Posted on in General

Orange 3G – update

Following on from the issue I posted earlier, on travelling abroad I have discovered something extra about 3G.

I was led to believe that 3G requires a USIM rather than a SIM. This is certainly what Orange UK requires and to get a 3G USIM you need to either buy a 3G Orange branded phone on contract or get a 3G PAYG SIM (with no option to transfer the number to contract). i.e. you can’t get 3G on Orange UK with a SIM free 3G phone .

Travelling in France with my plain “2G” SIM that only gives me 2G on Orange UK, I discovered the phone locked onto Orange France but got a 3G signal! Same with Orange Switzerland and another roaming parter.

Back in the UK, a bit more googling and it turns out USIMs have nothing to do with it at all!

The problem is Orange UK have used 3G as a way of pushing Orange branded phones and moving customers onto USIMs. Other than that, there’s no technical reason to use a USIM for 3G, as is demonstrated outside the UK.

Other UK networks in fact it appears allow access to their 3G network with a regular SIM.

Still the problem remains that I can’t get 3G on Orange contract without buying an Orange branded phone (which I won’t do, due to lock downs and high monthly costs on the high-end phones ultimately costing as much or more as a SIM free phone).

Posted on in Computers

Wii Mame

wiimame Wii’s Virtual Console is essentially a MAME-like emulator for various consoles allowing older console games to be downloaded (for a price) onto the Wii. It’s a great product that makes the Wii even more fun to use. I often play the Virtual Console games more than the Wii games itself. Daft when it’s a 7th generation console being used to play antique games from more than a decade ago, but the beauty is it’s everything in one box. No need to dig out an old console and games, or fire up a PC with a MAME emulator (and likely be playing illegal copies of ROMs).

The interesting thing with the Virtual Console is they haven’t just stuck to Nintendo consoles. Sega’s MegaDrive for example is on there too.

As it appears to be, like MAME, an emulator for many platforms, then this raises the possibility of supporting MAME itself. By doing so this would open the Virtual Console up to a wealth of arcade games, many of which are superior to console ports over the years.

Now the stumbling block to this is copyright. An official MAME port to the Wii would never happen if the user could just download illegal ROMs and play them on it, so we can forget that. However it does seem a lucrative possibility for both Nintendo and the publishers of the original games to offer their arcade games officially (for a price) via the Virtual Console with MAME as the back-end emulator. Both parties could then regulate what is offered via the Virtual Console and even tweak games to work best with the Wii. The bonus of using MAME is the hard work of emulation is done already.

That however is a problem when it comes to MAME’s licence as it doesn’t allow commercial use. Although the idea behind this restriction apparently is to prevent arcade owners from installing MAME cabinents, profiting from the games without any of that money going to the original publishers of the games.

If however Nintendo were to do a deal with MAME’s authors and the original publishers of the games then it becomes a good possibility, along with a high turnaround for publishing classic arcade games in their original form. If set at a price of 500 Wii points it would be quite attractive to those who don’t mind paying a small amount for classic games. Of course there are obviously many who would rather go for illegal downloads for free, which may be the sticking point with anyone adopting MAME commercially. On the other hand it may help MAME get an official status and reputation (but then deals with MAME’s authors may include requiring restrictions on other MAME ports to block illegal games).

Anyway, it’s just a thought. Another is that Nintendo could easily just go and write their own emulator for arcade platforms and use that in the Virtual Console. Just that as MAME is there and works, it’s something out there they could use.

Posted on in General

last.fm

last.fm logo Didn’t really get the idea of social networking your music, and still not too sure, but I’ve signed up for last.fm and found that Rockbox* and Slimserver both support updating your last.fm profile with what music you’ve been listening too (this is known as ‘Scrobbling’).

So I can have my music profile updated now when using my iRiver (through Rockbox) and Squeezebox (via Slimserver).

Why anyone would be interested in my music profile I don’t know, but here it is: http://www.last.fm/user/tj_moore/

What’s useful though is to see for myself what my tastes are like, and to some extent it’s handy to remember what I played recently (I tend to go through album by album for a particular artist so I like to continue where I left off).

last.fm actually has it’s own software which acts as music player, but you don’t have to use it to ‘scrobble’. It does allow you to listen to their own radio station though (but apparently there is a plugin for Slimserver to do this also).

* – Rockbox is open source firmware for mp3 players, offering better file format support (no DRM support though… but that’s a good thing), rich features, gapless playback on devices that don’t support it, even videos on devices that never played videos!, and games (e.g. Doom).

Posted on in Photography

Exhibit Engine 2

Exhibit Engine Finally got around to updating my gallery to Exhibit Engine 2. The upgrade process from 1.5 RC4 is quite technical but the instructions are very detailed and following them to the letter they work fine. As always support from the author is excellent anyway.

EE2 is now the official release (see here) and 1.5 is discontinued, with EE2 recommended for security patches also. Upgrades are supported from a wide range of earlier versions to 2, but you will have to then upgrade from 2 to 2.02 for a few additional fixes. Still, update frequency is far lower and the process is less painful than updating Coppermine, and talking of which I’m now removing Coppermine from my site entirely. It’s too much of a risk as it’s popular enough to have a lot of hack attempts and I don’t check for updates enough. Next job is to move my archive I had in Coppermine into EE.

EE2 looks very nice. Very professional. Only thing is I’m also using Flickr quite a lot now and I do find the whole social networking / commenting feature of Flickr very useful and wonder how much I’ll use that vs EE2. Still, Flickr has a major issue yet for a complete photo archive when you have a lot of photos and want to store large size photos, as broadband is still typically quite limited for upload speeds. For the moment anyway, EE2 and Flickr can work side by side I think for me. Flickr for showing off the best stuff, and EE2 for a complete archive.