Archive for category Technology

HTC Desire - first impressions

Posted by David Hurst in Apple, Hardware, Reviews, Technology on July 15th, 2010

I’ve blogged before about my various irritations with the iPhone, which last year prompted me to ditch the shiny Apple handset and opt for a Palm Pre. I liked the idea of the Linux based OS, the multi-tasking and the real keyboard. In reality, the OS was a little limited, but the multi-tasking and real keyboard were good. Build quality, not so much.

When a saw a friend’s HTC desire, I was hugely impressed. The large, bright, high resolution screen, excellent app support and good build quality certainly appealed, but it was the impressive 1GHz processor that sealed the deal. I’m sick of sluggish phones, and the HTC Desire is certainly not sluggish.

There are certainly areas where the Palm WebOS is better, and it’s probably not as intuitive to use as an iPhone, but my first impressions are that as an overall package it beats the competition hands down.

I’ve only had mine for a few days, so I’ll do a more in-depth review when I’ve lived with it for a little longer.

Anyone want to buy a slightly used Palm Pre?

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How personal should your company website be?

Posted by David Hurst in Guides on July 2nd, 2010

The thing about companies is that they’re made up of individuals, and individuals have personalities. A company is the sum of its parts, and in the case of a service company  those ‘parts’ are people. This is a good thing, unless one personality becomes too prominent in the overall mix.

This is a problem experienced by a website development company local to me recently - one I once worked at. The dominant personality there is the MD, a man with strongly held opinions. There’s nothing wrong with that of course - we’re all entitled to our own opinions. Sometimes though, it’s best just to keep your opinions to yourself. The aforementioned MD, thinking he was having a private email conversation, expressed some particularly strong opinions (in a somewhat unfortunate way), and sadly for him, the email correspondence found its way to a national newspaper and received copious amounts of negative press coverage.

Whilst I was working for this guy many years ago, I recall recommending that he kept his strongly held opinions to himself and desisted from publishing them on the company website. He ignored my advice, but I still stand by it, and am perhaps somewhat vindicated in light of recent events. Strongly held opinions, particularly those of a political or divisive nature, are best kept totally separate from a company website, lest a potential client’s opinion of your company be coloured by their distaste for your personal viewpoints.

However, I have worked with many clients who have enjoyed success by personalising their company websites to some extent. People like to deal with people, and the Internet hasn’t really changed that. When you make an order with an online shop, don’t you like to know that there are real human beings at the end of a phone line who can help you in case something goes wrong? What better way to humanise a company online than feature a staff blog, or some staff profiles? For single owner and small businesses, it’s really not worth trying to pretend your business is something else. I once worked for a very small company that advertised numerous regional phone numbers and tried to give the impression of a huge operation when it was anything but. I’m just not convinced this has any benefit. Why not embrace your small business status and advertise that fact by personalising your company website. Just don’t get too personal.

The moral of the story is to ensure that anything personal presented on your company website has been duly sanitised. If you’re not sure, seek the opinions of others or just don’t publish. And remember, email is one of the most insecure forms of communication, so never use it for really confidential messages, and never commit anything to writing that can be misconstrued, used against you, or cause offence if the wrong person saw it.

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The Digital Economy Bill - now law

Posted by David Hurst in Current Affairs, Issues on April 13th, 2010

I along with many thousands of my fellow citizens registered my objection to the Digital Economy Bill with my local MP. Specifically, I was extremely concerned that this bill would be rushed through during the wash-up period - where outstanding legislation is passed into law prior to a general election - without a proper debate and consultation. I raised my valid concerns with David Laws MP, and received a 3 page letter back from him. You could be forgiven for thinking that he actually gave my objection serious consideration, but alas the letter was clearly a standard response to this issue, and frankly it was poorly put together. It seemed to focus its message on music and video piracy, and appeared to me to be written to perpetrators of such theft. I object to being lumped in with this bunch - I buy all my music, video and software legally.

The part of the bill which bothers is me is that Internet users accused of copyright theft (note “accused” not “convicted”) can have their connection de-activated. This is not a step forwards at all. It is loosely aimed at preventing file sharers from sharing illegal content, but it will not prevent it from happening at all. What will actually happen is that innocent Internet users will be targeted by criminals in much the same way that senders of spam operate. Computers will be hijacked by a virus and become part of a botnet controlled by the criminals. The unsuspecting user will then begin hosting illegal files without any knowledge of it happening, and end up with having their Internet access removed.

Another problem is insecure WiFi networks, and there are still loads of these around. The hacker can sit in a car outside your house, hop on to your WiFi and download whatever they want, in your name.

The bill is cobbled together and has no protection for innocent users. It has been rushed through without due democratic process. It’s the same with all of these things: the Government proposes some piece of idiotic legislation; the people object; the Government does it anyway. Some democracy!

The Internet and the World Wide Web has been built by the people of this planet, for the people of this planet. It owes its life to numerous clever programmers who have devoted their time, often free of charge, to making it better for everyone. For the UK Government to suddenly decide they have the right to govern the Internet in the UK, is just as disturbing as the Chinese Government’s approach to controlling Internet use.

I don’t know how to stop copyright theft, but the kind of ill-considered approach set out in the Digital Economy Bill is not the answer.

The Digital Economy Bill is, in my opinion, nothing more than a sinister attempt to start monitoring and policing our Internet use without due cause. As per usual, the people that get burned as a result won’t be the actual criminals at all. Piracy and copyright theft will not disappear. The people that want to do this stuff will just invent new cleverer ways to circumvent the authorities and the real problems will remain unaddressed.

A sad day for the Internet.

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OS X Single User Mode - reset forgotten password

Posted by David Hurst in Apple, Guides on February 11th, 2010

Have you forgotten your OS X password? Maybe you bought a second hand Mac and don’t know the password, or even the username? This quick guide will solve your troubles.

  1. Shutdown your Mac
  2. Start the Mac whilst holding down Command + s
  3. The mac should boot to a command prompt with white text on a black background.
  4. Type: sh /etc/rc
  5. Now if you know your username, skip to step 9, otherwise follow on…
  6. Type: cd /Users
  7. Type: ls
  8. You are now looking at the contents of the Users folders where the users’ home directories are. The directories will match the names of the users, ergo you now have a username to change the password for. (You may need to repeat this if there are multiple users until you find an admin user.)
  9. Type: passwd username - where username is the name you want to change the password for.
  10. You now type a new password and confirm it.
  11. Type: shutdown -r now
  12. The Mac will now reboot and you can log in with your new password. From here, you can set up new user accounts via System Preferences etc.

I hope that helps someone out there.

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What exactly does the Apple iPad do better?

Posted by David Hurst in Apple, Guides, Hardware, Issues, Reviews, Technology on January 28th, 2010

When Steve Jobs launched the iPad yesterday, he made a compelling case for a device to fill the gap between a smartphone and a PC/Mac. In his words, “If there’s gonna be a third category, it has to be better at these tasks — otherwise it has no reason for being.” Which tasks?

  • Browsing
  • Email
  • Photos
  • Video
  • Music
  • Games
  • eBooks

So, I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these things and see whether it is better at these key tasks than any of the alternatives.

Browsing
I think browsing the Internet on the iPad would be a nice experience. The screen size and touch interface combined with the portability of the device would seem to offer a better experience than a smartphone, netbook or PC/Mac. However, at the moment there is no Flash player on the iPad, and given that much of the video streaming done on the Internet now runs through Flash, I would see this as a huge fault.

Verdict: better than a smartphone, but simply cannot compete with a PC/Mac. Probably a better browsing experience with that screen than a netbook, but at least my netbook has the Flash player, not to mention a choice of browsers. I don’t believe anyone could say the iPad is better at browsing.

Email
Apple have vastly improved the iPhone email interface for the iPad, but the iPad is not a phone. Surely they should have used Mac Mail as the starting point? By virtue of the bigger screen, the iPad will be more pleasant to use than a smartphone, but given the superior portability of a phone and the cheaper cost of connectivity, it doesn’t really win out in the mobile email stakes. And of course, it can’t match a standard OS for email power and choice of email clients.

Verdict: what’s better? Nothing that I can see. Smartphones are better for mobile email, netbooks and PC/Macs are better at general email. Another defeat for iPad I’m afraid.

Photos
I’m just confused by this. I could see a use for the iPad as a way to share and enjoy photos with family and friends, but its lack of standard USB connectivity ruins this. You can’t just plug your digital camera into your iPad (not without the special adapter/connector, which will be a cost extra anyway), nor can you copy photos onto a memory stick or external hard disk. Presumably you will be reduced to copying all those 10MP photos in your collection via the incredibly slow Bluetooth, or by WiFi, assuming you have an access point nearby.

There’s no camera in the iPad, and it’s not like you would want to actually take photos with a device of this size anyway. Many smartphones on the other hand, do have cameras, and some of them are very good. My Palm Pre has an acceptable camera, with a flash, and is able to upload directly to Facebook, which is actually where I share photos with my friends and family.

Verdict: better than a smartphone or netbook for browsing photos, but much more difficult to get the photos on the device in the first place. Can’t match a PC/Mac for this at all.

Video
This I really don’t understand. The screen is 1024 x 768 resolution, or 4:3 in aspect ratio terms, so there’s no widescreen and given that most video produced now is widescreen, that means you will be chopping part of the video off to make it fit, or you will be forced to watch video in a strip across the middle of the screen. Most smartphones are widescreen, and so is pretty much every netbook or PC/Mac you can buy.

The lack of Flash player means that there’s no chance of watching online TV with BBC iPlayer or other services, and that’s just a huge flaw. And that lack of USB also means no DVD drive either.

Verdict: smartphones may be small but they are at least widescreen. Netbooks have the Flash player and can play DVDs with external drives. Your PC/Mac can do all of these things much better. So where does that leave iPad?

Music
Music? Really? Who is going to want a portable music player with a 9.7″ screen? It could be useful, plugged into an amp whilst streaming music from your main iTunes collection, but on its own the iPad does not look like a revolutionary music device, nor can it do anything better than any other devices.

Perhaps Apple are referring to music production, but given they have supplied no apps for this, I think I’ll stick to Garageband and Logic on my more powerful and usable Macs.

Verdict: iPad does nothing better than anything else.

Games
Again, I don’t get it. Touchscreen games are all well and good on an iPhone or iPod touch, but on a larger device it is a nonsense interface. Plus, the graphics power is hardly going to be blowing anyone away. For the price of a decent iPad you can have a reasonable PC games rig, or you could have a netbook and a games console.

Verdict: smartphones are better for mobile games, and PC/Mac is better for proper games. The iPad probably beats a netbook here, although mine does run Quake3 at perfectly acceptable speeds. I remain entirely unconvinced.

eBooks
And here we get to the core of the issue. If Apple had launched the iPad as the iReader, I think everyone would be happy. Whether or not its screen works as well as the Kindle’s e-ink screen for reading books, remains to be seen. But given the closeness of the pricing on the various reader devices, the iPad makes a lot of sense: pay a little more, get a lot more. Personally, I’d rather sit and read a well thumbed paperback.

Verdict: the iPad’s true reason for being.

Should you buy an iPad?
If you are in the market for an e-reader, then the iPad has to be worthy of consideration. If not, then I don’t believe iPad will do anything for you other than giving you a short period of popularity whilst all your friends and colleagues come to stroke it and dribble on it. I guess if you have money to burn and you want to buy into Apple’s sexily packaged gadget du jour, then go for it.

If you do buy it, just remember that Apple will eventually address all the flaws, just as they did with iPhone, and then in short order they will bring out a better specced, more powerful and cheaper second version, leaving you with an obsolete but attractive door stop.

Apple has always treated its early adopters with an attitude bordering on contempt, yet the fanboys keep coming back for more, always failing to realise Apple couldn’t give a crap about them - they are, and always have been, a corporation interested only in the bottom line, and a bunch of early adopters buying what is essentially a beta version are simply helping to pay for the research and development of the final version, and that is very good for the bottom line.

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