AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE! The are the cheapest around but there is a reason for that. They miss-describe their items and then refuse to do anything about it when you request a refund. The customer service guy is rude and some times condescending. He was a little shocked when I pulled out the fact that I’m a bit of a geek and know what I’m talking about. Especially when I quoted the distance selling regulations. Still being an arse though.
Watch this space for updates on the stereo front.
Apparently the Pioneer DEH-6200BT does not support the Audio Profile via Bluetooth! Looks like that will be going back. The description of the stereo does not make any mention to only supporting hands free kit. It only mentions “Fully supporting Bluetooth”. Fully supporting. What a pile of sheite!
Why can’t one company make a good charging solution and dashboard/windscreen mount? For christmas I bought my partner a bluetooth stereo for her car. I rounded it up with a car charger and winscreen mount so she can charge her phone while using it in the car.
For a stereo I got her a Pioneer DEH-6200BT. It’s a lovely stereo with the ability to link to the phone with bluetooth, play music over it, link an iPod via USB, add an aux in. Take a look at the link above and see what you think of it!
For a charging mount I decided to go down the route of a Brodit active holder. I’ve used one for my HD2. The phone fits in well and it will charge via the cigarette lighter in the car. The down side of a brodit mount is the mounting solutions. Brodit seem to have some random mind set about sticking screws into everything! Literally. The think you should mount your phone into the car by sticking a screw into your dashboard! I’m not going to do that! Why the hell would I do that!
Read on after the break for how I fixed it. Continue reading
Turns out when you fit a new cartridge to a printer it really helps to remove the little tab from the top that lets air into the cartridge. I was trying to print for some time and getting some very odd colours out. I tried cleaning the print heads many times and sometimes I got a bit of colour.
I finally decided to look at the cartridges and I realised that I’d not taken the little tab of the Cyan cartridge. After doing that and cleaning the heads again to get the ink flowing it all worked fine! Must remember for next time… REMOVE THE RUDDY PACKAGING BEFORE FITTING!!!!
Last week I decided to give an android build a try on my HTC HD2. The guys at xda-developers have a series of builds for android. The install process was relatively simple. Just clear your SD card, copy the files from the distribution to the SD card, boot Windows Mobile and then run the haret.exe file on the card.
That then boots into a linux boot loader and eventually into android. I will say that the first boot takes a lot of time. It’s really is quite slow so don’t get disillusioned. This is just the first boot. It won’t take this long on subsequent boots.
As a review of the build on the HD2 I would say it’s very good but has one reasonable draw back. The battery life was terrible! The phone went from fully charged to flat in less than 8 hours. For me that is just terrible. On Windows Mobile I can get about 2 days. The OS ran very well, apps ran well, the time it takes to do things is very good. It was just the battery life that killed it for me. Once I knew it wouldn’t even last the night I cleared it off my SD card and went back to Windows Mobile.
I will say though. I think my next phone will be an Android phone.
One of the most obvious differences between Windows and Linux is the case sensitivity of the file system. Most of the time this is not an issue. There are times however when this comes and bites you in the arse!
Today I’ve been having a problem with MySQL. On Linux the file system is case sensitive but when importing to windows the MySQL server by default makes all table names lower case. This causes problems when you come to work with the tables on Linux again.
The way around these problems is to use the lower_case_table_names value in your my.ini file. For details on this see the MySQL Manual.
I just heard today. Me and a colleague have been awarded the Agile Project Management Practitioner qualification. That makes us the first two practitioners in the World! Quite an interesting thought.
The qualification is the first qualification of its kind and is accredited by APM Group. They are the body responsible for accrediting the PRINCE2 Practitioner and DSDM Atern practitioner.
I’ve just, for some unknown reason, had to setup my router again. For some reason it decided that it didn’t want to have USB support any more. This in turn meant that I couldn’t use my router as my home phone server.
Since I got my WRT610n I’ve not used the stock firmware. First thing I did when I got it was to put a release of DD-WRT on it. This basically turns your router into a linux esque box. This allowed me to setup a few things on it that make life easier. For example I have an ad-blocker on it that intercepts calls to certain advertising based domains and serves up a 1×1 pixel image. This does two things. 1) it stops you getting adverts on your web pages and 2) speeds up the access of pages. It’s usually adverts that are the slow parts!
The second main advantage of the setup is running asterisk from my router. I use SIP phones in my house to make phone calls. Using this I can connect to my works asterisk server and take calls when I’m working form home. I can also setup dial plans for other services. For example I’ve got two sip accounts that I use. Each is cheaper for different things. E.g. Calling abroad vs calling locally.
It’s taken me a little over an hour but I am now back and running again having reset the router to factory defaults, re-installed asterisk and other packages and re-configured my phones.
If you’ve not used dd-wrt before I seriously recommend it if your router is compatible.
I promised some later reviews of the laptop. Just a quick not on the battery life. I’ve been sat in a coffee shop for about an hour and a half now using the laptop for web browsing using WiFi constantly since entering the shop. I’m still here and have 33% Battery life remaining.
I’m going to estimate that I will get about 2 hours of battery life out of the machine before it dies with this kind of usage. Not the most strenuous usage but not too low.
I think with something more strenuous like listening to music or watching a video would get about an Hour and a half and the ultimate usage… watching a DVD with the disk spinning constantly would get probably a little under and hour.
I’m happy with that.
I’ve found this video recently and it is a very useful video about Agile Planning. Most of the other videos on this site are very targeted at Scrum so not all that useful but the Perfect plan video outlines the difference between Agile and Waterfall plans very well.
Take a look and let me know what you think: http://vimeo.com/2918378