Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Saturday, May 29, 2010
SIx photos from Ron Mueck: A Girl, Woman with Sticks and Two Women
Just some quick photos, didn't have much time today. Will be back with my better camera and my season pass later!
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
The #TelstraDesire and Mobile Journalism - It's simply not good enough ((tag:telstradesire)
I was expecting the HTC Desire I'm reviewing for Telstra in exchange for being allowed to keep the phone to be a serious competitor to the iPhone for mobile journalism. While it has some advantages, especially the 5MP camera which takes beautiful pictures, it has some major flaws which make it not really up to what I expect. For a start: I haven't found a single Android app that lets you edit video. Not even something that will do simple things like trimming clips, stringing them together, adding basic titles and uploading them. I can do this on my Nokia 6120c, one of the most-underpowered phones that still gets to be called a smartphone. Not being able to do it on a high-end smartphone seems ridiculous to me. Of course, someone may well write an app for it - this isn't Telstra's fault, or HTC's fault, but someone who wants that feature isn't going to buy the phone no matter whose fault it is. You can broadcast live using UStream or Qik. I've tested UStream briefly, it seems to work OK. But not being able to take a video or record sound, edit it, then file from the scene is to me a major weakness of the phone. However some people may think the only thing a smartphone is good for is talking quick video or crossing live to breaking news before better broadcast equipment is available. If you think that, you might not mind so much about the lack of video editing. The only audio editing app I could find, Ringdroid, only lets you trim a clip, not join up multiple clips into a single file. (it's designed to make ringtones, so it's not pretending to be something it isn't). Once again, IF you can record in one take so you don't need to edit, you can easily email an audio file to Posterous - you can set Posterous up to automatically send out updates of what you post to Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc. Of course, the file MUST be less than 5 MB; it seems you can't attach files above that size emails you send in the GMail app, and when I opened up Gmail in the Dolphin browser it simply refused to let me attach files - the button to do so was greyed out. I found a very awkward way around this: Open up Gmail in Opera Mini, go to "basic HTML" view and attach it there. But using this phone isn't meant to be awkward. The poor battery life, which many reviewers have noticed, is also going to be a problem unless a mobile journalist buys one or even more than one spare batteries, keeps them charged, and carries them around.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
#TelstraDesire - chewing through my data allowance like a data-allowance chewing monster!
We got 2 gig of data from Telstra to use as we reviewed the HTC Desire. By last night I'd gone through an entire gigabyte of that already, since Tuesday lunchtime. I'm not sure what's going on here. Sure, I've been playing with it a lot but I use my Nokia 6120c a lot as well, and I get a maximum of 350 gig a MONTH with a $49 prepaid cap. So I've been using data about twelve times as fast on the Desire as on the Nokia. I also have only 5 gig a month on my home internet plan, and rarely go over that. Now admittedly I'm only using a cut-down brower on the Nokia, Opera Mini, which compresses web pages so you use a lot less data. I'd LIKE to switch from the Dolphin Browser to Opera Mini on the Desire and see if that makes a difference. However, you can't set Opera Mini as your default browser! This is ridiculous, and means to go through the process of opening something in Opera Mini destroys the smooth user experience which is one of the big pluses to the Desire. I've also told applications like Slidescreen and Twidroid to check for updates every hour, instead of every five minutes, which might help. I hope. I've installed the NetCounter app so I will monitor that when I'm not using the phone to see if lots of data is transferred in the background.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
A day and a half of using #TelstraDesire - my thoughts
So, I got my HTC Desire yesterday and I've spent a day and a half thrashing it. Here's my first impressions:
GOOD:* The user interface is mostly very smooth. It mostly feels gorgeous to use. I've never owned a touch-screen phone before, and have only played with friends' phones. But using the touchscreen to scroll up and down is beautiful, and easy to understand. To give you an idea of what this means to me, on my current phone, a Nokia 6120c, to see a link someone has posted on Twitter, I have to:1) Use the Gravity Twitter app to send the link to the Instapaper link-saving service.
2) Close down Gravity (because the Nokia has very little RAM indeed)
3) Open up the Opera Mini browser (version 4, because v5 is not as good IMO)
4) Click on my bookmark to take me to Instaaper
5) Click on the link I want to visitOn the Desire, I just click on the link in Twidroid (the Twitter client I'm checking out), and it opens. This is so much easier. Of course, if the browser that comes built-in to the Nokia didn't suck, I wouldnt' have to go to so much effort, but it does and I do.
* I can change the home page! One of my big problems with Apple is their culture of locking down their phones to stop you changing all sorts of things. I can see their point - they don't want people mucking around with their phone, breaking it and then blaming Apple. It's their business, they can run it how they want, but I feel very wary of that. The Desire's home page came with a pretty background, a calendar/clock/weather app taking up the top half of the page, and four pre-loaded icons linking to services, presumably put there by Telstra as one of the icons was for Bigpond. After reading this article about some top Android apps at Lifehacker, I wanted to try out Slidescreen. I searched for it in the Marketplace (Android's equivalent of the App Store), found it easily, installed it with a click or two and fired it up. And I love it. Now, my home page has: 1) My latest unread emails in Gmail2) My upcoming events from Google Calendar3) My newest items in Google Reader4) My latest few Facebook updates5) The latest reply to me on Twitter 6) The time, date, battery level, latest temperature and weather forecast.This suits me perfectly. You might not want things set up this way of course (and if you don't like using Google services things won't be as simple). But the point remains that I totally changed the way the front screen of my phone works, and it was simple. * The 5MP camera is very good for a camera phone. I've taken a few pictures, posted them here and shared them other social networks and I've had several spontaneous comments about the good quality of the photos. I've done two side-by-side tests of the Desire's camera with my Nokia 6120c - click here to see those tests, or click here to see the other photos I've taken with the Desire. * I love having Foursquare with GPS.BAD:* You can't take a screenshot. Well you can, but to run the apps that will let you take a screenshot, you have to get root access to your phone, commonly called "rooting" the phone. Um. I'm not sure of the legal situation, but this may well void your warranty, so I'm not going to do it until after my obligation to review the phone for Tesltra is over (On Saturday May 22). But seriously, no screenhots? That's just silly. How am I supposed to review a phone when I can't easily take a screenshot to show you what an app looks like, or how the user interface is set up?
* Battery life is appalling so far. I took the phone out for 5 1/2 hours yesterday, wth GPS on but WiFi off. Even with a 20-minute charge in the middle of my trip out, the battery died before I got home. I've seen a suggestion that the battery life may improve after a few times being fully discharged and fully charged again, so I'll keep an eye on that, but there's no guarantees.
* There is no way to edit video on the phone so far. The Qik app is supposed to be able to let you do that, but the app didn't work in the way this blog post from Qik said it would. One of the things I want to test on the phone is its potential as a tool for mobile journalism. Without a video editor that lets you trim clips, splice them together and add titles (at the bare minimum) the phone is not much use for mobile video journalism. I don't know if this is a limitation of the phone, or just that no-one has got around to writing the right app. * I can't uninstall the pre-loaded Facebook app, which I want to do, because the app sucks.You can't pass on links other people have posted, and the "enter" button to add a comment is placed far too close to the top of the touch-screen keypad. I've already posted four half-typed comments by accident. So I'm just using Facebook through the internet browser and ignoring the app. But I should be able to get it off my phone entirely. So. Any questions? Anything you'd like to know about the phone? Let me know in the comments.
GOOD:* The user interface is mostly very smooth. It mostly feels gorgeous to use. I've never owned a touch-screen phone before, and have only played with friends' phones. But using the touchscreen to scroll up and down is beautiful, and easy to understand. To give you an idea of what this means to me, on my current phone, a Nokia 6120c, to see a link someone has posted on Twitter, I have to:1) Use the Gravity Twitter app to send the link to the Instapaper link-saving service.
2) Close down Gravity (because the Nokia has very little RAM indeed)
3) Open up the Opera Mini browser (version 4, because v5 is not as good IMO)
4) Click on my bookmark to take me to Instaaper
5) Click on the link I want to visitOn the Desire, I just click on the link in Twidroid (the Twitter client I'm checking out), and it opens. This is so much easier. Of course, if the browser that comes built-in to the Nokia didn't suck, I wouldnt' have to go to so much effort, but it does and I do.
* I can change the home page! One of my big problems with Apple is their culture of locking down their phones to stop you changing all sorts of things. I can see their point - they don't want people mucking around with their phone, breaking it and then blaming Apple. It's their business, they can run it how they want, but I feel very wary of that. The Desire's home page came with a pretty background, a calendar/clock/weather app taking up the top half of the page, and four pre-loaded icons linking to services, presumably put there by Telstra as one of the icons was for Bigpond. After reading this article about some top Android apps at Lifehacker, I wanted to try out Slidescreen. I searched for it in the Marketplace (Android's equivalent of the App Store), found it easily, installed it with a click or two and fired it up. And I love it. Now, my home page has: 1) My latest unread emails in Gmail2) My upcoming events from Google Calendar3) My newest items in Google Reader4) My latest few Facebook updates5) The latest reply to me on Twitter 6) The time, date, battery level, latest temperature and weather forecast.This suits me perfectly. You might not want things set up this way of course (and if you don't like using Google services things won't be as simple). But the point remains that I totally changed the way the front screen of my phone works, and it was simple. * The 5MP camera is very good for a camera phone. I've taken a few pictures, posted them here and shared them other social networks and I've had several spontaneous comments about the good quality of the photos. I've done two side-by-side tests of the Desire's camera with my Nokia 6120c - click here to see those tests, or click here to see the other photos I've taken with the Desire. * I love having Foursquare with GPS.BAD:* You can't take a screenshot. Well you can, but to run the apps that will let you take a screenshot, you have to get root access to your phone, commonly called "rooting" the phone. Um. I'm not sure of the legal situation, but this may well void your warranty, so I'm not going to do it until after my obligation to review the phone for Tesltra is over (On Saturday May 22). But seriously, no screenhots? That's just silly. How am I supposed to review a phone when I can't easily take a screenshot to show you what an app looks like, or how the user interface is set up?
* Battery life is appalling so far. I took the phone out for 5 1/2 hours yesterday, wth GPS on but WiFi off. Even with a 20-minute charge in the middle of my trip out, the battery died before I got home. I've seen a suggestion that the battery life may improve after a few times being fully discharged and fully charged again, so I'll keep an eye on that, but there's no guarantees.
* There is no way to edit video on the phone so far. The Qik app is supposed to be able to let you do that, but the app didn't work in the way this blog post from Qik said it would. One of the things I want to test on the phone is its potential as a tool for mobile journalism. Without a video editor that lets you trim clips, splice them together and add titles (at the bare minimum) the phone is not much use for mobile video journalism. I don't know if this is a limitation of the phone, or just that no-one has got around to writing the right app. * I can't uninstall the pre-loaded Facebook app, which I want to do, because the app sucks.You can't pass on links other people have posted, and the "enter" button to add a comment is placed far too close to the top of the touch-screen keypad. I've already posted four half-typed comments by accident. So I'm just using Facebook through the internet browser and ignoring the app. But I should be able to get it off my phone entirely. So. Any questions? Anything you'd like to know about the phone? Let me know in the comments.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Pix: #telstradesire first impressions (before turning it on)
Looks: nice and slick, black with silver and dark grey trim. Size: smaller than I thought. About 1.5cm wider than my Nokia 6120c, maybe 1cm taller and about 3mm LESS thick. Headphones: standard 3.5mm headphone socket. This means you can use ANY standard set of headphones with instead of having to buy expensive headphones from the phone manufacturer or muck around with adapters. You have to put the earmuffs onto the headphones yourself. They're a little flimsy; I ripped one so be careful. Charging/data: Only one other wired input into the phone, the USB socket which also charges the battery. Once again it's a standard size so if you lose your USB cable you can buy a cheap generic one to replace it. The power plug has a socket where the large end of the USB cable plugs in, so you don't need to be at a computer to charge it. Only using generic headphones and USB sockets is a BIG plus for me. A 2gb memory card came in the box, I believe this is standard Battery, SIM card, memory card. You lever the back plate off using a little indent just next to the power button. I accidentally turned the phone on as I did this, but the plate came off simply. The battery was already in the phone. You have to take it out to put in the SIM card and memory card. They both slide in easily, unlike some phones where it's a real pain. The back plate presses back on easily. Of course I did all of this without reading the manual, the only thing that was a little confusing was taking the battery out to slide in the cards. Other than that, pretty simple so far.
Please do NOT retweet anything by dishonest manipulator @DanBuzzard
On Monday I came across a dodgy, unreliable person on Twitter trying to get attention by deliberately publishing inaccurate, misleading inflammatory info. His name online is Dan Buzzard, and I'm asking you to block him, and to refuse to retweet anything he posts on Twitter. I first saw what he posted after Twitter user @askegg (Andrew Skegg) retweeted it. The tweet I saw said:
Well that sounded like it was worth passing on to the people who read my stuff on Twitter, so I checked it out. And I quickly found the info was utterly worthless. The link goes to a story in The Age about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange having his passport confiscated. Um, I thought, being a political prisoner means going to jail for your political beliefs or actions, not having your passport taken away. But it gets worse. The headline of the story says Assange's passport was taken away. But the actual story says his passport was taken away for fifteen minutes, and then returned. Half an hour after that, an Australian Federal Police officer questioned him. Assange says the official who gave him his passport back said it was cancelled, or about to be cancelled, according to the story. But the journalist who wrote the story claims he has information saying Assange was free to travel. So all we can be reasonably sure of is that someone who has embarassed the Australian Government by posting the secret Internet censorship blacklist online suffered some minor bureaucratic harassment. It's certainly worth a story. It's just the sort of mindless, petty thing you'd expect from Australian authorities. But having your passport taken for fifteen minutes and having to deal with some chest-thumping low-grade officials is NOT the same as having your passport confiscated. And it's definitely not the same as being a "political prisoner". So I replied to both @askegg and @danbuzzard:
I said
And Buzzard replied:
At which point I decided any further discussion was useless, as Buzzard clearly has no idea what simple concepts like "ethics" and "not being a manipulative, lying creep" mean. According to Buzzard, if you make a statement into a question that makes it "100% accurate". So let's try that with a few statements, shall we?Dan Buzzard: Guilty of Murder?
Dan Buzzard: Abuser of Women?
Dan Buzzard: Oxygen Thief?
Dan Buzzard: Worthy of Tarring and Feathering?OK, let's see. Yep, question marks after each statement, turning them into a question. By Buzzard's rules of honesty, these statements, now questions, are all "100% accurate". They are of course ALL UNTRUE, but these ridiculous examples certainly show what a joke his "100% accurate" claim is. We know Buzzard thinks honesty is important. The latest post on his blog, as I write, says:
So yeah. Not only is he a hypocrite, he's one of these pathetic sectarian atheists who think the most important thing worth arguing about is religion. I am an atheist and I don't give a good Goddamn what other people believe, I care about whether they make the world a better place or a worse one. And Buzzard makes it worse. Clearly Buzzard is motivated by publicity and attention. I thought about whether I should write this post, as it gives him attention, but I thought dealing with the issue of manipulative bullshit was worth the risk of giving him a few more eyeballs. So:If you agree with me that Buzzard has lied;If you think his claim that using a question mark at the end of any statement makes that statement "100% accurate" is utter garbage;And if you think this sort of dishonest behaviour should have consequences, Please:a) Block him on Twitter
b) If you see anyone passing on his tweets, ask them not to, and send them a link to this tweet
c) Check everything before you retweet it to make it harder for dishonest tactics to work.
Wikileaks founder now a political prisoner in Australia: http://bit.ly/9Qkard #nocleanfeed #openinternet (via @DanBuzzard)
Well that sounded like it was worth passing on to the people who read my stuff on Twitter, so I checked it out. And I quickly found the info was utterly worthless. The link goes to a story in The Age about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange having his passport confiscated. Um, I thought, being a political prisoner means going to jail for your political beliefs or actions, not having your passport taken away. But it gets worse. The headline of the story says Assange's passport was taken away. But the actual story says his passport was taken away for fifteen minutes, and then returned. Half an hour after that, an Australian Federal Police officer questioned him. Assange says the official who gave him his passport back said it was cancelled, or about to be cancelled, according to the story. But the journalist who wrote the story claims he has information saying Assange was free to travel. So all we can be reasonably sure of is that someone who has embarassed the Australian Government by posting the secret Internet censorship blacklist online suffered some minor bureaucratic harassment. It's certainly worth a story. It's just the sort of mindless, petty thing you'd expect from Australian authorities. But having your passport taken for fifteen minutes and having to deal with some chest-thumping low-grade officials is NOT the same as having your passport confiscated. And it's definitely not the same as being a "political prisoner". So I replied to both @askegg and @danbuzzard:
And I got a reply:@askegg @DanBuzzard absolute nonsense. The story doesn't even confirm he's banned from travel. Leave the misleading headlines to Murdoch?
@djackmanson that sounds like jealousy to me :D Headlines sell stories. Perhaps I should have put a "?" mark at the end.
I said
@DanBuzzard No, it's anger that you'd tweet an inflammatory and utterly misleading headline. A question mark would make it no better.
And Buzzard replied:
@djackmanson Marketing 96 clicks and counting. The article is accurate and the headline would have been 100% accurate with a ? mark included
At which point I decided any further discussion was useless, as Buzzard clearly has no idea what simple concepts like "ethics" and "not being a manipulative, lying creep" mean. According to Buzzard, if you make a statement into a question that makes it "100% accurate". So let's try that with a few statements, shall we?Dan Buzzard: Guilty of Murder?
Dan Buzzard: Abuser of Women?
Dan Buzzard: Oxygen Thief?
Dan Buzzard: Worthy of Tarring and Feathering?OK, let's see. Yep, question marks after each statement, turning them into a question. By Buzzard's rules of honesty, these statements, now questions, are all "100% accurate". They are of course ALL UNTRUE, but these ridiculous examples certainly show what a joke his "100% accurate" claim is. We know Buzzard thinks honesty is important. The latest post on his blog, as I write, says:
One of the things that really annoys me about Creationists is their dishonesty;
So yeah. Not only is he a hypocrite, he's one of these pathetic sectarian atheists who think the most important thing worth arguing about is religion. I am an atheist and I don't give a good Goddamn what other people believe, I care about whether they make the world a better place or a worse one. And Buzzard makes it worse. Clearly Buzzard is motivated by publicity and attention. I thought about whether I should write this post, as it gives him attention, but I thought dealing with the issue of manipulative bullshit was worth the risk of giving him a few more eyeballs. So:If you agree with me that Buzzard has lied;If you think his claim that using a question mark at the end of any statement makes that statement "100% accurate" is utter garbage;And if you think this sort of dishonest behaviour should have consequences, Please:a) Block him on Twitter
b) If you see anyone passing on his tweets, ask them not to, and send them a link to this tweet
c) Check everything before you retweet it to make it harder for dishonest tactics to work.
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