Tag Archives: iPhone

A riot is the language of the unheard

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And also the language of people who really want an iPhone and some jewellery.

Nothing on Craigslist in Bristol yet.

Rioting? There's an app for that

 

Boyfriend cheating on you? Girlfriend didn’t pay back that money she borrowed? Go on - shop one of this lot. Sod civic duty or respect for the law; do it for petty vengeance or spite. No one will ever know it was you.

Click this link for the full gallery of looters.

The Magic Screwdriver and Windows 7

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My IT support career extends back just far enough to recall the first era of “big iron” – when men were real men, women were real women, and a proper computer had its own postal code.

Admittedly, by the time I started climbing down the rungs of the support career ladder most of these beasts were deactivated, derelict and otherwise defunct due to the rise of personal computers. But they still looked amazing, and were a useful source of 3-pin plugs, 13-amp fuses and similar consumables if you needed one in a hurry.

One anecdote I recall hearing from an old lag in the mainframes team was about the engineer from IBM with his “magic screwdriver”; let’s say your company had purchase a large and powerful machine back in the seventies (something with a tiny percentage of the computing power of a first generation iPhone for example) then IBM would arrive in a fleet of trucks, install it, negotiate with the local electricity board for power connections, arrange for a new substation to be installed, reinforce the floor, fit all the data cabling, fit some enormous air conditioning units and then leave you a signed off installation and a staggeringly large invoice.

If a year or two later your company needed an upgrade to a machine twice as powerful, then this time IBM would only send one engineer who would rotate a small switch ninety degrees clockwise using a flat headed screwdriver, and then leave the new upgraded installation, not forgetting the invoice which would be – and this is the clever bit – exactly the same staggeringly large value as the first one.

Elements of this are apocryphal (it may have been a Phillips head screwdriver ) but in-place upgrades that were actually the removal of previously installed limiters were a pretty common element of old data centre life. And as I was typing my upgrade code into a Windows 7 Home Premium installation today, and seeing – ten minutes, one reboot and £100 later – that it was now Windows 7 Ultimate, I realised that there are no new tricks in the world of IT marketing. But they have phased out the screwdriver.

Blackberry Storm

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I’ve recently upgraded to the Blackberry Storm on Vodafone, having previously been a Blackberry Pearl user on Orange (after 13 years – I should be on the board of directors by now).

Here’s a list of tips if you’re doing the same thing:

  • The Blackberry Desktop Manager made a good stab at backing up my old device from one network (Orange) and restoring it to my new device on a different network (Vodafone). All my contacts and messages came across, and even a few random photos I’d forgotten about. But it did knacker the email addresses and other settings I had configured on the new device.
  • To configure the Blackberry Internet Service, go to http://mobileemail.vodafone.net/ and create an account at the BIS portal. Don’t use the built-in “Email settings” application on the device. If you do create a BIS account from the icon on the Storm, you won’t be able to access the advanced function such as email filters or reloading service books. Which leads me to:
  • If you are moving from one network to another, get your login to the BIS portal and create your account first, then move your setttings from the old device to your new device, then reload the service books and then, finally, create your email accounts. Doing it the other way round leads to problems.
  • Upgrade the firmware as soon as you can.
  • One annoyance on the calendar – if you set a daily alarm this shows up as a calendar entry. This can be removed by changing “General Options” in the Calendar Application.

Other than that, it was relatively plain sailing. The good bits:

  1. It’s a fun device and the clickable screen makes a surprisingly good keyboard.
  2. HTML email is now supported
  3. Call quality is excellent and the speaker phone is pretty powerful as well.
  4. The SD Card slot is easy to get to.
  5. The video camera is quite good and You Tube friendly.
  6. The connecting cable is now standard Micro USB.
  7. Word Mole
  8. Google Sync still works, and now does contacts and calendar appointments.

The bad bits:

  1. Even after the firmware upgrade the menus do lag at times.
  2. The built-in camera (3 Megapixel) is very slow to take a picture. But the quality is good and the autofocus is fast.
  3. The built-in You Tube application doesn’t remember your login details (Also, if you’ve integrated your You Tube and Google accounts, you still need the old password for this login). Video downloads are often badly lagging, and the application has actually crashed the Storm’s audio processor on two occassions.
  4. The touch-screen nearest the green-call button seems to required much more pressure to register a click.
  5. It really seems to burn through power. My old 8100 Pearl could cheerfully go a couple of days without charging. The Storm’s battery bar drops by half in only a few hours.
  6. No Wi-Fi
  7. No clip-on holster

Comparison to the iPhone are inevitable. My opinion: the Storm is a great Blackberry but a poor iPhone, whereas the iPhone is a great iPhone but a poor Blackberry. As to whether the Storm is a better Blackberry than the Bold, you’ll have to ask someone else.