Tao of Mac

Oct 22nd 2004 · 2 min read

Burst Mode

Stuff I've glanced at over the last 48 hours or so:

  • New batteries, 2100 mAh worth of them. Mine is finally starting to have trouble holding a charge - maybe I should try wiping it first, since it apparently resets the battery thresholds...
  • . I expect to have the -based web front-end for it done this weekend, as soon as I figure out if a stupid image resizing bug I have is my fault or the handsets'. I'm optimistic - it could be both.
  • The . It's a Series 60 phone. It makes calls. It does not make video calls on its own. Has a good camera. Has packet data. End of story - I can't get excited about a phone that is as complex to use and maintain as a PDA, no matter how many bells and whistles it has. It's just too much hassle babysitting this sort of gadget, even for someone like me. Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I've come to my senses. Russell is going to be ecstatic with it (on a network like ours).
  • The plugin for . at your fingertips, once it works better.
  • The Blackberry/7100 - Every time I pick one up I hear the sound of cash registers in Canada. I don't give one whit if it's not a "regular" PDA or if you can't install every stupid piece of software under the sun - what it does, it does brilliantly and It Just Works. Mostly. It's not perfect - I can't sync it to my using - but then nothing is.
  • The Garfield Comic Strip Generator - Bruno has, unknowingly, wreaked havoc on at least three floors of our building by ing the URL to us. I was wreaking havoc in too many meetings myself to follow the events, but the number of Garfield strips pinned to the desk partitions saw a definite increase today.
  • Besides wreaking said havoc Bruno has also been installing and posting some hints on how to drop keys in the WRT54g. I still can't get my battery-applet to give me the time of day, but I will definetly snarf Bruno's notes on the WRT54g when mine arrives.
  • Jef Raskin, the original purist, now calls it a mess (or gets misquoted out of context - you figure it out). Although I've read pretty much evertyhing he's written and actually tried THE for a while, I can't get excited about something too minimalistic to be unfathomable to people who don't spend all their lives immersed in it - and are the most usable things we have right now.
  • From misquotes to dumb reporting: is dangerous too. Yeah right. Quoting from the article: "Although he hasn't tested it, Gowdiak's reckons the vulnerabilities he has demonstrated on Nokia 6310i phones might also apply to mobiles from Nokia, Siemens, Panasonic, Samsung, Motorola and others underpinned by Java technology." The ignorance this demonstrates is astounding, considering manufacturers are practically rewriting their entire codebase every year. I'll believe this when I see it done on this year's phones - all of them.
  • Everyone linked to this, so I might as well do it too. Neal is still sharp as a tack. Or monofilament thread. Which reminds me - I don't do politics at all, but the perfect US Presidential debate would probably be pitting him against Jon Stewart. I'd pay to watch.