NiMUG are having another meeting!.
They’re also looking for some Professional Mac users who might want to show off a demo of what they do with their Macs. Or why they use the tools they do.
Anyone fancy a few minutes of free advertising?
James, the EirePreneur, is maintaining a map of Free (or cheap) WiFi hotspots in Ireland. Log into GMail and then you can add extras. I’ve added a few in the North, mostly centred around McDonalds (which explains why I look like I’ve been Supersized).
Add some more in? What about your own?
A German web site did a test between the iPhone and a recent 3G phone in web rendering.
Time in seconds taken to render the following web sites
Webseite iPhone
(EDGE, 2.5G)Nokia E61i
(UMTS, 3G)Die Zeit 76 79 EBay 30 26 Applephoneinfo 31 27
You also have to consider that the iPhone renders it better but that may be an entirely subjective thing.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about “Going Bedouin”, an idea of working that I adore and which I have tried to do for several years, while working for a large telecoms company and also while working for my own company. I feel it helped the company pay for my productivity because as I embraced the flexibility to work from home, the company also received the benefits of me being available possibly 24×7 because I didn’t begrudge the call at 2 am (unlike the call at 2 am I got last night which I certainly did begrudge). It meant I was happy to help people out and most importantly I didn’t feel the need to demand extra money for the privilege.
Chris Brogan’s blog has an interesting post on how to become a digital nomad which is as much a marketing term as “Bedouin”.
It’s important to stay in contact if you’re going to be Bedouin. This means choosing your technology carefully. It’s no longer good enough to carry a pager and mobile phone. The expectation now is that you’ll get your email too and with the release of the iPhone comes the first mature implementation of a browser in a handheld device. It’s relegated my laptop for a lot of the day to the laptop bag.
While I recognise that online apps do provide a lot of power and sometimes a lot more potential for collaboration, I’m still very much a fan of rich clients. I don’t want to use primitive web app user interfaces which haven’t really changed recently. For what they offer, it’s a lowest common denominator model. It works, but it ain’t pretty.
This makes a lot of sense and I’d clarify by saying that as well as centralising some of your services it’s worth considering outsourcing those which don’t add value. Get everyone accounts on the same domain with the same reliable provider and keep these production services separate from your development servers and off your own machines. The economies of scale make it worthwhile.
Just do backups. Don’t mess around with your data. That’s one of the beauties of laptops and PDAs, for the most part they have insuffient storage for keeping all of your data. My laptop has a 160 GB drive in it which is a tenth of what I need for storage. My iPhone has 8 GB of storage which really isn’t enough for anything other than current email. And the odd movie. Keep regular backups and consider keeping your data in the cloud - so you can access it from anywhere.
If you’re not using instant messenger applications in business then you’re behind the times. I have no doubts that Skype and iChat will make it onto the iPhone which will make my phone the hub of my communications network rather than my laptop. I don’t believe for a second that Twitter and similar wanky apps are going to to be the core of the semantic web. They’re missing everything to do with context. I don’t wast to know only a short message about someone. I want to know where they are, how they are and whether they want to meet for coffee. FaceBook or Google would seem to be the contenders here for writing the meta-app which will fulfill your context needs. I just don’t really want content delivered as a side order to a main course of advertising.
This means not only making sure the kit you have is the right kit, but making sure you invest in ways and means to keep that gear running. I get a full day out of my always-on, incredibly busy iPhone. That means, if I’m planning ahead, always making sure I have at least got an iPod connection cable handy for a quick juice-up if I’m running low. For laptops you have to consider most have a battery life of 2-3 hours with some stretching it out to 5. So that’s more bulk to lug about. You’ll also have to get less shy about using power points in coffee shops and airports. The staff in the places I have been have never objected to me plugging in. Scope them out and make a beeline for them if they are free. Power is a more valuable commodity to a mobile worker than WiFi. Think about that.
For me it’s a waiting game. I’m waiting to see what will be possible with the iPhone when the SDK is released as I’m filled with ideas on how to manage this, how to add to what is already out there. I’m less and less keen on FaceBook and their constant barrages of crap but they are in the best position to start providing an implementation of the “digital shadow” (as PJ called it.
So, here’s the deal. Let’s say you want a job as an IT pundit. You first find out whether there’s any jobs. There’s one at ITWire, a site that reports to be “connecting technology professionals”. You use your charm and wit to get a job. Brilliant. They didn’t bother to even check your IT credentials!
So this brings me to Apple’s Xmas gift: wireless networking problems, by Sam Varghese. Like Sam I have a gleaming MacBook Pro. Like Sam I use wireless networking. I also use a variety of wireless routers from Apple’s own brand, premium brands like Cisco and of course, cheap as chips brands which come badged by my local IT shop in a white box.
And no, I’ve not seen any wireless problems with Leopard.
So, what do we have here.
Two people both using ostensibly the same hardware, using the same protocols, using likely the same embedded operating systems in the access points and yet one of them has a problem.
Sam rubs his grey RMS® beard and starts to write an article where he will moan that his wireless isn’t working and blame it on Apple. He makes allusions to a recent fix being very vague ad then not fixing the issue. Can’t really have been a software problem then, Sam. Then, he’s going to finish up with some fairy tale abut how one time at BandCamp he and some Linux d00ds cooked up a hack to help Ubuntu users connect to wireless network and therefore proprietary software is inferior to GPL software.
Okay, so let’s dig a bit deeper.
We don’t really want to dwell on the fact that the networking stack is Leopard is Open Source under the APSL which, despite not beig GPL, is a Free license (according to the FSF at least, though Sam disagrees).
Apparently Apple must now “be well aware” of the issues Leopard has caused with “laptop users”. He’s seriously that generic as if half of the people who bought Leopard since it’s launch (probably half a million laptop users) are all having the same issues as him.
Uh…Sam….you don’t work in tech support do you?
[Interesting to note one of his earlier stories: Was it Automatix or bad RAM that killed Ubuntu?]
Navizon was one of the pioneers of application development for the iPhone and as such I think we’re going to see something cool from them come February when the official iPhone SDK is released.
The Navizon Buddy Finder is probably one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen and something I’d be interested in a lot, however I think I’d work some on the UI before I would be happy with it. We’re going to see an explosion of IM and VoIP apps for the iPhone around then and I would really like to see location based information being available too.
I want to have lists of buddies, I want to be able to name locations and I want to be able to opt out of some updates easily.
As the iPhone is, in effect, always on, I’d like to be have it send updates to my ‘Status server’ so that instead of seeing
MJ
Love Minus Zero - Bob Dylan
in my chosen IM application - I’d have something like:
MJ
Unsent - Alanis Morissette
At Home
or
MJ
She’s so Lovely - Scouting for Girls
At the Daily Grind
or
MJ
You’re the First, The Last, My Everything - Barry White
Location Private
As I said, the UI of Buddy Finder isn’t to my taste but I think that’s more a question of polish and it’s amazing what they have achieved and an indication of what they could achieve with a documented SDK and no fear of a firmware update killing their release!
In some short hours, at 6.02 pm, thousands of people across the UK will be filing into Apple Stores, O2 stores and Carphone Warehouse stores to buy their iPhones.
The police are giving out an advisory not to display your iPhone openly. The debate of course is whether this is:
By this Saturday I’ll have owned an iPod touch for just a week and my impressions remain the same. I absolutely love it. I’ve not filled it - only used about 4 GB of space on it leaving 10 GB free and the only thing I would wish for would be that it had a phone built into it. I’ve been using it as an expensive teaching toy. It’s taught me a lot about the keyboard, about the interface and about the experience.
The keyboard is usable and I’m getting faster. If I’m paying attention then I make no mistakes and if my attention lapses I get either a correction suggested by the iPod or the odd case of egg freckles. I like the interaction and, to be honest, I don’t miss the feedback from pressing keys.
The interface is, of course, legendary by now. It flows, it inspires immediate gadget lust in people who view it and it’s just a lot of fun to play with.
The experience. Well, there are some good points and bad points. I would have to presume that all apps are running all the time because they launch so quickly but I know this not to be the case. The UI is very reminiscent of the Newton and the Palm in that it doesn’t really matter to the end user whether or not the engine under there is multi-tasking or single tasking because the device is really designed to do one thing at a time. There’s no application switching in a sense as it seems you leave one app to enter another, there’s very little sense that you have multiple applications running and, more than that, there’s no indication in the UI that some applications are running and some are not. They just launch when you touch them and disappear when you switch to another application or return to the home screen. The lack of an application switcher does leave you in the situation where you’re in the middle of something and you’re really hesitating switching to another task. I’ve been pleasantly surprised every time that I’ve not “lost my place” or had to start again, but the UI is kinda odd if you’re not used to it and have expectations. The Newton didn’t have pre-emptive multi-tasking but it could do several things at once and the UI for it was good (it also had a good way of doing cut and paste). But Newton is dead, the last Newton was discontinued in February of 1998. I’ve dug out my old Newt as a homage (though the battery pack is buggered) and marvelled at the size of the thing especially considering that I used to carry it around with me everywhere. By itself it was 640g and 210 mm long and 11 mm wide!
So I’m getting an iPhone.
When you see the pile of gear I’m replacing to get one slim device…
| Device | Long side | Short side | Thickness | Mass |
| Nokia N800 | 114mm | 75mm | 13mm | 206g |
| iPod | 104mm | 61mm | 14mm | 156g |
| Sony Ericsson K800i | 106mm | 47mm | 20mm | 115g |
| all replaced with | ||||
| iPhone | 115mm | 61mm | 11.6mm | 135g |
…you can see one advantage of going for this device. 477g (that’s nearly half a kilo, about a pound in weight) of technology will be replaced with a third of that. Sure it’s not quite the same equation. I’ll only have 8 GB of storage (as opposed to 60 GB in the iPod and 4.25 GB in the Nokia N800) but I’ll also only have one device I need to keep charged rather than 3. The battery life on my K800i is very poor and has been since day one with the phone dying if left without charging for more than 36 hours. It’s without a doubt the worst battery of any device I’ve ever had. I’ve heard a similar plea from Nokia N95 users (Hi Pete) which is shame because the E65 has phenomenal battery life and still delivers a great phone experience. So - changing phones will be welcome at any rate.
That, plus the savings I’ll make switching from Orange’s 30 MB a month data plan to O2’s unlimited without limits data plan will make the whole rigmarole worthwhile.
From a post on MacRumors:
O2 is pleased to advise you that we are in the process of implementing new EDGE technology across the UK. This will greatly improve the data speed to 4 to 5 times faster than GPRS on 2G devices such as BlackBerry.
To deliver EDGE, O2 has planned maintenance activities to be carried out on parts of the GPRS network across the UK until the middle of November 2007. This will result in the loss of service to cells that are being upgraded for up to 2 hours at night during the maintenance window from 10pm to 6am.
The full list of EDGE Network upgrades is at that link. Relevant to NI:
Region Area Postcode Date Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT12 6HR 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT14 6NP 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT7 2GB 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT9 5DY 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT4 1DH 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT14 7EE 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT9 6SY 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT2 7BB 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT12 7GL 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT11 8BJ 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Malone BT9 5JH 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT3 9JS 29/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Portadown Craigavon BT63 5PE 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Antrim BT41 2LP 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT36 6UZ 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Portadown BT63 5BA 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Tommesbridge BT41 3RA 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT17 0AT 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders BELFAST BT17 0HD 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Carrickfergus BT38 9DE 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Upper Ballinderry BT28 2PQ 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Antrim BT41 4PR 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Carn Money BT36 6QD 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Milltown BT28 3SL 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Broughshane BT43 7HJ 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Ballymena BT42 3HJ 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast Int Airport BT29 4DW 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Newtonabbey BT36 7LQ 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT15 4AW 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders LISBURN BT28 2UR 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Antrim BT41 1PG 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Craigavon BT65 5AG 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Craigavon BT63 5QQ 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Craigavon BT63 5QE 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Larne BT40 2ST 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Lurgan BT67 9JD 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Dromore BT25 1PR 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Belfast BT8 7XP 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Ballyclare BT39 9BB 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Carrickfergus BT38 9DN 30/9/07 Scotland NI and Borders Sherriffs Mountain BT48 0JX 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Draperstown BT45 7ES 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Dungannon BT71 6SJ 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Londonderry BT48 7AY 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Castledawson BT45 8DU 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Moneymore BT45 7NZ 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Derry BT48 8PY 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Londonderry BT47 6JZ 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Londonderry BT47 5FX 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Londonderry BT47 3LZ 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Cookstown BT80 8HX 3/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Armagh BT60 1JD 27/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Omagh BT78 1PL 27/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Woodview BT61 9HL 27/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Enniskillen BT74 7HR 27/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Omagh BT79 7HT 27/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Omagh BT78 5LU 27/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Tandragee BT62 2EF 28/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Newcastle BT33 0LN 28/10/07 Scotland NI and Borders Kilkeel BT34 4BH 28/10/07
I really want to get out of the rat race.
Not so much the 9-5 thing because I’m most alert during 11 am to about 3 pm and can get the most done during then but definitely the traffic commute. It takes me between 60 and 90 minutes to get to work in the morning and the cruel thing is: I live in Belfast and I work in Belfast (even more chilling is that I’m coming from South Belfast into the City so it’s about 4 miles as the crow flies).
Crawling along the roads at 4 mph isn’t going to do me or the environment any good and other than catching parts of the Chris Moyles show on Radio 1, it’s remarkably uneventful. Leaving the house at 07:45 usually gets me into the office for 9 or so.
If I leave at 07:00, I’m in the office for 07:15 when the sky is still dark outside. On the other hand, if I stay at home until 8:45, I can be in the office for 09:10. There’s something to be said for staggered work starts.
So let’s try to fix this, obviously avoiding the whole work thing isn’t going to wash - we need money to eat, keep a roof over our heads and buy iPods.
Moving far out of town seems reasonable as it would mean leaving extra early and then we’d miss most of the traffic (or miss all of it should we manage to downsize and not need the day job).
Phil said this morning:
Very few people ever want to be where they are.
and I wonder how much of that is true. Is the only reason most people work in these jobs because they pay money? Without work would we all become slovenly couch potatoes? I started this day job back in June because I was finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning.
The small villages on the peninsula and along the coast of Strangford Lough hold the most attraction. It’s rural which means a change of pace. They’ve got broadband so my work can continue. And they’d be a lot better for the kids.
If the village is the right size, I’d also be interested in working to build a community wireless network. After experiences with Belfast City Council and their preferred support of Big Business rather than community efforts, I’m much more inclined to look after the smaller community rather than the whole - they appreciate it more.
The Northern Ireland Science Park may not be the most obvious place for an bedouin entrepreneur but it’s a live and working Bedouin workspace in Belfast’s Titanic quarter. You can Join Up and benefit from the following:
Bronze (available to individuals only) - £50 per quarter paid in advance (1 month notice). All services provided are tracked and billed.
Service includes: -
Applications will be considered by NISP management on the basis of need and value to the individual and of the value to the NISP project. Irrespective of any of these criteria, NISP reserves the right at its absolute discretion to refuse any company application.
So, more Co-Working space in Ireland than you can shake a stick at!
