Portable Solar Power

Yesterday I picked up a little solar panel and charge regulator contained in a handy little flight case. I love it so far.

I have been testing it with the Mac Book Air and it all works splendidly. I am looking forward to testing it further at the Larmer Tree Festival and of course my own festival Geeknbury.

This is what technology should be doing, liberating us. Check out the Qik posts below embedded in the Phreadz widget to keep them together.

And here is a recent Seesmic conversation..

MTM BlackHawk Special Ops Watch

Today, only 18 hours after ordering on the phone I took delivery of an MTM BlackHawk Special Ops watch in titanium.

I imagine there has never been a complaint of any MTM watch arriving damaged as the case it arrived in was an incredibly sturdy, watertight ballistic ’seahorse’ case. With the watch already being water resistant to 330Ft and it’s case made from solid titanium, I imagine the post office could well drive off a cliff into a quarry and you would still get to receive a shiny new timepiece.. albeit a day or so late.

As soon as you take the ballistic case out of the cardboard box you feel you have purchased from a company that take great pride in it’s products.

I have only worn it for the last 14 hours so this is more like my first impressions rather than a review. Here is a video of the un-boxing..

I ordered the optional nylon strap as i have never really got on with metal ones. I want a watch that is substantial and solid but not one so heavy as i’m always aware it’s there. Nylon softens with time and really trims the weight of a watch down. Combined with the lightness of the titanium and this timepiece is not too weighty at all. I imagine the steel option is heavy enough to throw through a double glazed window though.

One of the main reasons for me wanting this watch apart from it’s apparent durability and use of hi-tech materials was the innovative addition of four LED’s embedded in the carbon fiber watch face. According to MTM’s website the Special Ops lighting technology was requested by the Special Forces in their original design specification.

Everyday I carry a torch (flashlight) with me as living in rural British countryside I often find myself in unlit spaces. I may not ever need to signal other members of an elite squad of Special Forces or scour a map in pitch darkness as I calculate the coordinates of an air strike, but just today I found the more than adequate illumination offered by the watch assisted me in plugging an additional HDMI cable in a tricky spot and remove a thorn from my dogs foot on a late walk. This is more than enough for me to be impressed and tomorrow I shall leave the little ARC-P flashlight I wear round my neck in my bedside draw. 

There are two types of light settings, an internal lighting mode uses the three bulbs with a blue diffused light for illuminating the watch face and the external lighting mode uses another set of three extremely powerful led’s emitting a bright orange light.

You may be wondering where all the energy comes from to power these lighting options as the watch is normal size and does not seem to be packed with an oversized battery.

Very cleverly the MTM BlackHawk also employs a unique recharging system. With no need to ever replace the batteries, you just place the watch on the specially designed recharging stand for a few hours every month. You are notified well in advance of the battery running flat by a second hand notification system that discreetly lets you know when power is running low. This is the first electromagnetically charged device I think I have owned but I imagine there will be many more to come.

I was a little concerned by the need to recharge a watch even this infrequently but am never away from home that long so it should not really be a problem and the charging stand isn’t ridiculously oversized so at a push it could be taken with me.

So.. It’s early days as far as my opinion goes and although my first impressions of this watch are good, I do have a habit of destroying watches that do not live up to their reputation and will report anything that may be amiss.

As I write this though I have just let the dog out for a wee in the back garden and was almost as amazed as she was as the watch illuminated the area of the garden she had snuck off to. Not really a life saving use of this great looking piece of hi tech engineering but one of the reasons for it being my choice over the many other hard wearing watches out there.

Already, this watch has liberated me from carrying a separate piece of kit (flashlight) in my everyday list of gadgets and paraphernalia I feel I must carry incase they’re needed.

All I need now is a watch that also incorporates a phone, a Leatherman, a wallet, my keys, a USB drive… …and so on.

Here are a few reactions to my video post:

 

In the UK this particular model retails at £399 (€499) and the steel version can be bought for £329 (€412). Prices in the US about a third lower.

The watch can be purchased from SpecialOpsWatch.co.uk

..and in the US SpecialOpsWatch.com

Nokia N95 8GB on Vodafone

Great phone.. crap network.

Am I asking too much to want my cake and eat it too?

I have only had it a day or so and am pleasantly blown away at not only the UI but by all the apps floating around out there.

The only issue that arose on day one was the realisation that the ‘Unlimited Data’ package I was sold by Vodafone was infact limited to 120meg.

Hang on.. let me pause for a moment so you can realise jut how ridiculous that is.

The Nokia N95 8GB prides itself on being able to use Vodafone’s lightning fast High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). Vodafone brags that their network can handle up to 7.2Mbit/sec.

So if my maths serves me correctly, on a connection running the mythical top speed of HSDPA, my entire monthly data allowance would last me around 17 seconds.

This is hardly what I would call unlimited. Especially when T-mobiles Web and Walk offer up to 3GB and an Iphone on O2 offers true unlimited data (all be it at 2G speeds).

So this morning I looked at my data-crippled phone as it chomped at the bit aching to behave as it was bred and decided to call Vodafone.

I got myself a hugh double scoop of coffee and dialed 191 expecting to be listening to some old pop track for an hour. Less than a minute later and i was talking to a human called Amy. This was a bit of a shock as I always remember Vodafone as being a nightmare for keeping people hanging on the line.

Within a few minutes she agreed that I had been duped into an unlimited contract that was nothing of the sort. She said 120 meg is nothing and that she would upgrade me to unlimited at no extra cost. I was in shock. This was all to good to be true. I asked for her to email what she had said just so as i had it on file.

I could only imagine that i was not the first to raise this issue and infact Trading Standards were in fact breathing down the necks of this mobile giant ordering them to make things right.

I was a very happy bunny and the call ended with me thinking all wrongs had been righted and that I was going to have to eat my previously harsh words in this very blog post.

Not so.

Twenty minutes later I still had no confirmation email and while mid call to a friend the phone cut off. I thought nothing of it. Perhaps he was driving and dropped the signal.

When it looked like I was not going to get an email i picked up my mobile and dialed 191. No connection. All I got was the error tones. I called a landline.. the same tones.

I could not believe it. I had been cut off.

Luckily I have a land line handy so i could call vodafone customer services. And i did.

Within a few minutes with the assistance of another advisor we had ascertained that Amy had assigned to my phone a data card tariff which had cut my phone services off. WTF.

Not only that, but the tariff I have been on for the last few years is now unavailable to me. I was only kept from migrating away recently because I could keep my pretty decent free minutes and texts with free weekend calls to both landlines and mobiles! They blocked me out from it and now I am not allowed to get back in! Surely they are in breach of some kind of contract here…

“Ok”, i said. Trying to remain composed.

To cut a long and stress filled story short.. Vodafone have buggered up my contract and stomped on any faith I had left in them. To top this they have absolutely nothing bigger than 120 meg for on-the-phone data and I think this is just ridiculous. Especially when T-Mobile offer 3gb on an unlimited (fair use) tariff.

Vodafone’s offerings are hardly cutting edge. Why advertise spangly new ‘VMI’ (Vodafone mobile internet) if all it is good for is downloading a few email headers and surfing wikipedia in the pub quiz?

So, the way things stand at the moment are they are offering me an extra 100 mins a month making it 300 free minutes to any landline, 500 free texts, Vodafone ’stop the clock’, which means after the first three mins on a weekend and every evening I can talk for an hour at no charge. On top of this they will give me £30 credit on my account and a free month of the £7.50 bolt on data tariff to see if i like it.

This is the absolute best they could offer me. The only thing I really wanted is a few mins and a decent data tariff, which they don’t can’t give me. They can’t even give me my old tariff back.

So i have about 14 days to make up my mind and in the first 14 minutes of this, my friend Giles has informed me that I can have a free Nokia N95 8GB on their Flex 35 contract (900 units, either text or mins) and for an extra £7.50 Web and Walk which is up to 3GB !!!

I seriously think that Vodafone are missing a trick here. If they really thought 120 meg was enough for anyone why not have the confidence to offer 1GB a month or even 500meg for starters? Why not put their meg where their mouth is.

Today mobile phones should enable us to leave our laptops at home. They have the capabilities to run a multitude of apps and stream data from cameras with decent resolutions. Never-the-less, some of our mobile network providers (namely Vodafone) seem to want us to stay in the dark ages.

I tweet therefore I twitter.

Today I was using and talking about twitter, as indeed I was the day before and the day before that.

As I said in my last blog post (when I talked about twitterposer) i am a self confessed twitterholic.

Reading that last sentence back.. Yes I do think It sounds sad, but it only sounds that way because twitter although a very apt and memorable name.. sounds silly.

Anyway, so when it comes to trying to tell people the benefits of using Twitter as a tool for social networking etc there are often smirks and sideways glances to one another as I carry on as normal uttering words which are now perfectly normal to me.

I love to use twitter, I am a twitterite, I tweet therefore I twitter.

Every time I meet a new potential ‘twitterling’ I find myself mentioning benefits and functions, techniques and applications of Twitter I did not mention to my previous converts..

Now, I am pleased to say, I don’t have to. All I need do thanks to Caroline Middlebrook and her hard blogging, Is point them to The Big Juicy Twitter Guide.

Fantastic. All you need to know in one handy place.

Enjoy.

Opting out of the iPhone

Why won’t I be rushing out for the new Apple iPhone?

Well, as a Mac lover with a heap of Apple products to my name you would think i was waiting in eager anticipation for the new Apple iPhone.. Especially as my Vodafone contract ran out last week.

After looking at and having a play with the iPhone and it’s data tariffs I have decided to not only stick with my current service provider but to also renew a 12 month contract and order a new phone.

One of the main reasons why the iPhone is not that appealing to me anymore probably has something to do with being an ipod touch owner. I won’t go on about how liberating the iCal and Address Book syncing are, coupled with the always ready and super effective WiFi. The only thing it misses for me is the ability to use Apples ‘Mail’ app. At present though I survive with webmail through the wifi.

So, whilst standing at the cross roads, I looked at all the things I really needed in a phone, what my current provider would bribe me with for staying and the over all cost of switching.

Once you phone up a company like Vodafone and say you want to leave, you get a whole new level of customer service. I sometimes imagine a room full of well paid, well trained staff. You know, the ones that used to exist in other departments in the company.. Like customer service.

If your contract is up this or next month, now is the time for you to do some serious bartering. I imagine a whole heap of phone companies are pulling out all the stops to stop their clients migrating.

I uttered the magic words, PAK number and iPhone and in no time at all I was pretty much customizing my next 12 months of phone contract. Yes, you heard me right.. 12 months. If you insist you can still get a 12 month contract. This along with loads of free minutes anytime, 500 texts and free calls to landlines at weekends and I was a happy customer. Then couple that with a free Sony Ericsson K850i (£350 off contract) and I was sold. I am paying half the price of an O2 iPhone contract so if i really wanted to, I could get myself a ‘3′ mobile modem at £15 a month to free my laptop and still have change.

I think If the iPhone had a 5 megapixel camera I would maybe have been tempted. Same if there were decent data packages around that didn’t take the piss.

I refuse to get suckered into the hype. Yes it is a beautiful piece of technology but it comes at a massive price to the early adopter and if my ipod does half of it then I can live with that till there comes a time when an unlocked iPhone is on the street at a more reasonable less sell-your-soul kind of price. A jail-braked ipod would probably do it though but we are really very close to third part apps becoming mainstream anyway.

So for the time being I will still carry the two devices around. My ipod and my phone. Although as I may well also be leaving my pocketable camera at home. I may be lighter in the pockets. We will have to see how the 5 mega pixel camera pans out.

Regarding syncing it to my mac, one google search later and i found Feisar who supplied two plug-ins for a couple of quid and it saved me a trawl of the net. I bought their handy address book app as well but I still don’t know what it does.

It’s great having a compact phone once again. My last phone was a Nokia E61 and yes it did a lot of stuff but you knew when you had it on you and you couldn’t sit down with it in the back pocket for fear of getting an ass full of glass. Also the mail and data tariffs are extortionate and with more and more WiFi around I was finding it becoming redundant as i prefer my ipod for browsing the net.

If i didn’t have great loyalty bonuses for sticking with my present service provider and wasn’t currently the owner of an ipod touch, would i be getting the iPhone?

I still think not.

With technology moving so fast a eighteen month contract is just ridiculous. I will at some point have an iphone but i have a strong feeling it will be off-contract and be a very different model to the one out in a couple of weeks.

Although if they put an 8 mega pixel Leica-lensed camera in one tomorrow.. I may well be camping out with the Uber-geeks on a cold dark November night.

Pocket Photography

Whilst in Edinburgh last week I found myself running low on mobile phone power. A friendly German couple in a phone shop on Home Street kindly let me charge it behind their counter whilst i was out and about.

I had one of those weird heads on when you tend to see a picture in everything and wished i had taken my camera out with me.

On returning to the shop i sparked up a conversation on phone technology and in no time at all i had made the spontaneous purchase of a brand new phone.

Granted it had been one i have been looking at for a while.. this particular model had been tweeked and messed with and even had the next and latest models firmwear installed inside it’s sleek black shell. I was chuffed to bits and ever since i have been snapping at anything that passes a train window or falls underfoot.

A two mega pixel camera in a phone… and no doubt this is only the beginning.

Well of course it is as the corporate giants obviously want us to keep on upgrading and as soon as we know it, we will have a five megapixel…eight… then who knows if a camera will ever be just a camera again.

There is talk of a five megapixel camera watch that uses bluetooth technology to beam the viewfinder onto the inside of your shades or glasses.

Half of me wants to leave all this life complicating technology behind and simplify things… the other wants to embrace it and just have fun…

Blog for Your Life

 

 

The Government needs YOU to start blogging now! Think about it. At this moment in time, those that run society have a few tools at their disposal to monitor the populous. Whether it be RFiD chips, CCTV, or Menwith hill and it’s technological wonders. The private life of the individual is secretly captured, mapped, collected, and owned in effigy by a mass of private business operations—the security industry.

All these methods of collection require continued research and development, massive corporate and private funding and thousands of members of staff.

Wouldn’t it be cheeper and easier for all if we publicly told the world exactly what we thought? What if we revealed our innermost fears and dreams in an attractive, easy to read, easily up-datable format?

Wouldn’t this serve the government information gatherers just perfectly? All that time and energy saved.

Straight away, the chit chat from little girls discussing about what kind of tattoo/piercing/hair colour they are sporting this week can be filtered from the educated informed and ever so slightly angst ridden masses.

The technology is already in use to read every electronic transmission on the planet, it looks for keywords so the email or blog can be filed and read at a later date. But what the Blog really achieves is the effect it has on making people who really feel like they have an axe to grind, blab their innermost secrets to the world.

No more private conversations. Everything out in the public domain. The diary of a sociopath left open for all to see.

So now, thanks to the blog and all the loyal bloggers out there, the trouble causers and potential revolutionaries can be rounded up. In data bundles at first, name lists and hard drives crammed with tales of people, peoples tales and their anti social thoughts.
Then, in a more physical fashion as groups of people are isolated until they are brought into line.

Think about this next time you are posting your deepest darkest thoughts. Think about it but don’t necessarily let it stop you.

New Web Tools

Well… Everyday I wake new and improved web tools are born with promises that they are the best at whatever it is they do.

I still don’t know what i am meant to be doing or why i’m even here…

I am meant to be a photographer. Taking pix and building a archive of images.. Every moment on this computer.. using these ‘tools’.. is another moment not out in the big wide world capturing moments for all times.

It is such an amazing distraction..

A few people i don’t know want to be my friend… A few people i didn’t know but nearly do seem to be on here to. Maybe after a while i will know many of the people i didn’t, and get to know some of the people i do a little bit better.

Who knows.

Man.. This time last week i was in Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan to be precise. I think i understood my enviroment there more than i do here.

I wonder what percentage of blogs in this world are written by people that have little or nothing to say… Like me… And how many more people actually read them. I think we all have much too much time on our hands.

Buddha help us in the future when all the work is done by robots and everyone and their Gran has a ‘blog’.
………………………………………………………………..
June the 23rd 2034…
“Today i mostly read other peoples blogs before deciding to write mine and tell you what little i have actually been doing. I can write so much faster now that i have my ‘thaughtwriter®’ plugin… Oh how did we ever manage without it.

All i need now are some decent thoughts.”
…………………………………………………………………

Ahh… so much to look forward too.