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

The standard for Voip is called SIP, and to use SIP you need a SIP account. I checked around a bit for different providers until i stumbled upon sipgate.co.uk. They allow you to setup your account directly for no charge and get a free real number to boot. Excellent. After some configuration I finally got the lovely message on my phone.  “Account is registered” The sipgate.co.uk webpanel confirmed it. It could see my phone. Rock on! My cellphone was ready to make internet calls.

Or so I thought. The Nokia 5630 even has its own field in the contacts for “internet phone”. But trying to call someone with only an internet phone number didn’t work. It should show up as a third call option. And trying to just hit the call button gives me the error “Internet-telephony service not available.” A flicker of fear awoke inside of me, was it all too good to be true?

And so far.. it was! Here is the response I got from Nokia Support (use babelfish you lazies)

Hej Martin.

Tack för att du kontaktat Nokia Care kundsupport.

Du behöver ett inställnings program som gör internet telefoni möjligt. Det är bara sjävla SIP inställningarna du kan göra på telefonen.
Program som tex Skype, Gizmo. Där finns många olika, kontakta gärna din opperatör och fråga om dem har något.
Det ända som supporteras av nokia är gizmo.

Om det är något annat du undrar över så tveka inte att kontakta oss igen.

Med vänliga hälsningar,
Nokia Service Professional
Swedish Team
Nokia Care

Thanks for that horrifying response Nokia, what I would like to know is if that is true, then what the hell is this page on about?  Nokia 5630 XpressMusic support Check out the movies surprise ending! Thats right, a SIP call being made without any special program.

I have seen phones being sold where some functionality was just broken or not functioning very well. i hope that the support guy just was mistaken, and that someone in the comments will tell me what an idiot I am. But since is such a new phone I can’t help but wonder. Is Nokia promoting the phone by showing a feature that is not even implemented yet?

Update 17/8

Here is how things stand right now:

• I got a third response from Nokia. I told them that my settings were working fine but that the phone could not place the call. The reply I got was simple. “Your settings are wrong, and we don’t support anything but Gizmo”. To sum up my experience with Nokia support the three mails and two phonecalls I have sent them regarding this have been a waste of time.
• The SIP Supplier sipgate.co.uk told me they would send me a config sms with the correct settings, I haven’t got it yet but i’m not hopeful. I think I got it right by myself.
• I did a complete format of the phone yesterday. Curiously this did not revive the camera function that went dead after I installed the Mail for Exchange program. Nokia Support told me I have to send it in for service.

I will make a new attempt after I get my phone back from service.. until then. If any of you reading this got it working, post a comment!

This is the same model cellphone as the first one I owned. I didn't have the flashy headset however.

It’s been a while since i bought a new cell phone. As a matter of fact the only phone I ever bought with my own money was my first phone. An Ericsson, back in 1997 or something like that when it was still quite exotic to have one.

You would think that that technology has progressed since then, but what we see today is a market totally overcrowded with bad products. I’m not joking when I tell you that the SonyEricsson p990, a phone I had the misfortune to meet at my current job, actually choke on the task of dialling a number. Out of memory after two digits! Receiving a call was the same gamble, the phone could run out of memory as it tried to recieve the call.. system restart.

So it was with pretty low expectations that I went shopping last week. What I wanted was so simple.

• A phone that is small, and that I can drop without it going a million pieces. A “vacation” phone if you will.
• Not an iPhone clone.
• As less keys as possible and as minimal design as possible.
• Wi-fi  and ability to stream music from my home network.

Ok so that last point was a bit of a joke, because I never expected to find a phone like that. The iPhone does that kind of, via the tversity web-interface. But it’s pretty slow and only works when it feels like it.

But what do you know, looks like Nokia r&d have been reading my mind.  I went and bought a Nokia 5630. The rest of this post is going to be about how great it is, and how UPnP changed everything.

I bought a budget Nokia for emergencies some months ago, it’s in itself a pretty good device, but as basic as you could possibly get. So the question arises: What else could you possibly need to have in your phone?  Turns out… lots of things!

The Good

There are the normal things you would expect, here are the things that first strike you:

• Its fast
• Its stable. I have managed to crash it a few times, but nothing major.
• Good battery time
• Nice design! Minimal.  Me like.
• Games games games. The Ngage gaming platform is built in. And no, I don’t care about that.
• Good camera.  Video editing is built in.
• It’s Symbian OS, so you can install lots of nice apps. I have seamless syncing with Googles Calendar and Contacs for example. Everything i put into the phones calendar, gets auto-synced.

The Awesome

Nokia 5630

Here is a rundown of the features that for me were totally new: I didn’t know any phone could do this.

• The voice-control is amazing: You can call anyone in your contacts by saying their name and what number to use. ie “Anders, mobile”. You can also say the name of any artist, album or song that you have in your phone, and it starts playing it.
• Total support for UPnP. That means that you can browse up music from your computer to your phone and stream it. So for example listen to anything you like when in bed, your whole collection at your fingertips, from your cellphone. Or why not copy it over so you can listen to it later when you leave home? You can also play music from your phone, on your computer or whatever else you happen to have in your home that supports UPnP. I have an old hacked xbox, works great. Fantastic way to move music between friends etc.
• Support for wi-fi.  Auto-detects hotspots and shows you an icon when there is a hotspot you can connect to.  This is the smallest cellphone I know about that supports wi-fi.
• Support for SIP.   I realize I’m coming late to this party, but it seems that there is built-in support for Voip (voice over internet).  That means that when the phone is without wi-fi range, I should be able to get a SIP account somewhere, and make REALLY cheap calls with my normal cellphone. The tech in itself is not so cool, but boy, that it comes built into my cellphone, that is pretty cool indeed.
• Podcasts,  every morning it grabs the latest episodes of whatever is new. Automatically, over wi-fi. This is how it should be.
• It can read you your new SMS’s and emails. (again to your headset if you like). A bit cheezy perhaps, but I like stuff like that.

The Problems

Here’s what doesn’t work:

• It’s pretty clear that this device was meant to be sold in Finland. The manual was in Finnish.. no big deal I thought I can get the manual from the web in some non-ugric language. But sadly there are functions in the phone that are in finnish only. Still trying to sort this out with Nokia support. Update:  I discovered that you can also download a voice for almost every language on earth for this feature. Very cool.
• This phone is not listed on the Nokia Support pages yet.  Update: Don’t bother with Nokia support. Read forums instead.
• When listening to music over bluetooth, there is no way to adjust volume. I trust this will be fixed. Right now its LOUD.  Very bad for my tinnitus.
• After installing some apps, the camera no longer works.  No big deal since It’s not a feature I use a lot, but still annoying. Update: After a  complete wipe of the phone the camera function is still broken! I guess I have to take it in for service. First time I own a phone where a software installation messes it up for good!

You are out driving in your car. You stop at a store and while you are there you steal some candy. I’ts illegal and not very nice, but you can’t help yourself, the candy looks so delicious. When you are about to leave the store owner appears and he is very mad.  ”For taking my candy without paying, you will lose your car.”  There is nothing you can do, you walk home.

This is more or less the essence of the telecom package, currently under deliberation in the European Parliament. The proposed price for you to pay for piracy is .. your internet connection can get taken away. Without the involvement of any court. (in the original proposal). They want to ban you from the internet for daring to take their precious movies and music. Nevermind that in 2009, the internet is a more given infrastructural item than even the telephone. You won’t be able to pay your bills or use it to declare your taxes. It is clear that the laws are based on outdated ideas. It is also clear that the people of Sweden have representation in Brussels that are pushing hard for an agenda that is utterly removed from the interests of the common people.

Our rights as citizens are getting compromised for the benefit of companies like HBO and Time Warner. It’s the end of the world.

http://www.dn.se/fordjupning/europa2009/telekompaketet-strid-om-rattssakerhet-in-i-det-sista-1.858591

Burns: And to think, Smithers, you laughed when I bought Ticketmaster. [imitating Smithers] Nobody’s going to pay a hundred-percent “service charge.”
Smithers: It’s a policy that ensures a healthy mix of the rich and the ignorant, sir.

Here is what has been bugging me in the debate: The state is jumping on the bandwagon a bit too fast when it comes to limiting your right on the net. With the telecom package around the corner you start asking yourself whose best interest the state has at heart. Do you know a single person who thinks this kind of government control is a good idea?

Then unfortunately on the other side of the debate, at least in Sweden, you find the Pirate-party. A whole political party whose only issue is the right of filesharing and the freedom of information or something like that. They want to get my vote, when filesharing is like the least of the worlds problems at the moment. Its very depressing, guys there is a name for one-issue organizations: lobby group. Allright?

So it was a complete breath of fresh air to read this article on fokus.se. It brings the discussion back to where it should have stayed in the first place: How is it possible that an album that costs a given amount of money in the store, almost costs the same amount as a digital download?

Read this article

Its in swedish, but I encourage you to use the translation engine of your choice if you need to. It’s worth it. Judging by how the way things are going now, we are heading head-first into a very dark place indeed.

Dear Spotify user,

Last week we were alerted to a group that managed to compromise
our protocols. After investigating we concluded that this group
had gained access to information that could allow testing of a
very large number of passwords, possibly finding the right one.
The information was exposed due to a bug that we discovered and
fixed on December 19th, 2008. Until last week we were unaware
that anyone had had access to our protocols to exploit it.

Along with passwords, registration information such as your email
address,birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt
details were potentially exposed. Credit card numbers are not
stored by us and were not at risk. All payment data is handled
by a secure 3rd party provider.

If you have an account that was created on or before December 19th 2008,
we strongly suggest that you change your password and strongly
encourage you to change your passwords for any other services
where you use the same password.

When choosing your password we provide you with an indicator of
the password strength to help you choose a good one. To change
your password please visit your profile page on our website.

https://www.spotify.com/en/account/profile/

For the technically minded amongst you, the information that may
have been exposed when our protocols were compromised is the
password hashes. As stated, we never store passwords, and they
have never been sent over the Internet unencrypted, but the
combination of the bug and the group’s reverse-engineering of
our encrypted streaming protocol may have given outsiders access
to individual hashes.

The hashes are salted, making attacks using rainbow tables unfeasible.
Short or otherwise bad passwords could still be vulnerable to
offline targeted brute-force or dictionary attacks on individual
users, but you could not run attacks in parallel. Also, there
has been no known breach of our internal systems. A complete user
database has not been leaked, but until December 19th, 2008 it was
possible to access the password hashes of individual users had
you reverse-engineered the Spotify protocol and knew the
username.

We are really sorry about this and hope you accept our apologies.
We’re doubling our efforts to keep the systems secure in order
to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Regards,
The Spotify Team

The bassline is of course limited in the amounts of sound it can produce, as it is meant to mimic the classic TB-303. The “Transistor Bass”, while being a great synth, is possibly the most cliché thing any studio doing electronic music could feature. I’m not very interested in how accurate the cloning of the sounds are, as every instrument is and should sound different. But I can say this: They successfully transferred the things that are fun about the TB-303 to the MSSIAH.

The best thing about this cart is of course the whole idea of making new software for a 25 year old hardware platform. Some corners have to be cut of course, and 8-bit ventures do a great job of navigating between the flaws in the c64 computer while keeping the cart easy to use in the hands of non-technical musicians. The whole sampler application (another review for another day) is for example built around a bug in the SID-chip. It wasn’t intended to work as a sampler at all..

You get a wide array of different ways to play and use the synth. You can hook it up to your midi sequencer and just play notes, while still being able to do glides and accents, or you can trigger patterns from the midi sequencer, OR most interestingly of all you can let Bassline do its thing and only slave it to the midi clock. This is perhaps the most interesting mode of them all, since it allows you to control every parameter of the synth with CC midi messages from your midi sequencer. Transpose the pattern, turn up the accent. Tweak the filter, fantastically useful.

On the other hand if you prefer to keep things hands-on you can also run it competely stand-alone. If you feel like doing some light soldering you can even add potentiometers to the top of the casing of the c64 and use them to control the synth realtime as it plays.

So in essence, this is a geeks wet dream. 8-bit ventures have done their homework well.

The full amazing story is here