Author: Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

Nokia 930

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[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve been using my Nokia 925 for just over a year now and I am very happy with it, however a friend has been using a BlackBerry Z10 since it came out and he’s recently converted to a Nokia 930.

The first thing you notice about the 930 is the significantly different design esthetic in comparison to the 925.  The 925 is round and subdued, where as the 930 is more square and bold.  I have to admit I like the 930 design, it looks good and sits in your hand nicely.

It is a larger phone, the 5″ display looks beautiful but does increase the overall dimensions of the phone.  It’s not nearly as large as I thought it would be and is virtually the same width as my 925, just a bit taller and thicker.

It is heavier though, the larger screen and battery do take their toll.  It’s still a pretty light phone, but after having the 925 for so long it is noticeable.

The camera is very impressive, the 20MP sensor really does a great job of capturing images.

There are a few other thoughts:

  • Miracast support is cool, projecting your phone on to a big screen may not be really all that useful but just doing it for the first time is neat!
  • 6 rows on the home screen looks good on the HD display, but unlike the 925 which has an option if you want 4 or 6, the 930 only supports 6 which seemed a little weird.
  • No support for glance mode.  That display looks great but doesn’t have the required mode to support glance and I have to admit I have really become accustomed to glance.
  • No SD card slot.  Really?  REALLY?
  • Wireless charging built-in… yea!

One of the other advantages to the 930 is that Microsoft pushed out WP 8.1.1 to it first.

It’s a great phone, I won’t be trading in my 925 for it but if I was buying a new phone right now for some reason the 930 would be a the top of my list.

 

Windows 10

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[sc:windows-category ]With any product that has been around for a few years, numbering always becomes a problem.

When first released, numbers are technically significant, you want to see the “1.0” release before you really start relaying on it and your excited to “2.0” for all the new features that were missing from “1.0”.

But then it starts to lose that meaning, is 6.0 really all that different from 7.0 or 9.0?

Microsoft has clearly understood this with the next release of Windows and decided to jump straight to 10 from 8.

It’s a pretty slick move really, it makes it clear it’s still Windows but is a big enough bump to separate it from previous releases.

The technical preview is focused pretty much on the enterprise clients so they’re left out quite a bit of the end-user features, but they have detailed some of them.  Also it looks like a least next summer before a release so we’re going to have a long wait to see something close to a final release.

Start Menu

Yes it’s back and it kind of looks like a Windows Phone start page.  I guess after the uproar of Windows 8 they had to bring it back, but I hope they still support the start page on desktops as well.

I do like the start page, I think it provides a much better interface even on a desktop, but I’m obviously in the minority there 🙂

Windowed Modern Apps

Just like the start menu, it only makes sense to make the modern apps work on the desktop in windowed mode.  I’d be using more modern apps if they did.  Now it looks like I’ll get my wish!

Multiple Desktops

Unix and Mac have had multiple desktop support baked in for years and it has been an option through third-party software for Windows, but Microsoft has included it in 10.  I’ve never been a fan of multiple desktops, but I understand why many people will find this a great addition.

Paste in to the Command Prompt

The command prompt has always been a pain if you want to copy and paste stuff around, Windows 10 now lets you use Ctrl-V to paste text from the clipboard directly in to the command window!

Charms Bar

I like the charms bar, but many people found it to be less than useful.  Microsoft is keeping it in Windows 10 but they’re going to be changing it in some unspecified manner before release.

 

Ubuntu 14.04 Upgrade

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[sc:linux-category ]A little while ago I moved from OpenSUSE to Ubuntu which went reasonably well, however just a week or so later it turned out that a new long-term support version of Ubuntu was released.

My first thought of course was that I was going to have to do a complete re-install on my server.  That didn’t make me happy and I was kicking myself for not checking the release schedule before installing my server 😉

However Ubuntu comes with an upgrade script, either through the GUI or through the CLI.  Since I was logged on to my console anyway I used the GUI.

The process worked fine, however there were two things stood out as issues:

  1. The upgrade takes a VERY long time and intermittently asks you for confirmations which is a real pain if you aren’t sitting right in front of the system while the upgrade happens.
  2. It wiped out all my perl modules that I had installed.

Honestly I can accept the fact it took a long time and asked a pile of confirmations, the Perl modules on the other hand were a lot more annoying.

It took a while to track down all the modules I needed again and get them working (cpan is great, but sometimes things just don’t work as you would expect).

In the end it was successful and I haven’t had any issues so far so.

 

WordPress SEO

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[sc:wordpress-category ]Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to be a way to trick search engines in to thinking your site was more popular than it really was but we’ve come a long way since then.

The search engines themselves rendered the common SEO techniques virtually useless and so SEO moved on to become more of a series of recommendations to improve the quality of your site to ensure it had the best chance of being ranked highly.

A site I help administrate uses Yoast WordPress SEO with WordPress and so I’ve had to spend some time using it.

The short version?  It’s kind of useless.

The slightly longer version…

The site is an information site for a WordPress plugin and really isn’t trying to drive traffic and therefore ad revenue.  That makes the majority of the SEO recommendations kind of redundant, things like a post being too short doesn’t really make sense when the post is just a release announcement.

Likewise trying to optimize the posts to ensure they show up first on the search engines doesn’t really help as anyone who is looking for the posts are probably coming from the plugin itself.

I guess in certain circumstances it could help drive traffic, but for the majority of sites I don’t think it is all that useful, especially if you’re not trying to generate revenue through ads.

Windows Phone 8.1 BBM Beta

Greg

[sc:mobile-category ]I have to admit that I have used a BlackBerry for work for a very long time and have NEVER used BBM.  Overall I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, but do use it a bit on my Windows Phone and at least one of my friends still has a BB so I thought I’d give the BBM beta a try.

First off, it is still a beta and I did have a few ‘weird’ moments with it hanging or not loading, but overall it’s pretty stable.  Getting connected to my friend was a little bit of a challenge as well.  At first I sent him an invite but he never received it.  Then he sent me one which I received the notification for but it didn’t appear in the app.  Finally after reloading BBM a couple of times it showed up and we connected.

The next day he disappeared from my contact list in BBM for a few hours and then came back.  Beta… definitely beta.

Otherwise it’s much like WhatsApp or Viber (or more aptly, they’re much like BBM).  There’s no compelling reason to use it over those apps.  Beyond the instability of the beta there is one big feature missing, Toast notifications do not contain any contact or message details, it just flash by a “BBM has a new notification” message and you have to go in to the app to see who has messaged you.  Presumably that will be fixed shortly, but it is amazing how annoying it really is right now to me 😉

I currently have 5 messaging apps on my phone (Kik, WhatsApp, Viber, Skype and BBM) and really would like to cut that down to one or two.  I don’t think BBM would make the cut.