Rob's Blog

A couple of weeks ago we got a card through the door saying I had got a letter with insufficient postage, and needed to pay 30p plus a £1 handling fee. Not knowing who it was from I paid the money in case it was important.

The next day the letter was delivered, and I was disappointed to discover it was some junk mail from “Visit East Perthshire” (I think they got my address when we visited the Outdoor Show). They had simply not put a stamp on it!

Obviously I wasn’t pleased so I decided to ask the senders of the letter to reimburse me the £1.30 that Royal Mail had charged, and I also added the same £1 handling charge, making a total of £2.30.

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This will be my last post on the GDI (Global Domains International) scheme (probably)and is a bit of a summary. The story so far (in brief): I decided that while the many “Get Rich Quick” schemes advertised on the internet sounded too good to be true, I decided to try them out. The first one I tried was the GDI scheme through GDI Goldrush which claimed needed no investment. The claims about not needing investment were suspect at least, and certainly the earnings predictions were way off.

So, my earnings were: zero. I did however pay $10 for the first month of my GDI subscription (after a 7 day free trial), and $35  for advertising through Bidvertiser when the free $20 ran out sooner than I expected. So the bottom line for this scheme is I’m down $45!

Read on after the break for my experience in cancelling, and my thoughts on whether it’s all a big scam.

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I keep having a problem with our BT Freestyle where one of the handsets reports “Not Possible” when you try to do anything. It’s an easy problem to fix (the first time I rang the helpline, subsequent times I’ve searched the internet), but I need to look it up each time so I thought I’d give the instructions here in case the solution disappears from the site I found it on, and so that I can help anyone else with the problem.

The solution is simple:

• On the base station press and hold the “Find” button.
• Turn the base station off at the wall, and back on again (while still holding the “Find” button).
• Let go of the “Find” button.
• The handsets should display “Searching” for a while, until going back to normal. It should now work.

All contacts and settings will be kept.

I think I have the problem because the signal strength is not great to one of the handsets – it’s that one that always fails.

I hope this helped someone. Please let me know if this doesn’t work for you (or even if it did!).

My sister is due to start a new job soon designing wind farms (well done Michelle). It got me thinking: why are wind farms called wind farms? A farm is somewhere you grow a product (normally a crop or animal) to be harvested for consumption in some way.

Wind farms don’t grow anything. They capture a wild resource: wind. If anything they are wind hunters, or wind traps.

It’s not something that annoys me (unlike some uses of english – what’s chocahol for example), I just thought it was interesting how we apply names to new technologies without thinking about whether they really apply.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. I must get Abby up, get myself dressed and finish packing for our holiday – a week in the Peaks. Keep your fingers crossed for nice weather for us.

Update: I have now cancelled the account, so many of the links below may not work. Read my final details here.

I announced last week that I was going to try out a “get rich quick” scheme to take a look at what the catch is (and if there’s no catch, maybe I really would get rich, and quickly!).

So, I tried it out. Am I rich? No. Not yet at least.

What’s the Scheme?

This scheme I signed up for is called GDI Goldrush (that link has my affiliate link on, but the original was obviously someone else’s). As you will see it claims (hidden in all the waffle) to only take 30 minutes to set up, and “Once you’re done, just sit back and watch money pour into your account.”. It also claims that you don’t have to pay anything.

Sounds great? Well I signed up.

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I’m sure everyone has seen adverts on Google, Facebook and even mobile phone apps with wild claims about working for just a couple of hours a day and giving huge incomes, and slogans like “Fire your boss”.

Most people will realise there has to be a catch, and simply ignore them. I think most are some form of pyramid scheme, which are unsustainable in the long term.

Even so, the claims are very tempting, so I’ve decided to have a look at some and see if there’s any truth in the claims. I’ll write honestly about the reality of them, including where the catches are.

I won’t join any schemes with big joining fees, or that are obviously scams or illegal. I also won’t be inviting all my friends, or selling products or services to my friends and family: they’d soon get fed up of me!

I have found one that claims to be free to join, and only takes 30 minutes to setup. I think it’s got something to do with selling domain names, but we’ll see!

Watch this space…

Update: Before you try any of the following, make sure you have the latest ROM update (2.73.405.5) from HTC (UK version here). This makes a huge difference to speed and is highly recommended.

Original article follows:

I love my HTC Hero Android phone, but one of it’s biggest criticisms is its speed (or lack of it), and occasional lags. I too had noticed these lags more and more.

Don’t automatically blame HTC Sense though. There are some simple things you can do which may give you a noticeable speed increase. Follow these steps in order, until you get the improvement you are after:

Uninstall the crap

If you’re like me, one of the first things you did when you got your new phone was to get straight on the Market and install every free app that looked fun. You’ve probably not used most of these more than once or twice, if at all, and half of them probably don’t even work properly.

Most of these apps won’t be causing any problem, but there’s a chance that some of them use up resources even when you don’t know they are running. Whether they are or not, it’s worth uninstalling them – it will save space and make your “All Programs” easier to navigate!

Open up the Market, tap “My Downloads”. You will see a list of all the apps you’ve installed. From here you can select them and tap “Uninstall”. While you’re there why not update any apps for which it says “Update available” – newer versions may well be better behaved with resources.

I uninstalled a fart app, a bubble-wrap popper, and a few more.

Tweak some settings

Many apps run in the backgroud. Generally this is a good thing as it can give some great functionality (such as notifying you of new tweets, or monitoring network usage), but they all use precious system resources.

Work out what’s running (most will offer notifications or have options like “open at startup” which should give you a clue),  and decide whether you use the functionality. For example, the Babbler Facebook app can run in the background and give you notifications. This is great, but I get emails (and therefore gmail notifications) anyway so it’s not something I need. I reduced the frequency of Peep (Twitter client) updates, as I really didn’t need to know waht people are up to every 20 mins. I also set the contacts Facebook sync to every 12 hours.

Don’t forget all this widgets on your homepages se resources, so get rid of any you don’t use. The full page ones are nice, but is it much harder to open the app than to switch to that page (and wait for it to refresh)?

I don’t know how much of this made any significant difference, but if you don’t need it running, its definitely worth a go.

Search for a culprit

After trying all of the above, my Hero was still a bit slower than I would have liked. I decided there must by something causing the problem, and I eventually traced t down to a widget/app I had downloaded called QuickCalendar. It’s a great app (I wanted a homescreen widget that would display more than one calendar entry, and only from selected calendars), but unfortunaly has some bugs, and also seemed to be the culprit for my slowdown. I noticed a significant speed increase once I uninstalled this app. I would like to add that I’m not sure this was causing the issue – see the response from Jim in the comments.

It may take some trial and error to find the culprit. Try uninstalling or disabling one thing at a time and see if it makes any difference. It may of course be that there is nothing causing a problem and you’re just being impatient!

There are of course other things you could try. You could try switching to the standard home screen instead of TouchFlo, although I’m unconvinced it makes a difference. I also noticed that when my phone lost the Facebook login details (not sure what caused this) it seems a little bit faster. I may have been imagining it. Maybe it’s because I have over 500 Google contacts, and quite a lot of Facebook friends, and it was just a lot of data being syncronised? Either way, if you don’t use this feature much it might be worth disabling.

So, my phone is now much faster, and as an added bonus the battery life seems significantly better. Let me know how you get on if you try this.

One of the biggest criticisms I’ve read (and have) of the lovely new HTC Hero is the slow speed at times. This seems to be largely caused by the lovely TouchFlo home screen interface, which has lots of lovely features and effects, but can slow things down a bit. This home screen is just part of the HTC Sense experience.

It is however very easy to switch from using this custom HTC homescreen, to using the default Android homescreen. The upside is things get a bit faster, the downside is that you can’t use the lovely HTC widgets (contacts, clocks, Twitter etc), but there are equivalents for many in the Android Market. You do still get to use the HTC improvements to things like contacts (with Facebook and Flickr integration). I’m not sure how much switching homescreens speeds up other apps (I haven’t played with it for too long). It is also very easy to switch back to TouchFlo.

To switch homescreens:

1. From the Homescreen press [Menu] and select [Settings]
2. Select [Applications]->[Manage Applications] (this may take some time to load)
3. Scroll down and select [TouchFlo]
4. Once the application info loads, scroll down and tap the [Clear Defaults] button. You may also want to tap [Force Stop] to ensure it closes.
5. Press the home key and you will be given the option of using [Home] or [TouchFlo]. You should select [Use by Default…] if you want to fully make the change, or just tap [Home] if you want to try it out first.
6. There you go, a standard Android homescreen.

If you want to switch back, the process is very similar, except you select the [Home] app at stage 3 instead.

Let me know what you think. Personally I am going to stick with TouchFlo for now. I now just need to find how to disable Footprints, as I’m sure it must be using some resources!

I was going to write a post about my new HTC Hero, but instead I thought I’d wrote a post with my Hero! I’m pleasantly surpised how well the WordPress admin page works in the browser, and I’m starting to get used to the onscreen keyboard and have got a reasonable typing speed.

I have found the phone lags occasionaly, and apps (mainly 3rd party) do sometimes crash, but it’s doing much more than the likes of the iPhone (multi-tasking for a start!).

I will leave it there for now and will try and find time to post a full “average user” review (from my computer) shortly.