Gamers at the PC Gamerz gaming centre in Hawaii were robbed by some idiots. Sadly, despite the apparently evil and sociopathic nature of gaming presented in mainstream media, no-one did anything to stop them… until they tried taking someone’s DS.

The owner of said DS decided to fight back, which prompted everyone else to wake up and attack the robbers. The robbers have since been arrested, and the world is safe again, thanks to the Nintendo DS.

Full story version is available at KHON2, if anyone wants to read about gamers getting good press. They’ve also got some of the security camera footage, and there are some pretty good blows in there.

[KHON2]

It’s not often that Tesco’s advertising makes me want to say good things, let alone Tesco warranting a blog post on a tech site, but they’ve done it.

In this advert, Tesco Mobile manages to pastiche the generic empowerment and “blue sky thinking” that you get in the average mobile phone adverts and give a basic message at the end…

The fiasco with the interfering granny that aired for far too long is forgiven, but it does raise the question as to why the UK mobile phone industry continues to batter us with “inspirational” claptrap in order to hawk phones.

And yes, I’m ignoring the advert’s focus on 12 month adverts instead of the 18 or 24 months you get with most other suppliers if you want a phone, because we all know what the answer to that would be…

As someone that really should be on the cutting edge of technology, it seems strange, but after a long and painful battle with my conscience, I have something to admit.

It’s taken me a while, but I am now a user of Twitter.

I know, I’m late to the party again, but hear me out.
When this microblogging thing came out, I just couldn’t understand the appeal of it at all. Why go from long and mostly informative communications, to short and extremely to the point posts with little or no detail added to make it interesting?
Cue attempting to use Pownce (I’m a closet Kevin Rose fan, sorrry). Unforunately the fairly limiting client given for usage didn’t help things along. There was little in alternative client development, so an Adobe Air client was what I had to put up with. And I just didn’t post much in that time.
Now, Pownce is in the coffin and lies in the cemetry after the project got wound up, and Twitter is the all-singing, all-dancing media darling being used by everyone, their zombie pets and Oprah.

I have already opened an account, and in the process have started to slowly “follow” people. Such as Stephen Fry, Kevin Rose, Brian Brushwood and, amazingly, Paul Daniels.

Over time I hope to be able to learn how to effectively use Twitter in a more full capacity than I am right now, maybe even by using my phone instead of waiting until I get to a PC, but for the moment would you mind Following Me?

Every once in a while, your mobile phone may stop making and receiving calls and texts. This happens to be the most common technical issue with handsets where I work, and stems from the fact that the phone simply stops updating on the phone network. Most handsets do this every few hours and can miss out on updates for a long time before it starts to affect the service. Effectively, the network eventually believes that the handset is not contactable, and therefore the problems start.

Sorting this out is pretty simple, so in an effort to save you money and aggravation on support calls (and to give me fewer repeat calls to deal with), here’s a short list of things before resorting to shouting down another phone.

Phone Kickstart
Turn off your phone, remove the back cover and remove the battery. Carefully, take the sim card out (It may come out easily, or it may be in some sort of mechanism, so if in doubt try and check your phone manual on how to do this). Put the battery back in WITHOUT the sim card, and turn it back on. The phone should complain about there not being a sim available. Don’t worry about this. After it’s been on and recognised the fact there’s no sim, turn it off again, put the sim back in (it might be a good idea to check that all of the contacts inside the phone and on the sim are clean and are touching each other properly) and put the battery in afterwards. Turn it on and see if you can call or text.

Manual Roam
If the above fails, go into the network settings and look for something that resembles Network Selection (your manual will help here again). It will probably be set to Automatic. Set it to Manual, and it will start scanning for what network carriers it can pick up. When the list appears, select any network but NOT the one you currently use. It’ll try and connect to that network, but it will probably fail. Even if it succeeds, change it back to your home network and set network selection back to Automatic.
Test again to see if it can call and text.

Sim Kickstart
If THAT fails, try and get hold of another handset from a friend that will accept sims from the home network that you use. Put the sim into that handset temporarily, turn it on, and then after it’s detected the network, turn it off and put the sim back into your own handset. Yet again test to see if it’s working now.

If it still fails, then feel free to call the network to see what it could be. It may well still be your handset, or it could be something network related that is outside of your control.