Giles Shaxted

Great adverts coming out from droid .. and great products .. I wonder what the adverts are like in the UK .. I must check them out.
If we had a better data connection here in Cayman I would be all over a droid phone from the get go. I think they have gotten almost everything right .. yet again google to the rescue. I never really cared for the iPhone myself, always found it gimmicky and then heard all the troubles it had. I used to love my HTC touch screen device, but hated winmo. Currently using a blackberry which I must admit gets the job done pretty good. However if I can get edge or 3g unlimited data on a droid phone in cayman for the same price as unlimited blackberry ($35) I will make the change for sure!

Audi design concept hover car

I have to admit .. it does look cool, and I would like to drive/fly one if it ever got made. Down side is you can only take one girl home !

via: DVICE: The Audi Shark, the gorgeous hovercar we want the most.

making your phone bills cheaper !

At the near beginning of this year i purchased a Philips VOIP841Dual Phone. I could not have been happier with this buy, especially now looking back .. it has done nothing but work out ! The phone itself is a dual phone as it plugs into my landline to give me a local phone number through my phone company as well as plugging via ethernet int my broadband router to give me a Skype phone.

For anyone who doesn’t believe in Skype .. silly you ! 2 cents a minute calls to anywhere in the USA and UK and Canada etc etc. Which as an expat and a traveler comes in very handy. It means I can call Familyin the UK for very cheap and friends in the USA very cheap. EVen to their mobiles .. check out their rates. I believe they are cheaper than almost all other VoIP service providers. The new feature that I am yet to use but seems amazing is All in rates or packages for calling a country or the world for unlimited amount of time per month. I think the price works out to be about $12 a month which I know is cheaper than my local VoIP provider. Cable and Wireless do a plan called Netspeak which has a basic package starting at $50 USD.

Now all that needs to happen is all my friends and family (actually most the family has or has tried to have a skype phone) need to get their hands on a skype phone and we can actually all talk for FREE .. thats the awesome part is Skype to Skype is completely free. The Quality is really very good now, Skype to Skype has a slight delay when you first call but after a few seconds is perfect, and calling other phones just works GREAT. The only trouble I see is that the phones are getting less sexy !

Quick ending note … having also seen a handset that doesn’t have a base unit and links into your home wireless connection .. I would suggest getting one like i pointed out that is Dual and plugs into your router at least as connection and charging is much much better with these non wifi ones !

http://www.pointui.com/

This is brilliant it has turned my iMate Windows Mobile Phone into a much more useable device. I lostmy stylus’ a long time ago and just use anything to hand or my fingers .. this actually allows you to use your fingers just like an iphone !

Well I had looked for this when i first got my mobile device however there didn’t appear to be one around back then. I have only had a brief little play with it so far, and while it definitely works it is not completely brilliant. It may just be the fact I am using IE mobile on Windows Mobile 5 but most other mobile sites come out great. What it does do very well is actually give you access to be able to write and manage posts. So even if you are just typing something up on the go and going to format it later then it’s a great little tool. I have never managed to get blog by email working that well for me and it always needs formatting afterwards so this is pretty much the same, and has an auto-save feature so as you type you won’t loose anything ! [wordpress mobile admin]

So I have been a member of Twitter since November 2006. At that Point twitter worked great for me here in the Cayman Islands and was actually proving quite fun and usefull. Since then they have changed their international number to the UK from the USA. Ok no problem, I don’t mind the SMS rate to the UK .. infact for me I think it is the same as to the USA .. I don’t mind paying it and I don’t expect them to set up a local Cayman number (although as you can send web sms at www.cw.ky I don’t think it would be too hard to set something up). The trouble when they changed international number is that I stopped recieving updates via SMS. So i temp switched to IM. Eh it’s ok .. but i was a little upset with the fact that it meant i had to be internet connected. Then I noticed a problem .. my Twitter kept on getting updated when I received updates as my IM replied with “I am currently away from the computer” which would then go to all my Twitter friends who followed me, making me look lame.

So I emailed Twitter asking for help to get my phone working again, they told me they no longer supported the USA number so I had to switch to the UK one, I knew this already. Anyways now I can’t even verify my phone although I had done previously both at the start and since the change, but I had to delete the phone settings and start over as updates stopped coming.

I am really wanting to try out Jaiku as it looks like in a microblogging way it actually can SMS you fees from your twitter account and from anything else you may choose to read by a RSS feed or API etc .. As I am not a member yet I don’t quite know how well thath works, but if they send updates of it all via SMS I can have SMS recieving updates from my favourite blogs, news sites, twitter .. everything.

So if you have a Jaiku invite .. please send it my way !

A fair time ago in a galaxy pretty similar to our own, infact on a planet named Earth funnily enough .. I signed up for twitter.com. Twitter is a social status site .. maybe i should have read their .. what is twtitter page …

It’s actually kind fun .. and I only have one friend on it right now .. thanks Eric. I can see it being entertaining if more people i know use it and I have them added .. knwoing what people are doing and how they are .. at any given moment.

Now I must admit .. I haven’t actually had it working properly yet .. and I am not sure why .. however .. I know I am close !
You see Twitter can be updated by either the web interface at twitter.com, phone, IM or a desktop widget of your choice .. Interesting you say. Well yes, originally I gave up as twitter didnt work with Cayman cell phones .. it may just have been me getting things wrong in retrospect .. however .. I saw a blog about it on Erics site so went back to try again on a whim .. well now they had IM .. and Phone .. and there were some desktop widgets around the place .. cool !
This time I got the phone working .. or at least I got it authenticated .. I had seen one udate made by me using pone text .. but don’t know how .. and now even though authenticated again, I can’t get updates sent to my phone .. nor can i update by sending and SMS .. IM .. I can send update from .. but have never recieved an update on it .. I today find out that IM is down .. so that may have been where my problem was.
Desktop widget working fine .. but i don’t like it ..

Anyways .. if you want some fun .. come and procrastinate on twitter.com ! http://twitter.com/caymaniac

So far our new house is proving very good for entertaining. We had our moving in party, lots of space for the 30 or so people that showed up. We made a complete mess .. but it all cleaned up the next day very easy .. and nothing damaged. The cool thing about our party was most people seemed to dress up. There are some photos on my Flickr Pages .. plenty of links around here for you to follow through on and go see some .. although you have to be a member of Flickr and one of my friends I think to see them.

Also .. Jamie and Jim brought back a poker kit from the states just recently. We had our first poker night as a group at our house. It went really well .. especially as I won the pot of $50 from only going in once with $5. Maybe next time I will get the camera out for a few poker photos.

I just signed up for Ma.gnolia and Technorati. I decided to get a bit more .. web2.0 .. whatever the hell that really means. What I really wanted to do was get my bookmarks that I have sort of organised in Firefox .. organised and shared on Ma.gnolia and then share them with everyone else .. and also share them all through Technorati, as well as using it to get my site a bit more noticed.

Screen Shot of a9 maps from www.hojohnlee.com

a9 maps is gone

I am a little upset that I go to check out a9 maps only to find they are no more ! Fore those of you who don’t know a9 created a mapping system that had photos of the area you were looking at on the map in a 360 format so you could recognise the place when you got there sort of thing. It was a great idea, which only had a few US metro areas done, mostly in NYC. But the fact that you had a street level image of the area was just brilliant. The images were obtained by driving around in a car with something like 9 cameras on the roof with a gps, so that when the photos were taken the computer mapped them immediately.

So anyway .. i went to go use it today .. and bam it’s gone … has someone taken this over .. or is it gone forever ?

sitting in the airport on my laptop, stealing bandwidth from some airport source and chatting on messenger and checking emails !!

Wireless kicks ass when out and about, shame it sucks for reliability at home etc.