Live From Brussels

What Happens when you Drive Behind an Airliner?

I bet my car-nut brother will love this video Mondeo and 2CV blown away.

Winter Fun

We woke up with 5 to 10 cm. of snow in the yard!

Optical Illusion

Damn, this is weird: Very cool illusion.

Amazing how the human brain can fool itself into not seeing stuff that is there, and seeing stuff that is not there...

Optical Illusion

Damn, this is weird: Very cool illusion.

Amazing how the human brain can fool itself into not seeing stuff that is there, and seeing stuff that is not there...

Telenet Launches Weblog Service

For those of you who don't read my Dutch language work related blog: a few days ago Telenet, the largest broadband cable internet provider in Flanders, launched its blogging service, and on TypePad no less.  More info on Blogologie, my other blog.

Thank Your First Commenter Day

Even though it is an American initiative related to Thanksgiving, I too would like to participate in Thank Your First Commenter Day.  Wherever you are now, Mark Edwards, thanks for this one.

All Your Base Rhapsody

For all of you who remember the 'All Your Base' meme floating around the net a couple of years back,  here it is again, with a cool new twist.

Paris Riots: Measures Taking Effect... or Just the Weather?

A.P. reports a steep drop in the number of arrests and cars burned in France.  Good news if you live there! The article speaks of the state of emergency and curfew laws taking effect, and links this to the decline. 

However, interestingly enough, if you take a look at this page of weather data for one of the Paris airports, something jumps out if you compare the average temperature with the number of cars burned.  It also says there was rain on the 9th.

Might there be a correlation?  Let's hope for a few more cold and wet days...

French Riots in Numbers

Just stumbled on this nifty overview table of the recent unpleasantness in France.  There are also some interesting graphs suggesting things may be quieting down. A few days of really cold or rainy weather would also help, I think.  For those of you who read Dutch, yesterday I wrote a limerick about the situation on my other blog.

  Wikipedia rules.

Qtek 2020i sucks!

Time to bring out the bad google juice, enough is enough...

For a project I'm involved in, I'm currently carrying around a Qtek 2020i Smartphone.  It runs Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC Edition, but it feels like Windows 95!

On paper, it all looked great compared to my previous smartphone, a Treo 600.  Built in WiFi, BlueTooth and GPRS (only GPRS on the Treo).  1.2 megapixel camera, with video capture, night settings and loads of options (only .3 megapixel on the Treo, with very basic camera software).  One-button audio recording (not on the Treo).  Pocket versions of Word, Outlook (mail and calendar) and Internet Explorer (relatively spartan equivalents available on the Treo).  Bigger screen.  More colours.  Streaming video...

Sounds great, right?

Well, that is until you start using it.  First of all, the usability:  I miss my Treo's keyboard so much!  One-handed use with the Treo was a snap: making calls, writing mails, taking pictures or notes...  Perfect for use while driving eating an ice-cream cone.  The Treo was also much smaller, wich made it look like you were talking into a phone instead of into a brick.

But there's more!  The Qtek 2020i also has these supposedly 'handy' buttons on the side for instant camera or memo recording action.  The number of pictures and recordings of the inside of my pockets by now is enormous.  Not to mention the number of times the batteries ran out due to this.  If there is a simple button lock (like my Treo had), I haven't found it yet.

Which brings me to battery life: the standard battery it comes with is dead after two, maybe three days... if you don't use the thing for doing actual work, that is.

Just listening to audio podcasts for oh, two hours or so, is enough to drain the battery completely.  Yesterday I even had the weird experience of taking the thing out of the charger (with the charging light on, indicating that it had been charging) after a few hours and noticing that the battery was empty... because the screen had been running while the thing was in the cradle!  So it sucks down power faster than it can recharge, even in the cradle if you don't turn it off!

Fortunately, there is a backup battery for keeping your data safe in case of empty main battery.  I've never lost data yet because of an empty battery, thanks to this reserve.

Which doesn't mean I never lost data.  Oh, I've lost plenty of it.  The device has the annoying habit of locking up completely when you do such arcane and exceptional things as ending a phone call, listening to music, watching a bit of video...  Sometimes a soft reset will wake the Qtek 2020i up in this case, but in many cases even that brings no results: the device will power up, show the normal boot screen (but without the  backlight on) and remain in this state until the battery runs dry or you take it out frustrated after half an hour of waiting to try again.

The only thing that seems to help in such cases is a hard reset... poof!  All your data is gone!  But what about synchronized data, you might ask?  On the Treo, it was real simple: when you synchronized, all your data was backed up.  Syncing a 'blank' Treo would just restore everything.  Simple as that.

Not so with the Qtek 2020i: First you have to set up the 'new' device by giving it a 'new' name. After that, your calendar, notes, email and other default items are restored.  But not your settings and files: GPRS user/pass, mail servers, theme, pictures, recording... all gone.  Any pictures and documents you might want to restore need to be copied to the right folder first by hand.

Oh, sure, there is a backup-restore function in the synchronization client.  But it is not on by default!  And when it is, it is slooooow!  And when you want to restore, you have to jump through quite some hoops: you need to make sure the 'new' device has exactly the same name as the old one, and that it's timezone is set exactly to the same one as the old one, else the backup/restore program will say you are not using the same device and refuse to do anything.  Quite the user-friendly experience.  I just want it to have a button that says: "dump the contents of this backup file on the device currently connected".  Why is that so hard?

And there's loads more: the lack of keyboard, the way annoying wifi-popups keep interrupting you when trying to get some work done, the clumsy phone/address book interface, the way the thing seems to slow down enormously sometimes without noticeable cause... gah!

I'm so waiting to get my hands on the Treo 700...