Eventually sold the iPhone on eBay for a reasonable price. The winner wanted to pick up the iPhone in person, no doubt to check the condition etc. Anyway he was happy.

The previous sale where the purchaser, who on receipt of the iPhone, demanded a $70 refund, was cancelled by myself and I’ve just noticed that eBay/Paypal have billed me 10% of the orginal selling price. When I queried it via email they just pointed me at the terms and conditions. I responded that they hadn’t answered my original email question and again they responded by pointing at their T’s & C’s. I then noticed that they also charged me a further $100 for god knows what else. The only other item I’ve sold on eBay was a 160gb iPod, which sold for $200. No doubt their justification for taking half the sale money is buried in their T’s & C’s. eBay/Payapl are definitely not to be trusted when selling stuff. In fact I’d go so far as to say that Paypal, who has control over my account, is acting just like any other bank, usual trick and trap stuff.

I was trying to measure a room with a laser measure, where you point the laser beam at the other end of the room and the display shows the distance away the wall is. I tried it a few times, with a far wall and all I got were wrong figures. So I tried switching from centimetres to feet and when pointed it at a wall 20 feet away it said it was about 4 feet away. Tried it with much closer walls or objects and it did seem to display correct distances. Tried with longer distances and again it was out by a magnitude. More digital junk that hasn’t been tested very well.

I got some Altec Lansing stereo Bluetooth headphones from the Apple Store the other day and they worked. When I originally asked about them in the store I was, as usual, shown Bluetooth headsets, which were for phone usage only, but when I persevered with someone slightly more senior he did show me those that I eventually bought. When I asked did they actually pair with an iPhone and playback stereo he said they had just come in and no one had bought any yet. Turned out that pairing was no problem, though many people would get confused by how to do it as it is a bit clunky. You have no idea whether the headphones are switched on or off as there is no on light displayed, I assume to preserve battery life. You actually have to press the on/off button for 4 seconds to see whether it switches itself on – blue light is momentarily lit, or it switches itself off – red light is momentarily lit. If you do have to switch it on then you need to connect to it from the iPhone from the Bluetooth software settings and then it’ll play back OK. In fact it plays back really well, but the on/off & connect & pair processes are messy.

Quote from Field Of Dreams “If you build it…they will come”
Moto for new Internet startups “Quick, they’re coming. Build something”.

Got an FM transmitter for the iPod from a filling station yesterday. Much larger than the iTrip and it connects via the headphone socket so that I can still charge the iPod when driving.

Dunno how many watts its chucking out but it’s gotta be more than the iTrip as it has a supposed range of up to 30 feet and the iPod plays back much louder. This thing cannot be legal.

Lord knows how much aggravation you could create with the thing if you were stuck in a traffic jam and you could tune it to one of the popular BBC radio station frequencies.

It runs on batteries or from the car lighter socket and has a switch on the front to change to one of the four frequencies it has been hard wired to use.

Tested it again at home on the stereo and it was much louder there too. But when using it this morning the sound quality was very distorted. Switched back to the iTrip and the sound was fine.

Virtually a no-name brand and it was only £6.99 which is about 25% of the cost of the iTrip. Will continue to check this distortion problem before probably chucking it in the ‘cheap and not tested very well junk’ pile, along with an unpowered USB desktop hub, a DAB radio, a couple of wireless mice and a bluetooth dongle that had the Chinese instructions translated into English so hellishly there was never any chance of getting that to work.

Quote of the day

‘It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious’ Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)