Today I bought an HSDPA modem (ZTE MF628) designed by Moods of Norway. Three designs are available, and I chose ZTE Cocktail with blue tractors and pink cocktails (I guess that is how they party on Voss?). Who said that modems all should have the same horrible design? The three design got launched during the Oslo Fashion Week back in February this year.
The modem is made by ZTE Corporation, an unknown company for us living in Norway, but it is China’s largest listed telecommunications manufacturer and wireless solutions provider. It can do downloads up to 7,2 Mbps.
The installation of the modem’s straight forward as long as you install it for Windows XP/Vista. I didn’t manage to install it for Windows 7. It also comes with drivers for MacOS X, and it also reported to work with Linux (Ubuntu). The coolness dropped a little bit, when I saw the horrible user interface that came with the application that establishes the Internet connection. Fact is, I have never seen a good design for this simple kind of application. Mobile Connect looked ok, launch2net did not! I haven’t used the modem a lot, but it seems to be of a good quality. The modem also come with the possibility to read/write to Mini-SD card. Nice for people having digital compact camera with that kind of card reader.
Hopefully a future version of the modem’s driver, let you do the dial up directly from Windows 7, without these funny/horrible looking 3rd party applications.
Not all Web 2.0 services make it. And not everything Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, founders of Skype, touch turns to gold. They are, according to IDG.se, pulling the plug on Joost. There are not many video solutions that have really succeeded in this area, Youtube and Vimeo, are not direct competitors. And Hulu is only available in U.S, iPlayer from BBC only in U.K, other services are also not available worldwide. But I can see that the amount of national services made it difficult for Joost.
Their service was cool, but lacked serious content. I often felt that I was running a demo of what the application was capable of doing. The video streams had and have a high quality, often better then their competitors. I didn’t mind running it as a standalone application, nor directly from a browser. I just wanted content…
One of my scientific staff ordered herself a MacBook Pro 10 days ago and it arrived yesterday. The machine is stunningly beautiful. It’s to the point where I almost want to replace my 2 year old MacBook Pro.
From unboxing it to getting it on net took about two minutes. I guess it is not possible to get first boot more optimized! When on net, the first thing I do is always to run Mac Update. 12 updates were waiting for me. Don’t want to make a point out of it, but I am one of the first one the my hands on this model (at least in Norway) and I am therefor a bit surprised that there were so many patches waiting for me.
This was more or less one of the first times that I work with a laptop with such a big touchpad, but getting used to it was easier then I thought. Multi-touch is just brilliant for some common tasks. Just as important, it is the first laptop that I have had in my hands with DRR 3 RAM and I must admit that this machine is impressingly fast (quite a bit faster then my 2 year old model). Also worth mentioning is that the new model doesn’t have the same heat problems as my model has! It is much cooler and it is not uncomfortable having it in my lap…
Other then that … there isn’t much to tell. 10.5.7 should be known for most Mac users now.
Funny how the media in Norway again fails to report on the flood along Donabe in Austria and Hungary. Newspapers only manage focus on one topic at the time, and the last week have been about Michael Jackson (only). I have just watched the TV news from MTV (Magyar TV) and googled for some pictures. Soldiers and volunteers are doing walls of sand bags on some parts of the river to protect buildings and roads.
As so many times social media these days are a better place to search for information about what is really happening. So also this time, the pictures are found on Flickr. Environment Minister Imre Szabo told reporters that the Danube is expected to peak at 7.6 metres above its normal level in Budapest yesterday. As you can see from the photos, the streets on both side of the river are flooded. The picture below shows the road in front of the Parlament.
Austria has seen some of its heaviest rainfall in 50 years in recent days, causing widespread flooding. All the ferries crossing Donabe in Hungary are now closed cause of that! We have our summer house a long the river Tisza in the east, but my mom can report report that several places in Hungary have gotten a lot of rain lately, some places in between 40 and 50 mm in a matter of hours.
Last year Hungary had flood in Tisza while I was at the summer house. And Donabe had bigger floods then this year in 2002 and 2006.
Also other parts of Hungary have flood. The Raab River rose to nearly 5 metres above its normal level in the western town of Szentgotthard, on Hungary’s border with Austria. This is 30 centimetres higher than a record set in 1965, when a major flood devastated large areas of western Hungary. Since then, however, flood defences have been built up along the river. Nevertheless, trains between Hungary and Austria had to be cancelled as tracks were covered when streams broke their banks.
It feels really strange to think about flood when the temperature in Oslo, yesterday reached 31,3 degrees and Oslo wasn’t even the hottest place in Norway. A small place called Gulsvik had 32,1 degrees. Well, time to prepare for work and another really hot day…
Watched the Norwegian movie Død Snø (Dead Snow) on DVD today. It had it’s premiere yesterday in the U.S. Dead Snow was one of the biggest hits at the Sundance Film Festival.
Some my readers will perhaps remember that Tommy Wirkola made another great movie that I wrote about, Kill Buljo.
This is Frank Paul Silye’s personal blog. I use this page to share information about media, travelling, technology, photography and stuff I find important.
