It’s not often I actually have to get my hands dirty and code real sites, but in this instance, a) there was noone else free and b) I fancied the challenge.
Soupercan! is a tongue-in-cheek site developed at work as a bit of fun and to run some relatively harmless experiments in viral marketing.
Doesn’t mean that the visual I was given was going to be easy to build though! Man I never knew how much I wouldn’t miss IE6!
Check out the cheeky use of jquery in the ’send to friend’ box, SWFObject embedded flash movie, and an xhtml-mp mobile friendly equivalent.
How much fun can you have with one page?
It surprised me how relieved I was last night when I took my SIM card out of the smartphone I had on loan and fired up my usual phone - normality returned, and there was almost a sigh of satisfaction.
It’s hard to pin the blame on any one aspect of the newcomer - it was a bit too big, it wasn’t a very good phone (usability of that side was terrible) nor was it a very good PDA (screen res was only a quarter of the Loox - 240×320 instead of 480×640). The 3G GPRS was impressive, but even though I wasn’t paying the bandwidth I still felt guilty and longed for guiltfree WiFi.
Having said that I feel the experiment was a success - I now know I’m happier with a phone being a good phone, and a seperate PDA.
Now who did I lend the Loox to?
It’s only on loan, but I’ve got a Palm Treo 750v to play with for a week or so - it’s a smartphone running Windows Mobile - the immediate difference from my PDA is that it’s also a phone - 3G GPRS can be used for connectivity. It’s a smaller screen, and has a ‘real’ qwerty keyboard. Oh, and no WIFI, which means I feel guilty using up any transfer.
Even if I had the chance I don’t know if I’d want to keep it - it doesn’t sit as well in my trouser pocket as my K750i, and not as nice to use as a PDA as the Loox. And now I’ve fifured out how to get the phone to provide GPRS connectivity to the PDA - I didn’t blog that did I? Use *99***1# as a number for the ‘modem’ to dial and it uses GPRS - I get the best of each role, but with two devices.
I wonder if I could get hold of a Qtek 910?
I ‘borrowed’ a suspect AGP graphics card from work to see if it would make a difference to my MythTV setup - I quickly dropped it in and ran KnoppMyth installer - and yes it has managed to produce almost jump-free playback. However, MythTV still isn’t quite … happy with this install method - time for some tinkering I think.
This time I download Ubuntu 6.1.10 Edgy Eft on which it’s apparently quite easy to install MythTV. It’s not without hiccups though - I’ve a PVR-250 instead of a Nova-T - I miss the vital step of apt-get update after modifying /etc/apr/sources.list so it can’t find mythtv to install.
Next, when I run mythtv-setup it can’t see my tuner card - a bit of investigating and I uncover I need to install ivtv which I’m working through now.
I now realise why the graphics card wasn’t being used - it doesn’t like booting. I also now realise that a Radeon 9700 is not the best for this anyway - turns out ATi cards don’t play well with Linux.
Wouldn’t it be easier to get a Sky+ box?
