mattwhite

Try Ytria tools for free

If you have anything to do with Notes and Domino and you haven’t yet tried the Ytria suite of tools, then you owe it to yourself to head over to their site. They have a summer promotion going where you can use the whole suite for free until the end of August. Honestly if you’ve not checked them out please do, they will save you literally hours of your life.

London meetup

The meetup last night went well with around 20 people turning up over the course of the evening. As ever it was good to catch up with old friends and meet some new people (for me at least) as well. There were a few photos taken, although not by me so I guess they’ll be seen up on Flickr if they aren’t too incriminating.

The Collab U conference is happening in London again in September so the plan is for another drinks night at the same time. Once we have dates and venue I’ll blog it as usual.

Nokia N95 Firmware upgrade

Because we won’t be getting the sainted iPhone in the UK until the end of the year, I have a Nokia N95 as my current handset. It’s good but not great and today I discovered why. The mobile operators int he UK seem to have hobbled the phone firmware down at a crappy version (10.0.xxx) in my case which gives an old set of software for the camera, GPS, battery life etc. Well Nokia is currently running at around version 12 which is better in every respect. So I found this site which tells you how to flash the firmware by changing the phone’s product code. Half an hour and a 115mb download later and I have, effectively, a brand new phone that has better battery life, camera, GPS support, 3.5g data and more that I haven’t looked into yet.

The only reason that I can think of for Orange to not allow me to upgrade my firmware without the fairly deep hacks required at the moment are to prevent me using VoiP and thus earn them more money, so you can be sure that the first thing I do over the weekend will be to download the latest version of Skype for Symbian 🙂

Don't people have better things to do?

In the continuing battle of people misusing the internet, first we had spammers, then comment spammers, now I’ve noticed a few sites taking content from here (like I get enough traffic that makes it worth stealing) and using it to create splogs. They take a few blog entries and then plaster as many ads on the new site as possible in the vain hope of earning a few pence. Honestly the people who do this sort of thing must have very much more time on their hands than they know what to do with, I just can’t see how it makes economic sense to do it.

Anyway, at the moment my morning routine involves sending a policy violation email to Google so that the thieving assholes don’t get any Adsense revenue for the stolen content, then I contact their hosting company to tell them about the site as well. It’s very labour intensive but at the moment it’s only one or two sites a day. Does anyone have a better way of dealing with them?

Don't Forget…

A few of us are meeting up for some beers this Thursday (the 19th) at All Bar One on New Oxford Street in London. I’ve created an Upcoming.org event (just because I’ve never used the site before and you have to try these things if you’re a geek) that has all of the details in. Hope to see you there. If you don’t know anyone in the community, please do feel free to come along and introduce yourself, I’ll be there from around 6pm and my mobile number is 07767 384970 if you’re having trouble finding us, although if you just look for the loud geeks then you’ll probably have the right group. See you there.

New Toys

You’ve got to love them. Over the last couple of months I’ve played with Wii’s owned by friends and had a good laugh, so this week I got a decent price on one on eBay and it arrived this morning. Even when you play the one player games it’s still a cracking way to spend half an hour, certainly better than vegetating in front of the TV. Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not at all into video games but this is so far removed from the PS3 or X-Box 360 that I’m not sure it even qualifies as a console game in the traditional sense.

Anyway, Wii Tennis beckons 😉