As part of setting up the new laptop over the weekend, I’ve installed (among other things) AVG for anti-virus and Firefox as my main web-browser.

Bizarrely, I found that when I was entering a URL in Firefox, the Enter key wasn’t working – I had to click on the ‘Go’ arrow in order to get it to go to the URL. Now, I never click to go to a URL, always just type it in and whack Enter, so this was going to be something that was deeply annoying if it stayed around.

It turns out that AVG installs a toolbar/add-on in Firefox called “AVG Safesearch” and for some reason it’s that add-on that was breaking the functionality for the Enter key. I don’t know why this is the case – it strikes me as just something that hasn’t been tested properly.

But if you’re having a problem with the Enter key not working in Firefox, the first port of call is to check you’re not running AVG Safesearch. As soon as it’s disabled, everything works fine.

Most odd.

On the journey into London yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice how ubiquitous the iPhone now is – it seems like everyone and their dog has one.

When I used to commute in to London from Bracknell, Blackberrys were the thing everyone had – or at least all the “Look at me, I’m so important” fucksticks had, anyway.

While I do agree that iPhones are a nice bit of kit, I’m still not convinced I’d actually use one if I had one. That lack of a “proper” keyboard is (for me) still a significant factor, as most of what I do on a phone involves typing – text messages, emails, SSH connections to servers for admin, that kind of thing.

But there’s also the ubiquity of it that’s (for me) detracts from any desire to own one. It may be childish, but I have a built-in reaction to doing “what everyone else does”, and while it’s not an over-arching reason for not getting one, it certainly contributes.

As I said yesterday, one of the more interesting challenges with Herself’s new iPhone was getting the contacts to transfer across from her old Samsung G600 phone to the iPhone.

When it comes to contacts and phonebooks, Samsung are – to be polite about it – bloody awful. They don’t support useful standards like SyncML (basically a standard set of markup for addresses, contacts etc.) and instead stick to their own proprietary method. And their phones really don’t like giving up their data. In this case, it wouldn’t even send the information via BlueTooth, or save the details from the phone onto the SIM in order to transfer that across.

In short, a fucking abysmal experience when it comes to transferring away from a Samsung phone to anything else. (If memory serves, even Samsung to Samsung is a pain in the arse, let alone Samsung to anything else)

On my Sony-Ericsson phone, I can regularly sync the phonebook up to an online service called Zyb, who make the entire process pretty painless for phones that support SyncML. It also gives you a backup of the entire contacts database, which can be useful if (for example) you lose your phone, or have it stolen. They’re now owned by Vodafone, but in a fit of surprising sanity, Vodafone haven’t locked out non-Vodafone users from the service.

Through Zyb, when I upgraded my phone at the end of last year, importing the contacts etc. took ten minutes, and was one of the smoothest examples of that procedure I’ve ever done.

Anyway, on checking, it turns out the Zyb supports the iPhone – so that seemed to be the way to go.

After that, the process was fairly simple.

• Sign up Herself with an account at Zyb
• Install the iPhone app for Zyb (they even provide a link to it in the sign-up process, so it includes all the information necessary)
• Type in all the contacts from Herself’s Samsung, setting it up with correct addresses, merging mobile/contact/home/work numbers into one contact where necessary
• When done (about an hours work) sync the Zyb contacts onto the iPhone
• Job done.

Of course, if Samsung supported SyncML (or any other decent service) then it would’ve been a max of ten minutes to sort out. As it was, it took an hour.  It could’ve been worse – far, far worse – if we’d been trying to do it via SIM or BlueTooth and then had to reorganise everything on the iPhone.

This post has been deleted, on the request of Ian Corbett, Marketing Manager of Toyota Ireland, and his legal advisers.

For more explanation, see here.

Following on from last week’s post about the death of the DVD player and Blue Witch’s comment therein, I decided to get a DVD head-cleaning disk, (disc, whatever) just to see whether it would have any effect.

It wasn’t much of an investment, only £6.50  from Amazon, so it’s no biggie.

Anyway, we tried it out last night, to absolutely no effect whatsoever. In fact, the player won’t even acknowledge there’s a disk in the machine. It spins, but can’t identify a disk at all.

So it looks like the DVD player is now completely kaput fucked, and we’ll need to get a replacement set-up.

Bugger.

Charlie Stross is one of my favourite current sci-fi authors, and this post goes some way to explaining why.

It’s the text of his keynote speech for LOGIN 2009, a conference for online games developers, and the speech is about the changes he sees coming in gaming over the next thirty years.  He’s already written a novel based around some of these ideas (“Halting State“) and is currently writing the sequel to it, so I think it’s fair to say he’s done a fair amount of research and thinking about this subject already.

All told, it’s an interesting and entertaining read – and I’m sure it would’ve been even better to see him make the speech in person.