Thanks to our new friends at BudgetGadgets, I have been given the opportunity to review good quality products listed on their website. They have a wide range of items on offer, from Garden things to Electronics at very low prices (Which is handy due to the *cough* recession). They have kindly offered me a Mini Keychain Universal TV Remote Control to test and play with.
As some of you know, the Asus EeePC 701 was reviewed a few months back by TechRant’s own Linux Geek. Now you may think that all Netbooks are practically the same, but they are very different. Since the OLPC program was launched and the EeePC released to children in developing countries (via the Give 1 Get One Program), several manufacturers have tried to grab their share of the market by releasing notebooks in various sizes and colours.
Though similar in size ranging from 7″ models to 10.2″, they have different hardware specs (though a majority are similar). The Samsung NC10 runs on the newly developed Intel atom architecture boasting a clock speed of 1.6GHz of Hyper-threading goodness. The EeePC 701 has a Celeron M 353 under its hood clocking at 0.9GHz.
Memory wise, the NC10 has a 1GB of RAM as standard whereas the EeePC has only half of that. Both netbooks come with XP preinstalled (Though a linux version is available for the EeePC, but to make things fair, I will compare the XP versions). Having only half a gig of RAM may make the netbook rather sluggish at running multiple applications though luckily RAM is user upgradable on both netbooks.
As promised from a while back, this is part 2 of the tutorials: Installing ported apps from the G900. The G900 is the latest offering (and probably the last) of a smartphone running UIQ3 from Sony Ericsson. It has the same specs as my P1i except for a 5MP camera and it also has a much improved user interface which sadly aren’t available on the P1. This is where the mods come in. At the moment there are only two mods available. One utilises the camera LEDs and the other is a nifty little app…
There is nothing that annoys me more than people who demand special attention and special care for the most retarded of reasons. There are those who cannot read black letters on a white background, yet they can read black characters on a yellow background. How does that work? Surely there’s a higher contrast between white and black than there is against black and yellow (I’ve since been informed that its not contrast but forms of colour blindness and side effects of dyslexia that causes this. No offence intended). The one that annoys me most is those who claim to be allergic to wifi or other radiowaves this condition is called Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (check out the link to read more about it (mostly biased)). Now i believe there are many flaws with this, before i go into the flaws i shall first explain what WiFi is.
Wifi is a radio signal, on the Electromagnetic scale it is on the the long wavelength, low frequency, low energy side of the spectrum. On the other side you get high energy, very short wavelength, high frequency gamma rays which can cause damage to cells and penetrate thick layers of lead. The visible light part is in the middle of this spectrum. Now i can understand if one “allergic” to gamma rays seeing as it has the potential to kill anything that’s exposed to it.
As all of you know (the 3 of you who read these posts) I own a Sony Ericsson P1i which is a powerful little smart phone. With a ARM processor clocked at 208MHz and 128MB of RAM it is capable of doing loads at once. The phone runs a variant of Symbian called UIQ (Nokias use the S60 3rd version) which is currently at its final version, UIQ3.
Sadly, its the end of UIQ due to the symbian merger but also due to the fact SE and Motorolla no longer have interest in continuing its development. Its a shame to see an operating system with huge potential to be ditched. Looks like we will have to rely on all the modders to supply new stuff because we definitely wont be getting updates and bug fixes from SE.
UIQ3, compared to its previous version UIQ2 have security features implemented which blocks access to all of the system folders and more annoyingly requires applications to be signed before they can be installed.
The new must have tech in education: the interactive smartboard. These cost at around £1500 each (excluding projector) so they are an expensive investment. But are they really necessary?
What I don’t understand is why they are needed in every classroom for every single subject. Though they make a school look high tech and for the right subjects they are a benefit for subjects such as physics where there are interactive demonstrations (like bloody oscillations of a spring). For subjects such as Mathematics or English they are absolutely pointless. In my maths class there is a smartboard installed, and its only purpose is a projector screen, nothing else which is a huge waste. Surely a whiteboard would make a cheaper projector screen.
There is a pretty high chance that there is intelligent life out there. Our galaxy the milky 
way is about 100,000 lightyears in diameter (a lightyear is the distance that light travels in a period of a year, that’s exactly 9,460,730,472,580 kM). No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space… Uhh yeah, even if we were being watched I doubt any ET life will be interested in us and our failure as a race. To add insult to injury, the online social networking site Bebo has decided it will spam the galaxy (even though it fills your inbox with crap)!
Well its (it was…) that time of year when the weathers all hot and sticky (Well it should be, crappy british weather). You’re sat in your room (probably in front of your pc) and youve left your window open. Well chances are something is gonna fly in and pester you, so what do you do to stop that? You close your window but then you have to put up with the heat.
Even when the window is closed those sneaky little pain-in-the-arses still manage to get into your room and fly around like a retard hitting the walls, your monitor and in my case, my face.
Well now its time for revenge! (more…)
Those of you who know me personally know that I am utterly useless with directions. I’ve lived in Eastbourne for about 16 years but if you ask me to take you somewhere local I’d just sit there staring at you blankly. So to save myself embarrassment, I’ve bought myself a shiny Satnav.
This is the TomTom Go520 and for its price and size, it has a lot of features packed into it. Costing you around £160 which I say is a fair price for what you get. Firstly you get a simple to use device that gets you from A to B in the way you tell it to (e.g. Fastest Route, Shortest Route, Walking Route etc.) though this doesn’t make it unique its the other features that make a TomTom what it is. One of these is the IQ routing. This clever feature takes time of day, time of year, speed limits, motorways, back-routes puts it into this magical formula and out comes the fastest routes, so you avoid traffic jams that occur at specific times of day on certain roads. The other feature is called Advanced Lane Guidance.
Well thanks to Mr Appaholic and his skills which allow me to post from my phone!! (finally i get to use this phone for a larger potential).
Well just a post to say hi to everyone, Im Cooper your Gadget Geek! I love to rant and bitch so yeah..
Anywho my first rant:
I love my phone. It does all the things i want and more! My phone runs symbian UIQ which used to be a good thing until they decided to merge all the individual “distros” (uiq, s60) meaning that all the bugs in the current uiq platform will never be fixed. At least im luckier than those stuck with the previous uiq release whose phones were crippled with bugs.
At the moment the wifi on my phone doesnt work (this could be because i have a wireless N network). Using SMTP to sync my email crashes my phone. There is no flash lite support nor an update for the preinstalled opera mobile browser.
Currently im relying on a group of “hackers” to port varous aspects of updated uiq software (which they are doing a good job of!). But cmon, Sony Ericsson should be providing these updates.
