Category Archives: Technology

Really everything related to technology

Technology

Better Photos From An Angle!

Stockholm from above at a 45 degrees angleWe’ve been spoiled by nice photos from above from services like Google Maps, but here in Sweden that service never really even got close to match what Hitta.se and Eniro have offered. Google’s service is and always have been too US-centric for us Swedes.

I’ve considered Hitta to be the Swedish leader in this race, with their street level photos of buildings for addresses you search for etc, but now it seems Eniro has taken this one step further up the ladder as now they no longer only provide very detailed photos taken from above, they now also offer very cool photos taken from a 45 degrees angle!

Also, it seems the new “utsikt” photos (which translates to “view” in English) are taken closer to the ground as I can view my own house and neighborhood even closer using this service. The only downside with this service is that it is painfully slow. I can see that I get very slow transfers and my computer is idling so it can’t be much else than underpowered servers in their end!

Electronics

MapShare part II – not the last episode

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Tomtom ONEContinued from Tomtom MapShare.

I bought a new shiny 2GB SD card (which btw made me realize how dirt cheap these things are nowadays) and inserted it into my Tomtom ONE only to find out that backups done with the previous version of “Tomtom HOME” (their windows-only PC-based management tool) weren’t recognized, so I had to put back the old SD card again, make a backup, swap back to the new card and restore the backup.

Then I could buy a version 7 Scandinavian map from Tomtom (4o Euros) and yes, the MapShare options are now available and I also enabled the “correction” button for the main screen to allow me to tap it to make corrections as I go. Now I’ll just need to find places to go to where corrections are needed. A bit dissapointing fact is that I’ve selected options to get other people’s corrections even those that aren’t Tomtom-verified (as long as “multiple persons” did the correction), but the tool just says there are no corrections available for me!

Are there really no corrections done? I find that hard to believe, but I’ll give this the benefit of a doubt for a while. Anyone reading this who made a correction on the Tomtom-provided Scandinavian v7 map? I’m curious if the corrections are based on maps or just on positions, since I would guess that their “Western Europe” map will have the same flaws and mistakes as the “Scandinavia” map does…

Open Source, Technology

Data Sheet Leakage

Irony is part of life.

Data Sheet for a technical thingOne of the “secret” kind of manufacturers out there which refuses to provide docs to their chips unless you sign an NDA and God-knows-what, requires a user name and a password on their web site before they hand out docs. It turned out they only protect themselves using javascript so you can just read the HTML pages and the embedded javascript in them to figure out the exact URLs to use and wham, the data sheets are downloadable…

No, I won’t tell you the exact company nor site (or even exactly when this was discovered or tested) since then they might discover this and fix. I’ve tried this myself and it works fine, but I was not the one who figured it out.

Yeah, this is a moral dilemma: should we tell the manufacturer about their problem and thus close the doors for users to get this docs? Or would that risk backfiring on the guy(s) that tell them? What would you do?

Electronics, Linux

More Phone Hacking Fun

With Google’s just announced Open Handset Alliance, I figure the chances of getting a phone that’s possible to hack and improve just suddenly increased a lot!Open Handset Alliance

Android is a project by the alliance, claimed to be an open source, Linux-based, platform for core and applications for mobile phones – “a complete mobile phone software stack”. They promise an “early look” of the SDK on November 12, so I figure that can be interesting. The SDK is supposed to be a free download and will contain all the docs. It could potentially mean some fun coming up soon!

It is cool to see both Samsung and Motorola from the handset world joining the band wagon, and also interesting and not the least surprising to see that Sony Ericsson and Nokia aren’t there…

Electronics

WQUXGA really

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LCD monitorI know this is a dear subject for many people but I feel I just have to spell it out after having read this engadget notice about Toshiba’s new 3840 x 2400 22″ LCD screen. They call this a WQUSGA resolution!

Man, can they please stop the silly WQZUXZQGA names for the screen resolutions? I’m a hardcore tech geek myself but I lost track of those weird resolution names a long time ago and I want pure resolution numbers in good old width x height style!

My 1600 x 1200 20″ screen does seem a bit old fashioned in comparison! (and no, I don’t know the name of this resolution either!)

Mail

gmail hiccups

gmail is fancy and offers lots of space

gmail is often praised these days by people all over, and yeah it is a neat web app and the amount of disk space they offer for this free service is daunting!gmail logo

I do however have several arguments against using gmail that make me not using it myself for anything that is critical.

gmail blocks zip files

The main and major complaint can be phrased like this:

(reason: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment p9si2809195fkb)

That’s the exact message gmail includes in the reject mail when I try to mail my own account with a zip file attached. The zip file itself is perfectly harmless (and contains source code).

I actually get completely legitimate zip files from people every now and then, perhaps even once per week or so and having it reject these mails without even properly explaining why to the user is quite a show-stopper!

gmail spam filter is inferior

The other issue I have with gmail is its annoying spam filter. This too is often claimed to be one of the better things with gmail, and given that they have millions of users and can do pretty detailed statistics on received mails they do have the opportunity to make a decent filter.

But, given that the spam filter is one huge you-have-no-choice-but-our-way there’s no way for me to alter configs, tweak it for my specific spams or make it better deal with the false positives that it picks. And I’ve had it catch far more false positives than my regular spamassassin filter on my main mail account and then I get probably a thousand times more mail and spam on that account.

Electronics

My Next Digicam

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Sony DSC-W1 5MP Digital cameraMy trusty old Sony DSC-W1 is several years old by now and it does show when I compare my camera with those of my friends – and especially when I compare the resulting images. I’m pondering on getting a new one, but I’m struggling to find one that matches my criterias:

  1. (Ultra-) Compact. I want to be able to bring it with me easily, in a pocket or similar. Otherwise I end up not taking any photos at all… So it shouldn’t be any bigger than my existing really. I also enjoy and mostly do point-and-shoot style photographing.
  2. 3″ LCD. I got one of the first 2.5″ LCD cameras and I loved how the big screen makes photographing and viewing pics on it more fun. I’ve seen some cameras with >2.5″ screens and I think they look awesome.
  3. Image Stabilizer. Clearly (according to reviews) they can make a difference, especially with zoom or in low light conditions.
  4. Good low-light images (at least comparable to the excellent Fujifilm Finepix F31fd). It seems even the more recent Fujifilms has went downhill in that department, based on reviews I’ve read.
  5. I think I would prefer a camera that accepts SDHC cards so that I can go with 4GB or perhaps even 8GB at once, easily and cheaply.

And what contenders are there really? Lots of them, but I’ve found none that even reaches 4 out of 5 in this list! 🙁

Oh, and note that the number of pixels ain’t terribly important as long as they’re at 6+ something megapixels.

Suggestions anyone?

Electronics

Tomtom MapShare

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Tomtom ONEI have one of these lovely little Tomtom ONE GPSes, and the other day my brother notified me about their cool recent update to their firmware!

Now they feature map correction abilities, and apparently your map corrections and added details such as points of interests etc can be shared with your friends!

Very cool (sounding). This turned out to be a little easier said than done (as usual). First, I had to boot my computer into in Windows and run the “Tomtom HOME” software. It turned out to crash repeatedly after about 20-30 seconds of use, but after a lot of restarts it managed to upgrade both the GPS unit and get a fresh new “HOME” software version. With the new HOME software it stopped crashing and funnily enough the new version immediately downloaded yet another new HOME upgrade…

Anyway, now I have the latest firmware and I try out the menu option for map correction only to see… that it claims my maps are too old to use this feature! OK, I have the “Scandinavian” version and using the Tomtom HOME it says I already have the latest version… I assume this means that I should rather buy another map set or similar. It claiming I have the latest is suspicious anyway since I know my brother have newer maps. After some checking, I learned that he bought newer maps a while ago. Ok, time to get updated maps. In fact, they don’t even sell “Scandinavian” maps these days so I guess my map route was a dead end, now the closest thing is “Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland” which is almost twice as much data – and thus such an upgrade requires me to get a larger SD card first! 😉

I’ll get back when I’ve got a new card and a new map!

As many times before, one can’t but to wonder what my parents or similarly (not at all) tech-skilled persons would do if they would face this kind of challenge…

Linux, Technology

OpenMoko yes, Greenphone no

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Trolltech’s GreenphoneObviously Trolltech announced their killing of the Greenphone, a Linux and qtopia powered GSM phone. I was seriously trying to get one when they launched it, but during the time they had troubles providing me one I rethought my position about it and decided I didn’t really have time nor energy to work on it and thus I never ended up getting one…

Openmoko So for the eager hackers wanting an open phone to hack on, I guess the Openmoko Neo1973 is now the evident “winner” of this moment.