What my mobile can and cannot do...

It is not that old and classy as this old guy above, but still it is kicking hard. My mobile phone's capabilities have been however fully unleashed by several upgradings and reprogramming sessions. Ladies and gentlemen, let me present you...  ta-ta-ra-taaaaa! My k750i.

This mobile has been quite old by today's standards. I bought it as at a special one-afternoon discount that I had read about in newspaper ad while waiting for the bus. Sounds cheap, huh?

This little guy turned out to be quite good and durable phone actually. My Sony Ericsson k750i came with a 2 Mb autofocus digital camera, video recorder, RDS radio, mp3 player, GPRS, java-enabled options, calendar, alarm, organizer, Bluetooth, infra-red connection, external speaker,  mug-light and quite small capacity MS Duo Pro memory card.

I performed on it quite a number of improvements. The old headset was to go first. I found a good replacement off the eBay. It looks just like original to me and I find it good enough for the purpose. Old 64-megabyte memory card has been replaced by a monster 4-gigabyte, also from eBay, turning my phone into capable and spacious media device.

I use it as a camera quite often. And as a  notebook. I find it obsolete this days to write things down. One click and I take pictures of whatever note I need to have written down. It has helped me out on a number of occasions on various lectures at the university by taking the photos of the whiteboard with long formulas on it.

I use a free user-developed software for synchronizing the content called My Phone Explorer. I connect my phone every now and then to my PC and just back-up the content of the phone, synchronize my phone calendar and organizer to Google calendar, SMS messages, photos, videos, calls.

For synchronizing of the audio media I use my audio software of choice Mediamonkey. This includes music, podcasts and audiobooks, but mostly podcasts and audiobooks.

Having such a huge capacity of memory card, I use my phone as a portable memory as well. You can put really much of the content on those 4 gigs.

I have an Opera mobile Internet explorer installed on my k750, but I don't really use it that much. Having a Wi-Fi enabled phone would feel much better indeed, still being able to surf via GPRS is good enough for me. If needed.

My mobile is my mp3 player on my jogging sessions. Therefore I upgraded it's firmware to a match those music oriented Sony Ericsson mobile phones. This means that my k750 has a sort of w800 heart beating inside. In other words, it has a Sony Ericsson w800 firmware and looks as k750, and a number of personalized capabilities enabled. One Google-search for flashing, k750i, w800, firmware will do. I am not much of a programmer, I just followed the step-by-step instruction for upgrading and - voila! When turned on, my k750 is rather unrecognizable.

I do not blog with my phone. As I said, it is rather old model and does not have blogging software enabled. Web 2.0 is yet to be uncovered by my next, more technically advanced cellphones.

Still, the number and scope of functions I have succeeded to unlock on this phone will keep it in my pocket for a while. It is running strong. Still.

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Face it, Facebook

There has been a buzz on the Net last week about Facebook losing 400000 UK visitors from December 2007 to January 2008. This is last month we are talking about. So, is there a general loss of interest in that service or is there something new around the corner that only Brits know about and won't tell the rest?

As for me personally, this reminds me of how the stock exchange works. Remember that just few months ago Yahoo was about to pay 1 billion US dollars for Facebook? Remember Microsoft evaluating Facebook at 15 billion dollars? So, what does this mean? Will Facebook slide down?

Well, we have the official data from Nielsen Online that reflect that 5 percent of site visitors who did not bother coming back to the site this month. What went wrong there? Do I smell another case of MySpace social network decline? is it the overload of applications within the program or a simple fact that people get bored sooner or later? Will other countries' statistics reflect the UK ex-Facebookers behavior? Is Facebook doomed do fail now? Is there a life on Mars? So many questions... What do you think?

What rings my red lamp, and I may be wrong, is the following additional info from Nielsen:

Nielsen Online only measures website traffic based on a panel of UK users at home and work - it does not cover usage in schools, universities and internet cafes, meaning that younger internet users are under-reported.

The explanation for lower number for Facebook can indeed be hidden behind the omitting the statistics about the company's biggest share of users. We are still to see. As I said, how about that life on Mars?

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Who I am? or Who am I? - is the question for ages

Well, how can I not remember that scene with Billy Crystal from the famous comedy Analyse This. I thought this short video may serve as an innuendo to a post about my media-self. This one is an assignment for the new new media university course. And, a handy way to introduce my media profile.

TV - not really for me, except for the tv screen itself. I do not tend to watch TV-program but I enjoy movies of my choice and an Internet video streaming material. I hooked up my tv-set to the Xbox game console, which has been "fixed" so it can play various media formats, plus more. A community driven Xbox application xbox media centre is THE actual media center of our home. This free program provides reproduction of just about every thinkable media format directly to our living room home cinema.

Xbox is connected to my home router and is a part of a home LAN. Router has it's own story too. Originally I bought it as a triple-media ADSL2+ modem. I am a curious and a gadget-driven man, so I found out the way to re-program my modem into a router. The best thing is that the router's capabilities have been locked by isp provider in order to limit the usage of the device.

Flashing modem into router and fixing xbox can start giving you my idea of media. Releasing the full potential of the devices through free network-available knowledge is my thing. As long as I know where and how to look.

Networking. I hooked my laptop to the home network too, so I stream music, videos and pictures from one device to another at my home. The good old television as I have known it for a few decades is forgotten where I live now.

My love to music in general has lasted quite long. I remember my late father taking me to a high-fidelity store speaker rooms, where he made me turn my back to the wall full of speakers and describe the difference in reproduction of various systems tested. Needless to say, I love music. It's a love with a capital L that transcends into a very personal perception of the music pieces. If neither you can compare both joy and pain of Anton Corbijn¨s "Control" movie about the band Joy Division and an obscurity of Eurovision Song Contest country-qualification concerts, than you know what I mean.

As I speak I listen to an instrumental piece Magic Spells by the new electronic band Crystal Cases. You will find this information in the right part of this page, where Last.fm displays the music I play on my pc, xbox or my zen. Social networking take another important part of my media-self. Being able to interact with others means a wider base, more alternatives, fresher ideas, and ultimately better choice. A logical concequence is a better music from my players. It helps me searching and finding music I enjoy, rather that what major music companies offer as mainstream music.

Music formats have evolved through my music voyage. I remember having a rather huge collection of long-play analog music albums. Yes, i was proud of my 350 records. In fact, they are still intact in my old room back at parents' place. Then I switched to digital cd format and collected even more albums. In late nineties minidisc format gave me portability and quality I prefered. Being addicted to my old Sony minidisc's fit and sharp sound I missed by far the first wave of mp3 players. I got my first mp3 player in 2004. That was a 15gb harddisk driven Philips hdd100. It still looks fantastic, a sort of an iPod antipod. Piano-black and shiny, though somewhat poor in functions for today's standard, but it still delivers superiour sound, when compared ty my present portable media player of choice: Creative Zen Vision:M.

Media organizing. The advantages of processor power in media organizing are thrilling. Having a several thousand large music collection, storing the songs in folders and managing them in that fashion is rather old and unpractical. Tagging is the winning word here. Mediamonkey is a free software that I use to manage my music. Once that this brilliant program unleashes it's whole powers, you actually learn to love your music collection. Automatic playlists generated by user-given criteria keep my music perception exciting after every synchronisation of the music library with my player.

One more thing worth mentioning is radio. The thing with radio is that I don't listen to it very much. I mean, I do love radio, I have even workhed a number years in front of a microphone on several radio stations, but I simply find radio quite obsolete nowadays. Podcast is the reason.

This post will be continued as soon as I get some sleep. It is 1:47 AM. Blogging carries me away too easy...

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