Updating Tom Tom (and Visit to Gent)

If it ain’t broke … That’s why I have not updated my sat nav in the first year, but last week I was booking a hotel in Gent, Belgium (more about that visit later), and before clicking away the last window it asked if I wanted to transfer the address to my Tom Tom. Sounded good, I thought, so I clicked on the button with the familiar icon. But before anything was activated my Tom Tom suggested I update the software. I don’t know why I hit the Yes button, but I did. Then I clicked on a few options that looked useful. Disaster!

When I tried to switch on the trusted guide gadget, it froze. It dawned on me that this was exactly what I had read a lot about on the net. I tried everything, like unplugging and then re-plugging, rebooting … Nothing worked. My next step was to google the issue, which led to many different, possible solutions, all involving complicated instructions about finding obscure files on my PC and to copy lots of stuff back and forth.

Then I remembered that my Windows software had popped up a window saying there was something not quite right with the drive which was the Tom Tom. But I had to close the Tom Tom first, and then the window disappeared, so I had to go to Control Panel and find the Check Disk function, and then activate it to correct what was wrong.

While this was in progress I realised what I had done initially. I had greedily chosen to update parts of the software which I had not paid for when I bought it. So I guessed that must have been what caused the freezing. Once the Tom Tom had been tidied up, I updated only the basic default option, and hey presto, it was again in working order!

I was happy as a child, picked up the Tom Tom, went outside to get a signal, walked up and down the street waving it in the air. I felt a bit silly, especially when the security patrol (I live on a military base!) came past in their pick-up truck. I was so embarrassed that I felt compelled to wave to them with a stupid smile on my face.

Like I mentioned earlier, we went to Gent, and I could certainly have done with the help of my Tom Tom to find the hotel in the old town centre with narrow one-way streets and pedestrianised areas. It was like in the old days, and in the end I had to stop and ask for directions.

The medieval town centre itself was unbelievably picturesque. We had a terrific two-night stay and had excellent food, beer and wine. The place was rather pricey, but not enough to deter us from returning. We actually bought a hotel voucher to get a cheaper stay next time with this particular chain.

 

Spag Ball

One day when I had formatted the camera memory card to make space for new images, I took a photograph just to check that all was OK. Normally I just hold the camera in front of me, which means I get a picture of my desk with the PC screen on it.

This time however I aimed at the floor next to me by the wall, and this is what it looked like.

And I thought, what a mess! How the heck do I know which is which, where do they go and where do they come from? Do I need them all?

Somehow I know them all, even without having labelled them, and should I forget, I just follow them with my fingers. They are all needed for the PC, phone, PDA, iPod, cameras, headphones etc. Is there a better way? Is it possible to organise this ball of spaghetti differently? What does yours look like?

Hopefully one day we won't be needing a physical conductor of signals and electricity at all; everything will be done by Bluetooth, infrared or something even more sophisticated and advanced. I can't wait!

Then I thought, life is a bit like this too, isn't it? But that's another issue all together. Have a wonderful weekend!

 

Building a Photo Web Site

I have been a very absent blogger of late. Sorry about that. The reason for this is that I am building a web site, and I am currently organising and processing lots of photos. The main structure is more or less in place, but the many photo galleries are hard work.

Why do I do this? Well, I just did not know what to do with all my pictures. I post some of them here and some on my photo blog, Camera Digitalis, so I thought I would display them in a much more organised way. I am building a straight-forward, no-frills, no bells-and-whistles site, although I use flash galleries to make it a little lively at least. Everything is done from scratch, no templates, because the only suitable photo site template that came with the software, was inadequate in my opinion.

The great difficulty is of course which photos to choose, how to categorise them and then to create the appropriate folders. After that comes the watermarking, since I want to protect my copyright. I am not so foolish as to think that all of my images are so attractive that people would want to copy them (steal them) all, but out of principle and for practical purposes I watermark every single one.

My particular interest in photography took off when I bought my digital SLR in the spring this year. Together with my previous compact camera photos, I have now many thousand images, although I have learned to be self-critical and I delete loads of them after transferring them to my PC for close inspection.

In the last couple of weeks I have trawled through gigabyte after gigabyte to find photos that I believe would be suitable. I am sure I will have second thoughts about many of them and take them off, and also replace some as I add new pictures.

One big issue is that I am not quite certain how much space they will use up of my total allowance, and also how long they will take to upload, so maybe I should launch the site well before I have completed all my planned galleries. Maybe I have to buy more space, we will see.

I am not far off now, perhaps a couple of weeks, so I hope to be able to announce the news before too long. It might come as a surprise to some readers, but I have decided to lift the veil of anonymity and use my real name on the new photo web site. I have nothing to hide, rather the opposite.

Too Multi-National For My Own Good?

When we left the UK to move to Germany I kept my English mobile. I had been with the same network for many years, although they became T-Mobile instead of One2One (the only low-cost alternative at the time).

I had joined One2One in the days when they still had sales reps who made home visits to convince you to buy their services. In this case a young woman came to my flat one evening. I was living on my own at that time, and I have thought many times how inappropriate and unacceptable that would have been today. No company would send a young female rep on her own to an unknown man's flat at night time these days; that would be irresponsible company behaviour. But this happened in the late eighties and was not considered a problem.

Sometime after the move to Germany I thought it would be best to have a German mobile, which obviously would cut down on costs. As I was considering this, my son and partner gave me an old (Swedish) phone with a pay-as-you-go SIM card, which would save both caller and receiver money when we were in Sweden. (Otherwise they would have to pay for calling the UK and I for transferring the call from the UK to Sweden!)

The phone was an old Sony Ericsson, which had seen its heyday. Often it was impossible to scroll up in a menu, because of a worn-out button. So I had to go back one level and start all over again. But OK, I could live with that.

Then it struck me that I could get a German SIM card and use that with the Swedish Sony Ericsson. Yeah! But NO! It just would not work. That's when I learned about how telecoms lock their phones to their networks. What to do?

I think I did a bit of googling and came across the phenomenon of unlocking the phones via the internet, to free them of their crippling chains. I used the service of mobileunlocked.com , and for a modest fee they liberated the handset. So, now I could use two different cards for two different countries in the same old knackered phone. Brilliant!

But I still had my old English one. One day I needed to ring their customer service regarding some matter or other, and to my great surprise the lady asked me would I want to upgrade my phone. Upgrade my phone? Yes, have a new one. I can see that you are out of contract and have not had a new phone, she said.

Then it dawned on me; I had never had a second phone from them, although I had bought one myself years ago, and I had been with them for close to 20 years!

To some younger readers of this blog, that seems a lifetime. How many phones could I have had over the years, I wonder?

So they sent me this spanking new Samsung Z560, with camera and the lot. (Read about it here.) It seemed to be state-of-the-art, but I really only used it when we were in France since we don't have a land line there. Can you see where this is leading? Unlock it, of course, thought I!

Oh no! It had only been on the market for a short time so nobody had had time to create a code to break the lock. Sigh! I had to wait for a long long time, but now, nearly two years later, I have just received the magical code. It took exactly 2 days 13 hours and 16 minutes to create it!

I feel, in my own modest way, slightly ecstatic to have just the one top-of-the-range phone (still, I hope) that allows me to use three different SIM cards for three different countries. And I hope my son will forgive me for saying this; no longer will I feel embarrassed, having to answer a phone call or receiving a text message on the worn and tired old Ericsson in public, but can now proudly flaunt my foldable friend for anyone to see. Does that make me vain or just practical?

From Lo-Tech To Hi-Tech

I have had one of those philosophical moments thinking about technological development. I thought of my grandfather, who was twenty years old when the brothers Wright managed to fly an aircraft for the very first time on 17 December 1903. Well before he passed away in 1976 he had also seen the first man on the moon. Isn't that a wonderful, fantastic thought? In his lifetime mankind developed the technology to put a man on that mysterious round disc illuminating the night sky. However Leonardo da Vinci, that multi-talented brainbox from half a millennium ago with his many ingenious ideas, did not always get it right. Like this one ...

So I started thinking about technological milestones in my own life, so far. Typing this draws my mind back to when I was a little boy. Then I used a pencil for most writing; on the odd occasion we used metal-nibbed pens in school for handwriting practice. Later the fountain pen, despite the danger of making a mess of your shirt pocket or your pencil case, made it much more user-friendly since you did not have to dip the nib into a bottle of ink every five seconds. My first fountain pen though, was of the kind that you had to fill, sucking the ink up with a pulling movement. When the ink cartridge was introduced some time later you felt that things were really moving on. Then there was the ballpoint pen, the greatest of them all. How that has revolutionised writing by hand! They were initially not really affordable to the average person, but these days most people would not care if they lost their ballpoint pen.

Long before these relatively modern writing tools, the quill pen was the only alternative, the forerunner to the metal-nibbed pen. I still remember how, when I was thirteen, I had found a big wing feather from a buzzard or similar bird of prey, and I made my own modern ballpoint quill pen out of it by inserting the ink tube with ballpoint into the shaft of the feather. Genius, I thought.

As a lucky seven-year-old I was sometimes allowed to use my fathers typewriter. Remember them? When the ribbon got stuck, entangled and messy? And the arms with the letters on them jammed completely if you tried to type too quickly! Much better when the electric ones with the spinning ball were introduced. There was no stopping the world's typists then. The employers could demand even higher speeds, as long as you did not forget to put in the carbon sheet so you got a copy, because this was when photo-copying was relatively new and expensive. Do you remember those days?

I was a newly appointed deputy head teacher when my head teacher said I needed a calculator for my work. I would be reimbursed, he assured me, otherwise I might have hesitated. This one had solar cells, and I was so impressed by the whole idea that I asked the shop assistant how long the solar cells would last?! I still use my second calculator, which must be at least twenty to twenty-five years old; and the cells have not given up on me yet!

Thinking of sunlight, makes me think again of my grandfather, how he went about taking photographs. It was a slow process; at least that was what we children thought as we stood there waiting to have the group picture taken. The technology in my digital camera is quite different.

Then we have communication technology; remember telex machines? The sender had to either type, punching a tape that then (I think) was put into another machine producing typed text, or it was received as it was typed in at the other end. After telex came fax; what a revolution! You could send any document over the phone?! Unheard of! Put the sheet in the facsimile machine, watch it being pulled slowly through and then phone to check that it had been received alright. You could not really trust the fickle fax!

These days we just attach a document to an email, but hey, that was almost surpassing the computer! Young folk nowadays have little understanding of how quickly things have moved on with computers. The computer on the first lunar landing craft, The Eagle, had less memory than a modern mobile phone. I remember buying my first PC nearly twenty years ago, how I said that I did not want to become a second class citizen, I had to learn about this new technology. How things have moved on since!

In the beginning the features of a computer were extremely limited and when the internet started up it was a desperate struggle to find anything since search engines were in their infancy as well. Those of you who also know the whole development would probably agree when I say it has been mind-boggling.

I must not forget to mention mobile phones; texting, sending pictures, taking photos ...

We have come a long way from the bricks of the eighties to the iPhones. It is amazing; and you wonder what will come next. Did I forget the iPod?

And here I am blogging about it all in my personal little space in the blogosphere.

C u l8r!