The firmware was v1.0.5.9 with a version string of;

Software Version: Program–1.0.5.9 Bootloader–1.0.0.18 HTML–1.0.0.37 VOC–1.0.0.6

Unfortunately I tried a number of different auto-update servers over TFTP – but none worked correctly.. I was stumped!

I searched the web and found a really good site with an archive of the different versions of the firmware – the site is;

https://gratissip.dk/firmware/archive/BT100_HT286_HT486/

What I didn’t realise – and I sort of stumbled across this – is that these devices need to upgraded through the majority of the versions to work correctly; you can’t just jump from v1.0.5.9 to v1.0.7.19… The old firmware asks for the wrong filenames over HTTP etc.

Anyway – to cut a long story short – the way to fix it is to find out which firmware you have, grab a copy from the above website, shove it on a apache server and point the device to look at that server. You can then iterate up the device firmware versions until you get to the last one you want!

Hope that helps others with the same problem I had!

Postage can also be a major problem – not least that there isn’t a delivery service in Cayman; you have to go to the post office to pick your mail up and if it’s from overseas, you have to pay any applicable import duty.

My wife teaches Law, so she has to read and reference a lot of Law books and keep up to date with the latest cases etc – she also enjoys reading fiction… Unfortunately this means that she needs to buy quite a few books throughout the year. Buying books in Cayman isn’t difficult; but it tends to be fiction and mainstream stuff rather than the latest employment law ‘chart-topper’ (OK – I was kidding about chart-topping)…. And even if you do find the book you want, it’s generally very expensive.

So the other day she was moaning about the problem in that she needs books, but it’s very difficult to get them here, either by post or by buying locally, and I just so happened to mention about the kindle and/or ipad. She looked at it – and realised what it did and decided to take the plunge – we bought a Amazon Kindle!! The price is now fairly reasonable, rather than absolutely stupid (£100 instead of $450+), and there is quite a lot of sources for mobipocket documentsif you’re able to convert them yourself. I’m pretty glad of my/our purchase – and we’re just waiting for it to arrive!

Anyone got any tips for using these things – getting books from cheaper places or converting from other formats? Just leave a comment below!!

I’ve had this problem numerous times before, as you do when you mess around with datasets from numerous sources… The quality differs and data formats can cause headaches.

Anyway – I was trying to import data from Amazon into perl, and this had worked fine before, but a particular product description didn’t want to import – instead coming up with the errors;

Wide character in print

Wide character in subroutine

All I want to do is get the text in unicode and convert it, preferably keeping as much ‘quality’ as possible, but ultimately the data should be in 7-bit ASCII.

I searched the web for a quick-and-dirty answer, but to no avail; countless people are out there telling you that it’s unicode and blah blah – there was one useful guy out there suggesting to use the binmode operator; but the downside is that I wasn’t actually writing the data to a file; I was repackaging it as XML data; binmode will only set the file writing mode.

Anyway – to cut a long story short – the best way around this – ie. to process unicode into being ‘just ASCII’ is to use the Text::Unidecode module and then use unidecode on any problem variables that are unicode.

Hope that helps someone and saves a bit of time!

Anyway – I’ve recently noticed a weird phenomena, which is basically that I’m sat at my PC doing my work and suddenly an IM will pop up on the screen – but it will be part of a conversation I had a week ago. At first I replied to the message thinking the message had just come through but then I realised that if I get a random message I can check it out by scrolling through my chat history and checking if anything has come in for the last 5 minutes or whatever.

However! These random messages can be really annoying and a bit odd!!

To fix the problem – I’ve been trying to figure out whether I can purge previous skype IM conversations – but you don’t seem to be able to do that, you can ‘hide’ conversations but you don’t seem to actually be able to delete them completely.

Anyone have the same problem and/or advice for how they fixed it?! It’s driving me nuts!

http://www.biglist.eu
http://www.betterdirectory.co.uk

Tracking the error back revealed that it was Net::SSLeay that was at fault – I tried to install it numerous times, but it kept coming up with an error;
Running install for module 'Net::SSLeay'
Running make for F/FL/FLORA/Net-SSLeay-1.36.tar.gz
Has already been unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/Net-SSLeay-1.36-xtsjC4
Could not make: Unknown error
Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
Make had returned bad status, install seems impossible


Anyway – after a lot of digging – it turns out that SSLeay has OS dependancies – these are;

libnet-ssleay-perl
libnet-https-any-perl
libssl-dev

Once these are install – you can go back to perl cpan and the modules installs like normal.. Phew!

Anyway – it’s available at RainWaterTanks.org.uk.

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 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!

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!