On the Beat

I have just bought a Nexus 7 - a companion for Nexus 4 phone. I like it a lot. It works just like my phone. Indeed, since I rarely use my phone as a phone, it is pretty identical. Apart from being much bigger.

I got it for several reasons. Well, two.

Firstly, I am going away for a couple of weeks, somewhere I'm not likely to have the internet, and I thought it would be good to load up some things to watch in iPlayer. At this it fails singularly. No fault of the Nexus; the Android iPlayer app uses only streaming, not downloaded, media. So if I'm not connected, I can't use iPlayer.

Secondly, I have a cat. (You may have noticed this.) When I sit down, Talisker often sits on my lap, particularly in the evenings. And when he does this, I cannot use my laptop, my lap being otherwise occupied. I reckoned a handheld device - bigger than my phone - would mean I could write stuff whilst sitting on the sofa.

At this, it works admirably well. As I have a cast on my lap right now.

One downside, perhaps, may be an increased level of typos. Which will please some people.

As you may know, I am moving in about a month, and the flat I shall temporarily be living in currently has neither a phone line nor broadband. (These things are connected, of course. Or rather, there is no connection at all…)

I am not sure how long I will be staying there, so I really don’t want to embrace a phone company or get into an annual broadband contract, and have been thinking through what I might do.

I have two ideas: getting mobile broadband, or getting an up-to-date mobile phone which will allow me to access the internet through its connection (using the phone as a modem, in essence).

I was in my mobile providers shop yesterday, talking through the options.

I fell in love with the Android G1 phone. I thought it was wonderful. I am not particularly enamoured by gadgets – I have had my current phone for about three years, well past its replace-by date. But if I have to use my mobile for all my calls, I’ll need to increase my contract, and I might as well get a new phone out of the bargain.

I really, really like the G1. It just felt right.

Unfortunately, the one thing it can’t do is be used as a modem to dial up the internet from my computer.

Lots of other phones can do that – the guy said they were LTCH enable or some other irritating acronym… But not the G1. It could do that, but it can’t – the manufacturers haven’t bothered.

Which is a real pity.

So I could get a different, probably equally as good (but not so desirable) phone... Or I could get a 3G mobile broadband modem and stick with my current, old, not internet friendly phone.

Or I could get a 3G mobile broadband modem and the G1…

I guess it is all down to how much I want to pay.

There is also another proviso: the flat I’m moving to is a basement. Which means it might not get a 3G signal at. In which case, I’m fucked!

If anyone out there uses Photoshop Elements, can you explain the difference between the clone stamp and the healing brush? They seem to do exactly the same thing to me.

Ta!

After watching Strictly Come Dancing, I caught up with a tv programme I recorded a ten days ago, about building a stream locomotive. From scratch.

I like steam trains. I'm not obsessive or anything. But I have been watching a lot of BBC4's recent (and ongoing) series of programmes about steam trains.

Tonight I watched Absolutely Chuffed¹, about a group of men who decided to build an A1 class locomotive. It took them eighteen years or so, and three million pounds.

And it made a really good tv programme. There was a lot of the Titfield Thunderbolt about the enterprise: a certain professional-amateurishness and the fact that everyone kept telling them that it would never work.

It did; and I wish I had been there.


¹Although the programme is still on iPlayer, I have no idea how long it may stay there, since usually programmes only stay for a week - and it is over seven days since this was shown...

iPods are most likely to cause injury to cats...

via Arbroath, who also had this excellent photograph...

Last week, the Independent carried a report that the Government had plans to keep track of all our phone calls and web-browsing.

Today, Boing Boing is reporting that you'll need a passport to buy a mobile phone. This of course makes sense - how else could they keep track of all that data? - but it is also a further example of the erosion of freedom this Government seems so keen to pursue.

The is a full article in The Times Online.

The front page of today's The Independent had the roaring headline "Storm over Big Brother database, although Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, has just been on the radio saying "it is not a database of calls, emails..."

The BBC has more information.

Given the UK government's - and their contractor - rather clumsy habit of losing data with frightening frequency , this is very worrying.

Coupled with the continuing Government pressure for ID cards, I can imagine every conman and fraud rushing to find jobs in the Civil Service.

One of the other things Mark Fletcher said in his talk was that the more you link to people, the more they link back - and hence you can build your audience, because people trawling through those blogs will pick up on you (as long as what you say is pertinent and inteliigent - natch!).

Also, he reckoned that it made a lot of sense to search blogs for your own name - he does, with an RSS-enabled blogsearch, so presumably it just shows up on his RSS feed. So I am just waiting for him to drop by here...

Until recently, I had been spared the pain of spam, the crowding out of useful email by junk email. Somehow, though, my personal email address has been discovered by the purveyors of this junk, and I now get several spam emails a day.

( Spam! Wonderful Spam! )

One of the websites at the entrepreneurs pitch evening was www.groopit.com, which allows to organise meetings and book tickets and things.

On Friday, someone I'm working with mentioned Meet-O-Matic. This also allows you to organise meetings - more for commercial than social occasions - and it seems to be pretty good.

I just thought you might find it useful.