Archives 2009

Well, I’ve had my Android G1 phone for a little over two months now and thought I’d write up my findings, and also put together a few tutorials on what I’ve done to my phone.

From day one, I’ve been impressed with my phone. I can’t comment on how different the cupcake (1.5) software is different from previous releases as mine came pre-upgraded, but from all accounts it was a major step forward. I have since rooted my phone and put some experimental builds of the operating system on it with fantastic results.

Once I’d uploaded my contacts to gmail, the phone automatically synced up with my account so all my contacts were available within a couple of minutes. I would’ve liked to stay using my own syncml server in egroupware, but google does make things a whole lot easier, as well as being a little more reliable than my home broadband! Also included in this sync was any calendar entries.

The general feel of the phone is quite nice, with the smooth touch screen interface working well. Not as slick as the iphones that I have seen, but then it is a lot cheaper. About the only criticism I have had with the phone is the abysmal battery life, this however has been fixed as I will mention below.

After using it for a few days, trying various applications from the market, and generally doing the usual new phone things, I decided it was time to break it! First on the agenda was rooting it. Underlying everything it is a Linux distribution, with all the geek fun that that entails. Rooting gives you access to the internal flash and allows you to do all sorts of fun things with your phone, most important to me was the ability to upload custom ROM images. A good guide to rooting your G1 (along with a lot of useful information) can be found at the xda developers forums.

After a bit of hunting around, I found what seemed to be one of the best ROM images to try buy a guy known as JesusFreke. Putting a custom ROM on your G1 once it has been rooted is a piece of cake. Simply drop the ROM image (update.zip) onto the root of an SD card, boot up the phone whilst pressing home and power which will drop you into a boot loader from which you can flash with the new ROM. Occasionally you will have to wipe all information from the phone, but that’s what backups are for!

Custom ROM images tend to have a few extra applications built in, and little tweaks here and there. Most importantly they do tend to improve the poor battery life. I ran with the JesusFreke ROM for a few weeks quite happily, until I came across another ROM image that seemed even more fun.

Whilst looking for info on the Android Donut release, I came across a guy called Cyanogen who had been back porting a lot of the new experimental Donut code, back into Cupcake. This included things like extra widgets, speed improvements, updated apps, and battery tweaks. I downloaded the latest experimental ROM and flashed my device with it. I’m glad I did. Battery life for me had started around the 5-6 hour mark when I was being conservative with phone usage and things being turned on. With JesusFreke that had extended to maybe 7-8 hours. Putting Cyanogen’s new ROM on has just about doubled the battery life. I’m easily getting a full days usage out of the phone without having to power save by turning wifi and bluetooth off constantly.

I’ve just put the latest version on (3.9.11.2) which now includes the global search function demoed at the Google IO conference earlier this year. One search bar will now search the internet, contacts, market and applications, with more applications tieing in as they are updated. Also included by default is apps2sd which installs apps to your SD card to save phone memory (if you partition your SD card correctly), linux swap on SD (again if your SD card is partitioned), compcache which greatly increases cached items performance, as well as so many performance increases you won’t believe the speed difference from the standard ROM.

All in all, the standard G1 is a great phone, just let down by poor battery life. A rooted/modded G1 using Cyanogen’s experimental ROM is probably the best phone I have ever had. If you have a G1 still running the stock ROM, all I can say is it is worth biting the bullet and getting a custom image put on it. Yes, there is a risk of turning your phone into a rather expensive plastic brick, but in my opinion it is worth it.

Hopefully I will write up a guide to how I’ve updated my phone incase anyone wants to do something similar. Also, I’ll probably have to do the obligatory list of apps that you should need!

Well, my laptop is playing up and getting a bit old so I’m in the market for a new one. I only want to buy one with Linux pre-installed, not for any anti-Microsoft reasons as such but just so that it can be noted that there is a market out there for Linux computers. My current laptop was bought from Dell with Ubuntu installed on it, which has done me well for the last few years, so I decided to give them my repeat business. Checking their Linux website shows no current devices available, so I decided to try and contact them to see if there were any future plans.

First off, when trying to contact Dell for any reason, they don’t supply an email address! I find this most bizarre as I don’t necessarily want to phone, snail mail, or chat online with a sales person. I bit the bullet and went to the online chat to ask the question and here is the conversation:

So, a one word response from their sales team. I guess they must be very, very busy and don’t have the time to answer properly. Granted, they did actually answer my question, but a two letter answer is rather abrupt.

Needless to say, they won’t be getting any repeat business from me, and seeing as I generally get asked for advice on buying laptops and desktops they’re probably going to be loosing a bit more business too. Time to find somewhere else that sells linux laptops!

First and foremost, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is fantastic story about a young adult growing up in a post 9/11 world full of paranoia, who gets caught up by Homeland Security after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. It paints a bleak view of how much power the authorities could gain if people let them, to monitor all activities and take people with no reason or apologies.

The reluctant hero of the story, Marcus, has a choice after caught wether to lie back and accept the new world order, or fight back. This leads to a fantastic story of someone growing up rather quickly and fighting back against the authorities that wrongly imprisoned him.

The second aspect of this book is the fact that it is open source. Published under a creative commons license the book is available as a free download as well as the more traditional dead tree version. Even better, the downloads page has the story in just about any format you could want, including the standard format for the Sony PRS-505. The author has written up his reasons for offering the book for free, along with suggesting ideas for donations if you enjoy the story.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this story and have since bought it to pass onto friends and urge others to do the same!

A lot of people complain about companies outsourcing their call centers and moving them overseas to places like India, saying that the service level suffers and they are a total waste of money. Well, taking out the issues around removing jobs from the UK, I think that it is down to training of the staff and the overseas people that the companies are willing to employ.

Just recently I’ve had reason to call a couple of call centers from different companies. One was a fantastic experience, with really helpful staff who dealt with my queries proffesionally. The other was absolutely abismal with the staff not being able to understand me and fobbing me off.

When I wanted to upgrade my phone with Three, I gave the upgrades line a ring and (after the usual automated menus) had a pleasant Indian sounding lady take my order who took my details and sorted out my upgrade. Of course, as it was a sales line she tried to sell me some addons, which I listened to and actually agreed to one, an unlimited internet package for an extra fiver a month. Now about 10 minutes after I finished the call, I got the lady ringing me back to tell me that the unlimited internet offer conflicted with my mobile broadband. After a short conversation where I explained what I actually needed she went away to talk to a supervisor. When she rang back she had everything sorted (I couldn’t have the unlimited internet offer and use my mobile as a modem). Of course, this was a sales line, so they may well have their best staff on there, but later that week there was a confusion over the delivery of my upgrade and when I rang up to track the package on a couple of occasions I got some more really helpful staff who gave me all the details I needed to find out what was happening to my delivery. Now order tracking is probably low on the priority for a company to provide, but I still got good service and helpful staff.

On the other end of the service spectrum is Sky. A year or so ago I got a Sky+ HD box off eBay and installed it myself. Now when I initially rang up to get my viewing card paired up I got really awful service. I kept getting cut off and when I finally got talking to someone they refused to let me pair the box unless I took the HD subscription. In the end, after getting put through to a supervisor they told me that the computer system had crashed and they’d have to submit my application via paper and it’d take up to seven days. I didn’t believe a word of it, but as it was only the movies that I couldn’t watch I gave them the benefit of the doubt and left it for a week. When I called back thankfully I got the Scottish call center and they sorted out the pairing whilst I was on the phone.

This all happened again when I actually wanted to get the HD subscription. The Indian call center basically couldn’t understand what I wanted and couldn’t be bothered trying, so I got fobbed off with yet another lie when they told me I’d have to get a new viewing card and it would turn up in a few days. Again, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and left it for a week before ringing back. This time I got a nice woman in Scotland who sorted everything out nice and quickly and within a couple of hours the HD subscription was sorted and I could watch Battlestar in all its HD glory!

So, when people complain about overseas call centers being useless, they can’t lump them all in together. Some companies have moved them and seem to actually traing their staff, or at least have good procedures in place. Others have just hired anyone who can speak a dozen words of english, plonked a script in front of them and left them to it.

Of course, it would be nice to keep the jobs and money in the UK, but thats a totally thing!