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At first I thought this was just a bug on the latest v9.5 build of Opera, but no it seems that I’m not alone. When Google finally added search to Google Reader the whole thing has sort of stopped working in Opera, thank goodness for OPML and Bloglines (which has improved quite a bit since I last commented on it). I’m still trying to understand why search was’nt built into Google reader in the first place, seeing as its what Google is good at and all and also how they managed to release without testing in Opera. Now I’m not going to go on a ‘mines better than yours’ rant over it as I am aware of the market figures for Opera desktop, however the mobile version has a very strong following and this has stopped working on Google reader as well. Quite a short sighted move, seeing as its taken so long to add search as a feature one might have thought they would of had time to test it!

Just picked up this one from one of my work related RSS feeds, essentially a DVB to IP multicast convertor, this is designed for corporate enviroments by the sound of things and definatly not the home network but it can’t be too long before someone makes a more compact version to do similar things on a home network, it’d be a perfect add-on for a home server. I know someone who has done this in linux, sending out the transport stream from a DVB-T receiver over multicast and then using VLC to act as the ‘tuner’, certainly something I’ll be trying once I get my home server up and running…

The contract has come up on my O2 XDA MiniS, its been a good phone to be honest although I wasn’t sure at first, Windows Mobile is not without its issues for me at least, MMS support is woefully poor (in WM5), the integration with Outlook while great for some is not perfect for me, but there are ways around this such as Gmobilesync for the calendar. All the same, the benefits delivered in terms of flexibility, availability of third party software such as Google Maps Mobile, and increased use of the device as a result make it worth while.

A short while ago the iPhone coverage couldnt be avoided, I’m just thankful its over now, every US blogger of note had themselves worked up into a frenzy over this thing (in another news Kleenex announced a record sales increase for the same period (sorry bad joke)). Me, I can’t see myself parting with that much money for a phone, if I had the money I’d could buy a nice big flat tv for that sort of cash. Additionally, having had the luxury of a full keyboard on my current hand set I can’t bring myself to part with it, I prefer the tactile feedback of a real thumb board to a virtual keyboard, whether it has an Apple symbol attached or not. Someone has been quick to conduct research to prove the value of this tactile feedback as well.

In the perfect world, a replacement handset would have 3G, Wifi, GPS, physical qwerty keyboard, touchscreen and 2 sim card slots so I can ditch the work phone. Closest I can find is the E-ten M700, which has almost everything except the 2 sim card slots. Its either that or the HTC Kaiser which as mentioned on my Google Maps post I have been assured should be released fairly soon on T-Mobile. They both have their positives, the HTC has a better camera, however styling, size and an improved GPS chipset (SiRFstar III) make the E-ten a winner for me, I have a decent camera already. I just need to find a network who’ll carry it now unless I go back on what I said earlier about paying for phones and cough up but its not cheap!

Update (12/11/2007): I bought the Kaiser, click here for the post. 

I had a go at using Google Maps Mobile for the first time yesterday on my O2 XDA Mini S, I must say I was impressed, its interesting to see that this is the only application (that I am aware of) which Google have released as a proper Windows Mobile installer. There’s a java based application for Gmail but its pretty useless for the most part, if they had taken the time to make a full program for windows mobile perhaps it might have had useful features such as integration with the today screen on windows mobile and not such a dodgy connection with the gmail servers.

I digress, anyway, I ended up trying maps mobile on Oxford street in the end after failing to find a particular branch of Maplin, the fact that you can install from the phone without going through active sync is in itself a good thing. I’ve yet to try it out with the bluetooth GPS I use for satnav but I’m impressed so far.

Now the only bad part is standing there thinking of the data costs and cringing, my next phone is probably going to be the HTC Kaiser and with that I think one of the T-Mobile web n walk plans might go down quite well. I’ve been in contact with a couple of T-mobile people via email and have been assured that they will be carrying the phone, although they refuse to comment further on when, they won’t even narrow it down to a month which is quite frustrating. However when it does arrive, with GPS on board this should be quite a decent phone to use with the maps app.

Update (12/11/2007): I bought the Kaiser and yes google maps works very well, click here for the post…

Even though I am quite attached to Google’s wide range of services, I’ve always used Bloglines in the past as my feed aggregator, sometimes its nice to be supporting someone other than Google! Unfortunatly the ‘Bloglines Plumber’ popped his head up again this morning. Its a pity, I actually quite liked Bloglines as an aggregator, it was never ground-breaking in its approach but when it works its quick and easy to use.

The obvious successor is of course Google Reader, having a Google account means the sign-up is done and although I can only see myself using it three or four times a year, the offline capability added recently makes it more attractive. The feature I’m most thankful for is that items are not marked as read until you actually see them on screen. With Bloglines, if you click on a feed from the side panel, all the new items within that feed are marked as read whether you’ve had a chance to actually read them or not. Both this and the nice use of AJAX to allow you to read archives easily by just carrying scrolling are excellent. At the same time my major gripe is that Google, the god’s of search somehow forgot to include a search function as part of Reader which could be a matter of some annoyance.

I know Google Reader has been around for a while and the features I’ve mentioned are not exactly new, but its a novelty and a nice surprise for someone coming from Bloglines and being used to living without these features.

I noted today on via TechCrunch that a Belgian court has just ruled that ISP’s are responsible for preventing illegal filesharing by their users.

Similar to me attacking the postman for putting a bill through my door I guess, but as its based on EU legislation I’ve no doubt it’ll be winging its way over to the UK sooner or later.

So ISP legal and infrastructure costs will go up as they move to try and enforce this and broadband prices will shoot as a result. Yay!

Saw this while out and about in London and it just doesnt seem right, I know McDonald’s claim healthy options on their menu, but we all know that for the most part its damn unhealthy. So here’s one next to Guy’s hospital…

One of the side things I do is supply New Media Knowledge with a full RSS feed of their latest website content via the screen scraping and RSS engine I wrote to use for the BBC website and others (although its slightly different in that NMK has no original RSS feed).

Unfortunatly this seems to have suffered a little bit of an accident (which as these things do happened while I was on holiday). I’ll try to get onto it properly as soon as possible although I have made a temporary (but not quite watertight!) patch.

 Update: After the NMK fire and the subsequent move to a Wordpress based blog I think this is now surplus to requirements!

So today apparently the G8 have moved “forward” with agreements on Climate Change as Mr Blair put it. All I can see is continued attempts to sweep aside the rising media and public noise urging more action on climate change. I think I should be forgiven for missing what they have achieved, I still find it incredible how childish an attitude is displayed by these the figures who are controlling this planets immediate future. The attitude that we won’t do anything if person/group x won’t is surely more reminiscent of a playground or a child’s response to a parents request when their sibling is not expected to follow the same request. It is important that climate change is a world wide effort, but whilst the G8 argue and fail to take any sort of credible or actionable stand, many smaller countries are getting on with it. Maybe something that they should consider, lead by example and all that!

Big Brother is the other point, something which I highly detest and only picked up on via the radio. Channel 4, worried over possible head bashing from Ofcom have evicted a contestant for referring in what appears to be a none-aggressive manner to another as a ‘nigger’. Yet Channel 4’s E4 flagship entertainment channel plays music during the day which should surely be considered just as, if not more derogatory. Double standards?

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Technorati : Big Brother, E4, G8, blair, climate change

Home media for the younger grouping of more technical minded people becomes a bit of a concern after a while. I’ve been considering options myself both for managing and storing digital media in a preferably protected manner as well as aquisition itself, be this via internet delivery or more traditional broadcast options (being in the UK this is DVB in my case). Firstly I’m considering what it needs to cater for. I have at home in regular use, one desktop, one laptop and an original Xbox running XBMC (Xbox Media Center), on this note I have yet to find a couch compatible media player which outdoes XBMC, especially when you consider the price (free!). I also live with others who might also wish to pull/push content at the same time so performance is a key consideration. In terms of media aquisition, bittorrent support is a definate must and expandability to cope with new delivery platforms is important. Broadcast DVB media could be aquired via this route, but my preference would be for a local receiver option.

Power consumption should also be decent, with the government busy bolstering the economy and pretending to care about the enviroment, energy prices are unlikely to fall and with multiple users and downloads to handle, the device will do considerable hours.

So from my point of view, the key points wind up being:

• Flexible (Bittorrent, perhaps DVB, DAAP?)
• Low power consumption (as low as possible)
• Expandable Storage (1Tb at least, RAID or similar redundancy a plus)

There’s an awful lot of interesting large capacity storage devices, unfortunatly most of them will not do the wide range of tasks which I would like them to perform as well as storage. Its a pity, especially with things like the Drobo around, extremly easy to use and well made, just a bummer its USB only, suitable for photographers etc (incidentally I picked up on the Drobo via Thomas Hawk). I originally thought the lack of USB was a bit short sighted of the developers but the review on ZDNet reveals a bit more about the market, turns out my needs are those of a minority (funny that). There are also things like the Buffalo Terrastation which received mixed press when it came out, or there’s the Infrant ReadyNAS devices, but they’re sort of expensive and thats without drives.

The best thing I’ve found so far as a prebuilt solution is the Bubba, runs Debian Linux as a backend, Webserver, Email, Print and file server in one as well as built in bittorrent support (although the bundled torrent handling isn’t that great so TorrentFlux might be a better alternative). And on the power front it kicks everything else into touch running on under 10W of power! On the down side it only has a single hard drive, although there are hacks to enable a second ‘internal’ hard drive so that could theoretically be either 1.5Tb or a redundant 750gb system. Kinda attractive and its not too bad on cost, it wouldn’t do the DVB side, but this could always be done by a nano-itx system as a side line. They’ve done a nice job with this device, the only major let down is the network interface which is only 100mbps.

Of course the other temptation in my head is the build the entire thing from scratch using a single nano-itx board with capacity for 4+ hard drives which would enable me to put in full DVB and streaming capability as well but at the expense of power efficiency. Decisions decisions! Not this month though, the government have stolen too much of my pay packet again! I’ll have to carry on mulling it over…

Update 04/04/08: I went for a totally different home server in the end, the Synology DS107+, click to read the results…