Well, I thought I had been here before, and heading back into the mists of blog-time I’ve found that I was raving (or was it ranting?) about them back in April 2003. As I still like and listen to the guys, I believe they are very worthy recipients of the band of the week award.
Here’s what I said about them back in April 2003
The Eye Bent Grape Spasm
Yes, erm, well I think they rock.
Today's listening is The Eye Bent Grape Spasm's seminal 1993 classic album Large Scary Nasal Hair. Personal favourites have to be Steenkin' Bandito's and Serious Jazz. What more can I say, excellent stuff, especially the Hendrix-esque excursions into previously uncharted sonic domains.
Something else to check out in a similar vein are the other bands on the Very Concerned Records site – Pompillion certainly look like a future candidate for band of the week!
So, Matt has finally got his 6682, but all is not entirely well in the land of Dorothy and the Tin Man.
Not content with being very late to the game (the N70 is now appearing in European shops), Cingular also appear to have hamstrung the 6682, you’d think the US networks would have started learning some lessons from the V710 debacle, and the subsequent class action.
I’ve got nothing much against operators changing the firmware on the phones they sell to improve the customer experience, I quite like the Orange home screen on my Nokia 6680, but I’m less than impressed when the networks take things away. Here’s one example of how the 6680 works for emailing an image taken with the camera.
Nothing too contentious there, open the gallery application, select an image, and choose to send it via email. Now, try this on a 6682 that’s been hamstrung by Cingular, and you won’t see the email choice. This may seem crazy, because Cingular are going to get your money anyway for the data traffic if you choose Multimedia (MMS) instead, with the major proviso that MMC images are frequently brutally cut down to size by the operators gateways, so your 1.3 megapixel image will look like a 256 colour vga sized image, hell you might as well have taken it with a RAZR…
After a few attempts at doing this, most people will take the smart route, they’ll either send pictures from their phone using bluetooth or by using a memory card reader, and the Cingular will have cut themselves completely out of the loop. I thought 3-UK took some beating for absolute stupidity, but Cingular are heading that way.
Update: Looks like I’ve got this a little wrong, for
all 6682s (and 6680s I guess) the
"Send via e-mail" menu option is hidden until you’ve
configured an email account on the phone, whoops!
However, Cingular still keep this menu item disabled.
So Rita has landed and as I write this she's making quite a mess of Galveston, my hosting provider is Texas based, so if this blog goes off the air you'll know what's happened.
I've got plenty of backups in part down to Gustaf's shell script to backup to Gmail which works nicely for blosxom, pyblosxom and even my wiki, in fact any file based cms (that's not vast) can use this backup approach.
As they always say you can never have too many backups, and off-site storage can be essential, you never know what might happen to your PCs...
You may have noticed that I’ve given my linkblog entry generator a slight revision, the output should be a little more informative with links to the tags used, and a link to the other people linking to each item.
As before, it’s GPL licensed and the source code is available as: pydelicious.py
One odd thing I encountered with pytextile was when I tried being too clever and used a definition list instead of nested unordered lists; definition list are pretty easy to do use in pytextile, but they appear to having a flaw in implementation. Their syntax is simple enough, for example
.bc dl. Monty Python:A British tv comedy series which first aired in 1969
would generate:
- Monty Python
- A British tv comedy series which first aired in 1969
It uses the colon character to split the items up, however if you try to use a link in a definition list things start getting strange. The format for a link is "link text":http://example.com and the definition list code spots the colon and split the link over two items! There’s probably a simple way around this but it’s not in my textile skillset yet.
So you’ve got a shiny new Nokia 6680 or 6682 and you’re concerned about keeping track of the length of your current phone call. Like so many Series 60 features this is configurable and I think it’s turned off by default.
Turning it on (or off) involves a little bit of menu navigation, start the “Log” application, and change the “Settings” for “Show call duration” to your desired value. Gustaf shows you how in this nice set of step by step instructions.
Gustaf’s tried this on a Nokia 6630 and I’m sure it should work on any Series 60 phone.
