Taken at Wembley Arena, November 21st 2006.

Okay this is a rubbish quality video (made worse by YouTube’s compression), but it was interesting to see just how the Nokia N80 would perform. Audio is better than I expected though. Should have done a longer clip really.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAD09VG8kpI
Edit: I changed YouTube account so it’s moved here now…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYqGvhwxps

Also have a gallery of photos at the concert taken with the N80 here…
http://www.sirjohn.co.uk/ee/list.php?exhibition=15

As mentioned earlier I was looking into the K2 theme for WordPress, so now I’ve actually got round to trying it out. Still not a v1.0 release but it’s pretty mature anyway and full of AJAX goodness 😀

Probably will be slow on my humble AMD 400Mhz server but anyway. Some day I’ll beef up the server, but for now it will do. Check out the AJAX commenting and search facilities. e.g. in the search, just type something and wait. Nice.

So you’ve got an old 2G phone and decide Orange’s upgrade charges are ridiculous (£200 fee for upgrade + cost of phone!), and you’re stuck on a contract, so you decide to just go out and buy a nice new 3G phone ‘sim-free’. You think you can just pop your existing sim into the phone and everything works?

Think again.

Well the sim does work, but it turns out the sim is a 2G sim. To be able to use any of the 3G functionality of the phone and connect to 3G networks, you need a 3G sim (a USIM)*. Fine you think, call the operator and ask for a 3G sim, and you don’t even mind paying a small cost for it.

Problem is you’re on Orange and they flat refuse to give you a 3G sim unless you go out an buy a new Orange branded 3G contract or PAYG phone !

So now I have a nice Nokia N80 3G phone and no 3G just because I didn’t buy it from Orange. Now I could have waited until my contract was up and get a new contract for the phone on Orange but I don’t want to be on a £40+ a month contract just to get the phone at a reasonable cost and I don’t like the way Orange lock down and customise things on the Orange branded version of the phone anyway.

Still other than the lack of 3G it’s a nice phone.

*Update: See this post for an update. Turns out the problem is specific to Orange UK as a regular SIM (not USIM) gets 3G just fine in Orange France!

To quote Moby’s blog back in 2004…

“just fyi,
if i release a cd and it has copy-protection on it, it’s not by my choice.
copy-protection annoys the shit out of me, cos it prevents me from putting my own cd’s into i-tunes.
just thought i’d let you know.
moby”

http://www.moby.com/moby_archive/1/1/2004/1/5044

So, what did I get in the post from cd-wow? Moby’s Hotel album (2 cd special edition affair)… copy protected!! Sigh.

Now okay it’s unlikely he really wanted it this way and this leads to my real gripe which is the practise of far-east suppliers providing copy protected versions of CDs that are not copy protected in the UK. It appears the music industry is telling us that if we want to avoid copy protection we need to pay twice as much for rip-off high street prices in the UK.

Now here’s the real bite though…

The BPI recently said copying for personal use is okay. This is a landmark statement as the UK has no fair use clause in copyright and technically anyone could be sued for just making a copy for backup or use on another device. The BPI saying this effectively wipes out any chance of legal action and makes it effectively legal to make copies for personal use, and this is really all we want.

After all, why did I buy this CD? Because I want to be able to use it on my home network through my media system, plus transfer it to my iRiver and whatever device I want in the future, without restriction, and get the best quality. Not to download a DRM protected version that only plays on either an AAC based device (iPod) or WMA device (not iPod) and can’t be transferred and has a crappy bit-rate, all at the price of a regular CD and no physical product to show for it :(.

Now this CD, like all copy protected CDs, has no CD logo. Why? Because it breaks the red-book standard. Basically I’ve been mis-sold an item on the claim that it is a CD but it isn’t. Even more daft though is the fact the copy protection is fairly useless as it can be beaten by EAC or the use of anything other than a PC. The annoyance though is it can take hours to rip the CD that I paid for.

I’m keeping an eye on K2 which is the replacement theme for the Kubrick theme. It’s in beta at the moment but looking very nice. I may just switch to it at some point.