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So, coming to the end of my first month on GiffGaff, the Mobile MVNO powered by O2, so what can i say about it?
First impressions are excellent. Quick simple well managed, my number port in was amazingly smooth, coverage is great (will expand in this later), certainly sorted the issues I had with Vodafone and a few rural towns I frequent.

I am running an HTC Desire HD, with Cyangenmod7, and it got the APN setting first time, I did however use the community provided android app to fine tune the APN settings. An excellent example of the community support model that GiffGaff owes its success to.

Fantastic value for money, 8p / min for most call unless you get a goody bag, I am using the 10 quid goody bag, 250 mins, truly unlimited SMs and truly unlimited internet (but you are not allowed to tether). Even if you brought a brand new android device for say £400, it comes in cheaper than a contract device over 14 months!!! Yes 14 months, NOT 24 and a loads of minutes you don’t need..

Auto top up on low credit, auto top up for goody bags is in the pipeline, so while being a PAYG service, it has all the flexibility of a contract and more.
Only TWO issues I can see at the moment.

1. O2 does not have the best 3G coverage in the UK, but does have outstanding 2G/edge to back it up, so for calls, text & email you can’t beat it, the foursquare app get a bit upset on 2G, but every other app I used just gets on with it
2. I would like more than a TOP5 breakdown on my call and SMS usage, online perhaps, that said this is a rare feature for a PAYG service.

Get your GiffGaff SIM Here…….?http://giffgaff.com/orders/affiliate/species5618

Been working on various web server build script for IIS7 in Powershell

most of it was VERY easy and more then wel document on the internet, but managing the ASP.NET trusts, but editing the .net web.config file was a bit more tricky

by glueing some code from here and here i managed to create the follwing code

Which assign FULL trust for web site ID 2 for 64 bit V2 .net framework, i am sure anyone can now tweak to suite there own requirements

Read the rest of this entry »

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Some while ago my wife brought me a Maplin badged, Watson WH1081 weather station. It has an outdoor unit which measures temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and rain fall. A wireless indoor unit then displays and logs the data. The indoor unit also has a USB port allowing it to be connected to a computer of some description.

The Software that comes with it is fairly basic, however http://sandaysoft.com offers some free and very powerful software call cumulus.

The cumulus software will talk to the indoor unit, manage the data logger, produce charts as you might expect. Then come the great stuff, it has built in tools to upload the data to a web site of your choosing, via FTP, as well as uploading the data to several weather services. A recent addition to the feature set is twitter. Cumulus will now send a tweet on a predefined regular basis with a summary of the current weather conditions

Mine is now tweeting to http://twitter.com/abbeymeadwx

Today my son turned 13
When I was 13 a handfull of my friends did not have a home phone, nights/days out had to be arranged by the time you left school or did not happen, homework was handwritten, home computers where rare, and ran at 4MHz with between 1 and 16kB of memory, hard disk where unheard of outside corporate circles and a 10 MB disk drive was the size of a washing machine. My TV was a 12 inch black and white portable which recieved THREE channels

Today, 98% of teenage kids have ther own personal mobile phone, a night out can be arranged by text, twitter, facebook, msn from the moble phone while on route to the destination. For his last history project, jake created a well edited 8 minute video and for his next it is a web site, the phone in his pocket runs at 500Mhz and has 8GB of memory, his (yes his own personal) laptop has 2GB memory 2x 2G Hz processors and a huge 250 GB hard disk drive. Jakes TV is a 42inch plamsa with all the toys and over 300 channels to chose from

Oh to be a teenager today

On the flip side when I was a teenager coping a grope with the teenage girl next door was considered a laugh, making a factual reference to someones ethnic background was the norm, and clipping a kid round the ear for scrumping apples was a daily summer time event…… today any of those would get you arrested

Social networks are not NEW,

They have just gained a wider audiance due to improvod usability.

USENET or news groups started in 1979 (long before HTTP), where like minded individuals could gather and exchange puclic messages, very much like twitter today.

The big difference, it was mainly a hardcore GEEK world.

upgraded ro mu 2.8.1

There is a lot of hype in the media of late about privacy, big brother state, Google street view, state owned data base on phone calls and internet use. There has also been some on social networks and gate crashing parties. But on closer examination there is more in common between state / corporate privacy issues and social networking that you might think.

Let’s talk about something we all understand first. If a young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over into someone else and a fight breaks out, a drunk and disorderly (or even GBH) charge may result. She will now fail the CRB check required to work with children. Mind you in extreme circumstance putting you bin out in the wrong day could also cause you to fail future CRB check!

Now apply this to social networking like Facebook, or ANY photo sharing service which allows tagging , naming and comments on photos, Flickr, Picasa Twitpic to name a few..

Now let’s re-visits the above scenario. A young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over, and is then sat in a pool of her own vomit with her underwear on show to everyone. Out pops all the camera phones, and with-in minutes that photo, she would rather forget, is posted ALL over the internet. Add some powerful internet search engine and you have a personal brand problem which is much harder to deal with than any official or corporate database will ever be.

Oh and just to make it worse, you have just been stitched up by your mates, not some organisation out to make money…..

You have been warned !!

Shame it arrive late and i missed it, Due to the reliable delivery system that is “pupil post” , but the local Jnr School ran a “ICT information evening for parents” this week

The note went on to say this….

“A true story which happened in Gloucestershire during the February holiday..

A 10 year old girl was attending her aunt’s wedding, by the time of the reception she was board and her aunt [an IT consultant] spotted her sitting quietly in a corner with her hand-held games console. The aunt enquired what she was playing to which the girl replied ‘don’t tell Mum or Dad, but someone round here has a wireless network and I’ve logged onto the internet’ “

Unfortunately I missed the event to see what stance they presenter took on children and the internet, but I recently had a similar discussion with an English teacher from a local secondary school and was pleased to hear their personal view point was the same as mine.

Over recent years I have too much negative press about the Internet being a dangerous place. The real world is a dangerous place, but you instinctively know NOT to walk done a dark alleyway. That same level of self preservation needs to be instilled into today’s internet users. The internet is a community, and like any community (physical or virtual) it has places you would rather not go. With this in mind I believe you should not try and stop your children from using the internet, but instead encourage safe, knowledgeable and managed used of the internet.

My son for example was not only made to sign an internet use agreement when he started his secondary school, but also, in his first week was not made to read a leaflet on internet safety, but had to produce one. For me that was a fantastic approach, just reading a leaflet would may have gone in one side and out the other, but i am fairly sure some of it actually sank in.

At the end of the day the Internet, Mobile phones, Media player are here to stay, we must embrace the new technology and educate accordingly.

Just found a .NET twitter api class, i can feel some automated twittering comming on http://is.gd/3a9X