Henri Cook

After much searching I found a supplier of Red American Party Cups (AKA Solo Cups) and i’m now reselling off them, the very very rubbish website (I prefer the term ‘functional’) can be found here.

I’ve just received my Nexus One from Google, fairly prompt delivery – I ordered during the press conference and it was dispatched a few days after by DHL International (Better than City Link!) which then took only three days to ship internationally.

A bit of background, this is an upgrade from an HTC Hero which is a brilliant, brilliant phone – but just a little slow in places. I’m hoping the Nexus One’s significantly beefier hardware will sort out this minor annoyance while keeping all the same awesome awesomeness.

The phone is great, everything works really nicely. The main reason for this post is a rant about lack of Sense UI in the Nexus. I didn’t realise how much HTC had added to the Android platform and I miss it now that i’ve made the jump. Just briefly here are a few things that I miss on the Nexus that are actually because of HTC’s great work and not part of the Android stock platform (which I had imagined they were):

• Keyboard, HTC’s keyboard is far superior to the standard Android one (i.e. the one that came with the Nexus) – and there aren’t that many available on the market.
• Where are all my widgets? I want a full page mail widget, a-la Hero – but there’s nothing to be found on the Nexus as standard, or in the Market. I’d also like a full page (google) calendar widget, same story.
• The top bar looks rubbish compared to HTC’s sleek black look, the default Android one is a little bit Elementary school, lots of big blocks and friendly letters with little thought about how attractive it looks.
• When dialing, HTC have an amazing system which allows you to type numbers to find names, e.g. to call ‘Henri’ I could start typing on the dialer ‘32 (H-E)’ and all matching contacts would appear, it was really fast finding contacts and a pleasure to use. At the minute I have to scroll my entire (400+) contacts list to find names, and THAT is annoying.

Everything else really nice at the moment, it’s definitely given me the speedboost I was looking for and i’m still an Android advocate, i’m just disappointed that a lot of what I thought Android is, was actually HTC’s Sense UI which I don’t think I can get hold of on my Nexus.

Free Wall Street Journal, if this interests… it might also work for various academic papers and for all these othersites that are about to throw up Pay Walls

… vive la resistance

Install this in firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953

Add a site:

Site: wsj.com
Action, Custom: http://www.google.com/news/

Disable RefControl (right click on the little icon you’ll see at the bottom of your firefox window)

Go to:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703735004574569873588687170.html

you’ll see “TO CONTINUE READING, SUBSCRIBE NOW”..

Enable RefControl (spoof our referrer) and reload the page

While I haven’t noticed much new graphical sugar with my recent install of Karmic, I have noticed a significant increase in driver support – this is the first time i’ve managed to install my system without having to drop back to a terminal or even play with text configuration files!

I have a system with three screens across two nVidia graphics cards and a Creative X-Fi Xtremegamer driving the sound instead of the on-board. These are the hardware elements that usually prove contentions and in Karmic:

No other problems to report, great release for improving driver support and boot time.

I’ve spent the last week, on and off, trying to add a card to my Google Checkout account on my HTC Hero. I got a collection of weird errors that I couldn’t explain, I was on a train at the time so thought it might be something to do with me hopping between access points. I’ve only now realised the problem upon visiting the Google Checkout website on a normal PC.

Google Checkout no longer supports Maestro, I had read an article about this but it had slipped my mind. The Google Checkout page (App?) on my Android phone’s Market still lists Maestro as a viable option. I can only think that the phone’s trying to send the Maestro details, getting a weird rejection code which it deals with in a correspondingly weird way.

So if you’re having problems adding a card to your Google checkout account – switch to Visa.

On the same note, why Google decided to ban Maestro is beyond me, it’s certainly the card of choice in the UK – everyone seems to have one – I resent having to use my credit card to make all these purchases, usually because I forget to pay it off and suffer in the subsequent round of interest!

I hear Maestro imposes very large fees and this is a big knock back from Google, but the support for Maestro in high street stores presumably isn’t going anywhere so what’s going to happen in this old-school mexican stand off? I suspect Google Checkout, and its customers are going to end up losing out.

I just found this in a paper by Michael Pafford (1975, Entwistle / How Students Learn) and think it’s something that I can relate to, on some level. What’s your opinion?

“In my childhood and more particularly  during my teens I sought solitude: it was a matter of choice not necessity. I was seldom unhappy and had many friends and enjoyable pastimes in the gregarious life of home and boarding-school, yet I needed, with a need almost like hunger or thirst, to escape on my own at frequent intervals. At first this need was unconscious and then, by degrees, rather than at any time I can pin down, I recognised its symptoms. All the closer friends I had in my later schooldays shared to some extent this quirk of temperament. We never talked about what we did with our solitude and yet some kind of understanding existed. It was as if there was a tacit agreement that our social selves were our superficial selves, that our real selves were private ,not to be talked about with-out embarrassment,. and that everyday language was inadequate for our real preoccupations. What we did talk about I do not know, but I am sure our conversation was trivial, facetious, sarcastic and freely sprinkled with slang and obscenity. We emphatically did not seek each other out as soul-mates to whom we could unbosom ourselves.”

Is anyone else unimpressed with Microsoft ‘Bing’ (launched today @ bing.com)? I’ve done a few searches and everything looks exactly like Google, best it evoked was a ‘meh’ – have i missed some cool new feature? I thought it was meant to be uber?

I’ve been messing aroung with songoftheminute.com since it launched a couple of days ago – i’ve slowly found myself using it more and more for ‘general listening’. As the name implies a different song is oftered up to visitors every minute but for me the added value comes with how those songs are selected – the site uses last.fm’s api to find its songs but it only selects songs which it’s algorithm deems to be ‘popular’, the result of course is that I get the best music in my chosen genre in a great random playlist. Easy to use anywhere and handy bio information for when you’re just surfing, two tumbs up

Nokia Nokia Nokia, i’ve been a faithful customer for years but the Ovi store might be the last straw.

I’ve had problems with you spamming my email in an impossible-to-unsubscribe manner, your poor online customer service and you’ve slowly been falling behind as the IPhone has become more and more prominent.

I’ve just logged in to the Ovi store all excited and i’ve come out with one application – SmsPreview, which looks and works great. The website crashed a few times (time outs) before I got it to load, the buttons have no user feedback and aren’t normal html submit buttons so I had no idea when I was actually submitting stuff which lead to a few double-submits and some confusion during signup.

The ‘20,000 apps’ that you’ve launched with are mostly bollocks themes and ring tones (hence me only finding one that’s of any use to me). I can’t believe you’re counting a star trek trailer as an ‘app’ – i’m really disappointed at the trickery. The internet market isn’t stupid – in fact it’s probably the hardest to fool of them all, this is a really bad start for Ovi.

All you needed was a private beta, ask 200 users like me to login and use your store for 30 days. I could have told you the forms were rubbish, it was unclear how to select what phone you have and that having themes as apps was a crap idea. I could also have told you that you need to give users the ability to comment on the apps they download as well as rate them.

I hope this gets better, next month’s going to be a big one for phones and I for one am looking for a new one. The N97 looks nice but I need Ovi to be good and I need Symbian to be a responsive, intuitive, *well tested* operating system unlike it is at the moment with my current N95.

I was surprised this morning to find that McAfee ‘On Access Scan’ had deleted my copy of Spotify overnight saying that it was an example of W32 IRCbot.gen.z – thanks Mcafee, you’re now disabled.

This of course raises an interesting question – does Spotify connect to IRC somewhere? What other reason could McAfee have for detecting it as a chat bot in this way?