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  • T-Mobile and Orange owners can now share networks!

    The merger of Orange and T-Mobile was some time ago and the intention is to continue to run them as seperate entities. None-the-less, there are advantages to the merger of some areas, and they’ve now announced that as of yesterday, users of either of their networks can now freely roam onto the other.

    What does this mean? Well I signed up yesterday and it means that when the signal at home disappears for T-Mobile (and it does!) it roams to Orange, which has a much stronger presence in my area.

    And all of this is free. Simply sign up at your networks site, provide your phone number and they’ll switch the facility on. You also have to tell them your phone make, as their may be some settings that require changing manually to allow roaming.

    They’ll send you a text which you reply to – Orange responds back to this, although T-Mobile appears not to. And that’s it. It may be worth re-powering your phone as well.

    Bear in mind that they haven’t got it running 100% smoothly yet so, for example, it won’t swap unnoticeable between the two.

  • Sharing with Pogoplug

    My earlier post about bargain prices for Pogoplug, reminded me that I hadn’t shared about, erm, sharing on Pogoplug.

    Last week I went bowling with work. I was rubbish. But I did remember to take a camera – a cheap digital camera mind you. Most of the pictures that night were taken by a colleague, but I had a fine and rather random collection by the end.

    I got home and copied the card directly to my PC. From there I used Picasa to edit them – removing useless (e.g. photos of the ceiling) and out of focus shots, removing red-eye, that kind of thing. Finally, I copied them onto the Western Digital Elements hard drive that I have connected to Pogoplug. The vast majority of this time was spent editing the shots but, never-the-less, it still didn’t take long at all.

    Then I went to bed and left Pogoplug to upload the photos to the Pogoplug site.

    Next morning, I signed onto their site and shared the folder. I was provided with a unique URL that I could then share with people from work. Anyone visiting this URL would have been presented with a professional presentation of photo thumbnails that they can scroll through and click on to see larger images. From there they can download and share further. They can even run a slideshow (which many did) rather than click through them individually. If I’d wanted to I could have added select photos and generated my own slideshow.

    It’s all very swish and I had to do nothing to get them into this state – all of this is provided, free, by the Pogoplug website. I was very, very impressed.

    I’ll be generous and share the pictures, so you can see exactly what I mean – click here to view the bowling photos on the Pogoplug website.

  • No Power to Nintendo Wii!

    Tonight I noticed there was no power light at all on my Wii – normally, even if off, the light on the front is red. Now, there was a brief power cut on Monday night and I wonder if it happened then.

    Anyway, I unplugged it (which involved moving the TV out and pulling out lots of cables!) and tried another power socket – nothing.

    Bum.

    Hopefully, I was thinking, it was the power supply – that would be cheap to replace!

    I did a quick Google though and came across a Nintendo article that explains how the AC Adapter can be “reset” (I assume it has some kind of protective cut-out facility built in) – you, basically, unplug the power supply from both ends, leave it 2 minutes and then try it again. So I unplug it and leave it while I go and wash-up. Plugging it back in, I do indeed get power back!

    One thing that would have helped would have been some kind of power light on the power supply itself – most laptop PSUs have one, and it’s a shame the Wii doesn’t. If it’s for “green” reasons, why not have a small button that you press – if it has power a light comes on momentarily?

  • Xmarks is closing

    For quite a few years now I’ve happily used Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as my de-facto bookmarks synchroniser. However, they’ve now announced that within the next 90 days, Xmarks will be closing down.

    It’s mentioned on their blog, but not their site front page (and I probably wouldn’t have realised if I hadn’t seen the news elsewhere). It would appear that their inability to “moneterise” Xmarks has been the problem. They had made steps recently to move Xmarks towards a newer audience, with the display of site ratings both in search results and in the browser toolbar. However, they’ve done this whilst not keeping up-to-date with the sync applications available elsewhere – they’ve recently added tab syncing, but they still lag behind the sync features of many of their competition.

    Many of those commenting on the blog have suggested that they try charging $10 a year for the service – many are saying they would and it does seem strange that Xmarks hasn’t tried a subscription service before giving up.

    For us end users, it leaves us wondering where to go now. Personally, I’ve now installed Firefox Sync, which is from Mozilla. This will be included by default in the next major Firefox release – it doesn’t have the bells and whistles which I never used, but does synchronise, well, pretty much everything.

  • Google Rich Snippets

    Google have recently introduced a new “Rich Snippets” feature that allows you greater interactivity with the way your website results appear in their search results.

    Using one of 3 formats (microdata, microformats, or RDFa) you can add “meta data” about your site which Google will then pick up on and then format your results appropriately.

    They have Rich Snippets available for different scenarios, including for people and reviews. The latter, as you can imagine, I was interested in.

    Google have some good documentation on Rich Snippets and, in particular, review snippets. I decided to use microformats as my format of choice, and simply added the appropriate code into my theme. Hidden from the viewer, my product review data is now made available to Google – product name, rating, reviewer name, etc.

    Once done, you can test the results using a supplied testing tool.

    It’s so easy, I implemented the review changes and even provided “people” information from my “About” page during my lunchtime.