Philip Nicosia

I bought a second hand car a couple of days ago and noticed that it had a Parrot bluetooth hands free kit installed. Great I thought and I tried to pair my mobile phone with it only to get a message “Memory Full”. Now I didn’t have the instructions for the kit with the paperwork I got with the car so I did a quick search on Google for “Parrot user guides” and low and behold the number 1 result was for the user guides at www.parrot.biz.

Clearing the memory was as easy as pressing the red and the green button together. Now I was able to pair my phone to the kit and can happily use my phone hands free now and not break the law.

Where would we be without search engines?

I bought a baby Harley Davidson last year and its just had its 1st birthday which means I have to get it serviced. Embarrassed about the fact I have never cleaned it once since I got it so I thought I ought to do that before I got to the Harley dealership. I like things to be clean but sadly don’t have the patience to do it myself unlike some people I know. I have a friend who bought a Ducati from a dealer who delivered it to his house in an enclosed trailer and he spent the next 2 days in his garage taking it apart to clean it “properly” as he told me.

That’s something I’m never going to do so I searched on the internet for:

Motor cycle cleaning
Motorbike cleaning
Motorbike valeting
Motor cycle valeting

but couldn’t find anyone in my local area to do it.

Then I thought on the off chance I would call the guy who recently valeted my car for me to see if he did bikes and much to my delight he said yes.

He came round to my house and after a few hours I couldn’t believe the difference. It didn’t look like my bike at all and it was if it had just left the showroom.

Now I don’t feel so guilty taking my bike to the dealer anymore

So if you are in the Aylesbury area and you need a motor bike or a car cleaned I would highly recommend David Hadley who did mine. He can be contacted on 0808 178 7117.

In a previous post I mentioned that one of my sites, XML-Sitemaps according to Alexa was the 6707th most popular website in the world. Now I know this isn’t true as I know exactly how many visitors this site gets a day. I also have other websites which receive 5 x the amount of daily visitors yet rank between 50,000 and 60,000.

So why is my site with less visitors showing such popularity? My guess would be that the majority of people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed which collects the data are webmasters who are interested in seeing what their Alexa rank is. As my site XML-Sitemaps is geared towards webmasters this really makes a nonsense of the figures quoted as it isn’t representative of your average surfer.

Apart from the Alexa Rank figures the toolbar provides a convenient search box so you can search the internet without having to go to Google, etc, first. Now this used to be okay when Alexa was using search results powered by Google but recently they changed and now there search results are powered by Windows Live. If there was ever a reason to delete the Alexa Toolbar this would be it.

I’m sorry but Windows Live as a search engine just isn’t cutting it for me. I’m sure they are trying hard but for me its a waste of time. I’ll give you an example:

Searching for “free ringtones” (without the quotes) 5 of the top 10 results (including the top 2) are disabled blogger accounts presumably as they were spam pages designed to fool search engines, another 1 is a disabled homestead page, presumably disabled for the same reason as the blogger pages, the 3rd result is another disabled domain which says “Domain deleted – reason abuse”, another 2 are made for adverts pages which only have adverts on which you can click which just leaves 1 genuine website left.

At least with Google generally I find at least 9 of the top 10 results are genuine sites and the ones that do slip through are normally removed quite quickly.

It makes you wonder how many people will now delete their Alexa Toolbar because of this. It might be the only people left using it are the webmasters to check on their Alexa rank which is only going to make their figures even more unrepresentative of the general surfers.

Unlocking the Cingular Edge card in the Sony UX180P is actually an easy task. All you need do is make a note of the IMEI number, call Sony Support at 888-476-6972 (United States) or 239-768-7676 (International). They will give you an unlock code and you then need to the Sim unlock procedure.

Follow this procedure to unlock the Sony Ericsson EDGE module after obtaining the SIM unlock code. This involves connecting to the card using HyperTerminal, entering a few commands and your unlcok code and that’s it. They even provide instructions on the internet to do this.

Some things they don’t tell you (or at least I couldn’t see) in the specifications is what networks the Edge card will work on. When I unlocked mine and placed a new sim card inside there is an option to choose a network. All I got in the UK was Orange and T-Mobile which both work on the 1800 frequency. Vodafone and O2 were not available and they use the 900 frequency in the UK. I must admit I hadn’t even considered there could be a problem here but luckily I use T-Mobile anyway.

I don’t really know how this EDGE or 3G data works to be honest and whether different networks are using different frequencies for their services.

What you can do though is if EDGE is not available in your area use the GPRS network or even dial up (very slow) to get a connection.

Now I have had my Sony UX180P for about a week now and am still learning all the things it can do. When it first arrived my initial thoughts were Wow!

It’s just so tiny about the size of a PSP. I bought it primarily because I am a man who likes to travel light. When I go away I still want to be able to keep in touch with the world and keep an eye on my websites and email. My previous sub-notebook was a Flybook which served me well but when I originally bought it on Ebay from a German seller it never crossed my mind that it would come with a German keyboard and Windows XP in German. For the most part that wasn’t too much of a problem as I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP on it and set the keyboard to English. There aren’t too many differences and if you use a keyboard often enough you get to know where all the keys are. It is only the special characters I have a hard time finding sometimes.

Anyway, back to the Sony, the first thing you notice is the screen. It is just amazing and although it is a tiny 4 inches it is so clear there is no problem reading it at all. They do provide zoom buttons to enlarge what you are viewing but honestly I haven’t found them necessary.

Its also so bright that you can use this pc just about anywhere except for in direct bright sunlight. This is something that I was never able to do with my Flybook. Even in a bright sunny room indoors you wouldn’t be able to see the screen.

I wouldn’t recommend using this as your only pc or even only laptop if you need to do a lot of typing as you can imagine the keyboard is only just big enough to type with two fingers or thumbs and will slow you down considerably. I know you could use an external keyboard but that really defeats the object of an ultra-portable pc. The other option albeit still slow is to do what I’m doing now and use some handwriting recognition software. I am using EverNote’s ritePen 2.5 which works really well.

I managed to get the Cingular Edge card unlocked so can use it with a UK network card and with the built in wireless I am able to connect into my home network and hotspots without any trouble.

The test of time will be once this Sony UX180P has lost its initial novelty factor. I am pretty confident I’ll be using it regularly way after that happens. I’m still learning what all the buttons do and once I’ve figured it all out and been using it a while I’ll give an honest opinion to what I really think to it in an everyday world.