Tom Ash at PC Pro writes The iPad 2: looks nice, plays ugly

This sure is quite  a concern and personally I think I’ll be sticking with Android. I know Android isn’t perfect but I’d rather not contribute to such anti-competitive bullying.

Android Donut 1.6

Over the weekend my HTC Magic got the message to update to the latest Android version and (after I agreed to the prompt) it updated. I must admit I wasn’t expecting much and I haven’t been following the news much. I was in for a pleasant surprise.

The first thing I noticed was that the screen updated a lot faster when I rotated the screen. With Cupcake there was an annoying lag while the screen was greyed out and the Android thought about how to display the screen in this new orientation. I would say the time for this rotation has probably halved with the Donut update.

http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10014274o-2000667842b,00.htm

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2251715/google-highlights-donut

http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=android+donut

LAMP under threat?

LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) is a combination of applications used as a platform for all manner of web development projects from blogging platforms (WordPress) and CMS (Joomla) to e-commerce sites and other back-ends.

All the elements  of the LAMP suite are licenced under GPL. Some would say this is a good thing, others suggest that this might be the Achilles Heel of this powerhouse.

John Dvorak suggests that PostgrSQL  might provided a powerful alternative to MySQL now that Sun has been bought by Oracle. He makes quite a good argument for the damage caused by the much loved GNU GPL licence.

I’ve always been a fan of open source software and to be honest I don’t really mind too much which licence it uses. I’m also a realist and I would definitely go for economic business case over freedom for the sake of it. I think it’s great that so much open source software is available and being used in business but it does concern me when avid open source promoters start getting a bit over zealous and thereby actually lower the value of the fantastic software.

Long life LAMP I say!!

HTC Magic (Android Phone)

When my mobile phone contract came up for renewal I spent ages looking at the numerous upgrade options available. After a thorough evaluation of all the options I narrowed my choice down to 3 phones: The Nokia 5800 (aka Tube), the iPhone 3G and the HTC Magic.

In the end the key factors in making my decision were:

• Cost (monthly or upfront)
• Size
• Openness (and hence customizability)
• Input options (a few buttons or just touchscreen)

I was looking for something that could be used to bring a bit of order to my life and would allow me to easily read, listen to and type stuff up. Browsing the web was a key consideration so screen size was a factor.

I’m the sort of techie who likes to tweak stuff so the iPhone and Android apps looked pretty appealing as they allow a lot of customisation of the experience. I decided not to go with the Nokia 5800 because it just didn’t look like it would have the broad functionality that I was looking for.

The decision between the Android Magic and the iPhone was less clear cut. A major negative for the iPhone was the cost. For a £35/month contract O2 weren’t offering very many minutes or txts so that meant I would have had to go with the more expensive contracts. Vodafone, by contrast, offered 600 minutes and 500 txts for £35/month. The question that then remained was whether I would be happy with the Android Magic. So I began reading and watching reviews. The iPhone has bigger screen but it’s also a much bigger phone. After enjoying the slim Sony Ericsson W880 I wasn’t keen to have a massive phone in my pocket so that pushed me more towards the Android Magic. I also use quite a few Google apps (GMail, Calendar, Docs, Reader, Notebook) so, having satisfied my questioning whether it would do the trick I decided to go for it and get the HTC Magic.

Sansa Fuze

Lance Ulanoff says “It’s an iPod World“. I disagree so I bought a Sansa Fuze. I looked at the costs and features of the various options and couldn’t bring myself to just buy one. The nano was the closest to meeting my requirements but for about half the price I could get a Sansa Fuze whose capacity is continuously upgradeable with cheap MicroSD cards.

The only problem now is that after wanting one for ages I just don’t carry it around enough for it to be useful. (This problem would have afflicted an iPod if I’d bought one.) Perhaps it’ll become a driving companion. For me at least, this wasn’t a smart purchase. I guess you live and learn.

What are all these files?

I’ve had reason to be slightly annoyed with a bunch of MP3 files recently. This was related to two main problems: filenames and ID3 tags. Finding the right tools to fix these problems was even more frustrating. To help you avoid such frustration here’s what I found.

ID3 tags in MP3 files are used by many MP3 players to group files into artist, album, genre, etc. If an MP3 file doesn’t have any ID3 tags then it just gets dumped into the “unknown” category. So the moral of this is that the ID3 tags have to be set if you are planning to enjoy listening to your MP3s. Now my problem was that I had a large number of files (audio book chapters plus sermons from moresermons.net). For many of them the artist or album would be the same and I didn’t want to go through each one setting the tags appropriately. Googling for (what I thought to be) relevant search terms didn’t help. The problem wasn’t so big that I thought it was worth buying software to fix the problem and it wasn’t so small that I could use just any ID3 tag editor.

Finally I found the solution to my problem in Mp3tag (ID3 editor). Most of the tools I used were under the “Convert” menu (although technically one isn’t converting the file). There you’ll find useful features like Filename to Tag (if your file names are already set up), Text file to tag (because it may be much easier to just type the relevant tags into a text document). Most of the power comes in the Actions. See the list of available options here.

I had made a start with renaming the files with the help of MP3tag but I also used Bulk Rename Utility (also known as BRU). At first BRU looks a little daunting because it has so many options:

Bulk Rename Utility's 13 ways to rename files

Don’t be daunted. The athor is obviously somewhat aware of this problem because in the first section of the Bulk Rename Utility Manual he says “DO NOT PANIC!!!” Take your time and read each group (if you don’t understand regular expressions then skip group 1). I like adding prefixes and suffixes (group 7) but appending the folder name (group 9) or changing the case (group 4) can also be very helpful. Obviously reading the manual will make your life a lot easier. So, the next time you need to rename a whole bunch of files think to your self “I should have just installed Bulk Rename Utility when TechCircles told me to.”

A couple more useful audio utilities you may like:

• MP3 and Ogg Splitter (or MP3splt as it is officially known): Allows you to easily split an MP3 (or Ogg) file at one or more specified time points.
• Audacity: Open source and very useful all round audio editing suite.

Twitter - More than just tweet tweet?

I must admit that despite my geekiness I don’t even have a Twitter account. I think I must have been on holiday or working really hard when all this social networking stuff kicked off and I have just never caught up. That’s why I truly appreciate a recent article on PCMag describing Nine Ways to Use Twitter.

John Dvorak explains that Twitter isn’t just for letting people know your latest thoughts but it can be used for many different things. Some of these are really useful.

I had come across another interesting use of Twitter a few days ago in a story about a taco truck that uses Twitter to tell people where they’ll be next. That’s smart.

I’m going to think of some smart things to do with Twitter. Maybe I should start by signing up for an account…

Linux

It’s been a couple of years since I ran Linux. To be honest, part of the reason I don’t use it is because the laptop I bought came with Vista pre-installed. Another part of the reason is because I use Windows at work (as does my wife) and it’s easier not to have to switch from one OS to the other everytime you go home or go to work.

Recently John Dvorak said that he thinks Ubuntu Linux is a winner.

This might not seem like major news but I think the article articulates the point that Linux has now reached the point where there aren’t the serious technical hurdles to adoption that there were in the past. Whoever came up with the idea of the live disk was definitely onto a good thing. I used Knoppix a few years ago and when Mark Shuttleworth started the Ubuntu foundation I kind of thought that Ubuntu would be the next big thing. Obviously having a pioneer behind this development project is key to its success.

If you haven’t tried Linux yet then take the following 3 simple steps:

1. Download the latest Ubuntu image
2. Burn it to CD
3. Leave the CD in the drive and reboot.

Things will look a bit different, but not all that different. If you don’t like it or don’t know what to do then just reboot your computer (and take the CD out). If you do like it then think about installing it.

One of the things I love about Debian based Linux is the ease with which new applications can be installed. It’s slightly different from doing things on Windows but there’s a ton of open source (free and free) software to be had.

Note: If you don’t have a CD burner or the bandwidth (or patience) to download the CD you can ask for a free copy of Ubuntu.

All the colour elements were added by me!

I used to think that it was almost impossible to edit PDFs if you didn’t pay vast amounts of money to Adobe for Acrobat Professional. Today I discovered that this just isn’t true.

While reading about a free textbook I discovered a link to a “nice free PDF viewer”. I’ve tried a few different PDF viewers in my time so I was a little sceptical but I thought I would take a look given that it had been recommended by someone who is likely to know about such things.

Anyway, it turns out that the PDF-XChange Viewer is rather a wonderful application. It allows various methods of highlighting including underlining, scoring out, text boxes, sticky notes and good old highlighting (see my screenshot example). This can be very helpful for a number of different things:

• Mark the good points in a very long book. Then all you have to do is scroll through and find all the highlighted sections for revision.
• fill in forms instead of having to print them and fill them in by hand. This will make it much easier to email a response back.
• Add your own notes to eBooks and reports you’ve downloaded.

If the document you would like to comment on or annotate is secured than use PDFCreator (or similar program) to print the document to a PDF and you have a fresh start. This is really going to make it easier for me to fill in visa forms!

Another very handy little feature of this program is the ability to quickly load the PDF in Adobe Reader, just in case you need to.

One last cool feature – it’s free to use!

I think his second point regarding tags requires some investigation by Flickr, but I think the main reason to use tags is as a secondary level of categorisation for articles/podcasts/photos that validly fit into more than one category.

Going backwards now to his first point on his readership levels. I think this could be the result of over-promising on the part of what SEO actually achieves. What does it achieve? Well, by definition, it aims to improve the performance of a website in search results. Readership (or visitors) are probably very related to this performance but it depends on what happens when you make the change in your URL structure. How are re-directs handled? Are pages that were previously seen as a single page now producing duplicates? How do the search companies rank a site that appears to have suddenly removed all of its internal linking structure and replaced it?

I think Mr. Dvorak’s article should be read from the perspective that he is a self-proclaimed Cranky Geek.