Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Category Archives: Consulting

Kindle – Weight Loss Reading

I have written here about the extra curricular uses of the Kindle 3G, but after a number of weeks using it I have become very enamoured of its ability to swallow documents and manuals in PDF form. Of course, I could always have (and do have) them with me on my laptop and even iPad but nothing beats having them in a device that can be held in one hand, and has a hi res screen good enough to show a whole A4 page with good comfort. With the amount of reading material with me today as I type this in my hotel room, it would have to be hundreds of kilogrammes of paper all at my fingertips.

You can send the PDFs to the Kindle for conversion via email but I don’t find that the best way (particularly with the roulette wheel of picking it up by 3G or WiFi, when you are charged for the 3G transmission). Strangely enough the best way to me is side loading the books to the device via the micro-USB cable, as this does not do any strange conversion attempts.

PDFs on the Kindle offer almost all of the capabilities of normal books – the tracking of read position being the key one, particularly with texts that are hundreds of pages long. The only downside I can see at the moment is the lack of flexibility of filing of the books and the inability to see status at a glance of the cover (the ‘new’ book status soon disappears when you open it).

This device is a real boon to the traveller.

Netbooks and Performance

ASUS1005HA Almost all netbooks (apart from some of the early Acer and Asus devices running Linux) are supplied with 1GB of RAM. Microsoft has further cemented this by defining lower license fees for Windows XP for computers with small screens and only 1GB of RAM, which means that this is the most popular memory configuration for netbooks.

advent-4211-msi-wind-mini-laptop-small At the same time, many people rule out netbooks as low power, sluggish computers that cannot replace a main machine. After my experience of the last month and a half, I would agree. This is when I purchased a new netbook after a problem occurred with my first one … the venerable Advent 4211C, an MSI Wind U100 rebrand. Amazing how I can call a computer that is less than 15 months old as venerable!

The netbook I purchased was the Asus EeePC 1008HA, a very nice and thin machine which I did not originally desire, but my options were limited. The machine I wanted was the Asus EeePC 1005HA but that was not in stock in the timeframe I needed. The problem with the 1008HA is the shorter battery life and the higher price, but I was desperate that evening for a machine. The other problem is that it came with 1GB of RAM compared to my upgraded Advent machine that had 2GB.

The other problem I quickly discovered was that it is closed up harder than a coconut. The machine is basically not upgradeable by anyone but the brave. Needless to say I proved braver than most, particularly after I managed to pierce the keyboard ribbon connector and cut two wires whilst trying to get at the memory. This is because you have to crack the case open after removing the keyboard, disconnecting multiple connectors and making sure that you use the dip switch to disable the battery feed to the machine (thus avoiding blowing the whole thing).  Who needs the left CTRL, Alt, Windows, Fn, function, delete and backspace keys anyway!  After all the fun with doing that I found I had the wrong 2GB memory stick. Putting my slightly crippled machine back together, I had to focus on my day job and with it using the still 1GB Asus.

What I noticed quite quickly is that the machine perpetually struggled with the lack of RAM at a scale that virtual memory could not help. The machine has had a minimum physical memory used of between 700MB and 930MB, and I now know what happens when the physical memory starts to run out… a machine that goes into coma for 30 seconds plus as it struggles to unload a program, to load another one. This has not been a good experience. If this was all the experience I had ever had with a netbook, I could understand saying that netbooks are useless.

Let us be honest, the sweet spot for Windows XP is 2GB ( just like the sweet spot for Vista I have found is 3GB ). This means that all netbooks are not as performant as they could be, and it will stay this way as long as manufacturers keep with supplying them with 1GB. I have started to see however netbooks and their like coming through with 2GB and this seems to be tied to supplying the machine with Windows 7… At least, Windows 7 Home Premium. I hope this continues.

So my best advice out there for the netbook owner? Get yourself upgraded to 2GB… you will then have a very functional, low cost, very portable machine that will perform every duty you throw at it except really heavy duty graphics/video or gaming. The other advice? Make sure that your netbook is user upgradeable. Me? I now have the machine I need but no warranty.

iPhone Battery Life… improvements

10-15-07-iphone The iPhone has (like many 3G smartphones) always had poor battery life when using connectivity for email sync etc. As new firmwares have become available, this life has improved generally, so that I have only had to recharge twice a day sometimes. However with the release of the 3.1 firmware, my battery life took a tumble so that I was in fact charging four times a day. This has been documented elsewhere on the Internet, and as a travelling man this had become almost impossible to keep going through the whole business day. Even with going to the 3.1.2 firmware, there was no improvement.

Then I accidentally left the WiFi on after leaving one office with WiFi and went to another office without WiFi. I did not really notice but suddenly my phone was back to and exceeded my previous battery life. WTF! Further tests with both my iPhones (yes I have two, one for each country) concluded further that this is a real affect and is not proven explainable although I have a theory that I would love checking. Technically turning WiFi should cause a REDUCTION in battery life.

The theory that I have is that Apple have boosted the transmission power on the iPhone 3G radio to allow it to better operate on the US ATT network which is notoriously poor in many US states. This causes the battery to drain further, and also explains why it was not ‘fixed’ in the 3.1.2 release – as it is not something they want to fix as it is solving a US issue that they are getting a lot of flack for. However, the moment you turn the WiFi on I believe that drops the 3G transmission power back to previous levels, which when WiFi is only beacon’ing (trying to find another WiFi network) means a reduced power draw and better battery life. The other evidence is that I note that the iPhones are noticeably warmer when only on 3G.

Not sure if this is really true, but all I know is that my phones now last a lot longer. Try it, it can only improve things.

Travelling … service resuming

ASUS1005HA Things have been a little quiet on the site for a while, mainly because I have been involved in a pretty intense period of project work which has required me to do a multi-country commute for almost six months now. During this time, I have really appreciated the smallness of my netbook main machine and gained a (poor) appreciation of hotel provided WiFi, as well as just how far ahead of the game the UK is in Mobile Broadband (particularly in terms of PAYG tariffs). I have also experienced a sea change in my phone experiences also as I have moved from Windows Mobile to the Apple iPhone. One thing I can really push is that the iPhone has proven a worthy secondary device to go with the MSI Wind netbook – not a replacement, just a secondary device. With the release of the v3.0 software, the Apple iPhone has become a great business device for the mobile worker, particularly one that travels to multiple countries. The applications and the iTunes App store are THE killer aspect for the phone. So much in fact, I had to get two – one for the UK and one for the remote country :-) . I guess an iPhone with support for two SIMs is still too much of a specialised requirement.

More on that another time, but I would like to return to the ‘secondary’ device comment. Walking around, the iPhone is a great emailer and mobile work business helper but it simply cannot replace a PC for working email and documents. You do need a PC to get the job done, and netbooks are really a good package for that, particularly when you have a large screen and keyboard installation in your semi-permanent working locations.  Working with the MSI Wind though has really punched my buttons with regard to battery life – my MSI Wind is simply too short lived at 4 hours, although good for many I am now looking at the latest batch of machines that give 8+ hours. However I am torn between waiting for Windows 7 based machines or getting an XP based machine now. I will have to see how long I can tough that one out. You can sense an update coming…

How about your experiences with iPhone? Netbook? Recommendations for a long life battery netbook? Feel free to comment.

News Clipping Service

Recently I was contacted by a company who wanted to sell me access to a news clipping service. I have no idea why or how they selected me, but they did the hard sell and in response to my rejections threw a free trial at me and they promised to call me after a week to see if I had found it useful. They would then sign me up – at least they hoped they would.

Now those who read this blog know that I value the capabilities of Google Alerts for obtaining live information about whatever subject I want. So it was interesting to compare the service with the ‘freebie’.

Well I can say now that newsclipping services are on the deathlist with the availability of Google Alerts and that pretty much all news and other information is now being published online. The service just provided me the same links that Google Alerts provides with the addition of fancy graphics, a different interface and a bill. I never checked how much the news clipping service would cost me, but frankly anything more than free would have been too much.

These services can only survive in the future by providing something else of value but I cannot identify what that something else could be – certainly correcting for the odd false positive is really not worth the money. Google Alerts is the thing.

Online/Small Business Leave Management

Whos Off Leave

Whos Off Leave

This sounds like a diversion from the main point of this blog but it really is not. If you are a small business owner or a consultant/contractor who needs to manage a number of other people then you can be left out in the cold in terms of managing sickness and leave. What I have used in the past and do recommend is the service provided by Whosoff. Whosoff provides a basic free service that gives you a basic workflow for managing the time off that the people you work with do have/need. The major advantage of the system is that this is web and email based, available to all, with a good selection of resources for managing leave entitlement.

It does not have full Outlook or iCal integration but that just has to be a matter of time.

Obviously you do need to ensure that you handle the Dataprotection issues that apply, but this is a very effective system.