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I often browse IT security forums to keep up-to-date with the latest hacks and methods of circumventing various locks and blocks on hardware. Even though I don’t have an Apple iPhone, when I heard about jailbreakme.com I decided to have a quick browse of their site to see if there was any mention of how they circumvented the Apple security.

I was out at the time, so used my 3G connection (on my N900) to visit the site – and was shocked to see that jailbreakme.com was blocked on my network connection. I wondered if the site was down – so when I got home I visited the site via wifi. It worked fine!

I’ve visited the site by various other network connections I have available to me – and it definitely seems like 3 UK are actively blocking just this URL – whilst all the others are fine… Shame on you 3! What are you going to block next – your competitors?

I’m lucky enough to have been an owner of a Nokia N900 for quite some time now, and my wife has just bought the HTC Desire – so I thought I would put this article together to give others a better idea of what the differences are between the devices. When I first received the N900 I didn’t really get my full usage out of it, however it has now become the centre of my mobile communications and I use it all day, every day.

I bought the N900 because I was interested in the increasing uptake of smartphones 2.0: smart phones have been around for a long time and I believe the new generation of phones are such a step up that they can’t even be put in the same category as old ‘smartphones’ like the Nokia N96 or E71.

The smartphone 2.0 marketplace

The thing that differentiates the smartphones of 2010 is the operating system – there is Android, Maemo/Meego and the iPhoneOS. I bought the N900 in the full presumption that Maego would be a better OS than Android/iPhone – and as far as I’m concerned it is… However that never stopped the general populace going for the others (remember Betamax/VHS!).

In my (humble) opinion, the reason why the N900/Maemo hasn’t taken off yet is that it is seen as a niche OS – in comparison to Android/iPhone there’s only one phone offering it – it’s quite big in comparison to other handsets and it’s more of a geeks dream rather than a cool phone to be seen with. Also there are only a handful of apps for Maemo and these are (sorry) still quite hacky compared to Android/iPhone apps. (Good for IT guys – bad for consumers)

What’s good about the HTC Desire?

The screen is great, the brightness and colours beat the N900 handsdown, this is presumably down to the AMOLED screen employed by the HTC Desire.

The menus are really nicely constructed, though the Sense UI widgets are more like ‘fill my whole screen’ than small building blocks, but you can easily switch back to the normal Android widgets which use much less screen space.

What’s bad about the HTC Desire?

It’s a linux OS, but not as we know it… based on my usage of the phone, it’s quite locked-down – I would expect to be able to drop into a terminal, but you’ve got to hack around on the device before you can do that. It’s pretty clear that they are try to keep you away from any internals.

The software keyboard is difficult to type on in comparison to other phones I’ve tried.. The keys seem a little narrow, and worse, my wife finds it difficult to type on because of her fingernails (no such problems with the N900!). I do have to reiterate what others have said which is that you should calibrate your touch typing as soon as you get your device because it works much better once you’ve done this.

Maybe it’s me, but I can’t get my head around leaving apps running on the HTC; Android doesn’t have a close button on apps – they sit around and the OS closes them when it decides they are no longer needed. However this clearly is going to use more battery life than necessary.

Again, maybe it’s me, but the N900 interface allows you to do everything via touch – you can browse the web etc without sliding out the keyboard. On the other hand, the HTC offers 4 buttons and an optical scroll button (or whatever they call it) – which is OK but it’s difficult to know when you should use the buttons rather than click the screen

Sometimes difficult to achieve simple tasks; on the N900 to set a ringtone you click Settings>Profiles>Ring tone and you can set an MP3 or whatever. On the HTC Desire, you can’t set an MP3…. Unless you go via the Music app and then click Menu and then choose to set it up. Again, it might be me, but some things seem far less intuitive than they should be on the HTC Desire.

What’s bad about both?

The battery life is shocking on these new phones, compared to phones of a few years ago. Both the N900 and HTC Desire will rarely last longer than a full days usage. The reason why is they are running 1Ghz+ processors with 500+ MB RAM. GPS, wifi and bluetooth all munch that battery life.

You can get extended life batteries like this video shows – but do people seriously expect me to make my pocket brick into a pocket slab? (nice fingernail decoration BTW – I doubt you’re a real N900 user!).

The phones are so expensive that you have to sign up for a long contract, typically 24 months in the UK.

The phones are nickable, so if some chav spots you with one – you might not have it for long!

I’ll post back about any other downsides of the HTC Desire I spot when I see them!

Just upgraded to Karmic Koala, and everything appeared to go fine.. But when I tried to run firefox – I got XML Parse error, browser.xul undefined entity.. Turns out it was getting confused with some xul from an old install of firefox-3.

Tried a reinstall of firefox-3.5.3 which did no good.

Anyways – the way to fix this particular problem is just to delete the .mozilla folder in your home directory. Obviously – you need to be careful with your bookmarks etc – but really you should be using a bookmark backup service like xmarks anyway!

Found this blog about Oracle JInitiator very useful when tracking down an IE8/Jinitiator problem! Thanks for the tip – no wonder it took so long to figure it out.

The basics are that Oracle no longer supports JInitiator v1.3… So users who are forced to upgrade to IE8 are having issues as it triggers the Data Execution Prevention security feature in IE8.

To fix this, simply download Sun Java JRE (link from Nitesh’s Blog) – install, then grab the jvm.dll file from C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_13\bin\client and copy it into C:\Program Files\Oracle\JInitiator 1.3.1.XX\bin\hotspot

XX being the minor version number of Jinitiator… I found .9, .17, .21 and .22, it depends on how old the app you are trying to access is! Some people have multiple installs of Jinitiator as they use different versions for different products.. In this case copy jvm.dll to all \bin\hotspot folders.

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a few weeks now, and I’ve got to say that Microsoft seem to have done a pretty good job with it… However one thing that has annoyed me is that my Safely Remove Hardware doesn’t seem to work correctly.

Anyway – I figured out a way to get it working today – so I thought I would post it here for others;

The problem: When I click Safely Remove Hardware – it doesn’t appear to do anything.

The solution: Close all windows, right click on the desktop and Choose New>Create Shortcut. A window will appear asking for a location – cut+paste the following into the box;

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Click Next, and then type a name, eg. “Remove Hardware”.

You will now have a blank button on your desktop that you can click to get the familiar XP/Vista style hardware-stop window back. Just use this ‘shortcut’ to remove the hardware correctly.

A few posts earlier on this blog – I was aching for an EEE with a 3G sim slot… It looked like they were going to add one – with the sim card solder-points on the new 901 model – but as far as I know – they haven’t got there yet.

But the good news is: PC World – AMAZINGLY – have managed to deliver the product that no-one else could… A mini notebook with a sim card slot!

.. with sim card slot!!!

Price is listed as £349.99 – specs are:

• Intel Atom N270 (Same as EEE 901 and MSI Wind/Advent 4211)
• 1GB RAM
• 160GB HD
• Windows XP 

I’ve been reading about Google Chrome for a while now — and have been patiently waiting for it’s release on the google site… Anyway – to all those waiting: It’s out now!!

I’m a web developer – and have to keep up with the latest developments. I’ve got to say – when I heard Google were going to release a new browser – I thought “Oh no – not another browser to test!”… But after reading about what they aim to do in their browser ‘comicbook’ – I have to say I was more than interested!

I’m not a big supporter of Google — they’ve pissed me off multiple times… One time they chucked me off adwords for no reason – and took all my £30 earnings.. I appealed – waited 2 weeks – but they said “Nope – we’ve decided you can’t have your account back”. Other things have happened – which I won’t bore you about.

But… The ideas behind Google Chrome are to force more competition in the browser-wars… IE and Firefox *do* seem very used to their position… IE8 is failing the acid-tests and neither firefox or IE seem to get much closer than 85% EVER!!

Anyway – I’ve been using Google Chrome for a couple of hours – and I’m more than impressed. It seems to perform really well… I’ve had one or two unexplained ‘pauses’ – but the default new tab page (AKA your fave sites) is a really good idea.

I’ve got to say the overall feeling is that Chrome is a bit faster – and considering this is a beta release it makes you wonder what can be done with a bit of tweaking!! The designs are very basic – but a nice looking interface will come with time – and obviously it’s been designed to be functional rather than pretty (a common coder occurence!).

The problem with firefox is that a lot of home users have never heard of Mozilla or Firefox and are (rightfully) dubious about installing new programs with weird names…. But “Google – The browser” might just be the killer product to replace IE!

I’ll report back on how my browsing goes on with this pretty cool new browser.

Update: Google Chrome is REALLY fast… Just what users will need with the overloaded multimedia-laden web of 2008! This is an amazing first release. Just not sure about the vista-ish buttons on the interface.

Just been reading that the Acer Aspire is being offered for a snip at £199 at pcworld. It comes with the Atom N270 processor, 0.5GB RAM and 80GB hard drive, comes installed with a Linux OS.

The offer can be found here – I’m presuming it won’t be on offer for long!!

I got back off holiday last Sunday, and had loads of things to sort out… Tanned and relaxed – I was ready for the week back at work with a million things needing to be fixed. Then I spotted an account of mine with £3000 missing – taken out over the last week.

It looks like one of my (windows) PCs has been hacked and used whilst I was away.

I’ve moved my various sites to new servers, and I’ve reported the details to the appropriate people etc.

… And now I’m spending the weekend mopping up the mess.

Just shows you can’t be too careful these days.

Edit: As I said above – I’ve moved my various websites to other servers, so there might be some slight issues with DNS updates etc. The DNS changes may take a while to propagate – but the sites should be back online fairly soon.

One of the reasons for purchasing my EEE PC was so that I could use it whilst out+about… I don’t really see the reason to torture myself with it’s small keyboard whilst at home – I have an all singing and all dancing for use at home.
I’ve been wanting this ability for years – I purchased an old Toshiba Portege years ago but ubiquitous web access was a no-no… When wifi became mainstream – I purchase a few 802.11b cards – but no one had AP’s yet!! As the years moved forward – the ability to have an internet connection wherever I happened to be came closer and closer.

The ultimate ‘net access whilst out+about’ is whilst in a foreign country…. The thought of using the internet in a far flung country has been on my mind for years. It’s been possible to use dial-up etc. and in later years even GPRS… But the cost has been enormous.

As soon as I saw the EEE PC – I knew I had to have one. It was perfect for travel-internet usage… A low-power, small and easily carryable laptop with USB and Linux for a cheap price… Almost cheap enough that if it gets damaged in transit it’s not too much of a loss.

I arranged to go on holiday to Italy and Sweden this year — and after a bit of searching realised that a 3G modem from the Three UK network — would be the ideal companion. The reason being — the same network has coverage in these countries too — so you can roam on these networks as if you were at home… Quite good when you have ‘mobile broadband’ of 1/3/5/7GB per month to use.

Question of tariff

There are various tariffs available – from PAYG to 7GB on a 12, 18 or 24 month contract.

Usually I’m contract all-the-way, however the PAYG has certain properties that make it much more desirable than the contract offerings… To put it basically – the PAYG allows you to buy a chunk of data and use it for the next 30 days… However if you’re a heavy user (like me) – once you’ve used the chunk you can buy the next chunk.

In comparison – the contract offerings are simply “You have 1GB to use over the next 30 days. After this there’s a fixed price per meg.”.

So — the key with the PAYG is you top-up with £10, buy 1GB of data (your account now sits at £0)… Once you’ve used your 1GB allowance – the net access suspends (because you have no credit left) and you have to top-up… This allows you to get out of the larger “£X for 1MB” charges. And then you can buy the next 1GB of usage.

The only problem – on PAYG you have to pay to buy a 3G modem.

As an existing customer of Three – I was able to get the best of both worlds: A free huawei E220 modem on an 18 month contract for £5/month – but I also had a spare PAYG sim so I could swap and change.

Anyway – to cut a long story short I’ve been using my EEEPC with my 3g broadband in Italy – and it works really well. I’ve been here a week – I’ve been browsing digg/slashdot/theregister/bbc/reading emails etc…. all my normal stuff and watching my dogs in the kennels on a webcam… and streaming ogg’s from home via winamp through XMMS and I’ve used just 400MB. It’s pretty amazing really.

As I said in my post earlier in my blog – this thing really does need an integrated Huawei  E220 – it deserves it!! But until then – I’ll stick with my 3G dongle – it’s worth it for the time being.