Archive for the 'Just geek' Category

aka the art of the 3 minute presentation

The websledge present­a­tion is on slide­share, it has had a couple of minor addi­tions (ie what I should of added earlier). But it really needs an audio track, because the words are far more import­ant than the slides, plus you miss the cheer from the staff of one web design com­pany when they find the have not been left out. I will let you know if the video goes online.

Cre­at­ing a 3 minute present­a­tion for Web­Jam is harder than cre­at­ing a 30 minute present­a­tion for another event…

I would like to thank the people who voted for me. I never thought I win a prize or gen­er­ate a new word to describe my type of present­a­tion web-sledging. The main aim of my present­a­tion was to enter­tain the audi­ence, and hope­fully get them think­ing about how any new sites they develop will look in mobile browsers. Yes I did websledge by demostrat­ing the prob­lems of mobile web on sites cre­ated by people I knew would be in the audi­ence (and sorry if I did not pick on your site I only had 3 minutes). I hope it was taken in way inten­ded, all in good fun.

or what a difference a change of operating system makes

The first two weeks with the Nokia BH501 was a little frus­trat­ing. I had not spent the time to get bluetooth ste­reo work­ing on my Mac­Book Pro and while the sound qual­ity was ok and only sub­ject to the rare break up of the sig­nal. It was only mono and on occa­sions a pain to con­nect. On the Dopod 838pro the sound qual­ity was poor, the bot­tom end was real muddy and the sig­nal would reg­u­larly break up.

Well on Tues­day I upgraded the Dopod to Win­dows Mobile 6 and what a dif­fer­ence that made to the sound quality …

When ResourceNet was announced last month, I was a little suprised. I did not expect a free wifi ser­vice to be launched without so quietly and to cover such a large area of Perth’s cent­ral busi­ness dis­trict (CBD). I also wondered how Met­roMesh a com­mer­ical pro­vider of wifi over most of Perth’s CBD would react to the com­pet­i­tion. These ques­tion where answered at a West Aus­tralian Inter­net Asso­ci­ation break­fast sem­inar with rep­res­ent­at­ives of both ResourceNet and MetroMesh.

As I have pre­vi­ous men­tioned I am pretty hard on head­phones and my cur­rent pair of Koss KSC-75 head­phones only las­ted 10 months. As my last three pairs of head­phones all had prob­lems with their wir­ing and my Dopod 838Pro needs a spe­cial adapter for a stand­ard head­phone jack which does cause me prob­lems. So I decided to try a pair of bluetooth ste­reo head­phones. After a quick look around the reviews on the net, I settled on a pair of Nokia BH501s that were on spe­cial in a local phone store.

Got home and found a let­ter from my telco. I wondered what it was about, opened it and got a pleas­ant sur­prise. 3 is really going after the mobile data mar­ket in Aus­tralia, they were already the cheapest mobile data pro­vider. They are now dra­mat­ic­ally increas­ing data allow­ances on all their plans, mine went from 1Gb to 2Gb a month.

It is inter­est­ing to see how the other tel­cos are going to react …

A few days after Bar­Camp Perth 2007, one of the Perth Twit­ter Mob found the Pod­Camp Aus­tralia and it was passed quickly through the local social network.

At that time the Pod­Camp site was very bare, there was no inform­a­tion about the people behind the concept, just an About Pod­Camp page and a sign up page. How­ever, after the buzz of Bar­Camp Perth 2007 the oppor­tun­ity for another uncon­fer­ence con­cen­trat­ing on the social side of the web was to good an offer to refuse …

I really enjoyed Bar­Camp Perth 2007 and am look­ing for­ward to the next one. Well I get­ting involved in the next local uncon­fer­ence Uncon­fWALib. It would be a little hard to avoid, it is at my place of work, it is about tech­no­logy I am pas­sion­ate about and hope­fully will involve a lot of people […]

Looks like the end of the story for now …

I have been run­ning a Nova­tel Mer­lin XU870 Wire­less card with my power­book for some 5 months now and it is a great way to con­nect to the net at decent speeds (400 to 700kps on aver­age, at times faster) any­where inside you pro­viders area of ser­vice, which for me is most of the Perth’s exten­ded metro area includ­ing the 30 minute plus bus ride to work. But I wanted to go faster and this is my tale of woe