Neil Lathwood’s Blog

Would I have recommended them before yesterday, maybe, their prices seem pretty decent and the website is useable.

Would I recommend them now, not in the slightest, their staff are rude and abrupt on the phone when I called up to see about what they could do for me on another - more expensive lense price wise. So onto my experience.

I’d been looking around for a new lense for my Canon 350d, originally I had decided on a EF70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM but after reading review after review, most people seemed to be suggesting that the 70-200mm f4l would be a better buy, especially if coupled up with a teleconvertor. So I changed my focus onto one of these lenses, more expensive but obviously it’s an investment more than a cost decision.Looking around for the best price and somewhere that had it in stock led me to www.warehouseexpress.com, I had a look at their ‘bargain basement’ page and came across the lense people were recommending but with the nice addition of IS - Canon’s Image Stability system which would allow a few stops lower. They had it on the site priced at £414, bargain I’m sure those who know, would agree. I loaded up my cart over the course of a day, trying best to assure myself that this was a good choice and checking around to confirm pricing. I left things until a day later before deciding to go for it so again I loaded up the virtual shopping cart with the lense, a Slik 700DX tripod and a Manfrotto monopod and finished off the order process.

For the next hour and half, I kept checking back to my email expecting a order notification - I never did. Instead what arrived was the following

“Many thanks for your recent order with ourselves.

I regret to inform you that we are now sold out of the-Canon Ef70-200mm F4.0 L Is USM and unfortunately this item was the lastone. I’ve cancelled the order, and no payment has been taken from yourcredit card.

Please let me apologise for any problems this may cause.

For alternative items please visit our website or call our sales team on

01603 486413.”

Short sweet, doesn’t seem to really make sense in saying they’ve sold out and this one is the last one???!!! Anyway, I called them up to see if they could offer something similar to what I had ordered for a reasonable price. The lady who answered the phone was in the least bit helpful, all she could do was read a list of lenses from the website which were similar in specs to what I had asked for - I’m capable of doing that myself. I told her they weren’t really what I was after based on the price of my original order and specification so I ended the call. After looking around for other suppliers I decided that I would just plump for the non-is version as I had originally intended.

Ebay and a lot of other stores were all selling this lense for quite a lot less than could be bought from warehouseexpress.com so I thought I would give them another call to see if they could do anything on the price. I got through to a chap this time who mentioned they price matched with certain companies and asked me where I had seen the price. I also mentioned about my cancelled order and then as soon as I mentioned it was from Amazon, he said we don’t price match with them so I asked about another company to which he just point blank said ‘NO’, ok nice customer service skills here. I once again mentioned how I’d not long ago had my other order cancelled due to a fault on their part and could he look at offering me the lense at a slightly reduced cost, the answer again was quite categorically ‘NO’. At this point I’d had enough of speaking to them so ended the call and went and sourced the lense from another company - well done warehouseexpress.com, you lost out on a £500 order all because you seem to want to quote the classic Little Britain T.V show: “Computer says no”. Got the lense from another company for cheaper, also ordered the tripod and monopod from elsewhere for again, cheaper.

So folks, my advice, avoid warehouseexpress.com.

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Wow, no new blog posts this year - really need to get cracking with these this time round and actually post stuff worth reading! Anyway, picked up a new lense for the trusty ol 350d, weighs, erm, just a tad more than the 28-135mm lense I’ve got but that will be down to it being an L lense So, what did I get? A rather lovely new 70-200mm f4l USM lense along with a 1.4 x teleconvertor. Would have got a IS version for around the same price but the very kind people over at Warehouse express decided that they couldn’t wouldn’t sell it to me, see my blog post about that to come.Have to now hope that the weather brightens up a bit over this weekend so I can maybe get out and about with it and take some excellent pics - if that’s even possible for me yet! I’ll post back though if I do manage to get some good snaps so stay tuned to my dslr gallery

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http://www.nokia.com/A4705179

Overview
Nokia PC Phone is an experimental service that gives you a possibility to use your mobile phone with your Web Browser.You can call, text and manage contacts from your phone.

You can communicate by using Nokia PC Phone with your friends and family even though they don’t have the Nokia PC Phone themselves. Your friends are not able to tell the difference whether you are using the Nokia PC Phone or not, because your calls and text messages are actually made from your own Nokia phone.

Now also available for IE 7 browser.

Installation instructions
Please go through the Nokia PC Phone installation instructions step by step. It is very easy and fast

Sounds like it could be quite handy, would be interested to hear about any security issues this may present before giving it ago if anyone has any?

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Well the Lexus G300 that I have had sat on the drive for 14 months is going to a new home with someone from the lexus owners club forum. He knows the score with it and I’ve tried to explain everything that’s wrong with it.

I get a message from him saying that he would like to pick it up saturday or maybe earlier and could I check the oil and try and start it up. After 14 months I thought no chance, it would be a case of brake ceased and won’t start . So, I charge the battey up for a few days then pop it back in - central locking works straight away so in I get, totally forgetting how nice it is inside, I put the key in the illuminated ignition and check it’s in park before trying to start it up. After a chug or two I gave it a little gas and voila, the thing kicked straight into life!!!!! So, hopefully it will be gone from the drive in a few days time and I can see if any long lasting effects will show themselves up on the drive beneath it.

Gotta love the engineering behind a lexus

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On Monday to finish off my nice long weekend just before xmas, my mum, dad, Kate and I all headed down to Warwick castle for the afternoon, we’d already booked tickets as we wanted to see what the ice trail was like after being made to sound like an enchanted trail

For those of you that have never been before then go, it really is a lovely place but the entertainment they have on is really excellent, the staff they have dressed up walking around drumming up support do a damn good job about it and made the day all that much better - one of them even propositioned me

After spending an hour walking round to see some of the sites and have lunch, we ended up in the general direction of the ice trail so we headed on over in time for our slot at 2:15pm. The boots that were provided were the same ones as we used at the ice rink in Manchester, Piccadilly and proved to be comfortable enough although my legs were aching after it. The trail itself was a real change from the your usual square or rectangular shaped one, it had a square area where you started from and this is where the staff members ‘hung’ around. Gotta admit, even though they were stood round on the ice all day, they were still willing to help people out and even show them how to try and stop without crash landing in the barriers. From this ’square’ you then head around the trail in a semi circle until you near the centre, at this point you can then skate around a small round-a-bout type circle before heading for the finish/start and doing it all over again - if you wanted to

I’ve put some photos online at http://lathwood.co.uk/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=42

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Just a quick one this. I’ve just posted a quick how to add an icon to your desktop for remote vnc and remote desktop connections. Enjoy

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Wrote up a quick how-to on my site about using VPN on the ASUS eee.

VPN setup

I still need to get some icons done for the desktop, but for now, this is what I have.

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The next thing I’ve added to my 3e laptop is the ability to connect to the net via gprs on my mobile phone. You can do this via usb or bluetooth and i’ve opted for the latter event though it’s a bit more hassle to get it going.

Credit for this has to go to SublimePorte over on the eeeuser.com forums, he has packaged the installer up into a .deb package that can be downloaded and installed straight onto your Xandros system, so I did, it didn’t work So after checking into things and testing, I eventually got things working using wvdial rather than the scripts included in Porte’s package. It did however mean that I got an icon on the home page to use to start and stop the connection so I adapted what was already installed. I will try and give you the full instructions on how to do this without Porte’s deb package.

Firstly, plug your bluetooth adaptor in! Once you have done this run the following from a terminal on your 3e:

hciconfig hci0 up

You shouldn’t see any response back, if you do then their was a problem and you will need to check into this before carrying on.

Next run the following command which will search for devices with bluetooth enabled and DUN (dial up networking enabled). If you get a failed response back here then you have a problem with your bluetooth dongle or your mobile phone:

eepc:/root> sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...
Searching for DUN on 00:01:02:03:04:05 ...
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10027
Service Class ID List:
"Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
"L2CAP" (0x0100)
"RFCOMM" (0x0003)
Channel: 2
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x454e
encoding: 0x6a
base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
"Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
Version: 0x0100

Make a note of the bluetooth address and channel (00:01:02:03:04:05 and Channel 2 in the example above). Next, edit /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf and enter the following config:

options {
autoinit yes;
security auto;
pairing multi;
passkey "1234";
}device {
name "phone";
class 0x3e0100;
iscan enable;
pscan enable;
lm accept;
lp rswitch,hold,sniff,park;
}

This file is available to download here

Change the passkey line to something that only you will know, this is the passkey you will use when you synch your 3e with your phone. Also change the name to something a bit more descriptive for the phone. Now edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf and paste the following code into it

rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
device 00:01:02:03:04:05;
channel 2;
comment "Mobile";
}

This file is available to download here.

Change the device to match your bluetooth address from earlier, the channel and set the comment to something descriptive so you can identify this connection.

Ok, bluetooth should be now setup, if you try and find and pair with your dinky 3e using the passkey you set. If everything has worked ok then you should be able to pair successfully. This needs to be done from your mobile phone of choice using the bluetooth wizard most have installed. - Note, thanks to a reader for pointing out that I didn’t make it clear that you should now start the pairing from your mobile.

Now it’s onto the wvdial setup, firstly you need to install it though so add an additional repo to your apt configuration - I’m not going to show you how to do that here and then run apt-get install wvdial. Once installed you will need to setup the wvdial.conf in /etc/ to use the settings applicable for your mobile network provider. Mine was O2 in the UK so my settings reflect this. Anyway, edit the wvdial.conf file and put this in it:

[BluetoothMobile]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 912600
SetVolume = 0
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0-0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”mobile.o2.co.uk”
FlowControl = CRTSCTS
ISDN=0[Dialer GPRS]
Username = mobileweb
Password = password
Phone = *99#
Stupid Mode = 1
Inherits = BluetoothMobile

This file is available to download here. You need to replace the mobile.o2.co.uk with the APN (access point name) for your mobile provider, the username and password need to be provided by them as well. Nothing else needs changing in this file so you should be good to go.

Next paste this into the /usr/sbin/gprs script (if you are creating this yourself then don’t forget to chmod 755 /usr/sbin/gprs when done):

#!/bin/sh
wvdial_running=$(ps xa | grep -v grep | grep 'wvdial GPRS' | awk '{print $1}')
pppd_running=$(ps xa | grep -v grep | grep 'pppd' | grep wvdial | awk '{print $1}'
if test $wvdial_running > 0 && test $pppd_running > 0
then
sudo kill -9 $wvdial_running
sudo kill -9 $pppd_running
kdialog --msgbox "GPRS Connection has been stopped!"
else
kdialog --msgbox "Please make sure your bluetooth dongle is inserted then press OK to continue"
sudo /usr/bin/wvdial GPRS &
kdialog --msgbox "GPRS Connection has been started!"
fi

This file is also available to download.

Ok, nearly finished now. Time to get the icons we need and place them in /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/:

accessibility_gprs_hi.png
business_gprs_hi.png
gprs_norm.png
gprs_hi.png
home_gprs_hi.png
student_gprs_hi.png

You will also need to edit the /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/simpleui.rc and add the following line somewhere above </simpleui>:

<parcel simplecat="Internet" extraargs="/usr/sbin/gprs"
icon="gprs_norm.png"
selected_icon="grps_hi.png">
<name lang="en">GPRS</name>
</parcel>

Now all that you need to is restart your X session (CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE) and once you log back in, you should have a GPRS icon on your home page which you can click to lanch the GPRS connection and stop it.

My longest blog so far? I think so

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Been a while since I used phpBB - probably about 2-3 years now but I must have been subscribed to their mailing list for new releases as I just got this in the post.

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=615945

If they have indeed sorted out the code problems they were plagued with previously then this could be a php forum of choice, in general it used to be pretty good at what it did and the main reason I moved to vBulletin was because of the security issues that came to light ever few weeks. A few extra options in vB also swayed me but these wouldn’t have been enough on it’s own.

Gotta say, I do like the user details being on the right hand side, it’s something you rarely look at in a forum so having it ‘out of the way’ seems a lot better, I know this is skinable in most forums but if phpBB comes like that then t00t

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Been spending a bit of time setting my 3e up just how I like it - that happens to be basic mode using the default installed Xandros OS.

I’ve been installing some extra software from the extra debian repos so that the little blighter will do everything I need it to Anyway, I like to have a shell (terminal/console) open so that I can edit files, connect to other systems via SSH etc. As default you can just hit CTRL+ALT+T for an xterm window and that is probably how I would launch it all the time but I thought I’d have a go at modifying the standard desktop and add it as an Icon/Application launch in the Work section of the desktop - hey it worked

Now, edit the file /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/simpleui.rc

You can put this next bit of code anywhere within the <simpleui> </simpleui> tags but I put it just below the Notes application. So, do a search for Notes and then below the </parcel> tag for this application, paste this config:

<parcel simplecat="Work" extraargs="/usr/bin/xterm"
icon="xterm_norm.png"
selected_icon="xterm_hi.png">
<name lang="en">Terminal</name>
</parcel>

Save the file and when your ready, restart your X display by doing CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. Your new program should now appear in the work folder using icons that already exist on your system. If you want to have a go at replacing the icons with your own then in the directory /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher re-place the following files:

xterm_norm.png
xterm_hi.png
accessibility_xterm_hi.png
business_xterm_hi.png
home_xterm_hi.png
student_xterm_hi.png

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