Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘broken’

My Google Nexus One died – or the perils of very early adoption

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

When I went to California last I was lucky enough to meet some friends from Google for lunch at their office and as a surprise on the way out I got a Nexus One as a present:

Nexus One - thanks Google! by  you.

I loved it immediately. It is a very slick phone with a real “developer touch”. This means:

  • To get data on or off it I connect it to a USB port and copy the stuff – no need to fire up some “Media Explorer” or iTunes.
  • The handling was wonderful – even though I never had a touch phone before I had no issues with it at all (except when I tried to type German SMS with the English dictionary on)
  • The geolocation stuff, Google Goggles, Google Maps, Point by Point navigation and all the other stuff that only runs on this platform beat the pants off the iPhone (at least for me)
  • The camera is amazing and the display is crisp as can be

That is until yesterday night. When I gave the phone to someone at the Future of Web Design after party to have a look at it he dropped it. I didn’t check and just pocketed it and this morning I found the display to look like this:

Broken Nexus One by  you.

It has a bit of a Eastman Colour vibe to it but makes it impossible to use. Funnily enough the touch stuff still works perfectly but outside of artificial light you cannot see anything on it any longer.

Now I am busted:

  • Where can I get a free Nexus One repaired in the UK? This is a no contract phone.
  • What can I do about my Jewels and Layar addiction?

It is a great example how being a very, very early adopter can bite you in the bum if something as simple as gravity messes with you :(.

YouTube now offers deep links to timestamps (via URI hash)

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

I was very happy this morning to see that YouTube now features the option to jump to a certain time in the video directly by adding a timestamp hash to the URL. For example:

They also automatically create links from comments that mention timestamps. This all is something that I’ve been hacking into YouTube with the YouTube captioner and other people building Splicd.

I guess the next natural step would be to show the timestamped comments as annotations just like Viddler does it.

A spot of rain on the parade is that the geo IP redirect in YouTube breaks timestamped links as you get sent from www. to uk. (for example here in the UK as found by Simon Willison). This should be easy to fix though, please?