What technologies make mobile life easier?

The rush and movement of my holiday necessitated getting my communication optimised. I arrived in the UK and loaded a Vodafone pre-paid SIM bought on a previous trip. It did not work. Vodafone expires their pre-paid SIMs after 3 months of inactivity. So I made use of roaming on my South African Vodacom account for the first two days of my holiday in the UK. I stayed in a reasonable hotel in Bayswater with Wi-Fi and began my technology upgrade.

I downloaded Google Maps Mobile over the hotel Wi-Fi to my laptop and transferred it to my phone. What a brilliant application. It works off cell phone mast triangulation (accuracy varies depends on the masts in the area) or it can use your phone's GPS.



I have an HTC Touch Diamond which I bought some time back due to its full suite of technologies (wi-fi, GPS, FM radio, Bluetooth 2.0, 3.2 megapixel camera, HSDPA, 3G, EDGE, GPRS) and its size. It has an iPhone-like touch interface, but following the iPhone shortly after its launch, it had a fuller complement of technologies and was about half the size. It integrates well with email, supporting multiple IMAP and POP3 accounts. It's been a great phone with only one shortcoming - the feature set overwhelms its battery which often hardly lasts a day. The GPS has to be used in a car connected to power, or it drains the battery in about 20 minutes.



I also downloaded Skype for Mobile to make calls back to SA at a cheaper rate while away.



I thought I had the North American maps for Co-Pilot, my Navteq-based GPS software. When I reached the US, I found I did not. I paid for the US and South African maps and then assumed I had access. But I then discovered they needed to be downloaded. As an HTC user, the maps are difficult to get hold of as CoPilot is bundled with the phone. They must be purchased and you then have to email support to get the link to download. Other users purchase the Co-Pilot software and then use its desktop console to download the maps. The North American maps were 1GB. By the time I reached Los Vegas and was about to hire a car, I discovered I did not have the maps. In discovering this I used 12mb of data on roaming while sitting at the side of the road - this alone cost me R1400. I eventually made it to my destination in Los Angeles using Google Maps. This is really not ideal as you have to read off the screen - difficult while driving and navigating the myriad of freeways in LA. CoPilot GPS has voice prompting.



After making contact with Co-Pilot European support from my hotel, I downloaded 250Mb before I had to check out. I downloaded the remainder when I reached my cousins. I was now in position to use the GPS maps and verbal direction on my drive up the west coast.

I had forgotten my iPod in South Africa and bought the new Nano in New York to listen to Depeche Mode and U2 prior to their concerts. At $199 for the 16Gb Nano, it was an expensive mistake. Now I have two...



I went to the New York store RCS Experience to buy a long-life battery for my Lenovo T60 notebook. My previous battery had reached the end of its useful life, and I have always wanted something for long plane journey's etc. It was a crazily expensive purchase in South Africa, and slightly cheaper in New York ($166).



While there I found a point-and-shoot camera, to complement my Canon EOS D20. It is the truly amazing Canon Digital IXUS 960IS - it takes 12 Megapixel photos and shoots HD video. It was quite an expensive purchase (about $300) with another $65 for an 8Gb extreme speed SD card.



A productivity aid I've longed for is a bluetooth keyboard for my phone. I bought a Freedom universal fold-up keyboard. It is amazing. It provides an almost full size keyboard and with office mobile on my phone, this allows me to work comfortably in a coffee shop on my phone. That cost about $80 and was one of my best purchases.





The truly impulse purchase was a set of binoculars. I've never had a pair, and end up using the telephoto lens on my camera in the bush. I found a cheapish pair of Bushnell binocs with an SD slot that allows you to take a 3.2 Megapixel photo of whatever you're viewing through the lens. They cost $240 - a long way short of the $3000-odd dollar starting price for Leica and other pedigrees.



I put the camera to good use and took some nice pictures and videos at the Depeche Mode and U2 Concerts, and while playing golf. I don't really do typical tourist pictures - you can always download really good ones off the net. I resolved during this trip that that was a poor excuse. In future I will look to take a good photo and help preserve a memory.

I began this resolution in LA at Universal pictures - where I was dismayed my Canon EOS D20 stopped working. It gave a Compact Flash error, yet the CF disk worked on a flash reader. That was really irritating, especially after hauling the camera half way round the world. When I got back I reformatted the disk and it's now working again.

I attempted to get a US pre-paid contract while in the US to reduce my burgeoning cell phone bill. I found that the US pre-paid contracts have no data portion. How irritating. That cost me a lot of money as I continued to access Google maps, etc while roaming.

Once back in the UK, I switched to a new Vodafone pre-paid account. I had a nightmare setting the account up, which I will detail in a comprehensive bitch about Vodafone service in another post. But once on that I was able to sustain a week's comprehensive data access and calls for less than £15.

Is Microsoft trying to sabotage Linux?

My life has been a technology hell this past month and a bit. I appear to have become one of those people who causes technology to explode when I walk past.

First one of my server hard drives went. The RAID saved my butt and it was then a matter of ordering replacements from the States via eBay. They finally arrived, but to do the capacity expansion (I ordered bigger hard drives) I had to back up all the data, replace the drives and then retsore the data - not a trivial task for a few hundred Gigs of data. This was made more difficult because my DLT drive is still busted (it will cost thousands to fix). However, although time consuming, the drives are in. They are reconditioned drives and two failed on start up - which is where I got lucky because I ordered two extra.

The new laptop I bought to replace the stolen one arrived with Windows Vista for Business. I resized the partition to install a dual boot of Debian Linux, and disaster. Vista would no longer boot. So I've been working exclusively in Linux for the last month while I've tried to sort out the Vista problem. This has allowed me to develop an appreciation of key migration issues. The biggest? For me, tables in Powerpoint. Almost all my consulting documentation ends up in Powerpoint (roll on the consulting jokes). Tables are critical for formatting data on a slide. And Impress (the OpenOffice.org equivilent) doesn't do them. No. Kidding.

Solving the Vista problem has been a ball-ache of note. The recovery disk will not boot if you have resized the orginal install partitiion and IBM suggested I buy a copy of Vista - at a few thousand rand - to replace the OEM version on my machine. This after much efforty including a trip to the East Rand to the Laptop distribution and support warehouse.

I finally found documentation on the issue here after arriving at a similar conclusion.

The key is being able to run "chkdsk" on the affected Vista partition. You can either boot with a NTFS-capable start disk and run it from there, or you can run ntfsfix from Linux and then boot your Vista partition which will launch "chkdsk".

This a pretty huge issue - most Linux installations now make use of partition resizing in order to turn a Windows machine into a dual-booting machine. This issue results in a broken Windows installation. Sabotage?

As if the above pains were not enough, I dropped my cell phone into some water. With my old laptop stolen, I was contactless! I have a backup on my LDAP server, but with the transition to a new eGroupware this had also got broken. Yup, I certainly have become Karma's bitch (taking over from Devil).

Anyway, much more about all of the above incidents, workarounds and fixes on my technical blog.

After a week of drying out, I tried my phone yesterday - et voila! It works. Together with the Vista fix, the arrival of my new wireless router (after six months of fighting with Digital Planet) and my new UPS, does this mark a change in my techinical fortunes. Please God let it be so.

Thank goodness for technology?

On Friday night one of my server's hard drives went to hard drive heaven. This resulted in many pretty messages printed on the screen and many pretty words pouring out my mouth.

It reminded me how dependent on technology each of us is. That server has a ton of my life on it.

Not only that, but after my tape drive failed a year ago, my effort to procure a new drive from a bloke in Beijing through eBay were frustrated by the fact that he was a thief. $750 US down the drain. So my backups are way out of date.

Luckily, I invested in RAID. The miracle of technology means that I merely have to put in a new drive and it will be rebuilt. I don't even have to switch the machine off when replacing the drive.

So pray that my new eBay drive order goes according to plan. If another drive in the RAID fails during the interim, I'm toast.