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…

Just a quick post from where we’re currently staying on the Gower peninsula in south Wales—in the end, I found that my mobile network’s 3G data service reaches even out here, so I’ve been able to send out a few photos to Flickr, Twitpic and other services I use (thanks to Pixelpipe as ever!).

For the latest news, keep an eye on our Flickr photoset for some of the sights we’ve been seeing (look for the tag ‘walkerroadtrip09′), and also my Twitter feed for quick updates and some notifications of new uploads.

More soon…

Posted by Wordmobi

This being the middle of the worst recession in most people’s lifetimes (as the media seems to take a little too much pleasure in reminding us most days), the Walker family is taking a somewhat modest summer break this year, and it starts this Saturday (raaaaay! ). It’ll be great to just go away and do/be somewhere different to the normal routine, and I’m looking forward to it a lot—not just because it’s a holiday…

…but in true Sidingsound style, it’ll give me the first proper test of whether I can ‘run’ this blog, and post multimedia to it, all from my mobile phone

I’m calling this a “road trip”, even though we’re not likely to be driving that far by US standards. We’re going to stay with some friends in south Wales for a couple of days, and then… well, you’ll just have to wait and see. I’m planning to blog the journey and the places we visit—certainly in words (this blog and Twitter), and depending on access to 3G data and/or WiFi hotspots, in photos (Flickr and/or Picasa) and videos (YouTube and (suitably fast data connection permitting) Qik).

By the time we go away, I intend to set up a separate page at the blog, with an embedded Google Map so that you can view photos by their geotagged information (i.e. they’ll show up as markers on the map), and hopefully any videos which I can upload while we’re out. I’ll also tag any Flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc. with “walkerroadtrip09″, which should help you find them.

More details nearer the weekend…