Anyway, this little keyboard is a great idea, we’ve gotten used to having a wireless keyboard and mouse in the living room as well as the remote, but it would be nice to be able to put them away outta sight and still have all the functionality.

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.

Prior to that we were eircom’s customer for 18 month’s give or take and I’ll be cold in the ground before that every happens again. I got the impression from repeated “technical issues” going unresolved until the regulator, Comreg, stepped in that eircom couldn’t care less about there domestic customers. Strangely, our migration to Smart coincided with a polar change in the quality of service.

Since Smart took over our voice traffic we have not had an issue since, compared to every 2-3 months previously.Unfortunately, Smart could not provide us Broadband so we were in the unusual situation of having our voice services from Smart and our Data from eircom.

Now, I’m not a petty man, really I’m not (ask Elly if you won’t take my word for it ) but from what I have heard reading various articles and blogs this week it would appear that eircom turned off Smarts voice customers ’cause Smart hadn’t paid there bill, then hired 500 hundred new temporary “switcher” staff the same day and I even heard a rumour that eircom had actually refused a payment from Smart. To me this stinks of Anti-competitive behaviour short of sending a masked men with AK-47′s round the smart offices, I can’t actually think of any way it could have abused it’s position more. As a result I will be cancelling my broadband with eircom and seeing as how if I have a land-line I’m paying eircom line rental one way or another That’s gotta go as well.

This leaves me in a rather difficult position, despite living in the greater Dublin area with many broadband providers available to me I have a choice of 3 apparently, once you rule out DSL (cause they need a land line) and satellite (latency is too high for good voice) 2 of these (QBS and Digiweb) are listed on the governments Broadband website. The other, NTL, isn’t listed for some reason.So far we have only confirmed that NTL can provide us service, but the others will be contacted and checked out as well before a final decision is made. As for the voice service well again there are 3 choices, Skype, Blueface and Skytel, actually thanks to Tom Raftery maybe only two.

What’s our holy grail for voice?

 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.

 

So we drove to Cork this afternoon, yup Lucan to Cork on a friday afternoon, the journey can be best described as sauntering, we got checked into our hotel and headed out to try and meet up with a few people although we hadn’t let anyone know we would be about.

So it was about 8pm when we left the hotel. We walked around Cork from MacCurtain st. to “The thirsty Scholar” but no luck meeting any other campers. Ah well, I got to wander around Cork for the first time in over 20 years that I wasn’t there on business and I have to say there was a fantastic “vibe” about the city, maybe it was all the students on the street or the smell of fresh pizza dough in the air but it reminded me of the electricity that was in the air in the Temple bar of the late eighties and early nineties, before it was “improved”

On the way back to the hotel I snapped the picture above with the compact camera. I’m stunned that it even picked up the light but not as stunned as how steady my hand was for a long exposure, especially considering I have had one or two

I can’t wait to get out around this fantastic city with the 5200, I saw some gorgeous pictures just waiting to be taken.

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

This isn’t my first post to be written on it, but it is the first to be published. The first post written should be available on friday as part of my new series of regular features, but more on that in another post.

There were a couple of things that “the old girl” needed, so a new battery is on order (first one to make a wise crack about Sony laptop batteries gets a slap ) until that’s delivered I’m tied to the wall socket, even though I did manage to pick up a wireless card for it, in of all places, Tesco. Boy was that a surprise a reasonable brand (Buffalo) for just a smidge under €40 while the local PC World’s most cost effective option was €70!

Now I could wax lyrical for days about the evil, profiteering of IT retailers but I never I’d see the day when a grocery chain would out do an IT retailer at their own game, tis a sad sad day for IT retailers everywhere…

Some people slag me for it but when I started with Compustore there were 2 stores when I left there were 5 and about 10-12 franchises, so I like to think I played my part, and even if I didn’t I had a hell of a lot of fun and met some great people while working there.

And, if you’ll indulge me I’d like to tell you a story about one person I met there a little more than 8 years ago.

It was a Saturday afternoon and I’m pretty sure I was hung over, I was hung over a lot in those days, hell it was right in the eye of the storm that was the Celtic tiger. So life was a constant party, we liked to think we worked hard and played harder and there were times that was the only way you could stay sane

Anyway, I digress, I was prowling the shop floor doing my best to avoid the time wasters and be available to the people that were there to spend money, hey, a good months sales made the difference between getting the bus home after work or a drink after hours and a taxi later

Anyway, I see this group come wandering in what looked to be fairly good suits, on a Saturday afternoon, so I’m seeing a “cure” there’s 2 guys and a lady, different ages and very obviously serious business people. So I make my way across towards them doing my best to play deaf to the scumbag looking for help reading the system requirements of some piece of software and see the fantastic looking shoes the tall skinny guy is wearing.

Cha ching, I’m thinking:D

So I introduce myself and the tall guy takes the lead…

“You don’t sound terribly local?” I inquire as we start to wander toward the display of shiny new state of the art PC’s.

“naw, I’m from the U.S.” he says.

“ah ok” I say,” so your in town for business?”

“Yup, so why don’t you show us your best selling PC?”

“Ah nuts” I’m thinking cause I know our best seller is also the one I make the least commission on. So I start to nudge him a bit about what he wants the machine for etc. Trying to get a bit more info for the up sell I’m thinking of

Then without any prompting he starts talking plural and I’m all of a sudden thinking “give him exactly what he wants get the deal and if he’s looking for a few, sure that’ll make it worthwhile. Little did I know…

I’m settling into my patter now about our best seller it was a Compaq Presario If memory serves, it was definitely an AMD K6 2 powered model, a budget model with most of the bases covered.

All in all we talked for about 20 minutes a lot about business and how the different chips were sizing up against each other and so on and so forth, it was refreshing to speak to a middle aged man who actually new a fairly decent amount (As I thought) about computer technology, please don’t think I’m being patronising or ageist with that statement if you had worked there at the time you would understand what I mean, it wasn’t unheard of but it was rare.

Anyway, it was at this point, after I had pitched an AMD powered PC to him, discussed the virtues of the CPU over the Intel alternative at the time, that he introduced himself as Craig and handed me his card…

INTEL COO

And as I was apologising he asked me to stop and thanked me for being “straight and honest” with him explaining that it was rare that he got the chance to speak to people like me that new so much about “his” market.

At this point as we were saying our farewells, I’m thinking that’s a bit much “his” market, jaysus like you run one Intel factory in Ireland, get a grip mate. God I was so naive/dumb.

As soon as he had left the store our head technician, Rob, comes running out from behind the tech counter asking who the guy that I had just been talking too was. Keep in mind Rob, like myself, wasn’t the smallest lad in the world and I don’t ever remember seeing him move that fast before.

I said it was some bloke from Intel, to which Rob replied “yea he pulled up in a massive stretch limo.

Slowly the penny was starting to drop, I pulled his card out of my pocket and as Rob saw it he just looked gob smacked and goes “George you do know who he is?”

I reply “yea he’s some big cheese out in Lucan” and Rob starts shaking his head.

“no George, that’s THE big cheese in Intel”

Ker klunk finally, the penny drops. I can still hear Rob laughing when I told him that I ‘d tried to sell him an AMD PC.

I learned some very valuable lessons that day.

The value of honesty in all your dealings as you just never know exactly who you are dealing with.

The truly clever people will always listen to and value everyone else’s opinion, before forming their own.

Always remain humble, you will gain far more respect from people that way than telling them how fantastic you are

And the most important lesson?

Listen to your elders, chances are they have seen and done it before you or else they have a PHD

So Monday evening when I got home from the office’ late as always, my x-box 360 got powered up and the shiny new disk slotted into the drive.

First thing I have to say about this is the game was launched on Friday, I got it on Monday and the first thing I see is a message to download a patch or get booted off of live Don’t get me wrong I love the way the 360 can do that but come on, guys you sent the game to press with flaws! After almost a year of delays!!!

Still that’s not the worst thing in the world it gave me a chance to make some dinner and boy am I glad I did. Cause once I picked up that pad and started to play, I was completely absorbed, the only reason I’m not a sleep on the couch at the moment is because I had the good sense to set a “you gotta work in the morning alarm”

Been a while since a game grabbed me that way. The strange thing is, there were so many things wrong with it, but it seems there is more right with it

It’s nothing special looks wise, I have become far to used to next gen graphics far to quickly but at times it seems the flowing corners are a bit 50p like at the edge’s.

I couldn’t get online to race any real opponents due to the “TDU servers unavailable” message that kept popping up, again it’s only just been released so why can’t I get online? Thankfully that does seem to have been fixed as I was losing a small fortune by the end of Tuesday night.

After those issue’s are ignored there is so much to do, the “world” is the Island of Oahu, complete with 1000 miles of roads, I managed to cover only 100 miles of that in an evening.

The sound on this game is incredible, PGR3 is the only car game I have heard that comes close and that pales in comparison to TDU. Every car engine I’ve heard in the game sounds different and thanks to the “test drive” option in the car dealerships, I’ve heard a good few of them.

That’s the other thing I like if you want to buy a car you got to drive to the dealer for that marque, if you want to change clothes you need to buy your new threads in a store, same for performance upgrades and Motor bikes.

This is a great game it’s escapism at it’s best. You have to buy your home first then your car and all on a small budget to begin with. That’s not so bad though as your buying a house in the Hawaiian islands for less than the cost of a 3 bed semi-D in Dublin

After 2 evenings of play I have finally managed to drive around the island win a few races, buy new clothes, buy a second car, tune it and still lose about 20K in races where I should have checked what the opposition was driving before placing a bet. D’oh

I have still got to try out a bike. Check out the dinners and the club scene and that’s after clocking about 6 hours of game play. But already I can see that this game is all about building a solid community who like to use these mad machines to go really really fast and also to challenge each other with.
If like me your a fan of the racing genre, then buy this game! Hell buy an x-box 360 just to play it if you have to.