Kindle

Ooh look!

No, it’s not a rubbish flower, it’s the new Wi-Fi Kindle and also the 3G Kindle (which also does Wi-Fi).

These are something I’ve never tried. I do love the feel of books, and the fact one can flip between pages, inserting a finger or locally available piece of paper, and you can stick post-it tabs on the page edges. I bet these are all possible with the kindle. I guess what isn’t is the ability to lend books to your friends.

So I’ll probably have a look one day, but for now I’ll stick to books. If you have a kindle and love it, then please let me know in the comments. I don’t want to be a complete luddite – especially when I’m ignorant of their features and benefits.

If you don’t have a kindle and want one, then there are your links up there to go ahead and pre-order today!

An iPhone, Yesterday

Apple says a fault on its new iPhone 4 is causing it to incorrectly display the phone’s signal.

Ah… so holding the phone wrong isn’t causing the signal to drop? It’s just being displayed incorrectly?

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.

Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays two more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display four bars when we should be displaying as few as two bars.

(Full story here)

Now, I’m not known for my cynicism, but you don’t think that Apple were perhaps exaggerating their signal strengths as some kind of marketing offensive do you? And they got caught out?

No… that couldn’t be the case at all.

Whatever the cause, it’s a big knock for the Lord and Saviour™ of shiny consumer goods. That leads me to another thought… the atheists complain that those of faith defend their faiths even in the lack of evidence, or even counter-evidence. I wonder what the Apple fans’ response will be. I very much compare them to the ‘blind faithful’.

Warning! Technical ranting. Please move along… nothing to see here.

Fun With Command Lines

Well, that was a hassle. With a linux server with a hosed motherboard, one PC that H uses and one spare PC neither of which have Linux drivers for their network adapters (or they used to but are too old now for NVIDIA to support). In the end I figured I could put the linux drive in a PC running windows and copy everything that way. But something to do with attempting to use the network adapter from Linux meant that H’s PC no longer had a network adapter, so I had to transplant the hard drive and video card from H’s PC into the spare PC (pretty much the same spec).

Of course, that meant I had to reactivate windows due to their ‘Microsoft Genuine Advantage’ programme. Bastards. As if I didn’t have enough trouble already.

Then the linux drive wouldn’t mount. Three drivers later I found one which would mount the drive I’d created in Slackware (inode=256 for the techs out there… only ext2fsd would do it. And only then after head-scratching, reconfiguring and rebooting.

And after all that, I figured a database dump of the blog wouldn’t integrate with my ‘one database’ setup with my new hosting, so I had to go in and perform an export on wordpress. All from a computer with no GUI and no network card. (Rewrite hosts to point to itself, use ‘links’ to navigate to the export page). Then throw the drive (as a slave, not master) into the PC.

So it’s all back now, apart from the links. I’ll find a way to restore those in a bit, after a cup of tea. What a palaver!

Anyone good at diagnosing mobile phone problems?

Here’s the issue – my phone has, of late, had really poor signal quality. I mean really poor… like breaking up so much that I can’t understand a word being said to me on the other end.

The strange thing is that I have four bars (max) of signal strength.

That got me to wondering whether the network have increased traffic without increasing the data capacity or something like that. Is that possible? It is likely? Could my phone be causing the trouble? I can’t imagine how, but you never know, do you? It does seem to respond slowly to certain operations nowadays, too.

It’s actually getting to the point where the phone is all but useless.

Suggestions?

I’ve been with Demon Internet for… um… 14 years but their declining standards have just annoyed me to the point of needing to look elsewhere. Firstly, since their upgrade to extra fast broadband I have a) not been able to connect to the extra fast broadband (despite buying a brand new router to do so), and b) the original speed broadband (G.dmt for the techies) has become incredibly unreliable.

The straw that broke the camel’s back is their new ‘e-bill’. I actually can’t get onto their “simple, easy to use system for our customers to store, manage and pay their invoices electronically and enjoy the simplicity and convenience of online billing.” The error messages aren’t very useful either.

I thought I’d check if there were any hints on the net, and came across this article:

Demon Internet has sent out a spreadsheet containing the personal details of thousands of customers with one of its new ebills.

The spreadsheet – which has been forwarded to PC Pro – contains email addresses, telephone numbers and what appears to be usernames and passwords for the ebilling system.

[...]

Demon is refusing to disclose how many customers have received the spreadsheet, although it says it’s less than a few thousand.

Just not acceptable.

BUT, since I do all my own hosting, I could do with finding an ISP who will give me a static IP address and unlimited access from the outside world. Anyone know of any decent companies that fit the bill? It doesn’t even have to be super-cheap – I’ve been paying quite a lot for my broadband for the last many years because the benefits outweighed all the problems I’d been hearing about on other ISPs.