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Nando’s Voucher Interpretation

Every year my parents buy a book of vouchers for various businesses in Victoria. It’s one of those deals where businesses (mostly restaurants) pay for advertising space to have their tear-off vouchers in the book (which typically allow a discount of between $5 and $30) and the customers buy the book for something like $40 […]

An Introduction to Android

I gave a brief introductory talk about Android at this month’s LUV meeting. Here are the slides with a brief description. All the screen-shots were made on a Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod version 7.1 [1] (Android version 2.3.7). With that build of Cyanogenmod you can press the power button for about 1.5 seconds to […]

Airtasker – Outsourcing Small Jobs

Airtasker.com is a new company that is dedicated to outsourcing small jobs [1]. It’s still in a “beta” phase and has no way of making money – the worker is paid directly by the employer and there’s no facility for either of them to pay Airtasker, I would really like to know what the business […]

My First Cruise

A few weeks ago I went on my first cruise, from Sydney to Melbourne on the Dawn Princess. VacationsToGo.com (a discount cruise/resort web site) has a review of the Dawn Princess [1], they give it 4 stars out of a possible 6. The 6 star ships seem to have discount rates in excess of $500 […]

Cocolo Chocolate

Cocolo Overview

I recently wrote about buying a fridge for storing chocolate [1].

Jason Lewis (the co-founder of Organic Trader [2]) read that post and sent me some free samples of Cocolo chocolate [3] (Cocolo is an Organic Trader product that is made in Switzerland).

It’s interesting to note that Cocolo seem very focussed on […]

CyanogenMod and the Galaxy S

Thanks to some advice from Philipp Kern I have now got my Galaxy S running CyanogenMod 7.1.0 which is based on Android 2.3.7 [1]. CyanogenMod has lots of configuration options that seem to be lacking in the stock releases and also supports some advanced features such as OpenVPN and a command-line. I can’t properly compare […]

Galaxy S vs Xperia X10 and Android Network Access

Galaxy S Review

I’ve just been given an indefinite loan of a Samsung Galaxy S which is more useful than the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 that I own.

I think that the main benefit is that it runs Android 2.2 instead of Android 2.1 on the Xperia. 2.2 is what gives it USB tethering support […]

Cruises

It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite economical vacations. The cheapest prices tend to be around $100 per person per night for an “inside” cabin (IE no window) with two people (there is a significant extra fee for having a cabin with only one person). If you book a room in a […]

Digital Cameras

In May I gave a talk for LUV about the basics of creating video on Linux. As part of the research for that I investigated which cameras were good for such use. I determined that 720p was a good enough resolution, as nothing that does 1080p was affordable and 1080i is lower quality. One thing […]

More about the Xperia X10

I’ve now had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for almost two months (here is a link for my first review) [1]. This is a phone that people seem to really dislike because the battery life is poor and Sony doesn’t allow replacing the kernel. I’m happy with mine, happy enough that after buying one for […]