I am most definitely going to try to replace my D410 at the office with one of these – if it is anything like my One, it is the damn near perfect device to run Citrix on.

Interesting strategy for customer retention.

Substantiated or not, I’m betting these two rumors are interesting enough to be re-posted and magnified beyond any recognition by the end of the week.

Interesting, in the sense that it means that I need to take a long, hard look at MobileMe traffic and figure out how some stuff is transferred (namely contacts and portions of interaction with webmail, since e-mail address harvesting might still be a risk). But even if they’re encrypting some of the data, it doesn’t let iDisk off the hook. Update: it seems I needn’t bother. There are plenty of people out there willing to investigate this, and debunk any pseudo-security claims.

You can tell that Summer is preparing to leave, and with my new team cut down to two (myself plus another, who should be returning from vacation tomorrow), I anticipate a busy week ahead.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to enjoy the quiet imparted by a three-day weekend and having mild success at it, even though I was unable to do much in terms of reading, writing or tinkering with technology – which I did do, but not in the manner or intensity I usually favor: I got my hands on one of these, and have spent a couple of hours, all told, tinkering around (and have already had to resort to the OS restore DVD once¹).

More on that later, but rest assured that my notes on the tweaking I’m doing will be a matter of public record. I’m trying to make the minimal amount of changes possible, since it is already pretty damn useful to me as shipped, but that doesn’t mean I won’t throw in some original twists…

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¹ No matter what you do, don’t mess around with the built-in GTK or update any packages without checking the dependencies first, or you’ll break the custom desktop environment beyond repair.

Wherein we find that ‘could be’ is now an excuse for making up stories. Where the hell is John Siracusa?

I love to see reporters blabbing on about stuff they don’t understand, and am amazed at the backwardness of the US. Back on the dawn of 3G here, issues like these were a dime a dozen – these days, we spot and tune them out in hours. Not that there is anything actually wrong here – I haven’t experienced any issues, but then again we have a pretty good network.

Seems like a great approach, regardless of the cumbersome logistics involved.

Now this is a clever idea. Beautifully executed too, it seems.

After settling in at my new desk yesterday, I decided to take the DisplayLink adapter the kind folks there sent me a few months back back to the office and set up half of my workspace like so:

That’s Entourage on the far left¹ running on the DisplayLink screen, Google Reader covering up the top secret stuff on the laptop panel, and Preview and Evernote on the middle. The paperclips stuck to a magnetic strip on the back are, in fact, our set of ‘official SIM removal and factory reset tools’, and the full keyboard is on its way out given that I find the MacBook Pro’s to be excellent.

(The other half of my workspace is a pretty decent window overlooking the Gare do Oriente, and I use it for reading printed materials and fooling around with more secret stuff. I am beginning to like having a clean desk – or rather, half of it – and will surely try to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.)

The DisplayLink beta drivers for the Mac work fine, and although I didn’t play full screen video given my lack of inclination to put up with that anywhere, I did sneak a peek at Dr. Horrible (which I had never come across before, and promptly bookmarked for watching after dinner), and the Hulu player worked fine. There is hardly any noticeable performance difference for standard office use and the drivers seem rock solid, but I wouldn’t enthusiastically dragging large windows around – the whole thing becomes somewhat Vistaish.

In the meantime, you might be curious about my using Evernote after this post. The answer’s pretty straightforward – since Evernote for the iPhone got an upgrade to enable note editing today, I decided to try it out again for the remainder of the week. On-device editing makes it a lot more useful (as in better than zero usefulness) for me on the iPhone and my current note taking solution based on TiddlyWiki is a trifle hard to sync across machines, so there is an opportunity here.

I still don’t rate it highly in terms of security and can’t for the life of me figure out why the Mac version can’t yet do exactly the same things like using local processing for OCR as the Windows one (no, I don’t think doing that server-side is a good idea, thank you very much), but based on today’s usage I would rate it as useful enough as a drafting board for my posts when I’m on the move and for composing bug reports when I’m using my laptop for testing and am disconnected from the ‘regular’ Internet.

But the lack of an offline mode on the mobile app annoys me tremendously, as does its reliance on Safari for authentication and some preference settings. It still isn’t anywhere near perfect.

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¹ No, I don’t really trust it with my e-mail – I use Outlook over Citrix, but sometimes it’s useful to have something to fish out attachments from the Exchange server and it acts as a sort of Spotlight proxy to the content there.

I suppose this will, given sufficient time, result in one of the most interesting discussions ever on Mark’s site.

Nothing much has been happening, other than I’ve started coding Hashi, moved to a new floor at the office (with the usual comedic value associated with trying to fit two closets’ worth of stuff in cardboard boxes), and my mind, when it can spare some time from the splitting headache the humid weather has nudged my sinuses into causing, has again been on getting an Asus Eee PC 901 or an Acer Aspire One 150 (no, no MSI clones – definitely).

The underlying reasoning being that with my computer use at home becoming more random and unpredictable (literally at the kid’s whims), I need something that I can literally toss aside in a fraction of a second. And run vim. And Python. And preferably under Windows, since some of the stuff I have to play around with only works under that, whether I like it or not.

And, let’s face it, running a cheapskate OS is best done on a cheap, throwaway computer.

A little digging around revealed that Acer seems to have difficulty selling their stuff here in Portugal. Which is not strange, considering their local web page is ‘Iberian’ (meaning that it is most likely maintained in Spain), and retailers I contacted complained about shortages and delays in shipment. The Asus’ keyboard feels small and cramped, but it is going to be available here next week, and another weekend with a 701 made it seem at least tolerable.

Still, the Acer does have a better keyboard, as illustrated in this pseudo-review. The video feels awkward and somewhat naïve, considering that I’ve been tracking the device for over two months now, but it might be just the thing for those of you who never heard about it or visited these forums to see what people are doing with theirs.

And yeah, there are some nuts running Mac OS X on it. For what it’s worth.

Update: In the meantime, I got word from Acer that they’ll only start selling the 150 (XP, decent battery, etc.) over here come end of September. So I guess I’ll have another look at the 901 next week.

Not that it’s a momentous occurrence or something, but my Twitter updates are now (at least for a while) public. And no, I will not post them here all the time.

The Big Picture has 24 amazing shots that, for the first time, make me wish I had been there.

If I happened to feel the need for a plausible excuse to buy a Nintendo DS, this would be more than enough.

Fear. It’s been a good while since I’ve fooled around with Tiddlywiki, but this is sure to be at the top of my list when I find the time to sort out my personal projects.

An Outlook add-in similar to Xobni in some ways, but with apparently superior automatic filing abilities. I keep wondering if anything similar will ever appear for the Mac.

Oh FOR $DIVNITY’S SAKE! Can’t these people write decent release notes?!!! We know it has “bug fixes” – it still doesn’t fix the Portuguese dictionary, though.

Yeah, since e-mail and SSL are such fresh novelties and nobody gets them right.

The Linux 901 edition with SSD, 802.11n & Bluetooth gets a price quote and a release date for Portugal. Somewhat tastier than the Acer Aspire One in many regards (except for the keyboard).