Jonathan Tullett

I’ve been playing around with quite a few of the systems I use on a daily basis.

A recap of the last week’s changes:

• Purchased an offline Motorola Milestone – an Android based mobile phone.
• Downgraded my O2 contract, saving me £25/month.
• Sent my iPhone off for repair, the battery life is appalling; sending two SMS should not reduce the battery level from 100% to 97%! This will the become my backup phone.
• Migrated my personal email from self-hosted (postfix/courier solution) over to Google Apps. I now have push email to my phone, and it’s fantastic.
• Configured Spanning Sync 3 so I can sync my iCal and address book stuff to Google.
• Started using Google Voice extensively.

Switching over to Android was definitely a good move. I’m finding the UI nicer than the iPhone, and the OS being able to multitask is a definite plus – Google Voice, Twitter et al. can all run simultaneously.

Google Voice is fantastic, even though I’m only using the SMS facilities. It integrates with my mobile’s address book, and is set to poll (no push for that yet) for messages every 15 minutes. From sending to receipt is mere seconds, and it’s possible to SMS other countries for free too. Seeing complete message history online along with the ability to send SMSs while the computer is a boon too, no fiddling with the mobile while at the office.

I’ve been using the Samsung NC10 for about a week now. I use it primarily on the train, and occasionally in the office, having started leaving my MBP at home each day (the NC10 is far lighter).

After first booting to Windows XP Home (the pre-installed OS), I built a USB key containing Ubuntu 8.10 and within the hour, I was using a shiney, portable, primarily linux based laptop.

Having used nothing but macs for the past 2.5 years, it’s taking some getting used to the slightly rearranged keyboard; I’m resisting the urge so far to remap the keys to something more sensible.

I followed the community notes and upgraded the kernel to the release currently in the Jaunty repository, modified a few config files, and now everything’s pretty much working – the function keys (which control volume, screen brightness etc), sound, the ridiculous initial mouse sensitivity. It’s all good.

Surprisingly, I plugged in my USB 3g modem stick, and it was automatically detected, and after clicking a few buttons in a wizard, I was connected. How things have changed since I last properly played with linux!

The battery life has been stellar, averaging over 4 hours between charges. If its ability to play videos is good, it’ll be replacing the MBP on long distance flights!

If you’re in the market for a netbook, IMO, the NC10 is a very good choice.

This week I am cancelling my account with Sky Television.

I’ve been with sky for 7 years, and between years 2-5 I used a trusty Tivo box to provide the recording functionality. When I moved house two years ago, I thought Sky+ would be a better option – it records at the quality transmitted (no mpeg encoding/converting) and would also support Dolby Surround. Unfortunately the UI is awful, and the season pass (series link) support is only slightly less than unusable.

So this week it’s going to be cancelled. In its place, I’ll be installing a Mac Mini and a Iomega MiniMax 1TB hard drive which will be running the Vuze bittorrent client and most likely Hellanzb for usenet downloads. With some custom scripts for polling usenet (via Easynews or similar), I should have a steady stream of exactly the shows and films I want to watch, in hi-def, for an ongoing cost of less than £10/month. Win.