The Ramblings of a Geek…

Yesterday I saw a tweet from @appleboyy with a screen shot of a iPhone’s Siri function displaying Windows Phone as the best selling phone.  I tried this myself and it indeed did the same.

Today that it’s now change for different response, but doesn’t query wolfram Alpha any longer.

I said in the blog post The Great Windows Phone to iPhone switch (back) that I would post why I switched, this is that post, it’s taken some time for me to write, sorry for the wait.

I really want Windows Phone to succeed, yes even now.  I can develop already using Microsoft’s languages, so if it becomes a success, then it would be better for me to quickly develop app’s and make some money.

At the time of the switch I was, likely many others, frustrated with Microsoft for the lack of updates they were brining out for Windows Phone, for instance the time it took for Copy & Paste.   Since Windows 8 has been announced it’s now obvious to me that the reason for the lack of updates, is because the Windows 8 kernel will be used as the foundation for Windows Phone 8.

This in of itself is fantastic as all apps will work across all device types, phone, tablet and PC. I do wonder if it’s all to late, time will tell.

There wasn’t one reason for me being frustrated with Windows Phone, it was lots of little things:-

• The lack of being able to set a customised text alert sound.
• When browsing a webpage with an embedded YouTube video, before the mango update this simply didn’t work, it was better after the mango update but it was far from a smooth experience.  For instance you would click to play and the whole experience would be horrible, even when on WiFi.
• I didn’t lack the fact I was forced to use a Windows Live Account, this is fundamental to the design of Windows Phone, but if I don’t want to use it, I should be given the option to turn it off.
• The 3rd’ party integration of Twitter (after mango update), was incomplete the same for Facebook, it all feels a bit of a mess.
• The 3rd parity applications felt slow compared to the built in apps.  
• Podcast support was buggy, it didn’t download the correct podcast’s in the correct order, no method of downloading new podcast from the phone directly. No option for Podcast in the Marketplace.  Oddly I believe this is only in Europe and not the US, why?
• I don’t like the status bar isn’t visible at all times.

I don’t have a Windows phone to hand to play a round with to remind me of any of the other things which bugged me. 

Windows Phone as it stands really should of been released in 2008, a year after the iPhone, it would of been a real competitor at that time.  I really do fear that Microsoft need to move more quickly and I hope that they do with Windows 8 as a platform.

Microsoft today have announced the local client download, think dropbox, for Windows and Mac OS X Lion.   They have also announced reduction of the free 25GB to 7GB, existing users can claim to keep there 25GB, Click here for Microsoft site for me details.  Sign in now to claim it before you lose it.   Login to your account and click the link to keep your current 25GB storage.

The pricing seems quite reasonable:

I believe it users part (some are saying the it’s not complete) mesh features for syncing.  I’ll update this post once I’ve know more.

UPDATE:  I have installed the desktop client and it sync’s files in one specified folder. Unlike Drop Box, there is no option to right click on a file and obtain a link to it on the web. Which can then be pasted in an IM window, email, etc  This option only seems to be available from the website.   Which isn’t as convenient.

Also when you right click on a folder (outside the specified sync folder) there is no option to sync that folder. 

This is a version 1.0 product and do hope Microsoft updates SkyDrive often.  I would also like to understand if the files are encrypted as I understand they are with Drop Box.

I’m comparing to Drop Box, as it’s the product that I’ve used the most.   However it would seem to make sense to switch to SkyDrive as this would bring the benefit of being able to login to any Windows 8 device and have my files available to me.

I thought I would post an update as I’ve be fairly quite of late.   I do intend to start blogging more in the near future.

I’ve been looking after my son for the past couple of months, spending some quality time with him.   Any spare time that I have found I’ve been using to go digital in everyway I can. To be honest this process has been going on for some time, I’ve just decided to actually try and getting organised.

So I’ve been organising 10 years worth of home video, pictures, geeky stuff (Virtual Machines Hard Drives, code).  I have 2TB worth of data which I’ve been tagging, uploading backing up etc.

Some of the organising has been extended to this site.   I have removed all categories and tags in preparation of actually trying to get a proper system of categories and tag’s in place at some point.

As part of this clean up process I have decided to remove the software section from the site as I feel it’s stale and I never update it, mainly due to the fact that the coding side of things has taken a back seat in the last 18 months.  I’m working to resolve that, so this section may indeed return.

So until next time, have fun……..

I tweeted about this a while back.  Looks like Microsoft actually seen sense and allowed the BBC to put this on the Xbox without the need for an XBOX Live Gold Subscription.  Which means it’s free to all.  Which is great.

Now all we need is for the whole country to have access to 10mb+ broadband connections.

Windows 8 HyperV requires support for SLAT (second level address translation).  Check you BIOS as it can be enabled disabled from within.

Download CoreInfo from the Windows Sysinternals website, here.

Open a command window with admin rights and type coreinfo –v, if an asterix is displayed next to EPT row then your Intel processor supports SLAT. 

The Want

To switch back to an iPhone from Windows Phone (another post coming here to explain the reasons).

The Problem

• Cost
• The Windows Phone is supplied by my Company.
• Didn’t want to carry two phones around, have two numbers.

The Solution(s)

I didn’t want to sign up for a two year, eighteen or 12 month contract, unlocked iPhone’s are expensive as we all know, but this wasn’t really avoidable, which is where having a fantastic wife helps.

My wife has as iPhone 3GS which was out of contract, which we could upgrade to an iPhone 4s for free on O2, for 2 years for an extra £7 per month and of course we retained the iPhone 3GS.

She didn’t mind not having the iPhone 4s as she feels it’s not as sleek in form as the iPhone 3GS.

So the next problem to be over come was that of networks and SIM’s.   For me to use the iPhone with my work SIM, it would have to be a micro SIM and the iPhone would have to would have to be unlocked.

So I had a look on the O2’s website and found the following:

Just in case you can’t make out the screenshot, it read’s:

Can I ‘unlock’ my iPhone and use it on another network?

Pay Monthly customers

Yes.  If you’re a Pay Monthly customer, then you can unlock your iPhone at anytime for free.  This doesn’t affect your

contract though – you’ll still need to see out of the rest if it.

 

To unlock your iPhone, just fill out this unlocking form and we’ll do the rest.

 

Once we’ve got your form, it’ll then taken up to 14 days for us to get it unlocked for you.  Once it’s unlocked, we’ll text

you to let you know.  You can then put a non-O2 Sim into the iPhone and connect it to iTunes.  iTunes will then tell

you the phone is unlocked.

 

So the next question that came to mind was, would O2 allow a newly upgraded iPhone 4s to be unlocked straight away?  Yes.

So the wife and I popped into a local O2 store and I asked the assistant if what I wanted to do (unlock the iPhone) would apply to a iPhone 4s and could I do it straight after the upgrade, he understood the request and he went of to check and he came back and said it shouldn’t be an issue but it must be online and couldn’t be in store.  – An mobile phone shop assistant that didn’t BS, who would of thought.

So we went though the upgrade, 30 minutes later we left the store with a new iPhone 4s with my wife’s number now transferred to a Micro SIM.  For those following, this presented another issue which I already had the solution, more on that later.

Once we had arrived home, I promptly filled in the unlock form online and all I could do next was to wait, while my wife had to use the iPhone 4s until the unlock was completed.   The next day I received an email from O2, telling me that the phone had been unlocked and it would hit the phone within the next 3 days.

2 days later my wife received a text informing us that the phone had been unlocked.  I’ll be honest I didn’t expect it to go as smoothly as it did and I’m impressed with O2 for doing what they said they would on there site, which as we know isn’t always the case.

For those paying attention I had another issue that I had to resolve the different size SIM’s, I had to convert my wife’s SIM from a Micro SIM and my Standard SIM to a Micro SIM.

What I needed was a converter and a Micro SIM cutter. A stamp which cuts the correct size of the Micro SIM from a standard SIM.

A quick search on eBay and I picked a cutter up around £5 including P&P and with two converters!

Once I received the cutter, I found an old SIM (Pay-As-You-Go) and cut it, popped it into the iPad (to test) and it worked like a dream.   So I popped my wife’s new SIM into the converter, and put this into her iPhone 3GS and her old phone was up and running as before.

I cut the SIM from my Windows Phone into a Micro SIM size and popped it into the iPhone 4Gs and boom I was up and running, checked with the wife that she was happy about anything she wanted to keep, photos, etc.. then I hit the reset on iPhone 4s to factory defaults and I have an up and running iPhone 4S for only £7 extra a month!  Which isn’t bad.

O2 allow you to change the plan after 12 months, so assuming we can get my wife’s contract back down to what it was before (or less), that means we managed to pick up an unlocked (not jail broken) iPhone 4S for £84.

I was going to blog about my thoughts on Windows 8, then I thought I didn’t want to re-blog, what Microsoft was blogging, I see little point.   Instead I thought I would wait for the Beta or as Microsoft is calling it, the Consumer Preview. 

Once I’ve has chance to play around, I shall blog about my own thoughts, good and bad.

Open Exchange management shell and enter the following:

Get-MailboxDatabase "<insert database name>" | Get-MailboxStatistics | Sort totalitemsize -desc | ft displayname, totalitemsize, itemcount

For Windows 7

Open an Windows Command Prompt and enter the following to disable: - 

sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi
sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled

To enabled, enter the following: -

sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/mrxsmb20/nsi
sc config mrxsmb20 start= auto

For Windows Server 2008

Run "regedit" on Windows Server 2008 based computer.

Expand and locate the sub tree as follows.

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

Add a new REG_DWORD key with the name of "Smb2" (without quotation mark)

Value name: Smb2
Value type: REG_DWORD
0 = disabled
1 = enabled

Set the value to 0 to disable SMB 2.0, or set it to 1 to re-enable SMB 2.0.

Reboot the server.