Irina went visited Masha today, but her mobile phone ran out of battery whilst at work. Although a little inconvenient by itself, the fact that Ira’s friend lives in an apartment block that has two locked doors and a lift that requires a card to get upstairs meant that just visiting her was a PITA. Eventually, some other residents arrived at the door, and let her in, however I still had to try and explain to Ira’s dad that she was OK, no longer at work, seeing a friend, and that her mobile phone was not working. (They normally speak each evening, and he would have been worried if he could not contact her without knowing the reason.
Anyway, Masha’s son has already grown a lot since I last saw him, so perhaps personalized baby clothes would not be the best idea; maybe you can get personalised toddler clothes?
Before I had a mobile phone, I had a pager, so could at least tell when someone wanted to contact me, if I wasn’t at home; before that, I’m guessing public payphones had a lot more traffic…

Scratch the original plans, here are the links I mentioned, not enough time left after having got everything ready for our trip to actually create proper posts. Now the DVD burner is fubared, and I wanted to burn another 3 discs of MP3s for driving to. Hey ho.

Kyrgyzstan elections not fair either - see this article and this one for more details. For those not familiar with the country, no that isn’t where we live (we’re in KAZAKHstan), however international monitors similarly do not think that the elections were free, fair and transparent there either…

Discounting apparently rife in stores - BBC article - Actually I’d call it pretty piss poor ‘professional’ journalism. They trot out the same rubbish each year, closely followed by an article in January saying how shoppers actually spent a lot more than expected. I especially loved the headline - attention grabbing, discounts sound significant, then followed in the main body of the text that this year’s reductions average at 36% off, not 35% ! Yep, 1% difference…

Wives Tales or Valid Medical Info? - Article here. If you don’t drink 8 glasses of water per day, you will use less than 10% of your brain, meaning you won’t be able to read in the dark, turkey will make you drowsy and your hair will continue to grow after death, no matter whether you shaved it or not. Or something like that I have heard before that the ban on mobile phone usage within hospitals is rubbish, espcially when you consider the power of the transmitters they need to use for their own internal walkie-talkies etc.

Eco-friendly consoles requested - BBC article - I know that some PC component manufacturers are already trying, but apparently the big three gaming giants (Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft) are being pressured to lower the amount of toxic chemicals used to produce their consoles, amongst other things.

Take care when you google - info here - My thanks to Irina for noticing this report, and also on the shoddy workmanship of the journalist once again. The article reads in parts as though they did no investigation, and simply read from Google’s press release, with contradictions in places. Anyway, bad people had been setting up sites to try and hack unprotected PCs, and were trying to drive traffic by optimizing for popular keywords.

Dynamic advert placement within PDF files - article - the title says it all here…

Info on Amazon’s ‘Kindle” - here and here - Amazon’s e-book reader, an attempt by another company to crack the market. Once again, the aims have been praised, the actual product is not so popular in some circles.

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimers - check here - A long time favourite author of mine, Mr Pratchett has revealed he has the condition, though is doing OK so far. Whilst I selfishly hope he will be able to continue to write such well crafter novels, I do hope that if/when the time comes that the balance between personal well being and writing output tips the wrong way, his fans will let him retire with grace.

One for Alex - here - Poorly kangaroo goes for a swim, and gets snapped up by a shark! (As you may have guessed, based in Australia)

W00t - BBC article - Like ‘all your base are belong to us ‘ from a few years back, but certainly a lot snappier, w00t appears to have started its life in the gaming world, and is used as an exclamation, normally positive.

Not an article, but Wikileaks may interest you. Has a small section for Kazakhstan. Not going to discuss that sort of thing right now, no time.

Excuse me whilst I don’t cry - boo-hoo - with any luck the BNP will eventually go the same way as the old National Front did. I just hope any splinter groups don’t survive, and aren’t too radical whilst they are around. Don’t have much time for racist, lying, Lowest Common Denominator politics and politicians, as you may have guessed.

Misbehaving pupils shocked into towing the line - article here - I can never imagine Mr Owen having given this sort of punishment in his lessons…

Right thats it, I’m off to bed, and won’t be posting for a couple of days probably. Hope all who read this do so in good health…

The ISP we now have our internet connection with is called Megaline. Unfortunately, since swapping to their service, everyday sees some downtime for connectivity. Even when all is apparently working, packets are often lost, and I can no longer as open as many simultaneous pages, without time outs occurring. That said, it is a lot cheaper, and although only 1/2 the speed, I do get an allowance of 10Gb/month before they throttle me down to 32Kbit/sec, from 128Kbit/sec.
Anyway, we first have a report on the UK’s lagginess (puns will stop now, sorry), when it comes to very fast internet connection availability. This is no great surprise really, given our history with BT’s (formerly part of the GPO) previous monopoly at nearly all stages of communications. Great investment will be needed to push beyond the current 24Mbps ceiling, and even that sort of connection is only really possibly if you live on top of your local exchange. Until we drop twisted pair copper lines as acceptable, the days of fibre optics into every home are a long way off, unless someone like Richard Branson decides that it is economically viable in areas when other Cable TV operators have avoided.

On a more positive note, here we have an article detailing how broadband internet connectivity (even if it isn’t globally breath-takingly fast) has rapidly become the preferred speed, compared to just four years ago, when most people considered dial up speeds acceptable. No pretty table to illustrate the point this time, sorry.

Finally, on a semi-related matter, the BBC News site had details on how some European nation’s citizens are rejecting land lines altogether, in favour of mobile phones. Although this may sound surprising at first, if you take into account that some of the nations, that were unable to develop as quickly under USSR rule, never had high rates for phone lines into every house, and how competitive some mobile phone network companies are in these markets, to try and get, then keep loyal customers, you can begin to see why having no land line number is becoming more common in some areas. Whether these figures include those that only use phone lines for internet usage, and use mobiles for cheaper evening calls etc, I couldn’t ascertain.

(USA Relevant)

Firstly, you can tell this is a web site dedicated to Americans looking for Used Car Loans, the header image depicts a driver at the wheel speaking on their mobile phone - a big no no in Britain. Anyway, as you may have guess from their domain name, this site is dedicated purely to those people who want a car, but do not currently have the money to buy one out right. Residents of all states are welcome to apply, and even if you have previously had problems obtaining credit elsewhere, the company still aim to put you in touch with an institution that is willing to offer you a loan.
So, it will only take a few minutes to see if you really could be buying the car you want within days, and there is no obligation, nor fees involved, so you have nothing to lose really. As the site states… “No Nonsense - Just Car Loans Made Quick & Easy!”

So I need to think what to get my wife. For our anniversary we got her a new mobile phone, so that isn’t a good choice, and although I do have a couple of ideas, they require this blog’s income to improve over the next two weeks. For those schemes that pay within a fortnight of posting, the money will obviously come through in time, but for presents that cost that little bit extra, such as diamond pendants, the schemes that pay 30 days after you make a post will soon be too late for Christmas shopping - I don’t want to leave it until the last minute…

Sony Ericcson have teamed up with The Times Online, Heat and FHM to organize a competition. The requirements for entry are really quite simple - if you have mobile phone with a camera, and fancy taking a photo that could be categorized into ‘News & Sport’, ‘Fashion’ or ‘Adventure’, then you could win a trip round the world, attending an FHM shoot or other great prizes.

To learn more, check out The Search website, with a nice little introduction by a Josh Ash (apparently a Pro-Surfer).

Irina seems to be happy with her new mobile phone, a Motorola Razr2 v8 (I better go and check that I have actually got that model name right ). It was a delayed anniversary present; the reason for the delay is that you can not yet buy it here in Kazakhstan. I could have ordered it and had it posted to our flat here in Astana, however using the normal post system involves long delays and visiting the Post Office to pick it up - assuming the postal workers do not ‘accidentally’ mislay it. That said, I have not heard stories of birthday cards arriving, with the money missing, as used to happen. So, when I visited Britain I picked on up there, and gave it to Ira on my return to Kazakhstan.
The phone does not have a memory card slot, but given that it has almost 1/2 gig of internal memory, Ira decided that this was one feature she could live without, for the sake of the sleekness of the phone. As she does not store multiple movies or a large collection of programs on her phones, the lack of expandable memory was not a problem. I remember when phones had external slots for an SD card. This meant changing from one card to another was fast and easy. The first phone I had with a memory card was my current one - a Orange C550 (actually a rebadged HTEC Hurricane), but as with most similar phones now, you have to remove the battery to gain access. This phone took mini-SD cards, which use the same electronics as their bigger and older brother, a normal SD card. However, phones have since moved on, and many now sport a micro sd slot. Again, the card is simply a smaller version of a mini SD card, and you can use adaptors to insert it into a standard USB card reader, or into a PDA. Personally, I prefer memory cards that are not smaller than my thumb nail, but that is more due to my tendency of losing things - the smaller the object, the less easy it is to find. I suppose if the memory capacities continue to increase, and the price premium is not too great for physically smaller cards, there is no real loss.

Back in Britain, when we lived in our cottage in the country, I had a basic security system setup. We did not have a security problem per se, I just wanted to learn a little about the processes required. The setup was relatively simple, I had a webcam trained on the door to the computer room, and when a new image did not match the previous image by more than a certain percentage, a 5 minute video was automatically recorded. The main reason for allowing a small change from image to image was that if the sun went behind a cloud, the resulting change in lighting would originally trigger the system. I also had the video feed served up by my PC, and I could check the live feed from my mobile phone, albeit at around 1 frame per 12 seconds. Although the whole home camera setup was very Heath Robinson-ish, it did teach me about several technologies simultaneously. As we lived out in the country, I didn’t have an ADSL connection back then, we ust had two phone lines. One was connected to the net at 49.2Kbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and so I could check how things looked at home day or night.

If you would like this sort of system, but professionally created, and therefore more reliable, or simply don’t want to go to the hassle of installing a full blown server on your home PC and learn how to write scripts, then HomeCamera.com have the perfect software for you. The best part of this information? The software is FREE! Thats right, as the software is still in Beta phase, customers can currently sign up and use the service without spending a penny. The fact that almost any device that connects to the net can access pictures streamed from your camera, or even video if your device and connection can handle the bandwidth required means that if you own a webcam and a mobile phone, you are ready to go.
The site itself is written in a refreshingly down to earth manner. The guys obviously know their techy stuff, to be able to put the system together, but the terms used are plain English, and even come down on the side of friendly chatter, rather than simply quoting capabilities and leaving you to figure out how you might use it yourself.
If you think you might be interested in trying this out, take a quick tour and see how it works.

This post was financially backed by HomeCamera.com - they specifically asked bloggers to provide an honest opinion though, so the words and sentiments above are all mine

Whether your company needs to know where their valuable assets are at any point in time (be they transport and their drivers or stock), or as a parent you want to know where your child is, location based services have moved beyond the scope of only FTSE100 companies or police forces. A few years ago I experimented with a program called CellTrack which detected which cell tower your mobile phone was closest to, and then relayed that information to a central server. Sadly the project appears to have stopped development; however, TruePosition appear to have picked up the baton, and taken the concept a great deal further with their U-TDOA technology.

As an example, the last time I used such location tracking services (CID based I believe), you were only able to detected in which approximate area the phone was in. Now, thanks to clever use of existing technologies, accuracy has increased a great deal. If any of my English readers watch ‘The Bill’ you will already have a rough idea of how the phones are tracked, with triangulation from any three cell towers being the most basic mode of operation. However, there are circumstances where three reference points (in this case, cell towers) are not available. If you were to travel through a remote area, on a motorway, you may well find that the cell towers are positioned in a straight line running alongside the road. This obviously makes traditional triangulation an issue, however with the use of Angle Of Arrival calculations, only two transmitters are required.

Of course, there are times when you may either need higher accuracy, or when only one cellular tower is in range of the phone being used to track your valuable asset. In these circumstances, a Global Positioning System comes into play. As you may have noticed from my Amsterdam posts, I already play with a GPS unit with my PDA and SmartPhone. The versatility is quite impressive, and the ability to achieve a 3D fix with just 4 satellites in view mean that you can be reassured that the quoted location is very accurate.

To get the best of both worlds, a Hybrid solution is required. In cities with many tall buildings, obtaining a reliable GPS fix can be an issue, so this is where the aforementioned U-TDOA and similar approaches (check the link for a comprehensive guide to just how it all works) come into play. When you need higher accuracy, or mobile phone towers are not in such abundance, GPS can really help track your assets down. When you combine the two systems together, you end up with a higher accuracy and coverage service. Personally, I like the idea of being able to use technology your child already has (a mobile) to make sure they are safe, and where they are supposed to be. I would not like to use the service without the child’s consent, but I can see it helping keep children safe, and parents reassured.