Mike was wondering what the average age of other peoples mobile phones as been. And from memory I will try to put the mobile phones I’ve owned into chronological order..
The first phone I ever sort of owned was my Mum’s old Sagem. It was the most basic mobile phone you’ve ever seen. It was technically my Mum’s but I took it out with me whenever I went out so my parents could contact me.. It looked something like that picture but I can’t remember the exact model number. Eventually the screen became detached from the electronics inside and it couldn’t be used for anything unless I held it together, haha. RIP that one.. Took it apart to see what was inside when I got the next one..
I managed to acquire a Motorola v100 from a friend for a very good price. This was such an awesome mobile phone and is probably the reason why I still SMS more than make calls. If you made a call on the mini-laptop looking v100 you had to use the hands free kit but it’s Qwerty keyboard made it perfect for sending texts. I remember it had a really fun break-out game on it too.
We’re into 6th form territory now, I had my own income from my part time job. So I got my first contract mobile, a Nokia 3510i which I paid for myself. I got 100 txts and 100 minutes for £30/month, a true rip off in today’s terms but back then not a bad deal. I had this phone for ages, when the contract ran out I went Pay As You Go for a while as well, so far this is probably the phone which has lasted longest. As Nokia phones go, it was top of the range when I bought it, look at that colour screen and imagine the polyphonic ringtones! I had Toploader - Dancing in the Moonlight for a while.. Haha. It had GPRS as well, I used to make wallpapers for it on my PC and upload them to my website and download them to the phone - no Bluetooth you see and I wasn’t going to pay £2.50/week for those horrible wallpaper services on the premium text numbers. My brand loyalty for Nokia began here…!
When I started University, I started a new contract, got a good deal from the Intarwebz, a deal which even today no one can beat. Good ol’ Vodafone and the Nokia 6680! Another fantastic long living handset from Nokia. It still works perfectly today, just a few bumps and scratches. As for the reduced sized MMC card reader it has, I put a 1GB card in there so I never had to delete any photos from it. It came with a hands free kit as well, so I had a fair few mp3s on there too. The only real problem was, the Symbian 2nd Edition wasn’t built at the time to handle so much data so it did get quite slow.
November last year saw my upgrade to the Nokia N95 8GB. By far the best phone in the world And long may it live! So, that is five phones… four if you don’t count the first one cos it wasn’t “mine”. All have lived (and died in some cases) in the last, six years or so I’d say. And that is the history of my mobile phone ownership.
Wow, Zattoo is amazing…! Thanks popey for the heads up. Zattoo is a peer-to-peer television streaming program. It’s got a selection of UK Terrestrial channels, BBC One, Two, ITV, Channel4 and Five and some other random channels to choose from. It’s quite handy for watching Neighbours without having to go all the way downstairs…! It uses IP Geo-location stuff to deliver you the channels for your country supporting a bunch of other channels in other countries in the EU. It occasionally blips but this the problem with streaming stuff, I suppose the more users who are watching a channel at anyone the better, since it uses magical clever peer-to-peer technologies to distribute the content. It’s another good demonstration of p2p technologies being used for everyone’s benefit It’s got clients for Windows, Mac and Linux which means it’s better than other similar projects like Joost which doesn’t support the same channels either.
(p.s. I’m also demonstrating the NextGEN Gallery plugin for Wordpress in this post.. Hence the web2.0 style full-size image if you click it, nice!)
Because I don’t have a PS3 or 360 (yet), I haven’t had the chance to play GTA IV but I’ve heard a lot about in the media recently and I have had the chance to listen to a promo CD of the music featured in the game.
The GTA series as a whole is renowned for having consistently good tailor-made soundtracks and by the sounds of this promo, the fourth in the collection is no exception. My favourite has still got to be the theme tune from the original GTA! I even played it on my radio show a while back.. (after bleeping the swear words out obviously)
Just listening back to it now makes me want to play the classic original. Good thing it’s available for free
The style in the fourth seems to be a lot more hip hop oriented featuring artists like Busta Rhymes and Mobb Depp which isn’t usually my thing but I’ll make an exception because they’ve picked some decent tunes. But it’s not all hip hop! Remember in the original when you hopped in a pick-up truck, the radio would be country music. There’s bound to be a wide selection, surely something to suit everyone. My favourite track on the promo is Qadir - Nickname
Of course, everyone who is playing it will be too busy playing it to care about what music is playing in the background as they speed away from the cops..
Another game series with a notable soundtrack is the Need for Speed collection. Definitely get a copy of the Most Wanted soundtrack, it’s brilliant - especially for driving music!!
Widsets is another application I have found on my travels. It’s a Java based thing which gives you a dashboard onto which you can put different widgets added either from the dashboard itself or via the website.
The strange thing is, I’d have thought this would have taken off a lot more than it has. There isn’t even a widget for Facebook which you’d perhaps expect. There’s a few mini-games like Sudoku, Minesweeper and that Helicopter game. There are a hand full of one-site RSS readers, like the BBC News one or the Techcrunch one. But apart from those few, nothing really jumps out as being amazingly useful or interesting..
It’s pretty slow to load up and slows down again in order to connect to the Internet to see if you’ve picked any more widgets since you last loaded it and to update the content of the RSS readers. It seems like a bit of a let down all in all. Oh well..
P.S. I finished writing this a couple of nights ago and scheduled the post to be published automatically. At the time of publishing, I’ll be at Alton Towers
If you’ve ever played Liero, you’ll know that worms-style real time games are a lot of fun. Take that and mix it up with the graphics from Chase Ace 2 and you’ve pretty much got Teeworlds.
There are less weapons than Liero had back in the day, just the close-quarters hammer (which reminds me of when you pick up the hammer in Super Smash Brothers), a pistol, a shotgun, a laser gun (think rail gun from Quake but it ricochets) and a grenade launcher. You can’t make tunnels into the maps either..
There are clients for Windows, Linux and Mac which is always a massive plus for these type of games. The amount of online servers running is decent, you can easily jump into a game (trouble is, they’re all pros and if it’s your first time you get absolutely annihilated as you try and figure out the controls). I changed jump to up, rather than space but whatever floats your boat. I noticed a couple of graphics glitches when connecting to a couple of servers but most of them seem fine. Anyway, it’s really addictive and a lot of fun. Don’t waste too much time on it!!
I have found a killer app for my phone. This is one reason why I went for the N95 8GB in the first place, for software like this to crop up and make it well worth the investment! WalkingHotSpot turns a wifi-enabled smart phone (like mine) into a wifi router! They’ve just released a trial version. It’s pretty much install, fill in a couple of settings and run. It sets up an ad-hoc wifi network, which can be secured if need be. The trial version allows only 1 connection at a time. I had a small issue with it not working initially but I was using the wrong Internet connection settings on the phone, oops. (Everything else connects via the other lot of settings, so who knows what the difference is.) It works like a dream now, so I might be able to use a bit more of that monthly 120mb I get from Vodafone.
I noticed when I loaded sionide.net, that the header image was quite poor quality. Apparently most 3G/GPRS traffic is filtered through a lossy HTTP proxy in order to cut down on the amount of traffic you use. It was also fairly slow when I tested it just now but I don’t live in an area covered by 3G..
No more messing about with annoying sharing the phones Internet connection over Bluetooth or across a USB cable, something I never even bothered to get working because it looked so.. needlessly complex. This is the perfect solution for “proper” Internet, when out and about.
Okay, I know the site isn’t really dead but it’s dead to me…! *cries* And only because I live in the UK. Pandora got threatened asked nicely to stop people from outside the US using their service a while ago. Quite a long while ago actually so this is news to no one but…
I found a replacement.. kind of. It’s not the same but MeeMix.com does the same kind of thing as Pandora used to. Sure, you could get on a proxy server based in the US to circumvent Pandora’s IP filtering but I’ve found that to be extremely unreliable and slow.
Guess how I found Meemix though? Via a Facebook advert. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing! The interface is kind of clunky and overly flash-based. They’re trying to make it more of a social network type site which is horrible so steer clear of that bit of it. I don’t know if it works using just user responses to decide what song to play next or some elaborate algorithms but hey, it works in the UK so whatever.
Actually, MeeMix has some pretty neat stuff which Pandora didn’t have.. The “mood control” bit allows you to fiddle with two settings which change the selection of tracks. “Surprise Me” and “Pulse”. The higher you set the “Surprise Me” slider, the more likely songs selected are going to Surprise you. *BOO* <- Not like that. The higher “Pulse” is the more the selections go “party time” and the lower it’s set, the more relaxing. Also, MeeMix has integrated YouTube videos of the current song a click away and believe-it-or-not a bunch of links to share the content on your favouritesocial network.
It’s okay, but it’ll never fill the void Pandora has left behind…
Now there is something I always ask myself, is there anything worth watching on TV tonight? Probably not but I can never remember what night the Apprentice is on or when…
My quest to find a decent application or website for TV listings has been going on for a while now… But I think I’ve finally found something I like!
Available from Sourceforge, for Windows and Linux it’s a pretty neat piece of software that’ll has an annoying manual method of selecting channels which took me ages. It also takes ages to download updates from wherever their TV listings are sourced. It’s a good idea but no offence, it’s ugly.
If it’s only a few select shows you want to know about, including ones from America. This one is good because you can filter by show rather than channel but not everything is on there. It tends to be only popular shows, Lost, 24 etc..
It’s simple and looks pretty good, shows are colour coded by genre and best of all you can select what TV package you’ve got (Virgin in my case) and it’ll display all your channels so you don’t have to go through and manually select them all. Hovering over a show gives a bit of information about it.. You can extend the grid to show up to 9 hours of TV all on the same page and you can check out what’s on up to a week in the future.
Haha, see what I’ve done there.. Like Valerie.. If you don’t then nevermind! Moving on..
Bit of back story first. Many moons ago I started a wiki for the Questionable Content community to document a fictional handbook for the AnthroPC which is often featured in the comic. Pintsize in the comic is an AnthroPC. Kind of a personal computer, with a personality, a little robot which on occasion does all the things a normal PC does. You must read the comic to understand…
I also made an album in my Gallery install to showcase some QC wallpapers made by the community.
Anyway, all that was back in 2005! When sionide.net was hosted on a different server. So what happened? Well, sionide.net had to move servers and there wasn’t a backup. Hence the reasons for moving the blog to the root directory amongst other things. The wiki had kind of died and was over-run with spam (p.s. I hate wiki spammers almost as much as blog comment spammers, if not more!) The gallery was dead too..
And it turns out, the two topics I started on the Questionable Content Forum are *still* on the front page with now over 40,000 views each, people are running into my site and hitting 404 errors looking for the AnthroPC wiki and Wallpapers gallery.
It’s good news for those people and anyone who reads QC because they’re BACK!!
I’ve installed a Mediawiki and this time, I’ve installed a spam filter so we’ll see how that goes. After a few tries at installing Gallery2 I gave up. It’s impossible to install, there’s too much stuff that can go wrong. I almost had a working install using version 1.5.7 but it wasn’t generating thumbnails properly. Possibly something to do with imagemagick, I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve gone with Plogger this time.. A very simple PHP based gallery which actually installed first time! …Enjoy.
This might be the start of a new meme type thing, or perhaps just one that’s been done hundreds of times before. So, take a screenie of your desktop and trackback to this post… We’ll see how many tidy and untidy desktops we get linked back.
How tidy is your desktop?
Mine isn’t! ^
They say a messy desktop is very reflective of a messy personality. Actually they don’t but it sounds like something “they” would say! For me it is only partly true, I’d say. My desktop is covered in mainly downloaded video/audio/image content, screenshots (ironically), scripts I’m testing at the moment, folders full of stuff I have yet to properly organise nicely into my home directory, random files of interest and just rubbish! Time for a spring clean I think…
I managed to acquire a Motorola v100 from a friend for a very good price. This was such an awesome mobile phone and is probably the reason why I still SMS more than make calls. If you made a call on the mini-laptop looking v100 you had to use the hands free kit but it’s Qwerty keyboard made it perfect for sending texts. I remember it had a really fun break-out game on it too.
We’re into 6th form territory now, I had my own income from my part time job. So I got my first contract mobile, a Nokia 3510i which I paid for myself. I got 100 txts and 100 minutes for £30/month, a true rip off in today’s terms but back then not a bad deal. I had this phone for ages, when the contract ran out I went Pay As You Go for a while as well, so far this is probably the phone which has lasted longest. As Nokia phones go, it was top of the range when I bought it, look at that colour screen and imagine the polyphonic ringtones! I had Toploader - Dancing in the Moonlight for a while.. Haha. It had GPRS as well, I used to make wallpapers for it on my PC and upload them to my website and download them to the phone - no Bluetooth you see and I wasn’t going to pay £2.50/week for those horrible wallpaper services on the premium text numbers. My brand loyalty for Nokia began here…!
When I started University, I started a new contract, got a good deal from the Intarwebz, a deal which even today no one can beat. Good ol’ Vodafone and the Nokia 6680! Another fantastic long living handset from Nokia. It still works perfectly today, just a few bumps and scratches. As for the reduced sized MMC card reader it has, I put a 1GB card in there so I never had to delete any photos from it. It came with a hands free kit as well, so I had a fair few mp3s on there too. The only real problem was, the Symbian 2nd Edition wasn’t built at the time to handle so much data so it did get quite slow.
And long may it live! So, that is five phones… four if you don’t count the first one cos it wasn’t “mine”. All have lived (and died in some cases) in the last, six years or so I’d say. And that is the history of my mobile phone ownership.
It’s got clients for Windows, Mac and Linux which means it’s better than other similar projects like 
I have found a killer app for my phone. This is one reason why I went for the N95 8GB in the first place, for software like this to crop up and make it well worth the investment! 
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