I have resisted getting a satellite navigation system for years now after my first experience of using one. I was going to the Channel Tunnel from Milton Keynes and when I got to the M1 it told me to turn left (the opposite direction I needed to be going in).

Naturally I turned right and the message on the screen came up “Recalculating Route” and then told me to carry straight on for 25 miles or so.

After that I thought what’s the point if all it is going to do is send me on a wild goose chase. Most of the places I go to I know how to get to them and when I didn’t I would get a route printed out on the internet. The last 2 occasions I did that though turned out to be a disaster and I ended up getting horribly lost.

So I decided to bite the bullet and have another go with a Sat Nav system. I have some friends who had already got TomTom’s and they all raved about them so when I saw the TomTom 510 with its widescreen display I decided to get one.

I used it for the first time a couple of days ago when I was going up to an exhibition at Olympia in London and I am so glad I got his now. It really does take the stress of driving away when you don’t know where you are going.

One thing that surprised me was just how easy it was to use. The touch screen menus are so simple that a 5 year old could use it. Just enter in the postcodes and the unit does the rest for you.

So if your someone that constantly gets lost get a TomTom or another Sat Nav unit today. They have improved drastically over the years and have come down to incredibly affordable prices.

Someone asked me if I had managed to get T-Mobile working on My Sony UX180P once I had got it unlocked from Cingular.

I had been using Orange as I was taking advantage of their ?1 a day unlimited Data but that has now come to a close for 3G Data so I am now using my T-Mobile pay as you go card. They only charge ?1 a day for unlimited data too on their pay as you go scheme and the good thing with this is you don’t have to order as an extra and they will simply keep billing you per kb until you have spent £1 and then cap the charge.

I am in the UK so this process with be different in other countries but I set it up to work with the T-Mobile sim card by doing the following:

1: Pretty obvious but you have to unlock the data card from Cingular
2: Put the T-Mobile sim card into the card slot and switch on WWAN.
3: Load the Cingular Connection Manager
4: Go to profiles then click add new profile and choose “Create Custom Profile”
5: Choose service type “Packet”
6: Leave the dial up number as shown on the screen “*99***1#
7: Enter “general.t-mobile.uk” as the Access Point Name
8: Enter “user” as username, password “wap” then click next,
9: Leave all the ip settings alone and click next. Name the profile, I chose “T-Mobile” and finish.

Then on the Cingular Connection Manager main screen click “Connect Using” and choose your T-Mobile profile. If you are in service it should come up with Ready “T-Mobile”, click connect and that’s it.

There may be other ways to do this but this is what worked for me.

Well I think I’ve seen it all now. Petsmobility have launched a Mobile Phone for your Dog!

As ridiculous as this may sound its actually a pretty good idea. Especially if you have a pet with a tendency to run off on its own.

The PetsCell not only allows you to call your dog if it gets lost but also allows anyone who finds it to call you. Coupled with GPS navigation you can also track online where your dog is and setup a Geo-Fence around a certain area and get notified if your dog leaves this specific area.

It could be said as a responsible pet owner you shouldn’t let your dog wander off unattended and I for one would agree with that sentiment but it could be useful if you have taken your dog for a walk off its lead and if it runs off at least you will be able to find them easier enough.

I guess the next step would be to somehow miniaturize this for use with cats. That I could see as being a good use of the technology as cats are always wandering off sometimes for hours on end. At least with one of these you’d know where it was.

Only problem is you’d have to move to America for it to work!

I’ve never felt the need to buy an iPod before as the only music I tend to listen to is what I hear on the radio but now I have had a change of heart.

There are so many great podcasts available which I do try to listen to but find it distracting to listen to these on my PC. So now I’ve decided to order an iPod so I can download the podcasts onto it and hopefully I’ll have more of a chance to listen to them when I’m on the move.

Some of the podcasts I listen to regularly are:

The Best of Chris Moyles
Scott Mills Daily
Webmaster Radio

I’m sure I will be listening to more once my iPod arrives.

When I first got my Sony PSP I noticed in the menus a link to “LocationFree”. I didn’t have a clue what this was so I searched on the internet and found that you could watch TV wireless on your Sony PSP if you had a LocationFree base station. How cool is that? Unfortunately these were only available in the US at the time.

Sony have now released these in the UK a short while ago and although they were out of  stock on their online store I found one on Ebay which was also a bargain and I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy it.

Setting up my PSP to receive TV was a piece of cake and took less than 5 minutes. All I had to do once I had connected the base station to my Sky+ box was to put it into setup mode then get the PSP to find it and register itself and I was set. I have to say I was a bit dubious how well it would work but to my amazement the picture quality received on the PSP was excellent.

Next thing to do was setup the remote control by downloading the codes to my PSP. This again was a simple exercise and now I can happily control my Sky+ satellite receiver anywhere in the house or garden.

Now I had got the PSP working the next task on my list was to get it working with my Sony UX180P. This wasn’t quite as straightforward as the PSP and took a little longer. Mainly because I don’t think the instructions were all that clear or I wasn’t reading them properly.

The confusing thing to start with was that I couldn’t connect to the base station. It turns out that unless you have the base station connected into your router by cable it won’t work. It wasn’t a problem for the PSP but the pc was a different story altogether.

This is one thing that I had overlooked when reading the specs before I bought it. Being a wireless device I had thought it would connect to my router wirelessly but this isn’t the case. It needs to hard wired in with a cable. Now this was going to be a problem for me as the location of the base station was going to be in a different room to where my router is. Luckily this didn’t turn out to be such a big problem after all. I bought a Netgear wireless game adapter and plugged it into that and it worked straight away.

Picture quality on the PC was equally as good as the PSP and again was excellent. My only disappointed is that on the PSP there is a button to control the picture format so if you are feeding it with a widescreen signal you can stretch it out to fill the whole screen as it should be but this feature isn’t available yet for the PC. I only hope they support this in the future with an upgrade to the software.

Now for the tricky part. I wanted to set it up to watch TV over the internet. This involved setting up port forwarding in the router to the base station which wasn’t such an issue as I had done this before with my wireless camera. The only real problem I had was finding out how to setup the dynamic dns service in the base station. This part got me scratching my head a lot as it wasn’t that clear in the instructions. The problem I had was I was looking in the wrong place. Instead of the advanced settings it was actually in the easy setup menu. Once I had found the correct menu it was as simple as can be. You don’t need to sign up to anything and the dynamic dns service assigns you a web address to connect to the base station with.

In the specs it says that the minimum requirements are a broadband connection with upload and download speeds no less than 300kbs. As my current provider only gives me a maximum of 256kbs and probably doesn’t achieve that I was a bit dubious to whether it would actually work or not. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did and although the picture quality wasn’t anywhere near as good as connecting directly to the base station it was perfectly viewable. I would say it was as good as watching a program recorded on an old VHS video tape.

Things can only improve when TalkTalk finally let me go and I get a different provider with 3 x the upload speed I’m currently getting.

So now I can happily watch anything on TV from home including all recorded programmes on my Sky+ box anywhere in the world where I can connect wirelessly to a hotspot or a 3G connection with my Sony UX180P.

I have to say it is pretty amazing and if anyone had told you ten years ago that you would be able to do this you would have laughed in their face. Imagine what we will be doing in another 10 years?