Sidingsound

Who would’ve thought it—I go away on holiday with my family for a week, ready to photo/video/audio-blog the whole proceedings with my N95, and… well, knock me down with a pot of Mumbles’ legendary ice cream parlour’s finest, if I wasn’t so busy having fun with everyone that I didn’t have time to upload more than a couple of photos to Twitpic. (Incidentally, if you’re ever in the Swansea area and have a bit of a ’sweet tooth’, Joe’s ice cream parlour in Mumbles is an absolute must-visit. Just take our friends’ advice and go for the ‘plain’ vanilla one first, then work your way through the menu…)

So, how did it go? Well, we had a pretty good time, I think, topped off by my (impossible-odds-defying) unexpectedly meeting one of my favourite musician/composers in a folk music instrument store… oh, you mean how the N95 content uploads went? Well, pretty good overall, although I did encounter two “flies in the ointment” with the system:

• Perhaps a bit obvious, but even where you’re fortunate enough (as I am) to be on a 3G network with an “all you can eat” usage policy, that still doesn’t help if the area you’re going to has a low or variable signal strength. I’d almost forgotten the frustration (from my 56k modem-using days) of having a long upload fail almost at the end, because the sputtering mobile data connection gave out at the last minute; clearly, a good WiFi connection is useful here, if you can find one and (if appropriate) don’t mind paying for it.
• Pixelpipe seems to have its fair share of quirks when uploading the same content to multiple different content sites (which is basically the point of the service), using the Nokia Share Online utility on the N95. There’s probably a whole post I could write about these in detail, but in a nutshell, the items you fill out for a new NSO upload (tags, summary, etc.) don’t always appear where you would expect them, when you check your content sites later. For instance, when you upload a video to YouTube, your ’summary’ text doesn’t appear for the uploaded video—YouTube just shows the title of your video where the summary should be.
  To be fair, the problems are almost certainly as much (if not more) due to the content services’ application interfaces (i.e. how Pixelpipe interacts with them), but I have to keep a mental note of what works well and what doesn’t, so I can correct the glitches later.

Oh, and I’m pleased to report that I finally invested in a new 8Gb Sandisk Mobile Ultra MicroSD memory card for the N95 (four times more capacity than the previous card), so no more mad scrambles to find more storage space on long trips where I’m taking lots of video (and perhaps more room for the odd movie or three!).

Must go—I’m installing Xubuntu on an old PC for Naomi. Lots of fun…