Mar 31
Reviews David
2mm, battery, bp-4l, charger, desktop, mains, micro, nokia, usb
Charge your spare Nokia Batteries
The benefit of having a phone with a user-replaceable battery, is that you can carry a spare when you’re going to be away from a charger. The downside, however, is that eventually the phone has to be plugged in twice as long to recharge the battery, and then the spare. This has been the case for me lately while using Nokia’s E55 and N97, both of which run on Nokia’s hero battery, the BP-4L.
Thanks to MobileFun.co.uk, I have a Nokia battery charger to review.
Continue reading …
Share this post 
Nov 2
Reviews David
accessories, bizz, bluetooth, bluetrek, card, charging, drive, flash, free, hands, handsfree, headset, mate, memory, micro, mobile, mobile mate, pairing, reader, sandisk, sd, sdhc, secure digital, usb, writer
We have a hardware review today. Mobilefun.co.uk have kindly sent me a Bluetooth headset to try out – the Bluetrek Bizz.
The BlueTrek Bizz Bluetooth Headset
Continue reading …
Share this post
Sep 9
Personal David
cd-rom, clonecd, DRM, micro, micro sd, miniaturisation, minimalism, mp3, piracy, rip, sdhc
I don’t tend to write too much about my actual life on this blog, although there’s a project I’m working on right now which has had a definite tech dimension.
My project is called Operation Clearance, it is me & my family clearing out our house of all our old unwanted possessions. My aspiration is to own as few items as is practical. I was partly inspired by the 100 item challenge, although I’m not holding myself to a firm number of items. Instead, I’m challenging myself to get all of my possessions into a single Ottoman (not including my clothes, but I’ve already given them an equivalent treatment). If you think I sound crazy, then think about the last time you moved house, now compare that memory to how it’ll be for me when I move, which I am planning to do in the near future. You see, not so crazy now, eh?!
What was the tech aspect of this? I discovered while excavating some of my cupboards a stack of CD-ROMs, mostly games, with a few applications. So here I had a stack of discs I’m unlikely to use, potentially taking up valuable space in my Ottoman, that wasn’t good. So did I simply throw them away, or did I keep them? Y‘know, just in case. Well “just in case” is the enemy of any clear out, so my answer was to cheat!
Squeezing all these discs into Micro SD makes me happy.
I decided I would take an ISO image of all the discs and save them to a Micro SDHC card, then throw the discs away! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is possible to create a file, based on any physical drive, which is an exact bit for bit copy. Your computer can then “mount” the file as if it were that same real physical drive. Given that you can currently get Micro SDHC cards with capacities of up to 16GB, you can fit an awful lot of CD images on them. Best of all, the physical size of a Micro SD card compared to even one CD is practically non-existent!
If at this point you’re wanting to ask me why didn’t I try trading in or selling these games, then let me answer you in advance – Firstly, I couldn’t sell them as I’d already dumped the boxes for them last year. Secondly, since I was keeping “back up” copies for myself, I thought it would be of questionable legitimacy to sell them when I still had copies for myself.
The only gotcha with this idea was that all of my games had copy protection, which prevented me using the universal ISO format. Fortunately, help was at had in the form of Slysoft’s CloneCD. They generously offer a twenty one day trial, and I only needed one day to image my discs. So I confess, I didn’t buy it. Although in the future, if I want to re-burn these images (which are proprietary to Slysoft applications 
), I promise you Slysoft, I will buy a lifetime licence!
At this point in the story, I really must launch into a rant. To image these discs, I really shouldn’t have needed to use a specialist application, but I did because of DRM. My story is yet another text book example of how DRM makes life harder for legitimate uses of media, while the real illegitimate copies are being freely traded across the internet. So, thank you very much to all computer game companies, your copy protection measures hampered my legitimate project, while not preventing the “piracy” you impotently sought to defeat.
Deep breath, relax …
Now, if you want to try clearing your shelves, then I really recommend you do as I have. Further to this, many years ago, I MP3 ripped all of my music CD’s, so I’ve been able to throw away those CD’s too. Anything to reduce the number of individual items clogging up your shelves and cupboards. George Carlin wisely said that a house is just a place for our stuff, and every now and then we have to get a bigger house just to fit in even more stuff. So join me in getting rid of all your physical media. In the age of terrabyte hard drives, physical media should be dead if we all had any common sense.
Share this post
Dec 17
Reviews David
16gb, class 2, micro, mobilefun, sandisk, sdhc
On Monday I posted reviewed my 8GB Micro SDHC card, back when I wrote that review, the 8GB cards were more economical than the 16GB cards. However, prices have come down. Once again, I went shopping with Mobile Fun.
I had two reasons for wanting a 16GB card for my phone. Firstly, I could hold my entire music collection and increase available space for video podcast storage. Secondly, it would free up my 8GB card for a secret project I’m working on (which, if I get working, I shall report on here!).
When I looked up the 16GB card on Mobile Fun the picture showed the card with a Class 4 marking, while my 8GB is a Class 6. “A shame” I thought, but I’d take the speed hit for the increased storage. However, I was dismayed when the 16GB card arrived, the actual card I received had a Class 2 marking on it. I wasn’t sure whether to complain or live with it. First things first, I had to test it.
If you recall from my 8GB review, that despite being a Class 6 card, it ran at an impressive 15 MB/s. So on the same basis, I was maybe hoping for 4 to 6 MB/s out of this Class 2 card. However, my socks were forthrightly blown off. This Sandisk Class 2 Micro SDHC card ran at a gobsmacking (it’s UK slang) 12 MB/s; faster than I even expected a Class 4 to run at. Safe to say I’m a happy boy!
If you would like to see in-depth benchmarks for this model of card, then see http://mobilitysite.com/2009/07/review-sandisk-16gb-microsdhc-card/
Share this post
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google
Flickr
YouTube
WishList
RSS
