Tony Blews

I’m trying to get to grips with my impulse purchase of the week. For reasons best left unexplored I’ve parted with about 120 quid for a Datawind UbiSurfer from Maplin. Its a ex-display model, hence the slight price reduction over the RRP of £149.99.

So, what is the UbiSurfer? In short, its a cheap netbook running an implementation of Linux. Oh, with a years free internet access thrown in.

More about that later, but first the specs:

• 7 inch 800×400 TFT screen
• 128MB RAM, 1GB Solid State disk
• Full QWERTY keyboard and Touchpad mouse
• Push-Push SD card socket and 2 USB ports (the box says 3, but I have 2 and a connector I’ve never seen before)
• Measures 222×165x29.5mm, weighs 700g
• Battery life provides 4 hours active use and 4 hours

Note the lack of a spec concerning the processor. Apparently it is some form of ARM 500Mhz job.

Applications wise you get the usual word processing and spreadsheet offerings, and a collections of email clients, PDF readers and the like, all GPLed programs.

For web browsing you have Mozilla IceWeasel (Firefox), which only works when connected via a Wifi hotspot, and the UbiSurfer browser itself.
And now we get to the main (only) reason that I bought this thing: free internet access. Included in the price of the device is 30 hours access per month (for a year) to Vodaphone’s GPRS network, via an onboard modem. As we all know, GPRS isn’t exactly lightening fast, but Datawind claim that any web page can be loaded in 7 seconds.

This is supposed to be achieved by Datawind pre-rendering the web pages on their servers (in Canada) and sending them on in a compressed form to the UbiSurfer browser, which then decodes and displays them.
Ok, that sounds fine in theory, but in practice its not so good.
Datawind’s own site (www.datawind.com) takes about fifteen seconds to load, and more complex site such a Google Mail can take up to a minute to fully render.
This pre-rendering process also throws up problems when entering data onto a web page. Tabbing between fields can take up to ten seconds.
Obviously these problems don’t occur when using IceWeasel and connecting via a Wifi hotspot.

But, oddly, my biggest complaint about the UbiSurfer browser is about the hideous splash screen which also comes up when you disconnect, thus preventing you from viewing pages offline. Here it is in all its glory.

Just look at the smug pissweasel. Those grass stains are going to raise questions in the office after lunch. Luckily you can overwrite the this image with something less irritating.

I shall continue to persevere with this thing, in the hope that I can find a use for it.

Evony, the browser based game which became notorious for its adverts picturing scantily clad women, amongst other things, has gone a step further with its advertising. From stealing images from costume sites, through some really ropey CGI women, using a model who is a gamer, to outright norkage, it seems that they’ll try anything to attract teenage boys and semi-employed 38 year old geeks to their game. The latest advert doesn’t even name the product, yet has all the hallmarks of their campaign.

First though, here are the adverts from times past:

Classy stuff, i’m sure you’ll agree, and cock all to do with the game which is a poor Civilisation clone with no queen to save, and thus no norks.

And so on to the new advert…

Christ, you’d hardly know it it was for Evony if it wasn’t for the “My Lord” catchphrase, and the the familiar looking button.

Still, it seems to work for them. Gullible idiots seem to be playing the game and even paying for it.

So. If it works for them, it might work for me. If you want to volunteer to show a lot of cleavage to advertise a website of mine, don’t hesitate to contact me. Jon, this does NOT apply to you!

Let us face it, everything annoys me all the time. But currently some things are more annoying that others.

DNS:

Arsecakes. Fifteen years ago I could write DNS records in my sleep. Actually, I frequently did, but don’t tell Staffordshire University that, as they may want my wages back. So why is it that now I have no idea what I’m doing?

Ebay:

Okay, so I’ve identified myself using my credit card, and now you want another form of ID. As I don’t have a landline number, I click on the “identify yourself by credit card” link and… HOLY FLASH H. GORDON, you’ve taken another £1 from my card! Well, my auctioning friends, you can sod that!

Guitars:

I have quite a few guitars.  I own probably more than it is healthy for a non-musician to own.  My favourite, for a long time, has been a Spanish 3/4 size acoustic that a mate gave me about 15 years ago.

It survived 3 house removals, but sadly, it didn’t survive falling off it’s stand.

Broken Guitar!

I’m hoping that given enough strong glue I can fix it.

Just found a GPS track of my trip last month from The Shrewsbury Arms in Stafford to The Stanley Arms in Chester. If you zoom in, you’ll see that it is quite accurate, even showing the bit where I missed an exit and went round a round-a-bout. If i’d set the logging to use small time intervals then the “road holding” would have been better.

Here is the map:

View Larger Map

Download the file

Its time for some more speed tests of 3’s Mobile Broadband, using the trusty old Huawei E220…

Firstly, where I currently live:

And Now, where I will be living in 2 weeks:

Oh dear.