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More sanyo s750 fun?

I've been doing my research on the 3g forum just recently. Some things of interest.

From Frazzel

The video calling is good as it lets you play back a video to someone your talking to also while on hold you will see windmills and hear some chillout music. Very different!

Not yet checked this out because everyone I know on 3g is using 3 (the company). I think I may know one person on Vodafone Live 3g but no one on Orange 3g. Hey talking of which is it actually possible to do cross network video calls yet? Or do we have to go through the whole interop thing for the 4th time now?

About those Bluetooth problems I was having, well I got them still and Jonstatt sums up the problem. The bluetooth implementation is nowhere near as good as Sony Ericsson. You can only have one bluetooth profile selected at a time whereas the Sony will auto select the right one.. I tried the sync option as described here but decided to just export vcards out of outlook then copy them to the sd card. When in the s750, it will let you import them with no problems. It seems generally people are sending back there sanyo phones which I may do if I can not setup bluetooth dialup within the next week. There is some light however, some people have got it working with the ipaq, mac, a toshiba laptop and even a pc. I got a feeling the last two are pre service pack 2 pc's and I'm going to make a long call to orange about my 3g ipaq dialup connection!

Its 4am, and I've finally got the ipaq to dialup GPRS and 3G over Bluetooth with the Sanyo S750! Actually this is now the 6th time i've done it. Whats the settings I'm using? First thing I've pared the two using the headset method described here. Then I'm using *99# to dialup orange and no modem string of any kind. Now to be fair, I did once get the dialup to work with the string at+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” but not consistently like the no string option. I'm now currently trying to work out why it didnt work before. Other things I noticed, I always have to dialup via the ipaq bluetooth manager otherwise it never works no matter what i do. The baud rate seems to work best on 57600 rather than 115200 and wait for dialtone slows the connection process down alot. I've also just been playing a little more and found +cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” works, but not as well as no extra modem commands. I really need to post this on the 3g forum soon.

I was trying to test the speed of the 3g connection and I can not find one tester which doesnt use javascript of java to complete the test. I really want to know what kind of speeds are possible using this 3g connection now. Which also reminds me to check to see if I get 50meg of 3G data too? By the way, if your interested in the quality of the 1.3 megapix camera check out these two great shots. Yep he's a lady killer…

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Future conference choices

Which one would you go to? and of course, how would you justify it?

Doors of perception 8 in New Delhi, India – 19-26 March 2005
O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, America – 14-17 March 2005
SVG Open 2005 in Enschede, Netherlands – 15-19 August 2005
The World Wide Web conference 2005 in Chiba, Japan – 10-14 May 2005
XTech 2005 (use to be XML Europe) in Amsterdam, Netherlands – 25-27 May 2005

Well if I can finally find time to write my SVG paper before the looming deadline of Feb 1st 2005, I would get a huge discount into SVG open 2005. (By the way, my new Sanyo S750 plays SVG). I was planning on a presentation on the Art and Design, Data Connection or Evangelism & Specs tracks. Even if I miss out on the paper call, I'm still going to create some kind of promotional animation showing off SVG at its best and hopefully projected on to the white walls of the university. Back to the subject, if worst comes to worst I'm going to pay for the conference because its so close, flights and sleeping arrangements will be cheap and its an excuse to go back to the netherlands again.

Update, thanks to Joel. I'm going to submit a paper to XTECH 2005 on behalf of BBC World Service about RSS. My main push will be about publishing RSS in 35 different languages and then how were publishing extra metadata to help build a better picture of the content. I'll also touch on how were able to service 3 different types of end points with the same content. Should make an interesting but challenging talk for those involved in the xml world. I wish BBC News lots of success with there paper, and honestly think if both papers are accepted this would be great for the BBC. You only have to look at the line up for Emerging technology to see how diverse and forward looking the BBC is.

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Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies

From BoingBoing.net

In an interview on news.com, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described free culture advocates as a “modern-day sort of communists.”

Q: “In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

A: “No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned–including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system–there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.”

Ok this damm right offensive, where does he get off saying the free-culture movement is sort of like the communists movement. I cant wait to hear what others say about this part of the interview. I'm glad the Bill Gates is worried about free-culture, but this kind of misunderstanding leads to fear and stupid reactions to something quite normal. I mean come on now, you seriously think having a flexable IP system which allows the long tail to be productive is some what anti-captist? Get real! Jon Udell discussed the propsal of the long tail, opensource, creative commons and free-culture in the case of audio recently. And i'm sorry but none of the thoughts sounded communistic in anyway. (some more on the longtail here)

Anyway, I hope Lessig reminds all of us that were so above these silly comments. And that free-culture, creative commons, archive.org, open-source, free software, the creative archive are all part of what makes the internet great and Bill Gates needs to get on now or catch up later.

Update, more views about Gates outburst, while the list grows in blogdigger
Gates Calls Patent Reformists “Communists” from of all places xbmc blogger
Gates brands IPR opponents Communists a link from planet Mozilla
More Gates “Creative Commies” propaganda from boingboing
And what I've been waiting for, lessig replies to Bill Gates. As expected, he takes the moral highground and reminds Bill that he should once in a while engage in a conversation with his own employees. Ow, what a stinger in the tail.

Ok last few comments on the topic now. This weeks Gillmor gang also covers Bill Gates comment but Robert Scoble is in the Hot and uncomfitable seat. Its well worth the listening to, I am suprised that Doc Searls doesnt take it too seriously, i mean I dont and do. Anyway whats really interesing is Miles comments. He pointed out that Bill Gates is surrounded by Yes people who wouldnt dare say anything out of turn (I mean listen to Robert Scoble when Dan asks for his view). And its not even Bill Gates talking, its Microsoft's Shareholders view of the free culture advocates… And in that we are done for now.

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Sanyo S750 is now with me

At last, I made the switch to the Sanyo S750. Generally, I'm quite impressed with the operating system and the phone. Its the first phone I've seen which has a decent copy and paste function. Email was a easy as pie to setup, i was tempted with using gmail but decided to stick to hotpop for now. The screen is so slick and beautiful that I cant bear to take off the plastic cover. I still cant believe it has the same rez as my ipaq! The T9 seems very good and allows for multiple languages. I'm glad to say it records all its movies in 3gp format and you can save pictures in either jpg or 24bit png which is amazing! By the way the camera quaity is great and puts my spv to shame. Sanyo really thought about the phone and included simple things like unlimited video recording on to the SD card, ringtones in many formats and unified inboxes for all messages.

However its not all good. First thing I'm having a huge a problem transfering my contacts via bluetooth and infrared from my spv2 and ipaq. It will do one contact at a time which sucks when you got 250 contacts needed to be synced. I really dont want to do it via my laptop but it looks like may have to export vcards from outlook or use the software on the cd. I also tried to hack the settings for orange network sync into the phone so I could use the orange sync option. But it simply refuses to work.
Another thing which is related to bluetooth contacts problems. It seems the Bluetooth only accepts one request then hangs up and kicks you back to the home screen. What this means is, if you want to sync multiple contacts it will simply hangup after the first one sent. The bluetooth also seems to be only on for a certain period of time (maybe to reserve battery life, which is pretty damm good so far). What this means is I need to tell the S750 to get ready to dialup or recieve a item before the event. This sucks big time when using my ipaq. I'm very use to just dialing up with my phone still in my pocket. There has got to be a way around this problem!

Anyhow, other things I've found. Mobile SVG support works but I need to explorer it more. The browser is a openwave xhtml and wap 2.0 browser and its pretty good, but I would rather have Opera thank you! There seems to be no way to have more than one email account on the phone, and I never saw an option for imap just pop3. USB storage mode is useful, because it turns the phone into a USB keychain, but only if you buy the optional usb cable. Not seen this option on any other phone, oh plus the phone does accept sd cards higher than 256meg, I put my 512meg in without any problems. You just got to create folders like a digital camera.

Formats supported by the phone out of the box
Documents [/Sanyo/Media Album/Documents] – SVG (.svg, .svgz), vCard (.vcf), vCalendar (.vcs), vNote (.vnt), Text (.txt).
Melody & Ringtones [/Sanyo/Media Album/Melody & Ringtones] – AAC (.3gp, .mp4), MIDI (.mid, .midi), Voice (.amr), MP3 (.mp3).
Videos [/Sanyo/Media Album/Video List] – Mpeg4 (.3gp, .mp4), H.263 (.3gp, .mp4)
Pictures [/Sanyo/Media Album/Picture] – PNG (.png), GIF (.gif), Bitmap (.bmp), Wireless bitmap (.wbmp), JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg, .jpe)

Generally its a good phone but needs alot of hacking to make it a great phone. I'm just worry if its actually quite hackable and if people will.

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PocketRSS 2.0 is out

Following on from my podcasting with only pocketrss 2.0 entry. Happyjackroad have released version 2.0.1.6 which is the gold version for anyone to listen to. Users of 1.42 can upgrade for free, which is good stuff. Enjoy!

PocketRSS 2.0 screenshots

Features
ability to use Today Screen plugin within PocketBreeze – not much use to me, but very cool today screen plugin none the less
database storage for faster feed viewing/searching/history archiving – yeah beats flat xml files for speed.
simple Feed content management – Yep simple but also advanced and fully featured
namespace/xml mapping feature for advanced users – Seriously crazy feature, which few desktop readers even do
custom view modes (including dynamic, keyword-based views) – yep nicely natrual aggregated views
Feed Wizard to easily add/find new RSS Feeds – includes feedster search and pulls opml files off the web, which few desktop readers do still
support for “stylus-free” viewing /images/emoticons/laugh.gif -pad optimized) – Ideal for reading in a crowded london train
feed item control (read,unread,locked,delete,etc.) – yep very cool
ability to download full article links for offline viewing – bit hit and miss but useful none the less
ability to download audio content (aka podcasting) – No other client does this on the pocketpc yet, enough said!
support for WM2003 SE landscape mode (and VGA) – I dont have a WM2003 SE device so I cant test it
improved network connections – Yep its good
overall new look-n-feel – Didnt like it at first, but love it now.

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Happy new year one and all…

Peace happiness health friendship for one and all

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IMDB webservices, when amazon when?

I was listening to a podcast today from Jeff Bezos at web 2.0, and I heard Amazon were developing there webservice more. So I zoomed over to the Amazon webservice blog and nothing except typepad users can now get there wishlists. Which generally pissed me off and I dropped a bad temper comment, which I wish I didnt. However I did look around for the Alexa and IMDB webservices and instead found this and this which made me feel a whole load better.

Just got home from work and Jeffrey Barr dropped me a email, next time I should think before I comment, as I've now been told!

Hi Ian,

Thanks for your comment. The Wishlist content is available via our
API. For example, here is a REST request to retrieve my personal
list

The “1G7V8WTVT8NPP” in this request is the Id of my wishlist. You
can use the Customer Content search to locate any public wishlist,
like this

Using the same API you can also get to a list of all content
(lists, reviews, and so forth) created by the user.

Does this answer your question?

Jeff;

Well yes it does, I cant help but feel this wasn't very clear at the time when I was looking at the Amazon webservices. Anyway thanks Jeffrey for the quick reply, and i'll be using it.

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Ravensbourne Audio Lectures on Archive.org at long last

Yes its been a super long time in coming, but finally the audio for the copyright vs community lectures and bbc creative archive lectures have been uploaded to the internet archive for everyone to rip, remix and burn under the creative commons licence of Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. I've done the best I can with the metadata of the files and also the site content, so please take it easy with the aggresive comments.

It should take a couple of days till the audio is ready to be taken, but I dont foresee any problems with it going through sometime after just new years. By the way, the video is on the way but its going to take a little more time (after new years for sure now). I had huge problems with the firewire drive and imovie (give me moviemaker or premiere any day) which actually meant I lost a load of footage which I had to recover using a linux tool. The copyright vs community lectures are ok but the creative archive footage needs alot more work.

Update, as of 23:00 GMT, the creative archive audio is avaliable for download and streaming. Its already been heard 3 times and thats not me.

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Audioscrobbling now

Ages ago I heard and looked at Audioscrobbler and wrote it off because I didn't like the idea of sharing my preferences in music with the public. However looking at it again almost a year later I'm using it. The fact the data is licenced under the Creative Commons License (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike), speaks volumes to my ear. Plus of course its all anonymous statistics, but it would be nice to get just your own data once in a while. However theres a ton of things I really want to change…

Firstup, what is up with < No Title > in the rdf feed? Why not have the track title or something instead? I was going to complain about the fact the submission engine seems to ignore podcasts but I was wrong thank goodness. Here is the Jeff Bezos (web 2.0) submission, which I was listening to at work today. Its a real shame audioscrobbler cant tell the difference between a podcast and a music track. Will Jeff Bezos ever have top fans? groups? top songs? Dont think so. I only just sorted the itunes audioscrobbler plugin proxy settings yesterday so Adam Curry's daily source code is not listed. I think it would be very interested to see who else is listening. Check out the Gilmor gang and ITconversations. So at least people are listening and audioscrobbler is doing something with it.

Ok next major thing, scream! I only listen to music and podcasts at work from my computer because I cant do it any other way. However at home I listen to stuff through my xbox media centre and when on the go through my ipaq and smartphone. So all that information is just lost, which is actually bulk of my listening! So ways forward, a audioscrobbler plugin for xbmc anyone?. For the mobile devices, theres already talk about capturing this data and then reporting back when the device is synced or online. Dana Greenlee talked about the problem with revenues when comparing streaming against download and she suggested something simular. And i'm starting to think this is going to be a bigger issue soon. Not only for revenue but for the audience and broadcaster. For example, if I the adam curry or mr evil genius knew how many times I fast forward there music, it may have some bearing on the next show? I douht it, but that information to gage how popular a tune could be. Am I right in saying Apple think they will sell another 4 million ipods next year and there will be millions of mp3phones sold next year. Who wants streaming audio on your phone when you can carry your own content with you? Yes I know you can justify your revenue with streaming but lets get creative and do something where all those offline device stats can be taken if the person opts in.

The whole last.fm thing is interesting but also kinda of iffy for me. I know the people behind this project, they were MA students and staff and it started out as a project in the college. And through a little bust-up, the project went off on a commercial tail. What happened next? who knows, who cares. Just gives me a funny feeling about seeing it. I dont think I'll be using it anyway because it relies on streaming which bugs me for the reasons above.

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Traditional downloading and beyond torrents

My wife refered to downloading using peer 2 peer networks like kazaa and winmx as traditional downloading in a conversation about Shareaza and bit torrent. I personally think the term Traditional downloading is so funny for all the right reasons, and it should on wordspy under networking or communications. Honestly I can not even start to explain why its funny.

Anyway in other thoughts, I've been looking around for new torrent sites since two of the best have gone offline. Suprnova and Torrentbits went offline at the same time during last week, which has something to do with the raids by the MPAA? Anyway things have moved on and there will be an announcement by suprnova tomorrow at 9pm GMT. I personally think its something to do with Exeem. I mean even the unofficial faq has this flashing lights.

When will SuprNova.org be back?
Never as it was. If it eventually does come back up, it won't feature ANY links to torrents at all.

However theres no mention of Exeem here, and I have yet to listen to the Novastream mp3 which is still sitting on my ipaq after days. But theres tons more links here and theres even screen shots of the beta here. By the way just incase you not read it yet, stop reading and check out the wired interview with Bram Cohen.

On the Torrentbits side of things – theres already movement around a torrentbits2 site but were all too late already… Anyway here's a few sites I've checked out and like so far…
http://www.tvtorrents.tv , http://torrentspy.com , http://torrentreactor.net , http://elitetorrents.org , http://lokitorrent.com and couple more. This list will get you started. I've also found RSS and IRC very useful during this time of unrest in the torrent world. Looking past Bit torrent, there are already people building systems which work in the same way as bit torrent but keep everyones ip hidden. My favourate p2p technology has to be PDTP which looks pretty much like bittorrent but with added bonuses. I mean a piece proxy is a novel concept in its self, I just hope there more protected than trackers in a traditional bit torrent network. Also on the plus side, lets not forget Freenet and darktorrent. As the Engadget guys said today, there are people working on better and faster ways to get information around and Hollywood will not be able to stop them.

Cluetrain #57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner

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