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June 28, 2006
Edinburgh from the Pentland Hills
This is a view of (some of) Edinburgh, Scotland as seen from the Pentland Hills in the South, taken last night. I promise to post less cheesy pictures next month.
Posted by dr at 12:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 24, 2006
on being solo
Good day. I managed to convince them to give me a glider to fly. Like... on my own. It flies, mostly, even with me piloting. The question is now: how frightened was my instructor Rat Andy? But all went well... La vita e bella!
Posted by dr at 11:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 22, 2006
Bye-bye Junior - a written off glider
Here's what a not-so-happy glider looks like after a failed field landing.
The (very experienced) pilot was on a cross-country flight in south-west Scotland when we ran out of lift and had to land in a field. That's a fairly normal occurrence in gliding - your friends come around with a trailer, disassemble the plane and drive off, while the pilot either apologizes or gets fed dinner by the farmer's family.
This time, unfortunately, the intended landing site had some obstacles (walls, I believe) which the pilot could only make out very late, at which point he turned 90 degrees to land in his alternate field. That's when he struck big power cables in the approach path.
As much as it hurts everyone to see the nice new Junior to be written off - the amazing thing about it is that the pilot walked away from the accident with a few bruises. Such accidents are sufficiently rare, but even then, gliders provide a nice crumple zone to protect you. The folks in the picture smile for a reason! I would still choose a glider over hang glider, a microlight with a lawnmower engine, or a motorbike.
Posted by dr at 11:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 16, 2006
Motorola SLVR L7: a flat, feature-packaged cell phone
The flattest phone on the market has a cute sister. I've bought a Motorola SLVR L7 a few days ago and I'm mostly impressed. I've been fairly happy with the smaller version, the L6, but I just couldn't resist the advantages of the L7. It's got a nicer screen (better resolution) and a slot for a memory chip which can hold a lot of music, which you can access through an iPod-like interface.
Overall, it's a great phone. Voice quality is good, the ringtones play loud enough and uploading your own ringtone via the wireless Bluetooth connection, encoded in MP3, is a breeze (here's my ringtone: a proper "ring-ring"!) The interface seems fast enough - if not a bit faster than that of the L6, and various keys can be assigned to a lot of different functions.
I really like the fact that Motorola uses a standard mini-USB connector, so you can connect and also recharge the phone with any normal USB cable and any normal USB computer. This means that when I'm travelling, I don't need to take the phone charger with me. A USB cable is enough to recharge the phone with my laptop. The battery gives you about 4-5 days standby time with occasional use.
While the SLVR L7 plays MP3s just fine, it's not a replacement for an iPod: you need USB headphones since there is no standard (analog) headphone jack. I suspect this means one will have to content oneself with somewhat cheap&crappy USB headphones. My package came with a 64MB memory stick, which would be enough for around 20 songs or so. Upgrading to more should be no problem.
The L7 comes with a "Digital Audio Player" Java software (not any more with any mobile version of "iTunes"), which does the job. The built-in speaker is just about good enough to show a song to your friends and as good as one can expect from a tiny device - of course it's nothing that I'd want to use to actually listen to music. The phone doesn't seem to sync with iTunes on my Mac - instead, you'll have to copy songs over via the USB/Finder interface (i.e. use it as a drive) or with Bluetooth Explorer. It'll be similar on Windows machines.
Just like with the L6, the built-in camera is rather low-end. In particular, I suspect there is a serious bug: when you take pictures with little light available, the camera switches to night mode and displays the pictures just fine. When downloading them, however, they get all blurry. Other phones come with much better cameras.
The display is bright enough to act as a weak flashlight at night, but it's nowhere near as bright as the built-in flashlight that comes with the Sony Ericsson W800.
I'm rather unhappy with the built-in alarm function. You'll find it under "Tools", and you'll have to "create" a new alarm if you want to be woken up. Afterwards it's a bit easier to enable/disable alarms for times entered before. The alarm, for me, is an essential function of a mobile phone. It needs to be more accessible than that. Similar to the L6, it's difficult to check the time just by looking at the display - you have to disable the key lock first.
Of course, the phone has a calendar and a contacts database (with the phone numbers). iSync works fine with the L7. The Mac's Address Book doesn't work as well - you can't use the phone to send text messages. I've written a plug-in that will allow you to do so. A new version supporting the L7 will be abvailable shortly.
Mobile phone have made wonderful advances in the last years. At this point, it's not a matter of how many features you can pack in a small enclosure. It's much more about how easily people can access those features. To give an example: the Music Player I mentioned above is to be found under "Games/Apps" - which is the non-technical term for "Java Applications". Clearly, developers have designed these menus from a technical perspective, and not from a user's point of view. A user would look for the Music Player in "Multimedia", or so.
Overall, the L7 is a feature-packed, yet very elegant phone. Its big flaw is the low-quality camera, its big draw is its slim profile. If you need a phone and not a mobile organizer, if you can live with the camera, and you'd like to keep a separate, superiod iPod, then go for it (or downgrade to the L6).
Posted by dr at 2:01 PM | Comments (116) | TrackBack
June 13, 2006
Charging money for free&open source software
Free (liberty) software can't always be free (beer) - because someone needs to work to develop it.
Kevin Walzer, who kicked off Aquamacs development more than a year ago has now begun charging a small sum for the download of his free and open source package manager. While such software follows the "free software" ideology, it is clear that developers need to earn a living somehow - a point which Stallman's philosophy fails to address (I remember him arguing that we're all employed by universities, when he was over at MLE).
The question is now: will people pay up?
Posted by dr at 9:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 10, 2006
Two snapshots from NYC
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June 3, 2006
Surprises on Continental
Just when I was getting hungry again, the beautiful, graceful, attentive, easygoing Continental flight attendants began to distribute interesting white-yellow cardboard boxes. My row of seats hesitated a second - it's a little bit like Christmas, when you get just the right present at the right time.
At least that's what we were hoping for. The boxes were just big enough to hold a tiny packaged chocolate chip cookie and an ugly bag of ugly chips (a bisquit and some crisps, for you British readers). Not fake "thai chicken" or "BBQ" chips. Plain potato thingies. Greasy. Salty. Tasteless. Ahh, joys of travel. On a flight between Britain and the States, you're probably doomed to get the best of the world's culinary experiences.
I turned up my iPod. 15,000 feet further down, a smaller bird draws circles in the air. It had a big window (that is, canopy) and a stick in front, and a view like this. Flying can be so nice.
(Photo by Gareth Francis.)
Posted by dr at 1:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack