Dear Patrick Kershaw

I see that you are new to Twitter. You’ve posted two tweets from your Twitter account (@patrickkershaw1). Perhaps just one if we consider your latest tweet to be a sign-off:

“has decided twitter is a fad… and this will be his last update”.

I know Twitter can be hard to understand for a new user, so perhaps a brief introduction would be in order?

Twitter is a place where I can chat with 1,500 friends and acquaintances, and indirectly with hundreds of thousands. If I want to address a tweet directly to another Twitter user, I type @TheirUserName somewhere in my message.

It’s a place where I can tell my friends about the great web hosting service I receive from @sitehostnz, or complain about @vodafonenz’s roaming data charges. I can book a table at @thefallsnz, a local restaurant in Henderson, and if my @orcon web service goes offline, I can txt a message to Twitter to let them know. I can see what’s coming up tomorrow on TVNZ’s @BreakfastOnOne, I can get wine advice from @thewinevault, and follow design and new media trends with @idealogmag.

Twitter is a place where @LewisBostock can tweet “Help, I’m stranded in Auckland and need to get home” (‘home’ being 45 minutes north of Auckland), and be inundated with offers of help, lodging, and transport. It’s a place where Lewis can tweet later in the day, pledging his thanks for the generosity of Twitter followers.

For me personally, Twitter has netted several speaking engagements, and countless tidbits of wonderful advice. Just today, after landing in Sydney, I posted a comment of outrage at Vodafone’s extortionary $10/Mb data roaming charges. Minutes later I had a response from @regen suggesting I buy a pre-pay sim card, which gets me data for $2/Mb. I can post a question about the intricacies of some obtuse software development task, and receive educated, specific responses in minutes.

And yes, Twitter is a place where I can type a short message about what I had for breakfast. One of my favourite things is to post early in the morning, informing my friends as to how many times the 6 week old baby woke up in the night. They respond likewise. We call it Parent Poker. How good was your hand last night?

Yet Twitter is just a fad, according to Patrick Kershaw. It has nothing to offer small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in New Zealand. Apparently, it might be useful for corporates and celebrities, but for SMEs, “the time spent in actually using Twitter as a business tool will be a loss-making venture”. I’d like to suggest that Patrick have a chat, perhaps on Twitter, to a couple of the SMEs I listed above.

One example from many: Jayson Bryant (@thewinevault) has picked up a wonderful niche on Twitter, and is now posting a daily wine video blog, including a cameo from @JohnJCampbell (yes, of TV3’s Campbell Live). Jason estimates that 20%-25% of his sales can be directly attributed to Twitter and Facebook.

Ironically, I think Patrick will be back on Twitter in a few months. If you look back through my Twitter history, you’ll find I had the same feeling early on. Just like jogging, Twitter has an early wall that you need to break through. The term ‘conversation’ is a cliché used far too frequently in social media circles, but quite honestly, the key thing is to find a few like-minded users to connect with – perhaps friends or businesses you know through the ‘real world’ – and join the conversation.

Then you can post about what your cat had for breakfast.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The question antenna has received a transmission:

Morning I have a 597e Air card, which I use as my only means of connection as I am not on a landline, here. I see it has a socket for a extension aerial, Orb has no knowledge of any device can you advise me please? Looking at the data on the dropdown its running at 115.2 Kbps Just wondering if I can get better reception somehow? Thanks a lot..

This question has so many components to it, I barely know where to start, but let’s take a crack at it.

First: the 597e. Here’s a handy datasheet [pdf link] that tells us all about the Sierra Wireless 597e. Excitingly, it’s capable of 3.1Mbps download speeds. The sad thing is that this is entirely dependent on the network. Telecom’s CDMA (not XT) network in this case. Before you go grabbing an antenna, there are a bunch of things to consider:

• Are there heaps of other cellular data users in your area? Cell networks have much higher contention rates than regular landlines. Even a handful of users downloading data from the same cell site will slow data speeds noticably for all users of that cell.
• How far away is your nearest cell site? An antenna may help, but if you’re too far away, it’s not going to help much.
• Does your local cell site even support EV-DO Rev A? Or is it still using an older, slower data standard? The only way to find out would be to ask Telecom.
• Is your computer fooling you? Sometimes a modem will report a speed of 115.2 Kbps by default, when the actual modem speed is much higher. Try a site like SpeedTest.net to see what sort of real-world download speeds you are getting.

Now on to antennas, or aerials. A quick Google tells me that the 597e comes with an SMB antenna socket. I’m pretty sure that’s a standard socket for most car kits, so it might be worth asking about a “car kit antenna”, or find an expert and ask for a cell phone antenna with an SMB plug. If local suppliers can’t help you out, you could always import an aerial and connector from an international retailer like these guys or those ones.

If you’re extremely keen on something cheap and cheerful, remember that an antenna is nothing more than an exposed piece of wire. If you use an antenna calculator, you can see that even the full-wavelength size of a 1900MHz antenna is only about 6 inches. You could grab an SMB plug, connect it to some coaxial cable, then strip the last 6 inches off the cable to expose the conductor. Voila! An antenna! Of course the pro antennas come with base loads and boosters and all sorts of good stuff which makes them better than bare wire, but it might be worth a crack for a really cheap boost.

Good luck!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Due to the massive interest in this competition, I’m posting the results up in this new blog post. Check out twitter.com/nzben right now for live results, and I’ll update this post once I’ve completed the draw.

Done! And the winners (who have all been contacted by eamail) are:

• Belinda Y wins the Navman MY500XT
• Vicky H wins the Bury CV9040 car kit
• John C wins the LG HFB-500 solar Bluetooth hands free kit

Thanks for watching and reading. Keep watching the gadget slot on TVNZ Breakfast for more opportunities to win cool stuff!

Popularity: 3% [?]

This review is unique, simply because of the bizarre path of estimation I took when reviewing Piano Wizard. Like most reviews, I kicked off with a passing glance at the product, garnering a first impression, before putting it aside for a later in-depth analysis. That first-pass at the software revealed a fairly amateur approach – something akin to a $20 shareware knock-off of Guitar Hero, but with a keyboard. A passable piece of software at best. Blurry, scaled graphics, and a somewhat kludgy menu system. Read on to find out how wrong I was.

In the basic mode, you use a USB midi keyboard, modified with coloured stickers on each key that match with a coloured keyboard on the screen. Just like Guitar Hero, coloured indicators move up the screen, and you hit the keys in time as they reach the top. “It’s a game”, I thought to myself, teaching nothing more than the fact that different keys make different sounds. With some prompting, I was able to get my 5 year old to transfer some of the simple tunes to our traditional piano, although the lack of colour coding on the piano keyboard confused him.

As a game, it has a lot of settings. Kids can choose from a number of different backgrounds (e.g. space, undersea, dinosaurs). It will also allow you to import any MIDI file you can find online (like from this website) to use as a source of music. Bear in mind that most MIDI files you find online will be incredibly complex and far too difficult for all but the most experienced user to play in this game mode.

The keyboard provided with the review kit is quite a nice M-Audio 49 key model. Importantly it’s velocity-sensitive, meaning that like a true piano, the harder you press the keys the louder the notes sound. You should note that the keyboard is simply a MIDI controller. That is, it does nothing without being plugged into a computer with MIDI software, or other MIDI device. You can’t use this keyboard as a standalone digital piano.

So like I say, I put the software and USB keyboard aside after my 5  year old played the game a number of times, to his great enjoyment. Some time later, I sat down to start writing this review. The first thing I did was review the price of the software, and just about fell off my chair when I saw that the base software was NZ$399. You can get additional packages: software plus a tutorial DVD for $499, and add the keyboard in my review kit for a $799 package.

Stunned by the price, I presumed I must have completely missed something, so I dug further. I popped the tutorial DVD in the PC to watch. The tutorials are very professionally shot (if a bit scarily ‘American’), and broken down into 5 weeks. They show an approach to take to gently introduce kids and first-time players to the software. They also show that the software is capable of a heck of a lot more than I gave it credit for.

In the advanced modes, the keyboard is switched sideways to better represent the association of the keys to the staves in musical notation. If I’d had something like this back when I was learning piano as a child, I think it would have made a heck of a lot more sense and I wouldn’t have given up at Grade 3.

As you increase the difficulty settings in the advance mode, the colour-matching is removed, and eventually the keyboard view can be removed altogether, leaving you playing music along with standard notation. The theory being, if you progress through the levels as your ability increases, eventually you should be able to transition to traditional sheet music on a regular piano. I can’t see why this wouldn’t be the case.

So is the software worth the price? After using it for a while, the only real issue I can find is the screen resolution. It defaults to something like 800×600, and will stretch to fit your LCD monitor, which makes it look pretty bad on my 22″ widescreen. If Piano Wizard can fix that issue and implement a proper scaling interface, I’d be hooked.

As it stands, $399 is a wonderful deal if you compare it to the equivalent price of a lifetime of piano lessons. The $799 price including the keyboard is also a good deal compared against the equivalent of an electronic piano and piano lessons. I’m going to be completely unscientific and say that Piano Wizard is never going to make you a concert pianist like one-on-one tuition would. But if what you want is an easy way to learn how to read and play music on a keyboard, Piano Wizard is probably a damn good alternative.

Popularity: 12% [?]

I had a massive flashback on Sunday. A flashback to the days of running a beat-up old car. Spending weekends underneath it, fixing something or modifying something else. A flashback of trips to the car wrecking yard, taking home something that ‘might just fit’, returning later to find something that’ll ’surely bolt straight on’, before finally fixing and refitting the original part.

I run a much more modern car these days, but it didn’t stop the WoF guys from pulling me up on a cracked brake light. Being a Sunday, the only place open was the post-apocalyptic Pick-a-Part. This place is a self-service parts yard. You rock on up with your tools, find a car vaguely similar to the one you need, and go to town. Anything you can drag away with you they’ll charge you for. The good part is they charge something like $18 for a tail light that would be $50 anywhere else.

Pick-a-Part is like something straight out of Mad Max. The gatehouse is barred and chained, the walls are made from scrap corrugated iron, and the yard is bare dirt covered in cars sitting jacked up on piles of disused wheel rims. On a cold Autumn day, the wind whistling through the iron fencing and the shambling, boilersuit-clad scavengers really added to the ambience.

Huge signs proclaimed the “Yard Rules”. Such gems as “No children in the yard or left unattended in the car park”; “No gas torches or plasma cutters”; and “No theft: we’ll check your pockets and socks when you leave!”.

The final touch of apocalyptical sweetness is the exit door. Once I paid for my shoddy wares, the toothless lady in the gatehouse untied a length of wire from the leg of her desk. Initially puzzled, I realised her diabolical genius when I followed the wire snaking up past the payment window, out a hole in the wall, and tired securely around the exit gate, holding it shut. In my mind I pictured some greasy, penniless scavenger, frantically dragging half an engine towards the gate, only to be foiled by Ma Dixie’s security wire of doooooom!

Popularity: 2% [?]