Status-Q

I see that IOGear's incarnation of the USB Nivo is listed on their site now, and there's a possible price of $83, though nobody seems to have stock of it quite yet...

I have an elderly Nikon Coolpix 995, which I love. I, or at least my company, also owned two of its predecessors, and while newer cameras may have more megapixels, and be easier to wear on one's belt, the optics on these were great, and the twisty design proved useful over and over again.

Anyway, I was distressed to see, last time I used it, that it had developed a few 'hot' pixels. These are failures in the CCD sensor, which show up as bright pixels in the same place in every image, especially when a long exposure is used.

To have a few failures is normal, and some cameras have the ability to remap such dud pixels so they don't appear in the final image. Normally, this would involve sending the camera to Nikon for servicing, but I came across a Windows utility called CCD Defects Reader, written by a Russian chap named Paul. It works with several of the cameras in the Coolpix range, and sure enough, after rebooting my Linux box into Windows to run this, my dead pixels had vanished, and a photo taken with the lens cap on was beautifully black, instead of looking like a map of the night sky!

Here's an account from somebody doing the same thing with a Coolpix 5700.

Rui Carmo says his iPod Shuffle has been my faithful companion at work for many months now (it is the only way to survive the incredible waste of productivity and endless entropy brought on by the "open space office" concept).

I think I'm generally less productive when listening to music while I work - it's probably part of getting old - but it's less of a negative impact than being in an open-plan office, so I do occasionally retreat into headphones if I find myself in that environment.

Rui writes about how he uses a BluEye device to switch between his iPod and incoming phone calls. Quite neat.

But I can't help feeling that there's scope for somebody to make a killing building more officially-office-oriented products here. If you're blessed with an employer who's bought into the open plan idea, then you'll know some of the main problems:

• The distraction of overhearing everyone else's calls and discussions.
• The annoyance of other peoples' ringing phones that are not answered.
• The physical distractions of people walking past, moving furniture, etc in your vicinity.
• Having to leave your desk and your normal work environment whenever you want to make or receive a long call (so as not to annoy others) or a personal call.
• Having to be away from your desk when you have visitors.
• Trying to find empty meeting rooms on the spur of the moment.
• Brainstorming on a whiteboard and then having to erase the whiteboard before the meeting room is used by the next person.

and so forth. The best environment I ever worked in had offices of, typically, between one and three people, and a convention that office doors would normally be open unless you didn't want to be disturbed. We wandered freely in and out of each others' offices and scribbled on each others' whiteboards. Glass windows in the doors let you judge how disturbable somebody was if their door was closed. Don't get me wrong - I know there are some environments where the open-plan model works, but I think they are few and far between, especially if your employees are knowledge-based workers and particularly if they are programmers. Often senior management will talk about the supposed productivity improvements for everyone else but mysteriously need offices for themselves! No, there's usually a simpler underlying explanation. Sometimes it's that the management don't trust employees to be sufficiently self-motivated. But in general it's pure economics: the cost of providing individual or small-group offices is fairly high and very obvious, while the loss of productivity from not having them is much less tangible. Many employers feel they simply can't afford the infrastructure. So there must be a big market for technological solutions to this problem - systems which give you the impression of a real office without isolating you too much from your colleagues. VNC-like systems in meeting rooms which let you get at your normal computing world when you've had to leave it for some reason. Ways of telling your co-workers that you really don't want to be disturbed right now... There's a big commercial opportunity here for somebody, surely?

Some questions for you:

• How often do you use the speakerphone facility on your mobile? If you're like me, only very occasionally.
• How often do you get the urge to listen to music through the (probably mono) speaker or headset on your mobile? Again, I would suggest, probably not often. Even the cheapest iPod will do a much better job.
• How often, when listening to podcasts while shaving, do you wish that your iPod had built-in speakers so you don't have to keep plugging it into those speakers with the battery that runs down and makes Leo Laporte sound like a dalek? Well, there may be fewer of you here, but I'm sure you can at least sympathise with those of us for whom this is a source of distress.

So I'm quite intrigued by the new software that I've just installed on my Nokia E61: Nokia's Podcasting application. This is not, as the name might suggest, something that lets you create podcasts on the phone, but something that lets you subscribe to, download and listen to them. And the phone's audio, limited and monophonic though it may be, is just fine for most podcasts, either through earphone or through the loudspeaker - speech is what it was designed for, after all! This would also be a good way to generate phenomenally large phone bills if I were charged per megabyte for my 3G connection, or if I couldn't set the phone to do the downloads via my wifi connection. And I'll have to watch my settings carefully. My real worry is that I'll accidentally go abroad and the application will download the latest episode of TWiT over a roaming GSM connection, which would, I calculate, cost me something in the region of £280.

How do you interact with a screen on a device without putting finger-marks on it? You make the frame touch-sensitive, according to a recent Apple patent.

Many people are speculating that the diagrams give a good idea of what the next iPod might look like...

Perhaps you need a Clocky...

My Nokia E61 has a keyboard and a little joystick thingy. It doesn't have a touchscreen. This can be restricting for some applications but it has a major advantage, as Steve Litchfield points out: Screens without a touchscreen in front of them are much more readable in sunlight. He has some photos to illustrate this.

Here's a picture of my Nokia E61, for those who haven't seen them in the flesh:

Unusually for devices of this shape, it's not a bad phone. The sound quality and signal strength are really pretty good.

I think I may have to reach for a J2ME programming book to see if I can fix some of the shortcomings of the built-in software...

Well, this post comes via a 3G network, using my Nokia E61.

I'll write more about this device soon. It does so much more than my Blackberry - better sound, wifi connectivity, VOIP calls, lovely big screen and pretty decent keyboard, to name a few - but some aspects are noticeably more flaky or obscure.

I had my Blackberry up & running and doing what I wanted very quickly, whereas I've been playing with this device all weekend and still haven't quite got it as I want it. But that's partly because there is so much more you can do with this... I didn't spend much time configuring my BB to connect to my Asterisk server via wifi, for example! But the BB is basically an enhanced phone, where this is a very capable PDA, almost a tiny laptop, with a whole new operating system to learn - Symbian, in this case, which I'm much happier to have on my phone than anything from Redmond.

The main reason I wanted to try the E61 was to get 3G connectivity for my laptop, and it does that very nicely. It's also better for doing blog posts from the breakfast table! But for general ease of use, it's hard to beat a Blackberry.

This is very cool and I wish I'd thought of it first. It will...

...keep track of several things that need metering. That includes anything from "CPU Usage" to eBay Auction Status" to our personal favorite, "The Current GDP of Uzbekistan." From what we can tell, "The Device" connects to your Windows machine (Mac / Linux support is coming soon, apparently) and displays some piece of data generated from your computer or culled from the internet.