Rogers Unveils A Different Data Plan
I admit that I was rough on Rogers the other day when I heard about the data plan for the new 3G iPhone, set to go on sale this Friday. But I was hardly the only one to get P.O.’d about it.
It’s nice to see that Rogers was listening, and whether it was due to public outcry or something that they’d planned to do all along, they’ve now announced a 6GB data plan for just $30 per month, as long as you activate the phone on a 3-year contract by August 31st.
They’ve also announced that they’ll be limiting buyers to a maximum of two iPhones to help deal with the high demand. This isn’t that unusual, as they already do this in the U.S. - although that was primarily to deal with iPhones that wound up on eBay.
Filed Under AppleReview: Corsair Voyager 4GB USB Key
The other day I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Corsair Voyager 4GB USB key courtesy of my employer, so I thought I’d do a review of the device.
Right off the bat it was quite obvious that this was one tough USB key. The whole thing is rubber coated, meaning that you don’t have to panic if you happen to drop the thing. Working in the environment that I do is a definite plus.
Flash Voyager 4GB Key
This is a USB 2.0 key, but it’s also backward compatible with any USB 1.1 ports. If you wanted to use it with Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost, this key would work just fine. It’s also available in 4, 8, 16 or 32GB configurations, and comes with a lanyard and a USB extension cable. The actual reported capacity of the drive in XP SP3 is 3.74 GB.
In a performance test against my no-name 4GB USB key, I was able to copy a 1.1 GB folder (572 files) to the Corsair in 5 minutes and 15 seconds. The generic key was 6 minutes and 49 seconds for the same folder. Quite a significant difference. Using HDTach (thanks, Tyler), I ran a basic test, and found the transfer rate to be around 6 MB/s for the generic, but more than 5 times that for the Corsair. Guess which key I’m happier with?
If you’re looking for a good rugged USB key, you’d be hard pressed to top this statement from the Corsair site: "The Flash Voyager has been shown laundered, baked, frozen, boiled, dropped, and even run over by a SUV in many third party reviews. After all the punishment it receives, the drive continues to work."
Indeed. This is one tough key.
Disclosure: This is a completely independent review of the Corsair Voyager. The drive was not supplied by Corsair for purposes of review. I was just impressed with the device enough to want to do a review of it.
Filed Under ReviewsOn The Hunt For A New Phone
Evidently my two year old cell phone has decided to take its toys and go home. It would appear that the mic is dead, because whether I make or receive a call, I can hear the person on the other end just fine, but they evidently can’t hear me.
Based on my post about the iPhone I won’t be looking at that, but I’m kind of limited in my options because I use Fido’s prepaid service, which means I don’t get any of the benefits of subsidization.
I don’t live on my phone like some do, and I haven’t had to spend more than $20 per month in probably the last 6 years or so, and I’ve been happy. If I don’t need the phone for awhile, I just don’t pick up a new card for a month or two and everything’s fine. No fees if I don’t use the phone.
But now it’s time to look at a new phone, I guess. Any recommendations for GSM phones that work on the Fido network? Anyone got a phone they’d like me to review for them here on RTdN?
Filed Under MiscellaneousRogers Does It To Canadians Again With the iPhone
When it was announced earlier this month that the iPhone would finally be coming to Canada on July 11th, there was no shortage of discussion as to just how bad the pricing was going to be for the data plans.
For those outside of Canada who might not know, there are three (major) mobile carriers - Rogers, Bell, and Telus. Only Rogers uses GSM, so it was a given that they (along with subsidiary Fido) were going to be carrying the iPhone exclusively in Canada.
The big question came down to data. Many don’t realize, but there’s really no such thing as unlimited data plans in the Great White North, and to match a U.S. unlimited data plan, Canadians would need to shell out somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1200 PER MONTH.
So when Engadget Mobile dropped a rumour about a $30 consumer plan and a $45 enterprise plan, it was quite the surprise. Today though, comes the hard slap of reality.
While requiring a 3-year contract, you’ll get exactly 400MB of data along with 150 minutes for $60 per month. If you’re a hardcore user, the most you’re going to get is 2GB of data + 800 minutes for a whopping $115 per month.
Oh, and if you want caller ID with that, it’s available in a couple of extra packages, for either $15 or $20 per month. Otherwise, you don’t even get caller ID with a phone that you’re going to pay a premium for.
And if you’re a prepaid customer, I’m willing to bet that you’re looking at close to $1000 to buy the phone, and then no data plan.
But what else can you do? No competition means they can charge what they want.
Filed Under AppleDon’t Blame Your Customer If You Sold Them Faulty Equipment
Last night I got a call from someone I occasionally do computer work for, and he provided me with a story that I felt I needed to blog about. I’m not giving any names, and it might become obvious why a little later.
He had just purchased a new 12 megapixel Canon camera, along with a card reader so that he wouldn’t have to drain batteries when pulling photos off of the camera. He had about 30 pictures on the card in JPEG format, about 4MB apiece, so about 120MB give or take.
While he was copying the images off the card on to his machine, he noticed that it was taking a LONG time to pull each image off. About two minutes per image. So he called up the camera shop where he bought both the camera and the reader, and spoke to their "computer guy", who asked about his PC. He told them that it was a four year old Dell, running XP SP3 with 1GB of memory, and lots of free space on the disk.
"Oh, no," he was told. "That machine is too old for something as intensive as that. It should be upgraded or replaced. It can’t handle something like what you’re trying to do." He asked if the card reader could be bad, but was told that, no, it was the PC.
Excuse me?? I’m not trying to paint all camera dealers with the same brush here, but this is why you don’t go to a camera shop to ask about problems with your PC, even if the problem is related to your camera. To prove this to myself, I fired up my Olympus E-10 and shot 30 RAW images (11MB each) and put the card in my generic $19 card reader plugged into my four year old whitebox machine running XP SP3 with 756MB of RAM. Took about 3-4 minutes to copy all 300+ MB.
So, he pulled the card out of the reader, put it back in the camera, and plugged that into his "decrepit" PC. It took less than a minute to copy all of the photos off.
It was a bad card reader.
So, please, if you don’t want to admit that you sold a piece of broken gear, don’t try and shift the blame to the user’s existing gear, or put the blame on them. Because it’ll really come back to bite you someday if someone finds out about it (and blogs about it, too).
Filed Under Miscellaneous, PhotographyBC Place Turns 25
It was 1979, and the Vancouver Whitecaps had just won the NASL Soccer Bowl, defeating the Tampa Bay Rowdies in New York’s Giant’s Stadium.
As the parade made it’s way through the streets of downtown, a chant started to go through the crowd: "We Want A Stadium!" - Old Empire Stadium had been built for the 1954 British Empire Games (now known as the Commonwealth Games). It was a rickety old place that admittedly still had a lot of character, and when it was packed to the rafters with fans watching the ‘Caps play, it was a pretty cool place.
Plans started to slowly come together for a new stadium for the city, one that would be a home for the Whitecaps, the BC Lions, and maybe a Major League Baseball franchise someday.
Photo courtesy of BC Place Archives
The stadium was built with great expectations, and I can remember watching when they inflated the roof, and how it changed the skyline of the city. Today, it’s one of the most recognizable things in any photograph of Vancouver. Although I still think they should have called it Terry Fox Memorial Stadium, but that’s just me.
I was there on the opening day, too. The Whitecaps faced the Seattle Sounders on June 19, 1983. They handed out pins for Soccer Bowl ‘83 which would be played at the new stadium later that summer.
Ironically, Soccer Bowl ‘83 was the last game that the NASL played. Vancouver had built a beautiful 60,000 seat stadium for the Whitecaps and they played all of about 15 games there. Today the Whitecaps are trying to build a new stadium near Gastown.
The old place has stood up pretty well, despite having the roof rip last year. And it’s getting a facelift, too. A retractable roof is going to be put in place, although not in time for the 2010 Olympic Games.
It’s been the site of some good times for me, too. The closing party for the staff at Expo86, a Jeff Healey Concert, a few football and soccer games, etc.
BC Place is part of Vancouver, and here’s to hoping that it’s here for a good many more years as well.
Filed Under VancouverGoogle Analytics Suite for Adobe Air
As I was checking my feeds earlier today, I came across a post on Lifehacker about the Top 10 Apps Worth Installing Adobe AIR For and I had a quick scan of the list to see what all was included. To be honest, the only reason I’ve installed AIR was to use Twhirl as my Twitter client. But maybe this list would give me an idea of what else was available.
I was glad to see that Twhirl was included at number 5, but nothing else really caught my attention, until I saw the top 2: the ReaderAIR Google Reader client, and the Google Analytics Reporting Suite, which I’m going to cover here.
One of the things that I love about the Analytics Reporting Suite (ARS) is that it is *fast*. Stats seem to come up a whole lot quicker than what I’ve found in the web based version. I also find it a little easier to interpret the stats that I get from the ARS, but that might just be me. I’m hardly what you’d call an expert at analyzing web stats.
Unfortunately, my connection has been a little flaky tonight, so I’m not able to download it for my home machine and get screenshots. But I’ll grab some captures tomorrow morning and re-edit this post, adding them in at that time.
If you’re looking for a new way to get your Google Analytics stats presented, you couldn’t really go wrong by downloading the Google Analytics Reporting Suite. If you’ve got AIR installed on your machine, give it a try.
Filed Under GoogleFixing the “AwesomeBar” in Firefox 3
If you’ve never tried Firefox, it might be a good idea to give it a try now that version 3 has been officially released.
While there are a number of great improvements in this version of the browser (with the memory leaks being fixed one of the most important), there was one feature that I wanted to fix as soon as I downloaded the official version this morning.
The Mozilla folks have ‘improved’ the address bar so that it shows a number of “suggestions” while you’re typing an address into the bar. At first these are based on popular sites, but eventually it’ll start picking up on your browsing history, and making suggestions based on that.
It’s hardly foolproof, though. When I enter “reader.” into the address bar, it should pick up on the fact that (based on my past browsing) I want reader.google.com to come up. But, neither of the two suggestions point to Google Reader. Instead they assume I mean a couple of GR sites on Blogger. And this is with me visiting the GR site on a daily basis.
So I set out to find out how to disable this feature, as it’s not something that I want in my browser. And Firefox is supposed to be the customizable browser, right?
So, with a bit of time on Google, I found the answer. You’ll need to enter ‘about:config‘ (minus the quotes) into the Firefox address bar, and make a change to one setting on the resulting page. In the filter, enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults and the key should appear. Double click on it, and change the default value from 12 to 0. Once that’s done, the Firefox suggestions should stop.
This makes Firefox back into the browser that I want to keep using. Now if the add-on developers could finish making their add-ons compatible with the new version, it would be better still.
Filed Under MiscellaneousReview: Logiix Optic Alloy Case for 2nd Gen iPod Nano
For the last year and a half or so, I’ve had a black Logiix silicone skin on my 2nd generation iPod Nano, and I’ve been more than impressed with it. iPods have a tendency to scratch fairly easily, although I hadn’t seen much of this with mine, thankfully.
But it was getting to be time for a new skin, as the Nano was starting to slide out the bottom of the skin and I had visions of it bouncing off the floor sometime. Not something that you want to have happen.
So I decided that I’d see what I could do about picking up a new silicone skin, preferably something other than black, as it was time for a change. Headed to the store where I’d purchased my last one, and they didn’t seem to have any for the 2nd generation Nanos. Lots for the 3rd gen, but I didn’t feel like buying a new iPod just to get a skin for it, y’know?
As I was getting ready to leave, I saw that they were on a different rack, kind of out of the way, so I spun the rack around looking for something that caught my eye. That turned out to be the price. Silicone skins were marked down from $12.99 to just 99 cents. Cool. Sometimes obsolescence can be a good thing. I wound up buying three, a Logiix clear silicone, a black iSeal skin, and a Logixx Optic Alloy case, which was the expensive option ($1.99)
I put the clear Logiix skin on after I bought them and it worked out about as well as its black predecessor had. The one complaint that I have about silicone skins is that you lose a fair bit of sensitivity in the click wheel. The center button will be fine, but dragging my finger on the wheel has been sluggish or even non-responsive at times.
So this morning I opened up the Optic Alloy case to see if it was any different. First thing I noticed was that, being a hard case, the screen protector is built in. I don’t have much in the way of scratching on the display of my Nano, and it’s nice to see that I won’t be getting any more in the foreseeable future.
I slid the Nano into the case, and gave it a spin. The whole thing feels a lot more substantial, and not quite as ‘delicate’ as the Nano felt when it wasn’t encased in the silicone skin. The Nano doesn’t slide around inside the case like it did with the metal one that I bought for my holidays last year. The wheel isn’t covered, so it’s as responsive as I would expect it to be if the device wasn’t encased. The edges are rubber coated as well, so I don’t feel like it’s going to slip out of my hand when I’m trying to find something else to listen to.
Had I known about this case a year and a half ago, I’d have picked one up and used it all along. Of course, then it was probably $39.99, but it would have been worth it.
If you’re not ready to be upgrading your 2nd generation Nano to a 3rd gen, or even a Touch, this would be the case I’d recommend picking up for your device, and quickly if at all possible - I wouldn’t imagine that too many retailers are going to be stocking 2nd gen accessories for too much longer.
I’ve emailed Logiix to ask them if they’ll continue to make the cases available for order online, but the response from them was that the case was no longer available, but new designs were being worked on.
If you’re able to pick up an Optic Alloy case from Logiix for your 2nd gen Nano, I highly recommend doing so. This the only case that I’m going to be keeping on mine until it’s time to upgrade it to something newer.
Filed Under Apple, Google, Microsoft, RSS, Vista, Windows, WordPressAVG 8 "Feature" Blocks Windows Live Messenger
Over the course of the last week or so, I’ve noticed that I’ve been having more and more problems logging in to Windows Live Messenger at work. Usually I would have to try a couple of times to get it to login, but otherwise, it would report that it was attempting to sign in, but would just spin for ten minutes or so before I gave up on it.
This morning I decided that I’d use Pidgin instead, and got this interesting error:
Disconnected: Our protocol is not supported by the server.
WTF? Microsoft trying to block other IM applications from accessing its server? No, that wouldn’t make sense, because logging in with WLM should work. Entered the error message into Google, and it appears to be a known issue with the latest version of AVG 8, but there was a fix listed:
- Open AVG
- Click Tools -> Advanced Settings
- Click on the ‘+’ beside Web Shield to expand it
- Select Instant Messaging, and untick the "Enable Instant Messaging Shield"
- After clicking OK you should be able to login to Messenger with no trouble
Note that there are a couple of options for enabling protection on ICQ and MSN. Simply unchecking the box for MSN Protection isn’t enough. You’re required to disable the Instant Messaging Shield.
This will also make AVG complain that you’re not fully protected, and it will report that the Web Shield is only partially functional.
Filed Under Security-
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