Neil Lathwood’s blog on the world :)
Got sent this link just now about how to get around T-Mobile mangling content on mobile devices/3g cards.
Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it on o2 so not sure if they do it or not but this is a nice work around for those who use Firefox.
http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product.htm
I have a 4G version on it’s way to me for tomorrow. Can’t wait to have a play and see what all the hype is about. I’ll post my comments/thoughts up when I have tested it for a bit.
t00t
Ryan asked what the desktop is like so here we go:
Got some games that I no longer want so if anyone wants to give me p+p costs for them then feel free. Only request a game if you really want it.
http://forum.lathwood.co.uk/showthread.php?t=8074
Grand Theft Auto - Vice City
Hidden & Dangerous 2
Black & White 2 Collectors Edition
Doom 3
Halo
The Settlers III
Call of Duty 2
6 copies of Farcry.
Well I picked up my new car and sold the BMW on Wed last week. I’ve already posted in my forum what car I was going to be getting but for those of you who don’t know then let me introduce you to my new car, the Dodge Nitro 2.8 CRD SE. Now it’s a far cry from the BM and something I didn’t think I could see myself driving or really liked seeing other people driving tbh but over the past few days after falling for it on a test drive, I can honestly say that it’s one of the better ‘vehicles’ I’ve owned so far. The BMW was fun but having to avoid pot holes when driving it become such a chore that I found driving it quite boring, it turned heads when it was clean which is probably also what helped sell it so quick, only took me 9 days which I don’t think was that bad.
Anyway, enough about that car now, it’s gone, someone else is driving it and I hope they enjoy it. For me, well for the next 12 months at least, I’ll be sedately plodding along in this beast. Whilst the spec on it is a lot more basic than the BM and it doesn’t quite look as nice as the SXT model, it turns heads everywhere. People stop and stare whilst I’m driving down the road, you see people drooling down their windows as they push up against them to get a better look. On the flip side of the looks is the space and 4×4 feature of it, this swung it for me when thinking about the bike rides I’ve been on and the few times I went to the lake district last year, I’m hoping that this will increase the time I spend doing both of these and it will make it more comfortable and accessible.
I never used to be one who liked seeing people driving ‘trucks’ around, especially if they did nothing more than go to work or drop the school kids of in them. Whilst I will be doing a bit of the former, I’m hoping it will see a lot of the country side and I do still cycle to work so why shouldn’t I be able to have a little something I like in my life even if it does have the carbon footprint of about a rack of servers or 10 
Try one, you might like it.
p.s. you can find me lingering around www.nitroforumz.com now 
Well I’ve been running my Nokia E90 for about 3 weeks now and I’ve got to say it’s the best phone I’ve owned so far - one of the main reasons is Wifi, I use it casually when I’m at home, girlfriends or work where I have Wifi access and it is really good. Now I know you can get a lot of other phones with Wifi in them so let me carry on by saying that I really really like this phone for all of the features it has, but the Wireless makes it more useable.
The inbuilt GPS is really good, the signal lock on can take a bit longer than my N70 + Bluetooth GPS but a firmware update should be out soon for the E90 in the UK that has AGPS support which will basically use your data tariff to transfer a small amount of data which should help to get a GPS lock in a matter of seconds. The mapping software itself is good and handy for finding things out no matter where you are but if you are going to use this as a replacement for a TomTom device like I was, then a subscription to the voice guidance system is a must and tbh, rather cheap compared to other options out there.
Web browsing/Email. I use the phone to check my personal email via IMAP and it works well enough, the features provided are very basic but for keeping upto date on things whilst your away from your normal PC then it’s fine. The web browsing is pretty good and I’ve found very few sites that I either can’t access or use all of their features. The random disconnects I experience during anything wireless related is annoying so i’m hoping this will be fixed in the coming firmware update.
The keyboard when you open the phone up is perfectly adequate for short term use, I have fairly big fingers and don’t really find that this gets in the way, my biggest problem is hitting the M key rather than the N key on occasions. The shortcuts that are available are useful and even though the keyboard lacks an escape key, you can use the shortcut key of CTRL + [ which isn’t so bad, a lot of apps use the red cancel button instead or you can send a special character in things like puTTY.
Software wise, the standard tools you get with the phone are handy. The alarm could do with not defaulting to the following day after a certain time. I have however installed puTTY, a vnc viewer and an old nokia vpn client which I am yet to get working for the latter. The former two apps work perfectly fine and allow me to connect into works network from anywhere required. I am waiting for NewNet Marketing to update their catalogue of software so that I can do full remote out of bounds access into our core network equipment. Installation of 3rd party sofware is simple, you will probably want to change the certificate check feature so that you can install some software.
The screens are both very clear and good enough in size to make this phone a useable device even if it does stretch the old pocket out a bit. My biggest gripe with it so far is the speed at which it does things, quite often when I’m checking my imap mail account the device will appear to have crashed and fail to respond. Leaving it a short while will see everything catching up again but none the less, it is quite annoying. It’s not something that I can replace anytime soon as I’m locked into a 18 month contact but tbh, do I really want to change? I don’t want or need a iPhone thank god.
Stuck close(ish) to home for this one so that we could get a couple of new faces on board - Rich and his next door neighbour Dave.
This particular ride saw us starting off and finishing in Rochdale which is where Rich and Dave live and not quite as an early start as previous days but after being out on the beer the night before i was certainly glad of the extra half an hour in bed. That could have been interrupted by a txt at 4:30am from Giles kindly informing us he wasn’t going to be able to make it - who was she Giles Anyway, it didn’t work and i struggled to get out of bed at 6:45 as planned, packed my stuff up and headed to Rich’s house.
Like normal, I arrived first thanks to the trusty sat nav and leaving early enough - take note fellow bike riders! The Salisbury house hold was just getting themselves up and ready when I arrived, breakfast was on the go and I was kindly offered some toast to get me going which was handy as for once I’d forgotten to have breakfast 
We waited around for a while longer before Jordan turned up late as always. So, it was then time to start getting the bikes ready and double checking that we had everything needed to get through the day. Rich’s next door neighbour, Dave, joined us whilst we were getting ready and after some brief introductions, a couple of lubed up chains and we were on our way to, well, somewhere!
The route had been picked and planned by Dave so we were at this mercy to how good the this day would get and obviously which way we were going. Dave had only done part of the route before so wasn’t quite sure how good the start would be. If anyone is interested in the route then it’s been planned out on Google Maps - http://tinyurl.com/35lypu let me know if it was of any use to you.
The weather for the day seemed to be looking pretty good, no sign of rain, wasn’t colder than other rides I’ve been on so it was all good. It had however been raining the night before so the ground was quite bogged down in places but didn’t seem to be causing us any problem at the start. As the ride progressed, one of the best things about it compared to other days was that the majority of the uphills we had to do, were progressive rather than being steep. This meant that I didn’t get tired as quick as I normally do. The gradual uphills lead us into our first downhill of the day and if what that offered as even 10% of the rest of the day then I knew we were in for a decent day. Nice and rocky, rough, steep enough and twisty to make you have to think about the path ahead - I loved it
As the day went on and the mini breaks had been had a few times by everyone, we started coming across more and more ‘puddles’ and when I say ‘puddles’, I really mean mini ponds! These things were deep, with some of them covering half of the wheel which provided some entertainment to people following behind. It also mean that any slightly boggy sections were pretty bad Jordan and Dave were thoughtful enough to let me and Rich go first - which we were only happy to do. One section that we were heading through went from being about a foot deep with water to being a foot deep with water and a layer of mud about 10 inches deep at the bottom, obviously neither our wheels or feet could get through this thing and we had to drag ourselves out of it before doing the next sensible thing and carrying on :p Just past this I ended up in front of everyone and was heading down a very short downhill to what looked like a perfectly flat piece of ground, how wrong could I be, I hit the ground at a decent enough speed and managed to get about 50% of the way across before my front wheel just sank about a 3rd of the way into this bog and I went straight over the handle bars face first into a lovely stench pit which reminded me of the bog of eternal stench but without Sir Didymus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(film)). Well obviously that provided some entertainment for everyone and allowed us all to catch our breaths again. By this time, we were all pretty much covered in mud but I think I took top prize for being the worst one out of us all.
We’d pretty much hit about the half way mark and we came across a small windy road which led us down into a nearby town/village, Dave headed the way down this as he’d been before, I followed with Rich and Jordan behind us. Not 30 seconds into the descent and I heard and then saw Jordan whizzing past, peddaling for all he was worth, he went straight past me and caught up with Dave straight away, when I say caught up with, what I really mean is, lost control, started to go over his handle bars, get caught up with Dave and wipe both of them out leaving Dave sprawled across the top of a barb wired fence - ouch! Considering the speed of everyone and the spectacular merging of metal, at the time the only apparant injury sustained was by the innocent Dave who had a chunk of shin taken from his leg, nothing some water and a bit of cloth couldn’t wipe up. After a check of everyone, a check of the bikes and a bit of work (yes, I even get called up on the side of mountains :)) we carried on to the bottom of the road, slowly, until Jordan stopped in front of us complaining his front brake wasn’t working. We had another look over Jordan’s bike and found that his front wheel was buckled pretty badly and his front brakes were pretty much non-existant. With no tools to be able to fix this we carried on as best we could, leaving Jordan to stop himself with his feet or gravity - it was mostly the former.
We hadn’t gotten about 20 more minutes into the ride when we were hit with Dave’s chaing becoming wedged between the bottom bracket and the frame - a bad design if you ask me. This cost us about 40 minutes in time whilst Dave worked to: remove the bolt holding the cog in place, remove the chain from it’s new home, remove two links from the chain and then, well not much more. It then took all four of us to try and get the pin back into the link on the chain where we were reconnecting, after us all being hit with mild hypothermia, I decided to run over to a house we were outside to borrow a pair of tweasers or pliers so that we could hold the pin in place whilst we tightened it all back up. This worked and got us back up and running in 5 minutes, so after a quick thank you to the kind chap who borrowed us his pliers we were able to set off again and we all decided that the best thing forward was to head back the shortest way and call it a day. At least we’d learnt (the hard way) not to fully remove a pin when splitting a chain, oh and I also learnt that my bike multi tool has both a tyre lever set and a chain splitter, grrrr.
About 4 hours had past so far and we had around another hour before we got back, the pace slowed down slightly as everyone was becoming more and more tired. However the quality of the trail didn’t change and it finished off just as good as it started with the exception of us being slightly dirtier
Jordan took some pics along the way, I’ve uploaded these to my gallery so go check them out here
I was browsing a website the early (www.swapz.co.uk) and after searching on a few pages I was presented with this rather lovely and amusing error message:
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Unknown MySQL server host ‘ds95.reliablehosting.com’ (2) in /home/swapzco/public_html/init/class/db.class.php on line 33
Could not connect
Doh!
Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:49:03 GMT Standard Time:
[hpt374]: Array ‘RAID_5_0′ rebuilding completed.
After a day of sweating, this is exactly the email that I wanted to get. Thank god for raid 5 that’s all I can say
I’m not really into web dev much (hence this blog :D) however I saw this on a mailing list and thought some people might like to try it.
This has got to be one of the funniest things that I’ve seen on the web in ages (well apart from the Ripe video :))
