This may be a little over the top, over exaggerated and a tad harsh, but we all need to have a rant occasionally, and today I have a problem with the HP F2280. I’ll be honest, it is a good printer, for features anyway, but after that, I hate it.

It’s one of those things like the Vauxhall Vectra, it does everything, and it does it well, but compare it with anything else and its boring and hideous.

Just like the Vectra, the HP F series of printer is also a cheap but reliable printer. This, the latest F2280 has shaping from fisher price, buttons that look like they were taken directly from a better printer, and the hinge of its scanner looks like it’s from a 1930’s car.

While I’m on the topic of naf printers, I’ll show this one also, the bread bin.

Eva Solo Bread bin

HP D1460

Or something like that. At this point I’ll stop bashing perfectly good printers and do something useful.

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The Asus Eee PC isn’t really a laptop, it’s more like a life form, in that it changes in some way at the very least, once a month. If not, more regularly. But, to look at it scientifically, it’s survival of the fittest, and it has survived.

This is the Eee PC 701SD, photos of which have leaked on to the internet. The updates on the 701SD are subtle, but non the less, there.

Aesthetically the lid will now support an Eee logo, the mouse will have 2 buttons on it, instead of one that worked as 2, and well, yeah, that’s it!

Inside, that’s more interesting, well actually it’s not because there’s still not a lot to go on, but one will have the 30gb hard drive. All then that I can add on to that is that it looks like nothing will take down the mighty Eee, as I’m sure I’ve said before, no longer is this a gadget for the nerd in the I.T office to play Runescape on in his lunch hour (and some time after that too), it’s a normal mobile computer, used by the masses.

Via Laptop

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Have a look at this picture (above). Usually my first thought when I see something like this is "Great! What have the Chinese been making now. Another knock-off that will line eBay listings but will never actually work." But this wasn’t made by the Chinese…

Neo, based in the UK and Dubai apparently have made this, and it is available to buy from legitimate retailers. Costing £89.99 off eBuyer Mobile sim-free, it really does have a good deal of fairly useful stuff inside. It has:-

• 1.2mp Camera
• MP3 player with flash card for memory
• Data connections include Wap, GPRS and according to eBuyer, it has Edge, but their official web site doesn’t, so it might have edge.
• XHTML web browser
• FM Radio
• Various personal organizer features
• Notable applications include an E-book reader and a Menstrual Calculator
• Video recording and playback naturally.

So the spec’s aren’t that great, the camera isn’t so big and the MP3 player can only hold a maximum of 1gb of songs, but it’s all there.

While those specifications may, combined with the fact the keys point the wrong way, deter you from buying it, this next picture should work in Neo’s favor.

As you can see, it is no larger than a slightly big key ring, making it brilliant to carry around, until your phone rings and you have to answer it with keys in your ear. So I’m not saying use it as a key ring, but that’s how small it is.

In normal circumstances, £89.99 for a phone with these features is poor. Over priced. But that £89.99 sim free price is very good, and if Neo can get a deal with a network to subsidize the price, they’ll be on to something good. It won’t replace Nokia, but it’ll be a good phone at a good price.

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Well, there has been many competitors attempting to compete and even overpower Google for the pole position in the Internet search race. There’s been a fair few who have tried and failed, some of those being Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset. There’s also a competitor called Microsoft who’s currently trying to buy their way in but we don’t go in to that.

Because today the center of attention will be going to a company who call themselves Cuil. So, what does this search engine do that others don’t. How exactly do they intend to succeed where others have failed.

Yes in a nutshell this is it! Nice and simple, follows after the same visual style as that new Adobe online web 2.0 stuff. 

Well, it claims that it has based it’s index on more pages than Google used and it has gone for a minimal look, which I do like.

Google has always been liked for it’s ethical appearance. Their not charging for many services, and it is these same reasons that deter people from Microsoft. Cuil are trying take it a step further, by setting themselves apart as a company who don’t hold on to your searches. There has been, to say the least, a few people who have not liked this element of Google, thus bringing about features sites like Scroogle.

Unfortunately, I don’t think purely appealing to people who don’t like being watched will help, but I wont go straight to the conclusion they won’t succeed. They have their equipment set up now, we’ll see how they do.

Hit Cuil.com for a go!

P.S. We’re not listed in it yet, clearly it hasn’t indexed the web that thoroughly yet.

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We’ve covered a lot of news and major products recently, iPhones, Eee PC’s and all the rest of it. Today, I’m covering something a little more ordinary, from the range of sale at think geek.

When we go out, we leave a light on, so thieves pottering about will be convinced people are in and not rob you. It works better than a burglar alarm! That only scares the thief away once they’re in, leaving the light on tells them not to bother. But, if you want this ideal situation but leaving a light on is too simple for you, you need one of these:

Yes, it’s a light to leave on. This light changes repeatedly to simulate a light given by a TV, to add a bit of style to your visual deterrent.

With this, people will not at all want to steal the real TV, which will be no doubt about 3 ft from it. It uses 50 times less power than a real TV too, (not sure what sort of TV it was compared to to get that statistic) but you can be (reasonably) sure that the hippies won’t be round your house with their signs and their megaphones. So yeah, fake TV burglar deterrent device on think geek. The End

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Great News! Microsoft’s new client operating system code named Mojave is here for testing and you can have a go…

…is what a handful of Vista skeptics were told recently before being shown the new said operating system. Smugly thinking their rubbish feedback had finally triumphed over Microsoft they said the new up and coming OS was really good, in fact one of them even went to the extent of exclaiming ‘wow’ before Microsoft spilt the beans that they had just been playing with Windows Vista. And there they were thinking they had something good to tell the world that night.

As I’ve said before, I’m fed up of people telling me Vista is crap, because it’s Microsoft and Microsoft get everything wrong. They then all seem surprised when I don’t agree. It all boils down to, as proved by OS Mojave, the fact they want to have an opinion for themselves that they think will make them look cool. As I’ve also said before, Vista had its teething issues, just like Windows XP and also dare I say, Windows ME.

So Microsoft has this really good bit of research and is intending to use it to help promote Vista, the fact that when you disguise it, the skeptics and big mouths suddenly say thing like ‘wow’ and ‘how cool is that’. This should also come as a motivation to Microsoft to keep going, feel proud that they did actually do a half decent job of Vista, despite what all the big mouths say.

And if you would like to buy Windows Mojave you can do so here, at Windows Marketplace. If you in fact did click on that link, don’t tell us or we’ll laugh at you.

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Now, I was driving through Horsforth this morning and I found this:

Yes, the Google street view car. It’s been spotted in London and other places where it has been a cause of interest and concern. So when they found themselves photographing the small village of Horsforth they’ll of been expecting an easy run. Not so. I drove past, spun round and went back to snap a photo. The cars they use are not conspicuous at all. An Opel Astra with a tripod on the roof.

Well, I’m going to be eagle eyedly watching Google Streetview to see if I’m on it and how well they’ve caught an area I’ve grown up in. The Google car has been spotted in various places around the country, below you will see it in London and inverness and now our Horsforth picture may join the ranks.

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Another Apple software update for iTunes has again sparked a small controversy in the Windows users world. Anybody with Windows Vista (and possibly XP too) who upgraded to iTunes 7.7 will now find a Mobile Me icon in their control panel.

Now, one of the great new features of the new iPhone is that it uses push technology to push emails straight to the phone. However maybe this pushing idea has gone a little too far. A couple of months ago, Apple pushed Safari on to unwitting iTunes users who just thought they were getting the new version of iTunes. And now they’ve done it again.

Thats breaking and entering! 

Now I don’t think they did that necessarily for any benefit to iPhone users. I think there are far better ways to prepare Windows PCs for Mobile Me than install its underlying software on every computer that is running iTunes. Because only a fraction of those iTunes installations well ever, ever come across an iPhone or an iPod touch. I think more likely they did it as a marketing ploy to raise awareness of Mobile Me. Yes I do.

Is Mobile Me in fact becoming a cross platform, it’s cloud based, its Windows compatible, will push your email to apples mail thing or Outlook, I just don’t like the idea of you having  to install an Apple suite of programs on your PC to use it.

Of course, that could all be a load of rubbish, but it’s just some ideas to provoke thoughts. It’s not at all bad to implement Mobile Me on the Windows platform, I myself like the idea of ‘exchange for the rest of us’, even though I know I can pay a similar monthly price for exchange hosting, but I don’t like Apples pushing their software on to Windows PC’s without active consent from users.

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Oh surprise and alarm, another Eee PC has come to join the collection. These things are a blogger’s nightmare, you write your reviews and sit back and think you’re pretty confident you’ve got them all covered and then you look and they’ve unveiled another one. Eee PC’s are becoming like space launches were. They were revolutionary and now there’s one coming out every Tuesday.

So what does this Eee PC do that the others don’t? It has a 30gb Hard Drive, a spinny disk one, not a solid state one. It will also be joining the Eee 900 line, because it isn’t an Atom powered one. All other specs remain unchanged.

I bet you’ve never seen this picture before… and thought, that’s actually 
a really stupid thing to do, dumb blonde.

Now, that doesn’t upset me, because while Atom and SSD technologies are really sweet because they make it a bit more energy efficient and a bit more modern, but it really doesn’t make a difference. And oh sure, people want Atom PC’s with solid state drives, but if they’re not available yet, or would be too expensive, stuff it, give people the functionality instead.

No real info on pricing, some figures in Chinese money, which resulted in the Windows XP version being about $15 more than the Linux one, and as of yet I don’t think Microsoft have had a giveaway sale on Windows XP licence’s. The Eee has evolved very quickly to give all sorts of options from highly functional mobile computers to simple internet devices. Anyway, that’s all for this Eee, we’ll be back writing about Eee PC’s in probably a weeks time when they make another one.

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Several months ago when we first got news that eBay were changing their feedback system, we met it with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it is true that sellers do sometimes threaten buyers to give bad feedback unless the buyer gives good feedback, even if the seller has been frankly rubbish. But then on the other hand, that gives no public way for sellers to communicate to the rest of the eBay world that buyers are being dipsticks.

Maybe this is going too far… Thanks to
whoever thought this up. 

However my debate is now over. I have a conclusion. I now strongly feel that this change in the feedback system was a step backwards. Last week, I sold my old Minidisk player on eBay, to cut a long story short though, the transaction didn’t go smoothly. The buyer refused to pay by PayPal, although it was my only option. He then claimed he wouldn’t give me his address to send a postal order to, before finally when receiving the item claiming it was broken and resorting straight to giving me bad feedback.

So, so much for eBay’s ideas of using the dispute console to resolve the issue, rather than the feedback system. Instead what we have now is a selection of stuck-up buyers who are a little too big for their boots, and nothing to drop them down a level. So my feedback to eBay is that this idea didn’t work. Not for me anyway. It is true that many sellers now are shops, and merchants, and as their role is to make money and typically not care how they do it, some regulation is necessary, but the genuine people, clearing their loft shouldn’t really be treat as traders or businesses. Their postage times may well be slower than businesses, their postage costs may be more. There may be debates at both ends as to if second hand items really do match their descriptions. Maybe instead there should be different rules for people who sell 100 or more items in a year. But one thing eBay should be aware of, it is their sellers who bring in the money. If they annoy them all, perhaps in the same way a store manager annoys their staff, their income will dry up.

Could it be that in a few years from now, sellers leave eBay for other such sites, and Google make a search engine that links them all. Maybe I’ve gone too far.

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