Good day piezanos! As you may have read, I have passed my exams with a 2.1. This means I get on to my second year of my course.

To celebrate this, I’m sitting up in Ware having a drink with my mates.

I must excuse my absence from updating this blog. This has been due to my exams. [You may have guessed that already, but what the hey]

I’ll be catching up with Google Earth Friday shortly and keep an eye out for some developments that will be happening to Southanuk very shortly.

Its 11pm now and I want to get to bed, as I was kept up till 3am this morning by some noisy people.

Ta-ra.

So its that time already?

Who are you voting for this year? No age limits here, so feel free to vote even if you are under the legal voting age!

Its just a bit of fun and doesn’t represent the views of myself or any animals in my possession.

Also for a bit more election fun try out Slapometer, slap the main candidates to your hearts content.

Poll:

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So recently you may have noticed I bought myself a brand new HTC Desire. Since then I’ve been striving to get this site to display properly in the web browser.

To achieve this I used the fantastic WPTouch made by BraveNewCode. A very simple and easy to use plugin that requires hardly any configuration. Its very easy to add new user agents of websites I wanted to target and looks great too! You can also integrate your Twitter account into it using their other plugin WordTwit [Unfortunately I don't use that on this blog, but I'm sure its up to the standard of WPTouch.]

To try it out on your mobile device, point your camera to this QR code and give it a scan, or just enter m.southanuk.co.uk to view it also.

As the title says, Sony have finally ended production of the ever wonderful 3.5 inch Floppy disk.

I well remember the days of only being able to carry ~1.5MB of data around with me. Just look how far technology has come, I can carry 4GB in my pocket on a card many times smaller than the floppy disk. And for something that was developed in the 1970s to still have the popularity it does today is great.

Suddenly, a Wikipedia quote:

A floppy disk is a data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible ("floppy") magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell.

[Wikipedia]

From: Telegraph

Well there we have it, my new phone is in fact the HTC Desire.

This nifty little device is one of the most powerful phones on the market and runs the up and coming Android OS [2.1]. It carries a speedy 1Ghz Snapdragon processor allowing for smooth and crisp navigation in the operating system, and for fast programs. Also, it has a 3.7′ OLED display, creating vibrant and colour rich pictures. Also featured on the device is a 5 Megapixel camera that takes rather good photos for a mobile phone.

Some specs for your viewing pleasure:

• Screen    3.7-inch 480×800 AMOLED touchscreen
• Camera    5 Megapixel autofocus with LED flash
• Operating system    Android 2.1
• Input    Dual-touch with HTC Sense interface
• CPU    Qualcomm QSD 8250 (Snapdragon), 1 Ghz
• Memory    512 MB flash, 576 MB RAM

A very powerful phone if I do say so myself. The Application Store (Market) included on all Android devices contains plenty of apps to entice and waste your time. The form factor of the device is very elegant and streamlined. Some may think its a bulky and heavy phone however, the Desire doesn’t feel heavy in the hand compared to my old Nokia N95 8GB but its weight makes it feel solid. Speaking of solid, the build quality of the phone is tip top, although the way the back panel clicks in and out of place makes it feel a bit like it could break.

Overall I’m very impressed with my phone and will continue to test it out.

Good day fair people! This is mostly a rant post so feel free to skip it, moan at it, print it off and use it as kindling, you know.

<rant>

I spent the good part of an hour listening to a man rant on about how bees like to dance in the direction in which the food was found. Not putting the man’s work down or anything but please, I know about that and have done since I was a little kid. Also, an hour of rambling about the dances they do… or don’t do for that fact, takes it out of you. I feel I wasted the best part of an hour that I won’t get back anytime soon. With the foreboding exams coming up I could have used this time to prepare my notes, study or do anything apart from learning about bees. And the best part is, there’s another lecture next week too(!)

</rant>

That’s all in the way of ranting at this precise moment.

Other things shall be left to another post for another time. Good luck to all revising for exam and whatnot. Boo to irrelevant lectures.

Due to the terrible build quality of the N95, the time to replace my phone draws close.

The all evil, N97

Previously, I said I was getting the all new Nokia N97. However, after reading reviews and whatnot, it becomes apparent that its terrible. Underpowered for the operating system its running [Seriously, Nokia should drop Symbian, its old and buggy], causes the phone to slowdown and lock up at points. Gizmodo reviewed the phone and seems to share my sentiments in the terrible OS that is Symbian.

Still being rather loyal to Nokia after 10 years, I have come to expect quality phones from them. This was not the case with the Nokia N95 8GB that I bought less than 2 years ago.

Being a relatively light user of the mobile and treating it nicely, you would expect the phone to last at least a good 4 years or more. Currently my N95 has lost all its metallic surrounds on the buttons, chipped off metallic paint around the camera surround and has severe problems with the sliders. I can accept that the metallic paint would chip off over time, I found this with my Nokia 6680, but slider problems? From day 1? I know you’re thinking “Why didn’t you send it back?” but at the time I didn’t really notice the dodgy slider. However, after spending many hours trawling though various Nokia forums both unofficial and official, I noticed that this was a common thing with all the N95 8GBs.

Various other things bug the hell out of me; including the fact that it can take a good 10 seconds to open the text message application on the phone, frequent lockups/crashes with the YouTube app, crappy web browser and others.

Nokia N900 showing all

The next phone I hope to get will be the ever lovely Nokia N900.

“Nokia again?” I hear you ask. Well its Nokia again for a few reasons.

1. I still trust that I will be getting a good phone
2. Maemo 5 is the operating system of choice. A Debian based system, so essentially this is a pocket computer/phone.
3. Touch screen, gotta love ‘em.
4. Windows Mobile just doesn’t cut it for me at the moment, although 7 series looks good.

So there are my reasons, I know a few of you [Mark ] love your WinMo/Android phones but I’m a Nokia man at heart [although I was nearly seduced by Samsung with their Omnia HD]

I’ve now got to find  £449 to buy it :/

Not feeling the best so I thought I’d thrash out a blog post.

Just been resting for the good part of 3 days now, I think its just a cold so hopefully I’ll be back at full strength in good time. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been up to:

• Watched a very good anime, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. About a group of 3; brother, sister and some girl they meet along the way. A Wikipedia quote to make things more clear:

After a massive earthquake in Tokyo, siblings Mirai and YÅ«ki, who were visiting a robot exhibition in Odaiba at the beginning of their summer vacation, struggle to reach their parents in their house in Setagaya assisted by a female motorcycle courier named Mari, who is striving to reach her own daughter and mother in Sanjengaya. – Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 [Wikipedia]

• Carrying on with my University course. Second semester is getting very interesting now. Becoming very involved, a cold doesn’t help when you’re trying to revise this stuff.

That’s all really, just gonna take it easy for the time being. Maybe even write a less whiney blog post too.

Good news everyone! I have Windows 7 on my Lappy.

You may remember I wrote earlier that I received Windows 7 the day before it came out, thanks to Amazon’s fancy delivery department. The only thing putting me off actually installing the OS was that I lacked an external HDD. So for Christmas, that’s just what I purchased.

The HDD in question:

Seagate Expansions 1TB External Desktop USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Quite the HDD indeed. With Backup and whatnot done on the old Vista installation, Windows 7 was duely loaded onto a freshly formatted hard drive.

I must say, the 15 minute install was very impressive. I did have a few problems however:

• Native drivers didn’t recognise my wireless network, fixed by installing Dell’s drivers
• Touchpad was a bit erratic at times, fixed by installing necessary drivers
• McAfee refuses to install on it, my fault however, I seem to have used it on too many computers

Other than that, the install was pretty painless.

Final thoughts: Windows 7 is indeed quite the improvement on the bloated monster that was Vista. Improvements in power management means I was able to squeeze another 30 minutes out of the battery, which is very surprising due to the battery coming up for 2 years in age. The only thing that is irking me slightly is the taskbar. The taskbar, when it gets full, groups by application, which can be a pain to navigate. I know this can be turned off but the option “Never Combine” just doesn’t cut the mustard. Also the time taken for Aero Peek to work is, by default, a tad too long. A simple registry change fixes this and makes the operating system, graphically, a bit more snappy. All in all, a great operating system indeed.