If you’re someone who uses a computer for a living then having a decent keyboard is a very worthwhile investment. Earlier on this year I bought myself a couple of US layout “customizer” keyboards from Unicomp (one for work and one for home).

Unicomp was founded in 1996 when they bought the rights to the “buckling spring” technology as used in the well-known IBM Model-M keyboards. The Customizer models are essentially modern manufactured Model M keyboards albeit with slightly different numbers of keys and of course a USB cable.

Having had these keyboards for several months now I’m really happy with them. They are just beautiful to type on. The only downside of getting feedback from every key-press is the loud click that accompanies every key-stroke. My colleagues are pretty much use to me clacking away each day but I probably only get away with it because there’s a large amount of background noise in the office. Ultimately though because you can feel when you’ve made contact with a key it should mean you end up typing a little lighter than you would with an inferior rubber domed keyboard.

That said for me I would find it hard to go back to a normal keyboard. Having recently had to use a machine with a rubber domed keyboard I found the lack of feedback made the keyboard seem lifeless.

The build quality is great – these keyboards are built like the proverbial brick outhouse. So if you’re in the market for a decent keyboard I would recommend taking a look at Unicomp keyboards, they’re not particularly expensive at around $69 and they certainly feel like they should last a lifetime.

Amazon’s Mp3 store is now available in the UK which is great news. They seem to have a lot of tracks and albums available and track pricing is variable but seems tio start at the 69p which undercuts Apple’s iTunes music store by quite a bit.

Amazon’s tracks are DRM free tracks which means that you will always have access to your music. Whereas DRM tracks could become unplayable should the DRM service be switched off in the future. Think it won’t happen? Sadly there’s been several cases of DRM services being shutdown. MSN and Yahoo have both shut-down DRM based services in the past so it’s a big problem potentially. Clearly if Amazon can negotiate their way around the DRM problem companies like Apple should be able to just as well. (Granted apple does have the iTunes Plus tracks which are DRM free but this is a Minor subset of their overall catalogue.)

Album pricing seems to start at around £3.00 which is surprisingly aggressive, and it’s good to see major players like iTunes getting some decent competition. Also right now there seems to be lots of recently released albums available for £3.00 such as the Kings Of Leon album – Only By The Night. Can’t really complain at paying £3.00 for that. It’s £7.99 on the iTunes store.

The bit-rate is 256 kbps and whilst this is ok it would be good to see this upped in the future. Also I’d personally love to see the addition of open lossless formats such as flac. Though I can see that this possibly has a limited audience.

To download the tracks a software downloader is required but crucially this is available for OSX, windows and Linux. Purchasing a track is straight forward enough – a download of a .amz file is triggered which you open with the downloader and it proceeds to download the tracks.

Provided their music catalogue continues to grow to match their CD market I’m pretty sure Amazon’s UK mp3 offering will be a success. And Apple needs to start to wake up to this competition – whilst alternative mp3 services such as 7Digitial might not be widely known to the average Joe – Amazon is well known and anyone who uses amazon is likely to find the mp3 store pretty quickly if they’d not already heard of it.

In addition to the move to bazaar, Mysql are also using launchpad as their code repository though bugs will remain hosted at http://bugs.mysql.com/.

It’s great to see such a well respected project move over to bazaar, and I can see why – bazaar does make it much more easy for communities to contribute to a project whilst minimising the overhead of dealing with the community contribution.

Let’s hope this move inspires others, I for one would love to see the YUI look at openning up to increased community contribution by hosting their branches on launchpad.net.

For more info the official annoucement is here on the MySQL blog.

The steps to flashing your phone are very simple and this is mostly thanks to Nokia’s Software updater and the NSS suite which makes it possible to change your product code. Unfortunately the software for both of these operations is windows only but both work fine under parallels.

I followed these instructions which are very detailed and have excellent pictures. In any case I detail the procedure below with additional notes on doing this under a Parallels VM.

WARNING: You carry out the following at your own risk – I am not responsible if you brick your phone.

The Requirements

1. NSS (optional if you only want to update the firmware)
2. Nokia Software updater
3. USB Data Cable

Changing the Product Code to de-brand

To change the product code simply follow the following:

1. Make a backup with the Nokia PC suite before you start and make sure you have backed up anything important as everything will be wiped during this process.
2. Install the NSS software selecting “Virtual USB Device”
3. Connect your phone in PC suite mode and click the scan icon in the top right hand corner
4. Next select the “Phone Info” tab and then hit the “read” button on the right to read the info from your phone.
5. Tick the “enable” box to the right of the product code field and then enter the default product code which for the UK is: 0530151
6. Click the “write” button and close NSS

Next the process for updating the phone itself is just to follow the steps outlined on this site within the Nokia Software updater. Note if you are changing the product code and you already have the current firmware you will want to re-install the current firmware to get rid of your current branding.

Using Parallels to flash the firmware

I’ve used the current version of Parallels Desktop for Mac to carry out firmware updates on a Windows XP VM twice now. All you need to do is take care to keep an eye on the usb activity light and if necessary tick E61 if it appears and is unticked. This happened only on the first time I used parallels six months ago and when I carried this out yesterday I had no issues whatsoever. To get the USB device to work I had the USB device in parallels set to “ask what to do” when a device is detected.

I do recommend using the Nokia PC suite if you’ve not used your data cable before as this will get you used to handling it before you get into the flashing process. Sometime you will have to disconnect and re-connect the cable so that the software detects the phone properly.

If you’re in any doubt about carrying out this process under parallels then I suggest you either leave your phone as is or carry it out with a proper PC. It worked perfectly for me but YMMV.

Process Complete

After all is done you can start putting apps back on your phone and re-installing the contacts if necessary. You can also now check out the IM and Push to Talk apps that weren’t there before (on my Ex Vodafone phone). One point to make here is if you are only doing this for these apps then I wouldn’t bother. Apps like Fring and Mig33 (note site has audio) are probably far more useful and easier to use.

via Russ Weakly

The only limitation to this whole project is that the traffic is limited to 5% of the traffic generated on the pulbic site. If one user uses more than 1% of that, then Multimap will “be in touch to discuss how we can work together to help you grow”. Which sounds like you’ll be asked to open a commercial account. In any case, if you’re looking to create something based around draggable maps then multimap’s openAPI is well worth a look. In addition as Multimap support Mapstraction.com (mapstraction currently supports Multimaps paid service) you should be able to use that so that switching between providers becomes even easier.

For more info on Multimap’s openAPI see http://www.multimap.com/openapi/

Thunderbird does email very well, which is not that surprising given that email is Thunderbird’s core feature. The RSS support is what I find the most frustrating. I currently use Thunderbird’s RSS reader as my feed aggregator of choice on Windows. I like the fact it’s integrated within the mail application, which makes a lot of sense but it’s not without it’s shortcomings.

OPML

With the release of Thunderbird 1.5RC1 came OPML support and I expected this to allow you to export the OPML feed on one machine and import it on another machine so you would end up with an identical set of feeds. Wrong! All you end up with is a linear list of feeds that needs to be re-organised back into it’s previous hierarchical structure (assuming if like me you had one).

For example I have a blogs ‘folder’, within that I have 3 subfolders splitting the various blogs I am subscribed to into ‘British blogs’, ‘American/Canadian blogs’ and ‘European blogs’. Now when you export as OPML file Thunderbird doesn’t recreate this structure when you import back in.

Grouping feeds

The next issue I have with ‘folders’ (used to group feeds together) is that I can’t see the feeds grouped under the folder I am focused on. On the Mac I use NetNewsWire, why because it just does everything an RSS reader should do. If I hover on the folder that groups together a whole bunch of feeds I will see the list on the right displays all of these feeds available for me to look at.

Mark as read recursively

Thunderbird doesn’t allow you to recursively mark feeds as read. You can only mark feeds read one feed at a time which makes Thunderbird very time consuming to use. NetNewsWire(only on the Mac) allows you to do this without any hassles whatsoever.

Firefox integration with Thunderbird

Another surprising omission is that it isn’t currently possible to get Firefox to send feed urls to Thunderbird. Feed Your Reader is an extension that allows you to send feed urls from Firefox to NetNewsWire and many other News aggregators but unfortunately Thunderbird isn’t one of them.

The Lightning reaction

Mozilla Thunderbird has for a long time been criticised for the lack of an tightly integrated Calendar. However the Lightning project is due out this month and is set to give Thunderbird the calendar it’s been lacking for so long. I for one can’t wait to see this release.

Conclusion

To sum up, We’re all going to have be patient, but I don’t really expect much to change in Thunderbird’s upcoming 1.5 release. Still if in the future the RSS issues can be addressed and if a calendar gets implemented well, Thunderbird will undoubtedly become the firm favorite for email, news aggregation and calendaring.

Imagine a combination of Google Maps and Google Local in 3D. The search facilities can literally fly you anywhere on the map

It really has to be seen to be believed. If you’ve got windows and your machine’s up to the spec take a look.

• Google Earth Page
• Major Geeks Mirror

Google has launched Google maps for the UK as well as Google local.

Whilst Google maps is not a new feature it is certainly nice to see it in action for the places that you know. I think that with it’s directions feature and clean graphical interface it will probably give multimap a run for it’s money.

I like the fact that the maps are consistent graphically compared to multimap’s digitised Ordinance survey maps. The use of Javascript to request data makes the whole user experience very swift and responsive and it works incredibly well. Google have taken this technology and run with it and we are now seeing what can really be done.

I am looking forward to the satellite imagery feature (see maps.google.com) to be released for blighty.