42

Life segmentation

At a recent meeting of people on twitter one of the things we discussed was how connected we have our various pieces of social media.

For me there are currently five main elements to my use of social media:

• This blog 42.blogs.warnock.me.uk, this has now being going 7.5 years. Nowadays the content is mostly faith related with some general life, politics etc thrown in.
• My cycling blog 42bikes.warnock.me.uk this is about cycling :-) A mix of experiences, campaigning, comment etc. I am writing more here in recent months having taken up the challenge to post something everyday for 2011.
• Twitter @dave42w 
• Facebook dave.warnock
• Flickr for photos davew42 

Until a few minutes ago I had these pretty much automatically connected. Now I have some separation. So here is how I plan to connect them/cross post.

• I will update twitter and facebook whenever I post to either blog. I need to check whether they will appear on facebook as full posts or just links (as quite a lot of people comment on the facebook full posts I thiuk that is worth continuing).
• I have stopped automatically updating facebook from twitter. So facebook users won't see all the twitter oddities with # @ etc in them.
• I will sometimes update both twitter and facebook with a status message if I think both groups of people will be interested (for the technically minded I can do this by adding a #fb to the end of the tweet or from within the Hootsuite twitter client)
• Conversations on twitter (replies and retweets in particular) will not appear on facebook.
• My latest photos on flickr appear in the sidebar of 42bikes.warnock.me.uk

If I ever have time to bother I might use the features of twitter and facebook to breakdown my followers/friends into groups (family, work, cycling, ...). But I don't expect to make this a very high priority.

I guess that over time I will fine tune this.

Android phones and Lego

I may just have to dig out our (very old now) Lego Mindstorms so that I can program it with my phone. How cool is that!! See Android stretches its legs... errr wheels... with help from 20% time at Google.

 

iPhone users beat that :-)

Editing your Google Docs on the go

Yes!!! Official Google Blog: Editing your Google Docs on the go.

 

This is fantastic news. I use google docs quite a lot and this will be very very useful.

Thin terminals make life easy

Over the years I have written about the advantages of our SunRay thin terminals. They are now 5.5 years old and still working perfectly with no complaints about speed or new applications not working.

The new house is showing more advantages of having thin-clients. We have installed proper Cat5 network cabling with two wall ports in each bedroom plus lounge and dining room. They all connect to a patch panel in the utility room by the server.

This makes life so easy. For example providing wired connections for Xboxes or Wii's to the boys bedrooms.

However, the SunRay thin terminals are so easy to setup that everyone in the house is able to do their own. Jane had managed to clear a desk in our bedroom and so took a SunRay up, connected all the cables including from the patch panel herself. When she took her smartcard from a machine she had been using and put it in the one in the bedroom her screen was exactly as she had left it downstairs (mouse in the same place, same window with focus, same keyboard state).

Imagine how long it would have taken to add an extra PC and put all the applications and documents on it.

Plus of course who wants a noisy big PC in your bedroom when you can have a silent (no fan even) SunRay.

Sadly since Oracle bought Sun it looks to me as if any developments of these fabulous thin clients for homes are unlikely. That is a real pity as with modern broadband performance it is perfectly practical to have a server somewhere out on the internet supporting thin clients in hundreds of homes.

Anyway now that Ubuntu 10.10 (The Maverick Meerkat release) looking stable I'll be upgrading the SunRays soon, sadly it does look as if sound may be impossible on these when using Ubuntu for a while. Seems that the Sun Ray Software Server is not keeping pace with Linux standards for sound.

However, we will get newer versions of OpenOffice as well as all the other packages we use and it will still all be free :-)

Browser Shares

I don't often look at the browser shares for 42 but did today.

I think this is the last 1,000 visitors and I, at least, found interesting to note that Firefox 1, IE 8.x and Safari 1.x are with 0.7% of each other.

Internet Explorer usage falls below 50%

This Internet Explorer usage falls below 50% is actually big news and good news.

 

Over a few years the market share of the "other" web browsers has rocketed. That process was really started by free software by Mozilla (now Firefox) while others have come on board more recently, notably Google with Chrome.

 

The effect has been good for everyone. Internet Explorer has been massively improved in recent years and is becoming far more standards compliant.

 

Free Software is good for everyone, even those who never use it.

Internet search fun

The person who used this search why patriarchy in christian church is wonderful - AOL Search Results to find my post 42: Patriarchy Leads to Abuse. Period was probably a bit surprised to find my post on the first page of results :-)

Android on your next phone

In 42: Htc Desire, Android Mobile Phone review I wrote about how I love my Android phone. Remember Android is the operating system for phone (well any mobile device really), rather like Windows or Linux are operating systems for PC's (only Android is free and open so more like Linux than Windows).

Below is the keynote speech on Android at the recent Google IO conference. It is 45 minutes long but should be interesting to anyone who has any interest in smartphones. Lots of nice detail on where Android is now (60 devices, 49 countries, 100,000 phone activations a day [more than iPhone], more data traffic than any other phone operating system, 50,000 applications in the marketplace, ...). Also on what is now available in the latest release of Android (Froyo or version 2.2).

Note that for Android phones it is worth checking what version of Android your phone includes (mine is 2.1 but I should be able to upgrade to 2.2 within a few months). Some phones are cheap but are running very old versions of Android and so many new features will be unavailable on them (worth asking about Android upgrade policies too). Note of course that the features already on the phone will still work so if it has all you need and you like the price then upgrades won't be a concern.

Anyway here is the keynote:

I love some of those new things. The WiFi hotspot will save me £5 a month. The music sync support is going to allow me to replace my iPod (or at least allow me to use one device for work music and one for pleasure). Many of the other upgrades are cool even if just great fun to experiment.

All this with the open platform that is why I chose Android in the first place.

Htc Desire, Android Mobile Phone review

I have now had my Htc Desire mobile phone for over a month now. So here are some thoughts.

First, I am delighted. By far the best phone I have ever had. I use it far more than any other phone ever before and it has fulfilled my hopes by allowing me to go out for work without my laptop computer most of the time.

Many colleagues use iPhones, however, I have chosen the Htc Desire running Android instead of an iPhone for 4 main reasons (and critically the reasons do not include any hatred towards Apple).

1. I want the freedom that an open source operating system gives on my phone just as I do on all my computers. I prefer running Android on a phone compared to using an iPhone where the operating system is tightly controlled by one company. I want the freedom to install applications that have not been approved by the phone company (ie for an iPhone by Apple). I want the freedom to be able to write my own phone applications (unlikely though it is that I will find time) and give them away to anyone I wish. I like the fact I will be able to upgrade to new versions of Android. Either waiting for Htc to issue an update so I keep their Htc Sense widgets or by downloading (legally) a version from elsewhere. Currently it looks like I will be able to upgrade to the latest Android (2.2) before the end of the Summer.
2. I want the freedom to be able to buy my connection to the phone network from any supplier. I don't want to be locked into only certain companies and contracts. I bought my Htc Desire online, when it arrived I just put my existing SIM on and it worked without any hacking or breaking licence agreements. So currently I am with 3, when the contract runs out I may change to another supplier and I value that freedom.
3. I do not want to pay as much for my mobile phone as I would have to for an iPhone. I pay the full cost personally and am currently paying more than £10 a month less than I would for an iPhone with less minutes included. When I next change contracts I expect to save another £10 a month which will make my contract less than 1/2 the price of an iPhone yet lots more minutes and texts. While I chose to buy the handset I will still save money within less than 2 years.
4. I use Google Mail and Calendar all the time and so the excellent support for these on Android is very attractive.

Given these reasons I am not able or interested in directly comparing my Htc Desire to an iPhone. I don't know if the iPhone has all the things I like about my Htc Desire as I was not going to buy an iPhone. If you want a comparison between the two look elsewhere. Here though are my thoughts on the Htc Desire.

Things I love:

• The web browser is excellent. Works well with every web page I have tried. It is easy to do data entry, watch Youtube etc etc.
• Google Maps is great. You get your location, map view, satellite view, street view, directions. Great quality and surprisingly fast.
• The contacts is wonderful. You get an integrated list of phone contacts, google contacts, flickr and facebook contacts.
• Text messages is great. I love seeing the list of messages between me and someone else as well as a normal inbox etc.
• Connectivity is great. I like the way it works with WiFi and the different speeds of internet access over 3G. Also the control over when to use data roaming. I have got much better data access than I expected, far better than my old Nokia phone.
• FriendStream is great as it combines twitter and facebook into one list, much easier and quicker to use on here so I use my computer much less for twitter.
• BBC News widget: easiest way yet to stay up-to-date with the news. Only pity is that the BBC seem to push the same story out multiple times.
• The screen: absolutely wonderful.
• Typing: pretty good. Much better than the Samsung touch screen Jane has. I am pretty accurate and the predictive feature catches most typos.
• Scrolling and zooming. Super easy, accurate and fast.
• The marketplace. Found a number of very useful applications, have only paid for one so far (3.99 Euros) as the free ones have met all my needs.
• The super ease of sharing photos in lots of ways. Would be nice to be able to share a set of photos rather than one at a time.
• It also makes phone calls and does so very well :-) Possibly a slightly larger speaker area (I find I do need to hold it in the right place by my ear) would be good. I love the simple way of adding the number from an incoming call to an existing or new contact.

Niggles:

• Battery life. Yes you do need to charge it every night.
• Calendar. Most of the views give the date (eg 1/6/100) but they don't display the day as well eg "Tue 1/6/10"
• Google Mail. It would be nice to be able to delete some or all the message you are replying to rather than include it all at the bottom of every reply.

Summary.

Fantastic, highly recommended.

IP Alliance says that encouraging free/open source makes you an enemy of the USA

It is almost unbelievable and yet true.

The US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance has asked the US Trade Rep to add Indonesia to its list of rogue nations that don't respect copyright. What did Indonesia do to warrant inclusion on this "301 list"? Its government had the temerity to advise its ministries to give preference to free/open source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government. According to the IPA, this movement to reduce copyright infringement is actually bad for copyright, because "it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions."

via www.boingboing.net