David’s Musings

The Daily Mail newspaper has written a terrible article about Twitter and I thought I’d comment. The title of the article was How boring: Celebrities sign up to Twitter to reveal the most mundane aspect of their lives. How wrong could they possibly be? They completely missed the point I feel. (I hesitated actually linking to their site as it might drive traffic there, but did anyway!)

The article which took two people to write 24 paragraphs basically suggested that anyone who uses Twitter is a saddo. To be honest, the traditional media are feeling extremely squeezed with the massive uptake of social new media.

The fact of the matter, is that Twitter is a extensively used service, that, at the last guess put the number of users at 2.359 million, with over three-million messages sent daily. These figures are probably a tad conservative (a bit like the Mail, boom boom)

• Global visitors to Twitter rose almost fivefold to 5.57 million in September from a year earlier. Nov 12, 2008, Comscore via BBC.
• Locations (cities) with the most tweets, Tokyo is the most popular city, Real TimeTwitter Local
• Twitter is dominated by newer users - 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008, An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day, 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers, 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all, Dec 08, State of the Twittersphere
• (Credit: Web Strategy, Jeremiah Owyang)

Here in California, Twitter is widely embraced from public services, to schools, to theatres, to offices, to news outlets - and, of course, personally.

I believe that a public figure (such as a politician) using Twitter allows more transparency in the day-to-day workings of an individual. Would you believe something a person says, thinks or feels first-hand that they publish through Twitter, or read about it third- or fourth-hand through the traditional press?

If you’re a company promoting a concept or brand, it can help build consumer trust. Twitter can even be used at a time of crisis and can aid in disaster planning and aid response.

According to Nielsen, Twitter usage grew by 343% year-on-year and was the fastest growing social networking site of the year. It has also greatly expanded outside their youthful audience to find a place in older visitors’ professional lives.

Here in Silicon Valley, it’s practically unheard of that anyone working in web to not have a social networking presence. A great advocate of social networking, Jeremiah Owyang, (@jowyang) has close to 20,000 Twitter followers. People listen to what he says with great interest. If he suggests a ‘twitter meetup’, swarms attend - which is a great networking event and beneficial to all especially in these economic times.

To think of Twitter in its most basic terms and not think about the social networking aspects or it’s future potential is extremely short-sighted of The Mail. It’s not like they’re an active user of Twitter - oh, yeah, sorry, they are @mailonline.

I’d much rather know Will Carling (@willcarling) is trying to make his children eat veg, Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) is off to Codfish Island or Jonathan Ross (@wossy) wants Dizzee Rascal to be the new Dr Who, than the depressing rants of The Mail. I’m not saying Twitter is the b-all and end-all, but it a very useful tool nonetheless which is still in its infancy, with massive potential.

(Credit picture: Daily Mail Headlineinator)

One week in, and I absolutely love my Blackberry Bold from AT&T. With many delays, it was a long time coming, but worth the wait.

This is my eighth Blackberry which seems a bit greedy, and it’s only been six months since I bought the Curve, which is a little strange I admit, but, hey, I’m a glutton for new gadgets and technology.

The feel and usability of the Bold is fantastic. There have been many reviews already done, so I don’t want to replicate. You notice the speed and stability more than anything. There is more internal memory to let your applications run smoothly and load quickly. The screen is fantastic and you can watch video in glorious detail. I slapped in a 8GB card and have some films and television to watch when I’m on the move. The keypad is quiet, solid and responsive.

The improved Blackberry Browser tied with the crystal sharp screen gives a great web-experience. With 3G you can watch streaming clips from YouTube. If you take photos and video, it is now very speedy to take these off onto your PC or iMac via USB compared with previous Blackberry models.

AT&T and Blackberry put some good thought into the UI and the look and feel. The themes are crisp and fresh. I seem to have Wifi and Bluetooth switched on at all times. Even by doing that, the battery lasts a good 1.5 days with pretty heavy use. I have to say even though the device is 3G, I don’t notice it making a huge difference with normal Blackberry use. Emails come through the same as the previous models. When you browse, you don’t notice a huge difference either. However, if you download attachments, pictures or applications - that’s when you do notice it making a huge difference.

The camera is the same as my old Curve, 2MP, so no real change there. But again, because of the processing speed of the Bold, the videos I record are crisp and not jumpy

I’ve found two bugs in the software: On one occasion, the red light stayed on constantly and I had to reboot - and the other was that the colours of the writing of the keys in the calculator app sometimes act strangly when pressed. Apart from that, everything else is fine.

The only thing I don’t like too much is the specially commisioned music themes for the Bold by Stewart Copeland. They sound like a two-legged cat walking over my daughters Schoenhut (you might have to Google that!)

Blackberry Bold specifications:

• Size - Length: 114mm, Width: 66mm, Thickness: 14mm
• Weight (with battery) - 133g (same as the 88xx series. I can attest to it!)
• Memory - 1GB on-board (storage) and 128 MB Flash (applications)
• Battery - 1500mAhr lithium cell
• Est. Battery Life - Standby: 13 days, Talk Time: 5 hours
• Network Support - UMTS: 2100 / 1900 / 850MHz, GSM: 1900 / 1800 / 900 / 850 MHz, GPRS, EDGE and HDSPA networks
• Wi-Fi - 803.11a/b/g enabled
• Display - HVGA, 480 x 320 pixels, Transmissive TFT LCD, supports over 65k colors
• Media Player, Video Support - DivX 4, Div X 5 & 6 are partially supported, XviD is partially supported, H.263, H.264 and WMV3
• Media Player, Audio Support - .3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
• Media Player, Audio - BlackBerry Media Sync allows you to transfer your desktop iTunes music to your BlackBerry
• Camera - 2.0MP, 5 x digital zoom (with flash)
• GPS - internal GPS with extended ephemeris
• Bluetooth - Bluetooth v2.0, all the normal stuff and Bluetooth Stereo Audio via A2DP and AVCRP
• USB Port - Enables charging and high-speed data synchronizations via USB
• Browser - HTML browsing, view movies/clips from websites built for mobile streaming, RSS feed support
• Cost with USA AT&T from $299.99 for 2 year contract or upgrade with rebate - the no commitment price $549.99 (as at 20 Nov 08)

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:

• 30p progressive
• AVCHD
• HDMI sockets
• Full HD 1080 (1920×1080 recording)
• Dolby Digital
• Cinema mode - 24p

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.

This is the new iPhone, available July 11, enough said:

Other key takeaways:

• 35% of the Fortune 500 have participated in the iPhone 2.0 beta program. The top 5 banks, top 5 security firms, 6 or 7 top airlines, 8 of 10 top pharmaceuticals and 8 of 10 of the top entertainment companies
• Great mobile applications and games to come
• Apple will release a unified push notification service. It preserves battery life and maintains iPhone performance. It all works over the air over wifi and cellular - and it’ll be available in September
• There will be document support for all Microsoft Office files, addition of many new languages, bulk delete and move of email, ability to save files and pictures, new scientific calculator and parental controls
• Enterprise application distribution
• MobileMe, platform agnostic application suite; all applications looking like Apple native applications - looks nice. MobileMe is branded as Exchange for the rest of us - with proper ‘push’ functionality. Users of .Mac will be automatically upgraded, it will be available for $99 a year with 20GB of storage. Free trial for 60 days with iPhone 2.0
• iPhone sold 6m before running out, customer satisfaction 90%
• Need to make iPhone more affordable and allow sales in more countries
• iPhone 3G announced, black back, thinner at the edges, full plastic back, solid metal buttons, camera, flush headphone jack, improved audio
• With 3G, iPhone 36% faster than the Nokia N95 and Treo 750
• GPS included
• Full Exchange support, secure VPN
• Want to expand access to iPhones across the world, larger market, 70 countries in the next few months. iPhone will be sold for $199 for an 8GB - heavily subsidised. $299 for a white 16GB model

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:

• The keyboard is great. A big improvement on the last wide Blackberry I had, the 8700g.
• It has a great feel to it, seems solid in its build
• The camera is a huge improvement on the Pearl 8100. Obviously it’s a 2MP camera now, but the interface, the larger screen and a flash that is much improved makes a huge difference
• The GPS functionality is great. I use the free Google Maps for Blackberry. When you run the application it first triangulates via mobile phone towers and locks you into around 500-1000 metres. However, in seconds, the GPS kicks in and pulls you into your actual position. I’ve seen it get as close as one metre.
• The general UI is very much improved and speed of the device is noticeably better than the Pearl. I can actually watch video and listen to music (in stereo) on my Blackberry now via my additional 1GB card
• I have a tethered modem tariff via AT&T and the speeds I get are fantastic

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:

• Around 780Gb of information on my PC
• 90Gb of photos that go back to 1999
• An iTunes folder storing 94Gb of music and video
• Email archives of 16Gb stretching back to 1998
• Websites I’ve produced racking up 600Mb
• 160Gb of family video
• And disappointingly (because the filesize is so small), but probably most importantly, 920Mb of family and personal documents

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.

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…

I have a new look and feel for my blog. It’s more simplistic than the last, but fresh and quick to load. I’ll be refining it over the coming weeks. New items include recently posted items, funkier date format and recent comments on the right nav-bar. I still have SnapShots installed. I hope you like it.

My home theatre is now complete with the network addition of my Playstation Portable (PSP). Not only can I now stream DivX video from my PC through to my Playstation 3 so I can watch movies on the big screen, I can now stream through to my PSP - anywhere in the world.

Sony PSP Remote Play allows you to control your PS3 over the internet - you can even remotely switch your PS3 on and off.

Now, when I’m traveling, I’ll have direct access to my whole film library whenever I like. It’s clever stuff.

Also, I see a new firmware version (3.90) has been released today which allows PSP users to access Skype.

An exciting day for technical developments today. Google have released IMAP support for their Gmail and Google Applications. This is a godsend and I will explore more over the next few days. Also, RIM Blackberry announced today that they have created a Blackberry Facebook application. I received a customised download link from the Blackberry Owners Lounge this afternoon, have installed it - and will now explore.

Download the Facebook software from Blackberry here to install via your USB lead.

Google IMAP FAQs

This is a very funny clip that is gaining notoriety in the UK right now. Boris Johnson is a Tory MP who has just announced he is running for election of London Mayor next year. If you don’t know him, he is the archetypal British gentleman who is turning into a bit of a celeb due to his bumbling nature and quiz and gameshow presenting.

He was addressing the annual Conservative Party Conference as a warm up for a live satellite link with the Governor of California. The audio of Arnold waiting in turn has leaked and you can hear him critiquing Boris’ delivery.

An Austrian-American giving feedback on English pronunciation and presentation hits a raw nerve - but Arnold is completely right! Good stuff.

The seventh album from Radiohead, In Rainbows was made available for digital download from their website today. I was keen to download their latest offering, but the new approach had me baffled.

For the first time ever, the group are asking how much you are willing to pay for the album. You then enter the amount - and off you go. You are free to enter £0.00 all the way up to £99.99. It’s a strange concept - but I like it. I wonder how many people will type £0 - and how many will be honest and pay a realistic fee. As for me, how much did I pay? None of your business - but it wasn’t £0 and it certainly wasn’t £99.99

And how is the album? Not bad so far.

Today I’ve updated my Wordpress backend to 2.2 and it all looks good so far. I’ve also installed a script to generate a random image in my blog header. It was time for a freshen up! All the images were taken by me and feature abstract shots.

Over the last few weeks, I have noticed that my PC has started to really crawl and the internet speed lacking - or even not working. Why was this? I’ve never really had a problem before. I started looking for the Windows services running that I was unsure of, then I found kservice.exe. A quick look at the internet usage kservice.exe was consuming made me suspicious.

A quick search of the interwebnetworksuperhighway showed that this little devil belonged to Kontiki, the service that many VOD services use - and I have installed - such as 4OD, BBC iPlayer and Sky Anytime.

The problem is, this little unit works in a peer-to-peer fashion so that even when you’re not watching, or using the application, it’s trying to share your downloaded files with others. There’s no way to throttle the bandwidth or CPU usage - so your computer dies. Well, mine did anyway. Viewing my bandwidth logs, BBC iPlayer has exchanged around 130MB of data over a 24 hour period. It’s a good job I have an unlimited usage cable broadband account.

So, all of these applications have been uninstalled this evening. But it doesn’t end there - kservice.exe lingered on even when the applications were removed.

To truly uninstall it you need to follow some complicated guidelines. Alternatively, you can use a tool that Sky have hidden in its pages. You can download it here.

All is now ship-shape and Bristol fashion

iPhone without the phone?! Very cool, say no more: www.apple.com/ipodtouch

What seems a clever touch is that Apple are teaming up with Starbucks for their WiFi connections. However, it doesn’t stop there. If you stroll into a Starbucks, the iPod touch will automatically detect the WiFi connection and sign you on with no fuss.

Here’s the clever stuff - if you go to the iPod store menu option, you’ll actually see the track that is currently playing in the Bucks coffee shop - and you can do a one-click to buy it. This functionality will be rolled out slowly across the US over time. You can find out more at http://www.apple.com/itunes/starbucks/

New York: October 2, 2007

Seattle: October 2, 2007

San Francisco Bay Area: November 7, 2007

Los Angeles: February 2008

Chicago: March 2008