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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, October 07, 2002In the spirit of ask and ye shall receive, Pocket PC Thoughts now has their very own RSS feed. The re-design is sharp, if a little over-commercialized.
Where art thou, Pocket PC Thoughts?
Pocket PC Thoughts has been down since the weekend, their web site promising a new look on Monday morning. I've been silently hoping that they would add an RSS feed too.
Morning is long-gone in the continental US. Where are they? I need my fix.
Tablet PCs - the cool portables that come with a free pen
How do you put people off pen computing? Easy - put out a pen computer whose pen facilities seem more or less glued onto a normal computer, with only perfunctory integration with the rest of the platform. [The Register]
To my mind, the upcoming crop of Tablet PCs are a solution in search of a problem. A regular laptop with a touch-screen doesn't do much for me. They need to be smaller, much smaller.
CDMA, Cell Phone Standards And Who "Wins"
Fubar writes "Former Qualcomm engineer Steven Den Beste, Captain of the USS Clueless outlines why he thinks the US is primed to overtake Europe and Japan as the technological leader in cell phone technology. He argues it stems from open competition and the use of CDMA."
Superior technology is irrelevant. The EU's problem is that they legislated the adoption of a certain technology before it was ready. America's problem is that it takes forever for the market to select a plurality of winners. America rarely sees the benefits of a single dominant standard unless it is legislated (think: color television) or the market is manipulated (think: Microsoft "CPU Tax" OEM contracts).
Toshiba shrinks Bluetooth SDIO Card
A new Bluetooth SDIO Card from Toshiba cranks things down a notch - 9 millimeters in length, and power consumption by 50%, according to Toshiba. Also, it's Bluetooth 1.1 compliant. [infoSync]
Perfect timing from infoSync. I'd seen something about this a week or two ago, but when I had wanted to post about it the other day I could not locate the original source.
Given current trends in the Pocket PC market (few wireless models, many foregoing Compact Flash due to size), why hasn't anyone come out with a dual-SD unit? With Bluetooth SDIO here already, and WiFi SDIO coming, adding another SD slot would provide excellent expansion without adding much bulk or expense.
The probable answer is that Intel's StrongArm / XScale chipsets don't support it. Neither do they support SD's faster transfer modes.
My computer is approaching it's 5th half-birthday. I thought that I would celebrate by swapping my (formerly very expensive) 733MHz PIII for a (now quite cheap) 1.3GHz Celeron... but I discovered that my motherboard's maximum bus multiple is 8x. I knew that I had been overlooking something way back when... I can trade up to an 800MHz Celeron or 1GHz PIII. Not much value for my few upgrade dollars.
Swapping my motherboard out is pretty much unavoidable. I've grown to loath mucking about with computer innards. My previous PC was one of those Frankenstein beasts that had been through five motherboards, four cases, and at least three of everything else... "Never again", I swore.
But here I am, again, needing to create another Frankenstein.
Newz Crawler, Part III: Living with Newz Crawler
On the whole, Newz Crawler is vastly superior to Radio's aggregator. It's fast. It's organized. It's fast. Fast fast fast. I have been using myRadio to impose some order on top of Radio's aggregator. I use Mozilla's "Bookmark this group of tabs" feature to load all of my myRadio pages at once, and walk away for a few minutes while it churns...
Speed is good.
I also like that it allows me to quickly see which feeds have updated. Sometimes I'll do a scan, see that none of my important feeds have updated, and move on to doing something else...
I'll probably register it once my trial expires, in spite of my aversion to nag-ware.
What I don't like:
- Sometimes it marks unchanged items as unread. Two of my feeds consistently display all items as unread.
- Weblog client encodes quotes, breaking all hyperlinks. I fired up tcpTrace and compared against Pocket Blog just to be sure that this wasn't an issue with Radio.
- Weblog client doesn't support the MetaWeblog API. No titles, no categories, and don't even think about liveTopics.
- Weblog client doesn't have spell-check. It is so easy to integrate Word's spell-checker, and there are so many inexpensive ActiveX/COM spell-checkers, that it's almost inexcusable not to offer that functionality.
