tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
Am I going to jinx my ALT-C submission by stating on this blog that I have submitted a workshop for ALT-C entitled Hood 2.0.
It’s as you might expect a workshop on Web 2.0 and hopefully (if accepted) be a lot of fun as well as illuminating.
Watch this space.
Well it seems I am not the only one who suffers nightmare customer service from Vodafone.
Back in June 2004 I had a nightmare trying to order a 3G datacard from Vodafone, so much so that I basically nearly gave up even trying.
Well it seems four years later, customer service at Vodafone still leaves a lot to be desired.
James Whatley of SMSTextNews found his Nokia N95 wasn’t working, so he called Vodafone customer service, his phone was still under guarantee and he had insurance, so it should have been a simpe process, shouldn’t it…
What follows is an account of two hours of my life from the early evening of last night (Thursday).
Vodafone have pissed me off. Their insurance company more so – they are CLEARLY a 3rd party with nothing to do with Vodafone and as such, let them down on an almost spectacular level.
That aside – VF’s CS has seen better days.
If this issue is not resolved by the weekend, I am off to 3.
You heard it here first.
Read the whole story on the full blog entry.
To be honest reading that story doesn’t surprise me one bit, like James, when you are use to good customer service, when you have a bad experience, it really throws you and you can’t understand why they don’t just “get it”.
Hopefully Vodafone may realise that one bad experience for a customer results in lost sales or transfers to another network.
In case you are wondering, who do I use as my mobile phone provider, well it’s T-Mobile.
BBC News’ Bill Thompson gives a nice overview of Twitter and the impact it had for him with SxSW.
Unlike many of my friends and colleagues I wasn’t able to make it to Austin, Texas for this year’s SXSW interactive, the four-day technology conference and festival that is currently firing the imagination of the technology world.
So I wasn’t in the ballroom when the keynote address by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went awry under the less-than-forensic questioning of technology journalist Sarah Lacy.
I didn’t see the crowd start to get restless and heckle Zuckerberg about the deeply-unpopular Beacon advertising system, or get a chance to grab the microphone and ask questions when Lacy threw the conversation open to the floor.
And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.
I was there because I was plugged into Twitter, the instant messaging service that lets users send short text messages to anyone who cares to tune in, online or on their mobile phone.
Really nice article which demonstrates how Twitter is changing the face of communication and the web (to be honest mainly in the geek/tech world, but still causing change).
I do Twitter however I much prefer Jaiku, in the main as there is more of a community with Jaiku and Twitter is much more about the audience.
Twitter though is simple and tidy, whilst Jaiku has the functionality that allows much deeper discussion and the integration of RSS feeds.
They are similar, but they are also different. Though I use both I generally do not post exactly the same stuff to both. I do feed my Twitter feed into Jaiku, but my friends can choose to ignore it if they so wish
I have managed to download the iPhone SDK, but so far have left it alone. It does require an Intel Mac running Leopard and my iMac is still running Tiger (for a while).
My Mac mini is running Leopard, but it’s a G4 PPC Mac so no luck there.
Ah well out with the external Leopard drive and boot up the iMac.
After not using it for a while, I decided that I would move my Mac mini from under the TV and move it to another room and use it as a web server.
I never really got round to using it as a TV computer, or media centre or anything really. An old CRT television is never much cop for showing a computer screen so was always using VNC to control it and if I am doing that I might as well use the laptop I am using to control the mini to do my computer stuff.
As a media centre it failed, as the Mac mini could not cope with the streams that the USB EyeTV device provided. The EyeTV relied on the mini for encoding and could it do it, no, not very well.
I also found that I rarely watched TV which I wanted to pause if I got interrupted, for things I did care about I had already recorded it already on the iMac and was watching it through the EyeHome.
However after I moved it I realised I must have turned the Airport off, so I connected it back to the 802.11n Airport Extreme by ethernet and VNC’d back in.
Now here’s my advice, if you leave a Mac mini on top of an 802.11n Airport Extreme, be aware that both will get too hot to handle! The Mac mini’s fans were going like they were going to take off.
It’s incredible how hot the 802.11n Airport Extreme gets, what does it do which means it get’s so hot?
Well the Mac mini is now in a cooler place acting as a temporary web server.
The BBC launches a version of its iPlayer video on demand service for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch.
The BBC has launched a version of its iPlayer video on demand service for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. It is the first time the software has been available on portable devices. The software, which allows users to download programmes from the last seven days, will work over a wi-fi connection but not over the mobile network.
Read more.
I am really pleased to see this happen. I do use the (flash version) of the iPlayer on my Macs now and again to catch up with the odd BBC TV programme either I miss or my EyeTV misses.
From the Guardian…
In case anyone reading this is one of the 68,000 individuals who apparently interfaced thus with street furniture in London last year (mostly resulting in cuts and bruises, but with a fair proportion of broken noses, cheekbones and one fractured skull in the mix too) and therefore is self-evidently stupid enough to need the problem further delineated, these are injuries caused by people who do not understand the importance of peripheral vision. Until, that is, they compromise it by texting as they walk along the street and into lampposts, signs, bollards and other pedestrians.
Read more.
Goodbye Netscape Navigator.
BBC reports on the end of an era for the web icon which once had 90% of the browser market.
A web browser that gave many people their first experience of the web is set to disappear.
Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 March 2008, the company has said.
In the mid-1990s, as the commercial web began to take off, the browser was used by more than 90% of people online.
Its market share has since slipped to just 0.6% as other browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox have eroded its user base.
Well the 2GB Micro SD card I ordered form Play.com arrived yesterday.
It’s for my LG Viewty to give it a little more memory over the in-built 100MB.
The Micro SD card is tiny, really really small.
I am impressed that it holds 2GB, I look at some of my old clunky memory cards which hold 64MB and I think to myself how things have moved on.
It’s tiny, but big.
