Ewan's Photos - Prints and Gifts

Just in time for Mother's Day :-)

Yup, Ewan's Photos is up and open for business. After several weeks of finding the right photos (when you have nearly 100 gigs of images, just picking a couple hundred of them can be problematic), editing them, and programming the site, it's finally there.

Still don't have the forums setup yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so soon.

Even if you aren't interested in shopping right now, it's worth a look to see the photos.

Have a great weekend!

Nokia N800 - Touchscreen Red Flag

Well, I was aware that a significant number of owners were having issues with touchscreen sensitivity on the right side of the touchscreen. However, it turns out that a fair number of folks are having their touchscreens just die on them. I became one of the "fortunate" folks to have this happen over the weekend.

Nokia's warranty service turns out to be a bit of a joke. There are no authorized service centers in San Antonio (evidently a city of a million plus isn't big enough for one), and so I'd have to prepay postage both ways. Plus they reserve the right to determine if the problem was caused by anything I did - in which case it's parts and labor. Considering the touchscreen is the most expensive part of this thing, I suspect that I'd just end up being without the unit for a couple weeks and then still have a dead touchscreen.

I wouldn't even mind that if you could do everything with the built-in controls. But this thing is so touchscreen centric that you can't launch the web browser if the touchscreen is dead. You can play around with the applets, but that's about it. I'm trying to find someone with a solution for this so I can salvage something from my $400, but I may end up just putting the thing on eBay and see what I can get "for parts".

This is why I wish more places did "After 90 days" reviews as well as the first week reviews. The N800 is hardly the first device where a couple months of use has shown how much less useful the device is than it appeared at first. Rats!

Beatles - Online through NetTunes

Well, looks like Apple has been upstaged by a little company called "NetTunes". Using their service, you can download several of the albums by The Beatles, as well as several other groups, and play them for free.

The "catch" is that you have to use NetTunes' player. The reason the player is important is that the whole service is based on the idea of electronically sharing your music selection. So, if I upload an Alanis album (for example), the service checks the album in, and encrypts it. If I, or someone else wants to listen to it, then it locks the song to let that person exclusively listen to it, and then unlocks it again when they're finished.

IOW, their legal argument is that it's no different than lending a friend a CD since only one of you can be playing it at a time. Of course in this case you and your friend have catapults that let you hurl the CD back and forth between you at close to the speed of light... :-)

In any case, it will be interesting to see if the program scales well, and if the company isn't buried in litigation. In the meantime, I'm listening to "Abbey Road", and haven't had to skip a song yet.