Month: June 2007

My hate/hate relationship with my N95 continues. I was showing it to Matt tonight, and it crashed within about 30 seconds of my starting to demo it. He was actually quite impressed; from the way I’d been talking, he’d expected more like 15 seconds.

Anyway, catching up on feeds tonight (via the wonderful new NetNewsWire 3.0), I find that Scoble has blagged himself an N95. One of the problems I’ve been having is finding sensible software repositories for Series 60 apps to try out; one of Scoble’s comment threads helps there.

Incidentally, I’d agree with Scoble that the phone’s camera quality is excellent – noticeably better than the not-at-all-sniffy K750, and Nokia have toned down the somewhat crude over-sharpening their previous high-end Zeiss-lensed überphones applied. However, there are two problems with the N95 camera; shutter lag is pretty bad, but more of an issue is startup time. I count it at about five seconds, which is extreme. I’ve started flicking the lens cover open while the thing’s still in my pocket, as I’m walking up to where I think there might be a shot. Once I’m in place, I still have to count to three before the screen’s up and stabilised. Ugh.

Just so those of you who haven’t been paying attention know: comments here are down. Disabled for (shared) server performance reasons; I was getting hit by so many spam-bots, the comment script was nailing the server. Not that the spam was getting through – the filters were taking care of that – but it was still driving 100+ threads to reject everything.

I haven’t had chance to work out a solution yet. Sorry.

I like things like this: a bull (called ‘Derek’), in a field, wearing a GPS receiver and location transmitter. Guess where in the field he’s going to be at 3pm daily, and win tickets to Glastonbury, care of sponsors Orange.

Nice. Whimsical. Not even the bad puns annoy me.

(via Iain Tate’s crack unit)

I just woke up my venerable workhorse Power Mac from its overnight slumbers, and it made extremely worrying graunching sounds. A few minutes’ warming-up and it seems to have settled down, but still… eek?

Please don’t die please don’t die please don’t die.

I bought it on 18^th September 2002, and it’s been rock-solid since then. True, I have swapped out the hard drive for a larger one, fitted more RAM, and… actually, that’s about it. The video card took a beating when an old LCD monitor blew, taking out the card’s VGA output, so I’m down to the one (ADC) screen now. But it’s a real trooper, this thing. Still runs everything I need like a champ.

Wibble.

The votes are in (sorry about that, David…), and the winner is announced. Apparently no two judges voted for the same first choice, so it all came down to ranked lists and single transferrable vote. Which is pretty darned cool, actually.

Great work from David Colarusso on all this, and congratulations to the winner. Fun!

Great critique of the London 2012 logo, from Coudal Partners. I’m particularly fond of:

It’s simple. When we hear “my kid could have done that!” we think “success.” Some of the greatest logos of all time involve two lines (the Christian cross) or three lines and a circle (Mercedes). Your kid COULD have done that, but she didn’t. Nor did she design the graphics standards manual that goes with it. So give it a rest. Or send us her resume.

The beta of Movable Type 4 is out. Damn, and I was so close to moving The Daily Grind to WordPress, too.

Swap sardines for whitebait, and Portuguese conference food would closely parallel North Yorkshire’s. Though somehow I suspect Bridlington might struggle to accommodate a conference of 850 science centre and museum personnel and associated hangers-on. But I digress. Daily staples included roast potatoes and rice pudding – thankfully not served together – and coffee breaks were enlivened by these things. Which are basically egg custards, but sweeter and with more vanilla and a whole lot less nutmeg.

And very fine they were too, usually running out within seconds. On the last day of the conference, however, somebody had obviously been totting up the last cents, and great heaving plates of the things appeared. The coffee tables groaned beneath their weight, and under the pressure of bodies as we unceremoniously elbowed each other aside.

We ate every last one.

Since people seem to be liking the N95 comments, a few more:

• It crashes. A lot. Sometimes in the middle of calls.
• Hunting between 3G and standard cells seems to be the cause of most of my connection problems. Roaming in Portugal I’ve had to disable 3G altogether.
• The camera startup time and shutter lag are hilariously awful, and seriously impact the usability of the camera.
• Battery life is poor – I think worse than the quoted life for the iPhone? If Apple’s handset actually hits the specs – which Apple gear usually does – I think it’ll be considerably better than this thing. With WiFi off and only brief use, the N95 needs recharging essentially every night.
• The charger is the dinkiest, neatest little thing you ever did see. Great piece of kit.
• The camera lens cover has an annoying habit of getting activated when pushing or pulling the handset out of a pocket, just like the K750. The K800/810 avoid this by having the cover move on the perpendicular axis, which is much smarter.
• I’ve had horrid problems with SMS message centres, that are quite baffling. In Portugal, it receives but refuses to send texts, which is irritating as hell.
• Video quality is stunningly good. For a phone.

Strangely, I’m still enjoying using the N95. Mostly because in places it’s so bad it’s plain entertaining. I’ll be fed up with it long before the contract is up, but we still have six months before the iPhone arrives in the UK (longer for a 3G version?), so I guess it’ll have to do for now.