Into Tech

Electricity-free charity

I am a small, private donor to a developing world charity helping a village with no electricity. So far I have been able to give them a clockwork radio and torch. Are there any cheap computers designed for this market?
Chris Berg

JS: The most widely publicised device is the MIT-inspired XO-1 laptop, which has been developed under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. You can donate a laptop for $200, but you can’t direct it to a particular village (laptopgiving.org). Alternatively, have a look at UK-based Aleutia (aleutia.com). This company has developed the low-power E2 Mini Computer (£199), which can be powered by a foldable solar panel, and is suitable for use in Africa. The project started after Mike Rosenberg, the founder, set up a cybercafe in Takoradi, Ghana, to work with street children. The site’s wiki says: “We package the E2 with low-power LCDs, folding solar panels, and rugged batteries to form a 3kg, $900 kit that can be dispatched anywhere and set up in minutes, and is used by aid workers in the field.” (wiki.aleutia.com).

The Ethical Superstore may suggest some cheaper non-computer ideas: ethicalsuperstore.com.

Photo recovery

I have accidentally deleted some photos (grandchildren, special events etc) that I thought were backed up on my slave drive. I used Active File Recovery to undelete them, but I cannot open them. Irfanview says “cannot display header”.
Tony

JS: Try using PhotoRec, which is designed for “digital picture and file recovery”: it’s not guaranteed to work but at least it’s free. Image Recall may be even better: it costs £24.99, but there’s a demo version. Programs that will try to reconstruct damaged image files include Pix Recovery and EasyRecovery Pro.

They want your money

I’m seeing much more spam with zip attachments. The messages are carefully crafted to induce any busy office worker to click on them without thinking, and often seem to be targeted at individuals within the company. I’m not about to click on one of these, but if I did, what would happen?
Roger Wilson

JS: This is a common way of distributing botnet-controlled Trojan files, such as the ZBot banking Trojan, ideally a variant known as Prg. The basic idea is to capture and simulate all the keystrokes used to access your (preferably commercial) bank account to perform a fraudulent money transfer that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. ZBot can also attempt to disable your firewall, steal credit card numbers, takes snapshots of your screen and download extra components as required. Anti-virus software should block it, including online scanners such as Kaspersky. However, anyone who finds it would also need to change their banking and other passwords.

Email alerts

In the film Sleepless in Seattle, an onscreen alert box popped up every time a new email was received by one of the characters. I use Hotmail, Gmail and the Microsoft Vista successor to Outlook Express, but none of them seems to offer this convenience. Why not?
Michael McCarthy

JS: It’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea but can easily become really annoying. Still, many, if not most email programs have some form of alert, including Windows Live Mail, and you can set a sound for New Mail Notification in the Control Panel’s Sounds and Audio Devices applet. If you have Windows Live Messenger, you can get email alerts that, if clicked, will launch your Windows Live Mail program. For Gmail, you can use the Gmail Notifier - still in beta - but if you install the Google Talk client, you will get email alerts automatically.

There must be dozens of email alert programs and add-ons, many of them free. You can browse a selection. Otherwise, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, and I have not seen either.

Backchat

Richard Cooke wanted a PC to edit native AVCHD hi-def movies with Pinnacle software. Neil says he edits it with Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. There is a free trial version of the Sony software at Softpedia.

Annie Hall wanted to send newsletters from her Talk Talk mailbox. According to comments on the Ask Jack blog, Talk Talk can send an email to up to 50 recipients, but kds1767 reckons Talk Talk will solve the problem by soon offering Hostopia’s Announcer service. AttendantLord says: “My partial solution is to send bulk emails using the email facility of the hosting company for my website (Vision Internet).”

Last week, I mentioned Windows Easy Transfer Companion but Microsoft has withdrawn it. A Microsoft staff member said in a forum: “I think the download link is removed because [it] is not compatible with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows XP Service Pack 3.”

Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

About four years ago there were all sorts of rumors that Google was getting ready to enter the browser wars with its own offering, most likely built on Mozilla’s code. However, after years of nothing (and an increasingly close relationship between Mozilla and Google), many had thought that idea was dead. Apparently not. After some leaks of a comic book (a comic book?!?) detailing the new Google browser found their way to the web, Google quickly admitted that it is, indeed, getting into the browser business, releasing a brand new open source browser, called Google Chrome.

Rather than being built on Mozilla, as many expected, it’s been built on top of WebKit, which is also the core of Apple’s Safari browser — but which Google was also using for its own mobile browser. In the end, this isn’t all that surprising. While many will interpret it as Google trying to take on Microsoft in the browser market, in reality, this is probably a lot more about Google trying to help everyone move beyond the operating system market. As we first suggested four years ago when rumors of a Google browser first came around, Google knows that the way to beat Microsoft is to become the operating system for the internet, and you do that by relegating the actual OS obsolete. And, these days, the path to doing that is through the browser.

So, yes, this is a shot at Microsoft — but not at Internet Exporer. It’s a shot at Windows.

That doesn’t mean Google Chrome will be successful, but a quick look at the features itself show that the features it highlights (being able to run apps separately, better memory management, etc.) are the sorts of things that allow people to make browser-based apps much more useful, rather than feeling the need to rely on client-side applications. People have predicted for years that we’re getting closer to a world where all computing can be done over the network, and it looks like Google is trying to push that process right along.

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Passengers on London Underground could be using their mobile phones to get through the ticket barriers and even pay for their lunch within the next two years, after a successful trial of technology in the capital by O2 and Transport for London.

The mobile phone company integrated Oyster card technology and a Barclaycard Visa card into a Nokia 6131 handset and gave it to 500 testers who spent six months using the phone as a mobile wallet.

They made more than 50,000 tube journeys, either by putting their existing travel card on the device or topping up their pre-pay wallet at machines in underground stations, and bought items from shops such as Eat, Yo Sushi and Krispy Kreme. The phones also gave users access to the VIP section at the O2 arena and the Wireless festival in Hyde Park.

Claire Maslen from O2 said the trial was so successful that the company was trying to put together a consortium to launch a full service within two years, well in time for the London Olympics in 2012.

“The Olympics are an obvious target to aim for, but I think that is a very conservative timeframe for a commercial service,” she said. “We would hope to have something up and running much sooner than that.”

While it may seem ridiculous to turn a mobile phone into a bank card, research has shown that people realise they have lost their phone much sooner than their wallet.

The O2 trial used near field communications (NFC) technology. The Oyster card is an obvious example, but bundling travel cards with a mobile e-wallet, which users can top up from their bank account and use to pay for items under £10, have been mooted for several years.

In Japan, such phones have been in use for more than four years. The Japanese railway network has been using the technology since 2001 and millions of cards have been issued. But the technology used in Japan is based on Sony’s FeliCa chip technology, which is different from that used in the O2 trial and by Transport for London for the Oyster card.

Philip Makinson, at industry experts Greenwich Consulting, said mobile wallets had fallen down in the past because of the number of people needed to make any system viable.

“It requires cooperation, not just between handset manufacturers and network operators but third parties such as Visa or Mastercard and banks and retailers. To reach critical mass you really need to have at least three of the big operators to be involved or there is not enough in it for the likes of Transport for London or Nokia,” said Makinson.

Several of the UK’s five mobile phone networks are understood to be interested in mobile wallets.

“There does seem to be consumer demand for it, people are saying they want to carry less stuff around with them,” said Makinson.

The results of the O2 trial show that people like using a mobile phone to do more than send texts and talk.

Nine out of 10 of O2’s testers were happy using NFC technology, with convenience, ease of use and the status of having such an innovative device cited as benefits of the service.

Top of the testers’ wish list was using their mobile phone as an Oyster card, with 89% saying they would use it. The trial showed that having Oyster on a mobile phone led users to make more journeys on public transport.

More than one in five who used pay-as-you-go Oyster on their mobile phone reported that they made more journeys on public transport during the trial. More than two-thirds of users said they found it more convenient to use their phone than a standard Oyster card.

More than two-thirds of testers also said they would be interested in having the Barclaycard Visa payWave feature on their mobile.

Crucially for Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker and one of the companies involved in the trial, 87% of the testers said the ability to use Oyster on a mobile phone was likely to influence their choice of phone.

A pay as you go version of the Apple iPhone will go on sale in the UK later this month offering customers unlimited internet browsing for a year if they are prepared to top-up at least £10 a month and pay a whopping £349.99 for the handset.

O2 will be the first of Apple’s network partners to offer a pay as you go version of the phone and the news comes as Nokia today unveiled what it hopes will be the biggest seller at Christmas.

The first phone in its range of Nokia Comes With Music devices is also a pay as you go handset but is a lot more basic than the iPhone. For the price tag, which has yet to be set but will be between £100 and £300, however, users get free and unlimited access to 2.1m music tracks which they can keep even if they stop using the phone. Buying the same number of tracks from iTunes would cost over £1.6m.

The 3G version of the iPhone will go on sale on September 16 in O2 and Apple stores as well as from Carphone Warehouse. The basic 8GB version of the device will be £349.99 while the larger 16GB model - which can store about 4,000 songs - will be £399.99.

But for the price, users get a year’s worth of unlimited internet browsing, either using the O2 mobile phone network or its collection of short-range wireless broadband or wi-fi hotspots dotted across the country. At the end of the 12 months users will have to pay an extra £10 per month to carry on receiving unlimited internet access. The phone works on O2’s standard pay and go tariffs, which start at £10 top-up per month.

The price tag slapped on the pre-pay phone looks high when anyone willing to sign up for an 18 month contract, at £45 a month, will get a free 8GB version or a free 16GB version for £75 a month. But over the 18-month length of the contract a user of the basic “free” phone will pay £810, while over the same period a pre-pay user of the same phone - who will have to spend a further £60 to continue browsing the internet - will spend at least £589.99.

Contract customers, however, get extras such as visual voicemail and large bundles of texts and minutes which pre-pay customers will not receive.

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone company, will launch an all-out assault on Apple’s iPhone today with a new range of phones that will give music lovers access to an unlimited service.

Anyone willing buy a Nokia Comes With Music pre-pay phone will be able to download up to 2.1m music tracks - about a quarter of the number available from Apple’s iTunes - onto their computer for no extra charge for 12 months.

Those tracks can be loaded onto the Nokia phone and after a year users will need to buy a new device in order to continue downloading new releases. In contrast to other so-called unlimited music services, however, if they choose not to buy a new device, they can keep all the tracks they have already downloaded.

They will still play on the user’s computer and handset, which will also still be able to send texts and make calls.

Nokia, which is hoping the phone will be popular this Christmas with parents seeking to make their children’s music file sharing legal, will today announce that the UK will be the first market to get Comes With Music.

The first phone will be its 5310 handset, although at least one more device will be announced in time for Christmas.

The company has signed up Carphone Warehouse, which has more than 800 shops, to stock the phone. Carphone Warehouse is also Apple’s sole independent stockist of the iPhone.

Nokia’s UK managing director Simon Ainslie believes the Nokia Comes With Music range will be “the number one selling product at Christmas”.

“This is a unique proposition. Nobody has launched an unlimited music service that allows you to keep your music with no catches,” said Ainslie. “What we are trying to do is bring back some value to the music industry from people who are not paying for music. There are a lot of parents who would like to legitimise their children’s purchasing of music.”

Already some internet service providers (ISPs) have sent letters to persistent illegal file sharers warning them that their activities have been noticed, having reached a deal with industry body the BPI. For many parents this will be the first indication that their children are doing anything illicit on the internet.

Nokia Comes With Music, which was first mooted last year, is a gamble for the Finnish handset maker, which supplies four out of every 10 phones sold worldwide. It risks further damaging Nokia’s already fraught relationship with many of the major mobile phone companies. Last year it provoked their ire by announcing its own suite of mobile services - under the Ovi brand - which operators saw as a direct attempt to undercut their relationship with mobile phone users.

In fact, Nokia does not yet have a mobile phone partner for Comes With Music. As a result anyone buying the phone will have to put their existing SIM card into it or sign up for a SIM-only deal such as O2’s Simplicity.

All five UK networks have held talks with Nokia about Comes With Music but none has found the service attractive - or lucrative - enough to sign up. All the operators have their music download services and see no reason to subsidise a handset that connects users with Nokia’s own music store rather than their own. But Nokia still hopes to persuade an operator to subsidise the cost of the phone, which is why it will not set the price of the first handset until next month. It is expected to cost somewhere between £100 and £300.

Nokia has decided to press on with its unlimited service because of the threat posed to its dominance of the industry by Apple, according to mobile industry insiders. Sales of the iPhone are still small - with analysts forecasting 45m will be sold by next year compared with a global market of about 1bn handsets - it could soon be made available on more networks as the original exclusive network deals it signed in the UK, France, Germany and the US come up for renewal over the next few years.

Nokia will pay the music companies a licence fee to make their catalogues available to customers and for the three major labels that have already signed up - SonyBMG, Universal and Warner Music - the service is another attempt to try and claw some revenue back from the illegal file sharers. But Nokia has yet to reach a deal with the UK’s host of independent music labels or EMI.

“Comes With Music is a way for Nokia to add extra value to its handsets and generate more stickiness for its brand,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. But Nokia has tailored the service to the economic downturn in its major European markets.

“The 5310 handset is definitely more aimed at the mid-tier of the market - this is not the high-end device that people were expecting to see for Comes With Music,” she added. “They are responding to the trend we are beginning to see in Europe of people switching towards the mid-tier because of the economic climate.”

Explainer: Music unlimited

Nokia Comes With Music is the latest attempt to make digital music pay by bundling the cost together with another service or product - in this case the cost of the handset. There are already numerous subscription-based unlimited music services such as Napster and MusicStation; even Apple is rumoured to be working on one for iTunes. Rather than charging a separate subscription, the Danish internet firm TDC has bundled the cost of unlimited music with its broadband service. BSkyB recently signed a deal with Universal that could lead to a similar service in the UK. In France, Orange has launched MusiqueMax, which allows users to download up to 500 tracks a month for €12 and keep them as long as they like. All these services have some sort of digital rights management (DRM) software that prevents tracks being played after a subscription expires or means they can only be transferred to certain devices. Nokia Comes With Music uses Microsoft DRM technology, so downloaded tracks cannot be played on an iPod. Others in the music industry believe the future of digital music lies in offering DRM-free tracks that can be played on any device. Such tracks are already sold by iTunes, Amazon and handset maker Sony Ericsson in the Nordic region.

Apparently this is the week for force feedback “haptics” company Immersion to settle its various patent lawsuits. We already noted the infamous teledildonics case has been settled and now it’s settled an ongoing lawsuit with Microsoft as well. We wrote about the details back in May. It’s a case that highlights just how wasteful some patent lawsuits can be.

In this case, Immersion had sued both Sony and Microsoft for violating its patents, and it offered them a deal that’s becoming all too typical: giving competitors a chance to settle first in order to join the other side of the case. It’s a neat trick. Basically, you tell both sides that they can just pay up, and close out the case, while also getting the chance to claim some of that money back if Immersion wins against their competitor. Of course, Immersion took it to another level after Microsoft agreed to this deal, originally handing over to Immersion $26 million. After it got Sony to pay $130 million, it told Microsoft that the deal wasn’t technically a “settlement,” and thus it was excluded from the terms of the deal it gave Microsoft. Hence the lawsuit from Microsoft.

This latest settlement has Immersion apparently realizing it was never going to win the case, and forking over $20.75 million back to Microsoft, ostensibly from its winnings against Sony. It makes you wonder what’s up that Immersion seems to be rushing to settle its various cases. Either way, it shows another aspect of how the patent abuse game is played these days, with patent holders pitting competitors against each other to pressure companies into settling.

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A PC for editing AVC

I’ve bought a new HD video camera which records in AVCHD. When I looked at the Pinnacle editing software supplied with it, I read that the minimum requirements include an Intel quad core processor running at 2.66GHz. I have consulted PC World, Dell and HP, and none has a home computer running at this speed. What can I do?
Richard Cooke

JS: AVCHD is one of the high-definition movie standards used by Blu-ray and HD DVD and allows for pictures that are 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. It is a highly compressed format, to save space, but as a consequence it requires a great deal of processing power to reconstruct the original image. What the camera salesmen don’t tell you is that just displaying 25 of these large images a second is beyond many PCs, unless they have accelerated graphics. Editing them can be a nightmare, and a common approach (taken by Apple’s Final Cut Pro, among others) is to transcode them into something that is easier to handle. The Wikipedia page on AVCHS lists some of these converters.

Editing native AVCHD is not, of course, beyond reach. However, such powerful PCs are generally not off-the-shelf items, but assembled to order. First, pick your Intel Core 2 Quad processor from Intel’s spec sheet: the Q6700 is the cheap 2.66GHz chip, but there’s a newer, better 2.83GHz version, the Q9550. Next, look for a PC with that Q number, 4GB or 8GB of memory, and 64-bit Windows Vista. An example is the Mesh Xtreme X9550GTX with a Q9550, 8GB of memory, a terabyte of hard drive space, Blu-ray player and 24 inch widescreen monitor displaying 1,920 x 1,200 for £1,199 inc VAT.

On its own, Pinnacle Studio 12 will run OK on a 1.6 GHz Dual Core processor with 1GB of memory, so the problem is down to the videos you want to edit. You could reduce the PC hardware requirements by reducing the size of your videos. Instead of shooting 1,080p, for example, you could use 1,440 x 1,080 or go down to 720p (1,280 x 720 pixels), like broadcast HDTV. However, my experience is that editing MPeg-2 movies is a pig on a fast Pentium, and I’d expect editing MPeg-4 Part 10 (ie AVC) to be much piggier even on a quad core PC. I’d want more power, not less.

Newsletter mailing

I run a small business from home, and send a regular newsletter. I have a TalkTalk phone and broadband package. I now find that I am unable to send more than about 20 newsletters in a block.
Annie Hall

JS: I can’t find any mention of this on the TalkTalk website, but internet service providers usually limit the number of emails you can send at once, to discourage spamming. However, I’d have thought 100 was a more reasonable number than 20. You could try contacting TalkTalk for help, but ISP email services are not a selling point but an overhead that I suspect most would rather be rid of. Larger companies, including the Guardian, often use outside services such as cheetahmail.com and jangomail.com to send out promotional emails. You could try a local supplier such as Subscribed: there must be lots. These companies tend to be hostile towards anything “spammy” as it could affect their business.

Maximising battery life

What are your top tips for maximising the life of rechargeable batteries?
Richard Brown

JS: Different kinds of battery require different approaches, so it’s a bigger topic than it sounds. However, BatteryUniversity.com provides comprehensive coverage and a handy summary in table form. With the increasingly common Lithium-ion (Li-ion) types, the main advice is not to discharge them more than once a month: try to recharge them when they are on 20% or so. Alas, they are only good for a limited number of cycles and age even if not used. They may need replacing after 18-24 months or 350-500 cycles, but can last longer. It’s always worth checking the device’s manual for information and advice.

Blogs by location

Is there a way to search blogs by location?
J Bourtoni

JS: Not really. There are blogs from all over the world sitting on the same servers run by American companies such as Google (Blogger) and Microsoft (Spaces), and there is no easy way to tell them apart. However, there are sites you can try, such as Blogdigger Local, PlaceBlogger.com, feedmap.net and Globe of Blogs. Bloggers who want to be found geographically can make it easier by submitting their sites. In the longer term, there’s a 10-year plan involving 74 nations called Geoss, for Global Earth Observation System of Systems, which should encourage more location awareness. So should Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle.

Backchat

· Alec Williams was transferring data from an old PC. John Davies says: “I bought Transfer MyPC from Dell to move all my old data across. It did the job very well.” Windows Vista has a built-in program, Windows Easy Transfer, and you can download Windows Easy Transfer Companion to move programs.

· Cathy Matheson wanted a laptop for her son, who is going to study architecture. On the Ask Jack blog, Webweasel said: “As a recently qualified architect, I would wait and see what the facilities are like at the university in question. I would not advise buying any hardware or software until your son is a student, as generous discounts are available.”

· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

Microsoft is being all mysterious today by running a teaser ad for a new mouse technology with the intriguing - or completely misleading tagline - ‘Say Goodbye to Laser’.

The company looks set to bring something new to the world of computer mice on September 9 and, if the company hopes to have any chance of ousting the fabulous laser mouse, it will have to come up with something really special.

The price of a dedicated Blu-ray player has remained high - too high - even after winning the HD war against HD DVD but, Tesco has teamed up with German PB big-shot Medion to sell a performance PC with Blu-ray drive for just £600.

The PC in question is the shiny, black Medion Akoya P36888 and, despite the attractive pricing, it’s no slouch. The P36888 is powered by the Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600, runs Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium, has a 1TB 7200rpm hard disk drive, 3GB of RAM, a hybrid TV tuner and the all-important Blu-Ray Reader/DVD-ReWriter.

Here’s the full line up:

Rather than let Sony hog all the console news at the Leipzig Games Convention, Microsoft has confirmed earlier musings that there will be a new improved controller for the Xbox 360.

Try not to wet your pants yet though as this is no major overhaul we’re talking about here. The new controller will look like the current one but will have an improved d-pad for use in games - like footie - where the d-pad is the prime means of control.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Microsoft said: