Comfortably Numb 2.0

What to do on a rather wet and cloudy British Bank Holiday?  How’z about remotely tuning ham and short wave radio receivers from all over the world perhaps.

I’m currently using an  Icom receiver system in Ham Lake, Minnesota USA that allows me to tune from the shortwave and local AM bands  thro’ ham and commercial VHF/UHF channels and even local FM radio channels in stereo.

These systems usually have a number of presets that also allow you to tune the radio yourself and whilst the controls are a bit often clunky but you soon get used to them.  To hear the output you just click the  MP3 or WMA button (I’ve marked the example picture with a red arrrow as it’s not always obvious). 

And you can find dozens more of these receivers here..

(expect a few outages/deal inks  ‘cos people just do this for fun with their own kit)

If like me you are a fan of that cult Gerry Anderson/Doctor Who/Star Trek stuff  switch on your DAB radio or Freeview box and tune in to BBC Radio 7,  they are airing a Blake’s 7 special this morning!   Listen Live should work too as will  Listen Again but only up until September 7th.

I always fancied the pants off of Supreme Commander Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce), she could sort my ray gun out any day.

Well, not really but I though this video was quite clever..

Can’t say I’ve ever  been cruising but there’s a tempting one coming up next year;   US based Pink Floyd Tribute Band Think Floyd are playing a 4 day cruise on board the Carnival Imagination.  The cruise, entitled The Great Gig in the Sea promises material from Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.

The ship will sail on Friday, May 1st, 2009  from Miami at 16:00 on May 1st, sails all night and then arrives in Nassau, Bahamas at 8:00 AM on Saturday morning, departing again Sunday and returning  to Miami on May 4th.

With prices stating at US $379 this sounds very tempting, I just need to work out a inexpensive way to get to Miami from London in May 2009..

Probably old news if you are a hardened Trekkie but I’ve only just spotted the fact that there’s a new Star Trek movie in production due for release in the US on May 8th 2009.

There’s a ton of pictures over at slashfilm.com and plot synopisis at Wikipedia.

(I was more of a TNG fan myself…..)

Anyone who has a corporate mobile phone will probably have set a phone pin code because of the risk and theft and ability to run up high mobile phone bills. As are a result it’s often simple to find out what someone’s bank pin number is.

1) Ask if you can borrow their mobile phone for a few seconds just so that you can dial your own phone to make sure that new ring tone you installed yesterday is working, ( c’os someone in the office reckoned they called you and you didn’t answer.)

2) After they’ve handed their phone to you ‘acciddently’ switch the phone off and apologise for being so clumsy

3) Switch the phone back on and ask for their phone pin number when challenged.

99 times out 100 this will be their bank pin code….

I mentioned Joikuspot a couple of posts back but it’s so useful I though it worth it’s own slot. Joikuspot turns many Symbian-based WiFi enabled 3G phones into a WiFi hot-spot, allowing a number of computers to share the connection over 802.11b/g wireless. For the brief time I owned an iPhone this is the one app that would have been a killer for me, sadly the nearest I got to this was rather cruddy iPhone proxy server that was hit and miss requiring a jailbroken iPhone.

So, the next time you are stuck in a hotel that has rip-off rates Internet connections you can pull out you phone and use your create your own portable hot-spot instead, perhaps even providing WiFi Internet to collegues too! The current light version is free but only supports a 13 digit WEP key, my guess is the premium paid version will support WPA etc.

They also offer a Windows Mobile\smartphone version called WMWifiRouterfor .

There’s a brilliant video post on the google mobile blog mobile tricks section today entitled ‘a day in the life ‘ that just might ring a familiar bell with some of our spouses..

—-snip —-

The other day I was looking for a simple program to pull audio files off of my daughter’s iPod so that she could sync to a different computer rather than using the normal iTunes backup feature. Many supposed ‘Free‘ Windows iPod Managers seem to be bundled with trialware ‘spyware removers‘ - the modern day equivalent of a protection racket?

Then I stumbled across Floola, a cross platform program that comes in Windows, Mac OS X and even Ubuntu Linux flavours. Unusually it’s a fully working program provided for free (if you find it useful you are invited to send the author a small contribution, but only a purely voluntary basis.)

Caveat - you won’t be able to use Floola for any protected music you’ve purchased from the iTunes store.

So there’s been bucket loads of hype about the 3G iPhone over the past few weeks and my geek chums are scrambling to get their hands on one. I actually bought an iPhone (MK 1) last month to find out what all the fuss was about. Carphonewarehouse were clearing their stocks and relaxing the requirement to commit to a £35 per month in-store 02 contract, you just handed over your £169 and legged it. Thanks to a clever piece of free software called Ziphone within of minutes I was able to bypass the usual iTunes activation process and make the phone ‘SIM free’.

For the two weeks I owned the phoned I was disappointed with it’s performance as a regular phone (although it was a pretty good PDA) . We have Vodafone antennas on our roof in the office which ironically positions us in a near blind spot. Our corporate Noka 6021s, 3109s and Blackberries fight for a signal but for the most part keep their heads above water.. but the iPhone spent most of it’s time hunting for a signal.

I also didn’t get on well with the form factor which is also why I bypassed the N95 ‘Jesus’ phone. Having used a sleek Nokia 6300 until then the iPhone felt like a extra wide brick and I was very conscious of it’s frailty compared to the Nokia. Horse for courses I guess, I do hammer my phone and get about 10-20 calls a day so phone functionality is top of my list, anything else is icing on the cake.

On a more positive note I thought the edge performance was very acceptable (200K’ish) meaning a google search page come up in 2-3 seconds, ditto email, good enough for me me.

So the new kid on the block for me is the Nokia E51, it’s as sleek and slender tas he 6300, sports 3G HSPDA, 802.11B/G WiFi and will run anything the N95 will run, the only shortcoming being the lack of internal GPS (a £15 spend eBay).

And the Apppe Mac Community for the most part seem to be blissfully unaware that Nokia actually support Apple’s painless isync utility that evens launches iPhoto and makes Activesync seem rather clunky and dated, not to mention Google’s android project which could be something that sneaks up from behind and catches us all off guard.

There’s something to be said for ‘product maturity’ that companies like RIM (the Blackberry people) have made millions from.. a game Nokia are also ahead with phones like the 6300, 6500 and E51 etc.

(P.S Joikuspot - A neat little app fro any S60 WiFi enabled phone that turn into a 3G to WiFi hotspot)