Opera Mini 4.1

Opera Mini mobile web browser is free and can be downloaded from here, or by pointing your current mobile browser at http://operamini.com. It is a small application (about 120kb) that features automatic completion of web addresses, is now faster (due to Opera upgrading their servers), allows uploading and downloading of files (without being transferred to your phones native browser), saving and viewing pages for offline use and, perhaps most useful, you can search for text within a page.  I found out from the Opera website that the mobile software uses a remote server to pre-process the web pages before sending them, thus allowing the page to be compressed for smaller data transfers, to enhance the speed of surfing on your mobile.  This, for me, is a big plus if you are commuting to work and don’t have access to a wireless point.

The new version keeps the great features from the previous version, such as synchronising  bookmarks from your desktop or other mobile device running Opera Mini.  Of course Opera on the desktop is not the most popular of browsers so you might have to import your bookmarks to Opera desktop to sync them to your mobile…a hassle worth going through?  It also has the landscape mode for viewing pages and has power scrolling shortcuts, with zooming! 

One annoyance, that was also present in the older version of mini browser, is that when you are typing into a form it switches from the browser to the phone text editor.  I would prefer to just type straight into the form field, like the nokia browser does.

I have been trying the browser out in various websites, mobile and normal.  The mobile bbc website pages do load quickly and even this blog loads at a not unreasonable speed!  The mini browser also allows easy subscriptions to feeds, more intuitively than the nokia browser…

The next obvious question, ‘what is the competition’?  A quick search on google will bring up any number of other browsers, some only for windows mobile such as deepfish, but the two that caught my eye for further investigation were skyfire (currently in beta testing) and jB5 (which I hope to test out sometime this week).

O2 in the UK have sold out of 8GB iPhones, although it still possible to pay 329GBP for a 16GB iPhone.  I was told that apple are going for a global iPhone 2 roll-out.  There are other rumours spreading that it may be available in different colours, according to appleinsider.com AT&T’s website for existing users now has an option for a black iPhone.  Macprime.ch also suggest that Swisscom are going to be offering iPhones in Silver, Black and White…

So anyway, as I was saying, it must be nice to spend your entire day chatting and surfing about apple products when you are only there for high street presence.  I look forward to reading about the new iPhone…

For now I suggest checking out the new mac ads, they may have been running this campaign forever now, but they are still funny!

Similarly, wordpress has a great feature that allows you to change the theme, back to what you had.  Assuming, of course, that you didn’t delete it.  So, back to the clean white theme until iron out the creases in the black theme.  I have also added SimpleLife to the black theme, although I can’t seem to get it to pick up my twitters, therefore rendering it a bit less useful to me…  On the bright side I haven’t quite stooped to the level the Nikita and just linking to friend feed…oooh, miaow! 

While I am still feeling catty, I was a bit miffed about a friend extracting the urine about keeping a blog, suggesting that all I would write about is ‘went to work and came home’ and why would people be interested in that.  Well, as my revised about page will say soon, I don’t really give a crap what (as Dr Cox would say) Barbie thinks, although clicky tells me that Barbie spends time on the blog anyway…go figure.

I was planning on doing a lot of the work on the theme over the weekend but unfortunately a really shitty sore throat mixed with a liberal dose of hayfever took care of most of the weekend.  My plans for the new theme extend over the next couple of weeks, hopefully I’ll be able to get it running with SimpleLife going as well.

Tim brought them back from the USA for me, seeing as Europe prices suck (that and the US $ being so weak right now).  Cheapest UK price I saw on the web 174.99 GBP.  US $ price of the Oakley website $230.  Difference in price at todays XE.com exchange $113.95.  Add in a couple of beers for Tim and I thnk I’ll still be ahead in terms of $’s.  Especially seeing as Tim is starting another new health kick due to the two weeks of drunken debauchery sustained in the US and UK.

Anyway, thanks dude, I appreciate it! 

However, I do ‘now’ feel that I know how I want it to look and after all the knowledge gained from last week I think it should be easier *ahem* to implement.  So what am I going to change?  Well the header, as much as Nicki likes it, for starters and also the graphics for currently, linkage etc.  If you are viewing this on IE6 you will see that they are png files and that they look terrible on IE6.  I may have mentioned this before, but when will IE6 be wiped out forever.  In actually fact the site now looks best on Safari and FireFox.

I also added Gravatar to the comments which is quite neat, I have seen quite a few blogs now using gravatar and thought that I would add it in.  Get your Gravatar here.  Still to being considered is whether to have full blog posts on the front page or to have the excerpts on the front page.  The reason I am trying the excerpts is to expose my stats counter to what posts people are actually reading.  The downside to this is that if the readers are like me they may not want to click on the excerpts to read the post because they should be fully up anyway!

I am still trying out Remember the Milk as a reminder list, now that I have more to do I should be able to asses it more fully over the next week.

Anyway, the beta version of the new Being Primitive theme should be up by the weekend, assuming I can sort out the problems with the comment section of the site.  I am also working on the graphics and navigation just now as well which is consuming more time than I believed possible.

I was once told by a wise man to take the amount of time you think you need to do something and multiply it by Π.  I would also suggest adding in at least another days worth of procrastination though!  I can tell you that the next post is going to be about Remember the Milk, a really useful time management site, it has been going since 2005 and now has over 500,000 users…I cannot imagine how this passed me by for the past couple of years.  I feel like I have had my head in the sand for a long time and have just awoken to many things on the internet!  

Much has been made in academic circles regarding students using the net for cheating in essays, whether this is through paying others to do their essays or just plagiarising large sections of other people work.  I feel that this advance (that has been out for some time now) by Google gives back some of the credit to the internet that other cheating students have taken away.  Cheating by students has been well documented, a quick search on Google will bring up many hits.  While doing some research for this post I found a service that teachers can use to submit student essays to, TurnitinUK. This service can be used to check if a student is plagiarising essays.  It enables institutions and staff to carry out electronic comparisons of students work against electronic journals and also other students work.  

This brings up two obvious questions that I hope someone out there could answer in a comment.  Do students at university (at least in the UK) now have to hand in their essays in electronic format?  Are essays stored that are submitted to the service, and if so, what other information is kept along with the essay.  

I would think that the answers to these questions could bring up many more interesting questions.  I also wonder if the students have to agree to their essay being submitted to this kind of scrutiny?  However, I digress, the point of the post (if not already obvious) is:

• keep control of your reference list
• don’t copy others work without giving credit

It does raise some questions.  Is the cost of the iPhone at 269GBP to prohibitive for most people?  Is 169GBP more affordable?  After the massive debut, is it now just not selling?  Have people figured out that although it is an amazing interactive experience for a phone, it lacks a good camera, 3G and the ability for developers to release their own applications?

There are a few reasons going round the internet as to the price drop.  A 3G version of the iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs last year, to be released this year.  O2 may simply be trying to get rid of their stock before the new version comes out.  Apparently you can get the iPhone at this price whatever contract you take out.  This ’special offer’ is to remain in place until 1 June, and someare suggesting that this may be when the 3G iPhone may be released.

The price of the iPhone dropped in America last September.  Apple took $200US off the price and as you can imagine this left a lot of existing iPhone customers very unhappy, although Steve jobs promised a $100 store credit to anyone who bought an iPhone before the cut in price.

I think the next couple of months are going to be filled with rumours about the next iPhone, but I am glad that I resisted the temptation and went with the Nokia N95 8GB.  I am looking forward to seeing the next generation iPhone though…

After signing up yesterday there are seven services available so far, Twitter, Pownce, Flickr are services that I signed up for (others available include Vimeo and Facebook).  It does exactly as it says on the tin, it went to these services and brought back the things that had been going on recently in these services.  I was also able to post to the services that I wanted without any trouble.  You can set the ‘Lifestream’ up in a time-line, by service or by person.  There is also a voting section on what services you would like to see, Wordpress being high up in the list as is QIK.  They also tell you exactly what they are working on right now, it is good to know what to expect over the next couple of months.  The only down point I found (and it is really minor and normally I wouldn’t care) was that it doesn’t run on Internet Explorer.  I would like to clarify this before people start questioning my sanity for using Explorer.  Where I currently work I have a locked desktop which allows nothing to be installed, so I am locked into IE6 (yes, 6).

I honestly think social thing is going to be massive and I would like to thank them for inviting me to help test it out, I hope I can provide them with useful feedback and that it gets released to everyone soon!

I also downloaded twibble desktop last night.  I have been using twibble on my mobile phone for a while now, this is a service that allows me to post straight to twitter with my location taken from the GPS built into my phone.  The mobile service also lets you see your twitter line.  The desktop twibble desktop service sets up your twitter line in a neat small window, it allows for three accounts to be running and can pick up your tweets 60 times per hour, or once per minute if you prefer.  Twibble also has location awareness, you can see where your twitter contacts are in Google maps.  I don’t know why but I think this is a really cool feature.  The twibble twitter desktop client is built on top of the Adobe Air platform.  I have to say that I was really impressed with twibble desktop and I am looking forward to ‘twibble web’.  Their website says that ‘twibble web is a fancy interactive mash-up that integrates your virtual social life’, perhaps something to rival social thing in the future?  Hopefully it will be available soon…

The main task of my evening was actually to PDF my PhD thesis.  My supervisor (PGK) has been looking for a copy to send to another of his students.  Normally this wouldn’t be a hard task, however, last night it turned into a massive headache.  I have Adobe Acrobat 7 and I have never had trouble with it until yesterday.  It turns out that I couldn’t get a word 2007 document to become a PDF with acrobat 7 as Word 2007 is newer than Acrobat 7 and at the time I installed Acrobat 7 Word 2007 wasn’t available.  Now, if there is a fix for this I really don’t want to know now, but tell me anyway!  I dug out an old Dell Inspiron Laptop that weighs roughly the same as me (especially with the two batteries in it) and booted it up.  I was pretty sure that Word 2003 was on this and had the bright idea of installing Acrobat 7 onto it.  The installation onto the laptop took 30 mins… I honestly couldn’t believe it.  I then got the documents that made my thesis up and set up Acrobat to PDF it into one document.  Well, that was interesting.  I set it going last night around 9pm and went to bed at 12:30am with it 30% through PDF’ing the document.  It was finished when I got up this morning!  It’s just under 50 mb in size!  The laptop was wheezing and coughing after a hard nights work!

Although this old laptop is mainly used as a paper weight or doorstop nowadays I am glad that it was there!