I’m using the iPhone4 since a while and since a short time I installed an app for checking my app usage stats. I was thinking that it weren’t that much apps. At first I was thinking about making a top 10 iphone apps but I was surprised to see I had 35 apps in my list :

1. Mail – the most used app according the stats was mail, of course due to the usage of push and automatic retrieval
2. WhatsApp – The well-known app for sending text, pictures and video to your mobile phone contacts
3. Facebook – Most popular social network app, surprisingly in my top 3. I think this is caused because Facebook combined chat and messages into one and so they managed to come on place 3
4. Phone – Who statement is that iPhones are not being used as telephone are not talking about me. I didn’t know it either but the phone app is on number 4
5. MobileRSS – a handy app that uses google reader, I use this to read and manage my enormous pile of information
6. Music – Since iOS5 Apple renamed this app to Music, before it was known as the iPod app. I listen a lot of music via my iPhone
7. Settings – I’m tweaking and checking a lot in the settings, which explains why this app is on 7
8. BMI Calc – Tsja… Own made, currently the name is BMI Fast Calc – a free app to calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI) . I did a lot of testing that’s the reason why it’s on this spot
9. App Stat – it’s the app I used for checking the usage of my apps
10. Skype – the popular VoIP app
11. Twitter – social media app of Twitter which I use to check news of topics I’m interested in
12. myNZB – with this app you can manage downloads on your SABnzbd installation
13. Safari – the included browser of Apple
14. Opera Mini – another famous browser, I had expected this one to be used more often but I think Safari is 1 spot higher because it’s the internal browser
15. Calendar – Internal calendar feature
16. Messages – SMS text message app
17. Flipboard – since a few days this iPad app also available as iPhone app. Superb application. I use it for reading my Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr updates.
18. Camera – sometimes I make a photo or video…
19. Facebook Messenger – chat application from facebook, using this makes it possible to chat realtime
20. Miso – share which TV Series and movies I’m watching, I share it on facebook, sometimes on twitter and my website
21. Hyves – biggest Dutch social network
22. Photos – photo gallery to checkout your own photos and videos
23. Pixelpipe – app where you can publish your photo or video to several services at the same time (I can’t find it anymore in the iTunes Store?)
24. Reminders – internal app which makes it now possible to create a reminder based on location, reminder on arrival or leave and also the reminders of Outlook/Exchange
25. Speedtest.net – check out your current speed of your connection
26. Windows Live Messenger – MSN Live Messenger
27. JaNet – network utility
28. My Xbox Live – little app to do some social networking with your XBOX Live account
29. Firefox home – with app app you can store and retrieve browser history, passwords and favorites on your iPhone, it’s not a browser but you can access everything from your firefox browser of your computer.
30. MobileRSS Pro – same creator as 5. MobileRSS but more features. I prefer 5 because of the loading speed of the articles.
31. Google+ – tsja… I don’t know why I use this.. had something to do with being SEO minded but I don’t see other friends and family using Google+
32. ABN bankieren – App of ABN to use mobile banking on your iPhone
33. HT recorder – App for recording memos on your iphone
34. Contacts – internal app for all your contacts
35. LinkedIn – social network app, LinkedIn is considered a professional social network

You can also read my “Top 10 most used iPad apps“.

The Bose InEar headphones did meet my expectations. The sound is really phenomenal considering the size of these little headphones. I didn’t want to walk with such an enormous headphone.

Last week the unfortunate happened. Suddenly my left side of the headphone didn’t work anymore, no sound at all… Pity was my thought. I knew I had them longer than1 year.

Vorige week deed het noodlot toeslaan. Opeens deed mijn linkerkant het niet meer, geen geluid meer… Jammer dacht ik. Ik wist dat ik ze langer dan 1 jaar had. Showed my warranty to be 2 years on Bose headphones! I asked via their website I want to claim my warranty, if applicable. I received really fast a response by email with the instructions included how to send it to Bose for checking my warranty claim. I followed the instructions and sent my broken headphones.

Friday the package arrived from Bose… with… not my, repaired, InEar bose headphones… by my surprise I received a completely new Bose IE2 headphone. The succesor… I thought WOW… good. Let me see which things are improved compared to my ‘old’ model. I could conclude fast that Bose really listens to their customers. On a regular basis I received information, brochures and feedback forms from Bose. They really do something with this information.

The advantages of the Bose IE2 headphones compared to the previous model:

1. Bose added an additional appendix to their previous design to ensure it fits and stays on place better
2. In the previous model sometimes they fall of the headphone but now they created an extra notch

Maybe you also have thought this several times…. This won’t happen to me…. Yeah right… and then it happens…

The same case with me… My iPhone felt into the water

What did I do to rescue my iPhone from the water?

1. Took it as fast as possible out of the water (duh)
2. Removed the protection case (had a lot of water)
3. Dry the iphone with a towel
4. Blew dry the openings of the phone. Only the next time I would not blow again but try to suck out of the air. I read on the Apple forum this is better because blowing will cause the water to go inside the phone
5. The iPhone4 was working… till…
6. I turned off and on the phone
7. everything looked normal
8. I wanted to put the sound volume louder but the phone showed me “headphone mode” while I didn’t had a headphone connected resulting in no sound.
9. then I put off the phone and surprise….
10. the phone jumped into recovery mode, where you have to connect the iphone on your PC syncing with iTunes which I didn’t want to do because of my jailbreak and the information on the phone. iTunes will do a restore and upgrade to the newest firmware
11. I installed tinyumbrella and chose the option so the phone has to get out of service mode and just boot
12. then I waited a while
13. and… eureka! everything works well again…. matter of drying and choosing NOT to restore

My sources:

http://thefirmwareumbrella.blogspot.com/

http://www.hackint0sh.org/f146/53923.htm

http://thetechjournal.com/electronics/iphone/recover-iphone-from-recovery-mode-loop-or-stuck-on-itune-logo-via-irecovery.xhtml

Updated : added download link and sources and corrected some words…

The component which causes to be slower than you would like is the harddrive. Why does it take that long before Windows or applications start? Why doesn’t respond my system? And go on.

In this project some other consultants had tried to tune up the performance to solve this issue. The case is that the customer has a database of 886 MB in size. They process a lot of records in this database.

An average harddrive of a personal computer will achieve around 80 MB/s reading speed and 75 MB/s as writing speed. This is with bigger files while with smaller files this can drop to even 1 MB/s reading/writing speed. Harddrives in servers and somewhat more expensive PCs can be used in RAID and this will result in twice the performance. I don’t want to get into detail because it’s not relevant for this article. The previous consultant with the best results had put 4 SSDs in RAID to achieve the for him maximum possible performance. They achieved 221 MB/s writing speed while sometimes it dropped to 60 MB/s with small files. The customer asked me to have a good solution as the proposed solutions were all to slow.

To start I have to say my solution has a reading speed of 2430 MB/s and a writing speed of 2438 MB/s which is almost 11 times faster. But I don’t stop there. The slowest value I could measure with trying to overload the system was a reading speed of 845 MB/s and writing speed 718 MB/s. The lowest speed was even 12 times faster compared to the other consultants their solutions. The solution was in my humble opinion really easy and simple to implement.

Because the database of the customer was only 886 MB and had a growthrate of 10% a month I choose for reserve 2 GB for my solution. I reintroduced an old mechanism in this solution with this customer. It’s called a RAMDisk. You claim a piece of RAM memory, which is blazing fast, from your computer which can by use of special software be accessed like it’s a harddrive.

Really strange all the other consultants couldn’t figure out this good and simple solution. Good part of the story is that my invoice was nice because of this knowledge and I had the pleasure of winning. The best solutions are always the simple ones.

The performance is now at a level where the customer is really statisfied. The waitingtimes are really shortend. Before they had to wait 7 minutes while now this job takes 2-3 seconds. Calculate the savings in a year in time…

PS all measurements of performance where done with CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64.

In little companies I see lack of good backups. They never check if the backup actually runs or is usable. Cutting costs on good maintenance is the issue.

I want to focus today on the normal computer home user. 10 years ago a home user had nothing important to do with backups. Occasionally a document and that was it.

Nowadays it’s different. Most families have at least 2 computers or notebooks in their home while this number is higher when they have more children in their family.

They all have their own passwords, documents, etc… but what do they backup at the moment?

In real life I see that they DON’T backup. They backup NOTHING. That surprised me a lot. People have the idea that harddrive will never fail and always will work. They don’t think about the possibility they can stop working in a second.

The photo and video files they have are GBs on data. I even know some families where they already have TBs on data. I have at the moment 5 TB on video (FullHD videocamera) and photo files. A good friend of me even has 16 TB on data and he told me recently it’s almost full. How are you suppost to backup this? What can you do as home user or little company?

The most easy solution is buying an external harddrive. A 2 TB external USB harddrive costs around 100 euro. Not expensive if you ask me. Harddrives have weakspots. If you really have important data I would recommend you buy 2. Maybe for your situation 2 x 1 TB is a safer option than buying one 2 TB. Be aware that 2 x 1 TB will cost more than one 2 TB.

If you  buy an extra large internal harddrive you can also consider mirroring. When one harddrive fails the other takes over the operation. Disadvantage is that notebooks in most case don’t give you the possibility to add an additional harddrive, this solution can only be applied on normal desktop computers.

You can consider to buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution. With a NAS you can connect harddrives to your network. Most of the NAS solutions offer RAID, RAID is necessary to do mirroring, like mentioned earlier. A NAS solution can be bought for 100 euro.

You can archive photos on a DVD. A single layer DVD can hold 4.5GB which are a lot of photos, a dual layer can hold even 9GB. Video files archiving is more complex. Especially if you use a videocamera which records in FullHD. You will notice the many GBs are used for recordings. You will have to archive those files on a harddrive. You can consider a Bluray writer (25/50 GB), but the GB cost is expensive.

If you really want to archive everything good you have to think about a tapestreamer. Be aware with large capacities they are expensive.

Take care of archiving you most important documents, photos and video file. Edit and publish on DVD your most important videos as soon as possible. Making a copie of a DVD is easily and fast done.

The first technical preview and beta had already stole my heart. How fast Office 2010 was working. Still I wanted to inform you briefly about some problems I experienced, which all early adopters have.

You can install fffice 2010 as 64-bit version. Nice idea, I thought. Works really fast. It didn’t take long for me to discover that a lot of applications weren’t working with the 64-bit version of Office 2010 because… they still are 32 bit. It should be supported via WOW64 but it sometimes doesn’t work at all. Microsoft also states this when you are installing the 64-bit version, you can also read this in 32 or 64 bits version office 2010 .

Windows Mobile Device Center for example, the new version of ActiveSync, is behaving strange. Several people already reported that their Windows Mobile phone lost all their contacts while syncing with Office 2010 64 bit. Microsoft Phone is the utility to have for having a backup. Always nice… to have a backup nearby.

I installed the 32 bit version when I read also the Sharepoint lists are not available in 64 bit.

The final conclusion is that 2010 is a really good version. Like I started, the betas impressed me, they work really good.

Since a while I use a Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia smartphone. This mobile runs Windows Mobile. There are custommade ROMs available and one of the best, made by a Dutchman, is the Christian Rom.

What can you do with a phone with this ROM? I want to summarize what I use, it’s a long list but not everything what is possible.

Above you see the list of programs. From left to right:

• Adobe Reader LE - Windows Mobile version to be able to view PDF
• Afbeeldingen en video’s – dutch for Pictures and videos
• Audio-booster – this program will give a deeper sound if a headphone is connected
• FBTV – I don’t use it, it’s a TV guide
• Midomi – a program you can sing a song which the program tries to recognize and if so it will give you the name of the song and singer/group (internet necessary)
• NOS Mobiel – mobile app for dutch NOS (internet necessary)
• Nos Teletekst – mobile app so you can see the dutch teletext services of NOS (internet necessary)
• SPB Screenshot – can be used to make screenshots, I made all these you see with this program
• Streaming Media -for Windows Media streaming
• Uitzending gemist – mobile app to see missed programs from public broadcasting (internet necessary)
• Windows Media - mediaplayer ofMicrosoft
• Youtube – nice Youtube application
• You see the folders Internet, Multimedia, Office Mobile 2010, spelletjes, tools en utilities which contain a lot of programs and some games
• ActiveSync is used for synchronize your data with an Exchange server or computer
• Alarmen is Dutch for Alarms
• Bing makes it possible you can search via the Bing searchengine
• Comm manager you can enable or disable connections
• Contacten, dutch for Contacts
• E-mail
• Extern bureaublad is the Remote Desktop client for Windows Mobile, dutch version
• Facebook is, you’ll never guess it, to see and change facebook activities (extra installed)
• Google maps, now included Street view!

• Hyves, Dutch social network (extra installed)

• Internet explorer
• Marathon (extra installed)
• Marketplace
• Messenger
• Microsoft MyPhone – synchronize all your data with je gegevens with Microsoft server, very usefull when upgrading a lot

• Microsoft Tag reader
• MSN geldzaken, dutch for MSN Money
• MSN Weer, MSN Weather in Dutch
• MusicID, like Midomi but you can’t sing yourself, detection of songs works really good (from radio, TV, etc…)

• Opera Mobile 10 – nice browser for Windows Mobile
• Panels - Xperia panels, I don’t use it
• PockeTwit – Twitter client for Windows Mobile. Really good Twitter application

• PockeTwit QuickPost – You can post quickly a tweet on Twitter
• QuickGPS, data download for calibratie GPS
• Rekenmachine, calc in Dutch
• Skype
• SMS bericht, Text messagging
• SPB Home, shell I often use, extra installed the newest version

• SPB TV, program which you can use for looking TV streams(internet necessary)
• SPB Weather, weather program, extra installed

• Telefoon, Dutch for phone
• Total Commander
• Verkenner, Dutch for Explorer
• Vodafone
• Windows Live

And last but not least : TomTom Navigator with Complete Western European Map

You can find Christian’s ROM here : http://www.christian-web.nl/index.php

(UPDATE: I see now a version is availabe : 5.120)

I have an Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 mobile phone with Windows Mobile 6.5. I like it a lot.

But since a while I got the errormessage ’The system cannot find the path specified.’ when I tried to play a playlist in Windows Media player. I have a lot of special playlists created for different styles of music, what is my mood and  for playing Audiobook CD’s of  Jim Rohn or Tony Robbins…

I was annoyed with the errormessage and wanted to find quickly a solution via Google. I was puzzeld I found only 1 relevant link (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=362841) but it wasn’t the solution for my problem.

What was the case?

First I had an English firmware ROM on my phone but since a while I have used a Dutch ROM. I discovered that playlists have a logical referrer of the location which is not translated bu the OS. I saw that all files on the external memorycard in the .asx file were stored in their path as \Storage card\. I saw when I created a new playlist that the system didn’t use \Storage card\ in the path but it used \Opslagkaart\ (note, this is dutch for storage card). Little odd as you ask for my opinion, but ok, it’s like that. I changed the path in my ASX files from \Storage card\ to  \Opslagkaart\ and… it WORKS! It’s that easy… I expect this solution is for all foreign languages of Windows Mobile and not only affects the Dutch ROM.

It’s really easy. Create a folder with the name ‘GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}’.

If you open this folder you will see nice options

It’s just easy to have all these options in 1 folder.

I’m going to give some key combinations which should make working with the PC easier. Eventually you will also work more relax with the computer. Which is a nice part of these tips.

The following combinations work in all Windows screens and applications :

CTRL-A : Select all
CTRL-C : Copy
CTRL-V : Paste
CTRL-F : Find
CTRL-Z : Undo (undo your mistake)
CTRL-P : Printmenu
CTRL-S : Save (Very useful tip!) (Now and than clicking CTRL-S saves your day because you have a saved copy of your document even if something went wrong)

Alt-F4 : Close screen/windows or close your program, if no program is working close Windows
SHIFT-INS : Paste

PrtSc : Make a screendump
Alt-PrtSc : Make a screendump of the currently active window/application

CTRL-ESC : Windows Start Menu

Last but not least : CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, you will start the Windows taskmanager and can you regain the controle of your system if a program have strange behaviour.

If you want to make choices from a menu in programs most of the time you can choose it by pressing ALT-x (x= character which you will see underlined when pressing ALT). As example I give you Word; pressing ALT-f will open you file. This works in most Windows programs.