dumell's blog

My Nokia E90 cell phone works well in almost any corner of the world, including here in the US. Still, I can not allow it to connect to the network because as soon as I do, the GPRS data connection icon pops up. I don't know which application causes the connection to be made, it might be several, but with data transfer prices ridiculously high while using a foreign network, there is no way I can keep the phone connected and allow the phone to transfer data at will.

Some applications have options like "warn before connecting while roaming" but obviously not all. Nor would it make any sense to choose "always ask before connecting" for all applications since I want them to connect automatically when needed - as long as I am in Finland where I have a fixed monthly price for unlimited data transfers.

Nokia needs to add an option where users can temporarily choose to not allow any application to connect to the network without explicit approval - while on trips abroad for example.

My transition to the Mac side is now complete.

I have been living with almost daily blue screens in Windows Vista Ultimate for a year now and nothing helps. I have hanged in there, thinking that things will improve once service pack 1 arrives. Today SP1 finally came and I immediately installed it. Once installed, Windows told me I needed to active Windows. Again? Well, ok.

But when I tried, it told me the key was already in use. Well of course it is already in use, I used it to activate the product a year ago when I bought it. So now it is offering me to either call the infamous automated Microsoft phone system and explain myself by pressing buttons on my cell phone or TO BUY A NEW LICENCE!

Ok, I give up on Vista. I have had it.

I am all for saving the whales and hugging penguins, especially if it gives me an excuse to buy more LED stuff. This apartment is only a few months old but the construction company chose to put three MR16 halogen spotlights in the bathroom, that is 3 x 35W for a total of 105W to light up a tiny room. What where they thinking? Halogen spotlights are a bit '80ish anyway.

In other rooms I can just screw in a low power fluorescent lamp as a replacement for an incandescent light bulb and feel good about my self and my progressive approach to energy consumption. But with tiny MR16 spotlights, there are no fluorescent alternatives available that I know of. Google led me to led1.de that offered a few LED alternatives though and that is even better than fluorescent alternatives.

They had two "high power" alternatives when it came to MR16, high power in this case meaning 3W which is about as much as you can get out of a LED today. One alternative uses a Cree XR-E LED and the other a Seoul P4. I chose the P4 because it is brighter but unfortunately it also has a colder white (6500K) compared to the warmer white of the Cree (3200K).

I was concerned the LED light would be a lot less bright than the 35W halogen I wanted to replace and I was also concerned about the beam being to focused and only illuminating a small spot on the floor instead of illuminating the entire room. To test the suitability of the LED spotlight, I begun by ordering only one. It turned out to work quite well. The 3W LED lamp is noticeable less bright than the 35W halogen lamp, but one LED and two halogen lamps certainly lit up the room well enough. The beam spread was also narrower than with the halogen lamp but not as narrow as I had worried it would be. The odd looking reflector and a diffusing lens seem to work well.

In fact, it all worked so well I went ahead and changed a second one of the halogen spotlights for a LED lamp. Now, with two out of three lamps being 3W LED lamps, the overall brightness is noticeably lower and I don't think switching all three lamps to LEDs would work, but two out of three is not bad - I brought down the power consumption from 105W to 41W.

No more complaints about the lack of WiFi, not even in the train. JoikuSpot is a Symbian S60v3 software that turns your WiFi equipped telephone into a WiFi hot spot - offering internet access trough 3G/GPRS to any WiFi device nearby.
The www.joikuspot.com website does not inspire much confidence, looking a bit like a link farm or a site designed to gather e-mails for spam, but I guess it is a genuine company and the site just suffers from a unfortunate design. The software itself is good, it is extremely simple but does exactly what you expect. You start the software, choose how the phone should connect to the internet now you have an open WiFi hot spot that other devices such as the iPod Touch can use.

If you just need to connect your laptop the the net, it makes more sense to use Bluetooth to access your phone and use it as a 3G/GPRS modem since Bluetooth uses much less power while WiFi drains your batteries. But if you have a device without Bluetooth but with WiFi, then JoikuSpot is a great (read only) solution. Such devices include the Sony PSP, iPhone Touch and digital pocket cameras with WiFi or the Eye-Fi SD card. Of course, if these devices had Bluetooth to begin with, we wouldn't have this problem that JoikuSpot now tries to fix.

Unfortunately, Eye-Fi is one of the WiFi devices that doesn't seem to be working with JokuSpot, perhaps Eye-Fi is designed not to use Ad-hoc WiFi connections (as opposed to "infrastructure" connections offered by ordinary WiFi base stations). JoikuSpot would have been a great companion for the Eye-Fi - just start JokuSpot, place the phone in your belt and start snapping photos while you are on the move and photos will be published as you go. Sure, it will be a bit slow but that is better than no connectivity. Hopefully Eye-Fi and/or JoikuSpot will be able to overcome this problem and get this to work.

The year is 2008. The high-speed Pendolino train in packed with commuters using laptops and all kinds of net capable gadgets - and there is no WiFi to connect to.

This is getting silly. Finland takes great pride in being a forerunner in all things wireless and still the national carrier Finnair and the national railway company VR show no sign of offering WiFi or internet in any form what so ever to their customers.

They could. Other airlines do and trains could use the @450 network like some trams in Helsinki do.

I have got 11 devices connected to my home network - so says the statistics page in my dsl modem.

I was browsing trough the settings pages in my dsl modem and came across the dhcp list and there where 11 devices listed. This means 11 devices have, during the last week, been connected to my home network and requested IP numbers for themselves. They have been connected either to my home Ethernet network or my home WiFi network.

Eleven. That's surprisingly many. Do we even own that many Ethernet/WiFi capable devices?

It turns out we have even more but some have static IP's and don't show up in the dhcp list. In a two person household each has one of the following:

- Laptop (work issued but used at home)
- Desktop computer
- Cell phone with WiFi
- Digital camera with WiFi

That makes eight devices that frequently uses the home network, either wired or wireless.

Add to that a Mac Mini functioning as a media server in the living room, an Apple iPod Touch, a Sony PSP, a Nintendo Wii, a Sony PS2 with networking module and a Marusys Digital TV (DVB-C) set-top-box with Ethernet and you have 14 devices.

Then there is also the Windows home server running some 24/7 applications, the Buffalo terastation holding music, photos and videos and the Apple Airport Extreme WiFi base station/printer server and suddenly the list of devices connected to the DSL modem jumps to 17.

I, too, have finally embraced the iPod, the iPod touch to be more specific. There was nothing particularly wrong with my old iRiver but the Touch is so much more.

I installed the new Google Maps application (January 2008 update) and pressed the cross hair target icon - it zoomed right in to the part of Helsinki where I was. How did it do that? It has no GPS. I know it can scan for surrounding WiFi networks and make an informed guess about its location based on this information, but I thought the WiFi location data was only available for North America. I walked to one end of the apartment and pressed the cross hair icon again while holding the iPod up in front of the window. Sure enough, the map scrolled slightly and the street outside the window became centered in the map. I then walked to the other end of the apartment and repeated the process. Again the map scrolled and the street in front of this window became centered on the map. Impressive. I can not even get GPS to work this well in front of a window in this apartment. And it takes a few seconds to find the location, not a few minutes as with the GPS in my Nokia.

It turns out that Skyhook, the company providing the WiFi positioning data to Apple do have data from Finland although mainly from Helsinki: www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/coverage.php

Finally, after having played around with the iPod for an hour, I connected my earphones and tried listening to music. The iPod can do a lot more than play music but it certainly has not lost its edge when it comes to this essential feature.

Yahoo's own software for automatic geotagging and Flickr uploading - ZoneTag - now (almost) works on any Nokia Series 60 version 3 phone, such as my Nokia E90.
It installs, starts, runs in the background and collects a log with cell info and GPS data (it does work with the built in GPS in the E90). The only problem is that when I try to start the camera from within ZoneTag (Take Picture) I get an "Error with Initialize Camera!" error message. And if I try to use the built in camera directly, ZoneTag does not pop up to ask if I want to upload the photo.
I partial work around is to keep ZoneTag running all the time and continuously collect positioning information and then upload the log to the ZoneTag site and match it with the photos I have manually taken and uploaded to Flickr. ZoneTag looks for timestamps in the log that matches timestamps in photo headers. This is no ideal solution and it also means the photos don't get tagged themselves, they only get location data added as meta data in Flickr.
When I asked about this problem, ZoneTag support told me they are aware of the problem and an updated version of the software that works correctly should be available soon.

I just snapped this photo and e-mailed it to Flickr along with the text you are now reading straight from the phone. The GPS coordinates for the photo where included automatically and stored in the EXIF header of the image before it left the phone.

Has Nokia finally got this right, have they finally made two of their applications (camera and gps) talk to each other? Unfortunately no. The solution is an application from a third party: Locr (www.locr.com).

The Locr application has been around for Nokia phones for some time and if you have tried it previously, you have probably been disappointed. Besides using its own camera application that did not work correctly with newer Nokia models, their software only included the coordinates in your photo if you uploaded the photo to the Locr web site - not if you uploaded it to any other site such as Flickr or simply moved it to your own computer.

The new version of Locr simply runs in the background. When you snap a photo using Nokia's own built in camera application, Locr silently starts the GPS in your phone and automatically includes the GPS coordinates inside each image in the EXIF header - the normal, standard way of doing it. This way, the coordinates are safely stored with each image if you move the image to your computer and services such as Flickr can automatically make use of the coordinates and place the image on a map if you e-mail or upload a photo to their site.