Peugeot 207 S2000 Rally Car Interior in Czech Republic

And here’s the whole Hroch Rally Team

Hroch Rally Team in Czech Republic

Here’s the Czech version of the video.

What is the cause all about? A couple of days ago, I discovered a strange thing on my May 2010 cell phone bill from the Czech T-Mobile. I’ve found they charged me for 800CZK for data (approximately $40) plus VAT. The actual amount they were supposed to charge me was 200CZK (approximately $10). Four times less! The data plan I’m using is called Surf&Mail and it’s not unlimited and FUP of the crappy 200MBs per month is applied. No complaints about the FUP, though, it’s fair for this price. At least when you compare it to the also crappy competition here in Czech. Whatever. What is not fair is that they started charging me 800 instead of 200. That is after 9 years of being their customer and after 18 months of using the data tariff with my iPhone and happily paying 200.

The thing is…. T-Mobile in Czech Republic thinks they can charge me whatever they want. They sold me the iPhone 3G back in 2008 with the data plan but since then they’ve started hating the iPhones probably. They’ve probably discovered that the data plans they were selling in 2008 cost them a lot of money so they did the sneakiest thing you could imagine. They just started to charge me more! I filed a complaint of course demanding my money back, but they just replied with a letter that everything is fine and that they can charge me this because the “not every type of traffic is included in the data plan”. What?? They were even unable to tell me what kind of apps I can and can’t use on my iPhone. They suggested me to turn off the internet. Which I did, having no other choice. My contract expires in 3 months and I’m currently taking steps to terminate it prematurely – due to change of terms – and I’ve also filled a complaint at some authorities and regulators about false advertising.

However, guess what? I’m not gonna stop here. I’m gonna fight back. And I’ve created this video to promote my new website and a page on Facebook where people who suffer the same can gather and coordinate next steps. My goal is not only to receive my money back but to actually make T-Mobile Czech to return the money to all people who’ve experienced the same and to change the data plan they are offering so that the 200CZK is the actual maximum amount paid by the customer. Anyway, here’s the box where you can see the current amount of fans on my page. The website’s address is 200misto800.cz (in Czech Only).

Malostranska Mostecka Gate

Old-New Synagogue in Prague

Krizovnicke Square in Prague

"Obora" Lookout Tower in Prague Zoo

View a virtual tour of Prague

Servers in Tent 2 (Czech Beer Festival 2010) in Czech Republic

Beer Taps in Tent 3 (Czech Beer Festival 2010) in Czech Republic

Click to open a virtual tour of the Czech Beer Festival.

source:BBC

Therefore, I’ve put an oil blob over my avatar icons on twitter and facebook (see below). I hope the spill will end soon, that the impact will be minimal and that we humans learn from the experience so it never happens again. If you feel the same and if the fate of wildlife, environment and our planet is a concern to you, just change your avatar icon the way I did and spread the word.

If you’ve got a similar similar activity or page let me know and might link it from here.

My facebook icon:

Before

After

My twitter icon:

Before

After

Make your own:

PNG (click on image to download)

Photoshop Version (click on image to download)

You can read the whole guide how to build it and more screenshots in the author’s article: The fisheye tin cam

The fisheye tin cam sample images

The fisheye tin cam lens

(I found this article originally at PetaPixel, thanks!)

This accomodation is called Sani Top Challet, and inside there is actually the highest pub in Africa, or so they claim. The altitude is 2865m above sea level here. To the left of the building you can see the Lesotho border post (75% of tourists that come to Lesotho use this gate to enter the country).

Sani Top Chalet in South Africa

This was absolutely pleasant experience. Look at the landscape around … one of the best places in the world I’ve seen for riding a horse. The pano was taken during a short break we took to enjoy the landscape around. Make sure you go fullscreen…

Khotso Horse Ride Break in South Africa

a local football game in Himeville

Local Football Game in Himeville in South Africa

Sani Pass (a picturesque valley that stretches between Republic of South Africa and Lesotho)

Sani Pass in South Africa

Thousands of Amur Falcons are ready to leave South Africa where they spend south african winter

Driving in a 4×4 car down through a beautiful landscape of Cobham Nature Reserve around Sani Pass Road which connects Lesotho and South African border post.

Flaw 1: Search Button Too Small

Let me state beforehand that I’m going to completely ignore features that the iPhone should or should not have. Features like resolution of the display, number of megapixels in the camera, the amount of ram, processor speed, gps sensitivity, blah blah blah etc. I’m also going to totally avoid talking about poorly integrated or implemented features such as the maps that should do this and that, or that is should be possible to send more than 5 images in an email, etc. I’m sure that there are thousands of articles written about iPhone features – by far more experienced mobile phone users and reviewers than I am. What I do want to write about, though, is a set of ten poor user interface implementation details and the crippled user experience they cause.

The annoying things I’m going to describe here stayed exactly the same for the whole time I’ve had an iphone since the fall 2008 and they were never improved. It means that even the ever-so-great Apple is perfectly capable making mistakes in their design and not fixing them for a very long time. There’s no particular order in this list.

Flaw 1: The Tiny Search Button in Contacts

(see the image above) The magnifier search button in contacts is simply too small. The search function is the single most important functionality in contacts and yet it has so little button. If you are like me, you’ve mistakenly clicked the larger plus button instead when trying to search for somebody. So annoying. The workaround is to click on the letter F (for example) and drag your finger up until the search field appears. The proper way to implement this would be to add the search button instead the “+” add button and move the add functionality somewhere else (I admit I don’t know where) or to make the search button more prominent.

Flaw 2: Passcode “7″ next to the emergency button

There is so much space on the screen and yet the iPhone has to have the number “7″ in the passcode unlock screen right next to the emergency call button. Not that the buttons are small but mistakes do happen and opening the emergency call screen when you want to unlock the phone can be annoying. Seriously, how many people out there have set their passcode to contain number 7? Unless you are really paranoid and you really want to check the emergency call screen time to time to make sure it still works you probably want to avoid having number 7 in your passcode. This is a screen that you see a many times a day and you probably don’t pay so much attention to it as to other normal screens, that’s why these buttons shouldn’t be so close together. Look at the keypad screen in the phone menu for example. The buttons are much bigger there, using much more of the screen.

Flaw 3: Why Do I Have To Click on Edit to Delete a Message?

In text message list, why does Edit only allow you to delete a message thread? Shouldn’t the button be called Delete instead?

Flaw 4: Missing Cancel in Delete Messages Screen

OK, I’m in the message deleting mode now after clicking on “Edit” – see previous flaw. What if I don’t want to delete anything? What if I’m too scared that I clicked on something wrong? I mean, these do not enter signs next to all my messages don’t look any good. Will all my messages be lost now? I want to click on a cancel button to get away from this scary screen! Instead, my iPhone is giving my only a Done button, which could easily mean “ok, delete all messages marked with the do not enter sign”. I’m an experienced user of course and I know that I would have to click on the do not enter sign to actually enable the delete button. An iphone newbie, however, who gets to this screen for the first time, will be very worried. This aspect of the user interface is not very intuitive and therefore is very wrong. The Done button should be called Cancel or Back initially and should change to Done only after you delete a message.

Flaw 5: Another Missing Cancel Button and a Forward Hack

This again has something to do with a wrongly named “Edit” button in a text message conversation view. When you click on the Edit button, which in fact should be called Delete button, you get to this screen. Now you can mark your messages to be deleted or – surprise surprise – forward them to somebody. The forward functionality is clearly an add-on hack that shouldn’t be in this screen. It seems to me that the iphone user interface designers didn’t know where to add the forward button so they decided to add it to the delete screen, which is kind of dangerous. Additionally, this screen once again misses the cancel (or Back) button that would clearly indicate that you haven’t deleted anything. The Clear All button at the place of the usual place for a back button is also not very nice to the user.

Flaw 6: The One Click Voicemail

Voicemail is not very popular here in Europe and having a voicemail button that dials my non-existing voicemail account and costing me money for doing nothing is simply annoying. Please allow me to disable the button in settings!

Flaw 7: Ability to Write a Text Message in Bed

This is what I see when I try to send a message when I laying in bed. Seriously. Not that I don’t appreciate iphone’s ability to react to it’s orientation and switch between normal and landscape keyboard. It surely is useful for commercials. However, as you can see it’s very hard to write a text message when you see this! There’s obviously not an easy solution for this. May be a rotate screen button? I don’t know. What I know is that I have to hold my phone above my head to be able to write messages in bed which makes my hand hurt after a while. It would be much more comfortable if I could rest my hand on the pillow. Don’t Apple iphone designers use beds?

Flaw 8: Weekly View In Calendar

This is not an unser interface flaw really but a missing feature maybe. To be honest I don’t use the Day view much either because it’s pretty much useless on the iphone. Therefore instead of adding the week view the day view could be improved somehow. The issue is that you can’t really see the whole day in the day view which makes the day view unreliable. It’s even missing markers to show there is something above or below the current view in the day you are viewing. Therefore I use the List view instead which gives me the comfort of making sure I’m not missing an event.

Flaw 9: Which Number Did Just Call Me?

If you have two or more numbers stored for a contact and they call you from one of them, there’s no way of knowing from which of the two numbers they just called you from. This is very unfortunate if you need to call them back and you don’t know which of the two numbers to use, isn’t it? What if you need to know if they called from the office or from their cell phone? It rarely happens but when it does, there’s no way of knowing.

Flaw 10: Silent + Vibrate + Ring

This is the only user interface flaw in this article that cannot be fixed using a software update. Or can it? I’m talking about the 3rd missing sound mode for the iphone that would allow me something between total silence and a normal mode. Sure, I can go to settings and turn the vibration on or off for the silent mode but that’s not something I want to do when I want to switch to the mode. What I would really want is three modes: Total silence (cinema, really important meetings, at night, etc.), Vibrations (meetings, office, quiet places, etc.), Sound on (all other cases). May be the iphone could ask me if I want to switch to total silence or vibrations when activating the silent mode? Or may be this option could be turned on in settings?

What are your iphone annoyances?

Here’s what I did:
- Take the pictures, there are two things that needs to be considered when taking pictures for automatic panos
- 1. Leveling: The horizon needs to be leveled as precise as possible because the automatic software cannot determine the correct leveling for you
- 2. Precission: The pano head parallax point needs to be precisely calibrated, any misaligned is more visible in auto mode
- Load the pictures into a computer
- Adjust chromatic aberation and via a predefined filter plus apply any other filter you wish
- Export them as tiffs
- Load them in PtGui and let them auto-stitch, there is one important point:
- 1. Lens settings in PtGui: I don’t have the numbers, I’m running completely on auto stitch, that’s why I need even better precision when taking panos
- Save the result as jpeg

That’s it. 30 seconds of manual input plus 2 minutes of my quad-core gaming machine time.

And here’s the result:

Tram 7 in Prague

What do you think? I know the quality could be better, I saved it in a very low resolution to improve load time and like I mentioned above, it would help to have a lens profile set correctly in PtGui and/or calibrate the pano head more precisely.