The three phones sort of have Skype, but if what you use Skype for is free calls from abroad over WiFi, they are no use. The Skype that three have only works over their network – if you use it abroad, it will coat a.fortune in roaming data charges.

Old symbian phones have proper Skype over WiFi ( Nokia n95 does at least).

Joe

I have pretty extensive experience of travelling with guitars and you really need to take a flight case if you want to be absolutely sure your pride and joy gets to the other end in one piece. Undo all the strings so the neck isn't under tension when it gets flung around.Most airlines charge a flat rate for musical equipment these days so the extra weight of a flight case isn't an issue. Assuming you are flying of course.

Surely the whole point of a travel guitar is that you can take it hand luggage – that's what my boss does with his, and doesn't seem to have problems.

Joe

Yeah, works okay. It is almost as good as Nokia Sports Tracker was. The people developing it are very responsive to queries, and are developing new features all the time.

The only pain I have with it is that you can't make your profile public to the whole world, only to other people who use endomondo. You can publish individual routes publicly, but not all the exercise that you've done – only your 'endo-friends' can see that.

Joe

Lifestyle wise in Auckland its 15oC + all year round and he goes sailing & biking alot

Be aware that at least in most of the south island, this isn't true. In Christchurch, it gets bloody cold for half the year, made worse by most of the houses being basically wooden shacks, and central heating being rare. Similarly, Wellington is famous for wind and rain – don't move out to nz expecting it to be like baywatch – it has much more in common with Scotland.

I worked on the south island for a bit. In many ways it is similar to the highlands of Scotland – decent mountains, hardly any people, friendly but quite reserved people. If you like culture, like art, music etc, you'll be very limited – a few international acts play Wellington or Auckland, but if you're in the south island, that means a weekend flight or a 12 hour road and ferry trip just to go to a gig, and only a pretty limited selection of bands play there. same is true of art – don't expect to see many non nz artists.

The riding is good, although due to access laws, there is nowhere near as much as in Scotland say, and you tend to have to drive quite a way to drive anything non local, on slow nz roads – the biggest roads on the s island are pretty much the same size as a bigger b road over here.

Basically, it's a nice enough place, but not the amazing perfect idyll that many people build it up to be – personally, if I wanted to live somewhere with decent hills for riding, I'd prefer Scotland or mainland Europe, where you can have access to culture, the ability to go wherever you want in the countryside / hills, but still have many of the benefits of big hills and nice scenery. I think nz gets bigged up a bit because normal people without much experience of the outdoors, or the scenery that there is in Europe go to nz as it is a standard tourist thing to do now.

Joe

What I object to is everybody calling themselves Engineers when they work in IT FF's. Technician or Programmer yes maybe but Engineer. NO WAY.

What about people calling themselves engineers, when they build products with firmware – they're just glorified programmers really. Or people who build software systems which happen to have a physical electronics element to them, do they get allowed to call themselves engineers?

Nowadays everything is all about designing systems, the software / hardware boundary at least in many areas (e.g. cars, aeroplanes, consumer devices etc.) is so blurred nowadays that it is pretty stupid to pretend that there is a massive difference between hardware 'engineering' and software 'programming'. Although judging from the general standards of most firmware programmer 'electronic engineers', they could probably do with a few people from a computer rather then engineering background involved – they make all the same mistakes that computer programmers have been battling with for years, but don't seem to have any of the systems to cope with them that computer people have developed, relying instead in things from old school engineering, which really don't adapt to a world that is largely software and changes rapidly.

Now, as for computer 'science', if you ask me, that is pretty stupid – it is blatantly engineering not science (and I work in a CS department!).

Joe

I expect you're right, but I'll keep on believing it's my heavy legs as I find swimming too hard and very dull unless it's in the sea or underwater

I'm agreed with you there – I only swim in pools if I'm at hotels with work or whatever and don't have an option. Rivers with a current are the best swimming places (daniel start's Wild Swimming book is a great introduction to a bunch of decent river spots)

Joe

Phone up the tax office + theywill tell you what to do and where to send it. When I had to do it tjey were dead helpful.

having spent most of my life either playing football or riding a bike, I find that my legs tend to sink making swimming difficult

Legs sinking is nothing todo with muscles or body shape – lots of people make this mistake. It is poor technique and lack of balance in the water. If your legs sink, it is because you are not getting the top of your body pushed down into the water enough. If it was true that heavy legged people couldn't swim, triathlon wouldn't exist.

There is a great book called "total immersion" which teaches how to fix this so that you don't suck at swimming. I only suck a bit at swimming now.

Joe

To answer the original question – I'm sure I read a study on this using crank power meters, and it was something like 2% more efficient than spinning well on flat pedals, basically for maximum efficiency, there was no pulling up, just unweighting the upward pedals.

Having said that, on spds, it is very very easy to spin well compared to flats, as they pull your feet round nicely and teach you to move your feet in nice circles. But you can develop a very efficient spin on flats with practice.

Joe

The ever so knowlegable guy in the O2 store says I should go for the SE Xperia X10 over the HTC Desire, cause it's better! And he has one so he must be right!

I'd go for the HTC – HTC are supposed to be one of the fastest at updating to the latest android software, at least on their newest phones, which makes a big difference on smartphones.

The Sony has a very Sony user interface, personally I find Sony stuff a bit counter intuitive.

Bear in mind that the guy in the store is probably out of stock of desires (them being the big phone of the moment), and not out of stock of Sony phones, and he wants his commission, or the commission is higher on the Sony.

Joe

It'd be okay, but the battery life is still not going to be good if you're using gps or wifi, same as all the other smartphones.

I wouldn't buy one on an 18 month contract personally, it's going to look really dated in 18 months, as almost all application development moves to the more modern smartphone platforms. Even Nokia stop developing new applications for their phones in approximately 2.5 years (with their new maps stuff, they've stopped supporting the N95, which only came out a year or less before the 5800.)

Unless you use zillions of minutes, you should be able to get it for <£20 a month – you can get the htc desire for less than that on Three, and that is a brand new phone that is worth about 3 times as much, rather than an end of line thing.

The Nokia X6 feels horrible and cheap.

Personally, I'd recommend an HTC Desire, they are great.

Joe

I'm not sure about pinnacle, they may have updated since, but when we looked last year, premiere was the only thing that natively edited avchd. That means you can get straight down to working with the clips without having to do some import / conversion stage.

In final cut / imovie, when you open avchd it imports it, which takes about twice the time of the video clip, ie if you have an hour of video, you will have to wait 2 hours before working with it, whereas in premiere cs4, you can edit hours of footage straight away.

So in short – if you could afford it premiere cs4 or later is the ideal software. Very nice, very fast, and extremely powerful. I have a feeling cs 5 is out now or soon, maybe cs 4 will be cheap.

Joe

Being someone who has a habit of leaving watches places and breaking them, I've always bought the cheapest watches. Of these, I find very cheap Casio or similar to be the most resilient. I've had more expensive chunky sports watches (Timex one, a Casio one), and whilst they may resist more bashing, they get bashed way more, so die easier.

Last watch was a £5 one from argos, which I unfortunately left at the bottom of a whitewater river (was filming video whilst swimming and had the strap caught up in the camera strap – one hectic bit of rapids later, I had no watch). I replaced it with a very similar one from Walmart.

Get one that is '50m waterproof' so you can wear it in the rain (or forget and wear it in the shower) – splashproof ones die.

You can get a fancy £500 mechanical watch, but it won't tell the time as well, and when you drop it in a river, it is £500 down the drain, rather than a fiver.

Joe

About boarding out – I'd recommend paying someone to do it. Ours was 120 quid inc materials, a lot better done than I would and total cost was only 20 quid or so more than I would've spent on materials.

Get them a copy of the cyclecraft book – recommended by the government cycling schemes, published by the government, it is pretty much the official book about riding on the road. You could perhaps highlight where it says where to ride in the road.

That way, you aren't just some mad mountain biker who knows nothing ranting on at them, you're showing them what the official line that they should be following is.

http://www.cyclecraft.co.uk/

Joe

it has 'bugger all' as you put it (at least we deliberately kept it short and simple

I meant the twitter feed, not the site itself, sorry!

Joe

I don't think lycra vs normal shorts makes a massive difference in performance. Although I wear normal shorts from topman shorts, not baggy bike shorts.

I did try cycling shorts for a bit, and I didn't really find a noticeable speed difference. In winter I wear tightish tracksuit bottoms, cos they're dirt cheap, dry very quickly, and don't flap.

As for why, just because I can't be bothered having six different types of clothing – normal shorts are fine for pretty much all the outdoor activities I get up to (and I can wear the same type of shorts at work too). I also do a lot of my riding as transport, where it is handy to not be lycraed up for most journeys.

Joe

Of course this is only my opinion, but as someone who works in the creative field, I strongly believe (and always have) that when I present a piece of work (a logo design, a website, a brochure etc) that I shouldn't expect the client to need to 'understand' what I have done, simply like it or not. If I need to justify something I don't think I have done my job properly.

That's because you're doing graphic design, basically communicating simple ideas in a simple, unambiguous way. It is a skilled craft to do that, but you are not doing the same thing that artists are trying to do (whatever that may be), which may involve complex or ambiguous ideas, or not even have any particular idea it is pushing.

Even old paintings are more complex than this. If you look at (for example) Las Meninas, by Velázquez, it is firstly obviously quite a technically competent painting of a bunch of people. But beyond that there are a vast number of underlying complexities – who are the people, what are their relationships, what does the painting say about the relationship that painters had with their patrons in 17th Century Spain. By knowing a little about the background of the painting it becomes a much more fascinating and interesting thing, and you can understand the hidden beauty that is in the complexity of the painting as a whole.

Whereas hopefully by looking at a logo that you have designed, you take a glance at it, and it conveys whatever you want it to convey. There isn't much complexity in it, at least not intended complexity. Although even if you look at design, there are a lot of interesting things underlying designs that people wouldn't really think about. For example, if you look at your website – that says a lot about you in ways that you perhaps aren't intending – clearly you are, like many companies at the moment, interested in being seen as forward and in with 'new media' trends, so you have a twitter feed and a blog, but again, like most companies, it has bugger all on it. Those "No twitter messages" things are surely an interesting comment on the fad led nature of modern design (not to mention the pictures at the top of all the 'I'm a creative design type' totems – a mac and some fancy design books, some wacky design toys, a unicycle etc.) I'm sure my website is just as revealing about me and how I am situated within the area that I work in.

Joe

i've got nearly 6'000km tracked in sportstracker.

Me too, about 10,000km. I made a start on a converter/exporter program to work on the files off the memory card, but I haven't had time to finish it off.

Joe

Cornwall is nice, and you are sort of at the right end of the country starting from Malvern. The eden project is okay, but not super exciting – but the beaches and towns are lovely.

Given you're based south westish, I'd just do stuff round there, and not bother with anywhere else – once you've factored in travel to cornwall and back to malvern, you'd basically have taken up half a day each end already – 4 days to go to Cornwall, have an explore, and go back would be just about enough.

Joe

Yeah, I just wish I had a bit more time – it isn't that complex an app to write, but my list of stuff to program in my spare time is a bit long at the moment, and the new baby is not going to help that.

Joe

If you want breakdowns one option that might work is, when you upload from MyTracks to Google over the air it gives you a Google Docs option. This populates an Excel-a-like spreadsheet based on the 'activity' field on the track; potentially you could put your activity as "mtb-May" etc and it'd create a separate sheet for each month containing rows of rides. Alternatively, create one huge master document and c&p the data locally into Excel to process it however you like. Sorry if this isn't particularly clear, it's hard to explain and a lot more obvious what I'm describing if you just try it and take a look.

Yeah, I can see that I could write some code, or copy / paste stuff into excel, but it is annoying that most of these apps don't do it, the whole point of using an automated system is so I don't have to do analysis by hand.

I mean surely they've seen nokia sports tracker, which is what they're all trying to rip off, they could at least implement most of the features in that as a base. On that, I could just go to 'summary' and see a summary of weeks, months, years, even split by sport if I wanted.

I guess with mytracks, I could make a spreadsheet that references into my master spreadsheet and has a bunch of formulas in it to make the graphs I want, but it would be a right old pain.

Joe

MapMyTracks

On android phone? The download page only has a version for older phones.

I've run a bunch of those. Annoyingly, nothing quite has the same features that the nokia one had –

Most obviously I want both: daily / weekly / monthly / yearly statistics (how much I rode each month), which mytracks doesn't do.

And to be able to share my rides and the list of rides I have done with anyone out there, which endomondo doesn't do.

Endomondo does everything except the last, but you can only share with 'endo-friends' i.e. people who have registered on the site.

It would be ideal if the statistics and list of rides was stored on the device as well as on the internet, as that makes it much quicker to just check up on how much riding I've been doing – but it seems nothing does that. Oh and a nice calendar interface to the ride list would be great too.

Cardiotrainer is very limited in what information you get about the ride.

sportstracker seems nice, although the ride sharing and statistics is a pay feature – I'm slightly put off by that, as it means I'm unlikely to know other people using it, so won't get to use the competitive features.

my tracks gives you information about the total amount of riding you've done ever, but doesn't have weekly / daily / monthly / yearly breakdowns.

Joe

Who spends 24hrs non-stop cycling?
That's plain silly.
Even the professionals have to stop to eat / loo.

Is that true? Okay, they might need to stop for 5 minutes for a dump at some point, but I'm sure when I did mountain mayhem solo, the good guys were getting most of their eating done on the bike – they had people passing them out bags of food each lap, and just kept going. Certainly nothing like 7 hours of stopping for them.

Joe

Funny thing is that it was the Conservatives who initially brought us into the EEC (precurser to the EU).

Free trade does seem quite useful from a personal point of view, you can buy things from the EU without paying extra duty or taxes, and I imagine it is way more important for companies.

Free movement is handy, it is way less of a pain to go through EU immigration than to go to the USA, Canada, Australia etc.

No one is ever going to take us out of the EU anyway, even the most right wing of the Conservatives probably don't want out of the free trade aspects, and it's pretty unlikely that the rest of Europe would let us just leave the social and other stuff without leaving the free trade agreements, as they are so interlinked nowadays.

would all the brits working in europe be forced home if we left the eu?

They'd probably have to apply for work permits in their host countries, same as in Switzerland. If they were lucky, the country would give them priority, and allow them to change jobs (Switzerland does now for EU citizens, but didn't used to), if not, they'd be like work permit workers in the USA, where if they get sacked / made redundant, they are likely to have to go home to their country of origin.

Joe

Nokia have the N8 coming soon – looks promising and you get free maps/navigation on the phone

Personally, I'd avoid it – still has the Symbian operating system, which means far fewer and much worse quality applications for it, not as good a screen as the Desire (probably also not as good as the iPhone, but not sure). Hardly anyone will bother programming for it now, as Android and iPhone are a million times easier to write apps for, so you'll just be stuck using whatever nokia puts in free, and the things on Ovi store, which is pretty limited at the moment compared with itunes or android market.

Maps and navigation is a bit old now, it is a slight bonus that you can preload them, but the Symbian maps are not as good as the maps on Android (which also has free navigation too).

It'll also probably be very expensive (the rrp for the N97 is almost 2x the cost of the HTC desire), which might make a difference to how good a deal you get on it on contract.

Joe

Joe – there is a basic road type of map on there that is free i think and this gives you just as good as google. and the 1:50000 maps are only £150 for the whole country. but i have been getting the 1:25000 maps but i just down load the ones i need as tokens.

Viewranger is great for what i need also it is avalble on the Android and Iphone

Yep, I only got a new phone this month because I was waiting for Viewranger Android to come out and making do with my N95 with broken earpiece speaker. The only application that I absolutely have to have on any phone I get.

Joe

Aha, the 'alert' thing was what I wanted – I changed the calendar alert tone so I now have 1 minute 30 of Bach's Well Tempered Klavier A-minor. So now, it will ding, every so often, and each ding lasts a significant length of time.

I guess I'm back to arriving at meetings on time now then. Cheers all.

Using any of the above apps doesn't it just use google maps, and therefore you cant actually see where you are if your off road ie just on a big green bit?

Yes, except viewranger, which has OS maps (but costs money).

Joe

I don't know if it's set up properly. Does your phone do something different?

It is set up so that it does remind me, and it does the reminder beep once (and the thing at the top of the screen / notification pull down lights up). But I can't work out how to make it repeatedly make a noise until I notice it.

Joe

Because, as I pointed out, we cannot stop somebody leaving the country, which is the last resort for someone who wants to reduce their tax bill.

People supporting tax cuts are always saying that, but it is hard to know how much evidence there is in support of it – the threatened massive exodus after the 50% tax rate never seemed to actually materialise. Realistically, we would have to have very very high personal taxes to convince anyone who wants an interesting life that they'd rather live in Frankfurt / Basel than in London.

Joe

My Iphone was free on contract. Not exactly expensive.

No it wasn't. You're just paying for it in installments.

I bet if you'd stuck with your old phone, you could have got the same number of minutes / texts etc. for £15-20 a month less, meaning that if you're on a 24 month contract, it is costing you £360.

For example on O2, you can get 600 minutes / unlimited texts for £20 a month, or for £35 a month with an iPhone.

Joe

Got any opinions on Maemo and the N900? Considering it at a later date if/when they come available. And yes I am a techie so I get that it's a hardcore techie phone etc.

I've done a bit of work on N800s (or was it n810,can't remember), running Maemo. It is nice that it runs linux. The user interface sucks a bit still. It can run lots of linux applications, which is nice, but it is a bit of a desktop operating system crammed into a handheld device, which feels a bit weird, same as old windows mobile phones used to. It doesn't feel like it is designed for mobile use. Very neat as a little computer in your pocket, but I'm not sure I'd want one as a phone. They are quite big too, even compared to the HTC Desire / iPhone. I'd also wonder how good the applications for them will be – personally, I quite like having a phone that normal people use, as developers seem to develop things with better user interfaces when their target market is normal people.

Joe

I like my desire a lot, really feels nice to use, and entering text is not a pain, works quite well.

If you're not a heavy phone user, Three are doing it on their website for £17 a month, with internet, but only 100 minutes/texts, which is a bit of a bargain for me, given I previously used to use about £15 a month in total and didn't get a fancy phone in that.

Joe

My phone has GPS, MP3, nice camera, sportstracker, facebook, push email, apps, google maps, etc etc etc. It was free on a £15/mo contract – Nokia 5800.

Whilst that's true, I've used & owned and developed for a lot of Nokias, also used iPhones, and now have an HTC Desire as my personal phone, and the iPhone and HTC are streets ahead of even the newest Nokias. The HTC & iPhones are as big a step up from the 5800 as the Nokia smartphones were from a talk/text only phone.

It is just a million times less fiddly to do everything, the web browser is so much better, it doesn't do 'out of memory' or randomly crash out of apps in the same way that Nokia phones seem to, the phone user interfaces are really well thought out, applications mostly have much nice user interfaces also. Nokia has too much hanging around from the early days of their 15-20 year old Symbian operating system that kind of makes things less stable.

Nokia are also an absolute nightmare pain in the arse to develop software for, so it is pretty unlikely they'll ever get the same kind of quantity or quality of applications that the newer systems have. I certainly will never develop for Nokia again unless someone is paying me a whole lot more money than I normally get paid – it is just a real hassle, and I've got quite a lot of experience of developing for Nokia/Symbian, and >20 years of development experience on other things, so it really shouldn't be as hard as it feels.

Joe

– Do bikes in NZ have brake levers the 'wrong' way round?

Yes. You either get used to it (I found I did pretty quick, there are only so many times that you can pull the wrong brake lever at 40mph and not learn), or take a set of allen keys with you and swap em over.

Joe

Cinema is great BTW – leather sofas and big seats, nice food and fancy cakes to buy, and you can have a glass of wine or beer while you watch. Trouble is its too popular and you can hardly ever get a seat!

Yeah. Worth being a member as you get the program in advance so you can actually book things.

It's the old deb factory where they used to make Swarfega. The site is going to be houses.

Not sure about that side of the hill, we're on the side with the mill but I would be surprised if it was nasty being so close to the town centre. Local paper moans about pissheads going home from the pubs walking down Nottingham Road on Saturday nights but local papers are always moaning about something.

None were locked to that airtime provider, none had any logos appear on start up, or any taylored profiles for that provider.

Be careful about this though, you can't assume it – I have 4 PAYG handsets here, of varying ages, and they were all locked to a particular network.

Joe

Yes, should do, as long as it is the same network.

Legally you probably aren't allowed to ebay the old handset until the contract ends, but if you did, you might make back a fair bit of money if it is anything nice – even a 2 year old old Nokia N95 will go for £80 or more.

Joe