Mike’s Blog

As usual, thanks to the guys at Mahalo Daily, save yourself a lot of time: Watch the keynote in 60 seconds instead of nearly 2 hours.
Enjoy.

No further comment needed. Enjoy.

I live and work in London since January 2007 and for the first time in my life I do no longer have a car. Until recently I have been rather happy with public transport in this great city. I use all means of transport, from DLR and tube to boats and buses.
Especially buses can be a good alternative, especially in certain parts of London which are do not have a dense underground network, but they are also a good, fast and cheap way to travel short distances.

Unfortunately buses don’t have a good reputation, especially in the South East and East of London, due to un-civilised behavior of a small minority of young people. But to be honest, so far I have never had any real bad experiences, and actually find it sometimes rather interesting to see that there is some life in the bus
Things have changed since June 1st. Let me explain why. Today was a wonderful sunny day here in London, and as such I was the whole day underway in different areas of London, using public transport to get around. This included several bus rides. But twice, those rides had been interrupted by what seems to have become something common: The Bus stops at a station, turns off the engine and doesn’t continue its travel. The only option was in both cases to get of the bus and wait for the next bus to arrive to continue the journey. Why?

Well, since June 1st it is  for every 11 to 15 year old to have a ticket with a photocard in order to be allowed to enjoy free travel on buses. The reason behind this new measure is apparently to be able to keep youngsters who behave bad on buses of the buses by revoking their right of free travel.
Unfortunately the job to enforce this new rule has been pushed towards the bus drivers. Driving a bus in London wasn’t necessarily an easy job until now, and this new rule certainly doesn’t make it any easier. On several occasions I saw rather heated discussions between the bus drivers and young people who wanted to get on the bus without a photocard. Sometimes, the discussion ends with the young guys getting of the bus again, but sometimes they simply ignore the driver an go on and take a seat on teh bus, mainly on the upper deck on the bus.
This leaves the bus driver only one choice. He stops the engine and waits until they either leave the bus again, or “help” arrives.
Unfortunately, in most cases they won’t leave the bus, and as a consequence most of the other people, who don’t have a clue what is happening (there is no communication) simply get off the bus and wait for the next one to arrive.

This clearly can’t be the solution! Taking the bus has become a joke!

Oh yes, and to make the day perfect, at one of the stops on Manchester road a group of teens started throwing stones and other stuff at the bus..sometimes it is a really an interesting experience to live in this great city

On my way back home from work I normally walk along the West India Docks at Canary Wharf. A nice, quiet and scenic path along the dock. Well, tonight, it was rather special, I couldn’t really believe what I saw. Yes, there is a seal swimming in the water. A rather unusual animal to be seen in London. After swimming around for a few minutes it disappeared again under water.
Since I very often carry a small camera with me, I took the opportunity to take a few shots of it. Enjoy.

I am kind of playing around with HD videos these days. The below video has been taken at yesterdays May Day Fayre in Greenwich using a Sony SR12 Full HD camcorder, converted to 720p in iMovie and then uploaded to Vimeo.
The Vimeo player requires a rather powerfull machine to play these clips without problems, but anyway. Give it a try.
UPDATE: Hmm, I guess I just noticed that Vimeo doesn’t allow HD in the embedded player. Click the video to go to the Vimeo site to see it in HD.
I guess I will give Dailymotion a try, which apparently allows HD in embedded players. Stay tuned…

Musket Shots - HD from mikehellers on Vimeo.

One of my favorite shows is still “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”.

Have a look at the following clip to see what I mean. In his typical way he is taking on the stock market, Bush, Cramer and the Bear,Stearns crisis. Enjoy!

Let the fun begin….

Go over to backbone-news.com for further details….

Do you want to save yourself some time? Instead of watching the whole 90 minutes of Steve Jobs Keynote at this weeks MacWorld, have a look at what Mahalo Daily did with it. All the facts in 60 seconds

As a lot of the rumours over the past weeks indicated, Apple did realease a new Macbook at MacWorld this week.
I was really looking forward to it, and was actually ready in buying one, since I am actually looking for a small size factor portable.

On a first view, the MacBook Air (MBA) is really fascinating and exciting! The design is just wonderful, it is incredibly thin, great keyboard, innovative touchpad (using multitouch gestures) and so on…

But unfortunately, it all ends there. Let me explain why I am currently clearly not convinced in buying one:

• No Ethernet port
  Yes, I could probably live with out it. I have wireless at my place, even the printer is using Wifi, so no real issue there, and I could probably get used to it. Although I am not convinced that the speed of wireless will be good enough to really enjoy everything. Transferring large files will be a nightmare.
  Providing an optional USB dongle to add an Ethernet port is also not convincing, for two reasons: It is only a 10/100 port, and will use up one USB port, which leads directly to the next issue.
• It only has ONE single USB port!
  What a disappointment! Even more for a portable device I want to have the flexibility of being able to connect more then a single external device to it, without having to use a USB hub each time.
• Poor graphics card performance.
  The MBA “only” has an integrated graphics chip. CLearly not good enough for a high end (look at the price) ultra portable.
• Build-in Battery
  The battery is build-in and can not be relaced by teh end-user. Not really a suprise, but not a good choice in my eyes. Especially with my past experiences with MacBook batteries. Just thinking about the fact that I would have to send my MBA to Apple to get the Battery replace is driving me crazy.
• No Firewire port
  I use my current MacBook Pro on a regular basis to capture videos from my Digital camera, which need the Firewire port.

So where does that leave me? I still like the look and feel of the MBA. A really desirable little beast! But I think for now at least, I am too disappointed by teh above mentionned issues to convince myself and buy it.
The guys at Gizmodo have created a nice comparison showing the alternatives. And one device really shines in that list. It is the Dell XPS M1330. Slightly cheaper, same screen estate, slightly thicker and heavier. Shorter battery life, but replaceable battery. And it goes on: Faster Processor, better graphics, faster and larger (and future proof) SATA HDD, more memory, firewire port, ethernet ports….

And to be honest, it is looking also surprisingly good! Yes, it doesn’t have the “Wow-effect” off the MBA, but still. And if you want to, you can also get it with a Solid State Harddrive up to 64GB, same as the MBA.
CNET did a short video review of it , which shows mainly focuses on the design, giving you a good idea of it.
Where does that leave me? I guess, I really haven’t made up my mind yet. I will do a Hand-on comparison of both devices the coming weekend in the shops here in London, which will hopefully help me to take the right decision.

I am a happy user of an unlocked iPhone since mid last year. I own one since they came out in the us during late summer. Since at the time, I was unable to buy the iPhone here in the UK, my only option was to use an unlocked US phone. The method to unlock it I use is the TurboSim method.

It worked perfectly fine until yesterday, when I started to see problems. The phone reports that there is no Sim card installed in the phone. A reboot of the phone solves the problem, but only for a few minutes. You can see the signal disappear several times for a few seconds, just before it reports that there is no Sim card installed again. Removing/reinstalling the Sim/TurboSim cards also has the same effect.

After searching around in different forums, it is becoming more and more certain that the problem is actually not the iPhone or the TurboSIM card, but it seems to be somehow caused by a change on the t-Mobile network. Why do I think that? All of the users reporting the problem are also using T-Mobile. Too much of a coincidence. As one of the users mentions, the problem does seem to have started occurring over the past days, at different “start” times for different users, which could indicate that T-Mobile is actually performing some kind of update on their network which is causing the TurboSim to fail.

I remember that I saw a very similar problem when I was travelling in Europe. Depending on which network I was roaming, I would loose the signal and the phone would report the same “noSim card” error message. I thought at the time that it was just me throwing around the phone too much, causing bad contact between the TurboSIM, the real SIM and the actual phone connectors, but now, I kind of think that it might have been the same problem that we are now experiencing on T-Mobile UK.

Here are some links to forums posts of people reporting the same issue:

bladox.com (TurboSim manufacturers Website Forum)

MacRumours

Update: As mysteriously as the problem started, it has disappeared again. My iPhone is working fine again. Unfortunately that also means that i still have no real idea what caused the problem, although I still expect it to be caused by some change on the T-Mobile network.