N97 - Nokia taking a step back?

Engadget has a post giving the specs of a potential future N97 multimedia phone.

Apart from a 20Gb HDD, it's surely a backwards step compared to the N95?

Sony Ericsson comes out top

Sony Ericsson tops the JD Powers Survey of customer satisfaction for wireless devices.

As a P910i owner it doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Sometimes the familiar is favourite

Tracy gave me pause for thought with her article on the use of Journal over OneNote or GoBinder

Seeing videos such as with James and Kevin at www.jkontherun.com and Josh at www.tinyscreenfuls.com, I have been suffering a little envy as I came to appreciate more how flexible the umpc really is.

Tracy made me realise that it is as much about what you can do with the technology, as what actual device one might use. I write this, sitting on a sofa beside a glowing coal fire, with my Axim x51v and Stowaway BT keyboard and it is as flexible as any UMPC. I need to use the programmes I have at my disposal more fully, before I need to think about upgrading.

Cornwall and Communication

It's a sad reflection on me I guess, that it takes a television programme to remind me of the great connection this county has with the world of communications.

The beach at [Porthcurno], a little over half an hour from here, was the point at which all the country's telegraph cables came in. 14 cables from places like New Foundland, Gibraltar, India, enabled almost instantaneous communication across the empire where once it would have took as much as weeks or months. I guess it was much like going from sub-light to faster-than-light travel.

[I can't mention Porthcurno without a nod to the Minack, an open air amphitheatre built almost single handedly on the side of a hill by Rowena Cade].

Half an hour in the other direction along the coast, lies Poldhu. It was here that the world's first transatlantic wireless signal was sent, the Morse letter S, by Marconi.

Half an hour inland from here, lies Goonhilly; the site of the world's first earth satellite dish. From this site, a majority of the satellite transmissions from around the world come in and are distributed around the UK from here. The first transmission was as recent as 1962 and look where we're at today.

I am going to make a Christmas pilgrimage this year, and head to Goonhilly for some blogging on the fly. I might even try to head by Porthcurno, opening times permitted and I'll include some pictures then.

Happy Birthday to me

It's been a good day.

We went to Plymouth to help celebrate my birthday. It was a chance to check out the new shopping centre and window shop. I didn't actually end up buying much but enjoyed the chance to hang out with Cathy, have a look at a wider range of products and have a spot of lunch. In the morning we headed to the Canadian Muffin company and grabbed a cup of java and a wholemeal muffin - definitely recommended; it sits next to a Halifax on the corner nearly opposite the Armada centre.

Lunch was going to be in Zeus, a little Greek place at the bottom end of one of the main streets but it turned out too busy. We were given a leaflet for a Japanese restaurant but on the way to check it out, in case it sold bento boxes, we saw the outside area of a Wetherspoons pub. The sky was a brilliant blue, the sun shining and the opportunity to eat al fresco was too good an opportunity to miss. As an added bonus they had wifi, it was The Wifi Zone but I couldn't get to the splash screen, even though I could grab the signal.

While I didn't end up buying anything of note on the day but that's not a bad thing. Since then I came across an illustrated Dan Brown book Angels & Demons at Asda and decided to treat myself. Today I nabbed a copy of Catherine Jenkins' latest cd Serenade in Tesco.

It was good to hang out together.

Naxos Music library

What a find!!

It turns out that as a member of Cornwall (in the UK) County Library, I can access (i.e. listen to) over 8000 tracks online in the Naxos Music Library.

The most valuable piece of plastic I carry in my wallet has always been my library card - now it's gotten even more precious.

Mysterious waves seen in Venus' clouds

I hope this report isn't presaging something out of Kevin J Anderson's Seven Suns saga

A solitary lesson in winter driving

It's a fine Autumn day, blue sky and sunshine all the way, simply beautiful. It's cold outside, bitterly so and at 6pm quite dark.

Weather like this can lure one into a false sense of security, I won't break down on a fine day like this. It follows that if I didn't breakdown, I didn't need extra stuff in the boot, hats, gloves, fleece, etc.

I didn't break down but I did get turned off the main road partway home and took to a narrow country lane to get around it. I wasn't the only one. Everything went swimmingly, for 10 minutes or so, until I met the people heading in the opposite direction who had the same idea. The lane was narrow and, apart from a couple of gateways, there were no passing places. A general consensus was that there was going to be at least an hour, maybe two, of waiting while one stream of cars reversed back. I shut off my engine and began to wait. It didn't take long to get to the point where I felt the chill. As luck would have it I had a fleece in the back of the car and even a pair of gloves.

I didn't want to put the radio on and run any risks with flattening a battery; OK a car radio shouldn't flatten a radio anytime soon, but, knowing my luck, it would be then that I would discover that I had a borderline faulty battery. No problem there, I got out my Axim and keyboard and composed a few emails and listened to some podcasts. Eventually things began moving and some 20+ cars reversed the mile to a t-junction. Apart from the need to keep the car stocked for any occasion where the engine isn't running, especially when it's cold or wet outside, one thing I learnt was don't head back down to the main road at the first opportunity, you will still meet others coming from that direction. I lost another 20 minutes heading back to the main road, when I should have headed further into the country at the t-junction. Ah well, all was well in the end, I got home warm and not very late; crickey, there are -people who have a far greater commute than the approximate hour or so each way.

Swimming Pool at Sarah's

Swimming Pool at Sarah's 1
Originally uploaded by Phil(hellene).

How could Cathy not swim everyday?

All this and a beach less than 5 minutes away.

Red Roller group

Red Roller group
Originally uploaded by Phil(hellene).

Here's a shot of some of the apples we retrieved from the tree in the garden. It's a tree that we share as a family and was planted over 70 years ago by a family member.

It was identified by a fruit expert some years ago as the Red Roller variety, a fairly rare Cornish variety named from it shape and once thought virtually extinct, or so I'm told.

View from a table on my first visit to Chesters

View from a table on my first visit to Chesters
Originally uploaded by Phil(hellene).

Here's the first of the photos from Cyprus.

Quite fitting as Chesters Bar, on the outskirts of Limassol (the Larnaca side), was my favourite place to eat/drink and use FREE wifi. Yep ,one of the very few places in Cyprus to be generous enough to offer free wifi to patrons.

The table I sat at was outdoors in front of the left hand doorway, as you look at the front of Chesters. I could keep a signal here for most of the time without interruption.

Autumn in Cornwall

Shakespeare had it right when he described Autumn as "the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness".

The last few apples are falling from the tree, it's been a good crop this year. From the windfalls we make various things like crumbles, nothing very adventurous but tasty. It's always good to be open to new things and I recently had this happen with our apples. A very kind person made apple jelly with some and gave it to my parents; we tried it and next year it's on my list of things to do. The apples I have referred to here before, they are Red Rollers - a rare Cornish variety (pictures to come).

On the subject of pictures, I have not posted the Cypriot holiday ones yet as they are taking a while to go through. Armed with a digital camera and 2Gb SD I went a littler wild.

Today it has been damp, mist slowly creeping in and now I can only just see the buildings across the way. While not cold, the damp brought a chill that encouraged us to light our first coal fire since early Spring. As soon as I had laid it in and we had lit it, the warmth flowed into every nook and cranny of our little cottage. Sitting along side of the fire, it's glowing coals a hypnotic distraction, blurring our sense of time. Whenever we have a fire it's so difficult to drag ourselves away from it to go to bed. For all the work of making and, the next day, clearing up the debris it's worth it every time; as an added bonus, we often find that it's already been made when we get home, [no names, no pack drill - as they say but the persons involved know how grateful we are].

Eric Idle on Parkinson

I have always enjoyed Michael Parkinson's shows, tonight was particularly good.

Eric Idle was funny while being more risqué than I had seen anyone on Parki before.

Eric Idle reports that when George Harrison was stabbed, 8 times by an intruder with a kitchen knife, he was being carried out on a stretcher; he hadn't met 2 new staff he had recently employed, when they came rushing in. George looked at them and said, "So what so you think of the job so far?"

Eric also said, "Niceness is overated".

Littlechef A350 Chippenham

Great service. Freshly cooked food, particularly the Olympic breakfast.

Wifi was up and down when a family were sitting near the take-away part, (we're sitting against the wall as you come in), now they are tone signal strength is stable. Strength 5 bars on today screen and average -50 on config screen.

Well worth nipping off the M4 junction 17 for the couple of miles to the end of the dual carriageway; the Littlechef is on far right on the roundabout you get to, next to the garage.

The Last Day in Cyprus

Colour me melancholic.

Everything is still, muted even on this last morning. The sky is blue with a hint of clouds at the edge of the window, (I say window but it runs floor to ceiling and wall to wall). I am a relaxed sort of tired today, as I have gotten up early to see my friend off when he goes to work.

We'll be packing later, definitely my most hated holiday job. I have a smaller case but we seem to have made it a rule to buy larger souvenirs than last year, not just larger but heavier too. I smiled when I saw case's on the carousel, when we came out, that were marked with the HEAVY warning tags; well that's not us this year, I thought to myself - there's a good chance I won't have the last laugh.

Already my head's a blur of holiday experiences and we haven't left the country yet. The trips we have done are fairly vivid but the trips into Limassol have melded into one long one, just like my favourite street Agiou Andreiou. We have quite a few photos to remember the place by and a little video to, (though it's my first proper attempt with the Nikon P2). Naming the shots will give me quite a few evenings' work through the winter.

Ah the sun's reached the balcony, maybe that will lift my spirits a little.

Views from a Cypriot window

I sit here, looking out on an azure blue sea. Across the horizon ships pass in a slow procession. In the foreground people pass in a wedding procession. The sky is blue ahead of me, gradually fading to a muted orange as the sun sets.

Earlier I watched a massive build up of cumulo nimbus clouds, they gathered, changed shape and moved slowly like massive white ships of the air. I could watch such majestic movement for years, but today is our last whole day and I have so much atmosphere to soak up; after all, this will have to last for as much as a year.

The air is noticably cooler than when we came out but this feeling is, in part, due to our becoming acclimatised and partly due to the storms in the West. The light has all but faded now, swiftly as it does this much closer to the equator than in Cornwall. Dusk is almost a blessing bestowed to compensate for the sapping of the sun's strength in Northern Europe.

Tonight will be the last meal of substance with our dear friends here, a bittersweet time. We have been through this on many occasions but it never gets any easier. When you get along as well as we do and then have to spend so long apart it comes as a wrench. Not seeing each other but only being an hour or two apart is such a salve.

Impressions of Cyprus Part 2

We were familiar with the streets of Corfu Town and the smaller town our friends used to live in; so much so that I could close my eyes and navigate to any of the locations we used to go to. It was a place where I was definitely in my comfort zone.

Cyprus was an unknown, even after studying maps and gudie books before coming out I was none the wiser. Take the scale for instance, in Corfu I could tell you the time it would take me to get to somewhere but out here, goodness knows. Now, I can almost hear you saying but that's the same for everyone who visits a new place; to that I would say yes and perhaps I am not doing justice to the unease I felt at going to these new places, having to get familiar with the bus routes, etc.

Obstensibly we had come to see our friends and anything else was a bonus. For instance, we are staying just 2 minutes walk from what is called a supermarket out here, not your out of town conglomerate but say a Spar shop in the UK or one of those 9-till-late stores in the US, (I forget the generic name for them), they seem to be every 500 metres, bonus; next to that is a bar, a bonus, though drinks bought from the store to be drunk at home are more economical and I am on something of an economy drive.

I went in to the supermarket on the first full day here and picked up some postcards. Before I had managed to no more than start to utter gramatossima (stamps) the Cypriot lady asked, in perfectly good English, whether I would like stamps for them. I had been told by several friends that on Cyprus a majority of people spoke very good English, but I still went around expecting to find a lot of people who would rather speak Greek; not so, I found a lot of people who would tolerantly listen to my efforts and then answer in extrememly good English, a bonus, especially in those circumstances when my most basic grasp of the language faltered over concepts or future/past tenses (often).

We got to learn the streets armed with a map and basically walking them. Orientation started with the old port; this, like arriving by boat in Corfu, led to the tourist area. We found ourselves walking through the old part of the town frequently and this is how we got to know Cabellaros opposite the castle, the caf?/restaurant I have already written about. From there we turned a corner and found ourselves in Agiou Andreiou or St.Andrew Street, a long street that in it's first third, (measured from the old port end), contains many of the types of shops we found between Corfu's port and it's Liston building.

St.Andrew Street runs all the way to the municipal gardens and at the end furthest from the port it meets a sort of skewed crossroads, where the Starbucks, (I have written about in my previous post), exists. Just along past the right hand of Starbucks, as you face it, is the Municipal Gardens.

Note: if you pass by the left of Starbucks you can walk less than 500 metres and the last building on your left, before the road junction, (a roundabout with large fountain in the middle), is the biggest bookshop in Limassol - Kyriakkou Bookshop. The bookshop has a dark tinted door and three windows displaying some books. As you enter the foyer contains magazines, currently Greek on the right and English on the left, hence the need for a tinted door to protect the covers. Be warned, magazines and books in Cyprus are not cheap. You check out charity sales of second books by buying an English language Cypriot newspaper, Cyprus Mail (daily), Cyprus Weekly (every Friday) or Sunday Mail (the Cyprus Mail's sunday paper that comes with a magazine called Seven, that I found contained some interesting articles). They both have online editions. I may have created a bad link as far as previous references to the Mail goes, I can't really check until I get home and go online but the above links should be fine as I just read them from the actual newpapers.

The Municipal Gardens has a zoo in it, but I would not recommend it for a visit, from the little I have seen from the park. On the whole I wouldn't recommend zoos.

Big correction on Starbucks hotspots in corfu

I need to correct an earlier post of mine.

Regarding Starbucks above the Municipal Gardens and Zoo in Limassol.

When I visited this Starbucks I saw signals from a range of wifi sites but could not connect to one and get a splash screen. Later I posted about a piece I saw in the Cyprus Mail giving wifi hotspots across Cyprus; it said you could access the internet in Starbucks across Cyprus with a card that costs ?7 (Cypriot pounds) for 24 hours.

I failed to pick up on this until I revisited the above mentioned Starbucks today. I asked whille I was there and was told that there was also a card that gave 2 hours connection for ?3 (Cypriot pounds). Once I had the card, which is from Logosnet Technologies and comes sealed in a plastic wallet, I scratched off the back which gave the user password, the username was displayed above it.

There is an explanatory leaflet, in Greek and English, that comes with the card; it sets out what needs to be done to connect to the hotspot e.g. having your browser set to accept "Active Scripting". I connected with my Axim and did not have any way of turning this on.

Initially my browser rejected the connection when I tried to connect to a website, expecting to be taken to a splash screen. I then put in www.forthnet.com as a website to visit and this took me to a splash screen for connecting, (I had already told the Axim to connect to the Forthnet signal that I saw). Because Opera had not suceeded in connecting I went through Internet Explorer but, when I tested it later, Opera could also get the splash screen and accept the login.

Connection strength from where we sat, the pillar nearest to the toilets, was five out of five bars on the Axim Today screen and -50 on it's wifi configuration screen. I walked up to the beverage collection point from my seat and the average signal strength was -50 which is very good for a public hotspot, (I've not seen full strength in the UK). Also, I was able to download a photowalking video by Scoble of Thomas Hawk 48Mb without any sign of throttling, unlike the UK.

Reflections on Cyprus Part 1

We came not knowing what we would find, a new experience for us.

Our first site of the island, when we looked out of the plane window, was of a barren spread of land; oh, this will improve we thought, once we're nearer the sea. As we approached the sea we saw the salt plain outside of Larnacca, maybe it would take longer to get to the green part; we ran out of island before this.

As we landed we could almost feel the heat pulsing against the side of the plane. Before they had opened the doors we knew it would be hot, like the time we landed in Athens and they opened the doors, letting in the tail-end of a heatwave.

There was a breeze when the doors opened and this tempered any feelings of heat, plus we were focused on getting to the arrivals hall and spotting our friends. Once we get to baggage reclaim, we would start scanning for a glimpse of our friends. This time we found that you cannot see the people waiting, reps and residents, one sort with little signs held at a height to indicate their level of self esteem; the other with just expectant looks, straining to turn into a smile.

Cyprus Mail

I neglected to include them before but, in recognition of the news source regarding wifi hotspots:

Cyprus Mail website: www.cyprus-mail.com

Email: mail@cyprus-mail.com