Nokia E75 "Teach the Technophobe" week four

The final challenge, part of the 'Teach the Technophobe' E75 competition, has been sent out we will attempt to complete it in the summit of Snowdon. If the Met Office (and they are not too reliable at predicting anything beyond the next day's) are to be believed, this will be the fourth walking trip this year we will be doing in the rain! Will update this post when we return on Tuesday/Wednesday.

Snowdonia trip

We will be heading to Snowdonia this weekend - our first trip there actually. Duly hope that the weather holds, though I am not going to hold my breath. Every single one of our trips this year has been blessed with awful weather, so I do not see the trend breaking anytime soon. Anyway, we are aiming to complete three walks, that is Snowdon via Pyg track and Miner's track from Pen-y-Pass and Moel Eilio circular from Llanberis and hopefully the Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach circular from Pen-y-Pass.

Thinking seriously on what gadgets to bring. I will definitely be needing my Walkman with me, as if there was one thing I learnt from the trip to Lake District, it is a necessity for a good night sleep, what with the noisy campers around. Will also be bringing my E51 and E75 trial unit for GPS'ing and the Proporta Ted Baker's No Ordinary charger (it is capable of charging my E51 and Navman B10 unit up to three times each). My Canon G9 and three batteries will be coming along too as with a bunch of memory cards, though I may pick up an extra card tomorrow. On the other hand, my PSP and DS Lite will be staying at home.

Opera moans about Internet Explorer icon now

I love Opera. In fact I use the browser occasionally whenever I need a quick web check (not browsing for more than a couple of minutes), as it is a hassle to boot up Firefox (seeing how RAM hungry it is).

But dear Opera (and the European Commission), please shut the hell up. First you complained that Microsoft is wrong to bundle a web browser with their own product, which even I do not understand. When Microsoft relented and announced that Windows 7 will be shipped Internet Explorer-less in Europe, you moaned about that too. And now Microsoft is doing exactly what you wanted them to do, allowing customers to pick the browser of their choice via a ballot screen in future releases of Windows. And still you take the time to bitch.

According to The Register, Opera Software's Hakon Wium Lie is reported to have questioned the use of the Internet Explorer icon on the ballot screen.

"The blue 'e' has become so associated with the Internet in general, due to the bundling with Windows. We think using the blue 'e' might not be such a good idea,"

Jesus. If you spend more time actually marketing your own browser like the peeps at Mozilla, maybe you will actually gain more marketshare. Firefox is a proof that you do not need regulations within the browser market to succeed. Sigg, if Microsoft drops the use of logo, I am sure the guys at Opera will moan about the 'Internet' in 'Internet Explorer' next... I love the browser, but the politics is just terrible.

FFS Opera. Instead of whining about everything, how about allocating some actual development time to make Opera Mini faster and Opera Mobile better?

OpenSolaris 2009.06

With the pending arrival of Windows 7 (it's great - no doubt about it) and the glamour of Linux, people could be forgiven to believe that no other alternatives exist. Thankfully, there are. OpenSolaris has always been a favourite alternative OS of mine, and the latest release 2009.06 is a step in the right direction.

My 2009.06 Live CD arrived about 2 weeks ago, but I haven't had the chance to play around with it much apart from that one time. I once again booted it up today and found the latest distribution to be very stable. It recognised all my ThinkPad X61 components without any issues, though the same can be said of its 2008.05 release. Some of the bundled apps are outdated, and VideoLan isn't even installed (Totem is included instead - which is a rather useless media player IMO, but this can easily be fixed).

Once I get a new harddrive, I'll definitely be creating a partition for OpenSolaris and Windows 7. Both are exciting enough.

Some concert videos

For whatever reason I've not used my YouTube account to upload videos for ages (I almost forgot I had one). Well I have finally gotten off my arse and decided to upload some videos. Quality's a bit crap because the videos have been re-encoded to speed up upload (if you must know I am with Virgin Media - I hope that explains it).

Au Revoir Simone playing "Shadows" from Still Night, Still Life at Proud Galleries London:



Those Dancing Days playing "Actionman" from In Our Space Hero Suits at Proud Galleries London:



Au Revoir Simone playing "Knights of Wands" from Still Night, Still Life at Pure Groove:



Camera Obscura playing "Razzle Dazzle Rose" from Let's Get Out of this Country at Shepherd's Bush Empire:

Cheap digital compact

Canon Ixus has always been a very desirable line of ultra compact digital camera, retaining the same basic design introduced with their decade old APS-based Ixus camera. Unfortunately, UK often gets screwed when it comes to pricing - sometimes forced to pay nearly double what it costs across the Atlantic!

Well here's a brilliant deal for those of you are looking for a new ultra compact digital camera. The Canon Ixus 110 IS is going for £189.99, down from its rip-off £349.99 list price just two months after its release, now bringing it more in line with US pricing. It contains a 12.1 Megapixel CCD sensor, wide angle lens (28mm equivalent), 4x optical zoom and all the usual technobabble stuff (image stabiliser, HDMI out etc.). Its slimmer cousin, the older Ixus 100 IS, is also selling for a mere £183.90, though you have to make do with only 3x optical zoom (33mm - 100mm equivalent).

Unfortunately for a 2009 camera, neither are capable of shooting 720p HD videos. If that is something you are looking for, the pricier but equally compact Panasonic Lumix TZ7 will be perfect for you.

Au Revoir Simone & Those Dancing Days @ Proud Galleries, Camden

Swedish girl indie band Those Dancing Days opened the night with a barrage of high quality twee pop from their 2008 album In Our Space Hero Suits. Au Revoir Simone then played a set that was acoustically disappointing. Sound engineer should be reprimanded for turning up the volume all the way up, as all you can hear is the bass. Still a fun night at Proud Bar (shit beer selection though), and as usual Annie, Heather and Erika are the nicest bunch of people you can meet.

Nokia E75 "Teach the Technophobe" week three

The third challenge from WOM World/Nokia only arrived today. A new sticker had to be sent out which was why I got it late. If you do not know, this is part of the 'Teach the Technophobe' E75 competition. I'll be out an about today, hopefully getting my technophobe to capture a nice picture for the challenge. Until then you can read about my past challenges here.

As I mentioned earlier, the E75 has the ability to geotag pictures taken. This is a simple enough process that involves turning on the GPS receiver and enabling location tagging withing the camera settings. Obviously this depends on whether the GPS receiver on the E75 has acquired its position. This can take up to a couple of minutes depending on location (outdoors works best) and the weather. Any co-ordinates will be recorded as a metadata on the image's EXIF.

Geotagging images has plenty of advantages. The most obvious is a way or organising your images by location. If you share images on Flickr, location tags will allow users to quickly trawl through images based on location. You can also use online maps like Google Maps to create an interactive map.

BTW, if your Series 60 phone has no support for geotagging (my E51 does not), an application like ViewRanger is a good alternative. Whilst it does not tag the images taken with the E51's camera with co-ordinates, you are able to upload images to ViewRanger's server. Images can be shared on ViewRanger's TravelLog site, which shows an interactive map with pin-points representing images.

Anyway, an update. My partner has just completed the third challenge. Basically the challenge calls for the technophobe to send me an e-mail of a picture taken of herself, and if possible a link to a map of where she took the picture. The reason why I wrote about the geotagging ability of the E75 is precisely that - it is much easier to let your images be tagged automatically so you can go through them later in pin-pointing exactly where each image was taken. When I brought the E75 to the Lake District, I had the GPS turn on for GPS logging and picture taking. You can see some of the results here. As I said earlier, the E75 is a good camera phone, but it won't replace your dedicated digital camera or even a high end camera phone like the N86.

So back to the challenge. As you know it has been a rainy day and she e-mailed me a picture of her all wet and pouting from her lunch walk. Privacy concerns meant that I won't be posting the picture up here, nor a link to Google Maps of where she works. Sorry.