Posts by Headley_Grange

MP: Googlepoly hurts British business

Google Wins Because It Has the Best Products

With Google Maps I can plan a route with waypoints (including pubs, ferries, museums) on google and on my PC and then use it when I walk round the city on my phone (iPhone excepted, obviously). I can send the route to friends as a browser friendly map, with a commentary on the route (handy for cultured pub crawls). Try doing that on multimap. The google map app on my iPhone has bus timetables in it and is more easy to use than the local bus company's website - can't do that with streetmap. They need to stop whingeing and innovate.

Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo 2TB Nas

Static IP

Thanks AC - I've had a quick look at the website and it looks interesting. If I can summon the energy I'll go another round with the kit.

Regards,

HG.

Remote Web Access - be careful

I have spent about 60 hours trying to get the remote web access to work. If your ISP will not give you a static IP then you will not be able to get remote web access to these servers.

Leica M9 rangefinder camera

Stop saying it's got a tiny body

M-series cameras are not small. I've owned one and with a 50mm lens it was bigger than my Olympus OM4 SLR. Nice camera, but this myth that's grown up about them being small and pocketable needs to be quashed.

Apple's draconian developer docs revealed

The long and lonely search for Nvidia drivers

Why the hell am I looking for Nvidia drivers to stop it rebooting halfway through the night!? - well, because often if I leave my laptop on overnight I get up the next day to find that the laptop has re-booted. When I log in and go to windows problems it tells me that an Nvidia driver caused my laptop to crash. I'd rather it didn't crash - so I spend time trying to find out if I can fix it. Nvidia's tells me there's something I could try but it's at my risk and not to blame them if my PC never works again. HP's website doesn't help much and device manager says I'm up to date and there's no problem. The search goes on and my PC keeps on crashing.

So what's wrong with preventing people desinging shoddy software that buggers up my machine?

My PC, in common with most others gets slower and crankier as I load it up with various bits of software, both bought and free and I bitch like hell about what a pile of crud it is. Ditto my Nokia. If the results of this control by Apple are products which keep working as they were intended and don't need a barrage of after-market apps just to manage disc use then I look forward to the day that Microsoft takes the same approach. I can't ditch my PC for various reasons, and I'm envious of my friends who have Macs and don't spend 10% of their keyboard time waiting for them to boot up, doing backups (I spent hours on Saturday configuring a wireless backup disk and it still doesn't work properly because I don't know my TCPIPs from my UPNPs so my firewall won't play nicely; my mate just plugged in a white box and it started working) de-fragging disks, deleting bloatware, installing updates, deleting updates, searching in vain for invidia drivers to stop the pc rebooting overnight half-way through the backup or virus check .........................................................If Apple's approach is what's needed to make my PC boot up in the same decade that I first hit the power button and stay stable enough to run 4 hour monte carlo sims without crashing then the sooner they start locking down my PC with rules about what developers can put on it the better. I'd pay extra for that.

TomTom Go 550 Live

They aren't reliable enough

When the tomtom live works it's up there with the best bit of kit ever. I travel a lot in the SE of England and it's a useful piece of kit. Like I said - when it works.

Here's what happens in my experience at least once a week.........Turn it on - plan a route. Wait for the live traffic to load. It doesn't and tells you there's no network coverage. Turn it off and on again. Traffic might load. If not hold power button for 30 secs to reset device. Traffic loads OK(unless it's a weekend, when there's a fair chance that the server will be down. You won't find this out until after sending a support request - following the instructions to re-format the hard disc - wasting 4 hours of your Sunday afternoon doing this 3 times - only to be told on Monday after ringing the help desk that the server was down). So, having got traffic working I want to connect to my mobilephone via bluetooth. It doesn't pair automatically (I've had 3 different phones and none of them pair automatically with the tomtom) Although you only paired it yesterday it won't pair and just tells you there's no response from the phone. Turn phone off and on - no pairing. Turn TomTom off and on - won't pair. Delete pairing from phone and TomTom. Go through the nausea of the discovery and pairing again. Of course - now you've turned the tomtom off so there's a fair chance that the traffic isn't available (GOTO start).

By now you're either 15 miles up the M3 without having looked at the road once or you've been sitting in the car park for almost 10 minutes and any time the tomtom might have saved on your trip has been used up in making it work. Oh - by the way - if the car park is not on the map (new industrial estate) then you can't do any of the above until you get onto a piece of road that it recognizes -- it just sits in an endless "planning route" loop. You have to drive to somewhere it recognizes, find somewhere to park, then do it all.

The map update service is useful - but beware because it deletes all your favourites, your home and work locations and any map overlays you've downloaded. TomTom will tell you there's a way round this by copying to and from PoIs; it's true but you won't want to do it.

I agree that Nokia will never replace this type of device, and on the rare occasion that I get into the car and it just works it is a fantastic bit of kit, but it's just not reliable enough and the compay is not interested in fixing bugs.