Posted by Louise on May 1, 2010 in
Images,
Technical I’ve been playing around with Google Maps and Google Latitude today. Maps are of course the map, satellite imagery and notorious street view. Latitude is the GPS tracking facility. I’m now tracking Nick’s mobile phone so I’ll know where he is each day when he is on holiday. If he stays stationary in Bangkok for too long I’ll start to worry that the red shirts have him. Anyway, while reading around the Google Maps site I discovered the feature that enables you to create your own route map, so I did. The map below shows my walk from Ipswich Station to the university. The only problem is that the Google satellite must have passed before the uni was built so it looks like I work in a heap of rubble!
View My walk to work in a larger map
Click on the UCS icon to see what the building looks like now.
Tags: Images, work
Posted by Louise on Aug 31, 2009 in
Mobile technology,
Technical I’ve been investigating calendars for the last couple of weeks. No, not the paper kind that hang on the wall but the electronic kind in Outlook 2007. I love Outlook 2007. I love the way OneNote and Outlook talk to each other and pass on linked info. I love categories. I even love tasks (the function not the actual stuff I have to do. However, I have a very complex (you’d think) list of calendar desires:
- · I’d love my Outlook calendar to be the same on my main PC, my PDA, my work PC, my mobile and my eeePC
- · I also would like the facility to share busy/free information with selected people
- · I want to be able to edit, add and delete items on the main PC, eeePC, PDA and work PC
- · I want other people to be “read only”
- · I want everything to be synchronised automatically, or at least semi automatically. I don’t mind initiating synchronisation.
- · I want to be able to access my calendars either online or offline. I don’t want to be disconnected after an hour or so.
I’m not the only one out there with a list of wants a mile long. I found a bloke after my own heart and with slightly higher expectations. Brad doesn’t just want synchronisation, he wants intelligent binding, roaming, alerts and free form input!
Calendaring to my prerequisites has been no small challenge. I have investigated several options in the past couple of weeks. The main contenders were:
None of these have provided all the functionality I want but all provided me with something.
Google calendar
Probably the strongest contender out of all those I looked at. Via the new Google Calendar Sync addon/plugin I am able to upload my main Outlook calendar to my Google account space. I can set it to sync either one direction (PC to Google or Google to PC) or both ways. I can set the frequency of synchronisation down to 10 minutes. Via my Google account I can share the calendar either fully or free/busy. I can also set the working day time that is visible to my colleagues. The only way to add appointments myself is online. Others can suggest appointments and I have to accept or decline them. So far so good.
Unfortunately I do a lot of work on the train between Norwich and Ipswich and there is frequently no mobile phone signal so I am not able to connect to the internet to access the calendar. Gears does do some way to solving this problem. It allows me to view the calendar when there is no internet signal but I can’t view appointment details, add appointments or amend them. Not much good for a neo-nomad .
At my work (University Campus Suffolk) we have a freely accessible wireless connection in the new building but it seems to disconnect me after an hour or so. Google also logs me out after about the same length of time if I don’t do anything on the page.
In short, good for sharing my calendar but not good for me personally. All software is free which is great but details are held on Google’s servers. Google is in the business of making money and I am not sure I like my info being in their hands.
Windows Live via Outlook Connector
Another newish piece of software. I imported my calendar file into Windows Live and now changes can be synchronised with Outlook. Windows Live looks much prettier than Google Calendar and more closely resembles Outlook which I like. It is not available offline though and the biggest problem is that although it transfer data from the internet to Outlook this is one way only – no Outlook to Windows Live. Not much good to me.
MS Office Online Internet Calendars
I’ve used this a fair bit in the last 18 months. Again the synchronisation is only one way – Outlook to the internet. It is manages from within Outlook by just clicking “Publish my calendar”. A link can be sent to the people you want to share with and you can share full or free/busy info. I’ve got a VERT calendar showing when I am working for UCS and when I’m not. My UCS colleagues can click on the link (if they have bookmarked it) and see where I am likely to be. Neither they nor I can make amendments or additions to the calendar. The lack of an offline facility and two way synchronisation is again the only real problem.
On the plus side, if they are running Outlook 2007 like me the calendar can be added to their own Outlook so they can see at a glance, in glorious categorised Technicolor, but again no adding, deleting or editing of appointments.
Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightening
I thought these would be the answer to my problems. I used and quite liked Thunderbird when I was on holiday. It is not as pretty as Outlook but takes up a lot less space on the eeePC. Lightening is the integrated calendar package. Unfortunately I couldn’t import a iCal file. I did find a Google calendar plugin which downloads my Google calendar but it is online only. That is not going to be possible in the signal black spot between Diss and Stowemarket. Lightening can show 7 days or 5 days but unfortunately the 5 day view can include weekends, it isn’t a working week it shows. I’m used to the Outlook view I’m afraid.
Nokia PC Suite
Does exactly what it should without any trouble at all. It syncs both ways between my N95 and Outlook. It is calm, collected and you can see a log after the sync which I find reassuring. I like to see if I have made any monumental synchronisation disasters. Only slight irritation is that there is no option to turn off reminders and they seem to set the phone ringing at midnight! I have no idea if there is a setting in the phone to sort this. It is minor and not worth changing the software for. PC Suite also provided a simple and almost 100% reliable way to use my mobile as a modem. If only it would not insist on installing to the C:\ drive of the eeePC I would have it on that computer too. I just don’t have room on that drive.
ActiveSync/Windows Mobile Device Manager
AS was the bain of my life for so long. It has an overwhelming desire to rename my PDA and then cancel its partnerships. I struggled to find a solution for almost two years before I gave up. I have a work around though. Before synchronisation look at the device ID in Settings > System > About > Device ID. If it has changed itself to something with WM_….. at the start then change it back to what it should be (make sure the ID you give it has an underscore somewhere in it). Then reset the device. Go back to Device ID and check it hasn’t changed. With that page still open sync the device. This forces AS to keep the name and the partnership. Always go through the same process when changing the PC you are sync’ing to. No exceptions, just get in the habit of doing it. I haven’t had any partnership problems for ages now.
Anyway, these two pieces of software keep my PDA in sync. The PDA keeps the work PC and the home PC calendars the same too. Shame work uses Outlook 2003 so my nicely coloured catagories don’t show at work unless I add labels. There are a limited number of labels you can add so this is not ideal. It is certainly the easiest and most effective way of keeping a sync’d calendar on two PCs. However, I have 3 PCs now. I am using the eeePC much, much more. Windows Mobile PDAs can’t sync with more than two PCs. There is software you can get to try to circumvent this problems but I’m in PDA synchronisation nirvana and am not going to risk mucking it all up.
ShareCalendar (formerly Calendar4Outlook) by 4Team Corporation
Lastly the piece of software I found today. ShareCalendar. It claims to be able to keep shared calendars sync’d on two or more PCs. Once installed on both PCs and shared from one, changes are sent via email to the other whenever Outlook sends and receives.
I downloaded and installed the free 14 day trial yesterday. After mucking up the first share because I didn’t read the directions I seem to be almost there. I have the same calendar on both the main PC and the eeePC now and any changes I make on the main one are sent to the eeePC. However I seem to have a problem with the reverse direction. I can make changes but they don’t seem to go anywhere. I’ve had a couple of error messages too. After reading the help files (which are really quite good) I’ve decided to install any Outlook updates. The 4Team Corporation suggest doing this if there are any problems.
The only issue I’m having now is that I don’t have enough room on my eeePC C:\ drive to install the blasted updates. I did have about 600 MB free before I started now I’ve had 3 the lack of disk space warning message and the main updates haven’t installed. Not sure I’ll ever get them done on this netbook. I’m certainly not going to get my calendar sync’d tonight.
Update 15th September 2009 I did a fresh install on the new Acer (see above) and have had no problems what so ever. 4Team gave me a 10% discount and were really, really helpful, even when I think it was my fault for mucking up the installation. I have purchased two licences and so far no problems. Having to purchase a licence for each computer is the downside but I think it is worth the expense. In the end I paid £27.65 ($44.91).
Tags: calendars, software
Now I’ve actually uploaded the wp-mail.php file this should post at exactly midnight. Another funny thing was that the server time was out. Not by an hour due to BST/GMT/CET but by about 8 minutes. You know I thought it was strange that it was possible to reply to an email before it had actually arrived. Sorted that too. You’d think that it was the easiest thing in the world to keep a computer at the correct time, but it isn’t.
Tags: Technical, Wordpress
Posted by Louise on Jun 19, 2009 in
Technical I think the n86 may be the way to go. It has a good 8 mega pixel camera and everything that the n95 has, that I use. I don’t care about music.
Tags: mobile phone
Posted by Louise on Jun 19, 2009 in
Technical Just been surfing the Nokia site for the new n97. Not the spectacular phone I hoped for so I might wait till the n98 comes out, if there is such a thing (most seem to have Russian characters so I am thining not). Anyway, the Nokia site was sooooo sloooooow that I did a speed test. Must be the Nokia site because speed test is pretty good :-)
Tags: mobile phone, Technical
Posted by Louise on May 6, 2009 in
Technical Just as I thought I had almost a gig free, down comes XP SP3 to the EeePC! Another round of uninstalling tomorrow.
Tags: EeePC
Posted by Louise on May 6, 2009 in
Technical No, not that kind of toy, the electronic kind…, no the small, compact, handbag sized toy… That’s not sounding any better is it. Ok, what I’ve got is an Asus EeePC 701. It is actually Nick’s one but he has given up using it since I networked the house and the Sony laptop connects easily via wifi. I really wanted a Toshiba Portege but the EeePC was about £1500+ cheaper. I am quite enjoying using it. It is a challenge. It has a tiny SSD (that’s solid state drive) of 4 GB (compressed) and 2 GB of ram. Nick upgraded it when he had it. It runs Windows XP Home SP2. Nick installed previously.
My challenge has been to get rid of most of the crap that comes with XP and get it running well. I’ve done all sorts of stuff that I’ve found out about on the Net. I’ve been into swap files and page files (are these the same?). I’ve deep 6′d the graphics (no idea what this means but it sounds cool) to the bare minimum. I’ve uninstalled WMP - Windows Media Player 11 (I never did get the hang of it). If I could uninstall Internet Explorer 6 I’d be a happy bunny… but I can’t figure out how to!
Currently I have 846 MB of free disk space on the main SSD. I’ve got a 16 GB SD card in the appropriate place so programs and files will get saved there instead of the main SSD. Currently I am in the process of getting rid of all the WMP but don’t think I can because all the updates are also linked to XP. Getting rid of WMP 11 rolls everything back to WMP 9 which I don’t see how to uninstall. This must be the reason the European Union fined Microsoft so much.
One way I could have got rid of the bloat in XP would have to been to install a light version of it using something like nLite which I am reliably informed creates a Window installation with only the stuff you want and need. If I ever have to format then I’ll do this.
One of my last challenges is to get rid of Real Arcade’s Casino Island To Go. This is some daft gambling game that Nick installed. It doesn’t show up in Add/Remove software, nor does it have an uninstaller. It is taking up a precious 14.6 MB!
Thanks to a couple of websites that have helped me to tweak the EeePC.
APC
OMG! UBUNTU!
Tags: EeePC, Technical
Posted by Louise on Jan 23, 2009 in
Technical Finally this afternoon all my email addresses were working. Who needs a managed server? Actually I take that back. There is no way I could ever learn enough to manage a server to make money. I can set up email addresses now and Wordpress blogs but that is definitely it, and I am still on the lookout for anyone who really knows what they are doing with servers, just in case ours ever gets a problem. The last thing I had to set up/amend/correct/modify was the MX record. The reason I was getting a “relay access denied” error in the bounced email was because there were several very strange MX records. Turns out that I couldn’t amend these in Plesk but had to do this in the SSC. Part of the problem was that I didn’t know what the LeaseWeb SSC was - Self Service Center - duh. Thankfully I figured it out before I had to send a very embarrassing email to the support guys.
I spent most of yesterday faffing about with themes and plugins for this blog and uselesscupid.com. I’ve installed some stonking ones on UselessCupid. It now has a UK weather plugin courtesy of Clive. The feed comes direct from the BBC RSS weather feed for Norwich. The only thing that is missing is little weather icons to go with the forecast. Unfortunately the BBC don’t publish the icons in the RSS feed. One day I might find out how to add them. I know it is possible because other weather plugins have them.
I also installed an embedded media player (Embedded Video) into UselessCupid. I’m not 100% convinced it is the best one but it seems to be doing the job. On this site I use CoolPlayer. I didn’t think it was working with WP 2.7 but now I know to look for it under WP settings it might just work. More testing needed.
The final plugin I went for is Contact Form 7. This sets up a really simple form on your WP blog. I don’t like having mailto tags on my websites because of the spam they generate and Contact Form 7 solves that problem because of course my email address is server side not client side (do I sound as though I know what I am talking about?).
Plugins area great but they do take a long time to research, at least they take me a long time because I have to make sure I get just the right one first time. The plugin directory on the Wordpress site is great but there are so many there. The next one ito research is a gallery one. I’ll let you know when I find the perfect one.
Tags: server, Technical, Wordpress
I’ve been looking for cool plugins for Wordpress for a few days now. I have of course updated and uploaded Mobile WP by Alex King. This plugin is great for mobile users (phone, PDA and that thing by Apple). This plugin is so great I actually PayPal’d a donation to Alex when I first found it. What it does is that when someone vistits your WP blog on their mobile device it automatically shows a text only version. Great if you are in a non-3G area. I think you can post with it too. I haven’t used it for that because when I am away from my wired (as opposed to bluetooth) keyboard I blog by email. Just for the record, Mobile WP does work with Wordpress 2.3.
My next plugin to try is Cool Player. This plugin embeds video into your blog. I couldn’t find any updates for it though…
Tags: mobile tech, plugins, Wordpress
Posted by Louise on Jan 17, 2009 in
Technical Finally something works! I think I mentioned before that we were getting a new server. Well we got it and it is unmanaged. How hard can it be we thought? The answer to that is that server admin people probably don’t get paid enough. It took me ages to figure out how to log into the root and change some config file so it would see the domains… Turns out I was using the wrong username (don’t laugh). Next I discovered that the server company have to do something their end to enable the sites to be seen (why didn’t they tell me?). Once that was done I couldn’t ftp to anything but the server root. Again the server company did something - changed my hostname (why didn’t they tell me what it was in the first place?). Then the emial server wouldn’t start - support had to upgrade it (why didn’t I have the latest version in the first place?). Now the only problem is that I can’t receive email to any of the email addresses I’ve set up unless they come from a domain on the server. Yes, I have ticked “requires authentication” in the Outlook settings. Just waiting on support to sort that one now. What have or haven’t I done this time?
The first easy thing I’ve done was set up the Wordpress database. That is always a doddle. I went to import my back up from the old server only to discover the file size was 0.0 kB. Thankfully we still have the old server and I was able to redo the backup. Turns out I did the back up when I was logged into C-panel via the root password and not my own password so the backup I origionally did didn’t actually back up. I got an error message when I did it this time.
After I finally got everything restored I went to the site and was faced with a blank page. I could have cried. I didn’t though, I went to the Wordpress help forums and found someone with exactly the same problem… turns out I hadn’t uploaded the theme and the database was of course looking for it! The whole restore mucked up my password so that the database didn’t recognise my old one or my new one. Thankfully some magic bit in Wordpress was able to send me a new one - as the email came from the server I could receive it 
All in all this has been an incredably stressfull experience and I am just glad some little bit works. I have no idea what will happen if the server goes down or we need to do something complicated. Pay for a little man in India to fix it probably, or find a friendly person who understands all this Appache stuff… I mean Apache stuff. I can’t even spell it!
Tags: server
