Recently I acquired an HTC Desire, when seems to be the de-facto Android phone of the moment__. Generally, I love this phone - I wrote part of this blog post on it, and the quality of the hardware is frankly astonishing. Irritatingly, one can’t help but feel a little smug comparing it to the iPhone. However, I don’t want to become yet another mindless gushing fan. So instead of raving about it, I thought I’d provide some provide some constructive criticism on the aspects of the phone I don’t like so much:

I use Lotus Sametime a lot at work, but it has an irritating feature that by default brings all conversations to the front whenever something new is added to them. Nevertheless, this can be turned off. You just need to know how to navigate the labyrinthine preferences menu:  This screenshot is from Sametime 8.5.1 on Linux, but other platforms are probably similar.

I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my Thinkpad T61 and set about disabling the touchpad, which I always find irritating. There seemed to be lots of guides to this, including this one, but none of them seemed to work for me. Eventually I figured some fairly simple steps which did work: Install two packages if they aren’t already installed (gpointing-device-settings is the more modern version of gsynaptics and will uninstall it if it’s installed):

I haven’t written a film review in some time, but having just come back from seeing Kick-Ass, with it still fresh in my mind, here goes… Kick-Ass is definitely a comic book movie. It’s been portrayed in some circles as the anti-comic book movie, and that’s certainly the impression I had going in: the first ten minutes or so leave you in no doubt that the protagonist isn’t a professional, well, hero.

I recently acquired a Logitech Presenter R800. It’s a beautiful device - not particularly cheap, but very slick and easy-to-use. Unfortunately, Windows XP (Service Pack 3) on my system refused to recognise it - the device was listed as USB Receiver in Windows Device Manager, but Windows kept claiming it couldn’t find the driver. It is presented to the system as a standard USB HID device, so there is no Logitech-specific driver: it uses the standard Windows HID Driver.

I no longer use Highrise, but when I did, I used this Python script to back up my contacts. Hope it’s helpful to someone. Updated 2009-12-14: Added license #!/usr/bin/python # # Copyright (c) 2009, Andrew Ferrier All rights reserved. # # Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without # modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: # # * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, # this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Just come back from the new Winchester Waitrose. Upsides are: Large; decent selection of food. Looks like usual upscale Waitrose food quality. Pleasant, well-turned out, professional staff (Sainsbury’s Winchester, I’m looking at you here). Clean and well-presented store (once again, a glance in Sainsbury’s direction). Downsides: It’s too far out of town. OK, it probably isn’t if you have a car, I admit. I’m in the minority by avoiding one for cost reasons (which might cause one to question why I choose to shop at Waitrose, so it probably works for most of their customers).

I recently bought a veryPC AT20 as a more powerful replacement for an aging Debian-hacked NSLU2 that I had serving up files, doing backups, and other such tasks. I thought I’d do a quick review in case it’s of value to anyone considering a machine from veryPC (at the time of writing, it seems to be no longer for sale, although the veryPC AT10 looks similar). I particularly wanted something more meaty than my NSLU2 so I could do full-disk encryption, fully-encrypted offsite backups, so it seemed ideal.

As I’ve written about before, I use a combination of Vodafone 3G and the AT&T Network Client on Windows to access my corporate VPN. Recently, I’ve been seeing this error a lot when ‘dialling’ the 3G network (I connect it via the Windows dialler, rather than the Vodafone client):  This morning, I figured out what it was that was causing the problem. AT&T was open when I was dialling, and had the modem selected in the ‘Cellular’ tab (which I don’t normally use):

I’ve written before about how poor the Vodafone 3G Mobile Connect client is, and the alternative in Windows. However, it’s also worth mentioning that the card itself is far from perfect. It is very sensitive to the position of the SIM Card - having it off by even a few millimetres can mean it doesn’t connect, and it’s not always obvious what is wrong. The crucial thing is to have it poking out of the top, but only by half a millimetre or so.