Jun 9 2009
Mobile
Mobile Phones, etc.
Nov 15 2008
Mac OS 10.5/Leopard on the Samsung NC10
Initially I ordered a Dell Inspiron 910/Mini 9, after reading about how easy it was to get Leopard running on these machines. However, after initially quoting 15 days delivery then then, on the 15th day, extended this to 30 days – at which point I cancelled the order.
Instead, due to its looks and frankly astonishing battery life, I ordered a Samsung NC10.
As it turns out, although all Atom netbooks are created equal, some are more equal than others – especially where OS X compatibility is concerned…
Jul 22 2008
First post! (again…)
WordPress 1.0 for the iPhone has been released, and I’m using it to write this post. It’s been a little time coming, but it looks pretty fully-featured.
Jul 12 2008
Indistinguishable from magic…
Gareth has an iPod Touch, which he’s just updated to firmware 2.0 (at even more cost – and that he’s not best pleased about…), which adds many of the iPhone’s location-aware services. The Touch, of course, lacks any 3G/GSM circuitry and bluetooth – leaving only WiFi for position acquisition. Even though my name-server at home doesn’t contain any geographic records, his Touch was able to instantly plot the specific location we were.
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Jul 11 2008
Breathtaking O2 incompetence reduces iPhone 3G launch to farce
Cambridge has one Apple Store (in the seemingly Bioshock-inspired Grand Arcade), one O2 shop, and two Carphone Warehouses.
Having decided that it’s finally time to replace my venerable Motorola RAZR V3, and never having been to an Apple product launch before
Jul 7 2008
Basic English: O2 Fail
So this morning at about 7:30am, O2 sent out an email to what is probably millions of punters (judging by the fact that their pre-orders site has crashed and burned) with the headline:
iPhone 3G is here and its free*
Anyone spot the problem with this?
Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about this:
ITS, it’s or its can mean:
- “its”, the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun form of the personal pronoun it
- “it’s”, a contraction of “it is” or “it has”
- The “It’s” man, a man with torn clothes and unkempt beard who appeared at the beginning of episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus
It comes to something when a corporation the size of O2 can’t even be bothered (or doesn’t have the knowledge – a more worrying conclusion) to get basic grammar and punctuation correct on what is unquestionably its biggest launch of the year.
Oct 2 2011
Installing Gentoo Prefix on HP TouchPad
The ill-fated HP TouchPad has, ironically, proven itself to be a gem of a machine for those with a computing/hacking background – with a fast processor, plenty of memory, and the most open architecture of any tablet so far (in that webOS Doctor can be hacked to alter partition layout and contents on restore), there are few limits to what it could be used for. Android (hopefully within a webOS card) is coming, and already Ubuntu & Debian can be run from a chroot() environment. The ARM build of Gentoo can be run in the same way – but that’s relatively trivial and not especially interesting (in that it doesn’t integrate with the OS – you have to specifically enter the chroot() environment in order to make any use of the software).
I would now always choose to run Ubuntu in a desktop environment – Canonical have done a great job of generalising the historically painful job of getting hardware and software reliably working together (try getting Bluetooth HID devices and WPA Wifi working on Linux from first principals if you want a reminder of just how obtuse software can be…), but I’d still opt for Gentoo for a server/command-line environment. This is what we have with the TouchPad – a great visual OS, but a minimalist installed get of command-line tools. This – with it’s ability to build optimised, efficient, and light-weight packages with only the necessary optional features present – is where Gentoo shines.
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By Stuart • Mobile, Technology, Toys, UNIX 2