Posts

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Why your boss should never be your Facebook friend?

Amusing article on why you should be careful on what you post to social networking sites such as Facebook.

There are many good reasons for not having your boss as a Facebook friend, and Sydney call centre worker Kyle Doyle has just discovered the most convincing of them all.

What this does show more than anything is the need for our learners to be given advice and guidance on how to conduct themselves online, a digital literacy.

Josie Fraser has written an excellent article on her work on digital literacy and it is well worth reading.

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The new MacBooks

Popped into the Apple Store today to check out the new MacBooks and boy are they nice. Though I had seen them online, there is something about seeing them in the flesh.

They are constructed well and I like the way they are made from a brick of aluminum.

I might have to get one.

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Bubbles…

Nice and amusing article on Mashable about how the speech bubble is found everywhere on the web.

How much value do you place in Web design? More specifically, how important is the construction of a company or website logo to you? Do you pay a good amount of attention to such things, or is it all really non-critical and ancillary?

Most of us judge books by their covers. It’s really just a matter of degree than anything else. You can be all cover, some cover, a little cover, and so on and so forth. Yet, with the rise of a full-on economy of online services that require some visual uniqueness to distinguish one from the other, there inevitably surface many similarities. Almost too many. One commonality is the speech bubble.

Read the article.

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BBC iPlayer on your Nokia N95 updated update

Well despite trying a few things, I still can’t get the BBC iPlayer working on my Nokia N95, either to stream or download BBC programmes.

Next thing to try is upgrading the Nokia N95 firmware.

If that doesn’t work then I am going to forget it.

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Google G1 here in the UK on the 30th October

T-Mobile have announced that the Google G1 mobile phone will be available in the UK from the 30th October and will be free on a £40 tariff.

It’s not the prettiest phone, but certainly has the potential to be a good phone, especially with the open platform.

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JoikuSpotting

I really do like the iPod touch, the interface, the browsing experience, the video playback, the different applications now available.

Of course to get full functionality you need to be in the vicinity of a wireless hotspot. You can’t (for obvious reasons) use a 3G dongle and without bluetooth or the ability to connect a cable you can’t use a tethered mobile phone.

Now I know what you’re saying, get a 3G iPhone, well yes, that is all well and good, but three things are stopping me, one I already have a Nokia N95 which does what I need (well the typing is nowhere as near as nice as on the iPod touch), secondly I am well into a long contract too with T-Mobile. Thirdly, I quite fancy upgrading to the Google G1 phone.

So I was quite interested in trying out JoikuSpot. What JoikuSpot does is basically turn your 3G wifi mobile phone into a wireless hotspot.

So the Nokia N95 connects to the internet via the 3G network and then allows wifi clients connect to it via the 802.11 wifi.

It works very well and is in my opinion very clever.

The free version is limited and doesn’t allow you to do e-mail which is a pity, so I will probably upgrade to the pro version.

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EyeHome stopped

I really do like my EyeHome media streamer and it look like it has stopped working (again). It’s at time like these why I remember why I blog, when it didn’t work before I was advised by Elgato to leave it off for a long time, so at the moment it is unplugged and (probably) cooling down.

The EyeHome is now four years old (which is a long time in consumer electronics) and starting to show its age.

Sadly Elgato no longer make the EyeHome device, so I will need to look for a possible replacement. The key issue will be, can it play the raw MPEG2 recordings from Elgato?

In the interim I am using MediaServer from Twonky and streaming to a Sony PS3, but this doesn’t work with MPEG2 files, works fine with the MP4 iPod versions which the EyeTV creates, but these take a long time to export.

So if I can’t find a media streamer which works with MPEG2, I may just invest in one of the Elgato turbo.264 USB devices to speed up the encoding.

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BBC iPlayer on your Nokia N95 updated

A couple of days ago I mentioned that BBC iPlayer was now available on certain Nokia S60 phones including the Nokia N95.

BBC iPlayer on your Nokia N95

I did have a go and well let’s just say it wasn’t a great success.

So this morning, with what is being Sunday morning and all, decided to try the service again, wasn’t holding out much hope.

Interestingly when I started the BBC iPlayer application there was a message saying an updates was available. Usually when I see that and my application is working fine and there are no new features I ignore them, in this case though, obviously having problems, I did go ahead and download and install the update.

First major difference was that it was now possible to download programmes from BBC iPlayer, something which wasn’t possible before this update and before has only been an available service on the Windows platform.

Screenshot

So selecting something, I clicked download…

Screenshot

 4%…

 56%…

 98%… 

Error!

Hmmm.

Phone must be registered with BBC Content Provider. Register phone now?

I guess so…

Unable to download… 

Okay

Tried again.

Unable to play content

Okay let’s try the streaming once more.

Screenshot

Oh that still doesn’t work.

Well that’s fifteen minutes of my life I am not going to get back!