Macbook pro monitor still dead.

Byrichard

Over a week later my laptop is still dead. It’s the same flaw as two weeks ago. I took it to technicians who did absolutely nothing for my laptop. They didn’t even run a diagnostic test to see that anything was wrong. Now I’m still without a laptop and I don’t have time to deal with incompetent people.

I need someone to recommend some competent people to check my laptop. Think it’s the screen that’s dead… just head the skype sound… What can I do to fix a dead monitor?

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Getting the laptop back (possibly)

Byrichard

Tomorrow I should have a clearer idea on why the laptop decided to die on me but a phonecall yesterday points towards dust. I’m not sure what the dust may have destroyed but that’s what may have caused the fault. 

Without the laptop it’s been an interesting week. It’s seen me playing witgh two versions of linux and portable devices such as the N95 and the touch. Both have their merits and it’s got me thinking about phasing out laptops from my use of the world wide web. What if i could get all podcasts, all e-mails and media content to both these devices without a computer?

With Nokia podcasts I can get all the audio files, with interbine I can get all the videos. With S60 I get some browsing for flash content and with the ipod I get a nicer display for browsing content. Both are easy to carry.  Both charge quickly with the right charger. 

At the same time neither of them has a good typing keyboard, being perfect for short form but a nightmare for writing a blog post for example. With time the experience should improve. 

 

 

Friendfeed and Jaiku

Byrichard

There’s so much hype about friendfeed because of it’s features but that’s something jaiku has been doing for months and months now. It’s a shame that silicon valley doesn’t look beyond their borders. Shame the hype is almost always around that part of the world.

The more I use jaiku the more I enjoy it. If anyone wants some invites I should have a few left. Just let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

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On moving from the Social media capital of Europe to Geneva

Byrichard

As a student it was not unusual for me to spend no more than six hours a day at home. The rest of the time I was out socialising, whether helping post grads with their work or with those from my studies. As a result of this I started to pay attention to many of the social networks. It had shifted from Facebook where all my real life friends could be found to more abstract social networks such as twitter, jaiku and others.

Through these networks I saw what everyone was up to and I could take the opportunity to go out and meet them occasionally at first and then more and more frequently as time passed. By the time I left England I had the opportunity to meet with one group every Friday morning and quite a few others on a number of different occasions. As a result my social life was built around what I saw via twitter and seesmic.

In geneva that social scene is pretty small at the moment. Some people are in Geneva, some are in Lausanne and others in Zurich. The problem is they’re not centralised therefore participating is not practical. That’s one of the weaknesses of social networking that I’ve encountered over the years. I do miss that aspect of life in England and I should attempt to recreate it here.

I’m not the only one facing this problem. Corvida of Read Write Web wrote about this topic recently and it’s an interesting challenge for Gen Y and early adopters. The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. As a student facebook was great to find out about events that were going on within that circle, then twitter became great once I graduated.

Now the challenge is to find what social network will be of interest in a city like Geneva. Would it be facebook used by most people in my age group. paying services that guarantee no results or simply going out into the physical world hoping to meet people that way.

Each method requires time and I’m not sure which is the most adapted to the lake Geneva region. It’s something I’m going to explore over the coming weeks. I want to rebuild a good physical world social network once more and see which tools remain relevant now.

Snackr and RSS

Byrichard

With my love for the short form Snackr is a welcome addition to my world as an easy way to keep an eye on rss feeds. It’s a ticker box that scrolls all the latest articles. You can choose whether you whether you want every post over the past day to a week.

So far it’s been easy to use.

May-21st for a twit-out, boycott of twitter

Byrichard

I’m not the only person that’s annoyed with the vast amount of downtime suffered by twitter and there is a call for an international boycott of twitter on may 21st. During that day we’ll be using other more reliable services to show that twitter is nothing without the community that makes it what it is.

Twitter has been having some serious issues over the last few weeks. It seems that the service is down almost as much as it’s active. Exaggeration or not, it’s a problem, and it seems to be worsening rather than improving. As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.

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