In my previous blog posting, “No Shuffle for me“, I may have given the impression that I dislike the iPod Nano. This is not true, as I had a Nano before getting an iPhone, and I still have a Nano as a great sidekick to the iPhone. This is especially so during my daily commute. I’ve thought of using the iPhone, but since I drive to work, I need an MP3 Player with tactile controls – it would be very dangerous to have to glance at the screen every time I wanted to pause playback or select another track.

The iPod Nano is perfect for listening in the car. First I had an 8GB second generation iPod Nano. Its only fault was that sometimes when I turned it on for the first time it froze. That was just a minor annoyance, nothing that a reset couldn’t fix. I also never quite figured out how to duplicate it. Sometimes it would happen, other times it wouldn’t – which made it difficult to take it in for exchange.

When the third generation iPod Nano was released, I bought one for a loved one, but my second gen was still working fine, with the occasional hiccup.

But when the fourth generation 16GB iPod Nano was released, it didn’t take long for me to yield to temptation. It does have some cool features, including a built-in accelerometer, so the screen orientation changes just like the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The scroll wheel just felt a bit slippery until I got used to it.

The Sony PlayStation Portable, as most of you may know, is a handheld gaming console with two 333 MHz MIPS32 R4000-based Processors, a Graphics Processing Unit with 2 MB onboard Video RAM running at 166 MHz. Main RAM is 32 MB, with 4 MB embedded DRAM.

Quite impressive specs, unfortunately a bit hobbled (depending where loyalties lie, this could also be called crippled) by reliance on optical disks, called “Universal Media Discs”, on which games, video (movies) and firmware updates are distributed. These are slower than the game cartridges used in the  Nintendo DS Lite, the Sony PSP’s main competitor.

Since this is about the latest iteration of the Sony PSP, I won’t go into the pros and cons of the Nintendo DS Lite versus the Sony PSP. I have played both handheld gaming consoles, and they each have  their good points.

The latest version of the Sony PlayStation Portable is called the PSP 3000. It adds built-in Skype with onboard microphone, and an improved screen which had several issues (see this article at CNET.COM).

The previous version, the PSP 2000, otherwise known as the PSP Slim, was 33% lighter and 19% thinner than the original PSP. The redesign also doubles the onboard RAM from 32 MB to 64 MB.

A long weekend, a some time to spend on a pet project. Since the cat is part of the family, and the aquarium is no more, I had two choices left. Actually more, but I’d narrowed it down to something constructive. Setting up a recently acquired Vista laptop was an option. Yes, I remember what I have been saying about Vista, but this Vista laptop (something like one of these Lenovo R61 Thinkpads) was a bargain which I had to take as is or not at all. With another setup being required if I did it now, that ruled it out.

The second option was to try to re-flash my Neo FreeRunner. Okay, for those readers who are wondering do the what? The Neo FreeRunner is smartphone from OpenMoko. It is not just any smartphone, but an “Open” smartphone, which, according to ars technica means “completely open in both hardware and software, and is designed to encourage third-party modification and customization.”

Now the Android platform used on Google’s G1 phone is also open, but not that open.

Back to the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner. You won’t find it on Pricegrabber (not yet anyway), because it is not currently a consumer product. OpenMoko says the phone will be ultimately aimed at general consumer use . Right now though it is aimed at developers and power users.

There is no printed documentation for the Neo FreeRunner. There is a whole lot of documentation online in the form of a wiki. It didn’t take me long to found out that to upgrade the firmware I needed a Linux Desktop. So I installed Ubuntu Linux on one of my main machines using Wubi. I was still reading through the wiki to figure out the next step when I ran out of weekend…

About a month ago I made the mistake of leaping onto the cutting edge of firmware updates and almost ended up being left on the bleeding edge. Version 2.2 of the iPhone firmware had just been released, and instead of doing the cautious “wait and see” for a week or two to see if there were any problems, I went blissfully ahead.

Possibly it was the promised Google Street View which caused me to throw caution to the wind. It definitely wasn’t the on the go downloading of podcast episodes, as I have had this feature on the Haier Ibiza Rhapsody for ages. Everything seemed to go well.

The following morning I turned on the iPhone to be greeted by this screen:

Now, I never had a first generation iPhone which could be activated a home, but I do remember that a similar screen was displayed the first time I turned on my iPod Touch. Basically it meant “Synchronize with iTunes before using this device.”  My first was that the firmware upgrade had messed up the iPhone and it would have to be re-activated. Then I took a deep breath and rebooted the iPhone. The following screen was displayed:

I was relieved. This was more familiar territory. The iPhone was working and hadn’t lost any information. The message abut the iPhone being activated was a bit puzzling.

The strange this about this is that I have not seen any mention of it on the forums. There is a possibility that most iPhone owners just never turn their phones off. I do, every night, and it is only when the iPhone has been off for a while that this might happens . This has only happened on a handful of occasions since then, and I can’t seem to duplicate it - which really bothers my logical cause-and-effect computer brain…

I’ve just got back from a much-needed vacation. Prior to leaving,  I had heard the horror stories about iPhone users getting massive bills after accidentally leaving data roaming on while traveling overseas, so I phoned AT&T Customer Support. After all, the cruise we were taking had ports of call mainly in Canada. According to Customer Support, I could make or receive calls on the cruise ship itself, but that would cost me $2.49 per minute. Even if I received a call and didn’t answer it, I would still get charged. The same applied for Visual Voicemail. Onshore in Canada, it would cost less to make a call : 79c a minute, but data roaming was still expensive.

I took my iPhone with me anyway, as it is a cellphone after all. In the packing space allotted for my gadgets I also took a few handheld gaming consoles, including a Sony PSP (an underrated device, according to PC World) and a Nintendo DS. Of course I took my main handheld computer, an aging Palm Tungsten C, as well as its designated replacement.

I really missed having the full functionality of the iPhone. Since most of the cruise was spent out of the US, I didn’t turn it on often, and when I did, data roaming was off, and it was in “flight mode”. Wi-Fi was available in the public lounges of the cruise ship, but that was not cheap either.

The first thing I did after getting back from vacation was to turn on the iPhone with all data services activated.

For those of us who may like the eye candy look of Windows Vista, but who are unwilling to upgrade to Windows Vista, there is an alternative. Stardock Window Blinds. Window Blinds is one of the most popular applications to “skin” or “mod” the Windows Desktop. Window Blinds at it’s simplest provides more Desktop themes for Windows XP and Windows Vista, but goes beyond that.

I’m running the trial version on my main Desktop PC and Windows XP could easily be mistaken for Windows Vista. The Start Button has been replaced by the Windows Logo, and the look of every application has been changed. Window Blinds was around when Windows XP was released, and you could use it to make Windows 98 look like Windows XP. It doesn’t stop there. In “Muchhala’s World” blog, there as a blog entry “Desktop Modding Explained” which covers the different types of Desktop Modding that can be done, with an example in “My Desktop - May 2007“.

Stardock has a number of other programs, including ObjectDock, which adds Mac OS X Dock Bar functionality to Windows.

Stardock’s programs are also mentioned in the book “Career Building Through Skinning and Modding” by Jeri Freedman.

The Dell XPS M1730 Notebook is not quite back to school gear, unless money is really no object, and you don’t mind lugging a 10 pound plus notebook around.

The XPS M1730 is in the Desktop replacement category (7.5 pounds or more). This entertainment and gaming notebook is really well equipped, with an Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X9000 processor running at 2.8GHz, which can be overclocked up to 3.4Ghz (this is according to Dell), 2GB RAM (upgradeable to 4GB), a choice of hard drives: a 400 GB RAID (2 x 200GB) 7200 rpm drive or a 128GB Solid State Drive. The screen is a 17 inch 1920 by 1200 pixel resolution active matrix display with a NVIDIA GeForce 8700MGT PCI Express x16 graphics card with 512MB of graphics memory (these are actually a dual graphics cards in a scalable link interface).

A 2 megapixel webcam with digital microphones is integrated above the screen for those important video conferences, or in-game chats. Keyboard illumination can be turned on for gaming in the dark.

Another great feature is Dell’s MediaDirect software, which allows you to play CDs and DVDs without booting the system.

There is also an optional Blu-Ray disc drive, with a choice of either a reader or a burner.

This was meant to be a feedback blog in which I happily told how successful I was browsing the internet with the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet hooked up to the Nokia E51 smartphone. Fortunately though I was willing to bet on my success I didn’t put any money down. So I guess you could say it “didn’t work as expected”.

I found a blog “Internet Tablet School” which had a tutorial on connecting the Nokia N800 to the internet using a Bluetooth phone. The cellphone must support the the DUN (Dial-Up Networking) Bluetooth profile. They even have an embedded YouTube video showing how it is done, and they manage to succeed! It turns out that you need to switch the cellphone Bluetooth on and then run a search for Bluetooth devices from the Nokia Tablet.

Connecting the N800 to the cellphone went well, so did telling the N800 to use the phone to connect to the internet. When it came to actually opening up a webpage in the browser on the N800, it timed out after a few minutes. After fiddling around with the settings a while, realized that the problem was most likely caused by the way my Nokia E51 was configured to connect to the data network. To fix this would involve deleting a whole lot of settings on the phone and starting again from scratch, something I may try at a later date. Alternatively I could wait for the Nokia N810 with WiMax and for Sprint to roll out WiMax in my area.

Listen to the voice. Not the voice(s) in your head, but the commanding, navigating voice.

I didn’t listen to the voice at first, “Turn left in 200 yards and then bear right“. I knew the way home from work, and wanted to drive my normal route. Eventually the voice was giving the directions I was driving.

It was a totally different matter when we went away for a long weekend to Cape Cod. Then I had no choice but to listen the computerized voice of the GPS, especially after getting lost following a map and some printed directions.

No GPS device is perfect, and it takes a bit of time to get used to the workings and limitations of a device, even one as highly rated as the HP iPaq rx5915 Travel Companion. The HP iPaq rx5915 does not have a text to speech option, which means it does not announce street names. As long as you are paying attention to the screen, you can see the name of the street anyway.

There were a few times when I could have done with a “Where am I?” option to tell me where I was, and not just where I was going.
The Tomtom GO 720 GPS actually has this feature, along with voice-guided turn-by-turn directions and a map-sharing function for the most up-to-date maps.
It doesn’t function as a handheld computer or have Wi-Fi though…

Are you a binary horse — somebody who can look at binary and convert it in your head rather than going to some website that will calculate it for you? If you are, then you need a binary clock, which will keep the connections in your brain snapping whenever you need to know the time.

Each column on the clock represents a different part of the time, with blue LEDs turned on or off to represent a given number. In the picture I’ve provided here, the left-most column represents 1. The next column represents 0. The third column is 4. The fourth column is 8. The fifth column is 3. And the right-most column is 6. Put those numbers together, and you get 10:48:36.

How long did it take you to figure that out? Took me about 10 minutes — using an online binary converter. I’ll never be able to use a clock like this, because it’ll guarantee my late arrival to any appointment in my calendar.

According to the description, you can run it in 12-hour (and look out the window to know which half of the day you’re in) or 24-hour mode.

In idle moments between jobs, I grab a magazine and read an article. Perhaps this little product would be a nice change of pace. Hmm. Or perhaps I could take up Spider Solitaire.