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 Old 64-megabyte memory card has been replaced by a monster 4-gigabyte, also from eBay, turning my phone into capable and spacious media device.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.

Read More......

Who am I? - part 2

Let's continue explaining my reception of the complicated radio/podcast perception. I find radio entertaining as long as it fits my time schedule. When I was younger, it was an option for me to listen to specific shows at the specific airing time. Nowadays however I got spoiled.

If there is an audio content on radio that I am interested in, then I will not adjust my time to it. If there is no possibility to listen to the show at my convenience, then I skip it. I try to use the podcasting + autoplaylists options on my mediamonkey media software and to actually manage and prioritize certain shows over the others.

Listening to podcast content is a sort of going back to roots of radio. Sure, large media and news production companies do produce podcasts and adjust to the growing demand of the market. But the real podcasting radio jewels are the private show produced by ordinary web users like you and me. The ability to produce a media content directly at the keyboard, the ability to be your own editor, censor, publisher and marketer surely attracts those individuals striving towards the free media. In most cases I feel those "small-time" shows as being more genuine and user oriented than the official radio-broadcasted commercial.

Just like people who blog and read blogs as a substitution for the written media. I personally prefer reading news online. By that I mean reading blog-comments about the official news. By reading, watching and listening to private net content I can feel the public opinion better then when reading the editors' approved content. 1000 bloggers give richer angle on any subject than a single newspaper. My usual newsreading starts with blog portals as technorati or knuff.

When it comes to reading, well, new new media have arrived to my written content world too. Audio books have spoiled me so much, that I find it more enjoyable listening to someone else's voice than reading the same content in a written form. I mean, children do enjoy listening to others reading to them, right? There has to be something in it. Needless to say, listening to a book instead of reading it gives me more degrees of freedom sort to say. Maybe I am more an aural type, who knows? Well, this allows me at least to have great book listening sessions while I am on my long jogging tours.

Don't get me wrong, I really like reading too. I do read local newspapers at daily basis, as long as I get them deliver every morning free of charge as a test reader. It's just that I find the new new media too convenient and user-friendly not to use their full potential.

Part of my media profile is also love to the digital photography, TV-radio commercials production, my mobile phone flashing and who knows what else... I will leave it to some other post. As I read in one of A-B-C's of the blogging, I must keep posts short and clear. The last two posts are everything but this...

To conclude the story, my media self would be best describe by words like free, portable, gadgets, tweaking, open. I can use these words as tags as well. Yup.

What is your media profile like? Anything I missed? Talk to you soon.

Read More......

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...

Read More......