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w850i and the mobile Gmail app
I finally reached the end of my tether with Orange and their customer service, continued cold calling from mobile phones, dreadful cattle-market style shops, and lack of knowledge of their sales staff. I was also paying over £100 a month for the everyday 50 plan which is about 9 years old now. It has only been 2 days but I am already much happier with T-Mobile and their flex-t plan.
The new phone is pretty sweet too, I went for the Sony Ericsson w850i in the end. Buying the phone online I got a cheaper package which encouraged me to get the web 'n walk package - always on flat rate Internet for £7.99 a month, quite a good deal I think. Any which way you calculate it, I'm paying a lot less than I used to!

Initially I really wanted a phone that ran Edition 2 of the Symbian Series 60 operating system, so I could play with the gps software that Nick wrote. I was on the phone to t-mobile tech support for quite a while till we determined that they didn't stock any, its all edition 3 now and apparently python software that used to run on edition 2 now will be a bit flaky on 3 because it has to be signed.
The battery life of the W850i (if you are playing with settings and the interweb constantly) is not quite what I would like, and the buttons are quite tricky to use at first. However, there are a lot of really neat features, the inbuilt RSS reader is lovely! and knowing that the Internet is at a flat fee gives you peace of mind.
That became especially useful when I discovered the gmail mobile app. Having battled before with security certificates and pop3 settings on my old phone just to get mail to work, this mobile application by comparison is breeze. Its lightweight, fast, utterly gorgeous!

You can browse your mail, jump to star'ed mail, use keyboard shortcuts to reply and its all very aesthetic and nicely done. If you have ever battled with Gmail on your phone either with pop3 or in a browser, this will make you life a lot easier!
To download the google mobile app, go to gmail.com/app from your phone and follow the instructions there. It is apparently best to do this from your default mobile browser instead of from opera mini so that the download can detect your mobile model. Happy emailing!
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Fumbling Towards Geekdom: A 2006 productivity hot-or-not guide
Fumbling Towards Geekdom: A 2006 productivity hot-or-not guide — review of how effective the various productivity tips of last year actually were.
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I Will Teach You To Be Rich: Set smaller goals: impress friends, get girls, lose weight
I Will Teach You To Be Rich: Set smaller goals: impress friends, get girls, lose weight — I wish I was better at understanding money.
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Highslide JS - JavaScript thumbnail viewer
Highslide JS - JavaScript thumbnail viewer — This might be really really neat if it werent dreadfully slow, its also a bit anoying that the thumbnails disapear when you open up the larger image.
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Stu Nicholls | CSSplay | Experiments with cascading style sheets
Stu Nicholls | CSSplay | Experiments with cascading style sheets — messing with css in interesting ways because you can.
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10 CSS Tips from a Professional CSS Front-End Architect at 72 dpi In the Shade
10 CSS Tips from a Professional CSS Front-End Architect at 72 dpi In the Shade — tips for the process of front end development.
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Talking about the weather
I know being British it may be considered stereotypical to talk about the weather... but I'm going to anyway. The winds were so atrocious today that their effect on our 'Great' British train service meant that I had to miss Pub Standards! I was really looking forward to going too, but with the prospect of taking a bus between Oxford and Didcot, possible disruption at Reading and with a lot of the tube services suspended; I decided it probably wasn't wise to travel tonight. The train people told me no to. I would have gotten there quite late and had to leave early for a hellish journey home.
Can't complain though, there were many people in much worse a situation than just having to miss a social. It would normally be quite amazing to see that the main story on the news is about the weather today, but it is getting unfortunately more frequent that the unusual local weather in the UK is top news. Today, last I heard, nine people died because of the weather, two tragically from falling walls.
Round our neck of the woods it is quite rural so we suffer quite a bit at the hands of the elements. Today we had 4 blackouts because of the wind and last week the river Evenlode burst its banks and flooded the nearby fields.
So, allthough we Brits may talk a lot about the weather, we have reason to.
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I Speak of Dreams: Dyslexia is a Junk Diagnosis
I Speak of Dreams: Dyslexia is a Junk Diagnosis — symptoms of dysexia explained and resoned ways of teaching dysexic childeren.


