After a few hours of using Gnome3 I decided to ditch it and switch to KDE (Seriously what are the gnome dev’s smoking, it’s horrible to work with)

So I installed KDE and set about setting it up with my Dual monitors.  I’d gotten everything setup just how I wanted it and decided to call it a day, so I shut the machine down

On the next boot-up I found that KDE had promptly decided to forget my monitor configuration and instead revert to cloning the primary display, it had also forgotten that the secondary Display is infact on the Left in my setup.

After some Goggling I found this page which helpfully tells you how to create a script to reapply your xrandr settings on login seeing as saving the settings (even using the save as defaults option) on Xrandr appears not to work.

Whilst this sorted the original problem it quite annoyingly seems to cause me to run into Bug #260360 which is very much not resolved despite the bug-tracker suggesting otherwise.  Whilst my desktop Background is very nice and all it would be much more useful to actually see my windows/panels…

Looking into the workarounds posted, I wasn’t really happy with most of them switching activities may fix the problem but it’s a pain in the backside to say the least.  One workaround around that seems to work for me is to slay and then restart plasma-desktop after configuring my screens.

I use the following commands to do this, you could use kquitapp instead of killall but I find doing so seems to make the automatic bug reporter launch more often than not.

killall plasma-desktop

plasma-desktop &

Now Naturally I don’t really want to be trying to bring up a console when I’m experiencing the issue with the desktop, so I added the commands to the end of the script I’d created earlier to setup the monitors during start-up

The entire script I use to setup the screen resolutions/locations for my monitors and restart the desktop now looks like this

xrandr –output HDMI-0 –pos 1920×0 –mode 1440×900 –refresh 59.8874
xrandr –output DVI-0 –pos 0×0 –mode 1920×1080 –refresh 60
xrandr –output HDMI-0 –primary
killall plasma-desktop
sleep 2
plasma-desktop &

Note:do Not blindly copy the above as the xrandr settings are specific to my monitor setup the part of the script that kills/restarts plasma is

killall plasma-desktop
sleep 2
plasma-desktop &

It’s a bodge and I’m pretty sure there must be a better way to go about getting dual screens working properly but in the meantime at least now I actually get a desktop that is usable and makes use of both monitors when I login.

The app works simular to most other navigation apps you’ll find on your smartphone in that you have a Map and directions, in this case the maps are downloaded over the air rather than stored on the device itself.

The Navigation facilities of the app aren’t the best I’ve come across, they aren’t Bad by any stretch of the imagination but sometimes I do question it’s route selection sometimes but I’ve never had it fail to get me where I was going.

What sets Waze apart from most other Sat-Nav’s however is the social features,  the app uses the location and speed data from people using it to work out where the traffic jams are, it also allows users to report traffic jams and other hazards to the community causing the app to alert you prior to approaching them.  So far I’ve been very impressed with this aspect of the app it seems to work very well.

It can also attempt to re-route where another route is available to try and avoid the jam.

Best of all it’s free on Android/iOS/Blackberry/Ovi So why not pop over to the marketplace/appstore and give it a try.

There are some nice discounts to be had on some pretty neat games so naturally I’ve picked up a few including Sonic Generations.

Nice to see that Sega have finally improved on the series, Although it’s very noticeable that they were somewhat lazy in making the PC version and seem to have just ported it pretty much directly from the Xbox version.

That said not a bad game so far, I seem to excel in falling off the 3d levels how ever

Maybe I’m just missing something but it doesn’t seem they want to make it easy :-/

Incidentally the issue I wanted to report is that It’s a right pain to copy/paste the app password on mobile/tablet devices such as Ipad’s as it also copies the crap about only needing to use the password once.

Which is actually wrong anyway as some app’s seem to forget the stored password every so often, for instance my android phone seems to want the Google account password to be re-entered if the Sim is changed and feedly on the Ipad sometimes forgets it for some reason (cache clearing perhaps?)  They also need to add a Re-generate button next to the revoke button.

Since my FreePBX box is not behind a NAT I didn’t need to do anything NAT related, I also set the Codec to Accept only G711 Ulaw/Alaw as I prefer audio quality over bandwidth usage and don’t have the required licenses for G729

Basically Outbound calls were working but I couldn’t get Inbound calls to work, It seems what you place in the outbound settings section also has an affect on the inbound calls!  The Symptom I was experiencing was  incoming calls being dropped with a 421 Unauthorized error

Outgoing Settings:

host=sipgate.co.uk
fromuser=SIP-ID
secret=SIP-password
disallow=all
allow=alaw&ulaw
context=from-trunk
insecure=very
type=peer
username=SIP-ID

Incoming Settings

secret=SIP-password
type=user
context=from-trunk

Registration

Register String:

SIP-ID:SIP-password@sipgate.co.uk/SIP-ID

Note: the “:” between the SIP-ID and password should be included e.g 123456:ABCDEF@sipgate.co.uk/123456

The SIP-ID and SIP-Password should be displayed in your Sipgate control panel

The forum is for a UK ISP and thus my example assumes that you are in the UK.

“Even now Net Neutrality doesn’t exist it’s an idealism and I just don’t see how it can work.

Most ISP’s will have private Interconnects with large content providers/CDN’s that use a lot of bandwidth.

Why would they pay a transit provider a lot of money to shift all that data when both parties can agree to connect directly to each other and save a fortune on both sides.

It generally costs less to reach a server in Europe via one of the major peering exchanges than to reach something on the other side of the world via a transit provider who is charging you per Mbit/s of traffic you push through their network.

The increasing amount of data demand is a real problem for ISP’s, their whole business model revolves around the fact that people tend to only send bursts of traffic.

At the moment it averages out that most people end up using a few hundred kbps (if that) so they can get away with selling 20Mbit+ broadband for less than £20/mo as long as there’s enough head room for people to burst when they do actually want to download something everything is ok.

The problem is with this new generation content that average data rate is going up and more people want to burst at the higher speeds for a longer duration, which means the ISP has to buy more bandwidth, install larger interconnects and buy more expensive equipment that can handle these higher data rates.

So either the ISP’s treat everything equally and the END USER (I.e YOU) pay a significantly lot more for their connectivity or they find some way of managing the traffic on their network/getting someone else to pay.

Fair?

Of course not, but life is anything but fair.”

What really sets this device apart from the competition is it’s the best display i’ve seen on a phone at this price point, it remains clear and crisp and the touch tracking is pretty good.  My only gripe with the screen is it’s a fingerprint magnet.

The SF supports multi-touch including pinch to zoom in the webbrowser aka iphone style which makes browsing on it a lot easier than other android devices.

The Device ships with a orange customised 2.1 Rom, however after a quick visit to Modaco soon sorts that out. They have some nice 2.1 roms or you can opt for the 2.2 ALPHA rom, which apart from a few teething problems is relitively stable.  I prefer to get rid of operator customisations so didn’t even bother trying the stock ROM.

The phone Generally remains fast and  responsive, although I have had a couple of moments where an App appeared to become unresponsive for a moment or two (A good example of this is spotify when it’s syncing offline playlists) and the audio could be louder, however both points can be forgiven given the price point.

If you want a Decent Android Handset but don’t want to sign your life away for the next 2years and don’t want to break the bank then the San Francisco should be given serious consideration, don’t like orange? Not a problem the SF can be unlocked fairly easily.

I had planned to attach some more pictures to this post, but I’ve since discovered I’m really terrible at photography

Above: ZTE Blade running Launcher Pro – wallpaper

Computer decides to become completely unresponsive, so ended up powercycling it, only to find after a reboot it’s still rather unresponsive and for some reason the display driver no longer loaded, I figured that i’d have either a dying drive or some file system corruption from that fact i’d just powercycled it without a proper shutdown.  The machine again stops responding completely, so I go for another powercycle and ready a boot CD to being some diagnostics.

But on powering backup it becomes evident that the drive had indeed died as the raid controller now reports a problem with the RAID0 stripe, and the drive is no longer showing in the controller.

I take the drives out of the raid0 configuration and boot a diagnostic cd just to double check it is indeed the drive, the utility fails to find the drive at all although the bios can still see it.

So I just ended up pulling it (and it’s partner) out and then reinstalling the OS on my other 2 drives (I used to have 4 drives in the machine).

Thankfully I have my PC backup on a daily basis to the RAID1 array in the NAS (Network attached storage) as well as doing an online backup of the most important data to the rackspace cloud (via jungledisk) so all I really lost was the HDD itself and the time it took to reinstall the machine (which BTW thanks to Ninite doesn’t take that long thesedays)

The Backup restored succesfully from the NAS so I didn’t need to restore from the Online backup this time… but it’s nice to know that the data’s safe even if something did happen to both the PC and the NAS (which is possible given they are both in the same room)

Did think about doing an Image based backup of my boot drive, but since I don’t find reinstalling to much of a problem I never bother, just would have preferred not to have spent my Saturday reinstalling me machine…

Since this was my first time using Navigation, I wasn’t sure what to expect and as it was a long Journey I also packed my Tomtom Just in case, although i’m pleased to say the Tomtom was not required.

Once thing to note is if you are using an Andorid version prior to 2.0 the voice navigation does not work, I didn’t realise this initially so sat there trying to navigate by voice and just making myself out to look like an Idiot.

Since voice navigation does not work on my phone, I used the alternative of searching for my destination on google maps, then selecting the navigate option.

Once navigate is pressed, Goggle navigation starts up and begins downloading the route information, this took a couple minutes since the simcard I had in the phone at the time seems to only be provisioned to allow access to the GPRS network and not the 3G network, although once this had happened I didn’t notice any difficulties caused by intermittent loss of coverage.

I did however find it a bit slow to re-route when i’d accidentally taken a wrong turning, this may be down to the aforementioned lack of 3G, I’ve yet to try and drive off route with no network coverage, so i’m not sure how it would react in those circumstances.

In terms of the accuracy of the Navigation and the Clarity of Instructions I didn’t have any major Issues, In-fact I quite liked how it reads out directions for roundabouts, not only telling you the exit you need but also the name of the road and sometimes even where it goes (And it usually matches up with what’s on the road-sign, making it a lot easier to make-sure you find your exit)

Unfortunately the voice they use is awful, I believe it’s a text to speech engine but it sounds very robotic and could easily irritate, hopefully in a future version they’ll be able to change it to a more human sounding voice.

It Did slip up once when locating a train-station, for some reason it took us to the road behind the station and not the one leading upto it, thankfully the station had a foot bridge to cross to the correct side and I was only dropping people off, might have been a little inconvenient if you were expecting the car park however.  It was very nifty how it drops into street view as you approach your destination (if Google have street-view imagery of the area)

In Terms of Data usage It appears to have used Less than 5MB for a 220Mile journey (The Prepay Sim i’d put in the phone had 250MB of data allowance on it and according to the operator there’s now 247Mb left… of course the data use may vary depending on what you are planning on doing with it, probably best to have some kind of data bundle if you plan to use navigation).

I’m unable to comment on the traffic reporting functionality as the majority of my journey goggle didn’t have traffic info for.

To Sum it all up it’s a pretty decent piece of navigation software and if you happen to have a Android handset running Android 1.6 or higher then all you need to do to get Navigation is to visit the market place and grab the updated maps application, not only is it Free but it’s darn good as well.

*Not supported on the official UK firmware, since at the time of writing the i7500 galaxy in the UK is running Andorid 1.5 and navigation needs a minimum of 1.6 I used JC6 (1.6 based) from here, note replacing the firmware with firmware obtained from an unofficial source will probably void the warranty on the phone.