When I got my new phone, a HTC P4350, I quickly managed to make and receive phone calls and text messages. I even connected straight to the Internet over WiFi and (slowly) over GPRS. It never occured to me that sending a MMS, a picture message, would be so complicated.
With a “Pow!” and a “Zap!” I asked their technical support people and got the answer. It works in two parts, firstly the GPRS side, which you can find in the Connections tab of the Settings screen:
Back in November I wrote about my then-new Belkin Wi-Fi Phone for Skype. At the time I was fairly pleased with the concept but less so with the actual implementation.
The phone’s hardware was fine. The unit as a whole was reasonably solid. The buttons were a bit wobbly and the screen was smaller than you might initially think, but there was nothing to complain about too much.
Reading this article by David Pogue reminded me of my own search for a reliable and easy backup solution. I came to a rather different answer so I thought it might be worth detailing a little history, the options I considered and the one I eventually chose.
Ancient History
In the olden days — i.e., going back a couple of years — I split the files into four categories:
Ever since I moved over to using the WordPress content management system to host this website I have been using a relatively small number of plugins. One of my most used is Photopress which you can see in use almost everywhere you see a picture.
However, late last year I realised how much one, small part of the functionality irritated me. You could either view a full size picture in a page on its own, but I’d never managed to create a template that worked well for both portrait and landscape images. Or you could have each image pop up in another window. I wasn’t keen on that either.
Talking about Google’s old and new hiring practices seems to be all the rage at the moment, so I thought that I would get in on the act.
I got through two phone interviews for a technical consultant role here in the UK before being rejected. My second interviewer told me that he’d had fourteen interviews before being hired. That’s just an absurd number. How much holiday and sick leave can you take at short notice without arousing suspicion?! (They were both long enough or required Internet access that I couldn’t do them at work.)
The problem is this. To get ADSL you need to have a BT phone line. Yet, except for calling my parents, I don’t really use a land-line phone. This has made using ADSL broadband more expensive than I’d have liked as I had to pay ?11 a month for a phone line I don’t make calls with1. Fast forward to last month, when I find that I can get cable broadband without phone or digital TV service.
As I mentioned previously, I am in the process of reducing the number of websites that I need to support. To that end, some time ago I moved the content from StephenDarlington.com to here with the intention of decommisioning the old site. That day is coming shortly. The actual domain isn’t going away for a while yet, but soon it will redirect to www.zx81.org.uk/blog/.
If you can read this, you are accessing my new web server. As with all of these things, there is no such thing as a completely clean transition, so if you notice anything amiss please do let me know.
On a similar note, moving my domain from my ISP to another provider has also affected my email. So if you have sent me email in the last day or two and it bounced back (or I’ve not replied) that is why. Please try again!
The short story is that if you have a standard configuration things should work entirely as you’d expect. That is, download the archive which, these days, comes as a RedHat “rpm” file. Become “root” and enter “rpm -ivh oracle-xe.rpm” and wait a bit. The install goes away and creates all the required users, starts up the listener and creates a default empty database.
CentOS, for those that have not come across it, is a Linux operating system built from the same source package as RedHat Enterprise Linux but without the support contract.
The premise
I have become increasingly disaffected by Apple’s .Mac service, so much so that when I recently got an email congratulating me for subscribing for another year I immediately went to the website and cancelled.
The background
But before we start going into all the details, what is .Mac? Basically it’s Apple’s on-line services that are geared for Mac users but are also usable by those stuck in the Microsoft world. When I first got my iBook back in 2001 it was called iTools. It had a more limited set of features back then, but that included a something@mac.com email address.