Robert Cambridge

Goodbye, Gizmodo, you’ve served me well, but your new site design is shit.

The old site design (although still accessible) is broken because of the upgrade, and your RSS feed requires me to click through to your site to read the full stories.

Fix it!

Meanwhile, hello Engadget!

Oh wait, we already know what would happen because, you know, it already did.

So what if it happened somewhere else? Say… Japan.

(more…)

I’ve mustered up enough material to blog about. I think about stuff that I could blog about all the time, I just never seem to do it for one reason or another. So perhaps I should rather say, I haven’t found a reason not to write a blog post. That said, the world is still kept up to date with my latest rant via Facebook statuses:

So yeah, I have a job and I’ve eaten several burgers. Oh and not really bothered much with Project Euler.

I must say I don’t feel much of an immediate need to progress my mathematical-programming knowledge via Project Euler, because thanks to the guys over at Boxlight Media I can now spend my time writing code for money. So, umm… like, when do I need to do actual work?

It’s a fact, I love to code, so it doesn’t really feel like work at all. Especially coming from a technical support role, it’s a breath of fresh air.

On a more recent note I decided that I needed a server. Somewhere I could test stuff and possibly host the odd website. But nothing serious so I can still run weird and crazy tests and not care too much for uptime/reliability. My friend recommended Linode.com.

It’s not even been a week and so far I can see exactly why he recommended them, so I feel the need to make this public:

• These guys ONLY do VPSs, so you have their full attention.
• $20 for a VPS is good – not cheap, but good (512MB RAM, 16GB HDD, 200GB BW).
• You get a choice of several locations for your VPS, including London.
• They have a mass of very good documentation for just about everything you could think of doing with your VPS. Including some very well-written getting started guides.
• DNS is included with your package for seemingly unlimited domains at no extra cost.
• They have a recovery console in case you make a typo with iptables.
• And quite uniquely: if your VPS becomes completely unbootable, they have a “Live CD” style recovery boot up option in the control panel.

My server was activated instantly without the complex registration forms most hosting companies make you suffer. First thing I did: name my server. This was perhaps the hardest thing I’ve done so far, but this discussion gave me quite a chuckle. It ended up being called chaos – from Wikipedia:

a gap or abyss at the beginning of the world, or more generally the initial, formless state of the universe.

or -

somewhere I can put stuff that isn’t anything until it grows into something

But after I got LAMP and subversion up and running, I was at a loose end. My other site looks like this and still does:

What I have done, is made this lovely welcome page available to those on IPv6, but what next? Once again I find myself in need of a project.

Hmm.

Since my last post about my (then) beloved Satio I’ve made another set of quite unprecedented changes: I went and got myself an Apple MacBook Pro 13″ and an iPhone 3GS. Why? (more…)

In my previous post I explained how installing HelloOX2 would allow you to install PyS60 and in turn the multitude of Python applications.

HelloOX2 also opens up other doorways. There are some really useful applications out there (mainly on www.dailymobile.se, massive credit to them) which have been developed/leaked/modified by the non-legit sources. These applications can make your phone look and feel just like an Golf *cough* I mean an iPhone, so if you’re anything like me and admire the iPhone’s UI but can’t bare the downsides, read on.

Free-iSMS (video):  Gives you threaded messaging, couldn’t live without it now!

Dayhand Input modified by Mr Milk for English: I don’t understand why the default QWERTY keyboard has been designed in a “square” layout, by this I mean the A is right below the Q, instead of being just below and to the right. If you’re like me and expect keys to be in all the right places, this will make your typing very difficult. Get Dayhand to be able to change this and even create your own skins!

SPB Mobile Shell (video): Let’s face it, the Satio’s homescreen is a poor effort and their menu system leaves you standing with a decade-old double-click interface. Install this leaked version of SPB Mobile Shell for Symbian and give your phone a makeover! It’s quite stable, once you figure out which buttons you *shouldn’t* press! You might need this fix at some point :)

And that’s about it, those are the applications I find improve S605th’s usage by a mile and, having started to use them, couldn’t go back to the bare system without kicking myself.

Enjoy :)

I did it! It took me a week, but I got there! PyS60 and XpressBeer are officially on my Satio working!!

The secret?

Donate some money to HelloOX2 to get their signed hacking application. Don’t worry, this isn’t a long winded approach.  It’s easy!

Once you get your email with a link to the installer… well… just download and install it. Then run ROMPatcher+ and enable Installserver_FP2. Your phone will now care not how the applications you want to install on it are signed.

I had trouble installing PyS60 2.0.0, so HelloOX2′s support kindly suggested I try PyS60 1.9.7 from the Maemo Garage. I hope whatever the problem is, is fixed in the next release of PyS60 or HelloOX2 – I don’t want to be stuck with 1.9.7 forever.

Right, Python is installed so now you can run out and try the multitude of useless applications written in this allegedly lovely language. But wait, that last one… what was it called?

XpressBeer at Symbian Freak

That page looks pretty convincing, right? I think the key is in “for 5th Ed Devices”. It should really mean all of them. Sadly the version they have hosted is 0.1, which for some reason doesn’t work on my Satio. Luckily, the developer has released 0.15!

I think I deserve a real beer, and you do too. Enjoy! :)

After a long time spent not getting myself involved in geeky projects I got myself a SonyEricsson Satio and somehow reminded myself of how much I miss them.

So far my impression of the Satio is that it’s a Symbian phone and, like any other, if you’ve never used Symbian you will struggle to now.  It’s a real shame because I see this phone as one that should at least bark a few insults at the iPhone, but aside from the hardware advantages it turns out to have as shit a software/GUI as every single Symbian predecessor and about as many applications as are available for a non-smartphone.

No doubt that, unless you bought your phone because a salesman told you, you’ll be straight into the menus (after checking out the camera) to see what lovely new features it has compared with your last. So be sure to set these when you get the chance.

• Settings -> Connectivity -> Network -> Network mode -> set to “GSM”. If you don’t do much video calling (who the hell does?) and don’t mind a slightly lesser GPRS speed (if you live  in London, you’ll never experience maximum speed anyway), this will double/triple your battery life.
• Download a nice theme. The stock themes can sometimes be confusing and clunky. mobile9 have a large collection from which to choose.
• Get an Invisible Shield. Although technically not a trick and turns out to be quite pricey, they’re apparently indestructible. I haven’t tried gouging mine with a key yet, but it’s not got a single mark on it after a week’s use. It does make finger use difficult by increasing traction, so you end up squeaking up and down your phone, but it’s a small price to pay to keep your shiny tech bling in tip top condition.

The Satio, when it comes to applications, is an epic fail (must read) without question.

• The PlayNow Arena is a half-arsed collection of applications developed by third parties which may or may not work. The best part of this is that you can’t try before you buy, so you’re stuck if it doesn’t work. nUnlock is a prime example: I paid £3 for an iPhone-like slider, but when active it doesn’t display network signal or battery life. PlayNow haven’t bothered to reply to my complaint either.
• I’ve not yet come across an application that can use the camera, they all error with “Feature not supported”.
• PyS60 (Python for S60) has been developed and signed by Nokia. Samsung developed a port for their devices, but SonyEricsson are, as above, showing no signs of life. Python applications seem plenty and this is a major downfall. Symbian phones will never stand up to the iPhone until these stupid problems get sorted out.
• Qt could have been the saviour. Granted I haven’t tried to install this as hard as I did Python and I got further than I did with Python: it actually installs successfully! But none of the sample applications will start.

Among the applications that are available and do work, check out Facebook, Symabook (not quite the best Facebook app but will be soon), Snaptu, Google Mail, Google Maps, Google Search(now with location-based voice-search!), Water level, Youtube, ZXReader (must have for eBooks! Also try the Gutenberg Project)

Please let me clear up a few things before I sign off: I will not buy an iPhone for a few reasons (tied to iTunes, App Store, no multitasking, no replaceable battery, to name a few), but when I compare the functionality of an app-loaded iPhone considering its underpowered hardware to the Satio and its unused potential, it makes me sad.

Come on Symbian. Sort it out.

Welcome to the new www.rcambridge.co.uk! (sorry about the mess)

I’ve moved my blog from a self-hosted Serendipity installation to WordPress because I got sick of maintaining what is supposed to my place of chill out by rant. This has taken me just over a year to sort out (check out the last post’s date), but hey… did anyone miss me? :)

I’ve ported all the old posts from Serendipity, except the moblog ones, but I don’t think I’ll get around to that.

For now, there are a few things that have changed:

1. The hard disk drive powering MythTV’s recordings failed, twice. I’ve since ripped out that machine because buying a replacement hard drive would have cost just as much. Instead I’ve replaced it with several machines which do one or two things each.
2. I use a Linksys NSLU2 for shared network storage.
3. I use a Netgear WG614 as a firewall and wireless access point.
4. I use a Goodmans GHD1621F2 to record and watch Freeview.
5. I play Xbox 360 (HDTV!) and my Nintendo Wii is in a box.
6. I use XBMC for Windows to play movies and music.

Done!

NOTE: this is a legacy post ported from the old blog platform for archiving purposes

Et voila! My fìrst meaningful mobile post, although edited on computer. This post is a compilation of a series of problems and their solutions which I experienced while linking my phone to my blog.

Lets start from the blog. Serendipity has a plugin available via SPARTACUS called Popfetcher. What this does is fetch emails from a POP3 inbox, format them, and post them on your blog. It’s quite a mature piece of kit and therefore very customisable. I created a gmail account for this and it worked without any hassle.

Now all I had to do was send an email to this account from my phone.

My first attempt failed miserably. I tried sending an MMS to that email address only find a message indicating a URL where I could read the actual message. Nice one O2, you’ve managed to break MMS-to-email functionality.

My second attempt involves setting up an email account on my phone, most modern mobiles have this functionality and I’m lucky my SonyEricsson k800i does too. This failed because of O2 again: to save money, the only connection I use on my contract SIM card is a GSM based one (not GPRS based). This is because I get several hours free every month. If I used GPRS I would have been fine, but with GSM one can only, as far as I’ve deduced, make an outgoing connection on port 80 through O2′s proxy, so as to browse the web via HTTP. This was also a problem while setting up my previously Blogger-dependent system.

My third attempt was the last idea I had, aside from starting to use the insanely overpriced GPRS connection. I figured O2 would surely not block their own email servers, so I painstakingly signed up for a new account on O2 (please fix your website!) just for the email, luckily one can register the same mobile number several times (I’m sure there are 5 or 6 accounts registered to my number :D), and searched around for the SMTP configuration details. My prediction was right, the O2 proxy allows SMTP connections only to the O2 mail server (and apparently to BT Yahoo! mail).

I had now linked my mobile phone to my blog. Success!

I also added nl2br() to the popfetcher plugin code, and, before you suggest it, I removed the serendipity plugin for automatic line breaks when it caused problems as I pasted from the clipboard into the WYSIWYG post editor.

That sorted, all I need is for London Underground to put antennas in the tunnels!

NOTE: this is a legacy post ported from the old blog platform for archiving purposes

I recently came across Wiideo Center (via Nintendo Scene). A media center tool that runs on a Windows PC box to provide your Wii with a website on which to access your videos, music and pictures via the Flash 7 plugin.

I’ve tried so many other similar applications that *should* do exactly this, only they don’t: they just have nice looking menus that you *wish* led to the gold!

The Wiideo Center is great because it requires no configuration at all, and I know this could be a problem for some users, but it’s the opposite with most Wii-oriented media centers out there: too much work has gone into the configuration that the functionality has been ignored. From the start, anyone with access to port 8080 on your dear vulnerable Windows PC will have access to all of your media, sorted by drive letter. If you want to play something on a network share you must create a Windows network drive on the Wiideo Center machine. It’s just so simple! I guess this will be changed in later versions to a more secure setup.

The Wii itself has its own major quirk which makes the whole thing a little annoying when watching a feature film or potentially anything over five minutes long, and it’s that it has barely any memory to store the video. For this reason, the Wiideo Center splits any video up into five minute-long chapters, which you can preview with thumbnails.

It doesn’t support .nuv files (natively compressed MythTV recorded shows) and I’m not sure how long it will take the developer to incorporate this, but he seems keen enough as I’ve already had a reply to this suggestion. Apart from this, which is quite minor as unencoded MythTV recordings *can* be played, I only have DivX files, but they need to have the .avi extension instead of .divx (as served by Stage6). Picture support is, well, not great, but I feel it just needs maturing. Music playback is the best it can be apart from one thing:

Sorting. FTW?! All files are unsorted, somehow, and I’ve no idea why. Saying that, any coder can easily overlook this feature, but it seriously affects the music playback in that your album’s tracks will always be played at random – in the same order. Edit: this only affects Samba network drives and I’m working with the developer to get it fixed. Edit: this has been fixed :)

Much impressed and pleased. I can now play movies in my bedroom without any extra hardware.