Easily one of the coolest gadgets I got this year was the Blackberry Pearl (or 8100 model). I’ve been playing with it for like a day now and I know it’s going to be something really special to use for a good long while. Although it’s a nice site, the images really don’t do it much justice. It’s honestly a thing of beauty in design if you have it infront of you. It’s only slightly larger than my previous Ericsson and packs a serious punch with respect to the number of features it’s got in it.
The only annoying thing I found was the flap you put the SIM card in doesn’t stay set, but opens until you put the battery in there. Minor annoyance but it’s a real shame as this could have scored some more points of rock solid construction. Another thing that is really starting to PISS me off, is the fact that none of these phone manufacturers have clocked onto the fact that it would be nice to have a normal earphone jack as opposed to some piece of shit they’ve concocted for you to plug in your earphones.
The Future was Orange
I’ve been with Orange for the last year and a half. The best part of being with Orange wasn’t the coverage (which is shit where I live) or the price package (which was shit once again but I’ll get to that in a minute) but rather the one little perk of having 2 for 1 cinema tickets on a Wednesday. Of course, based on my previous post, I’ve not been doing that very often either, which means that this little perk, wasn’t all that much of a perk as far as I’m concerned, so I didn’t need much convincing to drop them as my network of choice.
What’s interesting is that I was able to get the phone and a whole new package that suits me down to a T while paying less. The issue with a lot of these packages that many operators provide is that they’re honestly not tailored very well for the average user. They either give you an immense amount of time in “off-peak” hours that are not always useful, so you end up not using all of them, or they give you too little minutes during normal times. The good thing however is that after a year and a bit of using my phone regularly I’ve got enough bills to know exactly how much a use and of what. No need to guess these things (as I’ve had to in the past).
Enter the T
hmm got to check how much that costs on the internet to see if it’s cheaper.In the end T-mobile based on their Flext system which effectively gives you a pot of money every month that you can use for either calls or texts all from the same pot. Obviously I’ve opted for the unlimited internet service on there which is brilliant to be surfing the web while waiting on the train platform or even walking to and from places. You know when you’re in any store and you think to yourself:
Well now it’s just a few clicks to check the net there and then.
Opera Mini
So I’ll be talking about things/software/tips and tricks/links that I find out for the Pearl as I go along. Hopefully other people can benefit from my experiences. The first software tip I’ll throw everyone’s way is the Opera Mini browser.
Seems that Opera is definitely the little browser that could. Seems that this little browser is a hit on the Nintendo market. I’ve got to say that Opera Mini (opera for mobile devices) is MILES better than the standard BlackBerry browser. For a start they’ve cut away a lot of the clutter that the BB browser has when the menu is pressed. People on that size of screen don’t want to scroll FOREVER. We want something quick and to the point. Sure the browser is being updated pretty regularly as far as I can tell. It’s got RSS integration which is essential for all mobile devices as far as I’m concerned.
The Home page is EXACTLY what you want to see when you first log into the browser. Oh sure I’m as self obsessed as the next guy, but having BK as my home page on my BB seems a bit of a waste of space, although it’s definitely interesting to see how the site renders on a mobile phone (I’ll be sorting out a seperate mobile spreadsheet in the not too distant future).
The Application Opera Mini has attempted to access the network. Would you like to allow this?The only annoying thing for me at the moment (which I’m not sure if it’s got something to do with the actual browser or t-mobile’s settings) but effectively every time you use Opera it asks you:
If anyone’s got a way of stopping this fekking annoying message coming up everytime Opera is used please, pretty please with a cherry on top drop something in the comments and I’ll update this post accordingly.
For those in the T-mobile camp wondering how to sort this out onto your Pearl, here’s the steps I took:
From your Pearl go to http://mini.opera.com and follow the instructions.
<li><p>Chance are after you've tried to connect it'll fail on your ass (it did on mine). Thankfully Opera have already forseen this problem and posted <a href="http://www.operamini.com/help/connect/?provider=T-Mobile®ion=UK">this page</a>. Note that this is for the UK market, although as you can see they've sorted everyone out for the rest of the world as well.</p></li>
<li><p>Go to Options > Advanced Options > TCP and then put the information you got from that page.
Turn off, remove battery, turn on and it should all work.
As I continue my review of 2006, go read part 1 if you want to find out my thoughts on The best of the Net 2006, I’m turning my attention to movies. Interestingly I think this year has been one of the worst years for movies in a really long time. That isn’t to say that I haven’t enjoyed a good number of movies this year, it’s just that I found less time for movies this year, which I can probably attribute to the lack of quality flicks being shown this year.
moreI started writing a best of 2006 about a week ago, however I’ve had to break that down into several posts because it got far too large and I didn’t feel that I would be doing each topic justice, if I bulked all of them into one post. So for the first topic of conversation I’ll talk about the best of the Net for 2006. This is mainly about design on the net, internet applications, websites that caught my attention on the net for one reason or another. So without further adieu here’s the Squeaky Kode Trophies for the year of 2006.
Addictive Site of the Year
Advertising/Design Goodness. This is the one of those sites that even though I might have 500 unread items in my feed reader, I’ll most definitely jump to this site and have a look and see what’s new. The reason is pretty simple really, it provides me with inspiration every single time. Although I hate adverts, I absolutely LOVE good ads. A good ad will go a long way with me to be honest, and this site brings the very best of the advertising world right to your feed reader, generally speaking every day.
Best Advert of 2006
Sony Bravia Paint. On a similar note to the topic above, I couldn’t really not mention the new Sony Bravia advert. How do you top the supreme bouncy balls advert of last year? I’ll tell you how, using a hell of a lot of paint. You’d think this was probably the only advert I’d seen that was special, and I’ve got to say that it definitely had some stiff competition from the Citroen Mutations advert.
Best Designed Site of the Year
UXmag came out of nowhere as far as I’m concerned. Very very slick sight, it combined that attention to detail that Subtraction has and ran it all of a Textpattern install. What I love about it is the attention to detail, the fact that it resizes according to the size of the browser without really loosing any of it’s design intent. I think that’s an absolutely fabulous design for a news portal. I also really enjoyed seeing what Phu’s been doing with his site as well. Honourable mentions include Dave Shea’s new redesign, although his previous design was pretty timeless, the orange and blues really worked very well. Of course Shaun Inman also did a bit of a redesign job which I thought was an interesting concept . Watching Michael sort out his site for several months was fun, so the ‘new’ trend of a live redesign seems to be making a bit of a come back (Mike was ahead of that trend it would seem).
Best Internet Application
Up until last year, I’ve got to say that I only every used personally hosted services, however this year I’ve expanded to several other services that I’ve found to be crucial in how I enjoy the internet. The first on the list was Ma.gnolia. You’re probably using another social bookmarking service out there, I decided on this one because it was well designed. I know sounds fickle, but I’m a fickle designer that likes to be surrounded by nice things.
It’s taken me a long while but I finally bit the Flickr bug as well and got myself an pro account as well. I’ve got to say that I don’t use it as much as I should do but that will be changing in the not to distant future.
For my feed reading I’ve jumped on the Newsgator bandwagon. I’ve got a lot to write about with respect to FOFRedux and will hopefully go to using that application in the not too distant future sometime next year, but in the meanwhile I’ve found the Newsgator service to be exactly what I was looking for.
So I guess it’s not so much that I had a specific internet application, but rather the fact that I actually decided to use several of the plethora of applications out there for use in the first place.
Best Internet Related Software
Firefox 2. Yeah, what did you expect? If you haven’t tried this little browser yet, make your peace with the other browser you’re using and head on over to take back the internet your way. My favourite feature of the new ‘version’ (sorry it should have been 1.6, but I can understand it for marketing purposes) is the dictionary in the text fields, restore session and automatically restart after an update. The icons are also pretty cool I thought as well.
Best Firefox Plugin
Firebug. Yeah well, I created this particular category because FIrebug really blew my mind as I honestly thought that there was no way you could top the Web Developer Plugin which I can’t do anything without, and then comes this exceptional plugin that serious makes my life a lot more easy and lays everything in front of me in a clear manner that was otherwise obscured.
Blogging Networks Politics
While I know it wasn’t fun for any of the 9rulers out there to see our network’s name dragged into the mud, it made for interesting reading to be included in the internet gossip pages. One thing I will comment on however was the fact that Blogging Networks in general felt as though they were soo much less important this year than in previous years. Yeah I’m including the venture capital funding that b5media received. I might be feeling that way due to the fact that networks and the interaction I was having with the people in the network was less this year than in previous years.
If you think I’ve missed something pretty fundamental just drop a comment and I’ll be sure to add it into the list or create a whole new category for it.
Over a month ago I was on the hunt for a laptop. In my quest for a small laptop I actually looked at the Fujitsu-Seimens model and the Sony Vaio, and hell I even looked into getting myself an ibook or whatever it is they call themselves nowadays (the cheaper kind not the medal ones). Alas none of them really floated my boat, because they were either too thick, or too heavy. I wanted something far more portable than any of those models could provide me with.
In the end I settled on a Toshiba R100. I got this particular model for a couple of reasons. The first was because I’d actually seen the model in question as all the directors in the company got these things as standard issue earlier this year. The beauty of these particular laptops are that due to the fact that they don’t have a CD player makes them incredible light and super small.
As you can imagine, the standards Windows install lasted a total of like 5 hours on my machine as I quickly found a way to install dapper drake straight away. Once I’d done that I decided that it would be a good idea to try installing beryl on there, bad idea. For all those thinking that you can get all the funky 3D effects on this machine, you can’t. The computer has a Trident graphics card, and as such this extra layer it would seem is not possible. You could try but what happened with me is that it basically screwed up Sudo for me and things were not installing and a whole slew of other rubbish came of it. So word to the wise just avoid it on this machine.
I’m writing my findings down here in the hopes of a couple of things. I can’t be the only person to have Ubuntu installed on this machine, or even the only one that wants to have Ubuntu installed on this machine, so I’ll going to chronicle my findings here and fill it up as a resource for other helpless souls that are tearing their hair out as well, and hopefully I might get some answers to some of the bugs that can be found on this machine.
Installing Dapper Drake
This was actually the easiest thing in the world. Download an exe file, run it and it’ll reboot and start the installation process automatically from the net. It’ll download all the packages and install the thing right there and then, taking roughly about 1 hour in total (depending of course on your internet installation). The great thing is that everything worked out of the box. No problems whatsoever. I’m not sure if my keyboard was having a little bit of trouble there as I currently do in Edgy.
Installing Edgy Eft
Unfortunately things don’t go according to plan with this particular install. The reason as I’ve come to understand is really down to the shoddy and buggy Xorg. It’s a definitely step backwards as far as I’m concerned. If this was my only machine, I’d be fucked. Luckily the great guys over on the irc channel #ubuntuforums were a great help and got me up and running.
The problem is that Vesa doesn’t work, and the trident driver is just not good enough. There’s a bit of a bug involved here that I don’t know what the deal is. When you log in you’ll only see a quarter of the desktop. You’ve got to CTRL-ALT-F1 to restart xorg quickly, log back in and it’s all working nicely. Fekking annoying bug if you ask me. So I reported the bug on Launchpad, and someone got back to me less than 24hours later. Still hoping for a resolution to this, but it’s great to have someone get back to me directly and so quickly to try and solve my issue.
The next problem I had was in the keyboard (in fact I still have this problem, which is a real pain in the ass to be honest. Basically, when I log in, the keyboard letters are recognised, however the rest of the keyboard, and I’m talking about the symbols buttons, come up with some utter giberish. Selecting another generic keyboard solves the problem. If anyone has got a solution to this stupid bug I’d really be grateful (once again I’ve logged a report in as well about this).
So is Edgy worth it. It’s a more polished graphically at least distribution to Dapper. The login screen isn’t as scary as Dapper. The icons have been polished and look a lot more professional to be honest. Things like he new help icon and the new login screen are all great little additions that basically make the package look more professional. The new chocolate background is also pretty cool. I am glad that they didn’t go for the community created screenshots that we previewed. I’m with Mark Shuttleworth on this particular subject. It just wasn’t right.
One thing I have noticed (and maybe that’s because the harddisc is smaller and less complicated than on my desktop machine,) but Nautalis is actually faster on this install. It’s changed ever so slightly with the latest addition of gnome.
Applications
As I’m using this machine for a completely different set of reasons and because I’ve got less power than my desktop machine I’ve gone on a bit of a hunt for a different set of applications.
XFCE I thought I’d try another windows manager instead of gnome. XFCE was the obvious one. I’ve got to say that while it does seem lighter, it’s definitely not as polished as gnome. There are certain things in it that really do need some work. Some pretty fundamental things. I’ll definitely have a look at it in a few months/years to come, but for the moment I think it’s got a way before it’s as solid as gnome.
Thunar One of the great additions however is Thunar, which I think is a fantastic little application, very light and gets me to where I want to be straight away. I’m using a completely different icon to be honest, mainly because I love the screen with the stars, after all I am attracted to the stars.
Abiword Another great little find is Abiword. It’s got a pretty rubbish splash screen, but it is supremely lightweight Word replacement. It looks exactly like word, only slightly more slimmed down. For the type of documentation I require however it’s absolutely brilliant. So much so that I’m thinking about making it my default word processing tool of choice on my desktop machine as well. Hopefully the same developers can have a look at making an Excel alternative as well using the same ideologies, it just works really well and has got a very clean user interface.
Wifi
Not sure how to get this enabled or to test it’s all working to be honest. I’ve not had the chance really as we don’t have a wireless network at home (although we are definitely starting to think about this much more seriously). If anyone’s got any good tutorials or applications that can allow me to roam and see what’s around in my area or so that when I’m in a Starfucks I actually have that option available to me that would be most excellent.
One of the main reasons why I’m completely quiet at the moment is mainly due to the fact that I’m working on this behmouth of a building, Los Faros De Panama. It’s by far the largest project I’ve been involved with as it 3 towers (central tower clocking in at around 84 floors) and a podium level of 6 floors. Architects are Chapman Taylor, while we’re doing everything else (structure, mechanical, electrical, public health, fire, vertical transport and the list goes on) It’s been an interesting challenge getting to grips with the American
Interesting little bit on the Panama Investor Blog as well, regarding the size of this project. It’s going to be a damn long week, I can tell you that much.
In a time when I should really be blogging MUCH more often (as I’m going through some pretty tough and generally strange times right now) is actually the time when I felt the need to stay away from my blog and the online world in general. I’ve not really been able to pinpoint the reason behind this as my website has always been something of a release for me. It’s something that I use to express what’s on my mind and purge my mind.
The harsh reality of the situation is that the weblog is often times not the perfect or ideal solution for venting and for getting things off your chest. The reasons are simple. You end up sounding like some whiny git, or you upset people in your real life that might take offence with what you’ve written. So in effect over the past couple of weeks I’ve just kept silent because of that.
As if that would be enough, it’s not. I can’t really talk about my personal life as much as I’d like to. I’m a very open person, so most (if not all) of my thoughts are written on my face, so my site should really be a reflection of that right? Wrong. I can’t really talk about soo many things that I would like to get off my chest because these words are then let out into the wild. Left into the cyber realm far away from my control. I can’t realistically hide my writing from some people. It’s like some people I’d love for them to be able to read things that I write while others I’d like to filter that sort of thing out. Or does it really matter? That’s what’s been going on in my head these past few weeks and to be honest it’s not until I actually sat down and started writing these things down did I realise what was annoying me, what was keeping me away.
In a way I guess blogging is less (to me at least) about what it was in the beginning. At first it was all about expression. You did your thing and got on with it, because NO ONE was watching us in the beginning. Nobody really cared about what these guys did in the fringes of the internet. We had a certain amount of anonymity.
I’m currently at a crossroads. This is a crossroads that will effect my online presence, as this week I was seriously considering packing in the pipe dreams of graphic novels, artwork, design, graphics and the lot and just concentrating on engineering. I know it’s fucking strange to hear and it seems as though I’ve given up after a fashion.
Then yesterday I remembered something. It’s a feeling only artists can feel. Maybe designers as well, but artists more so, because they’re doing all the lifting. It’s about the feeling of completing the piece of artwork in front of you. You start off with a blank piece of paper, with only a vision, a clear idea of what the final drawing will look like once you’ve completed it. Once you’ve laid the last bit of ink, or completed the paint and it’s dried, that feeling lasts only a little while; the problem is that engineering can NEVER replicate that feeling, no matter how much I decide to give it time and energy and effort.
So am I packing it in? Probably not just yet, but I definitely needed to have this heart to heart to get things off my chest, and I guess that’s what it’s all about.