Mike Wilks' Blog

I ordered a Nexus One during the announcement event and I’ve had it a couple of days now. I got it to replace my iPhone 3G (not S) which is looking slightly long in the tooth now. Initial thoughts:

Positives

• It is blazing fast compared to the iPhone 3G.
• The screen is much crisper and colours pop more.
• The gMail client is infinitely better than the mail on the iPhone.
• No more 10Mb download limit on podcasts over 3G !
• Voip over 3G with Sipdroid and localphone.com is a killer app. That said SipDroid doesn’t seem to like localphone direct so I need to configure pbxes.org which will hopefully give better results.

Negatives

• I really miss 1Password – hopefully there is an Android version before too long.
• Multi-touch is not there on the standard apps. Not a huge thing but muscle memory keeps trying to do it.
• Bookmark sync with safari is going to take some getting used to not having. That said Crossmarks mobile site as a replacement is working pretty well so far.

I’m currently on the O2 Simplicity for iPhone tariff so I thought I better tell them I no longer had an iPhone. In theory the normal Simplicity tariff has more minutes and texts than the iPhone one but in reality I never get anywhere near using them.  Calling O2 just led to confusion. Once I got across what I wanted to do they initially told me that I should move to Simplicity 20 – but only if I was sure I wasn’t going back to iPhone. Eventually after he struggled with the system for 5 minutes while I was on hold he advised me to leave it as is. If there’s any come back about me being on the wrong tariff I might need to request they listen to the tape!

The phone is unlocked so I guess I need to look through the Sim only deals out there. O2 is not a great signal where I live but does seem to be properly unlimited data (at least they have never complained). I spend at least as much time away from home as at home so I can just about live with 3 bars of 2G at home. Vodafone is a much better 2G signal (in fact we can see the 2G only tower) but has a pathetic 500Mb limit as does Orange. That said at least I could just about get a 3G signal on Orange at home. I really do not understand how they are allowed to advertise 500Mb as unlimited. 3 and T-Mobile are complete non-starters as there is no signal at home. Decisions decisions, my Vodafone 3G data contract is up in a couple of months just to complicate things, the Mifi I use in theory means I need less phone data when I travel.

More updates as I live with the phone a bit longer.

I came across Backupify on some podcast or other. Their concept is fantastic – we all trust much of our data to the cloud now and Backupify backs up cloud data. Backupify is free until the end of January which also helps. The supported services have must people covered, I have started to use it for backing up Wordpress, Twitter and Google Docs but it does other things.

Setup is dead easy and once you have authorised your accounts you just sit back and it does the hard work with daily or weekly backups. When I first signed up I had a couple of issues: the Google Docs backups just contained a line saying not authorised and my Twitter account had been ignored. I deleted the Google Docs accounts and re-added, I also got a reply on Twitter from Backupify so I am not sure whether they fixed it or I did – either way it works now. The only slight issue I have is that my Wordpress has not backed up more than once, this may well be because it hasn’t changed but positive confirmation would be nice.

I have no affiliation with Backupify other than being a user of it and thinking it is a very cool concept that deserves to succeed. They also answered a tweet on Christmas day which makes them as sad as me!

I finally got around to doing some upgrades on my MacBook recently. Snow Leopard has been sat on my desk for a little while but I was put off by PGP Whole Disk Encryption being a known issue with it. My MacBook spends a fair amount of time in hotel rooms so I wasn’t keen to remove it. I weighed the risks of going with the Snow Leopard friendly Beta of PGP and decided to give it a go. The thing that actually put me over the edge was the new Version (3) of VMWare Fusion.

So in order here is what I did:

1. Paid for an upgrade from Fusion 2 to 3 and installed.
2. De-encrypted with PGP and uninstalled
3. Installed Snow Leopard
4. Installed PGP 10 Beta and re-encrypted

All this worked fine. I actually also bought a download delivered Windows 7 Home Premium to run under Fusion also. Windows 7 itself is pretty impressive and works well under Fusion. I probably didn’t need to shell out £80 for an OS that is secondary and only going to be used under Fusion but I like new shiny technology. I’d had an RC version which had pretty much replaced my Vista install as my windows operating system already so this was a natural progression.

So I now have a nice shiny version of OSX with the new Windows running under the new VMWare all protected by a (too) new PGP – good stuff.

I’m not sure when they were added but Skype have a whole load of new US Online numbers. These include 212, 917, 718, 646, 378. All of the other New York numbers have been there before albeit not very often but this the first time I have seen 212 numbers. I managed to snag a 212 zone one number which will replace my existing 917.  The 212s do seem to be getting snapped up fast, all of the zone ones have gone since yesterday but there seems to be a good amount of zone twos left.

Two months since I called BT about being charged the wrong amount the refund they promised has not appeared. I have no idea what they have billed me for. On the one hand they say the contract expired in July but on the other I was not entitled to the free calling package in April, May and June so they charged me for it. At least I think that is what they now are telling me, not what they said last time. May is particularly confusing as I paid £26 for line rental.

If I had any other choice for a line to supply ADSL I would dump BT in a heartbeat. I really can’t be bothered with this but I guess I should get around to a complaint.

I signed up to the BT 12 month contract with a promise of free evening and weekend calls out of apathy as much as anything else. Not that I wanted a 12 month contract nor would I use the free calls. Anyway the last three months BT seem to have rather cheekily charged me my normal line rental plus the cost of this package which is meant to be free. (They have also confusingly changed my billing date to align it with the date they take payment which also creates a bill that is difficult to understand.)

Anyway a quick call later and I have ditched the 12 month contract and gone back to £11.25 line rental only.  The 3 months higher line rental charge was explained as an error in their new billing system where the free calls package for people under contract was actually charged for. They’ve agreed to refund the charges but it does leave a nasty taste. This was clearly a known problem so why did I have to call after it had been incorrectly billed for three months? The whole idea of auto-renewing 12 month contracts is also something that doesn’t feel right (although admittedly they make perfect sense for house insurance etc.)

I would ditch my BT landline in a heartbeat if I didn’t need it for my ADSL connection (from an LLU provider). I have unlimited Skype and more mobile minutes than I need so a landline really is just something that I need to get ADSL rather than a phone.

The release of the new iPhone 3GS seems to have stirred up a hornets’ nest of controversy around the O2 contract and pricing.

The phone itself seems to be a bit of a stopgap release to me. Sure it is faster, has a better camera and has a few new features like a compass but there is nothing game changing. The really good stuff is in the 3.0 OS which will be available to previous iPhones. I can’t help thinking that this is not the must have upgrade that the 3G was from the original iPhone. Personally there is nothing much there to make me want to rush out and upgrade, especially given the O2 “upgrade policy”.

Now I understand that I signed up to an 18 month contract when I upgraded to the 3G but this does appear to be lost on many. That said O2 and Apple had set the precedent by allowing early upgrades to the 3G. The reasoning for allowing the upgrade last time but not this is that the original iPhone was not subsidised. Even accepting all this the O2 position of  having to buy out of your contract seems extreme. If the pricing for buying out of your old contract is really the number of months remaining multiplied by your monthly costs then why would anyone do that? You may as well sign-up to a new contract as it would be the same price and you still get the use of the minutes, texts and data on the old contract and have a new phone. I cannot understand how Apple and O2 didn’t see this storm coming (and maybe they did) – a 12 month product refresh and a contract of a different length was always going to cause problems!

I can’t really get too excited about the whole upgrade fiasco as there is nothing in the new phone I really want – it might be different if there was. What does really annoy me is the tethering charges. As I understand it O2 are going to allow iPhone tethering but will charge a bolt-on of exactly the same price as their 3G data plans. Now I could live with this if they didn’t describe the iPhone data as unlimited. I think I saw the O2 twitter account say that the reason they were charging for tethering is because it uses more data. Now leaving aside the discussion about whether tethering uses more data per se or just allows you to torrent and usenet it is clearly not the case that the iPhone data is unlimited. I cannot understand how the ASA and others have not slapped O2 and every other telecoms provider hard for this whole unlimited farce. Unlimited cannot have a limit by definition and it doesn’t matter whether you call it Fair Use, Acceptable Use, Excessive Usage  or anything else – it is still a limit.

The other thing I find funny about this whole situation is the fact that it makes Pay as You Go look so attractive. I haven’t checked the maths but various people are claiming that Pay as You Go is cheaper then signing a contract with the obvious advantage of not being locked in. If this is true then O2 may not care right not given they are still getting the revenue but they will start to care as soon as their exclusive ends. The fact O2 has an iPhone monopoly in the UK is probably the route of most of these issues and will no doubt be solved when there is some competition. When O2 started to push the 24 month contracts on iPhone so hard I thought it may be a clue to when there exclusive might end but now I am less sure because of the lack of early upgrades. If there were an end to the exclusive in sight I would presume O2 would look to tie in the existing users by extending their contracts by way of upgrade.

Anyway I am just going to wait out my 3G contract and then either continue on a rolling contract or explore jail-breaking and another network.

I’ve been messing about with the new Ubuntu this weekend, so much so I now have:

• The Netbook Remix running on my Acer Aspire One replacing the standard Linpus.

• My Macbook Vmware Fusion Ubuntu upgraded from 8.10.

• An old thinkpad running Ubuntu which was previously dual-booting XP and an old Slackware.

All in all Ubuntu 9.04 is pretty good. I only use Windows in my work machine now and this just vindicates the decision to ditch Windows even more.

I am, however, having an issue getting my VPN to work with the the GUI in both the Ubuntu desktop and Netbook Remix versions. It works fine if I issue the openvpn command and use the same config file which works elsewhere (OSX) but the GUI refuses to work. The build in Network Manager (after I installed the openvpn plugin) accepts the config file import but claims there are “no valid” VPN credentials. KVPNC on the other hand also accepts the config file but hangs on connect. More investigation needed methinks.

Being a Baseball fan who lives in the UK MLB.TV is where I watch most of my games. In the UK we also have ESPN America but they show a minority of Mets games so MLB.TV is important.

In the past I’ve had very little issue with MLB.TV and happily pay the subscription. For live games it seems ok this year but for archived games it is completely broken. The archived games either don’t appear or don’t seem to wotk when they do. I was looking forwards to watching the Mets Reds game from Thursday 9th (despite the Mets loss) but I cannot get it to work. In fact I can only get one game from Thursday to play. There doesn’t seem to be much wrong with my setup as games on Wednesday seem ok.

I really hope they fix this. I watch the majority of Mets games on archive because of the time difference so this is important to me. (Admittedly I missed the day game yesterday because I was at the Cinema!).