Tech Tuesday: Nokia Cares

I've actually lost count of how many weeks it's been since I promised reviews of my new 'toy' (I think it was 3). The good news is, I can finally start fiddling with it to start blogging. It's a new Nokia N96, which I managed to wrangle from a certain 'smart mofo with tats' who is involved with the device's marketing locally. So let's consider this my 'full disclosure' clause, I have the phone for the purposes of marketing it-of course the fact that I needed an upgrade anyway with my N95's backlight giving in meant the timing was perfect. I did make 100% sure that I'm not 'censored' in any way, so they obviously have a bit of faith in the product.
The reason for the delay in actually getting to it (and here's where I'm sure Nokia wishes there had been some kind of censorship) is that the first thing I did with the phone -hook it up to a PC and update it to the newest firmware- bricked it. Luckily there's a Nokia Care Centre across the road from our offices, so dropping it off there to get sorted out was no problem, unfortunately it did take almost three weeks for the handset to work it's way up the Nokia Care food chain to someone that realized it was completely fried and issued a replacement handset. I got that replacement today. I can't say the Nokia Care experience was at all pleasant, with the care center only starting to keep me in the loop when I payed them another visit and politely kakked them out for lousy customer service.
One positive aspect is that I discovered Nokia Care points recycle mobile phones, and I mean any kind-not just Nokias. So next time you're looking at that tangled mess of old chargers and broken phones in your desk drawer, throw it all in a bag and drop it off at your nearest Nokia Care center.

I wish I could pass on some gem of wisdom about being careful when updating firmware, but the truth is I did absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I connected a brand new, fully charged phone with minimal settings adjustments to my PC via USB and accepted the update prompt when Nokia’s PC suite informed me new software was available. I shudder to think how many people’s phones may have been bricked this way.

Next week I’ll finally have a real article on the phone, probably focusing on first impressions and ergonomics. See you then :)

Nothing for today

The “Toy” I mentioned last week is not yet in my hands (I should have it this evening), so as a blog topic that pretty much fell through. Aside from that we dealt with a really rough tragedy in the family last week and over the weekend, so blogging was really the last thing on my mind. Next week I promise a proper Tech Tuesday post.

Ubuntu Desktop part 3: Hardware support and development

I’m going to make this my last post on Ubuntu on the desktop (read the previous ones here and here), as I’ll soon be getting a new ‘toy’ that I’ll be putting through it’s paces and blogging about. I’ll also be trying to keep future tech related posts to Tuesday, henceforth to be known as (drumroll..)  Tech Tuesday.

In this post I’ll discuss my experiences with Ubuntu’s hardware support, and touch on using it as a dev platform.

Hardware ups and downs

As mentioned in my first post, my home machine is a P4 notebook with 1Gig ram and an ATi 9700 mobility video card. It’s a Mecer branded machine which I’m assuming uses fairly standard components. With no built in WiFi, Bluetooth, Webcam or any such gadgets, Ubuntu really didn’t have much to deal with.

What it did have (and continues to have) problems with is my video card. Strangely enough when I tried an older Ubuntu version (6.x) on it many moons ago, I seem to remember the hardware acceleration working fine. Somewhere along the development path to 8.4 something went terribly wrong though. I have done a lot of research and fiddling, and what it seems to come down to is that ATi (now part of AMD) has not kept up with it’s Linux drivers and there are a large number of unhappy owners of older mobile ATi graphics cards who run into compatibility issues on Ubuntu. AMD have promised that updated drivers will be available soon, but for now I am without video acceleration in Ubuntu. 

On the other side of the coin is Ubuntu’s incredible printer support. I have wasted many hours getting a wide assortment of printers to play nicely in both home and business contexts, and I would have loved Ubuntu’s awesome printer support in those situations. We have a fairly obscure Brother printer/fax/scanner combo hooked up to our ADSL router and accessed by our PCs over the LAN. Setting this up in Windows XP is fairly tedious (though admittedly much easier in Vista) and Ubuntu detected everything pretty much automatically. No messing with driver downloads or custom ports, everything just worked.

Other than the video card issue I would have to say Ubuntu has hardware compatibility and ease of setup nailed.

Ubuntu as a development OS

I’m working on a web development project at home at the moment (sorry, no details just yet) using PHP and MySQL, and it’s the first such project I have done. I’ve been using the excellent XAMPP package to run my web and database servers, and NetBeans 6.5 for coding and debugging. Like much of the software I’ve ended up using in Ubuntu, getting it all set up was definitely not as simple as it could (or should) have been, with a number of strange issues between XAMPP’s MySQL server and the settings expected by the default tools. As with the video card issue, this is a third party problem, not so much a Linux problem, but it does illustrate that there seems to be a serious lack of consistency in the way things are done from developer to developer when implementing software. This can be an absolute nightmare for users.

That said, now that my environment is up and running, it’s a pleasure to develop in, with NetBeans running significantly faster in Ubuntu than it ever did (on the same hardware) in Windows XP. I could honestly recommend the Ubuntu/XAMPP/Netbeans combo to those who want to fiddle with web development at home.

 

That’s it for my musings on Ubuntu. Next week I’ll introduce my new toy :)

Digital trash for all

One of the changes headed for the SA broadcast market is the switchover from an analogue to a digital TV transmission signal. This is in keeping with similar changes being made worldwide, and helps free up spectrum for other uses (as digitally encoded signals use less spectrum than analogue ones). As is typical with anything involving technology regulation in this country, the swapover has seen numerous delays. According to MyBroadband, the powers-that-be are currently aiming for an initial commercial launch near the end of the year.

This swap-over, along with the eventual discontinuation of the analogue signal, is likely to drive an increase in the sale of digital TVs. Downconverting set-top-boxes will be available, and will be partially subsidised by the government, but I would expect many households that have been avoiding the expense will see this as an excuse to upgrade to an LCD TV while they still have a perfectly serviceable CRT.

This is good news for the environment from from an energy point of view (if they go for a similarly sized set) due to the higher energy efficiency of LCD sets. However it has huge implications from a waste point of view. A culture of recycling and responsible personal waste management is seriously lacking in South Africa, and a lack of public education on the subject does not help. I have seen no mention in any of the articles relating to this swap-over on how the resulting e-waste will be handled. As it is finding a nearby location to do basic plastic, paper and metal recycling can be a challenge, and most people don’t bother. I would like to see the government using this change in technology as an opportunity to educate individuals on the importance of correctly disposing of old electronic equipment (which typically contains many toxic materials).

America is about to go through the same switch switch and faces similar issues as a result (see this article on Grist), however they seem to have at least taken some steps in the right direction. Their Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides excellent information on recycling e-waste and events were held to inform the public about the problem. In amongst all the electioneering and political posturing, I would really love to see a little bit of attention on this looming issue from the individuals tasked with managing our country.