testing ping.fm

Spotted in a window in clerkenwell

I’ve struggled for ages to get my Nokia E71 to work properly with Mac OS X on 3 UK over bluetooth.

I found 3g on 3 really slow, and thought it was 3’s fault.

Then I tried Ross Barkman’s scripts at http://www.taniwha.org.uk/. The speed went from 50kb/s to 450kb/s… Screenshot of the relevant settings, hope this saves someone some time.

I have been thinking about using abbreviated hash for some time, to make the process of identifying due diligence documents easier, and was just getting to the stage of thinking “mmh, wonder could we patent this?” when I found this article by Ralph Losey

We’re implementing a truncated hash system on our virtual dataroom. For due diligence, it’s just great when the index document has an automatic, easy to reference number, to ensure you’re talking about the same file - even if it gets moved around in the dataroom.

I took hold of a new nokia e71 last week, nokia’s latest smartphone, billed as their answer to the blackberry and the iphone. It was £32 a month on 3, with 1Gb of data transfer.

I’ve used smartphone’s for many years, starting with an early windows mobile device. To date, my experience has been mixed. If it worked, it was irregular, and always expensive, with per Mb and other insane walled garden internet access restrictions.

Last week, that all changed. The technology and network finally just work. For  less than £10 a month I get a Gb of internet, more than enough for emails, browsing and file transfer. The schedule below could probably be just as easy on a palm or iphone, what’s important is that it works, and you can now really be productive when you’re on the move.

Here’s todays commute:

Got train to London

Downloaded (via 3g) and listened to podcast

Answered emails on computer using phone as a bluetooth modem

Looked up diary (which automatically synchronises via bluetooth with my laptop),

used website to check tomorrow trains, and then email a new meeting based on the times.

Advise client by phone’s email train running 10 Minutes late.

Check route by gps, get walking directions to meeting.

Then wrote the draft of this whilst on the bus en route to another meeting.

And it all worked perfectly. At one stage the phone was doing no less than: email (Profimail), calendar, gps maps, opera mini web browser & listening to podcast, all at the same time.

No crashes, no lockups, just working as you would expect, and it actually looks nice  - unlike all my previous qwerty keyboard bricks.

I may leave the laptop behind next time I travel.

interesting. build it, host it, and amazon will bill it, and just charge you 3% of the amount. Amazon really get where the web is going.

If Microsoft get abuse for not complying to open standards, then how come Apple get away with it.

For the last few days I’ve been testing Apples ‘Pages’ - and it’s a lovely piece of software, much, much nicer to use than Office, or OpenOffice, except for one thing.

When you save a file, you can save as:

Pages

PDF

Word

Text

That’s it ! no open office formats. And the same goes for importing, just Word or Pages.

And thats not all, when you cut and paste rich data, like tables,the structure is lost. So where in NeoOffice or Mac Word I can paste a table structure into an email and it keeps the layout, with Pages, the layout is gone. It pastes as plain text only. 

So Pages is great if you want to just work with Pages, and not send files to anyone, or email content, or save it in an open format.  

The New York Times has a spectacular interactive Flash feature on Mad Magazine fold-ins. Remember those?  ( thanks adjust .blogspot.com )

I now work at home 2-3 days a week, and with a young baby in the house, that can be tough.  This week, I found the solution - a pair of Shure in ear headphones, and some software that plays ambient noises. The headphones are like those noise plugs, you roll them between your fingers, and they form a seal in your inner ear - blocking out sounds. The software, well to quote from their website ( http://www.chatterblocker.com ) ChatterBlocker does not use noise cancellation; instead, it blurs recognizable speech with a soothing blend of nature sounds, music and background chatter.

I had a wonderfully productive afternoon today, blissfully unaware that there were four babies and mums next door! ( I have no affiliation with either company ) 

When captchas go wrong! Fastshosts clearly having a bad day.

(via featureorbug)

Email - automatically file email for people I haven’t spoken with before - this simple rule, which redirects mail from people I haven’t worked with before, and sticks it in a folder, is saving me loads of time.

A lawyer for one of Eli  Lilly’s retained firms mis-addressed an email to a colleague with the same last name as that of the Times reporter

says a survey sponsored by the phone manufacturers. Wonder how they’ll get out of that one ?