I quite like my G1, and now I’ve got TasKiller it’s battery life is almost reasonable.

One of the big features of the G1 is that when you set it up you have to tie it to a Google Account. This gives you access to email and also synchronises your contacts and your calendar on the phone with your Google Account.

This gives you a lot of extra functionality. Rather than maintaining your contacts on your phone on its internal screen you can sit at your computer and login to your Google account and do all the work there and then synchronise it, and you can also do work on your email (like delete messages in bulk and move them round) from your computer which is a lot easier.

This breaks the traditional link between phone and SIM and contacts/numbers. In the past you saved numbers in the phone or on your SIM. Move phone or move provider and you’ve got fun and games getting all your contacts synced up in one place. With the G1 they are in your Google account. So change your phone to another Android phone, or change provider (which at the moment you can’t)  and everything simply moves with you. Brilliant – and the G1 even allows you to import contacts from your SIM.

But what happens when your phone goes wrong? Well I found out.

The keyboard on my G1 has gone faulty with the P key and the backspace key going a bit odd and not working about 70% of the times you press them, and anyone who knows my typing will know that I use the backspace key a lot.  So I phoned T-Mobile and they said “Take it to your local T-Mobile store and they’ll send it away for repair”, and so I did and yes they did.

T-Mobile gave me a loan phone, a phone that looks like it crawled out from the primordial soup, no internet, no 3G, no nothing, but most importantly : NO CONTACTS.

Where are my contacts? That’s right, they’re sitting on a Google server somewhere and the phone cannot get to them.

Now I fully understand that T-Mobile can’t keep a pile of G1s in stock as loan phones, but now with things like the G1 blurring the line between phone and internet, especially when it comes to contacts etc. I think that maybe they need to look at their loan phone policy.

As for getting my G1 back? It could be 10-15 working days. So I’m stuck in the technological backwater until I get it back, unless I can work out how to use the Viewty. The only good thing you can say about the Viewty is that Linux just works with the on-board 3G modem.

Back in 2002 Kathy and I bought a Hoover AAA 140 washing machine.

Hoover, a good name, so its going to be a good washing machine. Might last as long as my parents Hoover washing machine (aeons) or their Zanussi (not quite as long but still pretty good).

How wrong we were. Within a couple of years it needed its drum casing replace because the idiot designer at Hoover (who probably didn’t even have a degree in anything but stupidity) decided that they would use plastic for the outer drum casing and then they would secure the concrete ballast weights to it using rather thin semi self-tapping screws/bolts with no locking plates.

So what happens over time is that the bolts start to vibrate loose and then the concrete starts bouncing and suddenly one day there is a big bang as one or more of the bolts shears and the concrete flaps around inside the washing machine.

So the engineer comes and fits a new drum which has bigger mounting bolts and bigger mounting lugs and metal lock plates to stop the bolts vibrating loose.  So I guess some engineer looked at the original design and having hit the first idiot round the head a bit came up with a new design.

So its been pretty OK since then, well apart from the the fabric conditioner tray syphon not really working and the tray fills up with gloop and you have to keep taking the soap tray out to clean it and then of course the spring loaded handle falls off because its made of plastic that is about as robust as a CD Jewel case hinge.

Then the other day it started spewing water all over the floor.

So I check the obvious things, I look for loose pipes, I look for loose seals on the outer drum, I check that the door seal is OK. Everything is fine.

This morning I get a big torch and I really have a good look because frankly at the moment I do not want to have to replace the machine.

I find the problem.

The pipe from the soap tray that feeds water into the washer has a hole in it. Why does it have a hole in it? Well its simple – it has a hole in it because the pipe sits about 2mm away from one of the drum mounting springs so when the drum moves on the springs during washing it rubs against the pipe. So over time it wears a hole right through the pipe wall. Hello?? HELLO? That is not bad luck: its a shaped pipe – its in the only place it can go. This is lousy design pure and simple. Vibrating springs and rubber pipes do not go together… even I know that, so it looks like the curse of the idiot Hoover designer strikes again.

So Its all wrapped up in tape for the moment and I might just buy a new pipe (apart from the fact that you probably can’t get them) and then of course its just about impossible to get the pipe on and off the soap tray because there is a large block of concrete in the way which stops you getting both hands to the pipe (one holding the pliers that hold the spring clip open, and the other to move the clip up the pipe).

So yes, this Hoover sucks.

Well I’m still sort of offically employed : my last pay cheque arrives this Friday but I’m laid off.

So I’ve been using an old Toshiba Satellite SA30 laptop running Ubuntu and its OK but its only a 640*480 display and it was getting a bit unreliable. You know when the disk drive starting making twanging noises that its not a good sign.

So I went and bought a new Toshiba Satellite : a L300D-13S. Very nice, 3GB RAM 150GB HD, widescreen, AMD Turion X2.

All well and good but it comes with Vista Home Premium. What a pile of crap.

How can something like that take so long to boot up for Gods Sake. It takes forever to get to the password screen. It drove me mad, and dont even try to work out why applying system patches is rather like watching paint dry underwater.

So I decided to dual boot it with Ubuntu which at least uses the 64bit extensions rather than the 32bit Vista.

So I got that working after fighting with the partitioner and everything was fine. Until I booted back into Vista when the Wireless card didn’t work. Couldn’t get it working so I guessed I’d somehow screwed things up. Rebuilt it using the recovery DVDs which I’d made. Wireless came back for a bit then stopped again.

So I go round and round in circles. Ubuntu works fine on the Wireless. Vista works once then craps out on me each time.

So I dig round and what do I find. Its nothing I’ve done wrong. Its Vista being a total pile of shite.

I used WEP encryption with a 128 bit key on the home wireless. OK I know its crap but its better than nothing and the old 11b PCMCIA card in the SA30 didn’t like WPA.

Of course some moron at Microsoft screwed the WEP encryption on Vista and it looks like it just doesn’t work with 128 bit keys and truncates them at 64 bits. I did seem some advice that says “Upgrade to a Vista compatible wireless router”. I’m sorry? I end up buying a machine with an O/S that I have no choice over and now I’m told to upgrade my router to something that works with Vista because someone somewhere didn’t code something properly.

So I switch everything over to WPA and accept that I’ll have to use a cable to connect the old SA30 to get stuff off it.

Everything is fine until I really push the new laptop which then gets DNS failures and the only fix seems to be to restart the Wireless Access Point. So I drop back to WEP and it seems to be OK but of course Vista wont play. Then I manage to get the same problems under WEP. So I do some digging round and find that my new laptop is running IPV6 which seems to cause problems with the router.

So I turn off IPV6 on Ubuntu and its OK now so tomorrow I’ll put everything back on WPA and see if it goes wrong again.

OK so the Ubuntu stuff is not good – quite why it comes with IPV6 turned on by default I do not know but I’m sure it will be fixed soon. The router is old and I guess it can be excused not working very well. What is totally wrong is the fact that Microsoft can’t cope with WEP using 128 bit keys on Vista. OK I know WEP is broken  but that is NOT the point. WEP is a standard and once again Microsoft have decided that that they know better.