It’s just gone 11pm PST and Obama leads in the electoral votes by 338 to McCain’s 159, with four states still to declare - a pretty strong and convincing win. To be honest, it was over by 8.30pm PST this evening when CNN declared the win for Obama after he turned Florida red to blue.
CNN have put together a great slideshow of the evening, see it by clicking here.
A truly fascinating and momentous night. Unforgettable.
I had my first hands-on experience with the new T-Mobile G1 today and was more impressed than I thought I would be.
This little wonder is out officially tomorrow, but I got a sneak peak.
Firstly, I was really impressed with the shape and how it fits in your hand. I was not originally a fan of the bent bottom, but the way it moulds into your palm for calls is excellent. Within minutes I found the whole interface very intuitive.
The screen flips out very easily to reveal a perfectly functioning keyboard with great responsiveness. I was navigating so easily with the keyboard and buttons, I forgot about the touch-screen!
The applications are too many to mention, but even Google Maps has a nice twist to it. Run it, it’ll find your location, and with the built in e-compass as you turn the street view changes to actually reflect a 360 view. Very strange, but clever and cool.
I’m told the battery life is good, even with 3G on all day with average use. The iPhone 3G’s battery from experience isn’t too good for an average user and won’t last the day.
The camera is a powerful 3.2 megapixel one, with autofocus. Even down to a macro-level I was impressed with the quality. A neat application I saw was a bar code scanner linked to the camera. Scan a bar code in a shop, and instantly it brings up the details - and even links to Amazon to see what they’re selling it for - and buy it there and then. Clever.
The whole look-and-feel, UI and navigation has been given much thought. Again, after a short time, I was moving around the screen and applications like a pro.
I don’t think it’s a serious contender in the corporate space yet, but as soon as the applications appear similar to ActiveSync and security is proven, it’ll be a winner for sure. These will still fly off the shelf tomorrow without a doubt.
Someone commented to me today in the office that I hadn’t blogged for some considerable time. Firstly, I was surprised he’d heard about my blog, let alone even read it. I don’t get delusions of grandeur from his comments, I just thought, "Wow - this internet thing really is far reaching", (as if I didn’t know that already)
Something like a blog takes a lot of upkeep, (it’s been well over a month since I last blogged. The gap between the posts before that was only a week)
Then you have Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. Perhaps it’s time for me to rationalise? If I was to keep all this afloat it would take a fair chunk of my day.
That’s my point. Times change, priorities change. Workloads change. It really is a full-time job. Priorities and workloads have changed for me. I’m so behind:
It’s all mounting up. Have you thought about giving up some parts of social networking? If so, what are you cutting back on?
I’m really interested to see the launch of Peek. A “no-nonsense” communications device. The selling point is simple - just a device for you to send and receive email. No GPS, no WiFi, no camera, no music or video player, no Bluetooth - just email.
They beat the conventional way of doing things by the major mobile providers by negating the following:
It looks pretty cool too.
I’m an advocate for getting back to basics and keeping it simple. I think it could be a winning formula. What do you think?
I was lucky enough to get my hands on the new Canon Vixia HF100 HD camcorder this week, and I haven’t been disappointed. The camcorder has won many awards this year, and rightly so.
I’ve been using it non-stop and getting great results. I’ve had the Sony DCR-PC9E MiniDV Handycam since 2001, it served the family well, but a change was needed. Moving from tape to memory card is a delight.
To take the flash memory out of the camera, download and edit on the PC in full HD has to be seen to be believed. The camera is well spec’d with:
I’ve created a very quick clip in the cool Cinema 24 mode, downloaded it to my iMac and edited it in iMovie and then uploaded it to Vimeo.com (which I highly recommend - if you haven’t got an account yet, get one!)
Here’s an embedded test clip. For full HD, you need to visit the Vimeo.com site.
First trial of my new Canon Vixia HF100 - in HD from David Burden on Vimeo.
Everyone who knows me, knows I love my gadgets. I’m an early adopter. I buy stuff, and then something new comes out eight weeks after and I get burnt. However, I’m never going to change, I love the thrill of getting something new and exciting.
My friends and colleagues are scandalised that I won’t be buying an iPhone 3G tomorrow. “Why?” they asked - I’ll tell you why:
Some of these are obviously a little tongue-in-cheek, however I think I will stay with the original iPhone and the new OS 2.0 for now. But for those of you buying, I’m still envious…!
Over the weekend, I took the plunge and updated the firmware on my Blackberry 8310 to the new Blackberry OS 4.5. This is obviously not recommended as there could have been all sorts of issues, but, for now, things are looking pretty good and pretty stable.
I wanted to upgrade as, (a) I’m impatient, and (b) the upgrade brings massively improved functionality - the main ones being, better media player, video recorder, HTML email, better user interface, availability search for calendar invites.
So how did I do it? Here’s how. And please, do not contact me if you have problems. I don’t recommend this unless you think you know what you’re doing!
These instructions are only for owners with a Blackberry 8310. I am on the AT&T network in the USA. This method has not been tested by me on any other network or anywhere else in the world. Also, to get the full functionality of things such as HTML email, your BIS service must be running BIS 2.5 - but I believe they all are now.
This process may remove any applications you have installed and may remove your corporate policy if you have one. Be warned.
Also, start to finish, this process can take an hour or more. Once you start, you can’t stop, so make the time.
1. Ensure you have the latest Blackberry Desktop software installed. You can get it here: http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/desktop/
2. Install the Blackberry Desktop software.
3. Download the latest OS firmware from here, the only place to offer it right now - the Germany Vodafone site. (By the way, the official release by US operators is looking to be released around September if you can wait that long)
4. Install the OS firmware download.
5. Plug in your Blackberry, your device will be identified and the upgrade process should begin. The process, as I’ve said already, can take a long, long time. Lots of rebooting and white screens are normal. Be patient.
If you end up with a white screen with small icons and the number 507/543, simply connect to Desktop Manager again and run the application loader once again.
Good luck and enjoy! I’m certainly loving the new look.
Yesterday, I got my first iMac. I’ve been waiting to make the switch for a long time now (around 15 years I guess), but I finally have. 
I’m absolutely thrilled with the purchase. It’s going to take a while to make the conversion as I’m so used to a PC, but already I’m finding the iMac relatively easy to use.
I made an appointment with a personal shopper in the Stanford Apple store. Fantastic service, the guy really knew his stuff. I even got really into the deep technical questions and threw some curve balls around PC and Mac wireless networking, filesharing and DNLA, but nothing seemed to phase him.
I walked out with a shiny new 24″ iMac with the following:
Took it home, the setup was straight forward and even though the Apple Store offered to do it for me, I now begin the long road of transferring all my files from PC to Mac. I thought I might as well throw myself in at the deep end. Watch this space.
This is the new iPhone, available July 11, enough said:
Other key takeaways:
Looking through Flickr sometime ago, I stumbled across the group 365days. This is a group which people post a picture of any part of their body in a creative way, each day, for a whole year.
I see it as a challenge to post something daily and also be creative. I’ve been in awe of people doing this, especially my friend Paul.
The rules for the group are: “A self portrait is a photo of yourself taken by you - it is not a photo of you taken by someone else and it is not a photo of something you hold near and dear to your heart. Please don’t try to interpret ’self portrait’ into something drastically different than what it is. You are only allowed to submit one photo for each day. Only one. Feel free to do whatever you want to do within your own 365 Days set, but only send one to the pool.”
My first attempt was this:
001/365 - Tired eyes
This is my first photo for 365days. I aim to take a picture of some part of me for a whole year. This picture was taken on my Blackberry so it’s not a great quality, but I have been travelling all over the UK since mid May and am extremely tired. I looked in the mirror today and saw tired, red, eyes. Wish me luck on my 365 project…
My 365 day set is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dburden/sets/72157604705931719/
Or you can setup a RSS feed to follow my progress by clicking here.
Every single 365 contribution, can be seen here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/365days/pool/
Yesterday I bought a new Blackberry, the Blackberry Curve 8310. My Blackberry Pearl 8100 had served me extremely well - it was a very faithful device. However, after around a year and a half, the silver paint was wearing off, the camera started to blur, the connection would start to drop and reconnect and the back would occasionally fall to the ground.
I had to find a suitable replacement. I wanted to definitely get a Blackberry, and I definitely wanted a camera. I didn’t really think I would ever use wifi on a device - and if I had to choose between GPS and wifi, I’d go with GPS. I’ve never had a problem with the speeds over GPRS or EDGE when using a Blackberry.
I also thought about the new Blackberry 9000 that will be out later in the year. However, from what I’ve heard and read, the specifications sound great, but the battery life seems poor. The cost of the unit will be fairly substantial too. It’s supposed to have a high quality finish and the photos leaked seem to suggest that, however from people I know who have actually touched them, it seems to have a plastic feel to it. I cannot be sure that’s true.
The 8310 is my seventh Blackberry, but not my seventh phone. Can anyone out there beat that?! You can have a look at all the Blackberry devices I’ve owned at an old post here. A sample photo taken in bad light with the flash can be seen here. It doesn’t look too bad at all:
So, I wanted to go back to a bigger screen, a ‘proper’ keyboard and have a decent camera. Hence my choice of the 8310. So what have I noticed so far:
I’d highly recommend this Blackberry.
A friend of mine Paul Hammond has written a great blog post “What Is Your Backup Strategy?” that details his horrific weekend attempting to claw back his entire digital life including nine years of photos and 65Gb of iTunes songs.
It got me thinking, how would my family feel if my PC and hard-disk died tonight? Probably nothing much initially, but after a couple days when the dust settled, you’d get that horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach that you’d lost your whole life to a hard-disk failure.
Even though I do a weekly backup of my PC to an external hard-drive and I upload my pictures to Flickr, what would happen if my PC and external-drive died? Unfortunately for Paul, his 1TB hard-drive died without warning (as you’d expect)
Just at a rough glance this evening, I have:
On Paul’s recommendation, tonight I signed up for Mozy. I didn’t want to leave it another day. It’s a piece of software that sits on your PC and copies your important files to a secure, remote server for safekeeping.
I’ll sleep more soundly tonight.
UPDATE - 4 August 2008: This evening, my iMac finished it’s first backup. Just over three months since it started. That was a long time! It took this time to backup 73,000 files which weighed in at 188.2GB. However, the incremental backups that are happening now are taking around seven minutes.
There are some iPhone video clips working their way around the internet right now more quickly than Rick’s Astley’s, “Never Gonna Give You Up” Rick Roll video. The new look iPhone mark two is soon to be on the shelves of your nearest AT&T and Apple store. The iPhone 2, which most people believe will be announced at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June (a year after his older brother) is looking very, very good indeed.
This video shows some of the new look interface, which hasn’t changed a great deal apart for a few new options and the version 2 firmware. The new 3G, GPS iPhone is a little slimmer with a matt-black finish instead of the polished silver we all know and love.
Take a look at the clip here:
Tonight there’s a new PS3 Firmware Update, version 2.30. It’s now pretty much official, the PS3 is the cheapest and best Blu-ray player you can buy.
Sony has announced the PS3 now has DTS-HD Master Audio support, which is one of the highest resolution audio formats for films, with Dolby TrueHD being the only other contender (the PS3 supports this too, by the way).
Most new Blu-ray players can output DTS-HD MA, however only a small amount of AV receivers can actually decode it. The popular format gives the user a 7.1 audio channel, which is as close as you’ll get to the original studio master. The update will output all 7.1 channels via HDMI, but only to those few receivers that can actually take a 7.1 PCM stream, like the Onkyo TX-NR905.
There’s also a revamped Playstation store - not such a big deal, but it’s a deal. It now seems that the store is an application on the Playstation itself rather than it all being web-based. It’s very slick.
Today I gave up on my Linksys WRT300N router. Over the past few days I’ve decided that my poor connectivity in the house, coupled with dropped online games with my Playstation 3, must be down to the router.
This is my second WRT300N, the first one went back last year as it died. Before that, I had a Linksys WRT54GS router - and swapping back to that for a few days actually gave more stability but slower connection speeds and less range (as you’d expect)
The D-Link DIR-655 router I bought today seems to be a stellar improvement on the Linksys. It has more configuration items, but the way in which it has automatic Quality of Service (QoS) seems to be a winner - especially when I’m playing online. No more disconnects or game stalling, even when Sara, my wife, is also online surfing da web. The range seems to be more wide and long too.
I also have to say, from a support perspective, D-Link have it ’sussed’.
Easy install CD, a great online help site and a good user interface within the router menu options itself.
So far, the D-Link seems many times better than the Linksys. However, to be fair the Linksys router is nearly two years older than my current one even though they still both support draft-N.
I guess that’s the price you can pay when you’re an early adopter of technology…
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