Spoofscript

In my previous post, I compared the BlackBerry Storm to the iPhone 3G. One thing I intentionally omitted, because I think it deserves its own time is the fact that VodaFone Ireland appears to be screwing their customers over the BlackBerry Storm.

Take a look at the UK version of the VodaFone website and you’ll see this:

As a stark comparison lets compare the UK and Irish VodaFone offers:

UK: Free BlackBerry Storm

Eire: 110 Eur Premium

UK: Unlimited Internet (email/web)

Eire: 1Gb download allowance, 2 Eur per Mb thereafter

UK: Unlimited free texts

Eire: 100 free texts, 11c there after

UK: 600 inclusive talk time minutes

Eire: 100 inclusive minutes, 30c thereafter

Given that the BlackBerry Storm has no wifi, I find it extremely hard to justify the limits imposed. Anyone with the device will be limited to the 1Gb download allowance and will not be able to use Wifi hotspots afterwards. This is ok in the UK/US as with unlimited internet it means nothing more than an inconvenenience when your roaming or not in an 3G area. But in Ireland at least, it means you could easily be caught paying through the nose.

Its so easy these days to go through way more than 1Gb of data in a month, that it boggles the mind to think we have to almost go backwards to go forwards.

I would probably get the BlackBerry Storm if it were not for this, I dont know about anyone else. Can anyone truly justify why anyone who lives in the north… only a few miles away… can get such an offer but we in the south are shafted like this? Its actually insulting to think about.

My trusty iPaq h6900 is running a bit ragged as of late; its not holding too much power, and I’m starting to resent its lack of responsiveness. Its about time for a change.

with the new ‘made to order for VodaFone’ RIM BlackBerry Storm coming this friday, I thought I’d stack up the pros and cons against the Apple iPhone.

For Irish Customers the iPhone is available from O2 and the BlackBerry storm will be available this friday I’m told from VodaFone stores - dont expect it to be in Carphone warehouse for while yet.

So without any further stalling, heres how the two stack up against each other:

Here’s a summary of the pros and cons of the two devices and their respective network plans which you’ll have to subscribe to. Note that I’m comparing the bill pay services here, the pay-to-go iPhone is another beast and it’d be like comparing apples with… more different apples.

Oh, also I will only be focusing on the 16 Gb iPhone model. Besides the fact I see the 8Gb as frustratingly small, I also forsee a 32Gb iPhone model coming soon, with the 8Gb being phased out not long afterwards.

BlackBerry Storm (VodaFone)

Pros:

• Interchangable Battery
• 0.5 to 60 more hours Battery Life (350 / 5.5hrs total, respectively)
• Upgradable Memory (via MicroSD Card)
• 1.2 MegaPixel more resolution (3.2MP total)
• Mobile Television / Sports package
• In essence, has twice the download limit (1Gb on VodaFone Live!, 1Gb on BlackBerry web & email)

Cons:

• 5 Eur extra per month
• 75 less minutes per month
• Calls cost 10c extra per minute
• Texts cost 1c extra
• Outside bundle Internet fees are 100x more. Seriously. wtf?
• No Wifi (whose bad idea was that?)
• Browser doesnt support Flash

Apple iPhone 3G 16Gb (O2)

Pros:

• 75 Minutes Extra per month
• Free WiFi at every BitBuzz HotSpot
• Cheaper out of bundle calls/texts/Internet
• Actually has WiFi - which means you can use hotspots Storm users cant.

Cons:

• No Mobile TV (unless you count YouTube)
• Battery cannot be replaced; sort of diminishes their ‘greenier than thou’ argument.

A few caveats: the iPhone has a huge catalogue of games/apps available for it from iTunes; as yet I cant say either way if BlackBerry has a similar base of apps, so I avoided the issue. I’d apreciate comments from those who know.

I think the BlackBerry Storm comes as close as any other device on the market to being that ‘iPhone Killer’ everyone has been waiting for. However, you’ll be paying a price premium for it.

On a personal note, I’m conflicted. To get the same memory capacity you’d have to purchase a memory card raising the initial cost of the BlackBerry Storm to that equal of the iPhone; and then you’d still be paying 5eur extra per month in addition to the out of bundle charges.

I just had to fix a stupid bug in Skype…

I have a multi-monitor setup and a few days ago I switched which monitor is the primary, in addition to which side the primary/secondary monitor sits (display preferences).

This must’ve caused Skype to get confused, because ever since its been missing - the window is there, sure, but i only know because when I hover my mouse over the name in the taskbar, I get a snapshot.

Turns out the problem was it was moved to the far - far - far right of the screen, where it expected the old display to be, but was totally wrong. I had to go in and edit shared.xml and config.xml (all in the skype folder in the application data directory).

I had to change this part:

<MainWindow>
<Height>764</Height>
<Width>357</Width>
<X>2987</X>
<Y>153</Y>
</MainWindow>

to this:

<MainWindow>
<Height>764</Height>
<Width>357</Width>
<X>0</X>
<Y>0</Y>
</MainWindow>

This could all have been solved if skype actually cascaded properly like other windows, or even if it has a ‘move’ option like all good programs do. tut tut.

Perhaps I’m being too picky, I’ll let you decide:

Tescos had a 25% off video games sale, and having recently been paid for fixing someones computer, I thought I’d splurge on a couple games - it doesnt happen to often with me. I mostly spend my money, when I do that is, on hardware. So this was a bit of a strange act to begin with.

Basically, I rang around a couple stores getting the prices of some games. Side note here: apparently GameStop and doubtless others, hike their prices if they think your ringing as a price check from competitor, left me with a bad taste in my mouth when the manager told me that. Anyways, I got the prices for a number of PC games - Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Red Alert 3 and… Dead Space. Which I wouldnt have gotten was it not for being an avid Diggnation viewer, but i digress.

Long story short, tescos was near by advertising this 25% off deal, so I went and out of shock of the price just bought the three games I could there and then - GameStop did a very bad attempt at price-matching HMV which was significantly cheaper on the PC prices, so I was a bit miffed at them too.

So long story even shorter, after all, im disapointed I bought the console games EVEN THOUGH they’re 25% cheaper than normal, as even still, they cost more than their PC counterparts, and are of lesser quality; the graphics are not superior by any stretch of the imagination. At one point Fallout 3 presented significant artifcating, to such an extent that there was a whopping huge polygon obscuring my view until I died; not to mention the whole tutorial sequence being royally broken. I just sat there twiddling my thumbs for about 20mins until I restarted.

Luckily I think I can trade all the games in for _almost_ the same price I paid, maybe I lose 5eur, which isnt a huge loss. I’ll knock it up as a learning experience, or just a punishment for being so picky, whatever the case may be.

Vex - A vector based XNA game

Vex would be a game without any pre-rendered graphics, they would be drawn procedurally. The terrain would be generated randomly, within specified limits, and would scroll from right to left across the screen. The aim of the game would be to simply survive, without crashing your ship into the landscape.

Io - linux server

Callisto - Dual monitor desktop (main pc)

Ganymede - Apple iMac

Europa - Sony Laptop (main laptop)

Amalthea - Home Theatre PC (HTPC)

Hamalia - Next phone / PDA (doesnt suit the asus)

Elara - Asus EEE 901 (college laptop)

back from my tortureous excersion to beauvais paris, I have a couple of interesting pics. it looks like france is very linux friendly, more than that even, they’re hacker and shockingly - “pirate” friendly. These are only a couple of the magazines they had, there were a couple more - one notably called “hacker news”, which had some article about the pirate bay in french. 

there were also a couple of linux distro magazines. which from the looks of it was just the distro in a magazine slieve. maybe there was more to it, but i dont read french.

Bought an aluminium case, stripped its guts and spray painted. Then I inserted the foam which was nabbed out of a flight case.

The Warchalk symbol for an open ap was spray painted on the side. Glow in the dark paint can broke, otherwise It would be that instead of white.