Peter's Blog

My Mother bought herself a Kodak CX7525 Digital Camera. It seems decent enough, it's 5 megapixel and the picture quality looks very good, no noticable digital noise like the Kodak CX7220 that I bought my mother-in-law for christmas. Other than the resolution and the noise it is very similar to the CX7220.

Potted review:

• smallish screen
• few controls, simple to use
• good picture quality
• flash seems powerful, maybe too powerful, pictures look a bit overexposed.
• AA batteries, always good.
• takes videos etc

It is a very easy camera to use, ideal for mum's.

With my mum's new camera we got a photodock in an attempt to make it dead easy for her to copy photos to her computer.

Bullet point review:

• photodock conforms to 'pictbridge' standard which appears to support multiple camera and dock makers.
• the camera drops onto the top of the dock. It plugs in but with zero resistance.
• the photodock includes a printer that can print 6x4 inch pictures of good quality. When you put the camera in the dock it's screen comes on and you just pick a picture to print using the left and right arrow buttons and then press another button to print it.
• the paper and ink cartridges cost about £28 for 80 prints (I think it was) which is expensive: 35p a print. I can get them printed online for 7p each.
• the dock makes it very easy to copy pictures to a pc. Install the kodak software, plug in usb and it is a simple matter of putting the camera in the dock, the Kodak software fires up and copys the pictures. The kodak software is ok in a dumbed-down kind of way.
• the dock comes with rechargable batteries for the camera and will charge it. They were Ni-mh, which are not as good as lithium ion (memory effects and rapid ageing).

Conclusion: the dock is ok, it makes things easy if you find plugging USB cable too fiddly but the printer is an expensive way to print.

My favourite Photo Album software, Picasa now supports my favourite online printing service, Photobox. This means I can upload from Picasa directly to Photobox where I currently have 400M of storage available. Every time I order more prints I get 50M more storage.

I would happily abandon Jasc Paintshop Photo Album but it still provides two useful functions for me:

• it is the default application for importing images from my camera. Maybe picasa can do this, I haven't tried, another job for my todo list.
• PSPA supports drag and drop of pictures to other applications like a file manager. This way I can use it with the flickr uploader. With picasa you cannot drag and drop outside the application, a flaw in my opinion. As picasa is owned by google and flickr is owned by yahoo I cannot see flickr support in picasa coming any time soon.

I use the photobox storage as a backup for personal photos and flickr to show off pictures of my daughter.

Vodafone web site has to be amongst the least reliable I have come across. I am supposed to be able to see itemised phone bills, adjust my settings etc but most of the time all I get is:

We are unable to display the billing information for the account you’ve chosen. This may be because it is a new account or because a temporary problem has prevented us from displaying the information. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

I want to check my phone bill but this has only worked properly on about one day in the last week. I have not seen all the features of the site working, there is always an error of this kind somewhere or the other.

I am not sure if it is still the case but Vodafone used to be the largest company in the uk by market capitalisation (price of shares times number of shares). A big company ought to be able to get some decent web development staff in.

Just discovered I can turn silent mode on and off just by pressing and holding the # key.

It would be nice for me to be able to receive email notifications about server outages etc using text messages on my K750i. In theory I could do this through my Vodafone email account which can send text messages to report new emails but in practise the vodafone email service is flakier than my servers:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    <censored>@vodafone.net

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 553 5.3.0 Sorry, but your email could not be delivered
to the intended recipient. Please check the following link for details:
http://www.vodafone.net/error.htm

The error page this refers me to lets me check if an IP address is in a blocking list. If gmail is in a blocking list then it wasn't yesterday and overnight the spammers have won and made email useless.

The 'settings' page in vodafone's web email is offline again.

Conclusion: nice phone, lousy network.

Update: Also it appears that vodafone email notification texts do not come out of the 250 texts/month tarriff allocation: I have to pay 10.2p (+vat?) for them. Forget it. There are other email->sms gateways (e.g), possibly more reliable since their business depends on them.

Also, if an email is sent from the phone via SMS, the message received is buried in an html table full of vodafone graphics. It seems to be almost totally ruined for moblogging.

I read a moan that the shutter sound of the K750i could not be turned off for privacy reasons and I never thought to question it. Well stalkers and weirdo's out there, your luck is in, if the phone is in silent mode it doesn't click!

I am now committed to using awtags, so much so that I am adding awtags links all the time. To save myself some typing I have altered my wilki module to enable me to add a link to a tag very simply:

[awtags]

will link me to the awtags tag. If no tag is found with the given name then the linker goes on to look for a node number, article title or whatever that matches.

Previously I had to enter

[tags/awtags]

which was becoming a bind.

I have closed my Site5 account, now that the years subscription has expired. I don't need it now that I am hosted on oneandone and things have been running smoothly for a while. I find it kind of sad as the Site5 account served me well. If I wanted shared hosting again I would definitely go back to them.

Came across Google SMS uk. You send google a text message with a query and it sends back up to seven texts with search results. It is tailored to things like:

• finding nearest pizza outlet
• definitions of words
• answers to quiz questions (cheat!)
• find cheapest internet price of something
• driving directions

According to the faq it is not a premium service, the texts may come out of my tariff's sms allowance, but it is possible that vodafone will decide to penalise me for using it. I've done one query, I'll wait three days for the online itemised billing to be updated. Still, even if it costs 10p a shot it would be worth it if you were desperate for pizza.

I tried a search for 'price memory stick duo 1g' and it came up with an ebay price which is somewhat disappointing, I would prefer something like the amazon price as a better indication of the going rate. Is the ebay price second hand, stolen goods, based in hong kong?

I tried a driving directions search and it told me that the results were too long and I should use the web. Maybe I could ask for directions to a place half-way to where I was going and then ask again.

Ok, you could always do a proper google search via WAP but the SMS won't run up your GPRS bill, it is easier to use and the results are saved in your sms inbox. I can imagine myself checking prices with it if nothing else.

A thought: search for nearest petrol station could be useful!!