closed. Then the cover screen
becomes a viewfinder, and you can use the external joystick to
manipulate your shots.
Update: you can also read SMS text messages on the cover screen. Cool.
Updated on Wednesday, 2005-10-12.
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More stuff I’ve discovered about the Nokia N90.
No vibrating call alarm. WTF!? This is worse than useless. If you’re
working with headphones and you’ve happened to turn the phone upside
down, you’ll miss calls, because you won’t see the external screen
flashing. Ditto if the phone is in your pocket and you’re listening to
some music.
The pop-port is on the side of the phone, which means that you can’t
have it in a narrow pocket when using the headphones.
Image quality is decent, but not great. The pics are better than
average for a phone, but they’re still camphone pics.
It’s not very clear how to handle video calls. This doesn’t bother
me, because it’ll be a cold day in hell before I make a video call.
Screenshots
The “active” standby screen. This is the first thing you see. The
shortcut icons have tooltips.
The main menu.
The images gallery. Pressing the joypad left or right transports you
to some undefined place (head and end of image list?). Use the up/down
directions.
The browser, with Bloglines mobile. The hi-res screen really shines here.
This is a screenshot from a normal S60, showing the difference in
resolutions. The screens are the same physical size.
I tried to capture a screenshot of the phone in camera mode, but apparently
the normal keypad buttons are disabled there.
Update: added bullet about video calls, and added a comparative screenshot.
Updated on Monday, 2005-10-10.
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Apparently Google have released a web-based aggregator,
google.com/reader. I like gmail, so I
thought I’d try this out, even if it seems to lack a mobile interface.
So I uploaded my blogroll in OPML from Bloglines, and waited… and
waited… and waited some more. After 15 minutes it still said “Your
subscriptions are being imported…” so I decided to let Google Reader
cool down a bit and try again later, perhaps in a year or two.
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I got the chance to borrow the Nokia N90 for a couple of weeks. As
I already have a 3G phone, the 6630, I thought I’d give it a shot.
At first I was put off by the phone’s size, and the fact that none of
my settings would be on it. But it turns out that the latest version
of Nokia’s PC
Suite
is actually pretty good. There was no problem syncing two phones at
once, so I just loaded my contacts, calender etc. onto the N90 from my
PC.
Another “must-have” app is Wireless
IRC. I
downloaded a trial version (good for 2 weeks) and could start chatting
on #mobitopia on the way home from work.
Physically, the phone is pretty big. Even if it’s only a few millimetres bigger
than the 6630 when folded, it gives a much more massive
impression. Nokia haven’t been able to design a sleek folder model
yet.
Despite the size, the new charger cable attachment it very small — so
small and thin it looks fragile. Fortunately, there’s an adapter cable
for old chargers supplied with the phone.
The memory card slot is hard to use. You can get the card out, but if
you don’t have long fingernails it’s very hard to get it in again. A
64M card is included, same as for the 6630.
The screen is very nice, with a much higher resolution than other S60
phones. Unfortunately, my first impression was that the text in
Wireless IRC was blurry. This is an artifact of the fact that Wireless IRC
is a “legacy” app, and the text is scaled up to prevent unreadably
small fonts.
When using the web browser, the screen came into its own. The text
size was smaller, but more of it was fitted onto the screen. Using
Bloglines was nicer than using the 6630.
The keypad is larger and easier to use than the one on the 6630, which
is not surprising as the physical area is nearly twice as large.
This is the first S60 phone I’ve used with the “ready” or “today” screen, and I
found it a bit confusing at first. This is the fourth S60 phone I’ve
used, so if I found it confusing I hesitate to think of what first
time users might think. This said, the today screen provides nice
shortcuts to Contact, Calendar, Messaging etc. This is an improvement
over earlier interfaces where you had to press the swirl button to get
to the menu.
The camera is the showpiece of the phone, with a 2 mpx sensor and a
Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus. I liked the fact that it has a flash.
I haven’t been able to see how good the photos are outside the phone’s
screen yet. See the reviews linked from the page above for the gory
details.
When using the camera, you fold out the screen in a 90 + 90 degree
configuration. Access to camera controls is via an extra joystick on
the side of the phone. There are also 2 softkeys along the top of the
screen, or to the left if in shooting mode. Using these was fairly
self-explanatory, but not very “intuitive”. Read the fine manual for
the details.
When the phone is folded you can swing the camera housing and use the
cover screen as a viewfinder. More discrete than unfolding all the
bits and pieces in standard mode.
All in all, this isn’t a phone I’d choose if I had to pay for it, and
probably not if I got it for free either. The folding design is not
something I like in a phone, and I’d rather pay more money for a real
camera than one on a phone.
Prices
- Best price in Sweden: 5 725 SEK (via PriceRunner Sweden)
- Best price in the UK: £502.80 (via PriceRunner UK)
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Reading lots of feeds via
http://www.bloglines.com/mobile?
Only showing updated items can help.
Go to Account > Feed Options and check the “Show only updated feeds”
option.
(Thanks to Mark Fletcher for this tip :-))
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Det verkar som om Nordeas kunder utsattes för en phishing-attack
igår. Enligt en av det “drabbade” så var sajten imponerande, men
brevet inte lika välkomponerat:
Lägg märke till!
Extraförnyelse av elektronbetalingars säkerhetssystem!!
Ärade kunder av InternetBank NORDEA. Vi låtar komma Ers
kännedom de senaste nyheter om vår bankens
säkerhetssystem.
Banken Nordea insisterar på det bindande förfarande att
genomgå den upprepade autentifisering, för att få
er personalinformation överfört så fort som
möjligt på den nya, mera säker server av vår
banken.
För att få ert kontots normal funktions fortgång,
behövar ni ingå i ert konto på den nya server, som
är skyddad, med utnyttjande av era diskontdata; i motsatt fall
skall ert Internet konto blockeras provisoriskt under 24 timmar
för er säkerhet för
tillgångarsbortförande, för att undgå
“Phishing”'s attackers stora antal, som stiger ständigt.
Man skulle kunna tro att detta inte skulle lett till några som helst
napp för bedragarna, men medierna slog upp detta stort.
Expressen verkar utgå från
att alla är korkade:
Joakim Eberlund, 29, från Malmö reagerade direkt när
han fick mejlet klockan 21.56 i går kväll.
— Jag jobbar med e-postsystem så jag märkte ganska snart
att något inte stämde, annars hade mitt konto varit
tömt nu. Det är mycket oroande, säger han.
Ähem, jag jobbar inte med e-postsystem, men jag hade reagerat direkt jag med, eftersom jag skulle utgå från att Nordea skulle anställa någon som kan svenska för att skicka ett sådant mail…
Aftonbladet
är något mer balanserad. Samma Johan framställs där inte som ett lallande fån:
Joakim Eberlund i Malmö, kund i banken, fick mejlet, men anade
att något inte stod rätt till:
— Men jag är övertygad om att andra kunder kan ha lurats
av detta. Hade exempelvis min pappa haft Nordea skulle jag ha ringt
och varnat honom för att absolut inte gå in på den
falska hemsidan, säger han.
Jag försökte förgäves se vad DN hade att säga om det hela, men sajten
var nere när jag kollade (10:50).
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A UMTS Nokia Communicator would rock. Imagine being able to SSH into your screen session via 3G!
Ahem… excuse my geekiness.
Update: I should qualify the above, I think. I spend a lot more time
online than on the phone with the 6630. A communicator is a qwerty
smartphone married to a S40 Nokia phone. This puts the functionality
squarely where I want it: data use and text input. And 3G is fast data
that could and should be cheap, at least for modest data usage.
SSH means I can access an online Unix server from anywhere, using the
apps (emacs mostly) that I want.
Updated on Tuesday, 2005-10-04.
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Nathan:
Can’t help but think that there’s some conspiracy on the part of
phone manufacturers that they keep producing bigger and uglier
phones each with a disjoint set of features. I mean why is it that
the 8800 has a camera that’s really not up to par with other phones,
and doesn’t take memory cards. Yet promotes itself as having music
playing capabilities, yet has <40 megs or so of onboard memory?
Every time you find a phone that you like, you find that it’s got
some fundamental flaw in its design, that could only have been left
out of the feature list out of spite.
So true.
Incidentally, the Sony-Ericsson K750i he picks is a good choice. S-E
rule the mid-market between cheap voice-and-text phones and the more
expensive smartphones. For many people, those phones hit the spot with
a good mix of features (camera, Java support, music playback), small
size, and good design.
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Telia’s UMTS network has become nearly unusable these last few days. I
can’t connect to IRC most times, and the web gateway times out a
lot. I don’t know if they’re experiencing problems or are having a
surge in traffic. I also know it’s no use trying to find info on their
site, as it’s really crappy and mostly oriented to suckering people
into choosing their service.
This has put a serious crimp on my online lifestyle, but on the other
hand, I’m at last making progress with The System of the World.
Update: things seems to have sorted themselves out. Must have been a
glitch.
It’s a tribute to what I think of Telia that I immediately suspected
that they’d cut internet access (except for HTTP). I wouldn’t put it
past them at all. And that raises the question: why am I using a
provider that I fear and distrust?
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I got a pair of Koss
Porta-Pro[1]
headphones yesterday. They have a great sound, and there’s the
additional bonus of not looking like an iClone when walking about.
Also found a quick way to pause the ‘Pod (when answering a call on the
phone, for example) — just yank the headphone cord out of the jack,
and playback will pause. This is way simpler than unlocking the hold
button and then pressing pause.
[1] Koss’ own site is spectacularly user-unfriendly, you have to
register to do anything. Use the price comparison sites instead.
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Russ slams the iPod nano, and Frank disagrees.
As an iPod owner of just a few days, I can finally buy the hype. The
device is cool! I love the storage space — no more fiddling around
with 256M when you have 6G. The podcast support rocks. (I’ve started
to listen to podcasts too, another thing I’ll have to eat humble pie
for…) Having a single device that does one thing well — play audio
— is really nice.
Itunes sucks, but that’s another matter…
I’ve been using phones with mp3 players since at least 2001, when I
got a Siemens SL45. After that, I’ve used the taco as a music
phone. And sure, it works, but it doesn’t work as well as an iPod. And
if you factor in the cost of the phone and the likely cost of a memory
card that can carry enough songs to be competitive with even a small
iPod, you’re looking at serious bucks.
A young person in the EU might have a basic phone for voice and SMS,
either one they’ve bought themselves or got as a present. An iPod (or
other music player) makes a lot of sense in that it’s something you
can wish for as a present or save up to. Asking for a hugely expensive
phone is not.
Many people in Sweden get mobiles from work. This is something you
need to carry anyway, and often it’s some boring model that doesn’t
cost a lot. Getting a dedicated music player for your own money makes
a lot of sense then too.
Basically, I see phones and PDAs converging. But there’s still a
future for a good music playing device like the iPod.
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My old university pal Fralle has a
blog. We’ve sort of lost contact since he moved back to
Örnsköldsvik. Hopefully I’ll get more info now, though the wonders of
technology. Nice to see he’s been bitten by the O’Brian bug too.
Posted at 07:45,
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Some people want to know how long their call has lasted while they are
making it. Some have alluded to the lack of such functionality out of
the box as “the biggest interface flaw of them
all”. (As
Jim says in a comment to that post, “If
that’s the biggest flaw you can find in the Series 60 interface then
I’d say it’s got to be pretty good :-)”.)
It turns out the functionality is included, you just have to turn it
on (thanks bob!). Here’s how to do it:
- Open the Log application:
- Open the “Options” menu (left softkey):
- Turn on the “Show call duration” option:
Granted, I only know that this works on my 6630, but I’m guessing it’s
the same for the 6682.
Updated: you can get screenshots easily with FExplorer.
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Matt pontificates on the rumoured
iPhone, and
concludes:
To be honest, an N91-like
device with the iTunes store hookup would probably slaughter the
music/cellphone crossover market.
It would also slaughter Apple’s margins. They would have to pay
licensing to Symbian (also true with UIQ3), and maybe Nokia.
Plus, if they go their own way and make a “pure” apple phone, they
would have to deal with carriers and regulators too. Apple is too
small for this. Even Microsoft only provides software for phones, and lets
the companies that actually manufacture the phones take care of the
hassle of certifying the devices.
The Microsoft way means lots of confusing brand names for the same
phones, and a trickle of licensing to Redmond. But MS is the richest
company on the face of the planet. They won’t crush Nokia and Motorola
now, rightly seeing that the digital living room is more important at
the moment. Those pesky phone companies can be bought or out-competed
later.
But Apple doesn’t have those kinds of resources.
Also, consider a key use of an “iPhone” — using the stored music
files as ringtones. Do you think any carrier would offer this phone on
contract, if it’d mean that everyone that bought it wouldn’t buy
expensive ringtones over the air?
(Update: found this piece by Ewan that explains the carrier’s position in better detail than I’ve laid out.)
For this and other reasons, I’m betting we won’t see an iPhone (or a
phone with viable iTunes support) any time soon.
Updated on Saturday, 2005-09-03.
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I ducked into an OnOff store this morning to
get some Mini-DV casettes and took a gander at their mobile phone
display. Among their Series 60
phones I saw: Nokia 6680, Nokia
6600, Nokia
N-gage(!), Siemens
SX-1(!!), but not the Nokia
6630 (aka Charlie). Weird.
By the way, the Taco cost 1,495 SEK. I don’t know if that was an
unlocked phone though.
Posted at 20:00,
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Some random (l)user has proposed “RSS
3.0”. This is a bad idea.
Not only will Dave Winer hate his guts for diluting the sacred RSS 2.0
spec, but he has awakened the ire of merry pranksters Aaron
Swartz and Sean
B. Palmer. Swartz wrote the original RSS
3.0 three years ago. There’s even
a Blosxom plugin for it.
Palmer wrote a cease and desist
letter
complaining about the misappropriation of the name “RSS 3.0”. As a
compromise, he suggests the new version should be called “RSS DW”, for
“Really Simple Syndication, Dick Waving”.
Posted at 22:59,
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I installed WordPress on this site. You can
peruse the result here.
Impressions: impressive! Slick install, helpful
wiki, and nice default plugins
(Markdown especially appreciated). A lot of thought has gone into the
graphical presentation everywhere, not just the finished output. The
admin pages were just as slick as the default Kubrick theme.
I’m thinking of using WP for blogging at work, and I think it’ll be
just the ticket.
Posted at 23:41,
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Darla reports on the mobile feed
reader
from
MobHappy.
You know what also rocks? Mobile
Bloglines. Works like a charm, and keeps
your feed reading synced between sessions.
Posted at 20:59,
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You can back up your Wordpress blog to
gmail: here’s a post that explains
how.
I’ve been doing this since October last year, here are some gotchas
related to
that.
This is my setup.
- Blosxom blog
- shell account on the blog server
- gmail address
- bash shell scripting nous
I run the following script from cron:
#!/bin/sh
HOME=/home/gustaf
DIR=$HOME/backup
DATE=`date +"%Y-%m-%d"`
FILE=blog-$DATE.tar.gz
MUTT=/usr/bin/mutt
# save crontab
crontab -l > $HOME/save/crontab
# create backup file
tar czf $DIR/$FILE --exclude public_html/files/big \
blosxom-data blosxom-plugins public_html bin save
# mail the file
echo ""| mutt -a $DIR/$FILE -s "backup $DATE" <my email>[email protected]
This zips up my blog and plugins, the bin directory, all CSS and
.htaccess files, the crontab and my blogroll, and all smaller pics
in a tar file. This is then sent to gmail. mutt makes it easy to
send attachments from the command line.
The process leaves a bunch of files in the backup directory. This
needs to be periodically pruned.
As of today, the backup file is 1.3M. According to the comments to the
post referenced above, the gmail limit is 10M. You can add a check if
your file gets bigger.
Make sure you can check the mail to the account you’re sending from,
if the mail to gmail bounces you want to know about it.
Posted at 20:55,
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How weird is this: SixApart to offer Atom streams from TypePad and LiveJournal.
Streaming Atom. Who’d a thunk?
Basically, updates to huge blog sites like TypePad and LiveJournal are
now so large that it makes sense to treat them like multimedia.
Another idea by Dan Sandler: combine river-of-news and item based
feeds. Some
feeds are important, some are just noise — if it’s important, it’ll
come back. Slashdot definitely fits in the
latter category.
(Via Matt.)
Posted at 22:16,
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I swore I wouldn’t fall into the new-phone-every-year trap, but damn,
the Nokia N91 (warning: Flash) rocks!
4 Gb hard drive, UMTS, Series 60… yum!
But it’ll also be a premium-priced device. The fact that I’m still
paying Voda and Telia for two S60 devices is a bummer, but on the
other hand both the Taco and Charlie are in use — the N-gage as an
mp3 player and the 6630 as my main phone. And both were bargains
(between 2,000 and 2,500 SEK).
I’ll see if I can wait for the inevitable price drop on the N91. Or if
I should sell my soul to work and let them get me one — maybe being
woken in the middle of the night when the database goes down is worth
it?
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Where the hell is my Taco? I’ve looked high and low for it, but it’s
gone. And there’s a 256 MMC card in it that I paid good money for,
before MMC cards became cheap as dirt.
Grr.
Update: found it lurking in a jacket pocket.
Updated on Monday, 2005-08-15.
Posted at 00:35,
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Using maths to stop comment spam.
Interesting. Would be nice to get a blosxom plugin.
Posted at 14:51,
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At work I use MS Outlook, partly out of laziness, partly
because it’s an application that I work to support. I use it for mail
to me personally, and I also have access to a shared mailbox for
support issues. As we are more than one person that handle these
issues, we want to have a copy of all correspondence in the same
place; this means that we want our replies to be copied to the shared
support mailbox.
Now, under a normal mailing system such as IMAP, this is not a
problem. Shared resources are separate accounts, and a competent
mailreader can have different settings for signatures, local copies
etc. Outlook, of course, does this differently.
You can have rules that are run when a message is received or
sent. But from what I can see, you can’t specify these rules for a
different mailbox. This means that if I specify that all my replies
are saved to the support box, copies of my personal mail will be sent
there, too. This is tedious and probably in breach of Sarbanes-Oxley,
as well as brain-dead in general.
What I’ve had to do is to make a signature file containing a specified
string, and let that string match act as a trigger for the rule saving
the message. Of course, Outlook being what it is, you can’t specify
different signature per mailbox either — oh no, that would make
easy things possible! Instead I have to include the signature manually
Each time I write a mail that I want to be copied.
This is one of those posts where I wish I had comments. But if you
have any suggestions, and the time to write to me, I’d appreciate
it. I will summarize any such suggestions here, with credit as
appropriate. Email can be sent to gerikson@gmail.com. Thanks
in advance!
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Russ waxes lyrical about the PSP as a web
tablet.
I must say I agree. I played with Niclas’ Flybook yesterday, and it
pretty much rocked as a tablet.. But the PSP is smaller, lighter, and
has better games. Plus it’s waaay cheaper. I’ll definetely look at one
when it’s launched here.
Posted at 21:58,
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Matt describes the woeful state of N-gage gamitude in the
US.
I already feel like the only N-Gage user on the Eastern seaboard
though.
This is a pity, ‘cause the N-gage (classic, the “taco”) is still a
kick-ass phone. I use mine as a mp3-player nowadays, I’m not
really into games.
Posted at 21:55,
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Whisky leads to blogging.
Posted at 23:53,
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I discovered by accident that this site looks shite in Internet
Exploder. Rest assured that I will waste no precious brain cycles
trying to fix this.
Posted at 23:51,
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Found 2 mildly interesting sites today: Lloyd Cole’s
weblog and
DagensSkiva.com, a Swedish music review
site. Neither of them have RSS.
What’s with that? If you’re worried
about losing traffic, don’t post the whole text in the feed. Just let
me know that something has changed on your site! You can’t expect
people to return to your site just in case something has been added.
Get with the program, publish a fucking feed already.
Update: I found out today the DagensSkiva do have feeds, (with the
option of choosing per reviewer, natch). So I’ll amend the above to
say “make your fucking feeds autodiscovarable already”.
Lloyd Cole is still feedless, sadly.
Updated on Sunday, 2005-08-28.
Posted at 23:49,
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Darla has a new gig: associate editor at PhoneMag. Congrats!
Posted at 23:20,
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Well, I seem to have fallen into a blogging hiatus. No one care, no
one, I know, but I still feel a bit stressed that I’ve only posted 9
entries in May.
Things that I’d like to write about, simply to get them off my chest,
are off-limits. They concern work, which I try to avoid kvetching
about in public, and the concern the situation at home, which is more
or less grim but also rather private. So I’m reduced to book
“reviews”, and I can’t even find something good to write there either.
I’m really looking forward to vacation…
PS this blog needs a redesign… again.
Posted at 01:21,
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Russ: morse texter. Old skool.
Posted at 01:11,
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Jim points
out the fact
that most spam is sent with strange names as senders. A glance in the
gmail spam box seems to bear this out: Gonzalo, Rowland, Dewayne,
Homer(!), Mario, Robbie…
How would this be implemented in a spam filter? Obviously, it’s
locale-dependent. If you live somewhere where these names are common,
you would have to filter on Jim, Gustaf, and Matt instead.
Posted at 17:43,
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I’ve hacked together a list of traffic cams in Stockholm for
Christopher Schmidt’s traffic cam
app for Series60
Python. I’ll post
the link to Matt Croydon’s wiki
page as soon as I’ve
tested it a bit more.
Until then, the data file can be accessed from
http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/stockholm.dat.
The images are from Trafiken.nu
The following conventions are used in the tabs:
- C (Centre) for Innerstaden
- CS (Centre South) for Södermalm
- CW (Centre West) for Essingeleden
- S (South) for Nynäsvägen
- E (East) for Värmdöleden
- SW (South West) for E4:an
- N (North) for E4/E18 Norr
I don’t have any links for cameras in Södra Länken, where I spent 30
minutes in a glacial queue this morning.
Posted at 22:02,
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I’ve re-subscribed to the Gunroom after
a long hiatus, and I’m using gmail instead
of gnus this time. So far, I’m pleasantly surprised by the
experience. Google have done a lot of work making the user interface
easy to use, even with high volumes of mail.
Things I like about it:
Keyboard shortcuts makes it easy to navigate. Extra points for being
vi-like.
Intelligent threading. Older mails are “stacked” in a pile, making
it easy to see where in the conversation you are.
Quoting is handled very well. Quoted text is folded so you don’t
see it all the time.
Good handling of contacts, with autocompletion of names.
Drafts are saved in the position from where they would have been
sent if they weren’t drafts.
Things that could be better:
I’d like to be able to choose whether to place my text underneath
the text of the email I’m replying to.
The default display and composition font (Arial) sucks. I prefer
monospaced fonts for email. Maybe you can handle this with
Greasemonkey.
All in all, I’m impressed with gmail. Web-based interfaces are just
getting better and better, with gmail, Flickr
and Bloglines leading the mail.
Updated on Sunday, 2005-04-17.
Posted at 23:52,
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Matt has released
dict2go,
a Python for Series 60 app that’s an interface to the dict
protocol. This means that you
can easily lookup weird words on the hoof.
As usual when reading Patrick O’Brian, I encountered a word I didn’t
know — mammothrept. Having some free time, I used dict2go to look
it up:
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :
mammothrept \mam"mo*thrept\ (m[a^]m"m[-o]*thr[e^]pt), n. [Gr.
mammo`qreptos; ma`mma grandmother + tre`pein to nourish.]
A child brought up by its grandmother; a spoiled child. [R.]
[1913 Webster]
O, you are a more mammothrept in judgment. --B. Jonson. [1913 Webster]
Truly cool. Thanks, Matt!
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Take a page from my book and don’t get drawn into “testing” stupid
Bluetooth hacks. The only consequence is that your phone will be
b0rked for no good reason.
Zainman posted a so-called
tip
on how to turn off any phone that browsed your phone via
Bluetooth. The trick was to name your BT profile "<tab>1<tab>".
He pestered me to try this, and finally I relented. When I changed the
name of my 6630 and browsed for it with my N-gage, the BT app
crashed. The phone didn’t restart. But when I tried to open the list
of BT access points on the N-gage, it crashed again. Obviously the
string was cached somewhere and prevented me from browsing for new BT
devices.
So now I have a crippled N-Gage. Great. Thanks a fucking bunch,
Zainman.
Update: a full reset (key combination *#7370#) fixed this —
don’t forget to back up your phone first, this nukes everything.
Updated on Friday, 2005-04-01.
Posted at 13:11,
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Thanks to Erik I got an invitation to
Yahoo’s social networking effort Yahoo
360°.
I’m a bit wary about this, I got burnt a bit on
Orkut last year. And a one-size-fits-all
blogging solution (which 360° is, underneath the dazzle of
picture-sharing and “blasts”) is not really for me.
The lack of themes is a bit lame, I know some people who demand pink…
Posted at 23:34,
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I’m using a CSS layout with floats (essentially the one described
here) which has a
number of advantages for me. Chief among these is the fact that I can
put all the sidebar content in the physical end of the HTML. This
means that if you’re browsing with a text-mode browser such as lynx
you get the content first instead of having to scroll down three
screens.
However, some mobile browsers are too smart for their own good. They
can access CSS stylesheets and use them. In this case, my nice
semantically marked up page was all squished up on the screen as the device
tried to overlay two divs with negative margins.
Enter CSS Media
types. This lets you
specify different CSS layouts for different “devices” (screen, print,
handheld, aural…). I split my CSS into three parts,
common.css, simple.css (the one with
the floats) and handheld.css, which is essentially
empty right now.
Then I added this to my <head> section:
<head>
<title>The occasional scrivener</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/common.css" type="text/css">
<style type="text/css" media="screen">@import "/screen.css";</style>
<style type="text/css" media="handheld">@import "../../../gustaf-sub/handheld.css";</style>
Now my pages render nicely (i.e. no CSS at all) in the following phones:
- Nokia 6630
- N-gage classic.
- Sony-Ericsson K700i.
- Sony-Ericsson P800. Test conducted with the built-in browser, not Opera.
Phones that don’t work include:
- Motorola A925. I think the browser here is a branded version of Opera.
- Sanyo 8100.
- Samsung SPH-A500. Internal browser error.
Thanks to Anthony Eden of
dotMP for help researching this.
Update: this wiki discusses designing for mobile devices.
Updated on Saturday, 2005-03-19.
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Not only Jim and
I have started using
del.icio.us as a quickie way of keeping up the
blog count, exalted Swedish blogger Erik
Stattin is doing it
too.
Of course, this is just
ersatz, compared to the
master of linkblogging.
Posted at 22:03,
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Several new users of the
Charlie
aka the Nokia 6630 have mentioned the coolness of the Transfer
application. This is a little program (Menu -> Tools on my phone) that
is sent via Bluetooth to the phone you want to upgrade from. When it’s
installed there, it sends all your information (contacts, calendar
details etc) to the new phone. Painless.
The docs say that the 7610 and 6600 are supported, but I had no
problems syncing with the N-gage classic.
Of course, you can use a sync with a PIM for this, but Transfer
handles pictures too.
I mentioned it in the post linked above, but it’s such a nice feature I felt it should get a bit more attention.
Posted at 17:40,
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Dave Winer writes about the lack of categorization in
blogs. I
don’t find categorizing my posts that hard, because
Blosxom mirrors the filesystem. If I write
about computers, I add the file to the com
directory. If I write about weblogging, I add it to the
comm/weblog directory. If I don’t know where
to put it, it goes in the alt directory.
(This mimicking of the Usenet hierarchy seemed a fine idea at the
time, but now it’s a brilliant
mistake.)
The above points to a drawback of the Blosxom scheme. It’s rather
static. Moving posts between categories and renaming existing ones is
bothersome (although there are plugins that help).
Anyway, you can categorize if you really want, and the fad for tags
(in Flickr, Technorati et. al.) is an extension of this. Categories
are fluid and instant. The category space is flat. Things coalesce out
of it — some tags make sense, others don’t. I’d really love tags in
Blosxom.
Posted at 20:27,
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I’m officially hooked on Bloglines. Ghod
help us all if they go down or go out of business.
I’m checking my feeds on the go with the mobile version:
http://www.bloglines.com/mobile. Works
like a charm on
Charlie.
At work I’ve been using Sharpreader, an
application I can heartily recommend. But the three-paned approach and
the reliance on Internet Explorer as a rendering engine are personal
turn-offs.
I’ve added the “subscribe to Bloglines” button to my blog too, just to
mindlessly propagate the meme further. In fact, the more I use
Bloglines, the more I feel an inexplicable appetite for human flesh
and brains. Mmmmm… brains! BRAINS!!!
Ahem.
Check out my blogroll if
you want.
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A wiki as blog, very nicely done with updated internal links. Rui is a
mobitopian of sorts (he hangs out in the
channel sometimes). As a resident of Portugal and a telecoms insider,
his views are often a contrast to wild-eyed American mobile utopians
like Russ.
Of especial note right now is his list of Christmas
phones.
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Tom links to a post by
Clive
about the gestural interfaces on a new Samsung
phone. Clive
thinks the proposed inplmementation is pretty stupid, and I can’t
really disagree.
Gestural interfaces have been around meme-wise for a long time (in
fact, I wrote my thesis
based on a proposed interface). You would think that they’d show up
more now that mobiles are getting smaller and smaller. But the Samsung
is the first mainstream model I’ve seen so far.
In fact, only one haptic interface has made serious inroads: the
ubiquitous vibrate function on nearly every modern phone.
We haven’t really reached the point where the smallness of phones
requires a radically new interface to exploit all the features within
them.
But as Tom notes, existing interfaces can benefit from fresh thinking:
I mean, why do devices with stylus uniformly have interfaces which
require you to stab small areas of a small screen with a small
pointer? Why not have them use long, sweeping strokes of a stylus,
mimicking the way we write with pen and paper?
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“Work in progress”.
The
9300
is my new lust-thang, and I know my dad’s interested in upgrading his
Psion to a
9500. This
is just a place to store random URLs and info for the time being.
Update: Al reports from Malaysia that the 9300 keyboard is
very small, the 9500 is more like the Psion. On the other hand,
Christian
reports
that the 9300 is the size of a 6110. Yay!
Frank tells me that the list price for the
9300 is €600.
- Power Data — flat file database for 9x00 machines
- Series 80 SSH client
- Ewan’s 9500 review (first part)
Updated on Thursday, 2024-11-18.
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Russ is giving a talk at Web 2.0. From his post:
Not only are the numbers there (160 million Americans with mobile
phones), but every American carrier has reasonably priced unlimited
data plans. […] This gives the U.S. a huge advantage over other
markets around the world which continue to charge by the kilobyte.
Right! The Yanks are gonna clean our clocks — again! Just because the
carriers are so short-sighted that they can’t see that when it comes
to mobile data, cheaper traffic means more traffic! The net is
addictive, but right now everyone’s scared of the kB charges.
Make a short-term dent in your revenue, reap the benefits
later. Otherwise, the US will OWN the mobile data services space.
Update:
Frank
agrees.
Some more opinion points:
- Innovation and Operators
- DoCoMo works with developers
Updated on Thursday, 2024-10-07.
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Vodafone’s launch of a consumer 3G service yesterday put the finger on
a very real problem: what does this cost?
As Russ found
out, it’s not
easy to discover how much this will cost the consumer. In my opinion,
this fact is a bigger problem than the prices themselves.
As an example, I offer you an anecdote. No hard links or references,
because that’s the point.
A while ago, a Swedish newspaper wrote an article saying that if you
used your 3G phone as a broadband modem for office work — downloading
email, surfing, maybe getting a document or two — your monthly bill
would be more than 9,000 SEK (about $1,290).
The point of this is not whether it’s true. My strongest impression of
how much mobile data will cost is that it’s obscenely expensive. And I
haven’t seen anything from the carriers to dispel this.
If the pricing was up front, and you had a good way to check how much
you owed, and felt you could get redress for outrageous bills, the
carriers could charge quite a lot but still get customers.
For example, I use Tre.se’s service. Their portal
sucks, but you can buy ringtones for 30 SEK, background pictures for
15 SEK, a location lookup for 2 SEK. The point is, I can make an
informed decision whether this is worth it or not. By calling a
service number I get an up-to-date status on my account standing, in
voice and data. And it’s PAYG, so if I splurge I won’t have to deal
with this at the end of the month.
Here’s my modest proposal for Vodafone:
Free data traffic, within limits. Maybe you pay extra for this
monthly. Flat-rate, essentially.
If you want to buy premium content (footie scores, music, whatever)
you pay what’s on the screen.
This way, Vodafone will make a fixed amount of money for all data
users, as only a small percentage will max out their allotment. And
they can make money on premium content and allow others to make money
too, thus making the content more appealing.
They’ll also insensibly educate the user base about mobile data. There
will be room to experiment, to have fun, and to tell friends about
this cool new thing.
If they and other EU carriers don’t do this, however, and continue
treating their customers like cattle to be squeezed for every last kB
of data, then the US carriers and content providers will eat their
lunch.
Update: Russell analyses the Vodafone
webcast and
leads me to make this amendment:
- Browsing is free, but only in the Live! area. Wander outside, and
you pay GPRS rates per kB.
So it’s a subtle form of lock-in. Maybe aimed primarily at the content
vendors, as in “look at all these captive users we have! How much
would you pay to market your content to them?”
Updated on Saturday, 2024-11-13.
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I’ve been looking for a textmode syndication aggregator for a while. I
tried Raggle but it just core dumped on my
platform. Rawdog seems promising,
but just didn’t seem to fit my needs.
I came upon Snownews
via Rootprompt and
so far it looks promising. No native support for atom
feeds but that’s (supposedly) handled by
extensions.
So now I can read my feeds from within screen, as Ghod intended.
Update: I’ve since installed rawdog and must say it’s a very good
piece of software. Have a look at my feed
here.
Updated on Tuesday, 2024-06-29.
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This is how I moved my blog from MT to Blosxom. The process is very
specific for my case — you mileage will definitely vary.
Pre-requisites
I had the following pre-requisites:
- A good knowledge of Perl
- A shell account at the target machine
- A test machine running a free version of Un*x (OpenBSD).
I installed Blosxom on my test system and played around with CSS and
flavours until I was happy with the look of the site.
Exporting from MT
Searching Google led me to this
post. It concerned
moving from MT to Drupal, but mentioned an important thing: the
default MT export format is hard to parse. The method used instead was
to export to XML, and parse that.
I downloaded the XML export template and the Perl file used to parse
it, and modified them for my needs. They are available below:
The changes to the XML template are fairly minor. I added a new Index
Template in MT and called it “Export XML”. The output file was set to
“export.xml”.
The convert.pl script was modified in the following ways:
I changed the output from printing SQL insert statements to writing
to files. The timestamps were modified to reflect the original
posting date in MT.
I constructed new Blosxom filenames from the entry titles.
I mapped my MT categories to new ones via a hash.
After I had debugged these changes, I ran the script on an export
downloaded from MT.
Importing to Blosxom
After I had this running, it was a simple matter of taring the files
and moving them to the target server. After changing the relevant
paths, I was up and running.
A friendly sysadmin installed a redirect at my old blog which pointed
to the new one. The original MT archive posts were left alone to cater
to old bookmarks, but I’m working on redirecting those too.
Update, 2024-11-02: The links to the files above were b0rked, but
David McBride put me right about that. Thanks, David!
Update, 2024-11-26: Here is another article about moving from MT to Blosxom
Updated on Friday, 2024-11-26.
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For a guy who’s
scratching
his
head
at the whole ‘casting “phenomenon”, I sure can’t stop reading,
thinking, and writing about them.
Go figure.
Anyway, Paolo Valdemarin shall have the
last word:
Everything is packed, especially my hard disk. I have downloaded a
whole bunch of podcasts I have not been able to listen to (this is a
big issue with podcasts) and I’m kinda looking forward to be stuck
at the airport or on the airplane in order to be finally able to
listen to all this stuff.
Kudos to
Frank
for reminding me of this post, which I first saw at
Dave’s.
I think this illustrates the basic uselessness of audio blogs. Not
only are they
huge compared
to text, they contain relatively little information. The fact that you
can ramble on in front of a microphone does not mean that you are
being more coherent than if you sat down with pen, paper, or keyboard
and wrote something down. There is very little gain, information-wise.
And lastly, where is the time needed to listen to this? I can scan
blogs in the small pauses at work (these are frequent these
days),
get an idea, act on it, and go on with my work and life. If I listen
to a ‘cast in the taco, I’m out and about, and whatever ideas I may
get, whatever pointers to new information I may hear about, are gone,
unless I sit down and commit them to hardcopy, or visit the home site
of the cast to access the links.
What is gained?
Podcasting is a hobby for the idle rich. Only they can afford the time
to compose the ‘casts, the money to pay for bandwidth and music
licensing and the
inevitable
litigation,
and again, the time to listen to this junk being uploaded, RSSed,
downloaded in an unending spiral of digital aural effluvia.
The rest of us will have to content ourselves with text. And that’s an
issue of the Digital Divide I can live with. Count me out of the
“podcasting revolution”.
Update: Seth Ladd writes in a comment:
You obviously don’t spend 2 hours each day commuting on a bus or
train. Time delaying audio broadcasts is perfect for those idle
hours.
That’s a valid point. I’d like a way to time-shift regular radio
broadcasts, a kind of audio TiVo. But I’m still unsure whether
podcasting is the ideal application for this.
Updated on Wednesday, 2024-10-20.
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Rawdog has been updated. This is
an app that reads RSS feeds and generates a static HTML file that can
be viewed in a browser. It sounds like something Dave
Winer would
like us to use. And for once, I agree with the man. RSS is not
email. Don’t worry if you miss something, it’ll turn up again.
Update: I deleted my anti-‘cast rant, because Winder must have
realised the massive disconnect in accusing everyone of not getting
RSS and offering to explain it in a podcast.
Updated on Saturday, 2024-11-20.
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Yes, we do! Russ was just
going on and on about how cool Yahoo Messenger was, so everyone
downloaded it, logged in, added one another to their address books in
wild abandon, dug up old and cruddy webcams and sat looking at other
people looking at
them.
The weird thing was that we were still on #mobitopia, using the video
an unbelievably bandwidth-intensive backchannel.
After a while we got together for a voice sessions, stretching the
bandwidth limits to the max. Don’t know if it’ll work when the US
isn’t celebrating Thanksgiving. Waves to Russ (San Fransisco), Frank
(Germany), Anthony (Hawaii), and Tarek (UAE).
I don’t know if IM will be the new mode of communication for me
personally. I like the group chat nature of IRC, where you can fade in
and out of conversations as your interest in them wanes or waxes. PM
and rarely-used channels can be used for one-on-one conversations. In
IM, one-on-one is the norm.
Update: I got linklove from
Russ. I must say
I agree with him about the lack of an automatic group chat. A well-run
IRC channel (my experience of these is limited to #mobitopia, so I
could be arguing from a really limited data set here) is a like a nice
pub or a university common room. Sometimes there are people to talk
to. Sometimes they’re there, but reading a paper or chatting with
someone else. Entering a channel is like opening a door. It signals
the fact that you’re there, and other people can acknowledge you
directly or talk to you later.
In contrast, IM is like someone calling you on the phone while you’re
at home working. Granted, you can leave a message on your machine, or
simply not answer some calls, but it’s still an interruption.
For some people and situations, IM is really great. For me however, I
don’t think it’s the thing. I prefer to interact with others either
asynchronously via email, or loosely coupled, via IRC.
However, setting up an IRC network (even if this is just a channel and
some users) is a way bigger hassle than using a well designed IM
system like Yahoo’s or MSN’s. They take care of the hassle for you,
and you accept the compromise or do your own thing. I happen to
believe that the group dynamics of the
Mobitopia blog/channel would have been
hard to create with just IM. But ultimately, it’s not technology that
creates groups and ideas, but people. IM is simply another tool.
P.S. How much would you bet on a Google IM network? It would be
interesting, but then the realization would dawn that Google is just
Yahoo! v.2…
Updated on Saturday, 2024-11-27.
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Jeremy Zawodny on what’s wrong with email.
I’m glad he wrote it so I don’t have to.
This quote shall henceforce be my personal credo:
If you leave it up to me to figure out exactly what you mean, I’m
always going to choose the one I most like.
Update: This article
shows that the
problem is worse than just top-posting.
An entire educational industry has developed to offer remedial
writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private
universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering
evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in
business and technical writing.
Isn’t this a pretty bad grade for the American school system?
Finally:
“E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering
what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out
onto the screen,” Hogan said. “It has companies at their wits’ end.”
How true.
Updated on Wednesday, 2024-12-08.
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I finally installed Winamp version 5 and added the
Audioscrobbler
plugin. So now you can see what I’ve been listening to at my AS page.
Next up, getting the latest 5 tracks up on this weblog.
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Russ slams “mobile Luddites” apropos this Slashdot article.
He’s especially riled by this
comment. Read
his
response for
FCC-non-compliant goodness.
I think we can all agree with Russ was that his point was not to
denigrate those that need or want “just a phone”, but to point out
that the Slashdot crowd should be welcoming advanced phones with open
arms.
I’m with Russ here, even if my job isn’t as closely involved with
mobile tech as his is. But I’d find it very hard to use a phone
lacking Series 60 capabilities for any length of time. In fact, just
this morning I dug up the brick from it’s resting place in the cellar
do get a nice dose of UIQ.
But I can’t understand the American pining for simple phones. Aren’t
there any over there? In Sweden, anyone with a hankering for a simple
phone can go to a store and buy a Nokia 3310 with a pre-paid card for
around $60.
Phonehouse has a range of pre-paid
phones. For
example, the Sony-Ericsson T610 (colour screen, camera, polyphonic ringtones) is a
mere 999 SEK ($150).
The cost of calls is generally higher with pre-paid cards, but you
don’t need a billing relationship with a carrier. Most cards support
voice and SMS, but some offer GPRS too.
For an even cheaper deal, you can buy a used phone and a separate
pre-paid card. Wham, instant mobile presence.
Can’t you do that in the US?
Another issue reflected in the Slashdot debate and in the comments to
Russ’ post is that many advanced phones are hard to use and
expensive. This is generally true, but only by buying and using these
phones and reporting their faults will there be a chance of
improvement.
A part of this attitude towards mobile carriers is that they don’t
seem to “get” the Internet. According to Slashdot wisdom, everything
from information to bandwidth to servers should be really cheap, if
not free. The mobile phone business seems to defy this. Phones are
getting more advanced but also more expensive. Calls are not getting
cheaper. Customer service is bad.
Rui makes a convincing argument that
the mobile communications business is different from the “Internet”
business. You can’t just take a phone and plug it in the network. For
better or for worse, you need to get it certified and accepted by
regulators and carriers. This means that the “Bellheads” (old-style
telcos) can perpetuate their knowledge and corporate culture over the
“Netheads” (Internet companies).
(Read the classic Wired article Bellhead
vs. Netheads for
more info on the telco schism.)
Netheads hate this. Witness the interest for “mesh radio” and
ubiquitous wi-fi coverage in the US. Well, in Sweden we have
that. It’s called 3G and it’s expensive and slow. But I don’t think
there’s a better way right now. For what it’s worth, Chris Davies
agrees.
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Frank posts a tale of MMS
woe
and I can only concur. On New Year’s eve, I received an MMS from my
sister and her boyfriend on Teneriffa. But did I get the pic? Nooo, I
got a SMS with a link and a password to look at it on the Web.
Both she and I have the same carrier (Telia, spit) and my phone is
part of their pathetic attempt at branding. There should be no need
for me to fix my settings. Yet for all that, I can’t get a bloody
MMS.
Telia tries to promote MMS by offering them for free on weekends. If
this is the level of service they provide, even free is not cheap
enough.
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I broke down and got the Charlie, aka the Nokia
6630. I couldn’t stand
Russ being the
only Mobitopian with one (not counting lots of Finns who have them for
evaluation), so I decided to get one too.
Telia has a deal that says you get the phone for free if you pay 100
SEK extra a month for 2 years on a UMTS contract. Telia’s the biggest
carrier in Sweden, and have good coverage. The phone retails for 5,200
SEK without a contract.
I wasn’t the only one discovering that this was a pretty good deal, so
the phone was a bit hard to get. The nearest store didn’t have it, but
mentioned that the Kungsgatan store did. I phoned them and they said
they had two left, and no way were they gonna reserve one for me. I
decided to go there after work and let fate decide — no phone left,
I’d give it a rest.
The store was full of Christmas shoppers (including a guy who bought a
Motorola V3 Razr, and then decided not to go with his friends to the
movies, instead going home to fondle his new phone…). The
middle-aged man in front of me wanted to know more about the
Sony-Ericsson Z1010, which is even more sold out than the 6630. My
heart nearly stopped when the guy behind the counter hauled out a 6630
box and started hustling “the last one in the store”. Luckily the
potential buyer was a die-hard S-E fan and left without it. I pounced
on it instead.
I’ll post more soon about it. Until then, I can say that I used the
Transfer app to smoothly move my data from the taco to the
Charlie. Sweet!
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Jim Hughes asks if the iPod is the new
Newton in a speculative piece
about the future of the mobile phone as a personalized music player.
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Open up the music player on your computer.
Set it to play your entire music collection.
Hit the “shuffle” command.
Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their
musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping
that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip
credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty. Write it up in
your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the
other sites where you saw this.
If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or
third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness
could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists,
you can if you’d like.
This is my list:
- Kelly Clarkson, Walk Away
- Ragnarok, Et Vinterland i Nord
- Suzanne Vega, Those Whole Girls
- Badly Drawn Boy, Take The Glory
- Suzanne Vega, The Queen and the Soldier
- Lars Demian, Det manliga beteendet
- Stiff Little Fingers, At The Edge
- Julie Roberts, Pot of Gold
- Avril Lavigne, Forgotten
- Curve, Doppelganger
Via Rui, he got it
from Sergio
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The old blog is being hit
hard by comment spammers. Guess another Google dance is scheduled
soon. Freaking lowlives.
As far as I can see, the only alternative is to go through each post
by hand in Movable Type’s admin interface and manually disable
comments. There must be a better way to do this…
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Anthony Eden has been working like a dog to get
dotMP up and running. Congratulations! Russ
weighs in on how cool this
is.
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Tarek has written a nice
article
on how to access gmail from a Series 60
phone. Worth a look if you’re on the move.
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Russ finally broke down and
redesigned Mobitopia. It’s now a communal
linkblog, where the denizens of the #mobitopia IRC
channel post interesting URLs, with
comments.
Additionally, it now has a fresh look, with the classic Nokia 7650 as
visual signature.
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Idle words is a very well written, funny
blog.
I think I got this via Dave Winer back in
the day.
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The release of new Nokia models is a big event over at
#mobitopia. Today Nokia announced
three
new models:
The 6020 looks like a
common-sense business communications device. “Just a phone.” Runs
Series 40.
The 7110 is the long-awaited
Series 90 phone.
The 3230 is an “entry-level”
Series 60 phone with megapixel camera.
The 3230 especially looks interesting. As Christian Lindholm
notes
it has the potential for being the hottest selling smartphone ever.
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Russ has hacked
together mOlympics.com with the help of
Erik and Matt.
It’s a mobile-ready Olympic news aggregator.
Development time: 1 day. Go Mobitopians!
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Amusing
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The new URL for a feed for this site is
http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/index.vrss10. Thanks
to Matthias for fixing the rss10 plugin!
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Great blog, very
interesting common-sense
writings about the
nitty-gritty of writing code. Nice design too.
Thanks Jim for the pointer to this one.
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Interesting approach to text-based design, using blosxom. I’m
definitevely going to look closer to this site as it evolves.
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When I bought the Brick I also got a
tre.se prepaid
card. But
it’s not really a prepaid card. Most GSM carries here in Sweden sell
you a fixed amount of money in a certificate, which you can call for
until the amount is finished.
Tre have a two-tiered model. You can buy talk minutes (also valid for
video calls), but these will expire in 30 days, unless you buy more
minutes. In this, the card is not really a prepaid, but true
pay-as-you-go. Instead of getting billed in the future, you pay in
advance for the amount you’ll call in a month.
You can also buy traditional prepaid certificates that are only valid
for data traffic (SMS, MMS, packet data, and games and ringtones from
Tre’s mobile portal). These credits don’t expire.
As I’m only planning to use the Brick for data, this is a great
deal. I already have a GSM phone with a subscription, and don’t want
to switch numbers. Now I can keep a close eye on my data traffic
without paying for calls that I don’t need.
It’ll be interesting to see how many people take advantage of the
faster, cheaper data in Tre’s UMTS network and use their new phones
exclusively for data.
Posted at 21:19,
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Tre.se, the Swedish division of the
Hutchinson-Whampoa UMTS consortium, are launching pay-as-you-go cards,
and as a promotion I could buy a Motorola
A925 +
pre-paid card for 750 SEK, which is like, cheap. Especially as they
throw in a Bluetooth headset. The fact that you get 2 batteries too is
not a plus, it just means that the phone’s battery life is like the
half-life of some exotic particle.
Anyway, the phone is now known in the Erikson household as the Brick,
because it’s a huge phone, even compared to the none-too-svelte
Taco. The difference is no more than a centimetre each way, but that
extra centimetre makes the difference between a phone that fits in
your pocket and one that threatens to drag your pants down your
ankles.
Here’s a picture comparing the two phones:
But hey! It’s a UIQ phone for about $100, and that’s cool.
Tre don’t have a walled garden in the same way as Three.co.uk, you can
install apps on the phone and surf around. I grabbed
Quirc (found via
Ewan’s excellent guide to UIQ
freeware)
and was soon riding the subway, chatting in
#mobitopia with both a S60 device
(the Taco) and a UIQ (the Brick). I was in nerd nirvana.
But, there are issues.
Let’s take the pros first:
Symbian UIQ.
Bluetooth, IR, USB interface.
camera (this may not seem like a big deal, but unlike the rest of
the human race, I didn’t have a cameraphone).
And then there’s some cons:
The pen interface sucks. I agree with
Russ, you should be able to use a phone
one-handed. And if you think this conflicts with the first item in
the pro list, bite me.
The handwriting interface is hard for me to use. I’m used to
Graffiti on the Palm, and felt that hard to use, but this will
take some taking used to. But the predictive feature seems to help.
There aren’t as many cool features as on the Sony-Ericsson P{8,9}00,
like the jogwheel.
I’ll be spending some more time with phone, strictly for data. I can’t
see myself carrying this around as my primary phone. But as a fast
data terminal, it has possibilities.
Random tips
You change the PIN code in the phone application, not in some
central place in the operating system. Maybe pretty simple, but
there’s no mention of it in the manual.
Generally, the manual from 3 sucks. There’s no mention of the
handwriting system, for example.
Quirc started crashing randomly, so I emailed the author. He
suggested deleting the P-java specific file
C:\System\libs\quirc.dll, which seems to have solved the problem.
Only for users of Tre.se’s PAYG card: the tariffs are
confusing. This article attempts to
explain (in
Swedish).
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Podcasting is all the rage, but what the
early adopters are finding out is that it sucks bandwidth. To save
this, I propose the following components:
a BitTorrent tracker site
dedicated to Podcasts.
RSS feeds for these ‘casts.
A RSS reader client that takes the .torrent files as enclosures, and
hands them over to a BT client for download.
Ta-da! At least some of the bandwidth is shared among the downloaders.
Podcasts may be the first mainstream legal application for BT.
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In
this post, I promised to hang in on Movable Type and not move to
another tool.
Well, I’ve changed my mind.
Why? Simply because MT is too limiting for me. I edit my posts in
Emacs, run them through SmartyPants
and Markdown
to get nice formatting, then paste the result into MT’s
edit window on the site.
When using Windows, this works — kinda. But when I’m at
home, I use an old laptop running OpenBSD. Running Firebird on that
machine is slooow. So I’ve got this multi-step barrier in front
of my text and my weblog.
I’ve been playing with Blosxom on a spare unix
server. It’s everything MT isn’t: small, spare,
configurable — if you know Perl. Also I like the semi-dynamic
notion of timestamp-based sorting. Certain posts, such as my reading
list are updated often. Under MT, you can’t see this. If you
subscribe to my RSS feed, you can see that the post has been updated,
but not otherwise.
Also, it’s insanely fun to be hacking with
Blosxom. Turn-around time for site changes are instant, CSS changes
are fast — all because I’m working directly in Emacs, not
in bog-slow Firebird.
So as soon as I get stuff in order on Symbiandiaries I’m
outta MT. They can take their bloated “CMS” and sell it to
someone else. I’m sticking with the tools I know and trust.
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Symbiandiaries.com is back online
after a longer hiatus. The problem lay in the management interface,
not the serving of pages. For once, Movable Type’s use of static pages
paid off.
I’ve been chafing under the enforced silence, not realizing until now
how much I appreciate the chance of self-expression. I really regret
the chance to publish this
post (now
backdated). Oh well.
I’ve offered my services to Rafe of
AAS fame as ronin sysadmin, so
perhaps we can recover faster next time the site goes down.
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As Matt said, what if audio blogs are the Next Great Thing, and we
curmudgeons missed it? So as to be able to snidely comment on this
phenomenon from a position of knowledge, I pulled down
yesterdays
Daily Source
Code by Adam Curry,
and put it on the taco, my trusty N-Gage.
OK, step one was accomplished, and I didn’t need those near-obligatory
accessories, a $300 iPod and a $1,500 Mac. That’s nice, because I
can’t afford either.
I started listening on my way home (5 minute walk, 35 minute subway
ride, 7 minute walk). The taco is a nice enough mp3-player, but it
lacks a fast-forward feature. I pressed pause to avoid looking like a
zombie and read a book instead, but when I tried resuming, it started
from the beginning. Obviously, an iPod would handle this better, as
would any dedicated mp3 player.
Adam is involved in iPodder.org which he
intends to turn into a centre for podcasting. Well, that’s all well
and good, but if he wants creating and listening to podcasts to become
mainstream, he’d better get a better, less iPod-specific name. Now you
get the impression that it’s only for Mac + iPod users. Also, Apple’s
lawyers may have some things to say to him.
The post itself was entertaining, I’ll say that. It sure beats trying
to find new music to listen to, and fills a niche that FM radio
perhaps can’t fill. But still, the Net is about TEXT, goddammit. Audio
is all well and good for music and entertainment, but for information,
the bandwidth is wasted. I may be able to read articles and blog posts
“interstitially” at work, filling those blank pauses when I
task-switch from one issue to another, but I can’t multitask enough to
listen to speech.
Also, the barriers to entry are pretty high, both for producers and
consumers. A blog poster needs to be able to handle a web form and a
keyboard. An audioblogger needs mics, audio software, BANDWIDTH, and
audio nous, not too widely available. Lots more talented writers
than talented radio artists, but that may change as podcasting becomes
more popular.
Consumers need: a fast net connection, an mp3-player, a modern
computer, an intimate knowledge of RSS (version 2.0, no less), and
weird and wonderful “iPodder” software, which, despite it’s name, is
not tied to an iPod. Go figure.
Who’s the audience? The web is available to perhaps 20% percent of the
planet’s population. Of this percentage, maybe 15% wander outside MSN
et al. Of these, 10% read blogs. Perhaps 5% of these listen to
podcasts. But I bet 99% of these are white, and male, and live in the
US and Western Europe.
However, for all its flaws, audio blogging is much much better than
that next scourge, videoblogging. That will be scary. Until then, I’ll
stick to text, thank you very much.
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Frank and
Russell have
pointed out some problems with the user interface (UI) on
smartphones. Specifically, the Series 60 OS used in most smartphones
today.
Background
For the purpose of this post, I define “smartphone” as a mobile phone
that has an OS that can accommodate non-trivial extra
applications. Examples of smartphones are the Nokia 6600, Siemens SX1
(Series 60), Sony Ericsson P900 (UIQ), Treo 600 (PalmSource), Orange
SPV C500 (MS Mobile). “Phone” on this context is a traditional mobile
phone. Examples are Sony Ericsson T610, Nokia 6620, Samsung E700.
What does the interface need to handle?
Phones have some core applications. Central ones are making and taking
calls, handling addresses, and messaging (SMS, email, IM
protocols). Cameras probably also fall into this category. Less
central areas are Web browsing, calendars, etc.
Ideally, all phone functions should be accessible using the keypad
one-handed. This means using the thumb of one hand. The Sony Ericsson
smartphones use a jog wheel under the index finger of the dominant
hand (the right one). Relying on this feature for accessing functions
excludes all those who prefer to use their left hand.
An alternative to shoe-horning everything into “thumb-mode” is a
two-tiered approach. Basic functions are accesses using a keypad, but
an auxiliary keypad or stylus+touchscreen combo is used for more
advanced features. But where to draw the line between basic and
advanced?
I have had the misfortune to configure email on both a recent Sony
Ericsson and a Nokia. Tapping in multiple server names without the
benefit of copy and paste sucks. A PC-based app would help
here. Another solution is a web interface that sends a SMS with the
configuration.
But this begs the question: why do I have to do this? Why can’t I buy
a phone where the data connections Just Work? Why is MMS and GPRS
settings different? Why do I, as a consumer, have to care about
whether my phone manufacturer and my service provider has their act
together?
Alternatives
Speech recognition holds some promise, but will remain a complement to
the keypad.
How about gestural interfaces? I did a bit of research about
applications of gestural interfaces in the course of writing my
graduate thesis. (For the morbidly interested, you can download it here). An example is scrolling through an image gallery by
tilting the phone from side to side. Another is answering a call
simply by picking up the phone. My guess is that inertial interfaces
will be on par with speech interfaces; a complement to a primary
interface which will still be keyboard + screen.
However, the keypad is often woefully underutilised. Usually there’s
some buttons that are dedicated to navigation, or a joypad. The large
3x5 grid of numerals are used for inputting numbers and text. How
about using the ‘3’ and ‘9’ as PageUp and PageDown buttons when
browsing sites?
Who will be the mobile Apple?
Who will usher in the Mac Age for mobile phones? Not Apple, they can’t
cover the mobile space (they outsourced the development of the
iPod). Maybe Nokia can rise to the challenge. Another contender is
Sony Ericsson, with the Japanese half in charge of making lots of tiny
devices easy to handle. Another contender is Microsoft, if they’re
serious about taking the mobile space to the next level, and not just
treat it as an adjunct to the desktop space.
Posted at 16:22,
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news.readfreenews.net is back up!
Time to catch up on those 12,984 articles in
alt.sysadmin.recovery…
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Welcome to my new weblog!
I’ve given Movable Type a try, and as I’ve recounted
here
and
here,
it’s been a mixed experience.
MT is a very polished product. But I’m a command-line kind of guy, and
web applications really don’t appeal to me. Give me an ssh
connection and a remote server anyday. Blosxom is a better match for my style of work.
I have a TODO list up, and will be working on this
when I have time from renovating my house. Watch this space.
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Dave Winer has, in his inimitable way, defined
moblogging
for the rest of us. Oh, Scoble helped
out too.
The definition?
Moblogging is any activity that occurs away from your normal
blog-writing place whose purpose is to create content for your blog.
Hmm.
This is a bit too inclusive, if you ask me. For example, this blog
is hosted on a server in the States somewhere (even
Rafe, the guy generously donating
space and server resources, isn’t sure where — ain’t outsourcing
great?). I update it via tramp on emacs, running under screen on a
machine in the server closet at work. I just fire up Putty at work, or
on the Toshiba in the kitchen, or the Thinkpad while waiting for
Viking to sleep, or on the Dell upstairs, or my dad’s computer at his
place… So I’m basically moblogging all the time according to
Winer/Scoble.
FWIW, others agree with
me
and have drawn the ire of the man himself. He was just being
lighthearted, he says now. Just trying to start a discussion.
Far from me to define moblogging, but it seems to me as futile
exercise. If I can blog from my mobile phone, I will (and I
have); if
I can blog from an internet cafe in Katmandu (or
Norrtälje), I will; if I am
incarcerated with only a i386 running Windows 3.1 and Trumpet
Winsock, I’ll blog
with that.
In time, the artificial divide between “blogging” and “moblogging”
will disappear. Only a few diehards will consider their
desk, fully supported by [their] normal high-speed net connection,
laptop, multi-gigabyte external hard disk, second monitor, USB hub,
mouse, etc etc.
as a “normal blog-writing place”. For the rest of us, the world will
be that place.
Update I headed over to Scoble just to
see that the link worked, and it turns out he’s
dumped some
guy’s feed, because he was fooled by a
hoax. Well,
so was
Rich,
and he admits it. Yet he’s “dumped”. Scoble “can’t trust what goes on
his blog anymore”.
Wow. Talk about taking lessons from the
master. No
wonder they’re defining terms for the edification of the rest of us.
Posted at 22:19,
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The AAS pub
meet!
Where you can win a brand new, yet-to-be-released Nokia Communicator
9500!!
How the hell can I persuade the company to send me to London on the
4th October? I could plead the sorry state of the London branch’s
PCs, but that would mean I would be expected to fix them, and there’s
not enough time for that…
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Steve Litchfield posts some tips for the serious taco user.
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Number 1 for “gustaf erikson”.
Number 6 for gustaf.
Posted at 19:57,
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Blogs are like
tamagotchis — a
fitting metaphor. Incidentally, is our society in deep trouble when
tamagotchis are the basis for new metaphors?
Unfortunately, we the Mobitopians have
been neglecting our virtual pet. The traffic to the main page is down,
and I myself find I’ve bookmarked the IRC
links rather than the front
page. Of course, I hang out in the
channel all the time, having great
fun, but we don’t communicate that fun and insight and commentary to
visitors to the site.
A quick fix would be to move the IRC links to the front page, perhaps
adding a moderation system so that not just anything gets
posted. Also, being able to comment on the links would create a kind
of Ur-blog (as in the original incarnation, posting interesting URLs),
but with multiple commentators.
A way of submitting longer bits of IRC commentary would be nice too,
so that visitors get a feel for the vibe of the channel.
Of course, the longer opinion pieces would remain, but they would be
relegated from the front page.
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The phenomenon of pointless audio
blogs
shows no sign of going away. The reaction has set in, however. Hear
the manifesto
here,
or read it here.
I’d be tempted to call audio posts the ultimate ego-stroking, but
that’s already been appropriated by weblogging itself…
(via Mark.)
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The usual spam arrives, sneaking past
bogofilter with a headline
advertising the usual stuff (I don’t even know what C1alis is). On a
whim I open it. (To set the stage, I should mention I use
gnus, a mail and newsreader for emacs that is,
of course, text based).
The spam consists, in its visible entirity, of the following:
Your mailer do not support HTML messages. Switch to a better mailer.
Uhm, I’m pretty happy with my present “mailer”, thanks.
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A few years ago, Ericsson was losing it in the mobile handset space.
The phones it produced were technically excellent, but lacked the
styling and ease of use of Nokia’s handsets. Finally Ericsson faced
it’s failings and teamed up with Sony to form Sony Ericsson.
One of the first phones was the T68, later upgraded to the T68i. This
phone was criticised for being slow, but had excellent Bluetooth
support and quickly became a popular business choice. It also had a
rudimentary email client.
Early last year, S-E released the T610. This trend-setting cameraphone
set the stage for the triumphant return of Sony Ericsson. The
combination of camera, large colour screen, snappy styling, email, and
polyphonic ringtones made this a very popular phone choice. In Sweden,
where I live, it’s not unusual to see 12-year olds with T610s.
The T610 was followed by the Z600, the T630, and now the K700, all
upgrading the basic concept. Meanwhile, Nokia has stumbled, arguably
missing the cameraphone trend and perhaps pushing the smartphone
concept a little too hard.
At my workplace, a medium-sized tech company in Stockholm, the T610
“family” of phones is predominant. As a support engineer, I can attest
that it fits our profile very well. The email client especially is
appreciated by our sales force. And the ability to sync contacts and
calender with MS Outlook is also a plus. Bluetooth support is
excellent, and infra-red connectivity is included as a matter of
course. The UI is colourful and stylish, although texting and text
input is still slow.
For us, and for many other people, the latest S-E phones are “smart
enough”. The additional bulk and complexity of Nokia’s Symbian
smartphones can’t compete with S-E sleek styling.
Smartphones will remain a niche product for a few more years, but
eventually, mid-level phones from S-E and others will gradually
approach their functionality from below.
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Telia is offering a 3G deal for
businesses. You get a Sony Ericsson Z1010 for 1 SEK (about 10c) if you
sign up for a 24 month plan. To sweeten the deal, they offer free data
access until the end of the year — to the tune of 500 MB a
month. According to the billboards, this is just “data”, but according
to the
website
it’s GPRS data. Maybe it is one and the same, but for me, GPRS goes
with GSM, while 3G has another sort of data.
However, it’s beside the point. The point is that the billboards say
that these 500 MB are worth 4,000 SEK (about $535). So if you’re
hooked with 3G and want to continue your profligate data lifestyle
after your free months are up, you can end up with a habit nearly as
expensive as illegal drugs.
The interesting thing is the way Telia are pushing this deal. By
calling attention to the potentially enormous savings you would make
by accepting this offer, they make the deal sound better. But on the
other hand, they call attention to the truly bizarre pricing of mobile
data at the moment.
Posted at 20:28,
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Dave Winer is covering the Democratic National
Convention in Boston, along with some other accredited bloggers. Good for him.
This post
confuses me, however. I’m in Europe, and if I was covering this kind
of stuff and could afford the GPRS charges, I’d get a laptop and a
mobile to use as a mobile. Any half-competent phone manufactured in
the last 5 years can do this. Of course, you have to dick around with
cables, infrared, or Bluetooth, but it’s definitely doable.
Some bloggers say they’re the new journalists. I’d love to see a
journalist say: “I can’t cover that, there’s no Wi-Fi there.”
Posted at 23:29,
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Dave Winer has had blog posts in mp3 format
for a while. All I can say is: why?
Listening to a person talk is much less efficient than reading
something. You can’t skip back and forth, sometimes you miss a word or
sentence due to differing accents, and if the speaker is talking in a
language you don’t understand, you can’t babelfish it to get something
vaguely understandable.
In Dave’s case, it’s not always easy to hear what he says. Part of the
problem is his American accent. I speak and write English fluently,
but I learnt it in British schools. I seldom hear “real” American
accents, i.e. not those on TV or movies. This means that I find it
hard to understand what Dave says sometimes, even though my English is
very good. It must be even harder for someone who is more comfortable
reading English than listening to it.
Audio posts are a step back. They don’t encourage information
exchange, like text does. You can’t hyperlink to a specific audio
segment. You can’t quote it without transcribing it first. The
bandwidth requirements are absurdly high for the limited amount of
information they contain.
Let’s hope the trend doesn’t spread.
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According to Engadget, Sweden has more
mobile lines than
people.
In our family, we’re five. One is 2 and a half, he hasn’t got a mobile.
Between us, we have eight working phones.
We have four active SIMs, which gives the Erikson-West household a
mobile penetration of 80%. Below average for Sweden.
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Sometimes (not often enough, if you ask me)
msmobiles.com goes off on a
tangent and rants about how the world is unfairly hindering the
progress of Microsoft in the handheld market. It’s the only reason I
have them in my aggregator.
Of course, I want to share these gems with the gang at
#mobitopia,
but we don’t want to increase the ranking of these pages — the author
(or authors) are not above dirty tricks themselves, so why should they
get Google juice from us, the Symbian
Mafia?
Enter evilurl.com. This works just like
tinyurl.com, but the generated URLs are
… well, evil. This is now the preferred way to link to msmobiles.com
among the members of the Mafia. What goes around, comes around.
I wasn’t the one who suggested using evilurl.com (I think it was
Jim), but I was the first who used it in
the channel. Now they’ve
noticed, and I’m officially an
“anti-Microsoft fanatic”. I’ve kind of had that feeling. It’s nice to
get it in writing.
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Back to Basics
I’m hoping to go to basics soon. Right, Rafe?
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Love and Hate: Internet Communities
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In this week’s Ny Teknik, Hans Strandberg wrote an editorial about the need of
Sweden’s 3G providers need to look up from building the
infrastructure and to start selling/distributing content.
He’s concerned that the enormous amount of money spent on 3G in Sweden
will be squandered on providing “3G”: Games, Gambling, and Girls. The
first provider who sends video from a local council meeting will get a
gold star for “kaxighet” (Swedish for chutzpah).
Is that the future we are facing? “Free enterprise” selling crap, or
the “worthies”, Sweden’s politicians and authorities providing dull
information?
I don’t think so. On my short ride to work today, on bus and subway, I
came up with four possible mobile data services.
Existing communities
In the same paper there was a small article on how Lunarstorm, Sweden’s largest commnunity for young
people, has a 3G service. People can chat with their friends, update
their profiles, play games… just like on the web. Only now they
can do it in the classroom, which will probably lead to 3G phones
being banned in schools soon.
Traffic information
Scenario: I ride more or less the same route to work every day. I
got SL’s site and set my preferences for that
journey. Every weekday between 08:30 and 09:15 I can see any scheduled
or unscheduled outages. I can also see when the next bus/subway will
arrive, so I can decide whether to run or just take the next one. Same
thing for the return trip.
The same principle can be applied to commuters in cars. Video feeds
can show congestion, flash messages can warn of big accidents, a
reminder can be sent when the roads are icy.
Videotext
Sveriges Television has a videotext
service. Making this service available to 3G handsets is such a
no-brainer that I’m suprised no-one’s done it yet. For
that added pizazz, a link to a video feed can easily be added.
Location-based games
Another article in Ny Teknik described a virtual treasure hunt in
Tokyo, played with GPS-enhanced mobiles. Not really a 3G application,
but one that can be enhanced by a video feed showing the target
location and if anyone is nearing it.
Conclusion
The thread tying these services together is that they are
evolutionary, not revolutionary. They are web services that can be
simply adapted to mobile data terminals. No need for gimmicks, just
try to deliver information and services that are useful and simple to
use.
Posted at 11:16,
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This story is a good summary
of the recent
brouhaha over Dave Winer’s shutdown of
weblogs.com.
From the Wired article:
“People have been really afraid to discuss this,” said a New York
blogger who asked that his name be withheld. “There’s a lot of
concern that any nasty comments will result in Dave not getting
around to making a copy of your blog. I think a lot of the politeness
and ‘We love you, Dave!’ sentiments that you’re seeing in some Web
posts is just pure paranoia.”
That’s it. I now have a cron job running that’ll take an XML dump of
this blog every night. Who knows, maybe
Ewan will crack from England winning
Euro2024 and delete everything around him…
Posted at 14:36,
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The Nokia 6630 (aka. “Charlie”) is a UMTS (3G) phone
with Series 60. I’ve been holding off switching to 3G from GSM
due to the lack of good phones. Series 60 is the operating system used
in smartphones such as the Nokia 6600, the
Siemens
SX1 and the N-gage. There
are lots of apps available for this platform, and the integrated
planning tools and email reader are good enough for me.
But I won’t buy the 6630. Why? Because it’s ugly.
The 6630 combines the pear-shaped, bottom heavy look of the 3660 with the
faux-metal shine of the Siemens
ST55, a desperate attempt from Siemens to cash in on the
cameraphone trend.
Nokia can do better than this. The
7610 may have an
unusable keypad, but it looks good. The original
N-gage, aka. the Taco, packs lots of
features into a package that can be described as “interesting”, even
if it makes the the user look
ridiculous.
Let’s hope that Nokia will re-discover its design edge and give a 3G
smartphone with looks and content.
Posted at 11:41,
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I really enjoy weblogging. I didn’t think I would, but I do. It’s the
return to the personal web circa 1994, when everybody with a web
page put up their hobbies, reading lists, collectors items etc. for
all the other people out there to discover.
Now, after nearly a decade, we’re back where we started, but with
better tools. You don’t need a unix account anymore, and you don’t
need to grok HTML. Anyone can update a web page, a.k.a. a weblog
nowadays.
Every day makes me a day older, and even though I find it hard to
believe, it’s now seven years since I first installed Linux on a 386
by floppy. Now I’m using a IBM Thinkpad running OpenBSD to access mail
and IRC on a UltraSparc 5, also running OpenBSD. The company I work
for uses Linux on Intel for nearly all
its infrastructure. I spend nearly all my days in two or three
terminal windows. I read mail with
emacs.
So I’m a unix kind of guy. I’d rather write a 20-line perl program to
do some data munging than fire up Excel. My windows are handled by
screen. I browse the web with
links and
w3m (lynx is sooo 1998). I believe an
app should do one thing, and do it well.
Yet I’m using Movable Type, the CGI
version of Word, a bloated, opaque web application that definitely
puts style over substance, a blogging tool for Mac users and other
artistic types. It straddles uneasily across the Unix/Perl world, with
its (nowadays) strong open-source bias, and the corporate make-a-buck
world of proprietary source code and expensive
licensing.
Well, I’ve grown to know a lot of people on the
mobitopia channel, and one of them, Ewan
Spence has a site called
Symbian Diaries where just about
anyone can get a blog. His installation has a lot of authors, a lot of
blogs, and would probably cost $1,200 to license from Movable
Type… but that’s another
story.
Don’t get me wrong — MT is fine for anyone comfortable with web based
tools like Yahoo Mail and Google. However, I don’t feel comfortable
with it. I would rather have a system like
blosxom or even my own crude perl hack.
But the central question is: would I post more entries? Would new
software make me more productive?
I don’t think so. So even if I would have a lot of fun migrating to
another system, and even if I can do that while keeping the
symbiandiaries.com address, I think I’ll stick around MT for now. I’ll
try to kvetch less, and write more.
And be more interesting.
Posted at 19:01,
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Essentials [dive into mark]
Posted at 23:43,
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Here’s another strange thing about David Winer’s
trip to
Europe —
he’s started a temporary weblog
for the trip.
Why can’t he update his regular blog, the one read by millions each
day? He seems to have a laptop, and connects through internet
cafés. So he should be able to update a server somewhere.
I don’t get it. I can update this blog from a web interface or from
Emacs on a remote box. I’m nobody. Dave Winer is a respected internet personality. Go figure.
Posted at 22:42,
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David Winer has some strange idea on how
SMS
works. So
the gang at #mobitopia discusses
a little, and David writes a
post about it.
But how do we let Dave know about it. He’s travelling in
Europe right now. With a mobile
phone.
So now he has an SMS on it from yours truly. Hope he can read it.
Posted at 17:37,
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Well, this should help my
PageRank. Thanks,
Jim!
Posted at 10:20,
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Somehow it’s difficult for me to write on this blog sometimes. Part of the
problem is lack of time. I have a family and a full time job. I usually compose
rather nice entries when walking to the subway in the mornings, but they vanish
when I arrive at work and a terminal.
Of course, I could become a T9 god and tap out screeds on my taco, but I
prefer reading and listening to music when riding to work. If I’ve forgotten
reading matter, I’m usually too pissed off about that to be able to write
anything good anyway.
Work provides almost no convenient times for advanced composition. What free
time I doi have is spent reading other
peoples weblogs, which are much better
than anything I could produce. So that too is a barrier.
So why have a blog then? Egoboost of course. And sometimes you write
something or think about something that’s worth communicating.
Posted at 20:53,
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Gmail is a meme spread by
Google to help improve their search
algorithms.
By tracking references to this enticing service, they can see which
news sources and weblogs are influential. By launching on April 1,
they can also track arguments against the belief that the service
actually exists.
Posted at 08:48,
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I’m pretty new to weblogging. I guess what I did in 1997 was
weblogging, but that was what everything was doing then.
“Returning” to personal publishing, then, is entering a world where
people feel strongly about things. Issues that outsiders such as I
find arcane, like syndication formats, escalate quite quickly into
religious wars.
In these wars, two protagonists stand out. They are
Dave Winer, the grand old man of
weblogging, and Mark Pilgrim. I haven’t
really found out what they stand for, weblog-politically. But they are
antagonists.
When I enter a community, I instinctively choose sides. I don’t know
why I’ve chosen the side of Mark. Maybe he represents the young Turk
side of the debate. Maybe Dave’s ego is just that much bigger. But
there it is.
Posted at 23:12,
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Thanks to Gadget17 I’ve got links to the category to which the entry belongs working. See below, to the right of the permalink.
The vodoo code needed is this:
<a href="<MTEntryCategories glue=","><$MTCategoryArchiveLink$></MTEntryCategories>"><$MTEntryCategory$></a>
The first triplet of MT tags (within the HREF attribute) construct a hyperlink to the relevant category archive. The <$MTEntryCategory$> tag shows the name of the category to which the entry belongs.
Posted at 22:42,
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I think MS is making a strategic mistake in focusing on “corporate”
phones. They bet that if you use a MS phone to sync to Exchange at
work you’ll do that at home too. The strong focus that Microsoft has
on mobile developers is part of this too — it’s going to be easy to
create vertical applications and enterprise-specific solutions.
So corporate users of phones will influence other buyers, and MS
smartphones will slowly but surely infiltrate the mobile space.
But I’m not sure that the average phone customer has quite the good
picture of Microsoft’s products that MS seems to think.
Having a monopoly on desktops doesn’t mean that your users like
you. In fact, Microsoft is shielded from normal market pressures in
the desktop space.
In the phone space, there is still competition. Nokia has a very
strong brand and a product line that spans from simple black-and-white
phones to communicators. This is true for Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and
Samsung too.
Microsoft phones have a minimum spec — there has to be enough oomph
in the phone to run Pocket Explorer etc. Soon enough Moore’s Law will
ensure that every phone will be able to do just that (but the power
supplies may not follow the same development). The question is: do
people want a PC in their phone?
I don’t think so.
Posted at 15:46,
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So now I’m on a Moveable Type weblog, just like everybody else on
the planet…
I’m running around looking at all the options, and I’m really happy
I didn’t do that before I decided to write my own home-grown blog. I
wouldn’t even have started.
When I first started writing my old blog, I rediscovered the
feeling that I had when I first made a homepage back in 1997. The
wonderful feeling of seeing your words out there for anyone to
read. That feeling was behind many people’s websites. Then the web got
really big, and the small people got lost.
Now we have Google and easy-to-use publishing software. So now there’s
less of a barrier to just write something, and your words
will perhaps be noticed.
We’ll see if mine are.
Posted at 23:01,
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The taco earned it’s stripes today as a business phone. When I answered a
job call at home (for the first, and I hope the last, time), I needed to login
to the firewall. No probs, I used the handsfree set. Until Viking decided he
wanted to play with that.
Hmm. The taco is impossible to hold between the cheek and the shoulder like
a normal phone. But it does have a loudspeaker. Presto, I could check logs,
talk, and hang out in IRC at the same time.
The only thing left to use is the games in a boring meeting.
Posted at 22:00,
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From now on, my Nokia N-Gage will be referred to as the “taco”.
I’ve looked around a bit, and while there is a lot of software available for Series 60 phones, I still miss some simple things.
Most of these things would be easy to do if the following conditions were met:
- I would learn Python
- Nokia would release Python for Series 60 with hooks for Contacts, Calendar, SIM-card etc.
This is what I would do if that were the case:
- write a converter for importing/exporting CSV files from the Contacts application
- the same for the Notes application
- A SyncML client/server for any platform
Posted at 14:49,
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