Nokia and Stupidity!!!

Hmmm… Long time since the last blog post. I was so up to my neck in work and other stuff I didn’t have the time to write one. Didn’t have anything to write about anyway. But today I’m writing a rant just because I’m in the mood to …

Anyways as some of my twitter follwers might be aware of I’d been grumbling about needing a new phone. My trusty old Nokia N73 ME gave out and I had to get rid of it. Spent about a week or so without a phone of my own. Well yesterday I finally got a phone that I could afford and do the stuff I wanted it to do. (Or so i thought)…

Well… The phone i got was a Nokia N95 8GB. 5MP Camera, Bluetooth, Wi-fi, HSDPA, A-GPS, Symbian S60 3rd Edition with Feature Pack 1 blah blah blah (I’m sure you’ve heard about some of this before. And yes, I know the phone is nearly a couple of years old. But this one fitted my price range )…While I’m more than satisfied with its features there is something I really really hate about the bloody thing. Just shows How much a good phone can get screwed up because of one stupid mistake the designers make.

Before choosing the phone I looked through the internet and read some reviews about it. But not one… NOT ONE… not even the trusty and very detailed GSM Arena review thought about mentioning this. OK…Before you get fed up (If you haven’t already..) I’ll get to the point. Take a look at the following picture.

Notice anything out of the ordinary? Nope? Hmmm… Not even I thought of it. Take a look at the next pic.

As you can see the 3.5mm headset jack is positioned on the left side of the phone. When the headset is plugged in its poking out nearly an inch. HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO LISTEN TO MUSIC WHILE THE PHONE IS IN MY JEANS POCKET???? Forget listening to music with it in the pocket. Can’t even pocket the damn thing with the headset plugged in. I usually travel a couple of hours a day back and forth and I listen to music while doing so. Which is one of the reasons I went for this phone as it has 8GB of storage which is more than enough for me. But with this headset jack placement I have to keep the phone in my hand. Grrr…. It can be pocketed with a little difficulty of course. But the headset won’t survive the procedure for long.

Well… That’s it. I just wanted to get that off my mind. Stupid Nokia!!! Don’t ever do that again!!!

P.S :- Other than the above mentioned reason can I just say I’m positively in love with the phone?

Google Talk Gadget and Recovering Ubuntu Jaunty

OK. I wasn’t really going to write a post today. But as I was checking my mail suddenly. . . (Well people living in Sri Lanka are very used to this). .  power went out (Courtesy of the C.E.B.). So instead of staring at a “Page not Found” screen I decided this might be a good time to write a new blog post. So here goes.

Well there’s really nothing much to write about here. All of us like the Gmail chat program right? (Well most of us at any rate.). You can just log into your gmail account and just start chatting away.

Google also offers the facility to use the Google Talk Gadget to chat from anywhere. This works in a similar way to Gmail chat. But you might notice some differences here too. And as a bonus you can even add a Google Talk Gadget right to your webpage. I’m just going to add one here. You can login with your ID and start chatting away.

Like most widgets this requires only one line of code. You can customize the border size, color and the size of the widget and Google will generate the code for you to embed on your website. Easy as 1,2,3.

EDIT : Ok… Either WordPress doesn’t like the script or its not easy as 1,2,3. Sorry about that. I was hoping to post the gadget here. But here’s a screenshot for now.

Right.. I’ve finished the post too. So I saved the post as a note and went downstais to have dinner. And I decided to suspend the laptop to conserve power while I’m gone. And after I come back what do I find. The laptop refuses to resume. (Using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) Grrr… Well as there was nothing else to do I held the power button pressed and turned it off.

And after reboot . . . GRUB. . . Ok. Good. . .  Select Ubuntu. . . Now the loading screen displays. . . and. . . . nothing. . . nada. . . Ok now i was getting seriously pissed here. I spent a lot of time today customizing the damn thing and was I going to have to do all that all over again?

Anyway I decided to check out the Ubuntu recovery mode this time (I really had never needed to use it). So I rebooted and selected the Ubuntu Recovery Mode and a menu is displayed. It displays some options to recover your Ubuntu installation. I had absolutely no idea which one to try. Hmmm. . . Recover from graphics problems. . . OK lets give that one a try. It displayed some console output here saying overwriting any graphics settings bla bla bla. Basically it must have reset the xorg.conf file (I think…).

Since I was already here I decided to push some more stuff and see what happens. Next I went for the scan file system. It displayed a progress bar for one of my ext3 partitions (I think that was the root partition) and displayed a warning message saying the scan might do SEVERE damage if it was run while the file system was mounted. So I decided to skip that one. I wasn’t here to do more damage. Just fix the damage that was already done.

OK. Now I look at the options again. Fix broken packages or something like that. That looked interesting . . . I select that one too. It displayed a hell of a lot of gibberish that no sane person would understand. After it finished I selected the option to continue normal resume.

And voila!… The login screen. Everything was just dandy again. . . . I’m glad because if I really don’t have time right now to install all this stuff again. One of the three i did must have worked (or well maybe all three). And here I am finishing another post of considerable size, after recovering an Ubuntu installation and having dinner and still no friggin power. @#$%^&*(. I’ll post this when I get power (If that happens anytime today.) . . . Later then. Cheers!!

P.S – Anyone else had suspend/resume problems on Kernel 2.6.28-11? And sorry for the linux experts about the lack of clarity in the details. I’m still kind of a newbie