Martin Gumucio

One of the perks of my job is that I get to try out a great variety of technical gadgetry. Today I am for your benefit reviewing, the Sony Ericsson MW-600 bluetooth headset.

If you have been reading previous posts on this blog you may  be familiar with what a great part headphones in general and lately headsets specifically play in my life. In my line of work you spend a lot of time on the phone, so I need to be able to do so in the most convenient way available.  Not only that, but I’m also constantly listening to music while working, or in the car, or on my bike. And I am doing so from a variety of devices, sometimes from the computer, sometimes from the phone, sometimes from my other phone..

Finally there is a product on the market that allows this to happen. The MW-600 works great for this. Like other products I have reviewed in the past it is multi-homing, that is it can be bound via bluetooth to several devices at once.  This is normally tricky business since Bluetooth seems to be a rather flexible protocol, and some phone brands abuse this (Apple, I’m looking at you) and never lets the other phone in on the action. Other glitches with bluetooth and music I have seen in the past like music occationally dropping out, or being at a wierd, unchangeable volume, seem to finally be fixed.

So with the MW-600, you finally get the feeling that you get a product using bluetooth that is a really polished product. You get a nice friendly display which lets  you pick   1.  where do you want your calls to come from and  2. where do you want your music to come from.   So you can even, without any hassle, be playing music from one bluetooth source while accepting and making calls from another bluetooth device. Wicked!  You also get a built-in FM radio as a music source.

The MW-600 can handle three simultaneous devices. For me that means my work phone, my personal phone and my iPad.  But other choices could include a laptop with bluetooth or even a gaming console.

Now my only gripe is that the display works great with the iPhone, showing the names of music tracks in the display and the names of contacts calling you also. But oddly this does not work on Sony Ericssons own phones, whats up with that?  A very minor gripe on an all-around awesome product. Also the display is OLED, which I thought would mean that it would be really cool, but It’s not.  In any kind of outdoor enviroment the display is impossible to read. It’s not a dealbreaker, but annoying.

Did i mention its going for really cheap?  A solid investment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/18/phone-scam-india-call-centres

“Sir, I call you back because your wife told me she is not allowed to use the computer without her husbands permission”

I just got a call from a man with an indian accent following exactly the same call template as you can read about in the link above. My computer was at risk, it had a virus, but he could help!

Puzzled by this friendly stranger i let the call go on, explaning that I was myself working as a sysadmin, this did not deter his resolution in helping me in the slightest. It should be noted that this was the third of fourth time he called me, from a number in the USA. This might seem strange in itself, but I run a lot of internet sites so I have been getting a bit more love from US spammers in the past.

Here is what i was asked to do:

- click the start button
- right click on “my computer”
- click on manage
- click on event viewer
- click on Application logs

… and right there i stopped the call because i knew what was coming next. The pitch is that in the application logs there are quite a lot of Errors and Warnings. This is completely normal for a Windows computer, but look intimidating to the average user. If i had let the call continue I would have been offered a “fix” that would have involved me installing malware on the computer and handing over my credit card information.

So consider yourself warned! These are professional scammers and they sound very gentle and persuasive. I have notified the police and local media.. and my mom. And the quote at the top is genuine, i have the best wife ever.

I made some changes to how comments work. Comments haven’t been working very well due to the large amount of spammers that are working the wordpress system. 500 spam comments in the few months i have had the system open.

So to rectify this i installed the most ridiculous captcha system i could find and enabled comments to be visible right away. If you comment with your Facebook account you wont have to bother with the captcha.

So enjoy! And if you are reading this and working on a spam-script. Go to hell!

The iPhones built in pdf viewer made a dogs breakfast of our staffs weekly newsletter. To great comedic effect since the topic of the article is legibility and the importance of clear communication.. at least so I believe.

Clearer communication at SLU

[...] for the reader a formal and simple language. The graphical layout will be  [...]

[...] understands the message.

Technical Museum in Stockholm 1952 - Philips demonstrating television.

Me and L where talking the other day if we ever are going to see a change in our lives as fundamental as internet. Our generation grew up without it while this generation never knew how life was before cellphones and internet. And the next generation, what kind of internet will they get to know?

Changes are pretty big that the freedom and openness that we associate with internet today will be an unknown to them. I heard the other day on the radio a debater making the argument “of COURSE internet suppliers should be responsible for what is going on in their networks”. To that argument I must ask why. Internet connectivity is as commonplace today as any other part of the Swedish infrastructure. You don’t close bars if people get drunk there and then drive home. Nobody would even think about threatening my telephone company if I were to pick up the phone and call in a bomb threat at the Royal Palace. Yet somehow when it comes to internet connectivity, all the basic rules we take for granted don’t apply.

We are already being spied upon on a systematic and state-sponsored degree, Stasi of East Germany could only dream of having the control over its citizens that the Swedish state is enjoying at the moment. The argument that the intelligence gathered in Sweden cannot be used to track individuals is hardly comforting, when it is an established fact that intelligence data always have always been for sale or trade to intelligence agencies of other countries.

And now, around the corner looms ACTA. The article linked to below highlights a connection I was not aware of before: That ACTA operates the same way as the Great Chinese firewall. This in connection with the recent Google/China scandal really makes you wonder. What the hell is going on?

Read this –> The Similarity Between ACTA And Chinese Internet Censorship