Wow.

100 people. One hundred people. Every one of them has parted with money on the promise that by the end of the year I’ll deliver an e-book to them about digital literacies.

They’ve bought in to v0.1 which consists of little more than an explanation of the project. It’s all part of the OpenBeta publishing model explained here.

What are ‘digital literacies’? Why are they important? How can I develop them both personally and in other people? These are some of the questions that ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies by Doug Belshaw seeks to address.

I’m going to be working on finishing v0.2 over Easter weekend. So if you were thinking of buying into it, better be quick before the price doubles!

More here: http://dougbelshaw.com/ebooks/digilit

My first draft of these revisions is now available (along with the rest of my doctoral thesis) at neverendingthesis.com.

I have until April 9th to submit these revisions, then I should graduate in the summer!

1. The survey is now closed. Thank you very much to those who took time to give me some valuable feedback!

2. We have three winners of physical copies of Best of Belshaw 2011 randomly drawn from those leaving their name and email address. Congratulations Melanie Knight, Katie Hassman and Lesley Gourlay. Witness the process of randomly choosing here.

3. Interestingly, despite their having ceased over a year ago, re-introducing my Things I Learned This Week posts featured heavily in the question about how I could improve this blog. I’m still mulling over what to do about this.

Thanks again to those who took part. It’s given me much to smile about and lots to reflect upon. I’ll have an anonymised breakdown of results in a post next week. First I need to crunch the numbers and produce some pretty charts…

Now it looks like this (click to enlarge):

Why?

1. More information
2. Better user experience
3. It was time to tinker

Continuities: things that have stayed the same

• Reasonably similar colour scheme
• Prominent links to social media profiles
• Obvious links to RSS and About page for new visitors
• Links to related posts
• Evernote and Instapaper integration

Innovations: things that have changed:

• New name for blog, to enable guest posts improve identity
• Photos of real Doug, not just social media avatar
• Use of @font-face web font (Orbitron from The League of Moveable Type)
• Change of body font from Georgia to Arial (it’s easier to read online)
• Recent comments in sidebar
• Links to e-books
• Better use of footer

You like? Wondering why Synechism?

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to upgrade the firmware on my Nokia N95 after I’d read lots of blog posts saying how wonderful the new version was. In fact, some said it was like having a new phone! Unfortunately, I managed to re-install the same firmware over the top of my existing one and lose all of my contacts and settings in the process!

The problem was that the Nokia Software Updater reads the product code in your phone. Mine is an Orange handset and they have not done the testing for this particular firmware release yet. In other countries they’re using it fine. Therefore if you fool the updater into thinking it’s a SIM-free model you’ll be able to do the update (product code: 0536062). That’s what I did and what I’m going to show you how to do below…

Before I continue: a disclaimer: this is not supported by Nokia or by your service provider. The following procedure is undertaken entirely at your own risk and I take no responsibility if your phone ends up as a rather expensive doorstop. You might want to read this guy’s experience before proceeding…

The firmware upgrade procedure

1. Backup all your contacts, etc. by using the Nokia PC Suite Backup feature (Nokia Content Copier). I always like to have double-backups (especially since last time!) so backup your contacts to memory card using your phone as well.

2. Download and install the free Nemesis Service Suite (5MB download) . Keep pressing next and accept the default installation (Virtual USB mode)

3. Connect your fully-charged Nokia N95 via USB cable to your computer. Run Nemesis Service Suite and click on the magnifying glass at the top-right of the screen. This will search for connected devices.

4. Click on the Phone Info icon to bring up details about your connected N95. If it comes up with ‘error’ then try closing Nokia PC Suite, unplugging and re-plugging the cable, etc.

***Make sure you’ve backed up your stuff!***

5. Click on the Read icon on the right-hand side of the screen to bring up details about the firmware on your N95. Press the radio button next to Product Code and change the numbers in the box to 0536062. Press the Write button.

6. To check that you have changed the product code successfully, disconnect your N95, reconnect it and then go through steps 3 and 4 again. You should see 0536062 in the box where you changed it.

7. You now need the Nokia Software Updater. Get there by opening Nokia PC Suite and clicking on the bottom right-hand button:

***Make sure your phone is fully charged!***

8. The Nokia Software Updater should tell you that there are new updates for you to download. When you press Next, will begin the process of downloading and installing those updates.

9. Depending on the speed of your broadband connection, it will take around 10-15 minutes to download and install. Don’t touch the phone whilst it’s updating!

10. When it’s finished updating, your phone will restart and a message will appear on your computer. You will need to unplug and then re-plug your N95 into your computer. A message should come up when you try to connect saying that PC Suite is not installed on the N95. Follow the instructions to install it.

11. To get your phone back to how it was (contacts, etc.) simply use the backup program within Nokia PC Suite you used in step 1!

Many thanks to Dario Soltani at SimplySymbian for this blog post which helped a lot!

A note: don’t try to downgrade your firmware. You’ll brick your phone.

Photo credit: by khedara @ Flickr

Hannah’s laptop was running Windows XP and I had a spare copy of Windows Vista Ultimate lying around (a legitimate version, thank you very much!) so I decided to install it. Unfortunately, unlike the wonderful easy-to-use world of the Mac, things weren’t exactly straightforward on her Lenovo 3000 N100. So this post is to document what worked for those in the same boat.

One would think that installing the System Update software from Lenovo would do the trick, but oh no… After downloading c.500MB and restarting, the hard disk started churning away and the wireless LAN card wasn’t recognised. And the sound still didn’t work! So a quick System Restore later and a return to the Lenovo support website beckoned.

It turns out the files you need to download are:

• SoundMAX audio driver
• Broadcom Bluetooth EDR driver
• Fingerprint reader driver
• Inbuilt webcam driver

It’s still not plain sailing, though. You have to persuade Windows that you do actually know the best driver to install thank-you-very-much by going to Device Manager, right-clicking on the device you want to update the driver for, and selecting the option to update the driver. Navigate to the place where the files you downloaded have been extracted, and Windows should install the correct driver. I can’t guarantee this, however – it’s a bit hit-and-miss!

If, like me, ‘tapping’ (using the trackpad as a mouse button) drives you insane, you need to download the Synaptics driver which will enable you disable this ‘feature’. Simply go to the Mouse settings in the Control Panel, then the Synaptics tab, click on the ‘Settings’ button, then the ‘tapping’ option and untick the box. Quite why you’d want to enable by default something that causes windows pop up seemingly at random and productivity all but impossible is anyone’s guess.

I was actually quite impressed when Vista first loaded up: it’s a lot more polished now than the early beta version I downloaded this time last year. The amount of hassle I’ve had just getting things to work, though, has reminded me why I prefer Macs…