Sitting in the Heathrow Express station and on the train, deep underground, travelling between Terminal 4 and Terminal 1 yesterday I was pleased to see that there was a superb 3G signal. Rock steady.

So the question is, why don’t more tunnels have this special coverage?

On the other hand, having been stuck on a plane sitting at the gate, enginess off, for 2 hours waiting to take off, the noise from people using their mobiles was really annoying. So I’m officially against making phones work on planes. They should be places of relative calm.

Flickr continues to amaze me - I’ve just added the randomising side bar to the left in about one minute flat. Awesome.

Much less awesome is that the brand-new MacBook mentioned below will now only power up when plugged into the power. Sigh. Now we have to go through the hassle of getting a replacement and resinstalling all the software.

And the ugly was that for some reason the WordPress Dashboard that I use to monitor the blog was crashing on Thursday. Everything else was working perfectly, but not the dashboard. However today it is back in working order, nothing changed. Strange.

My elder daughter has just left for University. Her old Vaio was getting very slow and the battery was long since dead, so I decided to get her a new machine. Since I like my MacBook, combined with the reduced risk of viruses etc, it made sense to get her a MacBook. The fact it was a highly-fashionable white was icing on the cake for her, being non-technical.

However it has started throwing kernel panics and shutting down. It then won’t power on without taking out the battery and leaving it to sit for a while. A quick Google shows that we’re not alone.

This comes a few weeks after my father’s Dell blue screened and would not restart without a complete reinstall, including needing a different set of recovery disks from the media included in the box. My father gives great kudos to the lady from the Indian call centre who assiduously worked to resolve the issue.

I can just imagine one of those “Hello, I’m a PC, Hello, I’m a Mac” Apple adverts on this theme. If I had any spare time I could make one and put it on YouTube. But I don’t, so I’ll just go back to fuming.

I’m increasingly convinced that the final frontier of all things mobile or portable is power. Today my wireless mouse died within hours of me putting new batteries in. Better quality ones last consistently longer, but cheapo Ikea ones have very variable life.

My 9-month old SonyEricsson W900i needs charged up more or less everyday if it’s been used any amount.

My Sony Vaio still manages 20 minutes. Maybe. If you’re lucky.

My shiny new black MacBook works for hours without problem, but doubles as a trouser press due the massive heat built up on the lower surface.

And today Toshiba added another recall of batteries, taking the number up to over 4 million recalls this year. Ouch.
Once again I hope that there are people working on this problem, somewhere. And I hope they make a lot of money at it. They deserve to if they can crack portable power.

I’ve always had patchy Vodafone coverage at home, with the signal flip-flopping between GSM and 3G, but over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a change. Whenever I try to use a data service (eg e-mail, one of our apps) the 3G icon vanishes immediately the phone tries to connect. Long wait, usually 20s or so. GPRS kicks in and off it goes, slowly.

Now if this was occasional behaviour I could believe it was due to vagueries in the RF handling, but given it is systematic it looks like something deeper. Like the nearest base station has lost its 3G data capability and its not important enough to warrant fixing. Who knows. All I know is that its very annoying and not what I’m paying for.

Amazing, and impressive. A while back I posted that my father’s new Dell laptop didn’t have Skype on it. A chap called Todd from Dell’s customer advocacy group has posted a comment telling us that (in their view) Skype is not widely used, and hence they don’t include it.

The key thing about this is that Dell get it. They understand the power of peer-to-peer comment, and are acting to use it and sensibly control any feedback. I like it.

We use Register.com as our registry, and they’ve given us good service over the years. More expensive than some, but with excellent support when things went wrong. Until last week. One of their services is called “safe renew” and we’ve been using this to automatically renew key domains as they expire. Until last week.

Until I received an e-mail from them saying this domain had expired! I hastily manually renewed the domain, only to find that all the internal settings for it had been scrambled. Not only had our previous settings been lost, I couldn’t edit them back. After several phone calls and a frankly unhelpful e-mail, this has mostly been put right.

So this blog dissapeared for a few days. Not happy.

But how much unhappier would I have been if this had been a major website on which I rely for revenue? What would have happened if it co-incided with the Google spider checking the site?

To be told the “safe renew” service is not guaranteed just does not cut it.

Another very specialist website I’ve found: Piano Covers Online. And yes, they sell piano covers amongst other things.

Fireworks-10

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall.

Here I am in Flickr, about to post a photo into my blog. This is so cool it’s amazing. The glue is very simple combinations of HTTP traffic and the intelligence to make interfaces open.

Being able to do this even a couple of years ago was unimaginable without massive committees deciding what should and should not be interconnected.

I love it!

(The photo was from the Edinburgh Festival Fireworks last Sunday night. Canon 350D with 135mm zoom, on monopod. This edit made in WordPress directly and lo, the placement of the image is broken. Still impressive!)

Just had a play with Google Spreadsheets. Not quite Excel, but very good for the simple sort of things most people want to do. As an example of Ajax it’s pretty impressive as well. I noted the bounding box on cell editing was too large, but that was all.