Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Nokia Smartphone Hacks

    O’Reilly are known for their technical books and they publish some of my favourite reference books: Flickr Hacks, Mac OS X – The Missing Manual and Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther.

    At first I was skeptical, a book about hacking Nokia phones, what’s the point they’re so transitory as devices? I go through a new phone every 12 months or so.

    Nokia has released a plethora of OS’s for their phones: Series 40, Series 60 (of which we now have the 3rd edition), Series 90: which is what powered the 9X00 series communicators.

    To be fair most of the focus is on Series 60, the book provides advice on what hack doesn’t work with older Series 60 phones and highlights model exceptions.

    Nokia Smartphone Hacks at first seemed similar to other O’Reilly technical books, but as I worked through it over the past eight weeks in between work and travel I started to realise that Nokia Smartphone Hacks was different.

    The style and content of Nokia Smartphone Hacks has lots of useful content for the non-technically orientated users, this realisation slowly morphed into a realisation that Nokia Smartphone Hacks was in fact the manual that Nokia should ship with all their phones. It has a raft of helpful tips and links to really useful applications; many of them freeware and tips on how to get your phone to work with your Windows/Mac OS X/Linux box (delete as appropriate).

    Now some of the downsides:

    • The performance of a phone relies on a symbiotic relationship with the carriers network services (like port access), most the data in book usually relates to US carriers like Cingular / AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile USA
    • Size- its quite a weighty read but the content is really good

    More wireless related posts here.

  • Yojimbo

    Yojimbo

    Yojimbo is a central repository for content making it ideal for projects. Some of my blog posts are written on the fly often in reaction to something that has happened or something that I had as an idea and didn’t have the time to develop it fully. A couple of cases in point, my blog post on things I learnt to make long-haul business travel more palatable was created over two weeks whilst I was on the road and when I got back. My post on Spokeo was started in December, and I added a few bits and pieces while I waited for material from Harrison that never came.

    Yojimbo is a kind of sketch pad for ideas and a scrap book where I can keep related links and images. There are other products out there like DEVONThink Professional, which is a great exceptionally thorough product in its design, performance and feature set: but too involved for what I needed.

    I like the intuitive nature of Yojimbo and its light agile nature:

    • Not being too feature-rich to make working with it hard, which also plays into the creation of a clean user experience as you can see from the screen grab.
    • Being a small application that runs fast, even when my thinking doesn’t

    Part of the approach that makes Yojimbo my killer app for blogging and organising thoughts is its heritage. Bare Bones Software have produced a number of lean applications that have been essential users for Mac uers over the past decade, in particular I can recommend downloading the free application TextWrangler which facilitates text manipulation without all the features that get in the way from even the simplest word-processors like TextEdit. I find it really handy for editing the HTML tags on my links of the day postings.

  • GSMvy

    I have a Nokia e61 smartphone, but the new e90 has filled me with GSMvy . I had the current e61 for the past six months on Orange and after some teething troubles with buggy firmware I grew to like it so much I knew that was what I was going to replace my Orange phone with when I moved to T-Mobile: another e61. And when I went to San Francisco I sourced a special Timbuk2 case for it.

    However, Nokia shook me from my satisfaction with the e61, by announcing the e90 at GSMA in Barcelona (hence GSMvy, GSMA and envy). A powerful handset with a full sized keyboard hidden beneath the exterior of a candy-bar phone.

    e90, I love you

    The e90 is a leap forward from the previous 9X00-series communicators as Nokia has standardised on Series 60 3rd edition as its OS of choice. In a relatively slim case the phone carries a decent-sized screen, keyboard and even a GPS unit so you can load mapping software directly on to the handset.

    The built-in camera on the phone on the phone means that its an ideal way to participate in Dan Catt’s geotagging work at Flickr and makes blogging on the move a much more attractive proposition.

    The most maddening thing is that I can’t get hold of one for at least another six months, sod the iPhone: I am quite happy with my separate iPod nano, the e90 is the converged device that I want this year. More Nokia related posts here.

  • jPod

    It was a pleasure to read jPod. I like the writing of Douglas Coupland, he’s like a lightning rod for the zeitgeist for the knowledge economy. I’ve grown up and moved through my career with his works as a kind of literary soundtrack playing in the background. His writing moves from the monotony and empty-sadness of generation x in the 1990s through to the surreal humour of the present day.

    jPod is an updated world-view that builds upon Microserfs and Generation X. It is has a certain amount of recursion to these works and Douglas Coupland also appears in the book as a character. This recursion and self-referencing is fun for loyal readers and mirrors modern culture with its hipsters wearing ironic trucker caps, drain pipe jeans and Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts and listening to bad mash-ups of 1980s music radio fodder.

    The non-linear, multi-voice, collective approach in writing mirrors modern environments were online predominates. The only downside to this was that I was quite happy to put the book down and not revisit for a fair while because there wasn’t the same sense of suspense or urgency. The book took me four weeks to read, not because it was hard or inaccessible and I did enjoy it – I guess this drifting along is an analogue to the life that Coupland is trying represent.

    The fantastic dark humour of jPod mirrors a society facing world-war three in the Middle East, global warming and the meltdown of the relationship between employer and employee where not even greed can be trusted anymore.

    Deep down there however is the essential truth about the Kafta-esque nature of working in a knowledge economy company, particularly software or web services. The politics aren’t right, but they’re close enough.

    Go out and get it here. The author’s online presence is here. More book reviews here.

  • Airplane reading

    During my recent travels I needed some airplane reading materials, but didn’t want to go down the mindless thriller route a la Grisham, Dan Brown or Tom Clancy.

    I took a few books with me, two of which I will cover off in this post. It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be by Paul Arden. The book distills the wisdom of a senior advertising man and provides inspiration that agency account leads can dip into to dig themselves out of the usual SNAFU account work or new business pitches that occcasionally come up.

    Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro provides guidance on getting past team issues. The cleverest part of the book is the personality test for your team at the beginning that helps you move through the problem. Like the Paul Arden book, Unstuck can be read from cover-to-cover the value is knowing that it is there to pull out of the drawer and use it as a prudent time to resolve team and project issues.

    Having them as airplane reading material gave me a good idea of what I could get out of them. Also they are small and slim, providing a lighter load for your carry-on luggage or slip into the main pocket of a fleece. More book reviews here.