More updates arrive for Nokia N8

Following on from last week's 'Homescreen Widgets' update, Nokia Suite is this evening offering a further set of smaller updates, both Optional, for my Nokia N8 running Nokia Belle.

'Calendar Update' is version 10.6.1 and comes in at 202KB. The description promises 'improved calendar events handling and fixes to some known issues'.

'Music Player' is version 17.0.17 and a heftier 1.2MB. It brings 'improved navigation, artist view and support for lyrics'.


Installation for 'Calendar Update' is quick and requires a restart of the phone. Now I'm not a heavy user of the Calendar on Nokia Belle, so I can't say for sure what the changes are. I have attached a couple of screenshots:

The 'Music Player' update has some more obvious cosmetic changes to the front end, and will be the update which will affect me on a day to day basis. First up, the main screen now has an additional row of icons along the top edge of the screen:

 It's a nice idea, but it's just a pity that they couldn't quite fit in all five icons on the portrait view. As you'll see, the Artist View is now the default, and it remembers this setting even after restarting Music Player. I much prefer Album View, but this can picked up easily by flipping round to landscape view (see later).

The remaining 4 icons are Album View, Track View, Summary View (showing Most Played, Recently Played, Recently Added and Never Played (why?)) and Genre View:

  

'Now Playing' has also had a spruce up, and although it will take a bit of getting used to, the repositioned 'play position' bar seems responsive enough and well sized even for my clumsy fingertips.

As mentioned earlier, you still get the 'Album Cover' flow view in Landscape, but it has a new (?) semi-transparent overlay showing the tracks, makinf track selection nice and easy:

 And finally, Lyric Support. I'm pretty sure this wasn't available on my Music Player previously as my one of my sons is a big fan of 'Who's That Chick?' and we haven't had the lyrics before. But, as you'll see below, we can now correct all those lyrical mistakes with the lovely scrolling text!

So there you have it - yet another set of updates trickles down to the N8. It's just sad that these will very likely be the last for this generation of Symbian devices, but given the amount of updates over the past couple of years, we can't really complain.

Given the wide variety in the number of widgets actually received on different devices when the 'Homescreen Widgets' update came out recently, I'm interested to know how many people are getting the updates shown above and if there is any variation across different models?

Nokia N8 Tiny Creatures

Let me state up front, I'm no professional photographer. But I do enjoy trying to take semi decent pictures, and enjoy it all the more on my Nokia N8.

The mighty N8 has had to take a back seat recently though with the arrival of the 808 PureView, but until I can afford one of those beauties, I'll stick to my N8.

Anyway, I enjoyed the following post over at MyNokiaBlog by Jay Montano and tweeted today by @Nokia_UK :

http://mynokiablog.com/2012/08/12/collection-tiny-creatures-shot-on-nokia-808-pureview/

I enjoyed it so much in fact, that I decided to collect together my pictures of 'tiny creatures' photos that I have taken on the N8 - not so much to provide any competition to the PureView shots, but more as a comparison.

So below, please find my version - "Collection: Tiny Creatures shot on My Nokia N8"

Frog: Standard Macro Setting on N8 (I don't know how to use the other settings!)

Bee: The flower was actually my main focus for this shot....

Ladybird1: Enjoying a nice bit of peace and quiet in a playground until we arrived.

Ladybird2: Standard Macro mode again, but this looks like 'Honey I shrunk the Kids" landscape...

Snail: OK so my focus is a bit dodgy, but this was the best of a bad bunch....

Flies: Once again, the flower was the main subject but the flies come out quite well too.

Dragonfly: Not a close-up, but the one I was most proud to catch! I was trying to set the Macro mode for a second attempt when it flew off....BAH!

Nokia 808 PureView vs Nokia N8 comparison videos

Giving Rich Recording the F18 Hornet test


The above article, posted by PureViewclub on YouTube (and also shared by the AllAboutSymbian website) demonstrates the overlooked audio capabilities of the Nokia 808 PureView. As soon as I seen it was an F18, I remembered that I had taken some video at the airshow at RAF Leuchars in Sep 2011 on my Nokia N8.


We had been fortunate in getting our parking space right next to the start of the runway where we had a good view of the planes landing and taking off. And it was 4 Typhoons taking off which I managed to capture.


Standing right next to these powerful beasts as they lit their afterburners and thrust up into the grey sky was quite intense. The blast of noise was invigorating and I didn't give any thought to how the N8 was handling that.


When I got home and listened back, I was amazed at how much of that feeling had been captured on my phone. Listening back to the clip on the pc through my headphones, the engines sounded as raw and loud as they had at the airfield.


I haven't tried the PureView yet, and I can't wait to get the chance. But the more I read, the more i'm convinced that it truly is the evolution of the wonderful N8.


My Typhoon video is on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/7NLcp_yF2qU

HP Proliant DL320 G5 RAID Controller Woes

We recently had a problem with an HP ProLiant DL320 G5 running as a Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain Controller, where the power supply failed and took the motherboard with it.

HP came out, swapped the power supply, swapped the motherboard, tested it out - all ok - and off they went.

It had been running fine, but when I was working on the server yesterday, I noticed that instead of C: and D: drives, we also had new additional F: and G: drives. These showed as identical capacity but the F: and G: drives had slightly less 'used space'.

The server has two 148Gb drives, mirrored on the onboard Intel 82801GR SATA RAID controller, and partioned C: and D: so my initial thoughts were that the mirroring had been damaged or broken.

We have two other Domain Controllers, so after a quick client move, I rebooted and went into the BIOS setup. And there it was - the onboard SATA RAID controller was 'Disabled', which must have been the default setting on the board swapped into the server by HP.

Windows then appears to have gotten itself in a mixup on the drive configuration.

Wishing to get back to a safely mirrored server, I tried various things, but the inevitable fix was to go back into the BIOS and enable the controller.

Prior to this, I cleanly removed the server from its AD role via 'DCPROMO'. 

Any slight hope I had that enabling the RAID again might leave Windows in a bootable state was quickly quashed however, and its currently rebuilding.

So, moral of the story - if you have to swap the motherboard on any servers - don't rely on the engineer to know your default settings for any onboard controllers.

Grazer

Hello everyone!

So, everyday I have all this stuff buzzing around my head. Some of it I want to share with everyone, most of it I shouldn't share with anyone and 99.9% of it is on a repeat loop from 1994.

So, I'm going to try this blogging game. I think I'm going to try and share more of what I learn, instead of just always consuming the knowledge that others so kindly blog about.

Information posted by others has helped me out SO many times, its time I gave back some of that help (well out the 0.1% of my 'useful' thoughts).

Grazer