Mike Southby

As a converted Mac user, I no longer use my trusted Lenovo T61p.

The T61p may be a few years old but in my experience it still out performs most, if not all, of the mid-range machines on the market today.  The ‘p’ designation was a very high specification laptop designed as a mobile workstation geared towards serious mobile computing and design work and will frankly, embarrass many of the most up-to-date models; with good all round performance coupled to a quality full HD display, the T61p is truly a great machine.

I wrote a review of the machine a while ago which can be found here for further information.

Specifications are as follows:

Model – Lenovo ThinkPad T61p 6460-8UG
Processor – Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 2.4Ghz with Centrino Pro technology
Memory – 3Gb DDR2 SDRAM PC2-5300-667MHz SO DIMM 200-Pin
Display – 15.4″ Full HD (1920×1200 WUXGA) TFT Active Matrix
Graphics – Nvidia Quatro FX 570M 256Mb PCI Express x16
Battery – 9-Cell Extended (Genuine Lenovo, approximately 6 months old)
Hard Drive – 320Gb 7200rpm SATA
Optical Drive – DVD-Writer DVD+RW
Operating System – Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 32-Bit (installed, licensed and activated but no COA or media supplied)

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like any further information, or head over to the eBay auction directly to place a bid.  I also have available a Lenovo Advanced Dock (for the above) as well as a 19″ Widescreen Lenovo monitor.

It’s taken Google a little while to catch up with Safari to fully support the new full screen features in OS X 10.7 but an update is now available to do just that.  As well as supporting native full screen, the update also brings overlay toolbars to Chrome.  These features are not necessarily new and have been available for some time in the developer releases of Chrome, but of course these were not widely available and were quite unstable for day-to-day use.

To get the update, all you need to do is go to the Chrome menu and select About Google Chrome and then select Update Now, you can also download the update directly from Google servers by following this link.

Finally, after months of waiting Skype have officially released their native application for Android.  The native application is fully featured and offers amongst other things:

• Free Skype-to-Skype calls over both 3G and WiFi.
• Send and recieve instant messages.
• Discounted calls to foreign numbers.

For most, you’ll be able to find the application directly in the market or, you can download by visiting the Skype website directly.  If you are unable to find Skype using either of these methods owing to geo-locking, I have uploaded a repackaged .apk here (just unzip and away you go…).

Unfortunately it’s not all good news.  For such a new application it’s surprising that it does not support the ability to be installed on the SD card under Froyo; the application itself is a rather large 13Mb; however, you are able to overcome this by using a mod such as ‘setInstallLocation’, which will enable you to move the files to the SD card leaving only a 2.1Mb footprint on the internal memory.

For those who are interested, the very latest incarnation (albeit in Beta) of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is now available to download from here.

Review and my thoughts to follow shortly…

A lot of people will be waking up this morning and finding that they are unable to login to Twitter via HTC Peep on their Desires, confusingly your device will report that you have entered an incorrect username or password combination even though you have not made any changes.  The truth is that owing to a behind the scenes change to the Twitter APIs, HTC Peep is no longer compatible and more than likely won’t be for some time.

It’s been common knowledge for some time that Twitter has decided to move away from basic authentication to OAuth for all third party apps; it makes sense that some of the older Twitter clients would be affected by this but you’d have thought HTC would have had the foresight to release an update prior to today, especially given that the switchover date has already been put back previously.  I wonder just how many people will be scratching their heads today trying to figure out why HTC Peep isn’t working, not realising that it’s actually a fundamental problem that they will not be able to resolve, no matter how many times they re-enter their details or reboot their devices.

In honesty HTC Peep is actually a pretty poor client anyway; it does the job if you are after a simple Twitter client but it has been left behind feature wise compared to other apps freely available such as Twidroyd, Seesmic or TweetDeck (though still in Beta, this is by far the best Twitter client around in my opinion, you can download from here).  Of course if you have flashed a custom ROM onto your Desire already chances are you are not using HTC Peep so this will not affect you; certainly if you are using one of the many vanilla ROMs available you’ll probably be sat at home reading this having a little chuckle to yourself.  If not, perhaps this is the excuse you need to delve into custom ROMs and ditch HTC Sense.

Update 02/09/2010 08:30

Here’s an official release from Twitter which I recieved in my inbox overnight; though not effected with the HTC Peep issues myself, frustrating that they only made this public annoucement a full day after the problem manifested itself:

Hi @mikesouthby,

Over the coming weeks, we will be making two important updates that will impact how you interact with Twitter applications. We are sending this notice to all Twitter users to make sure you are aware of these changes.

What are applications?

There are over 250,000 applications built using the Twitter API. To use most applications, you first authorize the application to access your Twitter account, after which you can use it to read and post Tweets, discover new users and more. Applications come in many varieties, including desktop applications like TweetDeck, Seesmic, or EchoFon, websites such as TweetMeme, fflick, or Topsy, or mobile applications such as Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Blackberry, or Foursquare.

Update 1: New authorization rules for applications

Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use “OAuth” to access your Twitter account.

What’s OAuth?

OAuth is a technology that enables applications to access Twitter on your behalf with your approval without asking you directly for your password.

• Desktop and mobile applications may still ask for your password once, but after that request, they are required to use OAuth in order to access your timeline or allow you to tweet.

What does this mean for me?

• Applications are no longer allowed to store your password.
• If you change your password, the applications will continue to work.
• Some applications you have been using may require you to reauthorize them or may stop functioning at the time of this change.
• All applications you have authorized will be listed at http://twitter.com/settings/connections.
• You can revoke access to any application at any time from the list.

Update 2: t.co URL wrapping

In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing, so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant.

You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; we expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

What does this mean for me?

• A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title.
• You will start seeing links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened links and lets you know where each link will take you.
• When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. We hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time.

Thanks for reading this important update. Come and check what’s new at http://twitter.com.

Thanks,
The Twitter Team

It will be interesting to see how long it takes HTC to factor in the new OAuth requirement and release an update; watch this space for news!