David Carrington

My third HTC phone

David Carrington — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:12:19 +0000

I’ve just ordered an HTC Diamond, with delivery expected on Thursday.

This will be my third HTC handset. It has the speed advantage of the first (HTC BlueAngel) and the size / style advantage of the second (HTC Touch). Combined together it makes one awesome phone!

What to do with the old phones? The HTC BlueAngel functions as my bedside MP3 player. The Touch is still a great phone and a tech-savy relative might like to get hold of it. We’ll see.

I love mobile data

David Carrington — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:57:41 +0000

Over the last few days, I’ve been interested in various methods that I might get my hands on a new HTC Diamond phone. Each option has it’s ups and downs, but ultimately leaves me spending £150-400 for a phone that only does a fraction more than my existing HTC Touch (counting features that I’d actually use).

Sure, it’s got 3G and basically everything about it is a generation up from what my phone does, but I’m happy with what I’ve got. In fact, I’m really loving the new world that has been opened to me from having internet access wherever I go.

So far I’ve appreciated being able to do the following:

Managing my Google Calendar remotely
Watching for phones on Ebay Mobile
Checking cinema listings
Keeping an eye on motorway traffic
Direct uploads to Flickr (no 25p MMS charge)

I’m barely eating up 1Mb / day with what I consider to be quite a fair amount of usage on GPRS. This gives me quite a lot of room to play with other ideas like IM and similar. I’m sure I’ll find a way to eat up the rest of my monthly allowance.

Orange new feature: Usage since your last bill

David Carrington — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:06:24 +0000

I fairly despise the Orange website for a number of reasons: loading screens, endless “sorry, an error occurred but we’re aware of it” links, and now a fairly useless new feature: usage since your last bill.

With all the talk of “Unlimited” features (texts and now data too), what I really want is the website to tell me some real numbers that represent my months usage. Why give me 47 pages of junk when all I need is a count which says I’ve used 2000 of my 3000 texts.

I imagine this page will be equally useless at telling me how much of my 500Mb fair usage of data I’ve used for the month. Luckily, I’m already looking into some software that will let me keep track of that directly from my phone. I’ll post a review once the data plan is enabled.

New 500Mb data plan on Orange

David Carrington — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:07:35 +0000

Orange have seen the light! they’ve updated a bunch of their pay monthly plans to include 500Mb of data transfer. This is great for me and other Orange customers, as the existing bundles were terrible (£5/month for unlimited off peak, £8/month for 30Mb anytime).

Special thanks goes to Krystal at SMS Text News for letting people know that you can get this added to your existing account.

The actual terms and conditions state the following:

These Offers are available to new and existing customers connecting or upgrading to an Eligible Talkplan (as defined below) between 1 March 2007 and 31 July 2007 (an ‘Eligible Customer’) and are subject to the additional Our Customers First terms.
The Offers are subject at all times to a fair usage policy of 3000 minutes or texts (as appropriate) each month or 500MB data per month (See Mobile Internet Bundles). Usage above this amount will constitute abuse and Orange may monitor usage and withdraw the Offer from your account if the fair usage policy is abused.

UK government data for mashups

David Carrington — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:46:27 +0000

BBC News had an article on the UK government opening up a bunch of data for developers to play with the other day. I think it’s a real flaw in what’s most likely their article/linking policy that the actual link to the data is hidden on the right under the “Related Internet Links” section: Show Us a Better Way.

I’ve not had a chance to look at all of the available data, but it’s an interesting competition.

Here be dragons

David Carrington — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:25:42 +0000

I’ve been playing Rohan quite a bit lately. I started the year by playing RF Online quite a lot, but switched (with many others) in order to avoid the unstable servers at the time. Waking up to test the game at it’s exact release time of 4am in the UK was a bit much, but vaguely worth it by the fact that I got first dibs on my name of choice for a healing class: Faith. Inspiration of the name was actually Faith from the game Alien Swarm, which was the main game I played last year. All three are highly recommended.

I’m enjoying Rohan, especially since a lot of the people I play with are the same one’s I played RF Online with. I’m a healing Elf woman, fairly well valued in the game to keep parties alive in times of crisis - or more typically, to take on big monsters for an hour or so. However, even a healer has limits with great big fiery dragons…

Watch as the two strongest players run away in fear, which turned out to be the right choice as they were able to come back and revive me so I could heal the whole group and get us back in action.

Discussed today 23rd June 2008

David Carrington — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:17:32 +0000

A 728-ton stabilising ball
The Phoenix lander has “convinced” scientists of ice on Mars - still not actually confirmed.
A film about a guy that always responds “yes”, with Jim Carrey: Yes Man
Pityriasis rosea - an oval shaped rash
401? 301? 501? - HTTP status codes
Real time shadows in Blender
Site Identification Button in Firefox on various SSL sites
Skype phones. Especially the dual mode Netgear one.
HTML vs XHTML
9 day weeks

Should you share your own blog with Shared Items?

David Carrington — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:45:44 +0000

Bryan Person heard about it from Marketing Over Coffee and thinks it’s a good idea, as do his two commenters. Bill Deys wrote about it too.

Scoble refuses to not do it:

“My link blog is for keeping what I think are the most important RSS items of the day, including mine.”

The positive side of doing it is that you’re potentially pushing your blog into more people’s RSS readers. The only negative feedback I’ve read so far consists of one of these two arguments:

Duplicates - This is reasonable, hopefully Google Reader is now smart enough not to show an item twice. If not, it’s probably something they’re trying to do.
“I don’t like your blog” - People saying this have a fair point. For now, their only choice is to put up with it or unsubscribe.

I’m personally going to add this to my own Shared Items (david.carrington AT gmail DOT com if that helps).

Where’s Nick?

David Carrington — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:52:19 +0000

I’ve used Google Reader for ages, and I’ve been using GTalk with Nick for ages. Annoyingly, Reader flat-out refuses to let me add Nick as a friend to see his shared items in the new interface.

Since then, I’ve managed to add Scoble and Chris F. Masse, but still no Nick! Does Google not like him? Has he offended somebody?

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

Removing him from GTalk and re-adding
Deleting the whole GMail contact and re-adding

What can I try next?

Google Reader shared items become more social

David Carrington — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:30:23 +0000

Google Reader has become slightly more social lately with the addition of recommended feeds. I’ve just come across another tweak to the interface which helps a bit with the social aspect: a Shared Items improvement.

The screenshot above shows that not only did Scoble share the feed item in question, but my colleague Nick Clarke also shared it. Previously, this would have come up as two items for me to read, once in Nick’s shared items feed and again in Scoble’s feed.

This is a slight step forward to the point where items with more “shares” are promoted for reading. I don’t think there’s a current interface to accomplish this though.