Pete's Eats

Aral has been working on a secret project for a while now and without saying too much I have to tell you it is something to be amazed by. I don’t know what’s more inspiring, seeing how fired-up he is about it or the actual project itself…

Anyway, as part of his early work he created a Flash Lite app that converts hex to decimal to binary. To be honest, I don’t have that much use for it personally, but I wanted to see how it performed on my new handset because Flash Lite doesn’t seem to run too well on it to be honest (Nokia N73). I downloaded the file and sent it to my phone using Bluetooth as normal but upon opening it I got an error, ‘corrupt file’. I tried a couple of times, in different ways, but nothing worked so I just lodged the issue in my head to bring up with him the next time we met.

I did just that the very next day (working parties in Borders are beginning to rock) and in messing around with it we found a very worrying issue with the Flash Lite players on our handsets. The N73 ships with Flash Lite 1.1 as standard but being who we are, we both have 2.1 installed too (available in return for a lengthy form on the Adobe site now) and this is where the issue starts.

If you send a file that requires 2.1 over to your phone and run it from the messages window (you have no choice in this btw) it will open in the 1.1 player and give an error. Ahh, I have 2.1 you think, I’ll just uninstall the 1.1 player right? Wrong. You can’t uninstall it by any obvious (and not so obvious) route. How about making the 2.1 player the default? Nope again. No obvious way of changing this setting anywhere on the phone. So, you can’t save it, or run it. When you get the error screen in the 1.1 player the only ui option available is ‘close’, you can’t even save it anywhere to open it in the 2.1 player manually. So, to recap, you can’t run it or save it and that effectively consigns your handset to running 1.1 or nothing.

But, there is a workaround that we found completely accidentally.

When you find yourself at the error message, where you can only press the button that corresponds to ‘close’, just click the central joystick-style button left or something. This clears the ‘close’ option and leaves you in the Flash Lite player filesystem where you can then save the file in order to run it manually from the 2.1 player later on.

Confused? We were too. Imagine how a non-technical user will feel.

It seems like nearly all of my friends are Twitter addicts these days and I hope that I don’t offend anyone of them with this opinion but…

I’m increasingly captured by the whole concept of deliberate presence notifications and less so by the global chat that twitter seems to have become. I’ve been playing with Jaiku a lot this week and I find myself so much more engaged by it over Twitter. For me, Twitter has become less about presence and much more of a global chat room. It also has a sort of adolescent slant that I don’t find in Jaiku – it sort of reminds me of MySpace to be honest.

When I started using Twitter I had a bit of difficulty overcoming the urge to build up yet another social network of all the usual suspects and I tried to keep it ‘local’ and use it purely as a way of noting my various locations and statuses to people who could do something with that information if they wanted to. It worked in the early days too – twittering that I was off to Bill’s for breakfast regularly flushed various friends out of the woodwork whence they came down to Bill’s too. Eventually though, I gave in and ‘friended’ people who live in different countries and who could, perhaps, use my presence information on the occassions that we’re in the same town, at the same event etc. From that moment though, Twitter lost meaning for me – it became too diluted to be of as much use and I have become very aware that people in Japan or the US don’t want to know which Starbucks I’m in and so on.

Last summer I signed up for Jaiku. I had loaded the client onto my Nokia N90 but found that it killed my battery very quickly by having the Jaiku application running all the time. Researching the idea of presence again recently though, I rediscovered Jaiku and have installed it onto my N73. It still eats battery, but nowhere near as quickly as before. Aside from that, I’m enjoying using Jaiku *alot*. It is much more useful for me, provides a lot more information on my friends digital presence across a wide range of inputs and generally feels much more ‘grown up’ than Twitter does.

I have integrated my blog posts, my Last.fm trace, my Plazes information and my upcoming.org events into my Jaiku. If you’re my friend on there, then you can get a very good overview of my complete presence integrating my thoughts (my blog), my media consumption (Last.fm), my event plans (upcoming) and my current whereabouts and availability too (from the Jaiku app on my phone). To me, this idea of complete presence is exciting and much more informative and useful than the throwaway chat on Twitter.

I know that most people are engaging with Twitter simply because of the low overhead it requires to post but I think this will be it’s ultimate downfall. The low cost dilutes the quality of the information added and global chat has been done many times before much better (think, irc). Jaiku requires much more effort (but it’s in no way arduous) and I think this is reflected in the quality of the information presented.

SXSWi brought Twitter to the masses. I hope Jaiku reaches similar heights because the biggest problem at the moment is convincing my friends to sign up and/or use it alongside other things like Twitter. (If the service dropouts, desparingly slow response times and flaky friends system doesn’t push them away from Twitter first that is).

I’ll continue to use Twitter too but, for me, Jaiku is so much more rewarding.

I just came across a new TV channel called ‘Current TV‘. It seems that it only launched today and has Al Gore behind it. It claims to cover everything all things ‘current’ and has a very ‘mtv’ vibe about it.

Anyway, just finished watching ‘Google Current’ a sort of televisual Google Zeitgeist that covers what people are searching for on Google UK several times a day. That’s actually a pretty cool idea

It all looks pretty good so far, although the presenters seem a little bit too ‘channel 4′ for me :/

Channel 155 on Virgin Media (NTL)

My Macbook Pro’s battery is getting weird on me.

The first indication of this, was the complete, unannounced shutdown with around 60% life left in the battery. Not your normal ‘hey, you might wanna save what you’re working on and then shutdown because your battery is nearly dead’, but ‘blink’ instead. Total shutdown with no warning. This has happened a few times now and when it does, the battery led’s show 0 and yet when you plug it into the wall and fire it up they show 3 led’s and between 50% and 60% life left.

I’m also noticing a slight bulging and worsening ‘fit’ in the battery area.

Heading to the Apple store tomorrow. If it doesn’t catch fire in the meantime (like this guy’s Macbook did) of course…

Update: So, I went to the Apple store in Bluewater having booked a genius appointment via the online concierge service. They listened to what was wrong and changed the battery there and then. No quibbles or anything. Brilliant service. As Ben says in the comments, try that at PC World…

I know that Starbucks say their staff would be happy to provide table service to those working on laptops in their coffee shops for additional beverages etc. But would anyone really expect them too? How would you attract their attention?

What kind of reaction would you expect here in the UK I wonder? Pretty different to the US I’m sure where service is generally much, much better and customer focussed than here (where it’s much more aimed at making the employee’s life easier it seems).

Fed up with being threatened everytime you go to the cinema? Or having unskippable threats on a legally purchased DVD? The head over to FACT OFF and make your voice heard…

Nice one Aral.

Update: Digg It if you like…

The BBC reports that National Express coaches want their particular form of transport to be viewed as cool – even as a suitable form of business travel…

National Express chief executive Richard Bowker wants coach travel in Britain to be like Spain, where the company’s subsidiary, Alsa, carries business people between cities. In Spain, coach travel is “cool and acceptable” says Mr Bowker.

A very noble ambition, but I can only assume that Spain’s equivalent coach system hasn’t suffered from years of neglect like ours here in the UK. Nor do they have the rudest, sometimes simply nasty staff like we do in the UK.

As someone who lives in Brighton and travels from Heathrow a lot, I’m sometimes left with no choice but to use the coaches of the ‘National Express‘ company. Believe me, when I say ‘no choice’, it’s exactly that. If there was a sensible choice then I wouldn’t go near them at all.

The coaches are dirty, smelly, filthy and tatty inside. I even go as far as to not rest my head against the headrest because of the sticky residue on every part of the seat. The toilets are disgusting and the smell inside is vomit-inducing in all but the strongest of stomached people. I’ve ridden great distances in the back of an army Bedford truck in my time and even that is pleasant compared to one of these coaches.

The worst part however, are the staff. I don’t want to paint everyone with the same appalling brush, but it’s hard not to when the examples I’ve had the misfortune to come across must simply be the very worst of their breed. I get the impression that the National Express is where people go to work when even the normal bus system is too high class for them. They are rude, unhelpful and often appear to be aggressive to people who’s native language is not English. In fact, National Express staff have demonstrated the very worst behaviour I have ever seen in people who supposedly work in a service industry on several sorry times when I’ve had the misfortune to have to use their system.

I pity the management if they are truly going to try and change how things are there. The attitude that the staff display seems to be endemic and I imagine it will be very hard to eradicate. I’ve maintained, for years, that is someone who knew how to run a successful public transport service (Mr Branson are you listening?) came along and went into competition, they would kill National Express in months.

I have also maintained that we should force National Express to change their name to National Disgrace to be more representative of their true nature.

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