Spodtronic is an excellent application for listening to Internet radio streams and podcasts from around the world. The graphical interface is easy-to-use (a la Widsets) and the performance is snappy on my E61. The selection of stations is good enough for me (DI.FM) and the podcasts are a nice bonus. All this wrapped into a neat little package at a good price - free.

Unfortunately there are a few shortcomings as a post on Symbian-Guru points out and one of them went unnoticed: Spodtronic keeps an eye on your mobile minutes and decides when you should stop listening.

As I was writing this post Spodtronic was updated (from 2.1 to 2.1.0??) so some of the following issues might have been addressed.

Minute Minder

Spodtronic keeps a tab on the time you’ve been listening to avoid racking up a huge mobile bill for Internet data charges. Unfortunately there is no way to turn off (or change) the 30 minute timer. European users may not have unlimited data plans but we do in the U.S. and I want to use mine before T-Mobile changes their mind. (Bummer…the update hasn’t changed this.)

Wi-Fi Broken

It won’t work over my E61’s wi-fi connection. I can choose a wireless access point but it reports “error 0″ when trying to connect. This appears fixed in the latest release.

Screen Saver Issues

The phone’s screen saver is disabled while listening to Internet radio but isn’t for a podcast. The podcast will abruptly stop when the screen saver kicks in (1 minute for me). This makes one of the best features of Spodtronic unusable. This must be an E61 issue because there’s no way Spodtronic could win a Best of Show award for an obvious flaw.

Other Bugs Remain

The backlight still remains on for streaming music and it won’t play in the background. The folks at Spodtronic are listening because they replied to an e-mail I sent them about adding podcasts so send in your bug reports.

Today marks the passing of my first Apple certification exam. I’ve gone the Novell and Microsoft routes in the past and witnessed how the tests have evolved. What have I learned?

Back in the day Novell used “adaptive” tests where the more questions you answered correctly the fewer asked. In contrast, if you answered incorrectly the next question was easier and you needed to answer more of them. It was a fine day when I’d walk out with a passing grade from 12 questions.

Eventually people realized that rote memorization of the study guide was enough to pass so Microsoft upped the ante. They changed the question methodology to require first-hand knowledge of the software. Knowing the book inside and out meant nothing to solve the word problems thrown at you. Fortunately, most of Microsoft’s questions were “industry accurate” meaning they weren’t based on “how Microsoft (but no one else) does it.”

Apple has taken the middle-ground. The tests aren’t adaptive and there are no complex word problems. Can you read a study guide from PeachPit Press and pass? No. The study guide didn’t cover some of the questions asked in my exam making memorization pointless. However, a balance of hands-on experience and book-reading should get you a passing grade. Hint: whatever topic you feel weak in, get your hands dirty using it on the Mac before taking the test.

Today’s test was in the Technician track and my direction from here is Pro certification. It’ll be interesting to see how those tests differ.

Awhile back I was trying to use Gizmo Project on my E61 (v3 firmware) with limited success due to calls dropping the more I used it. Not giving up I sent a support ticket to Gizmo and after a lengthy delay (almost 30 days) I was given settings to try. This is probably the same set as described in Gizmo’s forums but, for some reason, this worked compared to their Symbian-native install wizard (and previous manual configuration attempts). View the settings after the jump.

Gizmo’s call quality is very random (some good, some awful) but the biggest remaining issue is stability. The E61 gets very unhappy if the wi-fi signal is interrupted but the access point is still available. The phone gets sluggish as if it doesn’t know the connection was interrupted and keeps trying (in the background) to reconnect and never gracefully terminates. Restarting resolves the issue.

If the wi-fi access point becomes unavailable (i.e.: leaving the house) the sluggishness doesn’t occur, however the Internet Telephone icon isn’t always removed from the Standby screen.

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Wow, fanboys everywhere have been screaming bloody murder for the fiasco known as the Phase 1 Beta Code Email Disaster. Bungie/Microsoft failed to issue the beta codes to those of us lucky enough to win a free code back in January. They claimed email issues (and client/ISP spam filtering) but put it on the back-burner to fix Crackdown beta code problems.

When they got back to the Phase 1 peeps, one generous soul at Bungie named SketchFactor started issuing codes by hand until a resolution was found. He finally went home for the evening and the following day found Bungie blaming Microsoft. Calls to Xbox support put the onice on Bungie and Bungie’s site claimed that all codes were emailed and that was it. No code, check your spam filter.

Ha! I use a semi-dedicated email server so there’s no reason mine didn’t come except the fact someone at Bungie/Microsoft goofed and it took a long while to sort it out. Perhaps it was just an email server issue (undoubtedly on a Windows box) but no details have surfaced (yet).

In any event, it’s a happy day because I just got my code. Play on Spartan, play on.

Web badges…they’re everywhere. It’s nice to see a consistently sized graphic image replace boring text links although they can become like those super-annoying animated GIFs when overused.

In any event, I couldn’t find a scuba diving logbook badge so I created one with images borrowed from Google Images, Photoshop, and Brilliant Button Maker. Download, use, enjoy.