Good news is… Well, good news
Today I had a meeting with one of my clients, Blackwood High School.
To lay down some background, I completed my Network Management I.T. Traineeship with them in 2007. During that time they asked me to begin creating them a new website. By the time I had finished my traineeship there I had the majority of the website completed, after I had finished they wanted to take me on as a freelancer to complete their website and maintain it from then on.
I have been waiting on content from them for the new site, today I met with the Principal and My IT boss today to talk more about the site and direction in taking it. I proposed to them the idea of having their own CMS (Content Mangement System) coded to their specifications. I pitched them this idea and they liked it. So now begins the process of getting a developer to build a back end for the website I have already designed. This is good news, it gives me a chance to have a project made that I can use on other clients as well with a CMS that I will find easy to use and doesn’t come massively bloated like some Content Management Systems are.
I also pitched them the idea of using Sean Slaters Feedsent to have parents, students and past scholars signed up so that when new newsletters are uploaded, or updates on the website. Feedsent will email them at monthly intervals to tell them what’s been happening.
Good news it is, more of this to come in coming weeks.
Bye Bye Bye… Nokia
Last Thursday I purchased a Sony Ericsson k770i, I’m leaving the land of Nokia. The terrible wad of waste it was, and I’m now going to be a Sony Ericsson user again. Posted on Friday with 3-4 days via courier. I should have it this week, after that I will post a review on it and also see how it compares up to the Nokia 6120 Classic, and maybe my old Sony Ericsson k750i just for good measure.
You can check out the phone here. I’ve got myself the Truffle Brown colour.
Create PDFs for Free!
I came across this little application a while ago, I was having some conflict issues between the Adobe Acrobat Reader I was using (version 8.0) and the Adobe Acrobat Distiller that creates the PDFs (version 5). They just wouldn’t talk with eachother nicely, especially when it came to viewing a PDF file through the web. I’ve found Adobes Acrobat software to become very bloated in the last few years, from a few meg to download a reader. To now 30mb, and now for the whole suit to create, read and edit is roughly 300mb. It’s just to big for something I only use when I need it. So I uninstalled and went in search of some freeware applications to create and view PDF files.
I’m now using FoxIT Reader to view my PDF files on both my desktop and in Firefox. I’ve also downloaded and installed a program called CutePDF to create my PDF files when I need to. It’s a great little application, it works on both Windows Vista and XP, it’s free for home, education and government uses. There are no watermarks across your PDFs either, and comes with all the usual options you need for creating a PDF. It installs itself as a printer, so it appears under “Printers and Faxes” in Windows XP. It also installs a PostScript to PDF file as well but its only a few kb’s and you don’t see it anywhere in your system.
Cows with voip…
He mooed we must fight, escape or we’ll die
Cows gathered around, cause the steaks were so high
Bad cow pun
Today I put through my order for Moo Cards and looked into the prospect of using MyNetFone for voip to to receive and make calls at home on my dedicated line, without the fees for a hardwired land line other than the one I already use for my ADSL.
Cows with voip…
My Moo Cards should arrive in a week or two. In the basics, I see them as a cheap form of business card, I can add my details on one side up to 6 lines of text, on the other side a coloured image and get 100 of them for $20 US. Plus a keychain holder that holds a few Moo Cards to give to people who are interested in I.T. or design work.
I’ve also made enquiries to MyNetFone about VOIP, they offer a service with a Dial In Number, no set up fees or monthly fees. Payment by credit card, it also allows you 2 lines. You can also use any cordless phone plugged straight into the router.
I’ll update on this in a few weeks when I have received the Moo Cards with images of the design and also if I pressed forward with the voip!
Desktop to Webtop in 3 sites.
For a while I’ve been wanting to have one place that does everything. A site that has everything that I use in a web based application and nothing over bloated. Today I think I got a step closer when I saw ADrive in a WebWorkerDaily article.
I think I have it down to 3 sites that I access regularly for all my information and files to keep online.
- Gmail
Over the last few months Gmail has upgraded their contact management. Only a few weeks ago I got the new Gmail contact layout, it includes more fields to enter information about each person who’s in your contact book. This is what I’ve been waiting for since I began using Gmail a lot more. I now have the ability to edit a contacts name, add their mobile phone number, home and work numbers, fax numbers, postal address, instant messaging addresses and company information. It doesn’t seem like there is a dedicated field for a company’s website. Adding it in a custom field doesn’t give the address a link either. In addition, there are also the Gmail regulars like Email with tags and over 6 gigabytes of storage, archiving and some more small adjustments they’ve made. Also the documents online. One thing I’d like to see is the option to put a 3rd panel in Gmail so I can see the contacts to access them, a lot of people have widescreen monitors now like I do and the space should be used. Also Google Calendar which I’m using even more every day.
- Netvibes
I’ve been using Netvibes for a while now, it’s been a great place to store my bookmarks and newsfeeds. Which is what I use the majority of it for, I don’t like Google’s news reader. Netvibes has a much nicer layout and more options to play with so you can set it just right. I’ve also got my Weather, a To-Do List, Notes, an Address Book (of which I’ll be transferring my contacts to Gmail). Netvibes has stacks more features, I suggest you check them out.
- ADrive
ADrive I only got onto recently, it’s still in beta. But go check it out, 50 gigabytes… yes, thats Fifty gigabytes. Of online storage for FREE. No catch, they are powering it by Google Ads, I’ve managed to get subfolders in there and upload applications I use in places. Back up some websites and some documents and files, add some music on there. It also has the ability to share these files publicly. It’s all web based, I’m hoping the possibility in future versions that we may see the storage be able to appear in Windows as a drive, and some FTP access. But for now it’s purely a web based java applet to upload your files. The only downside I can see, is popularity making the bandwidth to much to come and sending them under. So click the Google Ads and get them some money to pay for it!
- Alternatives
There are a few alternatives out there. Zoho has a lot to offer that covers pretty much all of what I’ve talked about, but for some reason I just don’t like the layout. It’s boring and I just don’t want to load the pages no matter how much cooler their web based applications are.
Google has the iGoogle which does a lot that Netvibes does, however I still like my clean Google search page and don’t want the crap all over it. I tried it once and then shifted my ways to Netvibes.
Another alternative, web based operating systems like EyeOS. It’s your operating system in a web browse, take everything I’ve already mentioned plus more, and operating system and it’s on the web. No need to keep anything on your computer. I’ll give these some time before I look at moving everything there and using one for every day to day work.
Nokia 6120 Classic – Part 2
Well… some months ago I made a post about the Nokia 6120 Classic. I’ve more time to use the Nokia 6120 Classic, and lets just say my first review was a little to early to give good judgement.
I’d had an ongoing battle with the place I bought the phone from, there’s been so many problems with it since I wrote my first review that I’m wondering why I ever switched from my lovely Sony Ericsson K750i at all.
So what exactly has gone wrong you ask? Well here’s a list of things I don’t like about it.
- The battery requires a full charge every 3 days, with or without calls taking place. My previous phone would require a full charge once a week, the battery just doesn’t hold out for long enough as I would want to.
- The quality of the camera photos are attrocious, I’m guessing Nokia provide no processing or CMOS sensor in the phone like other brands are doing for better image quality. The “night mode” has no difference on photos to taking it without them, it works ok in daylight, but if you go in a room with a light on there is a lot of noise through the photos. The flash is to harsh also which means anything close to the lense will be a bright white.
- The handset overheats which I can feel considerably through my hand and ear when on a call. There has been a lot of reports on this from Whirlpool.net.au and the Nokia.com.au forums. When I reported this to the place of purchase, they replied to me with one of Nokias press releases. Which is a load of crap, according to Nokia it’s been “made this way” and I should use the hands free kit. Well I don’t want to!
- A critical bug, I lose all sound for ringtones, message tones which has caused me to miss emergency calls at work. This can happen at any time without warning and nothing to trigger it. Should the phone vibrate for a call after and I answer, I cannot hear anyone speaking on the end. Which is totally unacceptable.
- Sending video via the MMS function has a cap on the size of the video of 300k. Considering the phone is 3G enabled and makes use of wireless broadband this shouldnt be a problem to send on. However being capped I cannot send anything at all and it’s rather frustrating.
- With a microSD card inserted and selected for messages to be saved on, loading anything off it. Messages, photos etc is ridiculously slow. I’ve waited near 10 seconds for a message to load.
- When photos/messages are selected to save to the microSD card, should I want to access the photos via USB an error occurs plugging in the USB and I have to switch the phone to phone memory to access the memory card photos.
- After changing the “font size” on the phone with it being to small to read, I’ve seen no difference and have a hard time seeing anything on the phone.
- I’ve found the phone to be incompatible with my old phone (to transfer contacts and data) and also another Sony Ericsson and LG phone which are used by my housemates.
That pretty much sums it up. I’m currently keeping my eye out on eBay for a Sony Ericsson K770i, it’s a nice little phone that does what I use the phone for. Once I get that I’m sure to give it a good wrap as previous SE’s have been good.
Invoice Machine 2.0
I’ve been a great fan of this little web 2.0 application. It’s been simple to use and effective, best of all it has been completely free. Invoice Machine is a free web based application to make invoices simple, enter in the fields of you and your client, add in the details for the invoice, choose a design template and then create the invoice and have a PDF pop out at the end. All this can be done in roughly 5 minutes.
Recently, I went to use the Invoice Machine for one of my clients and found that while the site was up, it had an error and was no longer producing the PDF at the end.
I made my way to Bombia Design who created the Invoice Machine to see if there was any news on if it would be coming back or not. Looking at their Blog, something is in the works from Bomba Design and our favourite little application is on it’s way back with some luck. There is a blog post about the Invoice Machine, below is what it says.
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The Invoice Machine 2.0 Video Teaser
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
Our handy little web application to create PDF invoices has been very well received by small businesses and free-lancers around the world. At times it’s been so heavily used that our server became overloaded. It’s now running on a new dedicated server to handle the increased traffic.
However, since the server move it haven’t been working correctly. The PDF file does not render, instead it shows up a bunch on characters. We apologize for this and thank you for your patience while we’re trying to figure out a solution.
We are currently working on version 2.0 and we’ve put up a little video teaser to demonstrate some of the new features and the lovely new interface. The Invoice Machine 2.0 will soon be open for voluntary beta testers and hopefully the final version will be ready to release in a couple of months.
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You can see the teaser movie here (Quicktime Movie) for Invoice Machine 2.0.
I emailed the creator asking how far off it was, and also that I’m interested in being a tester for the Beta of Invoice Machine 2.0, and we should be seeing something in the coming months. 
