I thought it would take me ages to get used to not having a keyboard on my HTC Sensation that I bought back in October, it has limited some of the things I’ll do on my phone – but that’s not necessary a bad thing!

I took my phone out of my pocket in the office last Thursday only to notice some dust on the screen, perfectly normal I’ll just wipe it off… Except it won’t come off and some careful tilting of the device with white wallpaper up shows that the dust is in fact under the screen!

I could open it up and clean it but that would invalidate the warranty. So I contacted Expansys who I bought it from to explain the situation and ask whether it was covered under warranty – with the obvious (at least in my mind!) implication that I’d like it fixed as this is a sealed unit I don’t expect dust to be on the inside! I got this reply:

Please be reassure that your phone is till cover by warranty.

That’s nice (and quite an irritatingly short response!), but how do I go about getting it fixed? A couple of emails later I have the phone number for HTC.

I’m expecting the worst given my email exchange so far with Expansys, it could not have gone more smoothly!

They’re sending a UPS courier to collect the phone (minus battery, SIM, back cover, SD) and it will be factory reset for data protection as soon as it gets there (I’ve done it myself anyway).  They’ll check it’s covered under warranty and fix and return in 7-10 working days, if it’s not covered under warranty they’ll advise a repair price via email, I can then opt to have it repaired or not (if I opt to not have it repaired they’ll return it to me for a fee!).

That all sounds reasonably fair, I did query the 7-10 working days based on this article on The Register. They were quite happy to admit they’d had major problems (and even asked if I’d seen the TV programme about it!) but discussed the fact they’d changed service centre’s and turnaround time was circa 10 working days now.

So, my phone is boxed and ready to be collected – and I have my trusty Motorola Milestone back out… I’m just hoping I don’t get too addicted to having a keyboard again! If I do HTC better release the HTC myTouch 4G slide or equivalent over here quick smart!

Update 18th January 2012

My phone was collected on the Tuesday as blogged about and I had it back on Monday, with what looks like a new screen! I had to take the photo above of the box as I was so impressed with the box!

Parts Replaced (according to the returns sheet):

Sub-Assy to 82H Lamination, LCM+Touch Window, GENERI

Conductive Fabric, PCB to chassis, PYD

Chassis Pre-Assy, TW-LCD-Chassis,AUO,PGS,Generic Co

If anyone can tell me what the above means I’d be very grateful!

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Having installed the WhatsApp app, I half expected all my old messages to just come down from “the cloud”, no such luck!

It took me half an hour of googling to work out how to restore the WhatsApp Chat backups! So here it is for anyone else who’s interested…

WhatsApp takes regular backups of your messages and chat history and copies them to your SD card (in /sdcard/WhatsApp/) you need to copy this  directory from your old phone your new one.

However, it’s not quite as simple as that – it won’t work once WhatsApp is installed!

So here’s how we did it:

1. Uninstall WhatsApp on the new phone (if you’ve installed it).
2. Copy the directory and it’s contents (/sdcard/WhatsApp) to your new phone in the same location.
3. Reinstall WhatsApp
4. Walk through the setup procedure, in the last step it will ask you if you want to restore a backup

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The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors offers a really good insight into it for anyone that hasn’t got the time to read the mountains of resources on the net.

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I became a father not two weeks ago, and seeing this story made me think back to my own childhood. So I retweeted it and was surprised at the response.

From memory the first gaming consoles really started to appear when I was 10 or 11 in the  form of the NES (there were earlier consoles but games were severely restricted). We never bothered with consoles, I had a ZX Spectrum 48k, we connected it up to the TV, loaded a game from tape (and hoped we’d got the volume setting correct) and played.

Except I didn’t play for long, I got bored. Paperboy, Pac Man, Horace Goes Skiing, Chess, I eventually got fed up with all of them, then I found out you could actually make this little black box of tricks do what you told it to!

I’d spend hours copying lines of code from a magazine, only to find it missing a statement somewhere that I’d somehow missed and doing my earliest debugging to get it working, learning a lot along the way! Yes I got frustrated, but I still got that thrill when it worked (the same thrill I still get today when code works – it doesn’t change).

What struck a chord with myself and my other followers is that children today are learning how to waggle a joystick/wiimote (that’s all well and good for leisure time), before being taught more about computers. The problem is that they’re being taught they learn how to use Excel and Word!

We didn’t have Excel and Word, we wrote our own word processing packages to print off on our tiny thermal printer rolls!

Where is the next generation of programmers going to come from?

photo credit: Quenerapú

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I haven’t used it as much as I’d hoped, mainly because I’d planned to use it with Instapaper a lot and it didn’t work quite how I wanted.

The problem with the way Instapaper sends documents is they come as one big bundle (i.e. a book full of the documents you’ve set to read later), in my case this was a fairly big bundle. Once I’d read an article it would still come down every day until I went to the website and removed it from Instapaper. Not really what I had in mind!

The Solution :: WordCycler

This little piece of software sits in your Tray (Windows) and when you connect your Kindle syncs all of your documents (or those folders you select) as individual articles. Fantastic! When you’ve read an article you delete it on the Kindle and it will be archived at Instapaper.

So my workfolow will be something like this:

• Read something interesting on the web, my6sense etc. Click to save to Instapaper.
• Sync my Kindle via USB every so often.
• Read articles and delete them on the Kindle (so they’re moved to archive at Instapaper).

Alternatively if you want them as one large book you can just set the correct settings at Instapaper and have it send it wirelessly, but I felt this method was stopping me using the Kindle how I wanted!

Note: There is one gotcha with this…

The articles synced down by WordCycler are put into a folder on the Kindle, but the Kindle only shows collections and ignores folders. They could be added to a collection but this would require a reset of the Kindle – you don’t want to do that every time you sync! The workaround is to make a collection for your books and put them in it, and use the main Kindle home page for all your Instapaper.

photo credit: kodomut

Happy Kindling!

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Reviews of the technical features, the screen, the Kindle store and any other feature of the Kindle have been done to death – so I’m not even going to discuss them… I just wanted to chat about the how’s and why of how I’ll be using it.

Firstly it means I won’t have to pack seven paperbacks for a week away, and with our first child well on the way that’s got tbe a good idea!!

Secondly it’s not all about the books! Let me explain….

I’ve bought a few books for it, downloaded the free classics and I will be reading them, that’s what the Kindle was invented for. However for me the biggest thing was being able to use InstaPaper with it, and sending PDF’s to it.

When you register your Kindle you are given an email address for it and can setup authorised emails that can send to it. If you have the 3G version (I don’t!) you may be charged for what is sent to your Kindle via this method – so check that before you go doing any of this.

PDF’s

I don’t print most things, I have a PDF printer driver that can combine prints into one large PDF. So I highlight all the things I want to read hit the print button and select combine, a PDF is on my desktop in seconds that I can simply email to my Kindle, it’s synced onto it in seconds.

Instapaper

I’m a huge fan of Instapaper.com, I’ve setup their “Read Later” javascript button in all my browser toolbars across all my machine. If I see something I want to read later I just click it (this has removed me emailing myself all the time – clearly the first sign of madness!). It’s then available on the Instapaper site, from there it’s available on my iPod Touch and Android phone.

Now it’s available on my Kindle, it appears as a periodical and updates itself everytime I add new items – fantastic! The only downside I’ve found to this is there is no two-way sync to tell the website what I’ve already read – I’d love to find a way of doing that as well on the Kindle but as I use it offline I guess it’s something I’ll have to live with and do manually!

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Losing your phone is one thing, it’s probably insured and you’ll either get your phone back or a replacement, great – you have a working phone, but aren’t you forgetting something?

What about the content on your phone?

Your photo’s? Your picture messages? Your diary? Your videos? They’re what make the phone yours aren’t they? It’s not just a loss that will mean you don’t have these but all manner of accidents!

I’ve just spent the morning extracting data from a phone that was dropped, and the screen completely died.

In the normal course of events I’d plug it in to a computer, get off what I could (photo’s by treating it as as memory card and hope that contacts and text messages would sync to the Motorola or Nokia suite as appropriate).In this case there was some bad, and some good luck!

First the bad, the phone wasn’t set into sync mode – it just wanted to be treated as a memory card. I knew this was an option in the phone, but with no screen how was I going to turn it on? A stroke of good luck… The phone was a Nokia N85!

What’s so special about it being an N85? The N85 has two slots on top, a USB Sync/Charge and a Video-Out! 1 cable later (and some rearrangement of furniture) the TV is in the office and I’m able to use the TV as a screen for the phone!! It was quite impressive!

I successfully extracted all the data except photo messages, I had to go into each individual photo message and save the image to the memory card then copy that back to the computer.

Now what?

Well we’re not going to lug a TV around to use as a screen are we? I rang up a local phone repair shop and dropped it in just over 2 hours ago. It’s ready for collection already… New LCD and new Lens all fitted… Hurrah!

For reference Swindon Phone Fix on Commercial Road, Swindon did this!

photo credit: Glen Bowman

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Lists Are Great

I follow well over a thousand people, so if you’re in the midst of that and aren’t in the 25 most recent tweets when I look at my main stream, then unless you’re on a list (a column in my TweetDeck) I’m not going to see what you tweeted! Sorry, but that’s the way it is (of course message me if you think you shold be on one of my lists, I’m @Keiron).

My lists so far have been mainly to make my life easier, local people, real life, a “see-all” for people I find interesting (and I try to limit that one to 20-30 people), a tech one etc. So I can see all of these people’s tweets at once. I have a few private lists too (customers, suppliers etc).

Following a List

You can also follow a list, say for example you wanted to follow all the comedians I follow – that’s easy you just follow this list, and when I update it you get all my recommendations:
http://twitter.com/Keiron/comedians

This functionality means that you can get a moderated list by someone who is an expert in their subject, for example I’ve followed in the past, Will Carling’s list of rugby players, whenever he finds a new one – I see their tweets (without having to go hunting for them, and he mixes in the right circles to know these people!).

I’ve followed one or two lists belonging to other people in the past – but I usually tend to follow a list for a while – work out who’s interesting on the list and then follow those individuals, adding them to a similar list of my own (which other people can follow if they wish!).

Ok, so lists are great – what’s the new thing?

It’s not exactly new, but it’s new to the way I think about lists! After some discussion over the last week and a little experimentation it turns out I might be able to clean up my main twitter stream somewhat (I can hear a lot of you breathing sighs of relief about how good that would be for you!).

You can add users to a list, without following them.

Why is this good? Well, taking one example – I follow a lot of rugby people, they don’t tend to follow me back – probably because as rugby players they aren’t particularly interested in my random tweets about doing the accounts, deciding if Big Brother’s going to be any good, or the latest PHP programming project! So I’m unlikely to get a reciprocal follow from them…

You’ve probably spotted where this is going now…………If it’s somebody I want to read their tweets but are unlikely to follow me back, I’m going to add them to lists rather than follow them that way they’ll appear in a specific niche column in my TweetDeck (or Seismic on my Milestone).

I know what some of you are thinking:

“You need to follow people, follow more people, then follow more people – it’s the only way you’ll get followers yourself!!”

I used to think the same, but I’m coming away from that now, I want people to follow me because they want to, if they don’t want to – that’s fine as well! By unfollowing all those that I’m interested in who don’t follow me and adding them to a list this will clean up my main stream so that in future it is full of people that interest me most of the time (and maybe don’t fit into a niche).

I’ll see how this goes initially, and if it goes well I’ll probably take it one stage further and unfollow people that are on my lists (even if they’re following me), I suspect this may lead to a mass unfollowing of me. But hey if they’re only following me so I’ll follow them back are they actually going to bother to read any of my tweets?

I haven’t quite sussed out the finer details of this yet, but I suspect I’ll have some kind of workflow:

1. Follow a User,
2. If they interest me a lot stay following (and add to list),
   If they interest but are quite niche unfollow them (and add to a list),
   If they make no sense and I simply don’t want to see their tweets them simply unfollow.

That said I’m going to have to put in quite a bit of legwork initially to clean up my initial followers, I’ll probably use friendorfollow.com to do this. Saying that, I started to use it the other day and opened 230 tabs in Firefox (after it had used up over a GB of RAM it settled down!). So I’ll be doing a Father Chistmas:

“Making a list, Checking it Twice… Going to find out who’s naughty or nice”

How do you use twitter lists, is there a way they make your life easier? I’d be interested to hear!

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I use both Akismet and WP-SpamFree to keep this blog reasonably clean of spam, but more has been getting through recently (well through to the point where it’s held for moderation). I wanted to tell you about the two most recent (and persistent offenders)

Battery Man

The most recent items are all about batteries and hard drives on my posts about MyXerver and my PINES USB Battery Pack. The spammer merrily went through several posts telling me his iPod Touch was dead and would I help, until he got to my post about spam comments, when his spam comment with links to a battery site simply said:

i konw this is a spam comment..

I almost let that one through it was so funny! But really, if you used a real name (instead of having me believe your name is battery) I’d let you link to your site!

Outsourced Link Building

The second one was quite strange and I’m not entirely sure how much information to give out about it! Let me explain…

The poster systematically went through a lot of posts, using a real name and linking to a UK company (I’m not sure whether to release the name of the company as they were probably unaware of the problem!). To be fair I would have let the comments through if it hadn’t been:
a) so obviously systematic .
b) so many pointless comments like “great post”.

What I found annoying about it was the IP address was in Bangladesh, no problem there we all outsource, but the email address being used was for a UK SEO company – yes, yes I know they’re entitled to outsource as much as the rest of us. But I wonder if their customer knew that spammy comments would be used in their SEO campaign? I somewhat doubt it?

I debated revealing the UK SEO company (and I know a few people on Twitter have asked me to do so at the time I was watching the spammer do this), but I’m not going to for now.. I’ll probably drop them a link to this post and ask for their feedback?

Interestingly, I did a search for links to their client’s site in Google and only two blogs allowed comments through – nothing else. So it can’t be that effective surely? Do you have any experience of this on your blog?

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Kyle’s post suggests that if rather than buying that shiny new Apple MacBook G3 250 back in 1997 for $5700 (ouch!!), you’d bought $5700 worth of Apple shares then today you would $330,000 better off!

It’s not really surprising given where Apple are today I guess, but does beg the question – could you do the same today with Apple? The fact that an iPod Touch (3G / Late 2009) was $199 in 2009 and would now have shares worth $315 suggests you might (particularly as that’s only a few months ago!).

Or, on the other hand should you be looking for more companies that will replicate what Apple have done?

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