Kiwiberry - a gadget obsessed Kiwi's blog



	Welcome to my blog. Pretty much everyone and his dog seem to have a blog so I thought why not me. Expect random ramblings - mostly about gadgets and occasionally about the life of a kiwi commuter who is a long, long way from home. marchandaprilblog@kiwiberry.net
	Tuesday 21st April 2009 Back in the days of Palm's dominance of the Personal Digital Companion I used a site called PeanutPress. They sold a range of e-Books that you could read on your Palm and did so extremely well. Years went buy and PeanutPress was bought out and is now owned by Barnes and Noble. In the years after the buyout Barnes and Noble didn't update their "eReader" and I changed from carrying a Palm everywhere to carrying a Nokia to carrying my BlackBerry. Finally, after more years than it's decent to admit, eReader.com have updated their reader to include my BlackBerry 9000 (and actually the Storm too). Imagine my surprise when I visited eReader.com and there was a huge splash ad explaining that "FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER AS AN EBOOK" the works of Tolkien were available! Wow! Oh wait a moment... I've been able to buy those from the excellent Mobipocket.com for years! It seems that eReader.com still has its proverbial head up its ass. The picture below is a screen capture from the Mobipocket.com website with a search for Tolkien... as you can see the site has lots of matches, and more importantly has had the whole set for years and years! Monday 6th April 2009 Ok I've decided it's not me. You shouldn't, in this day of WYSIWYG interfaces, have to write formats using the code window of a web design program. Microsoft Expressions just sucks. I'm a tolerably I.T. literate sort of chap. Ok - actually I'm an I.T. professional who runs training courses at the highest level. Writing a simple blog shouldn't be done using Notepad, and that's exactly what I turned to rather than using the shiny MS Expressions program I bought to run kiwiberry.net. Out with the new and in with the old... I've uninstalled the pathetic new Expressions program and reinstalled MS FrontPage 2003. That at least allows basic format and typing without resorting to notepad! Thursday 2nd April 2009 I took my Pocket VAIO for a walk in the park with the vague idea of working outside in the Spring sunshine for a couple of hours. I found a picnic table, unpacked and powered up the VAIO and opened my coffee flask. The VAIO fired into life saying it needed to finish installing 3 of 5 updates... and then promptly died on me. How nice, it had taken all night to do the update and drained my battery when I unplugged the VAIO. I finished my coffee and went for a walk around town instead. Wednesday 1st April 2009 I decided to treat myself (at the end of a long, long contract) to a new laptop when I saw the Sony VAIO-P in green on the Expansys.com website. I ordered it on Friday and made a point of selecting Royal Mail Special Delivery so I would get the VAIO Saturday morning. Unfortunately Expansys decided to send it using the incompetent TNT. Obviously the VAIO-P didn't come on Saturday morning as advertised (and paid for). Instead they left it at a neighbours house while I was at work on Monday. I hate 9-5 weekday delivery companies! If you don't take a day off work you have to drive miles to their depot to collect the parcel. I sent Expansys a snotty email and decided not to shop with them again. Anyway the VAIO-P series is Sony's smallest VAIO yet. The Sony adverts really don't get over the sense of scale for the VAIO-P - its blooming tiny!!! The 8 inch screen is so thin you would think it would bend, but it's delightfully rigid. The keyboard follows the T-Series calculator button example but seems to be ok for typing (so far). Compared to the HP 3122 the packaging for the VAIO was compact and well thought out. Okay so the 3122 came in a monster box, but the Pocket VAIO was a pleasure to unpack. I unpacked the VAIO and charged it overnight then spent most of today uninstalling all the junk on the VAIO and loading Office 2007. The baby VAIO only has a sixty gigabyte hard disk but I plan to do some pretty basic stuff with it - email, word processing etc and I'm going to get a 32Gb SD card as back up memory for the VAIO so I think it will work out ok. The Pocket sized VAIO comes in a range of colours and I opted for the sparkling green one, which is subtler than the VAIO-CS I also had in green. The pictures really don't do it justice, with my Nikon flash picking out the metallic effect more than in normal daylight. Saturday 21st March 2009 I ordered some skins for my 3 Skypephone S2, my iPod, my 3 modem and my trusty Sony PSP. I thought it would be nice to give them a make over like my new BlackBerry Bold with its wood effect skin. The skin I went for was the goldfish one from "Threeskins.com". I think they work pretty well and I've been pleased with the "team effect". Now if only Threeskins.com would make one for my BlackBerry Bold too! Even my classic iPod looks a bit fresher with a new goldfish skin on it! Saturday 14th March 2009 I got a TH Bury car kit fitted on my Mazda this morning and then took my car for a test drive. How sad is that? I drive thousands of miles a year and here I was taking a spin, although on an admittedly beautiful spring morning. One of the great things about the TH Bury universal kit is that you can change the cradle when you change mobile phones. The cradle for the BlackBerry Bold is somewhat bulbous compared to the slim one for the BlackBerry Storm. Something to do with the charging element I'm sure. The BlackBerry Bold sits in the bottom cradle and then a push backward clicks it into place. There is a release button on the top left of the cradle. Although the Bold charges using a USB port on the left, it charges in the cradle through the base. A minor miracle of technology in itself. I really do like how the BlackBerry Bold displays an analogue clock while its charging. Very nice little touch that! Wednesday 4th March 2009 I finally gave up on the BlackBerry Storm. It went with hardly a backward glance or regret. What lead to this wonderful devices downfall? It's all down to typing. Whilst away from home on work I rely on my BlackBerry for emails and occasionally have to make tolerably long replies. Basic typing on my old BlackBerry 8800 was a pleasure. Okay I wouldn't describe it as quick but it was painless. On the Storm even a short reply left me frustrated and annoyed. After four months of persevering I've given up on it. I won't get to like the strange off centre feel or the strange idea of select and click when typing. Each letter had become a battle. I bought a BlackBerry 9000 Bold, ordered a host of goodies for it, and felt better immediately. The Storm was a mistake. The BlackBerry 9000 Bold is really nicely engineered. The keyboard is a pleasure to welcome back. It has the same four buttons as the BlackBerry 8800, Call, Menu, Back and End, surrounding the "Pearl" trackball. I downloaded a few classic applications, well okay - Chuzzle, and enjoyed. If BlackBerry had released an update for the software on the 8800 I would have been equally delighted. One of the small annoyances of owning a Storm was that there were no Themes for it. It gets very dull having the same black theme week after week. One of my first jobs with the new BlackBerry Bold was to visit BPlay.com and buy an animated theme. A really simple peaceful picture of a woodland glade with leaves falling every now and then and a nice change to the standard icons on screen. Now that's how I like my gadgets! I like the back of the Bold... having a leather finish makes the Bold pleasant to hold. Kind of classy. Okay so I went out and bought skins for the Bold but still the leather effect is very nice. The Bolds camera is a rather lightweight two megapixels but that's really the only aspect of the Storm I'm going to miss. Although a closer upgrade to the Storm might have been the Curve 8900. It's basically a Storm with a keyboard and might be a nice "next upgrade" for me.