Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

If you haven’t heard about Grand Central (I hadn’t) it is a telecommunications service bought out by Google last year which basically helps you manage your phone calls. The basic idea is that you register with Grand Central and you get one phone number that you can give out and you never need to give out another.

So for example, and to be honest I am somewhat just guessing based on what I have read, but you get a number from Grand Central and give that out. Then when you get a new phone and end up with a whole new number (because for some reason most people don’t port their numbers like us sensible people do) they just put their new number into Grand Central and people and because everyone else uses their Grand Central number they won’t know a difference.

Notably this would be really useful for me though as currently I have two phones, one on Vodaphone and one on o2. This is ok but it means I have to have two numbers which means distributing two numbers. Using Grand Central I could give out my new number and when someone called it it would ring both my phones.

It also offers a number of other cool features including listening in to voicemail being recorded, recording of calls (both parties are notified to comply with privacy laws), voicemail notifications by email, have different callers put through to different phones and the ability to switch phones in the middle of call (battery running out – switch to your landline).

It’s currently in beta and only available in the United States but looks very interesting. Have a read on their website if you want to know more.

Awwww yeah.

For the first time, like, ever, my inbox is empty. Totally empty. This is a historic day.

Having got my new phone I requested my network unlock code for my old phone.

I phoned back in a few days when the said it would arrive. It hadn’t. So they requested it for me again. I rang back on the Monday. They still didn’t have it and requested it again. Wednesday I got an email with it. I entered it into my phone. And it bricked it.

Everything worked fine. I followed the instructions and then restarted my phone to find I got a “configuration error” message no matter what SIM I put in it.

I phoned up Vodaphone, several times, and they had no clue. They said back up your data on it and take it back into a Vodaphone shop and they will send it away for repair. So I downloaded and installed the crappy Sony Ecricsson software to backup my important data and guess what – it fails every time.

Any idea how you can recover data off a mobile phone anyone?

Meanwhile o2 is a whole different story. Norm dug me out an o2 SIM card which I inserted into my phone so I would have a pay as you go phone on o2’s network when my Vodaphone one wasn’t working. But the SIM refused to activate. So I tried to activate it online and was greeted with a message saying this was not an o2 number.

So I phoned up customer services who informed me that they had no record of this number in the database.

So I went down to the o2 store to get a new SIM card. Which I did as well as £10 top-up. I got home, inserted the SIM into my phone, phoned up and activated my top-up card and got the text messages to install the “settings” whatever that is. But despite having topped up, I apparently don’t have any credit. Fantastic.

Earler this evening (I guess it was technically yesterday evening now) this part of Leeds experienced a power glitch.

The power dropped out for a a second, enough time to kill about half the computers and set pretty much everyone’s alarm off. Including ours. Which was annoying.

If it hadn’t been for the lights going out I’m not sure I would have noticed. Both my UPS backups kicked in and kept all of my computers as well as my network online so I was able to continue streaming my movie from my file server to my desktop completely unaffected.

/smug :D.

I am most enjoying my new phone.

It looks quite good sat on my desk not doing anything.

I phoned up Vodaphone on Tuesday to get my unlock code for my k800i and they told me they would have it by Friday so I phoned back yesterday and they told me they didn’t have it. Not they didn’t have it yet, but rather they didn’t have it. And have now requested it for me again. Fantastic.

Guess who I’m on the phone to. It’s not hard. It’s the same people I am always on the phone to. UK Online. A somewhat ironic name it would seem. And opening itself up to derogatory word play but someone of any interlect.

Our connection isn’t just dropping, it’s just entirely going away and not coming back. Normally they do a tone test which magically starts it working again but even after that it died again tonight and support have nothing else to try.

After this happened yesterday advanced support refered me to their advanced support team (who don’t work this late) and who were supposed to re-adjust my line this morning. But didn’t. And are now scheduled to do it tomorrow when they arrive at work.

When someone first suggested we hire someone to manually ferry packets from the exchange and back I thought they were joking. Now I’m just wondering…

Play.com has begun selling DRM-free MP3 music downloads! This has to be a big step forward to widespread availabilty of DRM-free downloads which is looking like the only way copyright owners are ever going to prevent (or at least reduce) illegal downloading on their work.

Tracks are available for £0.65 which is competitive to say the least and they claim to have a library of millions of tracks. While there is a lot of stuff in there I haven’t heard of, that may just be because I’m getting old – just looking down the list of top sellers I notice Arctic Moneys, Queen, Phil Collins, Stereophonics and plenty of others so there are plenty of big labels on board with this.

My Windows desktop (Inca) stopped displaying things like filenames. They just disappear into blank test whenever you try to open a file.

My Linux desktop (Zapotec) refuses to play DVDs despite now having the codec installed.

My file server (Olmec) won’t boot if I initialise some of the hard drives into an array. Individually they work fine, if I plug them into the motherboard’s SATA connections. But if I try to run them through my really expensive RAID controller the computer complains of a boot failure even if I just put one into a JBOD configuration.

My Linux server (Nazca) is a write-off because I installed Webmin and Webmin now refuses to remove itself or allow me to run any kind of updates.

My laptop (Toltec) can’t even make 3 hours battery life anymore.

One of my web servers (Jennifer) is just being really, really slow despite my restarting like every service on it.

So, back to this plan for us to all run away and become pirates…

Ok, this is just a general heads-up.

You know those “this is valid HTML” buttons that W3C offer? Don’t put them on your site unless you actually have valid HTML. Because people do actually click them.

I’ve just been reading down the Union’s referendum site and they have no less than 5 errors on their motions page. Why, why would you put a valid HTML button on the page when you know it’s not valid code?

I’m thinking about renouncing my status as a Sony Ericsson fanboy and switching to a Nokia phone :o.

I was planning on getting the k850i but CNet didn’t like. Unfortunately I tend to let CNet tell me what to think. After all, they said they were an honest bunch of guys.

I got looking at the Nokia N95 8GB which seems rather snazzy and has somewhat captured my imagination. While I’m sure the k850i has many of these features it has lured me with promise of GPS, wifi, 8GB internal storage, a 5 megapixel camera, no annoying camera lens that opens every time you take it out of your pocket and best of all – a standard 3.5mm audio jack.

It’s not all good. The battery life will be shockingly bad which will be annoying (might have to keep a travel phone around, I’ve just replaced the battery in my k800i and am now enjoying only having to charge ever 5 days or so). Also the GPS downloads maps on the fly which means monster data usage. This does however give me an excuse to pay for the mobile internet dealie (£7.50 for 120mb a month bandwidth).

If I do go with the Nokia it means sticking with Vodaphone as o2 want £100 for it on the same priced price plan which means I still won’t be getting a signal in Stylus. But on the plus side I will continue to get a signal in my own home :D.