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11月24日 Vonage Disconnect ChargeHere in the office, I've been using Vonage Voice-over-IP Service for the past 18 months or so. I've found it to be reliable and of good quality, most of the time. Support leaves something to be desired (for instance, to close your account you need to call Vonage between 1pm and 11pm GMT - because the Support Team are based in the United States...) However we've recently moved back to a BT landline to take advantage of the many "free" Broadband offers - to use as backup to our 10mb Telewest line - and so there was little need to retain Vonage anymore. Imagine my surprise when we were charged £23.99 to disconnect from the service! That's right - if you leave Vonage they charge you 3 months worth of line rental (£7.99/month) for the privelege! When you join Vonage you are supplied with a VoIP Router, so I guessed this £23.99 was refundable upon safe return of the Router to Vonage. Nope. So what has gone from a service I would happily recommend to anyone, now goes to a service I'd never recommend to anyone!  11月23日 Computer AidThe BCS has an interview on their web-site with Tony Roberts, chief executive of Computer Aid International, who are the most recognisable name in Computer recycling and re-use in the UK. I thought things had moved on in leaps and bounds with regards to recycling IT equipment, but the statistics show almost 2 million PC's a year still end up in landfill. These aren't old 286 and 386 machines that you'd be struggling to find a use for, these are Pentium III and Pentium IV PC's, the sort that are probably sitting in the majority of most peoples son or daughters bedrooms right now. They are still being used for web-browsing, e-mail, Instant Messaging and Office - all of which PC's of this standard are capable of being used for. So if we can still find a use for them here in the UK, imagine how valuable they are to deprived areas in Africa. The article goes on to describe what sorts of projects Computer Aid are undertaking with the equipment donated. If you've got any IT equipment that you want to recycle or re-use, rather than send to landfill, do get in touch and I'll be happy to point you in the right direction! 11月12日 Edwards No 8 Burns DownWell it's not often I go to a nightclub which is so hot! My brother and I arrived home in the early hours of this morning after going out to celebrate a friends birthday, with bad throats, smelling of smoke and both having lost our coats. A standard night out, you might say! Except it was because we were partying at Edwards No. 8, one of the oldest nightclubs in Birmingham, which burnt to the ground overnight! BBC News covers the story here. The fire alarms went off around 0130, we were herded outside (ironically we left by walking past the Gents Toilets, where the fire started) where we saw from the amount of smoke that was billowing from the building that this wasn't a drill. Fire Engine after Fire Engine then arrived, and they are apparantly still trying to deal with the fire this morning. Nobody was seriously hurt although a number of people were suffering from smoke inhalation. My friends and I have been visiting Edwards No. 8 since we were teenagers. I guess we can say we were there to it's very end! Anyway, I'm off to recover. The smoke seems to have given me a pounding headache, dry throat, and a feeling of nausea. Yes, that'll be the smoke... 11月9日 MS Forefront Client SecurityI had an opportunity to watch a short video on Microsoft Forefront Client Security, the long awaited MS Enterprise Anti-Spyware and Anti-Virus package. Long-time readers of my blog will know that I've harped on about the lack of credible Enterprise Anti-Spyware packages many a time, so I've been waiting for news on Microsoft's offering with anticipation. First impressions are that it looks impressive. The software integrates with Active Directory, and appears to have some really good reporting features. As it stands, I recommend AVG Anti-Virus to most of my SME customers for it's good feature set and relatively low-cost, but don't have any real Anti-Spyware preferences - certainly not for any centrally managed solutions. Therefore I'll be keen on getting hold of a Beta copy of Forefront to put it through it's paces as soon as possible. 11月6日 OnSpeed - No WM5 Version...I've mentioned OnSpeed before. It's a service/software that works to compress data used across a dial-up or GPRS connection - reducing the amount of data downloaded, and speeding up the connection. I've used it on my laptop when in hotel rooms at 56kbps or worse, 9.6kbps GPRS - and it does it's job well to make life a bit easier when you have a slow connection. Since upgrading my PDA to a Dell Axim x50v with Windows Mobile v5, I've been waiting for OnSpeed to upgrade their service to work with WM5. It was promised over a year ago, but still hasn't arrived. So I was dissapointed when OnSpeed got back to my "Where is the WM5 version?" e-mail with the following response:- "Dear Sir/Madam, Unfortunately it is unlikely that support for Windows Mobile 5 devices will be added in the near future as there has been no date set for this. yours, ONSPEED Customer Services" As a WM5 PDA user - I think this is incredibly short-sighted of them. It's not like the WM5 user base is going to go away now is it? Every new PDA that is released will be using WM5 or a later version! So for now, OnSpeed remains a decent product - but for laptop or older model PDA users only. 70GB REV DriveIomega recently released a new REV drive, which stores 70GB of data natively - and upto 140GB with compression. Whilst you are unlikely to ever actually store 140GB (most files such as .JPG and .PDF have some sort of compression in them already, making further compression unlikely) 70GB natively is double the capacity of the original 35GB REV drive, and making REV an even more attractive proposal over traditional Tape Drives.
For the past 2 years I've been recommending REV drives to my small customers. It's relatively cheap per tape, it's fast compared to traditional tape, it's supported by the latest backup software such as Backup Exec and Arcserve - and it has many of the benefits of Tape Drives without most of the drawbacks.
If you're considering how to update your backup setup (you do make regular backups, right?) - then I'd suggest placing a solution based around a REV drive high on your list of options. Feel free to get in touch if you're a customer looking at backup solutions, or would like more advice in this area. 11月3日 When Turkeys AttackI've been uploading a few videos we took whilst in Dublin recently for Friends and Family to view, but I thought I'd share this video I took at Dublin Zoo with you. Click here if you can't see it below.
11月1日 Staying Connected when TravellingThe GG ran in the Dublin Marathon on Monday, so we took the opportunity to take a few days off to see the City at the same time. I'm sure Lin will cover more of her brilliant run in her own blog, but suffice to say - it was her first Road Marathon and she finished in 3'23'' and in the top Twenty Five females in her field. I'm very proud of her. :-)
Dublin is a lovely place - with plenty of opportunity to eat and drink out in it's many bars and restaurants. We also did plenty of walking and generally chilled out. It was nice to take a few days away from work and leave the mobile 'phone at home.
You can see some photos on both my Flickr and Lin's Flickr accounts.
But being a geek means being away from a 'net connection is akin to only eating muesli for days on end. You can live ok, but it's not very nice. ;-)
So despite leaving the mobile phone at home, I wanted to see how easy it would be to stay connected whilst away.
The first step was finding a hotel that gave Wi-Fi. Bewleys Hotel in Dublin has complimentary Wi-Fi in all it's rooms. It wasn't particularly fast, but it worked, and that meant we could use the PDA to make Skype calls - thus bypassing the traditionally outrageously priced hotel Telephone calls, and the equally disgusting rip-off charges levied by UK Mobile Phone operators on Roaming charges. Did you know that even by switching your Mobile Phone on in a foreign country, any calls you subsequently receive (even if you turn the 'phone off, and send calls to voicemail) can cost upto £1/min to receive? Disgusting!
Anyway, the 'phone stayed at home and the loved ones could easily leave voicemails on my Skype In number if they needed to contact us.
The second step was to make sure the PDA (a Dell Axim x50v in this case) was actually useable. So for this I invested in three items. A enhanced life 2200mAh battery. A Portable Charger. A Bluetooth Keyboard.
I was stunned by just how much difference having a small keyboard made to using a PDA. From becoming a tiny device that I just used for calendar, contact and task list and occasional MP3 listening - I suddenly had a mini-Laptop unit from which I could write decent sized e-mails, browse the web with ease and do all sorts of other tasks. So the investment of £70 in ThinkOutside's Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard was a wise one - I'd recommend them to anyone who wants to get the most out of their PDA. You can see a photo of the setup in action here.
Finally - I write this blog entry from the Private Airport Lounge at Dublin Airport. As a Prority Pass member you can sit in relaxing quiet surroundings, with no screaming children, no drunken groups of blokes, free snacks and drinks, and complimentary Internet access and Wi-Fi. The 90 minute wait for the flight boarding goes from being stressful, to a chance to relax and write this blog entry.
Don't get me wrong - I haven't come away on holiday just so I can stay in touch with work and not relax. I haven't read any work related e-mails in days, nor thought about work. But the ability to stay in touch with the family at home via VoIP and e-mail, and being able to use the Web to lookup nearby tourist attractions and details - I enjoyed it.
So will I be leaving the Laptop at home on business trips in future? Well - not just yet. There are a few things I still want to investigate tackling. The woeful Internet Explorer web-browser on Windows Mobile 5. The patchy Wi-Fi facilities of my PDA. But these are all niggles. When tackled, the day may very soon come when I can leave the heavy laptop bag at home and work just from a pocket sized PC. |
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