They’re both going to give us offshore processing of asylum seekers (though we have to decide between Nauru and East Timor). Personally, I’m appalled by the fact we are even considering either of these options. These are human beings we are dealing with here. We should be welcoming them with open arms into our country. No terrorist is going to come by leaking boat, so they pose a relatively small danger to the existing population. It’s all just a load of fear-mongering by the major parties, and I’m disappointed.

Both are making huge stuff-ups with Climate Change. The L/N coalition can’t even decide if it exists or not. The Labor party is having trouble committing to anything, and that’s showing through with climate change. We’re going to get a citizen’s assembly of 150 people to decide for us. This is a matter where normal citizens do just not have the information available to make the right decision. I (if I may) call myself a well-informed voter, and I don’t have the information for the job. The one man who does, Ross Garnaut (who wrote a report on this for the government), got his solution to the problem blown into a million pieces in parliament.

Both parties are completely over-using their campaign slogans.

One of the leaders is a backstabbing whining bitch; the other is also a backstabbing whining bitch.

There isn’t just a small number of people agreeing with me either. Here’s one of them.

At the election, I’ll be voting Green first. I think it’s the only rational choice. I don’t agree with every single policy they have, but the parliament needs a mix-up and a bit of discussion rather than simply disagreeing on the identical policy. I have no idea if they are running candidates in Tasmania, but if they are, the Liberal Democrat Party (basically a libertarian party) will get my second vote, simply because I think we need to stop turning into a nanny state.

So, unless something interesting happens, that’s all I really have to say about the federal election.

Note: As of the time of writing, the LDP’s website appears to be down for maintenance. I think they may need to fix that, being an election on and all…

Firstly, the Internet. 10-15 years ago you needed to go into the CBD to do quite a few of the non-everyday purchases you made, such as stationery, clothing, books and jewellery. There were smaller shops in suburban shopping malls sure, but if you wanted something specific, into town it was. Now, these same purchases can be made online, saving the purchaser time and money. A few days ago I bought a new fountain pen online. I selected from an absolutely huge range (1000+ items), quite a few cheaper than retail price, and I didn’t have to leave home during the cold of winter. A few days later it arrived on my doorstep without any other effort on my part. Seeing as I would have had to do research online anyway, I saved quite a lot of time. There are maybe some things I wouldn’t buy online (such as formal clothing, which ideally would be tailored, and at the very least should be tried on before purchase), but for a lot of items, the Internet will do fine.

Secondly, getting into and out of the Hobart CBD is the pits. There are three main choices. First up is driving the car in. This is bad for the environment, for a start. More importantly however, in this case, parking is just annoying. There isn’t enough of it, most spots being taken by people who drive in for their nine to five jobs. Which leads me in to the second option: catching a bus. There are plenty of buses going along the main routes into the city, but relatively few anywhere else. From my house there are two buses heading into town, and both are before nine in the morning. Which makes shopping a bit inconvenient, seeing as the shops don’t open until nine. There aren’t any buses back again until after three in the afternoon. Metro Tasmania can’t really be blamed for this, as it’s a chicken and egg problem. They can’t put more buses on unless people are already using the ones they have. The only other option is riding a bike, which if you live on the Eastern Shore (as I do) is hampered by the Tasman Bridge, which was certainly not designed with cyclists in mind (I’ll admit I’m slightly uncoordinated, but coming away with flesh wounds is excessive). Hobart is also incredibly hilly. Basically, it’s easier to drive the car to somewhere where there’s lots of parking, which is where land is cheap, which is out near the airport. It’s not difficult logic.

Finally, as more shops keep closing, less people will want to come in to just browse. As there are less people browsing and buying, less shops will be able to sustain themselves. Evidence for this can be seen in the downturn in the CBD after half of the Myer building burnt down.

I love Hobart’s CBD, don’t get me wrong. But unless the Hobart City Council changes policies (which they are starting to wake up to) then there is nowhere to go but out… to the airport.

I’m getting really sick of news outlets calling Facebook pages ‘websites’. It’s really demoralising to the people who actually own websites and put effort into maintaining them. I mean, it even costs money! I bet you don’t get the people who create pages spending money on them.

So, Southern Cross News, WIN News, and even ABC News (this one, I admit, surprised me), please just stop confusing pages and websites. If you really want to get pedantic, a Facebook page is indeed a webpage, but it’s not a website. Facebook as a whole is a website.

It also alarms me that the easier it gets to create content on the web, the stupider the content gets (I’m talking about this and this). Which makes me wonder: were the book publishers and the newspaper publishers right? Has the quality of published work suffered because of the Internet? The fact that they might just be right… well, that scares me.

First of all, the CPU’s fan was insanely noisy. When the computer started up you could have sworn a Boeing 747 was in my bedroom getting ready for takeoff. It settled down after a few seconds, but it was still enough to make using speakers pointless. I resorted to headphones.

I fixed this by buying two components. The first was a rear case fan to exhaust more hot air out of the computer. I chose a Scythe model that ran at 800RPM. They are renowned for being virtually silent. Not without reason, too. The second was a Cooler Master Hyper-212+ heat sink. The heat sink itself is about 600g of solid aluminium with copper pipes running up through it. It’s very good at getting the heat away from the CPU. It comes with a fan attached to it, but I took this off. Since I had the rear case fan, and nothing else that produced much heat in the machine, I didn’t need it. So this solved the CPU noise issue.

The next issue was the power supply. The power supply I originally had was a no-name 550W power supply I bought for $50 AUD. I suspect it was worth about $5. The efficiency of the power supply was also questionable. In the end I bit the bullet and decided to buy a new power supply. I did a bit of research on the PC hardware site SilentPCReview, and found 3 power supplies that fitted the bill. One was Antec’s Signature 650w. This is basically the premium model from Antec. The ‘Signature’ in the name comes from the fact that the quality-control checker signs the power supply when they check it. It was a bit on the pricey side though. A similar power supply from a different manufacturer was  Seasonic’s X-650. This was cheaper, and even quieter, but had a few quirks that I didn’t really like. The final power supply, and the one I chose, was Antec’s Truepower 550w. It was slightly noisier than the other two, but not by very much, and was significantly cheaper.

After replacing these components in my desktop, I now have a machine that I can’t hear over background noise (the nearby highway, birds outside, etc) during the day. I can hear a slight hum during the night, but I usually turn the machine off while I sleep, so it’s not a problem. Overall, I’m very happy! I’ll never again buy cheap computer components… it’s very expensive.

Peanut Butter & Choc-chip Biscuits

In my mind, there is very little doubt that cooking is both one of life’s greatest pleasures and one of life’s greatest skills. Far too many people still cannot cook well enough. Jamie Oliver seems to agree with me.

Luckily for me, when I still only a small child my mum started teaching me how to cook. One of the first things I ever cooked by myself (of real recipes, not toast and the like) was these biscuits. They are extremely simple, and extremely tasty.

It’s quite possible to leave the chocolate chips out of this recipe altogether, in which case you’ll end up with peanut butter biscuits. You don’t need to make any other modifications to do this.

Ingredients

• 100g of peanut butter (whether it is smooth or crunchy doesn’t matter, but I prefer crunchy)
• 100g of butter or margarine
• 175g of sugar
• 1 egg
• 150g of self-raising flour
• 250g of chocolate chips

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees celcius (320 degrees fahrenheit, 430 degrees kelvin).
2. Put the peanut butter in a large mixing bowl. It’s easiest to put the mixing bowl on the scales, tare (zero) the scales, then add the ingredients by weight.
3. Add the margarine and sugar to the bowl, and mix together.
4. Add the egg, and mix together.
5. Add the flour and the chocolate chips, and mix together.
6. Grease some oven trays (I use three trays, your trayage may vary). I use a spray can of vegetable oil.
7. Spoon the mixture (using a teaspoon) onto the trays. The size of the balls should be about 1″ across and 0.5″ high (roughly). Leave about 3-4″ between them.
8. Put them in the oven. The hardest part of the whole recipe is figuring out when they’re done. About 12-16 minutes is usual. 12 minutes will get you softer biscuits, 16 minutes will get you harder biscuits.
9. About 5 minutes after taking them out of the oven, prise them off the trays and place them on a cooling rack. If you don’t have a cooling rack, put them back on the oven tray upside-down. The idea is to let the moisture out of the biscuits so they will be chewy and crunchy instead of soft and floppy.
10. Enjoy!

The reason I decided to close my Google account was for the same reason as Leo (from Zen Habits). I don’t like the idea of a single corporation having access to all our personal data, no matter how “Don’t Be Evil” they are.

Gmail: I hadn’t been using Gmail for a few months anyway. I use the mail server on my web host, and download it via POP to Outlook on my desktop. I don’t care much about IMAP; if I’m on the move I don’t care about my email.

Calendar/Reader: For these I also use Outlook. For calendar, Outlook is second to none (basically, it was designed for corporate scheduling). For RSS, it’s less than ideal, but it’s decent. It’s nice to have it all in one program. If you don’t have Outlook, Thunderbird will do the same thing for free (and has better support for GPG to boot).

Search: Unfortunately I’m still a sucker for Google search. Along with all the sites Leo tried, I also used Dogpile. None of them even come close. Without an account however, Google only really can store my IP. Since I have a dynamic IP address and I’m behind a NAT router, that isn’t very useful.

Maps: Another hard one. There isn’t really an alternative (Microsoft’s solution within Bing is awful). I just use it without an account. Same functionality, less data stored by Google.

Other Google services: I never used them. I use Firefox, not Chrome. I use Word and Excel, not Google Docs. I use Facebook to share my photos.

You’ll notice in that last sentence there I mentioned Facebook. You may have read my essay Why I no longer use Facebook…, and in which case are wondering why I went back. The answer is simple. Within my circle of contacts, no Facebook equals no social life. Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen with Google.

I’ve just started my second year at university. My degree is supposed to be three years long, but I’ll stretch it out to three and a half because I failed stuff bigger is better. I’m still doing computing. This year comes one of the units I’ve eagerly anticipated: Algorithms. It’s programming in C, finally, after a year of Java. Also comes a not-so anticipated unit, ICT Project Management. It’s as dull as it sounds.

I’m not really sure why I’m at university. Mostly just because I can’t figure out anything else worth doing. I could go get a job, but having done that before, university seems much easier. I enjoy playing around with computers and programming, but I’m not quite confident that I really want a job as a programmer… I should probably figure that out soonish.

After resigning from Principal Computers again before I left to move to Berlin in July last year (which I ended up not doing, sadly enough), I’m now back there working Saturdays again. And I still jump every time the phone rings. Talk about Pavlov’s dog.

I’ve started playing around with Cisco networking gear again. This time I’ve got a 3550 switch, which strangely enough is more of a 24-port router than a switch. It can do some weird and wonderful things. I can’t wait to do the networking unit at university.

1. The public transport system. It sucks badly. If you want to go anywhere by bus after 6pm or on a weekend, forget it.
2. People complaining about the public transport system. People love complaining about Metro (I’m one of them). It smells. It’s always late. It goes nowhere near where you want to go. All this complaining is really bad; what we need to do is all get on the busses and give them the money they need to fix it. At the moment I can (and regularly do) catch a bus and be the only person on it.
3. Bogans. Individually Bogans are fine. I know quite a few, and they’re lovely people (mostly). It’s just when they get into groups; you start to get the feeling deep inside you that it’s no longer safe and you should leave. It’s not a good thing that The Powers That Be decided to build entire suburbs of public housing, which have now become ghettos.
4. There’s not very much to do. Assuming you don’t drink alcohol (which I don’t), there’s very few things of great excitement in Hobart (if you have ideas, leave comments please!).
5. Rubbish TV stations. People on the mainland get Channel 7, Channel 9 and Channel 10, as well as digital radio. We get Southern Cross, WIN TV, and TDT, which are bad impersonations of the mainland stations. I know Tasmania is a small market, but wouldn’t it be cheaper then to copy the stations over exactly as they are on the mainland and just change the evening news bulletin?
6. Badly surfaced roads. I know this is a complaint pretty much everywhere in the world, but in Hobart’s suburbs it’s getting pretty ridiculous. Neither of the two electorates that Hobart covers (Denison and Franklin) are marginal seats (in fact pretty solidly Labor) so there’s not a lot of money spent pork-barrelling here.
7. Slow Internet. We’re at the end of the world and there’s only a few Internet cables coming into the state. Add to that the high prices charged by ISPs in Australia generally, and it’s a pretty bad situation. The National Broadband Network (NBN) promises to fix the speeds, but at what cost?
8. The jokes about two-headed Tasmanians when you travel to the mainland. It’s getting old guys, seriously.

The USB connector was broken, WiFi only worked half the time, I was starting to get jealous of the iPhone; a number of reasons contributed to the need for a new phone.

I did however love HTC. The phones seemed rock-solid and well designed, especially compared to some of the other manufacturers on the market. Other HTC owners I have met over the years agree; I am yet to hear an HTC owner complain about anything but the price.

I considered a few phones. The Apple iPhone was high on the list, as were a number of Nokia phones, most notably the N79. I will admit at this point to being a brand junkie; there was no way was buying a cheap iPhone clone.

What drew me in to buying the HTC Touch Pro2 was the full QWERTY keyboard and large 3.6″ WVGA screen. I know from owning a decent desktop computer that the most important parts from a productivity point of view are the monitor and the keyboard. They are the parts your body has to interact with, and they should be comfortable.

I bought my phone new in the retail box for $887 AUD from a shop in town. I have seen them as low as $650 on eBay, though I didn’t go this route because I wanted a solid warranty. It is a mobile phone with a hinge, after all.

Now onto the device itself.

It’s far and away the largest and heaviest mobile phone I’ve ever had, or ever seen, or even heard of (apart from the old analogue brick phones). It’s 17mm thick, 116mm long, and 59mm wide. Looking at it another way though, it’s the smallest laptop computer I’ve ever seen. It has a 480×800 pixel screen, as well as a 5-row QWERTY keyboard. Although it is on the small side (naturally) the keyboard is very nice to type with, using both thumbs with the hands wrapped around the back of the device. The screen is also nice, not suffering from glare problems as much as other phones I’ve used (older Nokia phones were particularly bad). If you look closely you can see the individual pixels, but you have to look very closely. It is a very high quality screen.

The screen is a touchscreen, and this is one area where they might have done better. The level of touch required to activate a ‘click’ is in my opinion excessive. It’s far more than on my old phone, or the Apple iPhone. It’s still usable however.

Battery life, as expected for a smart phone with all the bells and whistles, is miserable. I have to charge mine every day, otherwise the battery does run flat. However, being human, I have to sleep sometime, and it’s convenient to charge it every night.

In the box comes a screen protector (very useful, it’s a large otherwise unprotected screen waiting to be scratched), a spare stylus, a USB cable, a wall adapter for charging without a computer, a pair of earphones, and a very nice leather case. The headphones that come with the device serve a dual purpose. The first is as a headset for using the phone, and for listening to music. The second is an antenna for the device’s FM radio. I have to say here that the shape of the headphones is abysmal. They do not fit in my ear at all, and the cable is far too short. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are required for FM radio, I would have just chucked them away.

Inside the device is a Qualcomm MSM7200A chipset running at 528MHz. It’s fast. There’s 512MB of storage onboard, of which around half is available to the user to store settings, documents, and optional applications. Program memory (RAM) is 288MB. More would have been nice, but I’m yet to run out of it.

HTC has gone to great lengths to ensure every piece of software you could desire is on the device, and they’ve managed well, with a few exceptions.

The operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1, upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5 some time in the future depending on which carrier you are with. It’s nice, though I notice no huge usability or performance increases compared to Windows Mobile 6.0.

HTC also put their custom TouchFlo 3D software on the device as an alternative user interface. If you’re not used to the Windows Mobile interface, you’ll probably find it nice. I just turned it off and used Windows Mobile as Microsoft designed it. The alternative interface does have a few cool features, mostly related to quickly turning communications on and off as well as turning emails into phone calls near instantly. I get the feeling it’s designed for the jetset business executive. As you may have noticed, I’m not one of them.

The device is also jammed with other software. A YouTube player is there, as is a choice of two browsers (Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile), Google Maps (with support for the GPS built into the device), and Microsoft Office Mobile. As well as a lot more. I loved the fact that Google Maps and YouTube were installed by default, saving me some download time. One application that is missing is Facebook, although given two browsers and a huge screen, it’s not so much of a problem. Opera Mobile even supports tabs, though having more than 2 or 3 tabs open at one time does slow down the device quite a lot, especially when multitasking with other applications as well. I would have liked a few more games installed by default, although I guess I can’t complain – this is a business phone.

Overall, I love this phone, and I’m very glad I bought it. Assuming you have the the money to spare, I would definitely recommend it.

Good:

• Huge 3.6″ screen.
• QWERTY keyboard.
• WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, HSPA, it’s all there.

Bad:

• Opera slows down when multitasking.
• Battery life is short.
• Included headphones are awful, and using your own requires an adaptor.

Overall: 4.5 stars.