The Blog of G

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, what’s new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spell-check as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later.

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over.

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it.

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on.

Before I get on with our main review I feel I have to mention this keyboard, all I can say is this is a work of art no more no less, I so want one and here’s hoping Santa will be good to me.

 Now back on topic, I have is a simple 128mb flash based unbranded player, hangs round my neck on lariat style headphones and holds little bit more than an hours worth of toonz so only minor overlap on an average workout.

If I’m being honest, I inherited this little guy, from my sweetie last christmas cause someone (ahem) got her a shiny new 6Gb Rio player.

While the 128mb capacity is not wonderful it only takes a couple of minutes to load a different set of songs on it so not a big hassle. I would be lying though if I said the new “clip-on” shuffle hadn’t tempted me when I saw the video of Steve Jobs Launching it, but thanks to not having the cash to drop straight away, I discovered this little iRiver player a few days later and I think I’ll wait for it

Unlike most people in the world today, I don’t swoon over ipods, I think there over priced, have way to many restrictions and well to be honest, I don’t follow the herd mindlesly, if there is a good reason to follow the herd then yes of course follow but to do so blindly is somewhat shortsighted. So the rest of the world can keep bleating on about how great there ipod is even though it’s there third warranty replacement and they had to reformat the thing cause they had to re-install windows and the case scratched within seconds of being removed from packaging.

Hi all, week 2 and I’m still going this week and next weeks reviews are actually fairly closly related. While MP3 players and Heart monitors seem fairly diverse gadgets I use both only in one place… The gym!

I know some of my readers may be surprised to learn that I have a weight problem! It’s true, It’s getting to be less of a problem everyday though and part of the success I’m having on this is down to these 2 gadgets.

I’ll start with the less interesting of the 2 gadgets, my Heart Monitor. The vital details first of all It’s the most basic “Polar” model available the F2, there are 2 elements a “wrist watch” type device and the sensor unit that straps to my chest.

While this is a basic model it does everything I need and has an unadvertised “Bonus features” that I really like but more on that later.

This unit does everthing I need, it tells me my current heart rate, it times my workout and when I’m finished it tells me my average heart rate for the duration of my workout.

There are other models on the range that give alarms when your heart rate is getting out of the range that you set but what’s wrong with just looking at your wrist? Or for that matter leaving the “watch” in an easily viewable spot while working out.

As for the unadvertised “bonus feature” I mentioned well my local gym uses Procor equipment that has heart monitor handles builty-in. The chest sensor for my Heart monitor is picked up by this kit so while I’m on one of these machines I have a full read out with target workout zones the whole lot, very handy

Why would you use a heart monitor? well for a start so far in the 3 months of my excercise regime I have paid out more than €500.00! A heart monitor is a small aditional cost that insures I get the most out of my exorcise program and optimise my limited time that I can afford to speng in the gym. Plus it’s interesting to see the difference in your heart rate for different activities.

All righty then, well welcome to the first of my weekly features, Wednesday is gadget day!

OK, so a while back I posted a list of gadgets and said that I would be following up with mini reviews of my own personel favourite gadgets, here’s the link to the post.

Anywho, that’s what I’m gonna be doing for the first few of these weekly posts. This week i’m kickin’ it all off with my HP ipaq 6515.

The 6515 is, actually I should say was (a new model has been released), marketed as a mobile communicator, now to be fair it does have a lot of mobile communications type features, but it is primarily a windows based PDA. So it does all the usual PDA type features…

Calendar, Address book, Tasklists, e-mail via sync with outlook or Exchange push, pocket word, pocket excel, adobe acrobat, Media Player (great for podcasts;) some games etc. So before we go any further it’s already a very handy device.

Lets go a little further, there is a camera and GPS receiver built in. The camera is a fairly run of the mill 1.2 mega pixel affair with similar quality to the majority of camera phones available so it’s only really usefull for the odd emergency snap.

The GPS receiver on the other hand is fantastic, it’s just a shame that Hewlett Packard don’t include Ireland when they promise maps for all major western european countries Although to be fair until fairly recently even google couldn’t get good maps for Ireand out of OSI, so lets not be to hard on HP. Anyway, my route planning requirements have been looked after fairly well by “Via Michelin” which draws from the same data as google maps.

Until recently that satisfied my GPS needs but as I’m getting more in to my photo walks I’m gonna need something that gives me a tracklog which is where Megolith comes in. While it won’t do route planning I can use screen shots from google earth as my maps more on that once testing has been completed

News just in thanks to Stalltheball.com it would appear that I should have a look at this new AA Navigator Software, it would appear from what’s been said here that it’s got some great maps for Ireland included.

Okay so I’ve covered the PDA, Camera and GPS. I haven’t mentioned the bluetooth capabilities, I use this for 2 things, firstly my “hands free” connection in the car and secondly I can share my Media Centre’s Internet connection with my PDA enabling me to use the mobile IE app to web surf from anywhere in the house or garden at home (even the smallest room, newspapers are so 20th century) yes, web browsing on a pda can be frustrating as it reformats the page you are looking at in order to make it fit on the 240×240 display, however with things like “news rivers” and “yomoblog” becoming more widespread It’s certainly becoming more useful and less frustrating almost daily.

The last feature of this unit to mention is the GSM phone with GPRS and EDGE connectivity. The GPRS is something I only use occasionally as I’m usually not to far away from a web connection of some sort that I can use to sync to or share. On the other hand if I was using more public transport then that’s a different story, I’m sure it would get more use to pass the time.

The mobile phone feature set is fairly basic it calls people, it receives inbound calls and it sends and recieves text messages, with one exception, the contacts list, it’s synced to your outlook address book so every contact you have is on your phone, if your using Exchange push then you have access to the entire domains contact list, what more could you want from a phone? Well reliability is the only concern I have on that front, now bear in mind I’m not a huge mobile phone user and if you are then I cannot recommend this unit as it has problems about once a month where it simply stops sending or receiving calls and a soft reset is the only way to resolve the problem. Big deal you might think but you’ll only know there’s a problem when you go to make a call, who knows how many calls you might have missed in the meantime.

As for the size/weight well it’s not one for the shirt pocket, jacket pocket yes. A better idea though is to get one of the many beltclip cases that are available, that’s where mine lives quite happily most of the time.

Now for some pictures

Ok the first Picture showsa you the front complete with mini keyboard, which works surprisingly well once you adjust to it. and the othe shows the rear of the unit in it’s case, nice of the case manufacturer to leave openings for the camera and speaker.

The left side of the unit showing (from left to right) it’s IR port, the Camera Shutter/memo recorder button and the volume slider.

The right hand side showing (left to Right) mini-SD card slot and the normal SD card slot, Stuffed with 2Gb card. [homer] mmmmmmmmm Storage [/homer]

And for our final shot some nudity

Just to give you a size comparison but also to show what 12 months of daily use and abuse has done to it. Answer very little apart from the fingerprints

Yes it’s that time, the time to put it all out there on the line and see if I can stick with this plan.

So What’s the plan? Well, simply put I am going to start three regular weekly features, this is what’s scary I’m commiting to doing these weekly and well this blogging thing is a hobby from which I generate no income and not only does it take time but it takes idea’s. So I’m gonna give it a go and see if I can manage this. Who knows maybe it’ll all just flow and I’ll take to it like a duck to water.

Anyway, enough of the nerves, on to more important thing’s. Like what are these weekly features gonna be? The first your going to see, will be available from tomorrow and it’s called (insert trumpet fanfare here) “Wednesday is gadget day” and strangely it’s gonna be all about gadgets and it’ll be available (hopefully) every Wednesdays from then on

The next one will appear on fridays, called “F1 Friday” No surprises here either, for the forseeable future, I’m gonna run articles on Formula 1 although I do reserve the right to post about other forms of motorsport if I so chose.

The final feature, for now, will have the stunningly original title of “Music Mondays” and this feature will have relevance to music. That may take the form of an album review or a rant on why the music industry is shrinking, or even just an esoteric rambling about how certain music makes me “feel”

So there you have it, as you’ve guessed I tend to prefer the “it does wot it says on the tin approach” to all that marketing fluff, some people seem to enjoy these days.

I do of course reserve the right to stop any or all of these regular features should I see fit at any time in the future, but prolly the best way to stop that from happening and maybe even to steer the direction of these is through your comments, I know there are people from all over the world reading The blog of George fairly regularly), much to my surprise (I really don’t think I’m that interesting) and I would love to hear from you. so please feel free to comment below.