I'm in the process of moving all my contacts from BlackBerry to Android. I've been moving contacts from phone to phone for close to 10 years - but I've never found a problem like this. Getting my contacts from BlackBerry to Google was simple. I exported a VCF of all my contacts from Outlook and imported them to Google. Simplicity. Everything worked. Syncing back to Android was easy - input Google account and password and hey-presto. But that's where it all broke down. The address seems…
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I was mightily disturbed to receive an email from Google apparently telling me I had purchased a Nexus One phone. Had I been hacked? Had my credit-card details been used to buy a phone? Were Google sending me one for free? Hello! Your new Nexus One phone has many cool and useful features. Learn more by clicking on the links to watch brief YouTube videos directly on your phone: Take pictures with your 5mpx camera and view them in your 3D Media Gallery. Learn more Get transcribed…
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I'm a natural Labour voter. As I explained several months ago, I went in to this election thinking I may vote Labour. It's now become clear that my vote will be going to the Liberal Democrats. More than that, I will be joining them. I want to explain why - without resorting to attacking the other parties. Voting Reform As I've said, I was raised in a Labour household. I went to university expecting to vote Labour. Yet in ever constituency I've ever lived, the Labour Party haven't fiel…
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If you haven't already heard, I've joined the award winning team at Touchnote ltd. I was overwhelmed by the support of my friends on Twitter and by the excellent bloggers at Mobile Industry Review and The Really Mobile Project. http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2010/04/vodafones-terence-eden-joins-touchnote.html Starting a new job is never easy - but you guys have given me wind in my sails. My first week has just flown by - so thank you all. As ever, this blog remains personal. Nothing …
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In 1974, a post-boxing day Britain tuned in to BBC 1 to watch "Robot" - the first Doctor Who story to star Tom Baker. For the next 6 years, 2 months, and 22 days, Tom Baker was The Doctor. But, as these things are wont to do, it came to an end. Forgive the spoilers, but The Doctor lay broken and bleeding after The Master threw him off the Pharos Project. Death was certain. And then... On the 1st of September, 2003, a young and eager Terence Eden walked into Vodafone to start on the G…
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I'm a huge fan of Paul Battley's iplayer-dl. In brief, it downloads videos from iPlayer by pretending to be an iPhone. The .MP4 files it grabs are suitable for playback on most mobile devices (480 x 272 and stereo audio). It also downloads radio programmes as .MP3 files. I was having a bit of trouble installing it on my XNAS - running Xebian Linux, so I've written this as an aide-mémoire. I hope you find it useful. Install Ruby and Ruby Gems apt-get install ruby rubygems Download and …
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My eye has been caught by a stunning new gadget - the Immortal Video Eye Gear. Head mounted 3-megapixel video camera. Seamlessly embedded within a pair of innocuous looking sun glasses. At £250, they're not cheap. While battery life looks good at 2.5 hours, they can only record one hour of video. No method of playback means no deletion, so you're stuck until you can find a laptop. No expandable memory. Would it have been so hard to take microSD cards? Regardless of any shortcomings, ta…
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Mobile QR codes are fantastic. They're real-life hyperlinks. Snap them with your phone and go direct to a website. What could be better? The BBC, however, need a few lessons in how to optimise the experience. As part of their Prisoner Zero page - the BBC have an awesome "Wanted Poster". Here's the teaser image. Prisoner Zero - QR Code Let's take a look at the full QR code. This is about the size it would be if the poster were printed on A4. QR Code There are three problems with this…
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It shouldn't come as a surprise to any reader of this blog that I'm a phone geek. And a Doctor Who geek. So, image my utter nerdgasm when we got to see the 11th Doctor using a mobile he'd nicked. The burning question is which phone? Touchscreen It's quite hard to see throughout the episode. It just looks like a standard touchscreen device in a rubber casing. I had wondered if the props team had created a dummy phone to be used. What Phone? Annoyingly, the phone is almost always out of fo…
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I'm a shameless Doctor Who geek. I loved the first episode of the new series. But I wanted to point out a (minor?) plot hole in the episode. Slight spoilers here, so wait until you've seen the show. Towards the end, the Doctor is having a stand off with the Atari. He's discussing the planet Earth and asks... Is this world protected? The Atari play a montage of various baddies the Doctor has seen off including the Silurians / Sea Devils!) - but take a look at these three images. Ood Ev…
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Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger, I bought a TARDIS. Sadly, it turned out to be made of cardboard and only suitable for storing DVDs. No flying through time for me :-( Also, it turns out that it wasn't bigger on the insider than on the outside. Meaning, it's now full. Does anyone know where I can get another one? …
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Weeks before Britons go to the polls, there's still no comprehensive list of candidates. Four citizens' initiatives have joined forces to tackle the problem. They've been gathering basic information about thousands of candidates and making the data public. "It may seem surprising but there simply is no single listing for all prospective parliamentary candidates. We want people to make an informed choice and that's difficult because so many new people are standing this time - and a record…
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