prolific.org

I recently switched from KPN to Vodafone to get a good deal on the Nokia N95. I’m terribly brand-loyal, but KPN aren’t the most happening provider around and they couldn’t offer me anything better than 370 euro. I picked up the phone for 129 € from the Vodafone shop yesterday and so far I am very happy with it and with Vodafone service. I haven’t actually used the phone to speak to anyone yet, but then I’m probably an a-typical mobile user.

Rarely do I use my mobile phones to ring someone. I own one so people can phone me, which also rarely happens. So I mostly use my phone for texting (SMS), checking mail and for entertainment. By entertainment I mean reading/posting to websites and blogs, feeds, etc. I do some light moblogging too. I don’t really play games at all, though if I could find a good Bejeweled clone for Symbian, I’d be tempted.

So yes, the Nokia n95. ‘What computers have become’, isn’t that the advertising pitch? Well, I’m not selling off my desk- and laptops yet, but it certainly is an action-packed gadget.

What I like:
- The size. It’s just right for me.
- Integrated Vox and Flickr. Connect using WiFi. Rocks!
- The radio auto-installs stations. Probably nothing new, but I like it.
- The ext speakers are good enough to listen to music to.
- The screen. Makes every crappy picture shine.
- The colour (‘plum’). So stylish.
- The software, PC suite, is solid.
- Maps. Have yet to get the hang of it, but could be fun.

What I don’t like:
- The camera. Thank you, I’ll use a real one.
- Sometimes the screen is slow refreshing.
- The double slide feels a little rickety.
- The chrome nav keys are ugly. Why can’t the front of the phone be as pretty as the back?
- Battery life. Using the phone for anything other than a phone will drain it like a hungry baby on a mother’s tit.

Applications
Here are some lovely third party applications that I’ve installed on the phone:
- Opera Mini
- Gmail mobile (Superb client made by Google.)
- Best MessageStorer (Shareware app to backup SMS in a text or csv file. Isn’t it bizarre they haven’t got this built into PC Suite yet?)
- Putty (The well known telnet/ssh client.)
- VOX (Slick client, made by 6A)
- EQO Mobile (IM client, among other things – not sure about this one yet)
- Google Maps
- jTwitter (This looks better than TinyTwitter which I ran on my SonyEricsson.)
- Y-Browser (A fully enabled file browser, better than the native app)
- Yamigo (The server I’m using in the native IM app)

Wishlist
- It would be great if these phones had more storage capacity so you could use them to store the pictures you take with your real camera.

To protect the phone from scratching, I got a Crumpler P.P. 55 sleeve instead of Nokia’s own expensive leather case.

Did I mention that I love this phone? I was able to do most of what I do with it with my previous phones (the ancient Nokia 3650 more so than the SE k750i – there seems to be more software for the Symbian OS.), but this is the first one where everything feels stable and reliable, even with the notoriously crappy Bluetooth connection on my PC.

I’m glad I can put the k750i to rest. I’m never switching phone brands again.

I wish there was a way on Flickr to upload a batch of photos temporarily, without them appearing in your photostream. So you can look at them, rotate them, whatever, and then tick off the ones you want to add to your stream, and the ones you want to delete. That’s all.

Would love to have a go at VOX, now that I’ve learnt it allows for friends/family only blogging, as well as looking pretty. I’ve no idea what else it does, but there’s stuff I want to write about all the time that the world has no business knowing and is meant only for a handful of people. Tired of having to be vague all the time.

This morning when I tried to go to gmail at mail.google.com/mail, I got a 404 not found page. When I shortened the URL and tried mail.google.com, I got this pixyblog.com homepage. Some kind of freaky DNS problem?

Where’s mah mail, Sergey?

This problem only occurs in Firefox.

My Sony Ericsson k750i mobile phone started sucking its battery dry every eight hours or so. I only got it in December so I brought it back to KPN’s Primafoon shop where a woman asked me to hand it over. She looked at the front. She turned it around. She looked at the back.

She asked ‘Do you have insurance?’. When I said ‘no’, she said they’d have to send it off to repairs, it would take three weeks and they didn’t have a replacement phone. By this point I started losing my temper. I do have a very short fuse.

I told her that was no use to me and she pointed me towards a 3rd party repair shop a few hundred meters further down the road…

… where I was told they’d have to send it off to repairs, it would take three weeks and they would charge extra because I hadn’t bought the phone from them. I said that was no use to me. They told me maybe a software upgrade would fix it, but it wasn’t something I could do myself. They pointed me towards a Sony Ericcson service centre on the other side of town…

‘You’re all making me walk all over town, dammit,’ I said and legged it out of there in a very bad mood and went… home where I dug up the USB data transfer cable, downloaded the latest firmware (‘not something I could do myself’), flashed the phone and…

Problem fixed.

Well, in any case, not when Joss Whedon decides it isn’t, dammit.

Whedonesque.com was named ‘Blog of the week’ at The Times today and in the comments on the post announcing it, a number of our users ask why Whedonesque is a blog. Before I can answer, Joss Whedon himself pipes in and declares Whedonesque not a blog.

I try to explain that perhaps people’s interpretation of the world blog has changed somewhat over the last five years and that Whedonesque has all the characteristics of a weblog. Joss seems to call me pedantic, dismissing my reasoning and telling me language evolves, ergo, my blog no longer a blog. He seems to think I’m ‘nerd girl’ who needs to be taught a lesson in language.

Welcome to bizarro world.

He’d already left when I finally came up with the ‘let’s say in 10 years time, a tv series is something that has a jury and televoting, so sorry, your work is now called ‘fanfic” analogy. I am a crappy debater.

It seems most of our users have no idea the site is a weblog. I guess they’ve never gone near our About page.

I’m quite baffled.

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There should be some kind of filter when you are searching Technorati to weed out all the OMG!! WTF!! livejournal posts from your results. When I want to read people’s thoughts on Brokeback Mountain I’d like to find more articles like Tom’s and not have to weed through the acres of ‘OMG Jake and Heath!!! D sex wuz hawt’ or ‘I’m like, so depressed right now, the movie made me think of my ex-boyfriend.’-type posts.

Test entry for my new MT installation

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I ordered a laptop from Dell yesterday. Two hours after I ordered, I was reading the specs again and realised I’d foolishly got the Dutch version of XP.

It annoys me no end that these sellers assume that since you’re ordering through their Dutch site, you’ll want Dutch software too. (There was no option to tick ´’UK’)

So I rang customer service and a very nice gentleman (who preferred an English OS himself) traced the order and changed the details.

Tracking my order on the Dell site now, the specs still say the computer will have a Dutch OS.

Who wants to bet I’ll get the wrong laptop?

(And yeah, I blame Hg for the order in the first place. Apart from the usual gadget envy, I probably wouldn’t have seen Dell’s offer if I hadn’t had checked out his on the site.)

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Like, wow, you can record voice on your iPod and use it for interviews. If you buy an iTalk voice recorder, that is. Big fucking deal. I can just picture Jobs’ faithful audience clapping like seals for this ‘amazing’ new feature.

Hello. Why can’t I just stick the (better) microphones I already own in the machine? Superior, feature rich players like the iRiver H-series can do just that. Apple, if you want me to buy your gear, make it do what it should be able to do. It takes a lot more than pretty design to win over this (power) user. I’m not a big fan of the white look anyway. And I really don’t need games on it. Seriously. I’ll take serious features over games, any day.

Oh well, at least those Photo iPods (359 €’s not a bad price, actually) will soon (March, software update) be able to connect directly to digital cameras. Something they should have been able to do from the start if you ask me.

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