In particular apps which seemingly randomly send out messages on your behalf and apps that don't even work half the time aren't good news.

They need to tighten up the controls, make it easier to understand what an app can or can't do on your behalf and they need to provide app hosting, or have some way to guarantee an app maker can handle the traffic.

1. VoIP. Solid built in VoIP functionality. I've got it set up to automatically connect to my two SIP accounts when I'm in range of my home wi-fi and for incoming it seems to work flawlessly. Outgoing my only gripe is that i'd like to be able to select which SIP account to dial-out on at the time of calling but haven't figured out yet how to do that.


2. Wi-fi. Handy for very quick queries, e.g. checking how to translate a word using google translate or just for checking what wifi access is available. Not as good a range as my laptop, but a very handy tool to have.


3. GPS. Lots of people seem to be complaining that they can't get the GPS to work. Mine does, but can be very slow to initially "get a lock" on the satellites or whatever it is they do. I haven't yet paid for the navigation voice functionality, but probably will at some point.


4. Camera. It's 5mp and boasts a Carl Zeiss 2.8/5.6 autofocusing lens. There is a bit of a lag between hitting the shutter button and the shutter opening which renders it a little crap for capturing spontaneous moments, but the picture quality is good and for general purpose non inspired photo taking it is ideal. Lots of functionality to control ISO, white balance etc. I haven't used the video functionality yet, but it is supposed to be 30fps at 640x480 which should be good enough.


5. Music. I've only got a couple of songs on it, primarily because I don't want to be using the phone when not necessary to preserve battery life. Stereo speakers are good though, and louder than you'd think. Interface seems intuitive enough.


6. Battery. Hmmm. I guess it works hard and so deserves to get fed every night. More than 20 hours is unachievable for me, and if I've been using it heavily the life is perhaps half that. Charges quickly though, and I usually only have to charge it once daily at night.


7. S60 OS. Good range of programs I can add, e.g. Putty combined with some bash scripts generally lets me rescue any server situations as soon as they happen. Only real complaint is that the OS seems a little sluggish sometimes, and probably once every two days it just hangs completely.

• I am missing the Edinburgh Festivals for the first time in probably 4 or 5 years. That sucks.
• Does anyone have any pointers for me on self-discipline. That would be useful.
• I'm going to Edinburgh, Elgin and Fort William for a few weeks in September. I'm very much looking forward to it.
• Liam just told me this post was melo-dramatic. FWIW, I think that is melo-dramatic.

"It's ridiculous. They're not even real friends. You can phone up K T Tunstall on the buttons and ask her to be your friend."

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

UPDATE: Jon Stewart said it good on the daily show.

Now the ball is in the other court and I'm contemplating the forensics that exist on me out there.

Somewhat embarrassingly you also discover that I was hotwired's "geek of the week" some time in 1997. The link no longer works, but google has cached it for your enjoyment. By the third page of results I'm no longer appearing, and references to Gregor Mendel and Gregor Samsa start to abound. So at least I'm in good company.

Move over to the 'groups' search results and things start to get scary. This is like taking a drill sample of the earth's core, there are entries in there back to 1993, that's ancient history. "alt.cuddle" - wtf was I thinking? Mining the groups dataset builds a profile of an overly sensitive geek, who loves northern exposure and is (was) a vegetarian.

There's even one of those chain letters / pyramid scheme letters in there with my name it, and Paul's. How awful!

[Via]

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

I still plan on trying this out, though I'll probably not use the bootable disk just because that sounds too easy to be truly satisfying. One of these days...

95% of my PC use is through a browser, the rest doesn't rely on proprietary formats like .doc or .xls. So, as of last weekend I'm running Gentoo Linux on my laptop and intend to spend time putting it on my desktop this weekend. It has the following advantages

• it works

This is actually kind of handy.

(12:14:02) wgkollock: I see, I thought the people wanted their info used as free content, I really sorry about this. However it does clear up a problem I had Itohught the script did not work. (my emphasis)