Insert Clever Title Here

<rant>
Ah the joys of being a tenant. We just had our six monthly inspection to make sure the house hadn’t been converted in an Asian brothel and meth house. (That should bring up some interesting Google Ad-Words :-))

But it got me thinking. Now we are tenants and have to put up with what feels like a parental inspection to make sure our room is tidy. Now last time I checked I was a grown up (yes my wife and a number of my friends my strongly disagree) and yet we have to put up with this.

Now the financial income to the landlord/lady on our property is around a low mortgage repayment. So of course the landlord/lady has a vested interest in the property being maintained.

Now consider this… image if we had a 105% loan on this house and the bank was owed a shit load of $$$ with the risk that we are trashing the place and dramatically reducing its value.  At this point the bank could be seriously out of pocket and with the credit crunch that is happening you’d think they might give a flying toss as to what is happening. But no.

Banks go “here is your mortgage please pay on time we need never speak to you again”.  For me there in lies the rub.  We are going to put less money into the house, for all we know it is being negatively geared what ever that means, than the landlord is.  Yet we have to put up with having our bathroom checked for mould.

Now our Agent was all very nice and was in and out in 5 min and took notes on something that we would like fixed, but what is the bank that lends 105% doing about their investment… nothing.  This is one of the reasons that tenants feel like second class citizens.

</rant>

Tags: Annoyances, Funny, General, n95 by Me
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O.k, well the firmware hit version 30 for the n95-8gb over night as well, and I have just finished installing it.   But for those that are uncomfortable about doing such a radical thing as updating your firmware, I thought I would put together a series of screenshots to show what you have to do and how easy it can be.

But one small catch, if you have your phone heavily customised it may not look the same when it reboots and not all of your apps may be where you think they are.  The process is still far from perfect in my opinion but the benefits of a more stable OS on your phone more than outweigh having to spend some time moving a few things around.

Stage 1 - Make a backup….   Just in case things go wrong (and to put your phone back to how it was…!)

To create the backup choose the backup option in Nokia PC Suite.

Stage 2 Click on the Update Phone software button in Nokia Pc Suite.  (yes Mac people you will need to find a PC to use… don’t nark on me!)

Follow the instructions:-) Also make sure you phone is on power or at least has a full battery if the power goes out whilst you are doing the upgrade all sorts of bad things could happen!

Now, if you phone can find the update this is what you will see.  Not all phones will see this update, phones that are closely tied to a phone company for their firmware may not see this update at all.

Now it will download over 100 meg of stuff

Then it will Flash the phone and start installing the software.  At this point your phone will turn off and on a few times.  Your computer will also go through a couple of found new hardware devices as well.

Now all going well your Firmware is up to date.

Now comes the fun part.  Putting your phone back together.  Not all of your apps will be installed correctly.  You will need to go to Applications, App.mgr. and look through the list to see what is not installed.  At this point you can reinstall some of your applications by choosing install.

Now the final stage is to put things back…. the easiest way to do this is to go back to Stage 1, the backup you made… rememember that…  it was Stage 1.  Go to the Back Up in Nokia PC Suite and choose restore backup.

Now go outside and enjoy the day.

Tags: n95, nokia by Me
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Ironic Mobile Advert Fail

Originally uploaded by wolfcat_aus

One of Eye Corps’s wizbang signs (the portrait plamsa tv’s) at Southlands had a modem failure

It was even more ironic given that the add was for a mobile phone. of course it was for my mobile phone, so that adds to the whole circular nature of the experience, an Nokia taken a photo of a Nokia kind of thing.. all very deep and profound I am sure.

I always suspected that these adds were basically simple flash animations just running on a windows box. And the windows error message just proves it. Seriously what a waste of computer just to show some simple animations, but I guess some one is a paying a lot for these adverts that cost nothing to build and nothing to run.

Yep, I am definitely in the wrong business.

Tags: Funny, Photos, n95 by Me
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The Nokia N95 1 (or as I like to call it the Nokia n95 Silver) has had a big firmware update..

• Nokia Maps 2.0 built-in
• Full N-Gage client
• Nokia Search 4.0 with Google plug-in
• Share online 3.0
• Enablers for Comes With Music
• Download! application updated (v 3.1.50)
• Upgrade to Music Player
• Update for Flash Lite 3 (improved viewing of sites like YouTube)
• Current consumption improvements (for e.g. WLAN scanning)
• New baseline for VoIP (with significant error corrections)

(thanks to All About Symbian) for the pointer….

and they also say that the 8gb version of this update should be out in the next few days as well.  I will let you know when it pops up.

Certainly I am looking forward to the NGage only being installed once :-)  Expect a report on the firmware as soon as it comes out for the N95-8gb version.

And I think Nokia owes me money as well…. since I got my I know of 5 of these phones being sold to my friends and co-workers.  I really should get a cut

Tags: n95, nokia by Me
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Been up in Sydney for a few days for a planning workshop with the Sydney crew which was all very nice, amazing how much work you can get done in a 5 minute face to face conversation over a nice glass of red (Thanks for the invite to your place Chris).  And got to spend sometime with my sister and by time I mean complete a set of tasks revolving around setting up and fixing various bits of tech in the house.

But that aside… and back to the non work stuff, I managed to squeeze out some photos on the flights up and back and get some new GPS traces for you to look at in Google Earth.

When I finish the project at work that is a month late due to my lack of calcium intake and low immune system I will be playing some more with the plug in version of Google Earth and will try and get my KMLS to work off this site directly.  Also hopefully soon my ISP will get off their arse and put PHP 5 on my damned server and I can run some more scripts at this end to show off some of the data I have.

Anyway click on the images for the bigger versions of these Nokia N958-gb geotagged photos and then click here to download the following KML Files…

Sydney-to-Melbourne-Flight2.kmz and Melbourne-to-Newcastle-Flight.kmz Both of which have the taxi and take off sequence although the gps lost fix due to the rapid climb in height.  They are not the cleanest traces either but getting a fix inside a 737 is never easy, especially when you put your phone into flightmode and then put it away as well.

This Photo doesn’t look like much at this size, and infact only looks good once you get up to the larger sizes, but it is Canberra at Night. There is a touch of a reflection, but given that I use only a camera phone on Night Mode with the general vibrations of an Aircraft and a few glass of wine before the trip this worked out better value than I anticipated.

Tags: General, Photos, gps, n95 by Me
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