I’ve never been a huge fan of The Times newspaper ever since Rupert Murdoch bought it, but I occasionally browse through the website not least because Clarkson is on there.

However, today I read an article that actually makes a huge amount of sense.

Read this.

Add to the research the fact that there would be less roadside ‘furniture’ for motorcyclists and cyclists to hit if they come off their respective vehicles and I think we have a winner here.

Awesome!

Saw this classic article on El Reg today.

The thing is this guy’s got a very valid point. I’ve always used a few basic rules when buying on eBay:

(1) If I can’t afford to lose the money then buy from a recognised brand site or a shop – don’t bid
(2) If there are no pictures – don’t bid
(3) If the pictures are obviously professional (plain white background say) or obviously copied from the manufacturer’s website – don’t bid
(4) If the pictures don’t show an electrical item switched on – don’t bid
(5) If the item only has a couple of minutes left to run – don’t bid
(6) If you get bid over your mental limit – don’t bid again…
(7) Don’t expect positive feedback. I’ve sold one item to someone who reacted in one of the ways outlined in the article and he threatened to leave me negative feedback despite me doing nothing wrong.
(8) Don’t believe feedback scores. There are quite a few ways in which they can be manipulated.
(9) Get a ‘feel’ for the language used. Generally honest people have better grammar and spelling. Sad but seemingly true.
(10) Anyone charging more than £10 for postage is taking the mick. I’ve never sold anything that cost more than that to package up and mail.

Now, having looked back through all the above points I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s worth the effort shopping on ebay now.

What?

In the Sunday Mirror yesterday there was a story that’s hard to believe; that Cheryl Cole (nee Tweedie) smashed up her mobile phone so that her “cheating husband” Ashley can’t call her. Surely someone in her entourage could have told her that just taking the SIM card out would suffice?

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about gadgets so it’s time to bring things back up to date.

About 3 months ago I mentioned the Roberts Robi and now that they’re flogging them in Tesco I took the plunge. £50 feels like a lot of cash for something so tiny – the button area as seen in the illustration above is about the size of a £1 coin. When I took it home I had that depressing feeling that you often get with new gadgets that you haven’t seen reviewed. Will it be a complete waste of cash? If so, how much can I sell it for on eBay before the reviews hit the web?

Anyway, it plugs neatly into the bottom port on my iPod Video (it also works on the second generation Nano and hopefully some of the newer iPods too) and fires up automatically when you hit the ‘Play’ button. It scans through the DAB frequencies and picks up the stronger signals, firing out beautiful stereo sound. To date, I’m really impressed.

There are a couple of negatives mind. It uses the iPod as a power source so the battery runs down faster than normal, and it uses the bottom port so you can’t charge or sync without unplugging it. Also, your headphones need to plug into the robi rather than the normal headphone port.

I think the positives outweigh the negatives. I can now use it to have DAB radio in my car. It works as a remote for the iPod. It’s also FM for those areas where you can’t pick up DAB. And it’s really small! Great stuff.

So that’s the music up to date. Now with my 5G iPod, JBL On Tour speakers and Robi I can pretty much have music wherever I go!

Now, onto mobiles. My Treo 680 has been great but Palm/Access haven’t updated any of their Palm OS handsets for some considerable period, and the OS for even longer. Over the years I’ve been faithful to Palm, owning at least 8 different pdas and Treo smartphones, but it’s got to the point where if you want a new Treo with a decent specification you have to buy a Windows Mobile one.

And as any of you who are into gadgets know, if you’re going to change OS you might as well evaluate the wider market to see what’s available.

So, I’m now the slightly bemused owner of an HP iPaq 514 Voice Messenger. In between selling the Treo on eBay and buying the iPaq, I used MrsG-T’s old Samsung slider, a handset that irritated beyond belief due to its non-intuitive interface. I lost count of the number of times I deleted an entire text during composition because the button for ‘delete’ was in the place where most other handsets had the ‘back one character’ key. Argh!!

However, I did like the reduced size compared to carrying a Treo around.

My man Luigi at work had recently purchased an iPaq 514 and loaned it to me for a couple of hours to try out. I liked the size, and the fact that it has 802.11b/g wifi built in as well as mostly all the functions that my Treo had.

So, I found one on the normal online auction site for just under £70 and snapped it up. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and it’s pretty good. The screen size is obviously a compromise, but that apart it’s proving useful. The Windows Mobile OS is (grudgingly) OK, although MS Autosync on PC is irritating to insanity. For example, why on earth the PC is allowed to overwrite the mobile device name when you’ve synchronised with it before is beyond me. So Robs_ipaq becomes WM_056283 and I have to change it back manually. Then it has all sorts of issues trying to sync again because it’s “a different mobile device”.

I had to buy ‘Missing Sync’ for Windows Mobile from MarkSpace to sync it with my Mac, and that software is great apart from one issue that means everytime I boot the software it locks up, has to be force-quitted and then works fine second go. It does it absolutely every time I use it.

The one thing that this phone doesn’t do is run TomTom software so I bought a basic TomTom One v3 in the Christmas sales with the balance of my Treo sale. Say what you want, and look at the variety of satnavs on the market, but TomTom stuff just works well in a very Apple Mac-esque way. A colleague bought an LG satnav over Christmas and found it very frustrating to use, not least because you can’t upgrade the maps so if the street isn’t on there it never will be. MrsG-T also has a One but hers has the European maps so mine is just for convenience really. Negatives? Well, it’s a bit tight to charge extra for a protective case in my opinion.

I really wanted to save up for a Macbook as my G4 tower is nearly eight years old and still being used every day. In ‘07 I added a 160GB hard drive (the old 80GB drive is still in the machine and being used as a backup with the aid of SuperDuper), a DVD R/W drive, a tad more RAM, OSX Tiger and some Logitech 2.1 speakers so iTunes sounds vaguely hifi-alike.

However, my Airport card has packed up and so now has the Belkin USB Wifi stick I was using as a replacement. When you read this entry, it’ll be because I’ve managed to solve the problem as at the time of writing I can’t connect to the web on it at all despite trying a number of different ways. Obviously the easiest way would be to cable in to the router, but the router is in my loft three floors above the Mac so that’s not really feasible.

Anyway, all my savings went on a Popcorn watch to celebrate MrsG-T’s 40th birthday and her reaction on the day was worth every penny. So it looks like 2009 might be the year of the Macbook. Maybe.

(And to those of you who think that if I hadn’t bought everything listed above I’d have enough for a Macbook are entirely missing the point. Combining all the things I’ve sold and all the things I’ve bought (excluding the watch!) I’m about £80 down, which isn’t enough for a Macbook. Ten times that maybe…)