Life2go.net Get a life ...to go.

Sonera, the largest telecom operator in Finland, published prices for the upcoming iPhone 3G yesterday (27.6.2008). Unfortunately, they have left out the unlimited data option available with other phones so people are going to end up paying 1,49 € per exceeding MB - that is about 4 € per minute or 251 € per hour at 3G speed.

Nokia today said it would become the sole owner of Symbian, buying out Ericsson, Siemens, Samsung and Panasonic. In reality, Symbian has been very Nokia centric for quite some time already so this move is not surprising.

More surprising is Nokia's intention to make Symbian open source trough the Symbian Foundation. This is clearly a pre-emptive attack on Google's Android project, the open source Linux based operating system for cell phones that will be put to use in the first cell phones later this year.

An important question needs to be answered: is Nokia successful because of Symbian or despite of Symbian?

Symbian has been around since 1998 and is based on Psion's EPOC that was made for PDA's in the late 1980s when processing power and memory were much more limited than today. Much has been done to modernize Symbian but a common complain from software developers is still that Symbian tries to be resource friendly and "light" by putting a lot of burden on the software developer. In contrast, more modern competitors such as Android seem to be much simpler to use for developers and simply designed for the kind of mobile devices we have today. Apple has also created a lot of interest in their iPhone trough a very impressive looking and easy to use software development kit (SDK). Developers are claiming they can make mobile software in weeks for the iPhone that used to take months for other mobile operating systems, ie Symbian.

It is indeed a sorry sight, all those road warriors sitting on the floor in convention centers and at airports in order to be close to one of the few electrical outlets that can be found in such places.

Now The New York Times reports that La Guardia airport in New York has installed "power poles", simply a pole with a number of electrical outlets.

It is a great move by the airport but it is sad that being able to find electrical outlets makes front page news.

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).

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.