stuart test blog

Vodafone have announced today that they will start locking the mobile phones they sell so that they can only be used on the Vodafone NZ network. You will be able to ring a special number to get an unlock code, but that will cost $50 for the privilege.

Vodafone’s spin doctor, Paul Brislen, insults everyone’s intelligence in the Geekzone forums by providing an excuse that only the most naive would believe:

Hi all,

Vodafone’s mobiles are sold exclusively for use on Vodafone New Zealand’s network.

From 1 May we are locking new handsets to our network. All new handsets sold will include information about handset locking and how to unlock handsets.

Locked handsets can be unlocked for a fee of $50.

This is being done to protect the customers’ experience of the Vodafone brand. Vodafone brands its mobiles with both the Vodafone and Vodafone Live! look and feel. If a customers takes a Vodafone mobile to another network, the customer won’t be able to access the Vodafone experience and services.

Cheers
Paul

(the emphasis is mine.)

I don’t blame Paul for his spin – it’s just his job – and all credit goes to both Paul and Vodafone for being willing to participate in the forums. But the truth is that Vodafone is about to face competition in NZ for the first time in as long as I’ve been in NZ. For the last six years (that I know of) they have been the only GSM operator in NZ, meaning they had no competition from anyone. But now that’s changing as Telecom finalises it’s GSM network rollout, and another small mobile operator called NZ Communications launches in Auckland. Paul wants us to believe that it’s just coincidence that Vodafone starts locking their phones at the same time they are about to face some competition.

Regardless of their reasons, Vodafone have decided to lock their phones to their network. This practice is actually commonplace in other countries, with one caveat. In other countries, the up-front cost of the mobile phone is hugely subsidised, and you can usually get a reasonably new phone for free with most contracts.

So if Vodafone are going to lock their phones to their networks, are we going to see hugely subsidised phones for sale? No word on that yet, but we’ll wait and see.

However, there is another way to do business – but I don’t know of any mobile operator that’s brave enough to try it… Instead of trying to lock in customers on two year contracts, with locked phones, exorbitant data rates, and crappy customer service, how about investing in providing a service that is so good, that customers have no reason to want to leave? Imagine if Vodafone provided reasonably priced phones, with fantastic call and data plans, with friendly and helpful customer service – why would you want to leave Vodafone?

So how about it Vodafone? Try slashing the costs of your data plans, and let customers buy the latest phones at great prices? Perhaps then you’ll stop losing so many customers to your competition.

• My post on the Geekzone forums.

The HowToForge site have released a step by step tutorial for the perfect Ubuntu 8.04 desktop setup. I’ve used their tutorials extensively over the last few years, and this one is just as good as the others and includes tips that you wouldn’t normally think of when installing Ubuntu.

The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)

This document describes step by step how to set up a Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment.

Now I just need to work out how to remove Firefox 3 beta, and install Firefox 2…

Virtual PC is infamous for it’s inability to support Linux installations. There are always hacks required to get through the installation, but once installed your Linux machine should work fine.

So I wasn’t completely surprised when I ran into issues while trying to install the latest server version of Ubuntu 8.04. A quick Google search lead me to find out (via a comment left in a blog post) that to get the installation working you need to do the following:

• Boot off the CD (ISO) and then choose your language
• Press F6 on the next screen and you’ll see a long string of text near the bottom of the screen.
• Type the following before the trailing dashes: noapic nolapic vga=791
• Press enter and continue the installation.

So far so good.

And remember, that Ubuntu 8.04 is a LTS (long term support) version, which means that Ubuntu will provide support and updates for 5 years for the server version.

I’ve been following Ubuntu since it’s inception in 2005 with Warty Warthog which was labelled 4.10. Each year since then they’ve released two versions a year – one in April and one in October – and this is where the version number comes from. For example, the 8 in 8.04 is from the year 2008, and the 04 is the fourth month of the year.

Each release has been getting better, and especially the last version (7.10) which I thought was a definite contender. So Ubuntu 8.04 was released today and I’ve just finished ‘installing’ it and giving it a very quick test.

I put ‘installing’ in quotes, because if you’re running Windows, Ubuntu have created an impressive installation called Wubi. This allows you to install it on your Windows computer without having to make any changes to the disk partitions. They do this by creating a folder called Ubuntu on either your C or D drive and install all the necessary files in this folder. Then, with a simple modification to your boot options, when you first turn on your computer you can choose between Windows or Ubuntu. Here’s a screenshot of the Wubi installation manager:

Once Wubi finished installing, I rebooted choosing the newly added Ubuntu option. Ubuntu loaded up quickly and I was presented with a login box. I had already set up the first user account in the Wubi installation manager as you can see in the installation window above. After logging, I was impressed to see that my screen resolution was set to the correct size, sound was working, and a network icon in the top menu bar indicated that there were available wireless networks available. I selected my wireless network, enter the secure key and connected successfully.

Wow.

What just happened there isn’t possible with any other operating system on my notebook. Not Windows XP, Vista or any other flavour of Linux that I’ve tested. The key hardware was detected automatically and I didn’t have to install any additional drivers or software to get up and running. That’s impressive – and all that without needing to repartition or reformat my disks.

So once again I’ve been impressed with Ubuntu, but there was one major problem – and this was a show-stopper for me. Ubuntu have always prided themselves on providing the absolute latest software and sometimes on the bleeding edge too. So I wasn’t completely surprised that they included Firefox 3.0, but I also wasn’t happy as it’s still in beta and in my opinion still has a way to go before being complete. This becomes obvious when trying to install addons, even installing the Adobe Flash plugin through up an error after just browsing for a few minutes.

For me, my internet browser is the most important tool on my computer, and I absolutely need it to be as stable as possible. That’s why I never run beta versions of Firefox as my default browser. So I tried to install Firefox 2 by using the add/remove programs applet but I couldn’t find anything apart from the version that was installed.

I’m sure that I could have installed Firefox 2 by downloading it directly from Mozilla but it just annoyed me that they would think that a beta version of Firefox would be fine for the typical home user.

When Flickr announced their new video service that allows you to store your videos in-line with your photos, I thought it was time to start processing all the videos that we’ve taken of Elliot over the last 10 months and start posting them online.

Turns out that video editing and processing is a lot harder than I first expected.

The first thing I did was start up Windows Movie Maker on my Vista notebook, expecting it to be a complete breeze. Came across a showstopper pretty quickly – Windows Movie Maker doesn’t support the MPEG2 videos from our Sony Video Recorder. It’s not like it’s an uncommon format or anything, so it’s annoying that there’s no support built in. I also found out later that the MPEG4 videos from my Nokia N95 are also not supported by Movie Maker. Not impressed.

So I then started some research into video editing software – I was hoping to find a good freebie that would do the job, but was also willing to pay for something if needed. After much research and downloading, I finally was deciding between Sony Vegas Movie Studio, or Adobe Premiere Elements.

I preferred the interface of Vegas as it was quite advanced but also dead simple to use, so it makes you feel like a pro. The interface in Premiere Elements is also nice, but more in a pretty, child-like way.

Both seemed to do the same sorts of things, but Premiere Elements had better options for exporting videos, whereas the Sony software tried to trick you into using their own online service for uploading videos to the Internet.

But the Premiere Elements trial was super annoying because you couldn’t export videos without a huge banner overlaid on the video saying that it was produced by a trial version of the software. The Sony software had no such limitations, and I almost bought the Sony software for that reason alone.

But I went for Adobe’s Premiere Elements in the end because it was the only software that I could use to export my videos in widescreen format without the letterbox bars and without the videos looking stretched. (I also learned a lot about the differences between square pixels and PAL and NTFS sized videos along the way.)

I actually bought the Adobe Elements bundle which also includes Photoshop Elements as the interface looked the same as Premiere so I thought it would be easy to use.

Anyway, here’s the first video from Premiere Elements. I haven’t actually done any editing on it as I was just pleased enough that the size came out right. A nice feature about embedding videos from Flickr is that you can choose the size of the video when embedding.

In the first round of Britain’s Got Talent 2008, a 13 year old boy has wowed the crowds and is destined to be the next big star. Andrew Johnston has been bullied at school because of his singing, but his first, nervous performance says it all…

I was upgrading to the latest version of Google Mobile Maps when my N95 rebooted itself. After starting up again, I would get the Nokia logo then nothing but a white screen. Removing the batter and SIM card didn’t help fix the issue either.

So after some Googling I found out how to reset your N95 back to the factory defaults while in a broken state. Turn on your N95 while holding the ‘3’, ‘*’, and ‘answer’ keys and it will go through the reset process and you’ll get back to the setup screen.

Hope this tip helps someone else searching for the solution.

Just noticed a little Easter egg in Google’s Docs application. When creating a new Document from within Google Docs, you’re given the option to create a "New airplane". Clicking on this opens a new Google Doc with the following image as a template. Enjoy.