Playing with my iPod yesterday, I found a very irritating bug. I have two albums called "Still", one by Joy Division and one by Wolverine. When I select either one of them from the albums list on the iPod, I get both albums smushed together rather than just the one I selected. In fact, despite Cover Flow showing both albums, the albums list only shows one with all the tracks in it.

I had an interesting letter through the door. The same letter everyone receives when moving into a new home: a threatening missive from the TV licensing people. What's interesting about it is the increasingly hostile tone of these letters. I remember when I moved into my last place, it was all very vague and woolly, saying that I could be subject to fines, and that I could be caught and so forth.

Just a minor puzzlement today. PC-BSD 7 has been released, and is apparently very good. I might even try it. What's perplexing me is that it's codenamed the "Fibonacci edition". 7 isn't even in the Fibonacci sequence ...

Some while ago, I wrote about NeoOffice, an OpenOffice.org port for the Mac. It provided what OpenOffice.org could not - a native interface. OpenOffice.org 2.x still used the X11 interface so integration was clunky at best.

Unfortunately for NeoOffice, that's just about to change. I've been playing with a release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for the Mac, and it's great. Fully native interface, and everything seems to work. No niggly little keybinding bugs. No scrolling issues. No strangely drawn dialog boxes. It "Just Works".

I'm not really sure where that leaves NeoOffice now, though. While I've appreciated their work, I can't really see any reason to still use it now that the "real" OOo works natively. And seeing as porting OOo 2.x to a native Aqua interface was the prime motivation of NeoOffice, I can't really see what they can bring to the table.

At the moment, the NeoOffice site claims that presentations run faster than OOo 3.0. I'm sure there are other Mac integration efforts they can use to make sure they stay a little way ahead of the OpenOffice.org curve, but for the basic functionality they seem to have been left somewhat high and dry by this latest OOo release.

Time will tell. In the meantime, you have to donate cash to get access to NeoOffice 3, while you can get the OOo release candidate for free. They don't expect to have a free release 'til January 2009. I think I'll just stick with OOo. Sorry, NeoOffice guys.

Update Now it has decided to randomly erase everything when I rebooted it. Avoid this piece of tat at all costs and buy one of the Maxtor home NAS devices.

I got a 500GB Iomega Home NAS device a while ago simply because it was cheap. I needed a bit of networked storage so I could share things no matter which of my machines I was using, and it seemed to fit the bill.

Unfortunately, it sucks. Royally. Mangled SMB packets, random destruction of the domain, all manner of badness. Then I happened across a nugget of information. The firmware it ships with (K104.W11) is just rubbish, and the latest update (K108.W15) is even worse. However, an older firmware (K102.W11) is much, much more stable. Go figure.

Officially you can't get the older firmware any more. But unofficially, you can if you know where to look. So if you're having trouble with your Iomega Home NAS being crap, try reflashing it with this:

http://download.iomega.com/english/storcenter_home_fimrware-k102w11.bin

The misspelling of "fimrware" is deliberate, just so you don't think to try and correct the link. Anyway, it might make all your woes go away. It does say that it makes it incompatible with OS X leopard, but I'm not sure how that's the case if it's just using standard SMB. I think it's the automagical device discovery tool that's not Leopard aware, but the OS already comes with the findsmb command which does exactly the same thing. Suck it and see. It's dead easy to reflash with the latest firmware if necessary anyway.

Sometimes, when I'm bimbling about in town of a lunchtime, I feel like getting something new to listen to. Seeing as I usually forget my "to buy" list, it's not unheard of me to buy something completely random from the HMV or Zavvi sale sections. That means that these albums rarely cost more than a fiver, and can be easily ebayed if they turn out to be rubbish.

I thought I'd take stock of what I've bought and see if the not-entirely-random selection process I employ works. Here are a few that I've bought over the last year with tiny, little baby reviews just to say if they're pap or not.

So I've spent a couple of weeks with my shiny new toy, the Samsumg F480 Tocco, so it's time to write a little review of it. I have to say that I'm very pleased with it, and would gladly recommend it to, well, anyone. The touchscreen interface might be a little too alien for some, but for anyone reasonably mobile-savvy it should present no issues at all.

Of course, it's going to end up getting compared to the iPhone a lot. It looks just like it to the untrained eye. It's actually slightly smaller than the iPhone, and the iPhone users who've seen it have commented that it's a much better size. Oh, and it comes with an optional faux-leather flip-front which is very effective and looks pretty good, too.

Those of you who remember the bad old days will know that getting freebies out of mobile companies was a worthwhile, though arduous task. Free upgrades, price reductions and other goodies could be had if you were able to withstand the tiring process of pretending to want a PAC to bugger off to pastures new.

More recently, the phone companies changed their tactic. You could phone up and request a PAC, but rather than offer you goodies to stick around, they'd just give you one. You then had a choice; let it expire, or use it to try and find a decent deal in a harsh marketplace.

Thankfully, yesterday Orange proved that the tides is changing once again. They called me, out of the blue, and said that my contract expires in 2 months. They offered me, right there and then, a free upgrade to any handset I chose and a substantially better value tariff. So I did. The fact is, I didn't actually want to leave Orange this time because they are, in my opinion, the best operator at the moment. However, they didn't know that, and I'm more than happy to let them ply me with free stuff to keep my custom.

So taking advantage of this generosity, I chose the new Samsung F480 Tocco, their new iPhone-alike with more features than you can shake a stick at. I was a bit dubious, a fan as I am of simplistic devices that do exactly what I need and no more. The X820 has been an absolute dream in that respect, being both completely reliable and having a very good feature set. So here I am branching out toward the world of shiny things without keypads.

Another reason I stick with Orange: they deliver promptly, and when they say they will. Unlike, say, O2, or T-Mobile. My new shiny device arrived promptly the morning after the night before, right on my desk where I could play nicely with it. I mean, where I could get on with my work and leave it until lunchtime ... *ahem* ...

So initial impressions, then. Excellent. I was worried about build quality, but no problems there. I was worried about touch screen sensitivity, and no problems there. I was worried about typing directly on to a touch screen, but again, no problems at all. The new "haptic response" system (i.e. a little buzz when it detects a click) means you get definite tactile feedback from the touch screen, which is both novel, and an amazing boost to usability.

Feature-wise I'm not very demanding of a phone, but I know what I like and I know what I don't. The T9 system is good, the touchscreen is just responsive enough, and the menus are logically laid out. The only complaint I can find so far is that the scrolling is upside down. The iPhone gets it right; move your finger down, and the screen scrolls down. The Tocco goes the other way and acts as if you're dragging a scroll bar, and it doesn't always realise that you're not clicking on the items you're dragging over. Still, it works well enough after a couple of minutes.

I'll use the phone for a bit and probably stick up a more detailed field report later. Until then, hooray for toys!

Tuesday 17th June was supposed to be a big day in Firefox history. The long awaited version 3 of the popular browser was to be released to record breaking numbers of downloads. The world would be in awe of the majesty of ... wait, maybe that's going a bit far.

Anyway, Tuesday came and went, and I didn't download it. I tried, but I failed. There were two things that stopped me in the end. First, the stability of the servers. All the various domains returned 'Http/1.1 Service unavailable' errors in the evening when I actually tried to get it. That didn't help.

The main thing that stopped me, though, was that it was released at 10am on the 17th. 10am PDT that is. California time. Those of us with a vague grasp of world geography will know that California is on the trailing edge of the world timezones. Indeed, by the time 10am PDT rolled around, it was already Wednesday the 18th at the international date line. Being sat there looking at the Firefox 2 link on the 17th didn't do wonders for the world at large's perception of the Mozilla organisation's ability to, well, organise.

In my mind, there were two possible things they could have done to make it not suck like it did. Either release it at midnight GMT (or UTC as people now like to refer to it), making sure that the two extreme timezones have at least 12 hours on the 17th where it is available. This would satisfy the world record download attempt's rules of it only being one day. The other way would be to launch at midnight on the 16th on the international date line, meaning it would require 48 hours before the whole world had seen midnight on the 17th.

Either way, the Firefox site gave no indication of intentions, fell over repeatedly and generally left those further east of California wondering what the hell was going on. Remember, Silicon Valley people, that most of the world sees the dawn long before you do. Without giving us more information than "the 17th" we'll all just get bored and wander off to the pub. Which, in fact, I did.


It was a busy week last week. I ended up going to two gigs on consecutive nights in backwater little townlets to see some really quite surprising bands.

First up was Blue Öyster Cult in the tiny village of Holmfirth, made famous by being the setting to Last of the Summer Wine. The venue was certainly peculiar, being as it was a half renovated play house with scaffold and steel fencing supporting half the structure and a peculiar sloping floor. Still, it was a decent enough place and the sound was fine to my ear, so I was ready for some rock.

Given that BÖC released their first album 7 years before I was born, I think they can be referred to as "old school" quite legitimately, and the show reflects this. As Ian (whose idea it was to go to this gig) pointed out, when the band started out a live show actually meant more than just playing a selection of songs from the album and going home. And it shows. 10 or 20 minute versions of classics like "Then Came The Last Days Of May", "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and "Godzilla", complete with duelling guitars, massive 4 guitar riff fests, drum solos and alternating vocalists. Top stuff.

So after all that, what could follow it? Well, a Friday night in Stocksbridge, steel centre of Sheffield, to see Mostly Autumn on the weekend prior to the release of their new album, Glass Shadows.

After finding possibly the single most distant venue in Sheffield, and standing around for an hour drinking a well kept and surprisingly cheap Farmer's Blonde from Bradfield Brewery, the band took to the stage. They played a good selection of classics and new material, which was great for me. Hearing songs from a new album live before you've even taken the album out of the shrink wrap makes them all the more special, and owning the album 3 days before general release makes it even more so.

Overall, the new album is a bit less proggy, a bit less folky, but definitely Mostly Autumnal. It's a solid release that surpasses the sometimes half-baked Heartful Of Sky, with none of the songs particularly disappointing (although one or two bring out puzzled expressions and exclamations of "What the... ?!", but in a good way) Still, overall a win, and a great couple of gigs. More like that, please.