Monday, March 29th, 2004
Digital divide
Japan:
Worldwide:
If the worldwide figures of 84 million units include the 50.7 million units shipped in japan (and i suppose they do), the rest of the world is far behind. Japan might be the place to live if you wanna live in our future.
I need a new bag
Daylight savings time is dragging me down. I’ve been up and running for the last 22 hours without sleep or food and most likely won’t get into bed for the next 12 hours as well, so typical late night grumpiness and paranoia possibly apply to the following post.
My beloved bag is not a year old and i already need a new one. It’s still in perfect shape, these crumpler bags are apparently built for eternity, putting eastpak and their lousy campaign to shame. I really like their products and was on the verge of buying another one today. The problem is that everybody at any university in vienna has one. Perhaps not everybody - there’s still your fair share of dull eastpaks, pumas and adidas’, but it’s almost like crumpler’s the new freitag among vienesse students.
Which leads me to the next troublesome bag brand. I really dig freitag, but a friend of mine convinced me that they are so mid-bubble and that it’s not even ok to carry one with an ironic post-bubble stance. But then again, he also confessed he wants one himself just a few weeks ago. Which reminds me that i haven’t called him far too long. Thank god there’s an alternative label for freitags f-cut bags available, so at least those are a viable option.
Another brand i discovered recently and like a lot is golla. They produce some really nice looking laptop bags, but i don’t have the slightest clue if they are available anywhere in austria and their site isn’t much help either. At least i know someone who’ll go to finland in a few months, perhaps he can pick one up for me then.
Perhaps i should just pick up that gorgeous white armani jeans bag i recently saw. I wonder if it could acommodate an ibook…
Saturday, March 27th, 2004
Watching videos on your mobile phone
On a motorola a835 in my case. This phone supports mp4 and 3gp playback (perhaps some other formats as well, but i’m fine with 3gp), which should work on most phones capable of video playback, e.g. the nokia 3650 and 6600, as well.
I use the nokia multimedia converter to convert my video files to 3gp format cause it’s simple to use and allows playing around with a lot of encoding settings for best results. You can grab the program for free @forum nokia (registration required for download). It’s only available for windows, but here’s a nice tutorial on how to use ffmpeg to encode 3gp videos under linux (already posted this to the linklog a while back). If you are on mac os x, quicktime might do the job, but i don’t know for sure.
Before i come to the settings i found to work best for my needs, a few words about the phone i’m gonna playback the files on: the moto a835 got a fairly decent display with a resolution of 176×220, but can’t playback video in fullscreen mode (at least i’m not aware how to do that), so the default qcif resolution of 176×144 works just fine. The phone has 64mb of internal memory and no memory card slots. That’s enough memory for a few episodes of your favourite sitcom. The limiting factor however is data transfer speed. I don’t know for sure what causes data transfer to be so painstakingly slow, but it takes approximately one minute to transfer 350kb - even with a usb cable. As a rule of thumb i wanted to get the size of one minute of converted video to 350kb - waiting 40 minutes to transfer 20 minutes of video was out of question for me. To achieve this i played around with the settings a bit and tested the results on my phone. During the process i made some interesting findings: changing resolution and fps had no considerable impact on the resulting file size, increasing intra period setting and lowering the bit rate of video enconding had.
The settings i found to work best for my needs aren’t radically different from the base settings, but here they are anyway:
video: qcif resolution (176×144), 15 fps, 30 seconds intra period, 36 kbps bit rate
audio: amr, 12,2 kbps bit rate
A side note: binary bonsai posted a link to a download archive of the star wars clone wars animated series today. I found those animated shorts to work surprisingly well for a few minutes of entertainment on the road.
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
engadgeted.net v3.5
Today i present engadgeted v3.5. In its 16 months of existance i switched blogging software two times (from self-written to self-rewritten to wordpress) and redesigned 3 (or so) times. This time the software didn’t change too much (i just took the opportunity to upgrade to wordpress v1.0.2), but there were quite some changes under the hood and some design changes as well.
The linklog which resided in the sidebar until now and relied on an ugly, tiny script i’ve written is no more - links will from now on be managed within wordpress (internally they are treated just like regular posts) and the linklog archives have moved into the wordpress database as well. A little like kottke did with his remaindered links some time back. This has the welcome side-effect that there’s now an rss feed for the linklog. It also means that the main feed will from now on include linklog-links. If you just want my ramblings delivered to your aggregator of choice, you can find the feed here. A slightly strange side-effect: there are some few dozens of links posted in the linklog on nov 17th - that’s the day i originally started maintaining the linklog (though it wasn’t public back then) and started moving all those temporary bookmarks to my site.
I’m still not perfectly satisfied with the design, something about the spacing and typography bothers me, but i’ll look into that later. Something else i plan to include on my site later is a moblog, though i’m not sure wether to wait for wordpress 1.2 (which should be out soon) so don’t hold your breathe (i won’t).
If you have any questions, suggestions, error reports regarding the redesign, feel free to drop me a note.
A match made in heaven - or not
Warning: massive moaning about unfulfilled desire and missed opportunities ahead.
The nokia 7610 looks like it’s been made for me. Except that it’s not.
This phone offers pretty much anything i had hoped for in a phone: megapixel cam, series60 os, small and lightweight. Above all, this phone is the sexiest phone i’ve ever seen, perhaps the sexiest thing in the world right after the ipod. Sure, that’s subjective and people are already bitching about the curved keypad, but who cares - this thing looks drop-dead gorgeous.
But i won’t buy it. It would’ve been perfect just two weeks back. Now the downside is that this is a gsm, 2.5g phone and i just switched to 3, an all-out umts, 3g provider. This beauty is a no-go for me. Of course i could retreat from my contract, but i won’t, videocalls, videostreaming and insanely fast data transfer (though overpriced) are nothing i wanna give up. Looks like the motorola e1000 will be my next phone, unless nokia finally announces a 3g series60 phone.
More nice new phones from the cebit show floor: siemens s65, siemens m65, c65, samsung sgh-z105, sgh-e800, samsung sgh-p730, sph-v4400, sch-v500
Update: stunning live shots of the n7610 @mobile burn
Update: infosync posted a preview
Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
Blogging is not nothing
Blogging is not nothing. [...] A million of us are not doing nothing.
Sunday, March 14th, 2004
mobile Phone Tools trouble shooting
I had a hard time figuring out how to get the mobile phone tools to work. The mobile phone tools are a software suite by motorola to sync your mobile (in my case an a835), something like the nokia pc suite for nokia phones. It took me about three days to get them running and i can only speculate about the real cause of my trouble, but i think it was that the mobile phone tools didn’t like the nokia pc suite. After uninstalling it, most things worked rather fine.
Since then they still troubled me now and then, but there’s one thing to get them up and running again usually: just uninstall the modem drivers for your phone, restart mobile phone tools, choose connection method, connect - now things should work again.
Site maintenance
I feel a lot like playing around with the innards of my site once again. Usually this happens after a 2 week period of dissatisfaction with the current state of the site and leads to a certain lack of motivation to post. Hopefully things will be sorted out soon. Things might break while i tamper with the site.
Oh, and i can definitely confirm this.
Update: I should perhaps note that this means that i’ll play around with the site sometime in the next few days. Or weeks. Or months. Probably. I know that i wanna change a lot, but don’t exactly know how or when.
Thursday, March 11th, 2004
Lifelogging
Nokia will present lifeblog, a new software program to log your life, @cebit next week. Bbc and guardian have the details, russell beattie comments. Considering that blog is a short term for weblog i think the name is slightly inappropriate as long as there’s no possibility to get your data online somehow, imho lifelog would have been better.
Nonetheless the idea is fascinating. I won’t be able to try it out now that i’m no longer on series60, but the software wouldn’t have worked with my old 7650 anyway - the nokia 6620 will be the first phone to include lifeblog it won’t be available for n6620, see here. Two downsides, though: the software will be part of the nokia pc suite, which is a terrible piece of software, and the full version will cost 30 euros - not very much, but i’m not sure if it’d be worth for me.
In related news: microsoft wearcam liferecorder
Wednesday, March 10th, 2004
Provider price-war in Austria
With the current price-war between austrian cellphone service providers i found these interviews with top executives of all five providers quite fascinating. All interviews are in german, but i suppose they aren’t interesting for anyone not living in austria anyway.
- boris nemsic, a1: 1, 2
- georg pÔø?lzl, t-mobile: 1, 2
- christian czech, one
- michael krammer, telering
- berthold thoma, 3