It’s been almost two weeks since Samsung sent me a Note 2 to try. I’ve used it as my primary phone since it arrived, and I thought I’d do a quick post about my experiences. In short, owning a 5.5 inch phone is a little like owning a really big car. It’s very comfortable and luxurious when you’re using it, but it’s somewhat impracticle when you’re looking for a place to park.
More Two weeks with Samsung’s Note 2

People here in the Netherlands will often complain about poor 3G data speeds. Twitter is full of people complaining about T-Mobile. Some will suggest Vodafone for better reception, while others agree that KPN has the best network. I simply don’t know. And to my knowledge, no independent studies have been done recently. So maybe it’s time for a community app that measures network performance, and reports back to an independent database?
More Idea: A mobile network performance statistics app?

There’s been a lot of controversy over Apple’s decision to ban Flash (and Java for that matter) from the iPhone since the day it was released. Now, with the iPad about to hit retail, there’s been more debate on whether this was a technical decision or not, and whether it’s a severe limitation for the devices, or a blessing. Being both a Flash developer, an iPhone OS user an open source advocate, I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation.

Before I get started though, let me point out that I’m not a fan of Flash. I think it’s a real shame that there’s no open, official standard that lets web designers do the things Flash can. Adobe has the web in an awkward stranglehold right now, and I’d love to see that change. But the reality is that Flash is an integral part of the web today.
More My thoughts on Flash and the iPad

I changed themes mid December, and according to googlebot’s stats, pages have been taking twice as long to load since then. This got me thinking. What was it I added that caused this? Surely I didn’t make the pages twice as heavy?
More What’s slowing down my blog?

I came across this article on Ars Technica a while ago while looking for ways to improve Flash performance on my two Ubuntu machines. I wanted to see if there was a way to get YouTube clips to play properly. Both my 1 GHz Pentium III and the 1.6 GHz Atom have trouble with Flash videos and especially it seems with Flash’s full screen mode.

Ars tested how much CPU load YouTube caused on some pretty interesting machines.
More What’s up with Linux and Mac Flash performance?

I haven’t been doing much Flash lately, but each time I needed to edit older projects I noticed how slow the Actionscript editor was since I moved to Vista. It was so sluggish I ended up making all sorts of typos. I googled for a fix, and eventually found one here.

Setting Flash.exe’s compatibility mode to “Windows XP” will restore the editor to its former speedy self. What a relief. Let’s hope this gets fixed altogether in future versions…