Scargill

I just don’t believe this government – and WHY have we gotten to the point wherein “we could see over 100,000 cases of swine flu a day by the end of August” ???

Why the HELL as they’ve seen things rise like this, haven’t they been stopping travel, testing people at all airports and stations etc… 100,000 a DAY for heaven’s sake.

I just hope the politicians are the first to go down followed by civil servants.

I recently discovered something called Liberkey. This comprises a menu system and a bunch of open source programs all wrapped together and well suited to use on a memory stick. Apparently the program itself isn’t open source – but that’s another matter. It has been compared to PortableApps – but for me the actual applications included are WAY better.

Ok so what’s special about that? These are programs that are generally available separately and nothing new… so why bother. Well, these “portable” versions of the programs all sit inside a nice popup menu system – and importantly the package looks after updates for you, so that the first thing that happens when you run the program, is that a load of updates occur automatically. Not only that but you can go to the website and simply double-click on links to add new programs to the list. We’re talking here of some pretty good open source and free sofware – like the GIMP for example which I’ve been using for a while now in preference to the expensive and somewhat overblown “PhotoShop”.

But there are also programs in here that certainly I’d never heard of. RadioSure for example plays streaming radio stations and has a massive list built in – so what I hear you say, Shoutcast does the same thing with Winamp – yes but this also has a large RECORD button on it which records straight off the radio to MP3 complete with titles – rather handy for parties.. and on the subject of music playback there is another free MP3 player in the pack called AIMP – and already I prefer it to Winamp – it’s fast, small, nice looking with analog meters… and does a very nice track-to-track fade straight out of the box. Once the Liberkey package is running and you’ve elected to hand it file associations, a quick right-click on any of your files will securely encrypyt it using DCU. As for passwords, the excellent KeePass is included also.

But I’m in danger of giving the impression that this is a manager for a small number of decent programs – it isn’t – the “ultimate” version of this is MASSIVE and of course you can put the whole lot on a memory stick and cart it from PC to PC. I strongly urge you to give Liberkey a second glance!

As far back as I remember, we always seem to get sensible white papers from governments either just before they go on summer break – or when they’re about to be thrown out of office – either way, nothing ever then happens.

In a new white paper, the suggestion is being made that parents could be fined or jailed if their children mis-behave! Now, you may think that’s drastic – but nothing else has worked, in many parts of Britain kids roam around causing damage and absolutely nothing is done about it – I’m 55 and it’s been this way since I was in my teens. The parents don’t care, the police are almost powerless, schools are terrified of even scolding kids – and the kids themselves know it. Perhaps the thought of a jail sentence might renew the parents’ interest in the behaviour of their offspring.

As a kid, I went to “Spring Gardens” school in North Shields and I had a fabulous time but there was no shortage of discipline when needed… I was generally productive – I had hobbies and simply got on with my life – but on the odd occasion I got into trouble like everyone else and I still to this day remember sitting for what would typically be 5 minutes but which seemed like hours, outside of the headmaster’s room awaiting a caning across the hand and BOY did it hurt. Ok the pain only lasted minutes but the whole authority thing, backed by parents who usually tool the school’s side, ensured I generally played ball with society. Today, schools have zero power to discipline kids and have done for some years. Parents of unruly kids are more likely to try to sue schools and police than cooperate with them and meanwhile the kids are loving it!

If someone has kids then until they are 18 and fully responsible for their own actions as adults, SOMEONE should be responsible – and I reckon it should be the parents – and it sounds like the government finally agrees…. it all sounds like a breath of fresh air – the funny thing is it’s the LAST thing I’d expect from socialists – but then, there isn’t a hope in hell of the current government staying in office for much longer – so don’t expect ANY of these new bold initiatives to actually GO anywhere.

According to the Independent (p5, 29th June) Britain “knows very little about the Bible”.  As few as 10% understand the main characters in the Bible.

Apparently St John’s college in Durham carried out the survey and according to the Reverend David Wilkinson – “the consequences of ignorance went far beyond being unclear about what church leaders might preach”.

I’m sorry Reverend – did you say IGNORANCE?  How can ANYONE who has imaginary friends call the rest of us WRONG?  It is no more ignorant not to have read the Bible than it is neither to have read Spiderman nor the Koran!! Many of us have more important things to be doing with our lives. I’d be worried if we were the same as the USA where a large percentage of people DO actively read this stuff – and worse – BELIEVE IT.

Choosing to suspend logic and instead to believe a collection of contradictory stories written in an age where people thought the earth was flat , had not even the vaguest notion of evolution and thought we were at the centre of the universe – THAT is ignorance – and dangerous ignorance at that. Sadly many youngsters have little choice as their parents and the church brainwash them before they are old enough to know better.

Stick to births, marriages and deaths, Reverend!!!

Tired of XP – but Vista is rubbish and you don’t want to use the release candidate of Windows 7? Don’t despair!

The solution is called “Seven Transformation Pack” and I’ve just installed this on my second computer – and up to now it’s BEAUTIFUL. No guarantees it won’t turn your computer into a harmless rock – but it worked for me! So what’s special about STP?

Installation is simple enough, involving a reset and about 15 minutes of your time. The various packages that are put together by the author of STP include a Windows 7 start button, semi-transparent task bar, 3d task switch and a Windows 7-like set of gadgets… but probably the biggest boost for Windows XP users – large icons – at last!

Enough talk – here is the link to Seven Transformation Pack

While you’re at it, a couple of other nice new packages I’ve added to my PCs… look up LIBERKEY – a wrapper around the best open-source software – which automatically updates the software for you and can be held on a memory stick or on your computer. If nothing else, apart from the other really nice OS packages included – I loved RADIOSURE the best… instant streaming radio and a quick search – pulled out Riviera Radio instantly and has niceties such as fade-in-fadeout – even fades between radio stations as you select.-

So now we’re supposed to get all emotional about the final demise of one the stalwarts of the analogue age – Kodachrome film. Wasn’t it wonderful, what about those subtle colours, the unique “flavour”…

For HEAVEN’S SAKE. I remember the same crap at the end of the valve era – that unique sound, how harsh transistors are (and there’s a simple reason for that, valves used to introduce even harmonic distortion into the sound giving it a warm but TOTALLY unrealistic sound whereas the early transistor amplifiers, driven by the need to keep costs down combined with a lot of ignorance on the behalf of designers LIKE AMSTRAD – our own Alan Michael Sugar – and his counterpart Clive Sinclair –  introduced some pretty awful distortion of their own…… but where are we now… only fools and horses still pretend that valves are better… mOSFETS were the turning point for those who like to bandy around technical terms – I recall I had several of the first Mosfets available – and managed to blow them all up…. but that’s another story.

And this brings us to photography – I remember when the first digitals came out – the same old crap, attacking a new technology in order to try to preserve the old – I could have told you over a decade ago (and did tell many people) that film was dead – the only excuse for using film now MIGHT still be for low-light exposure as most cheap digital cameras are rubbish in low-light levels – but give it a little longer and they’ll not only beat film, they will beat our eyes – indeed think about Hubble – some of the most beautiful images in the universe – are digital! You could stare at the night sky for a million years and never see what Hubble brings us.

I remember sending off images to BOOTS only to get the most BLAND rubbish prints back – the only way I could guarantee to get decent images was to order transparencies….  and let’s not forget that BOOTS in particular used to SHOP people who took photos they did not approve of – remember THAT? Kids in the bath etc!!!

In the hands of an idiot, it doesn’t matter whether the camera is film, digital or make-believe – the results will be the same – but if you’ve invested just a little time in learning how to use your camera and one of the MANY free tools out there – GIMP being one example – you can produce images that rival ANYTHING produced in the past – and in many cases go WAY beyond anything we could have done in the age of FILM. I believe that AVATAR was shot digitally! It’s certainly displayed digitally. What more could you want?

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As someone who’s always been ready to be a donor (though donating blood could be a lot easier – they could have as much as they liked if they’d come out to my village for it – like the milk run in the morning – they could do a “blood run” in the evenings perhaps?), I’ve never understood the pathetic arguments of some of our religious friends (and some not-so-religious) over NOT donating their kebabs when they die. According to the BBC there are something like 10,000 people waiting at any time for organs and there is a shortage – what POSSIBLE reason can anyone have other than sheer ignorance, for NOT offering up their bits when they pass away. In a 21st century where donated organs regularly save lives, surely it is up to us to help save others when we no longer have a need for our innards.

Well, it looks like the various UK religious leaders have finally gotten their act together and are currently recommending to the faithful that they DO offer up their parts – WELL DONE CHAPS!!

Here are the results of my hard graft over the weekend – shiny wheels. I can’t believe the effort it takes just to get that black crud off the wheels – it’s as if the brake manufacturers were in league with detergent suppliers!!

Anyway, there it is on our newly gravelled driveway, several tons of stone just to give us enough room to turn the car around!  Why am I parking inside instead of outside? Well, despite living in the countryside we still have a few brain-dead kids in the area and one of my mirrors recently went to meet it’s maker thanks to the kids – with a resulting £250 insurance excess!! It seems that the policy of the insurance companies is that if you can’t prove that someone else did it – you did!  Good job our laws don’t operate that way. So from now on I’m playing it safe and the kids can screw up someone else’s cars – preferably the ones that keep taking my parking space!

After a wedding on Friday which culminated in a trip to Costco, we spent the weekend enjoying the good weather. I borrowed a petrol strimmer from our good neighbours Sonia and Chris and went to work demolishing the back garden which, due to pressure on our time had recently grown into a fully-formed jungle. It now once again resembles a garden, however my solar lamps were not so lucky as the strimmer neatly chopped their heads off one by one. Still, it was time for an upgrade anyway, the cheap ones don’t last more than a couple of years as the plastic on the top goes foggy 🙂

This is an update of an earlier article on the Samsung Omnia. Those of you who read my constant gripes about mobile phones will know that I’ve stayed with HTC for the longest time. There can be no doubt that their phones are pretty. For some time I used the HTC Touch Diamond while Maureen has been using the Diamond HD.  The original Touch Diamond however had a number of flaws… not the least being a tendency for the ringer to stop working for no reason. Orange of course didn’t have a clue how to fix it and just kept swapping phones.

I finally lost it with Orange a little while ago and demanded another phone. The first person I spoke to was useless – said I had to have the same phone – I told her I wanted out of the contract, she wanted to charge me £250 – thankfully on my next call a very well spoken gent put me right – and introduced me to the Samsung i900 Omnia.   I’d originally asked for an upgrade to the Diamond HD (the larger brother of the Diamond – which bears more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone and works a treat) – but as is the way of things in the mobile industry but the Diamond HD now defunct – which is a shame as it’s a BLOODY MARVELOUS phone which works well.

Anyway – the HTC Touch has another fatal flaw – it comes with 4Gig of memory built in and no expansion. Once you get TomTom in there and maybe a movie – that’s it – you’re done. They addressed that on the Diamond HD phone – and that and future models have the ability to take micro-SD cards.

What sold me on the Samsung was when the Orange operator pointed out that the i900 comes with 16Gig AS STANDARD – AND has expansion, so in total you could have 32gig of memory – enough for all your photos, all your tunes and more’s the point, a good number of movies and apps – AT LAST, a serious mobile.

How to show you the phone – MyMobileR – is free and it works.

And so here is the original Samsung i900… complete with screenshots (most of the software is built-in – the rest are free or cheap apps with the exception of Navigator.

The phone comes complete with the usual – Windows Mobile 6 and a host of Microsoft utilities including a fairly useless OneNote – by name only. HOWEVER check out Evernote which lets you take audio, text or scribble notes and sync them with your PC – and does it well.

Of course that would not be much use if it were not for high speed cell communication, WIFI and Bluetooth – and the i900 has the lot along with GPS and more! It even has an FM radio. Google Mobile Apps gives you your messenger and email, Skype – well – works! The RSS reader lets you keep up with your news, you can FTP to your PC via Bluetooth…. the list goes on – I suggest taking a look at this phone. It comes with mains charger and the ONLY gotcha is the crappy connector which means you can’t use all your mini-usb chargers – however a quick order to China and for around £8 I have a car charger, silicon case, screen cover and spare battery.

GPS on the i900 
The GPS on the i900 appeared initially to have issues, it did NOT like TomTom and some other programs however there is a solution for a few dollars in the states – which takes the GPS further than you might imagine. For a mere $14 or thereabouts not only does it fix the GPS on the i900 but also lets you share it by a number of ways with other programs – simultaneously – you can even share the GPS with your PC via Bluetooth – stick MapPoint on your PC – turn the Bluetooth serial port on and Bob’s your uncle. It even lets you SIMULATE GPS when you’re working indoors to test things. WELL worth the money. The program is called GPSGATE.  Of course there is a lot more to the use of this phone than this – OH  – before I forget – typical touch-screen Smartphone (pocket PC) the buttons for the telephone and keypad are no real – i.e. they are onscreen – but where the i900 scores is it uses vibration feedback to give you a sense of having hit a button! Update: The internal GPS on the i900 appears to use LOTS of juice – i.e. it eats batteries. It took me a while to narrow this down but I’m now doing the same as others – I happen to have a tiny pocket Bluetooth GPS I picked up from Ebay for £20 a year ago.  GPSGATE allows you to select an external GPS as the source – and this works a lot better than the external one… I can even pick up 3 satellites in my office! For now I’m progressing this route.  As an update, with Windows mobile 6.5 none of the issues with the GPS have ever showed up again and the battery life is fine.

Video on the i900
Yes – it does work, before you ask. I loaded up a standard DIVX test recording (not a specially reduced version which would no doubt be smaller and run faster but what a hassle) – which for a full movie or show would be maybe 700meg – played it NO problem at all. One touch and it’s in landscape, full-screen. Audio is similarly simple to use.

Did I mention the phone has accelerometers? So it knows which direction it is facing and can go into landscape or portrait mode automatically (good gimmick but I turned that off – speeds things up a lot).

As for images – 1.5 meg original JPG images played a treat. They really do seem to have cracked this – in a phone that’s small, light and thin with a half-decent camera and a “flash” – though in reality it’s a bright white LED so don’t get too excited by the possibilities. See the pic of my grand-daughter on the right.

Opera on the i900
Opera browser and the new Skyfire browser all work – though I don’t think the WIFI is quite as sensitive as the HTC.  The phone does not come with weather software but a quick look on the web for a freeby sorted that out. Weather Watcher works a treat.

i900 Camera
The camera is a 5Mpixel effort with built in ability to take panoramas using up to 8 original images – all automatically – you just take the first shot and move the camera until it takes the rest.

Navigator on the Omnia
Mapfactor Navigator turned up today – and I have to say – with a caviat, it blows TomTom 6 out of the water. For £69 you get full maps of all of Europe plus of course the UK – now, I’m only really interested right now in the UK and Spain – and you can select what you install – result – the entire installation – which works in storage card space of course, takes up well under half a gigabyte – which, given the Omnia’s expansive 16Gig – is hardly a drop in the ocean!

I don’t have time to go into the details of Navigator here but the key things are 3D navigation, voice-guide, you get a PC program to view maps etc, it has so much programmability it will keep you going for hours, most of the little windows can be selected by simply touching them and then selecting from a larger range… which is great as some folk want to know what speed they are doing, others want to know the height from sea-level – and that’s on of my gripes about Tom-Tom, it doesn’t give you that level of flexibility.

Navfactor Navigator with UK and European Maps
The program comes complete on a DVD with maps, points of interest and cameras and features FULL postcodes!! Up to now I just can’t fault it – best buy I’ve had this year!  It also comes with an odometer feature and for a little extra it can handle vehicle tracking… though GPSGate can easily handle that also.

Finally if you have the right hardware it can handle TMC traffic monitoring – that’s my next job – for now I’m enjoying up to date maps and hassle-free sat-nav!

Now, the PC-based program that comes with Navigator is useless except for one thing – it can import basic CSV POV files into the Navigator format. Add a free program to take GOOGLE EARTH files and convert to CSV and you have the ability to create a bunch of favourite locations in Google Earth – and import into your Windows Mobile phone!

Update: Upgrading the i900
Now, you might say, if the i900 is so great, why upgrade it – well the phone out of the box does have issues: like the HTC Touch the battery life is naff, you could use it up in less than a day with sat-nav running… and also everywhere you turn it says Orange… so… here’s what I did – no guarantees it won’t turn your phone into a brick. The procedure involves making sure your phone is fully charged, downloading a registry editor and making a trivial change to one entry – then going off to the official Samsung site for the latest upgrade. According to the site  this helps battery life and offers other fixes. Here is the AVForums link to the Samsung i900 upgrade. Here on the left is the upgraded phone with Samsung’s gadgets added. This powers up as a Samsung phone, I’ve tested the WIFI and GPS and all work well. The upgraded phone immediately asked me if I wanted to configure the phone for Orange UK and so I’m hopeful that when I get in range it’ll even still work as a phone:-)

Oh – if you are into Twitter, get pocketTwit…. absolutely marvelous. I added that and the new pocket mobile Facebook app. This time around I’m running Navigator natively, i.e. without GPSGATE – as there is no point in having TomTom using up space. I have however purchased GPSGATE as it’s useful for sharing the phone’s GPS with my laptop!

And yes, I did go get the “iPhone”-look-alike software, it’s free and it’s called iFonz – but the icons he gives you are not up to much. I reset the sizes to 48 pixels and went off and found icons from all over the place – changed their transparent backgrounds to black (which the guy who wrote iFonz uses as a sort of transparency – see the icons on the bottom) – and then it’s just a case of collecting up enough decent icons for all the progs I’m putting in the massive 16gig space of the phone – no doubt soon to be complemented by a 16gig microSD – though I do have all my records in there already 🙂

To be honest, the iPhone display etc is more of a gimmick – I kept it on for a couple of weeks then scrapped it. Other interfaces are coming out of the woodwork now that look as good if not better.

Update September 2009: I’ve since upgraded the i900 to Windows Mobile 6.5 and it just works. Very rarely it needs a reset, the GPS works, the interface is wonderful…  but then other phones are now coming out with Windows Mobile 6.5 out and a larger screen would be about my only must-have. The HTC Touch Pro 2 would be my current recommendation – if you regularly spend £30 or more a month the cost of the phone is likely to be minimal. Who would I recommend? Well, aside from their customer service, Orange still offer one of the better deals if you need 3G data access… I’m on Racoon 35 and I get unlimited data, 600 minutes any network and enough texts to keep me going.  Unless something better comes along  – I’m sticking with that contract.  I should have a Pro 2 shortly and will endeavour to provide further updates.

According to the “Digital Britain” report, around 11% of homes cannot currently achieve speeds of 2Mpbs – and so the proposal is to fix faulty wiring and use satellite to fill in.

Well, the faulty wiring bit I can go along with – but satellite – I’ve had various forms of satellite and no amount of technical progress is going to fix the fact that the satellites are thousands of miles up in the sky and the latency makes for example Skype conversations virtually useless. Also one of the original satellite companies recently contacted me and I checked on their pricing – they are STILL taking us to the cleaners – so all that will happen now is that tax-payers will give them their money as against the privileged few who can afford them – this is NOT the solution – there are a boatload of alternatives – WIMAX where a large aerial, say at the top of a hill supplies a wide area…. is one solution, high altitude balloon is another (same idea as satellite without the thousands of miles) – but the real solution is to force BT to do their job properly!

Ofcom will now be able to force service providers to notify households who are downloading and sharing content illegally – HURRAY they’ve finally done what they’ve been wanting to do for years – control the INTERNET – this is big-brother CHINA-STYLE!! What next, selective control of material to make sure our nation sensibilities are not offended?  Social workers calling at your door because you’ve been reading too much right-wing material?

As for 3G networks – which really are pathetic in the UK, the proposition will “provide certainty for investment and an incentive towards greater roll-out” – what? sorry? Last time I contacted Orange to see why we didn’t have coverage in our village they insisted they would LOVE to provide coverage but every time they’d tried to find somewhere to site a masts the “mothers against masts” brigade had stopped them. Until we breed ignorance out of people we’re never going to roll out proper 3G or proper solar and wind power systems for that matter in the UK, instead we’ll just continue to piddle about.  We need a government that is brave enough to take a lead on this an ensure we have universal 3G coverage and policies which ensure the prices are practical – only THEN will we have a truly “digital Britain”.