So many ways to choose. Except if your RSS is dead, then you have zero.

The Economist, this means you!

If you move home, you can get the post office to redirect your letters so they come to your new address. If you change your internet address, it makes sense to tell your users where you’ve gone too.

So why do websites make it difficult for themselves by not doing this on their RSS feeds?

I almost never visit homepages, they are generally a waste of my time to flick through and find out what the new stuff is. I’ve even set my browser to come up with a blank page. Like most webusers, I begin with a search, or if I’m using some type of internet news reader software, then I’m using RSS.

If you change the address of your feed and don’t tell me, you’ve just lost me and everyone else who used to read you from that source.

Better still if you’ve decided to retire the blog, tell me and suggest alternatives. Don’t just stop updating. Best practice here from the Financial Times.

And the bad practice award also goes to the FT, as that’s exactly what they did almost a year ago when they moved their Tech Blog from

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ft/techblog

to

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ft/fttechhub

This means my feed just hangs on the last entry, 30 Dec 2010, and my tablet/phone/desktop newsreader stops working.

No more news for you

It’s not just news articles. Media downloads or podcasts depend on RSS. I haven’t had a new piece of Economist audio or video on my MP3 player since the end of October! No reason as to why in the feed. It still works, it’s just got nothing new in it.

So I pop over to their multimedia page.  Lots of new stuff on there, so at least they’re still making it. The RSS indicator on the page takes me to http://www.economist.com/rss which oddly mostly contains links back to the main websites, rather than to RSS links and certainly not a working multimedia RSS.

Their (possibly out of date) video portal at http://video.economist.com does have a front and centre RSS link. But that takes me to yet another (possibly even older) list of feeds, none of which is the one I’ve requested.

So, the Economist was making interesting stuff that used to turn up on my MP3 player/tablet/phone.

It’s still making useful stuff, except that now I can only watch/listen when I’m at my computer (which is increasingly irregular).  Or maybe I can get it on a more useful device, except they’re making it really hard to find out how.

If you’ve got a working feed for the Economist’s multimedia output, do let me know in the comments!

Because Breakfast <> Breakfast

I’m looking at many, many mobile apps at the moment. One which came across my radar and is currently having very heavy promotion on Apple’s App store is Zeebox.

Just for the web and iPads currently, although a phone version is promised, it’s an EPG with social features.  The major social feature being Twitter.

Zeebox promotes itself as a clever companion to TV viewing, although it wasn’t all that clever when I turned it on while watching BBC1′s ‘Breakfast’ earlier this week.

Anyone who’s ever watched BBC1 in the morning will tell you that a 3 hour show about having breakfast is hard to sustain (which is why it’s primarily a morning news show instead)

However, no one’s told Zeebox that, and as you can see from the photo above, it takes the name of the programme literally, helpfully giving me links to everything food related, and picking up everyone on Twitter burbling about what they’re eating.

I’m also not entirely sure how having a lot of keywords thrown at you represents usefulness, when you could almost as easily just put the word you were actually interested into a search engine, but what do I know, T3 loved it.

Now I could see the benefit of an app like this in the Breakfast TV gallery. Working the other way round, and scooping up info and ideas to enable the live producers to make the programme more interesting.

Incidentally, I notice that Yahoo bought a social TV app, IntoNow, earlier this year. It doesn’t do a lot yet either.

Got a useful TV app? Let me know in the comments.

Well maybe I don't want you to know

Privacy just got too simplistic

I’m fully invested in social networks. I love knowing what my friends are doing – whether across timezones or across London, I feel like I’m still with my friends even if I’m not physically with them.

I’m also a lot more social in real life than I used to be, and although this maybe just my current stage of life, it wouldn’t surprise me if online connections did foster those in the real-world.

However, I have many friends and colleagues however who are cautious about putting parts of their lives online. No problem, I would say. Facebook is the best for that: its privacy settings are so granular. You can choose exactly what you do want to share, and what you don’t, and with whom.

At least, that’s what I used to say. Facebook has made a really significant privacy settings change, and unlike all the others up till now which have increased and made my privacy options more flexible, this one is a definite downgrade.

Facebook used to have four main type of ownership or tag:

• Your uploaded photos
• Your name tag in a post
• Your name tag in a photo
• Your name tag in a place

This meant that I could put default restrictions who saw which types of tag.

I don’t mind some people seeing my own pictures, but I may not want them seeing other people’s pictures of me. There are people who can tag me in posts, but I don’t let most people tag me in a place, or see where I am. With different types of tag, I could decide some blanket rules, then set and forget.

I’m notorious at the BBC’s College of Journalism for demonstrating my many levels of privacy. By mixing and matching the above combinations, I have seven (!) different Facebook privacy settings. (Claire Wardle and Sue Llewellyn always find this most amusing.)

As the joke goes, I’m not paranoid; they ARE out to get me!

But Facebook have wrecked my system. There are now only two main types of tag:

• Your uploaded photos
• Your name tag in a post, photo or place.

This means that I can’t separate different types of post anymore. If you can see my tag, you can see everywhere it appears. No more allowing people to see photos of me, but not where I am, for instance.

The result of this is that I’m not going to share quite as much, quite as freely anymore.  All because Facebook over-simplified.

I can still make granular changes to individual posts, but only ones I’ve written, only as I make them, and only on the website. Now that’s complicated.

Your thoughts? Please comment.

No sooner than I complained about its disappearance, it’s back!

This is an update to a previous post where I’d found the Places Editor, and then thought I’d lost it again. I’ve now found it and have taken some screen grabs!

You can see what the first page looks like, why I get the choice of Northern Ireland, I have no idea!  I chose to tag duplicates, those things *really* annoy me.

Here’s what happens on the next, and it highlights one of the problems with the Places database:

You get a map and a bunch of entries from the database and you can tag each entry as to whether it’s a duplicate of the place shown, or specifically tag it not a dupe or you can leave it alone.

The interface needs some work. I don’t know why you’d get the option to tag it three ways. Surely easier to have just one button to ‘Confirm duplicate place’. Also the tick/cross is confusing. You’d think it was asking you to confirm if this entry was correct or not. It isn’t, it’s asking you to say if you think it’s a duplicate or not.

This mechanism needs to be made more fun – you just get screen after screen of data to correct, this gets boring without a good goal. I’d be interested in stats to show how many other people thought the entries were wrong, as well as knowing how much of a difference anything I do here is making to the database.

The most infuriating thing however is the inability to correct the actual location of the place in question! You can see here where FB has tagged ‘Paramount’ and where it actually is (in the Centrepoint Tower).

One of the big problems with adding new places is when the FB app grabs your GPS co-ordinates and how it verifies them. Some entries are several streets away from where they’re supposed to be, some are miles away. This is likely to be caused by the phone moving while the new entry was made, maybe the GPS cache in the phone was out of date.

So, yes I like being able to make edits to the database, but surely it’s important to have the actual locations correct too?

Places database gets fractionally more accurate, then doesn’t

I’m a Facebooker. I admit it, and I also admit that I’ve read most of the manual and pressed every single link on my page to see what happens. I get notifications delivered to my phone so I know the moment someone tags a photo of me that’s less than wholesome.  (Try doing that on Twitter when you have T-Mobile!)

So I was intrigued to find a new icon nestled in my apps navigation yesterday which said Facebook Places editor.

—

Update: The edit screen came back! Check out this post with new screengrabs.

—

I paraphrase the blurb which said something like ‘You use Places a lot, and you do a lot of tagging, so here’s a tool to help make the database better’.

I was offered a choice of places within the UK, or just places me and my friends checkin, and I could also choose to add additional information, or tag duplicates. I chose the duplicates, those things *really* annoy me.

Then I got a map and a place and a bunch of entries from the database and you can tag each entry as to whether it’s a duplicate of the place shown, or specifically tag it not a dupe or you can leave it alone.

The interface needs some work. I don’t know why you’d get the option to tag it three ways. Surely easier to have just one button to ‘Confirm duplicate place’. It also needs to be made more fun – you just get screen after screen of data to correct, this gets boring without a good goal. I’d be interested in stats to show how many other people thought the entries were wrong.

The most infuriating thing however was the inability to correct the actual location of the place in question! OK, so the duplicates and the misspellings of the dupes annoy me, but the thing that’s surely most important is that the marker for Heathrow Terminal 1 is actually in the right place!

One of the big problems with adding new places is when the FB app grabs your GPS co-ordinates and how it verifies them. Some entries are several streets away from where they’re supposed to be, some are miles away. This is likely to be caused by the phone moving while the new entry was made, maybe the GPS cache in the phone was out of date.

Anyway, in case you’re wondering, there are no screen grabs of any of this, because when I logged onto FB this afternoon the Places Editor had gone

Did they think my corrections were rubbish? Was I mistakenly put into this app and then someone realised and took me out?

Comment if you have the Places Editor, as a basic web search reveals absolutely no info about it whatsoever!

Old phone + new software = Extended life

So I’ve decided to keep my trusty N95 8GB phone going as long as I can. See the other two posts on how I made that decision and what upgrades and installations I made.

So what are the actual differences?

Browser

I now use Opera Mobile as my day-to-day surfing tool. Currently it’s on version 11, from March 2011, which makes it the newest piece of software on my 3 year old phone.

It displays pages on the web properly and has tabbed browsing – I can open multiple windows at once on my phone! The simple keypad shortcuts make it really easy to move around without a touchscreen.

It can even talk to the onboard GPS so I can use location services on websites like Facebook.

It’s great that Opera are still actively developing for Symbian S60. Nokia are working on a new browser, I bet they’re not bothering about older devices.

Maps

The GPS is much faster to lock on using the assisted GPS function which uses the phone’s data connection to give the GPS receiver an initial hint about where you are. I can now get an accurate fix within 20 seconds. This used to take 2 minutes or more.

Loading maps is simpler now with Ovi Suite.

I’ve chosen to stay with Nokia Maps 2 rather than get the new Ovi Maps because of the change they’ve made to navigation. Version 3.01 of Ovi Maps is prettier, but doesn’t include free navigation (even for walking!) and it nags to remind you this and even though there are menus to buy this additional feature, they don’t work.

Nokia Maps 2 still doesn’t do live navigation (although as a much older app the purchase function still appears to work) but you can create routes and step through them manually turn-by-turn, which works almost as well. You can do this in Ovi Maps, but it’s more fiddly.

Ovi Store

Nokia’s place to download apps. This is not well designed for an N95. It’s slow to move around and takes 3 clicks to do anything where 1 would suffice. It’s far more efficient to look for software on the website and get a link sent to your phone.

N-Gage games

Interestingly while I was still getting used to this feature, the N-Gage system seems to have been merged with Ovi and has stopped working. The N95 is not a great device for gaming, and the games for it are slow and fairly expensive when compared with iTunes and Apple devices which can do far more.

One of the games which caught my eye seems not to have made it over to Ovi (save this video walkthrough) was Dirk Dagger. I can’t find it in the new store and the URL is now dead. Still, you can play it on the web.

Sync

This is a neat app which backs up my contacts, calendar and notes. If something happens to my phone they can be sent back to it, and I can access that data online too, although I haven’t found where the Notes data is. I like not having to worry about my contact book anymore. My phone is absolutely my life and the data on it is extremely precious.

Other Apps I use

Joikuspot

This takes the 3G signal in my phone and turns it into a mobile wifi hotspot. This is so useful it’s one of the few times I’ve ever upgraded to the paid version of an app. (Dirty little secret: I have an iPod touch, and with this app, it effectively turns into an iPhone)

Podcasting

I couldn’t live without this now. I have 17 radio programmes (I’m normally can’t watch the screen cos I’m doing something else, like walking) I download regularly. There’s no better feeling than knowing your phone is full of great stuff to listen to.

Skype

Just the voice version. Much better over wifi than 3G, although perfectly good for instant messages.

Gmail

Perfectly optimised for a non-touch screens. You can access most functions via keypad shortcuts. Puts Nokia’s inbuilt app to shame.

BBC iPlayer

I’m getting less use of this than I expected, partly because it’s only for wifi use, I would only use it at home and when I’m at home I use my hard disc recorder. Stuff on there is full broadcast resolution and doesn’t expire after 7 days.

Photo sharing

There are plugins for sending photos to both Flickr and Ovi Share. Flickr is very useful but I can’t think of the use for Ovi Share (and likewise Ovi Mail), no one I know has ever heard of it. It doesn’t seem to integrate to anything. Nokia will probably send it the way of N-Gage.

Various IM apps

There’s Fring and eBuddy if you like those sort of things.

My friend Abdo swears by Whatsapp and continually demands that I download it, however I have unlimited text messages (and I’m pretty sure he does) so I don’t see the point of an app which duplicates that functionality.

It’s probably more useful if you have contacts in other countries, but I use FishText for that as it sends real SMS text messages to foreign networks very cheaply.

Conclusion

So that’s the current state of my phone. It does more and for me it’s more useful now than when I bought it. Plus the N95 is a very good reliable phone, with decent battery life.

I think this refresh should see my N95 8GB still in use in 2012, and assuming the electronics keep working, this could well be my backup phone for sometime after that.

If you’re still using an N95 I’d love to know why and if you have any tips you can share. Let me know in the comments.

It’s very common on Yahoo IM at least to have random users attempt to add you, if you accept a chat bot will attempt to send you a link to their “webcam” or similar and if you click, you’ll probably get some kind of drive-by download infection.

The attack attempt I saw today is different. The virus hijacks the Yahoo Instant Message client and sends out a chat stream to people you already know on IM. So rather than seeing the obvious chat bot from a random user who’s just added you, it comes from someone you already know. Scary and dangerous.

Here’s a transcript of the chat script … I didn’t realise it wasn’t my friend until the link showed up. I bet many unsuspecting people do click through:

contact: you there?
me: hey
contact: will you do me a quick favor and take an IQ quiz for a project im doing?
me: haha sure
contact: I need to see how many people out of my friends get over a 115.
me: what’s my prize?
contact: just go to  http://nastytrojanvirus.com/?invitecode=dxk4infa79 and take the test.. if you do ill owe you big time.
me: yeah, don’t think I’m clicking that somehow
contact: please let me know what score you get. thanks so much
me: rest assured I won’t
contact: im going to go cook while you do it
me: what does a bot cook?
contact: BRB, let me know your score when im back!
me: bot bot bot

The link it sends appears to go to a slightly different domain each time (the first was to iqtestingkoia, the second to iqtestinghiki3)

It’s also interesting that the bot appears to both initiate chat sessions and respond to them. The first time I saw the attack attempt, the chat was initiated by the bot.  But the second time I saw it, half and hour later, I initiated the chat session with a friend I just saw come online.

Anyone else seen this?

In the midst of my zeal to get more value out of some of my older electronics I’ve just had a setback.

This morning I turned on my Tivo and got this screen:

No more predictions for me

To be honest, I’ve been expecting this news. There were always going to be two options. Either the hardware was going to expire (something I’d tried to mitigate already 3 years ago by upgrading the hard disc, the only mechanical component), or Tivo itself would turn the system off.

Option two happened first. Yes, I am an early adopter. Tivo launched in Britain in October 2000. But in having my Tivo for something like 8 years, I’m surprised that they waited quite this long.

The thing about Tivo which makes it different from other hard disc recorders is that it depends on a regular download of TV and radio programme data provided by Tivo itself. No EPG data, and the box becomes a dumb VHS device you have to laboriously set for each recording.

Tivo was something that Sky brought in to help navigate their hundreds of satellite channels. But a year later Sky realised it was something they could do themselves and launched the Sky+ box in 2001.

Tivo lingered for a little while but decided to stop selling their device at the start of 2003.

All that time it was actually Sky which maintained the Tivo platform. You never needed a Sky subscription however, Tivo worked perfectly well with Freeview, which is what I used it with. If you had a problem with your subscription it’s  Sky’s call centre you get put through to.

I actually bought a Topfield Freeview Plus recorder a year ago and I have been running the two side by side. I’d been trying to wean myself off Tivo because I knew my hardware didn’t have a future although I still use it on a daily basis. The reason why is significant and it’s something that today’s manufacturers still need to pay attention to.

1) Tivo is really simple to use.

2) The box predicts what I want to watch and if I forget to record something, it normally does it anyway.

And that’s it. That’s what’s kept me using it for 8 years. Many’s the time I’ve been on the train in the morning and while flicking through the free paper realised there was something on TV that night I wanted to watch. Dammit, I’d think. I wish I’d set the recorder.

Imagine my delight when I got home and discovered that this gorgeous box had done it for me! There was always something on TV I wanted to watch. I stopped watching linear TV (and advertisements) the same week, and I’ve never gone back. That knack of prediction is something Freeview and Sky never managed to replicate.

Compared with the Topfield device I have now, even 8 years on, the original Tivo interface is a *lot* easier to use.

I shall miss it.

But Tivo is about to  re-launch on a new platform and want rid of legacies like my old box. Although I imagine that with Tivo now being associated with Virgin Media , Sky don’t want to keep it going any longer. Maybe there are contractual issues. Who knows.

It would be interesting to know how many of the original Thomson Scenium devices are still out there, and what proportion of them are still paying £10 a month for the EPG download (there was also an option to buy a ‘lifetime’ EPG subscription for £300).

I will now have to try and make the best of the last few months of my Tivo’s life. It’s an analogue device so keeping it going beyond digital switchover was another issue on my mind. Getting out of the habit of tagging programmes I like or dislike will be a struggle.

But viewing has moved on. My next TV will be HD, as will the recording box I buy with it. It will have at least 5x the recording space, although the number of TV channels coming into it will stay about the same (I intend staying on Freeview)

My entertainment choice will still change though. My next TV will be able to download directly from the web and playback media from any device within a WiFi radius.

What won’t change is the amount of time I have to be able to watch the damn thing!

N95 8GB - the recession buster

So, (and it took little longer than I anticipated) to bring you up to speed if you’ve not read the previous post: I had a Nokia N95 and rather than buy a newer Nokia or switch to Android or Apple, I thought I’d see if software updates would make it last a little bit longer.

After all, one of the reasons for getting an expensive smartphone to start with was for occasional new software and features, except that I never got around to doing many of them.

Here’s my prep list

1) Back up all  contacts, messages, audio, video pictures. Don’t just rely on the phone’s internal backup, I kept a copy on my computer too. You can never be too careful, my phone is my life.

2) Download Nokia’s software update tool and follow the instructions. The update will be about half an hour.

3)  It’s possible that you have firmware locked to a particular network operator, in which case the Nokia software update tool won’t give you the most recent version for your phone.

You can unlock this yourself by downloading some free software and carefully following ‘debranding’ guides such as these:

Nigel Coldwell’s firmware unbranding guide

Rich Edwards’s debranding guide

(Doing this will invalidate your warranty, although it’s probably run out now anyway.)

And now I have firmware version V35.0.001 from November 2009. Yes, it’s over a year old, but this is a definite improvement on the July 2008 stuff I was running.

So what’s it got me?

Nokia Maps 2

N-Gage games

Ovi store

And  a bunch of other apps! Which apps I chose and why coming up in part 2.

The N95 8GB - still going strong after 3 years?

The first smartphone I ever got was a Nokia N95 in mid-2007.  It was a contract deal, the handset was free if I stayed for 18 months, and it made a very expensive phone (around £400 I think) affordable.

I looked carefully at the specs and reckoned this had staying power: 5MP camera, expandable memory, MP3, email, WiFi, 3G, proper web browser, video recording/editing, playback through the TV with wide support for different video codecs, maps and GPS and the thing that swung it for me,  a standard headphone minijack.

I was hooked. It was a ‘media’ phone. I created media on it, I watched and listened to stuff too. I went everywhere with that phone.

And looking back, that was a damn good choice still. It outlasted the contract and I didn’t have to replace it for 2 years until the screen started to get flickery.  I looked around for another model which would last equally well.

When I compared prices and features I was disappointed. Phones hadn’t moved on much. True, Apple was in the market now and all my friends were turning to iPhones, although apart from a great interface and a touchscreen, the little N95 was still technically a better phone. Even two years later.

So I made my decision. I bought another N95.

This was mid-2009, phone companies were offering other models and they were proving hard to find. You could still buy them new, no-contract, but even though I liked the device, I didn’t think it was worth paying full price for a 2 year old phone.

So I looked around on Ebay to find someone locally who was upgrading. I bought an unlocked N95 8GB (Nokia’s updated version) in very good condition for about £170 (it also came with a copy of Spiderman, which I watched on a plane).

This is the phone I still have. Nokia gave the 8GB model a software update, added a larger capacity battery, and doubled the internal memory. My keypad’s starting to wear off with use, I still think it’s a great phone because it does everything I need and I use most of the features at least a couple of times a week.

However, the N95 models are now 3 and a half years old. There’s nothing wrong with my handset, but with iPhone 4 and the N8 now out, thoughts turned to a new model.

And then I had another thought: In these tightened times, would it make sense to ‘sweat my asset’ just a little bit more?

Drowned out by Apple marketing, Nokia has released many updates over the last couple of years, the biggest being the Ovi app system. The N95 is still supported and can be upgraded. Can I use these updates to revitalise my phone? Will it get a new breath of life? Can I prove again that the N95 was my smartest buy so far?

That’s the subject of the next post. Stay tuned.